For hundreds of years the Baltic Sea has both connected and separated the nations living on its shores. For the last fifty years the sea has been part of the Iron Curtain. However, for Estonia the formation of nation states on the shores of the Baltic has been inextricably linked with the idea of cooperation. What follows is a description of the historical background of the idea of Baltic Sea cooperation (before 1940) and some elements of its restoration in the 1990s.

General Features of Economic Development.

There are two parallel processes taking place in the Estonian economy. First, the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. Secondly, the shift from external relations that are Eastern oriented to relations that are Western oriented. Both processes accelerated after the introduction of the national currency—the kroon (abbreviation EEK)—on June 20, 1992.

Changing through the Ages

Over different historical periods the Estonian economy has exhibited quite a different character in terms of its international context. To be more specific, we can mention the medieval flourishing of the free Hanseatic towns of northern Europe when Tallinn and other Estonian Hanseatic centers played an important role in trade between the east (Novgorod) and the west (basically towns of northern Germany and the Netherlands). Later, after an intervening period when Estonia was part of the Swedish Kingdom, it evolved as a western region of Tsarist Russia with its own specificity, somewhat different from the rest of Russia.

Banking in Estonia Before 1992

Under the Soviet regime Estonian banking, like banking anywhere in the Soviet Union, was controlled and managed by the Central Bank of the Soviet Union. Besides the central bank, there was a limited number of all-Union banking structures with their numerous local branches in Estonia as well as in other Soviet republics. The whole banking system was state-owned and rigidly controlled from the center.

Introduction

In the 1940–50s a totalitarian regime was established and consolidated in Estonia. Socialist society led to a new kind of social stratification and inequality. Stratification under totalitarian, socialist regimes differs from that in Western, capitalist countries. The utopian idea to create an egalitarian society turned into the creation of a hierarchically organized and heavily institutionalized society. Access to political power became the basis for social stratification. Reforms in the early 1990s have led to fundamental changes in the social stratification of Estonian society. The present social situation in Estonia (as in other former socialist countries of Eastern Europe) is characterized by the co-existence of elements of socialist and post-socialist societies, the expected marks of transition. Privatization brings about the emergence of new social strata. Therefore, the new social stratification in Estonia is now in the formation phase, and further changes are still forthcoming.

All of the sociological surveys of Estonians carried out after the Second World War have highlighted family life and children as the main values for Estonians. Family and children were also the values that survived the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet system, becoming even higher ranked in Estonians’ value priorities. Other rising values during the transitional period were health, close friends, self-education, and a pollution-free environment. Among those aspects suffering considerable decline were participation in social as well as in cultural activities (visiting cultural institutions, reading books, etc.), professional work, and taking care of one's own physical well-being. The rural lifestyle together with Lutheran religious values, which emphasize the family and a “good mother,” have been the main cultural orientations handed down through generations of Estonian families. Even the Soviet period with its forced industrialization, collectivization and political terror did not break this value-system but, quite the opposite, often meant that the family became a place that provided “refuge, and temporary escape” from these pressures, thereby preserving important elements of an earlier cultural orientation. Through its ideologically restricted social studies and deformed official statistics, which left people without reliable information about reality, the Soviet system managed to preserve the relatively strong impact of cultural traditions on people's behavior.

Every nation has its own history and its own way to create civic culture. The problem of civil society in Estonia is rather specific being first and foremost related to the nation's cultural development and only then with its political development. The restoration of civil society in Estonia from 1987 to 1988 is based on our own historical experience of civil initiative rather than the example of the other post-Communist countries of Eastern Europe.