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Fighting for the Mini-State: Four Scenarios

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Andrus Park
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Extract

Historically there was a long-standing competition to control Estonian territory, primarily between Russia, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and Denmark, until 1710 when this area was conquered and ruled for two centuries by Imperial Russia. In the twentieth century, the only rival to Russia's (USSR's) domination over Estonia has been Germany. A Norwegian security analyst, Olav Knudsen, says correctly that the Baltic states “fall outside all other geographical and political contexts than the Russian and to some extent the German one.” As is known, Estonia was occupied by Germany in the course of the World Wars in 1918 and 1941–44. Generally speaking, the pre-1991 history of Estonia is a good case to prove that the survival of small states as independent powers is precarious, “depending on a multitude of factors over which they have little influence.”

Type
Part I: Estonia's Path to Identity and Independence
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 67 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR 

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References

Notes

2. For the Imperial Russian conquest, see Toivo Raun, Estonia and the Estonians (Stanford, Hoover Institution Press, 1991), pp. 33–38. The struggle over the Baltic area is well depicted in Allen F. Chew, An Atlas of Russian History: Eleven Centuries of Changing Borders, revised edition (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1970, pp. 2–104; and in Edgar Mattisen, Eesti-Vene piir (Tallinn: Ilo, 1993), pp. 5–126.Google Scholar

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69. Eesti Aeg, 16 March 1994, p. 7.Google Scholar

70. Ibid. Google Scholar

71. Eric Stern and Bengt Sundelius, “Managing Asymmetrical Crisis: Sweden, the USSR, and U-137,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 36, 1992, p. 217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar