Sharpness of situation really reveals poor Baltic cooperation
Editorial: diplomacy, peasant style
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Diplomacy is usually considered glamorous. Judging by movies, perhaps. In real life, the ambassador will often play janitor – mop in hand, he runs to remove footprints left by paymaster. This time around, Estonian ambassador to Lithuania is cleaning up after Juhan Parts the economy minister, who, inspired by Rail Baltica, labelled Lithuania’s government as «fools».
Hardly do the Lithuanians take an unfeigned interest in what the word – jobu, in original Estonian – might mean in all its applications. Leaning on dictionaries may, in this case, rather serve to make matters worse. Probably, all we can do is brush the word uttered aside as accident at work, acknowledging the good mutual relations and respect, common goals etc.
What, in essence, did our economy minister say, then? That the Lithuanians make too much ado about the Rail Baltica course and, therefore, the costly railway project may come to an unhappy end? The criticism might be deemed entirely unjustified only if Warsaw could be accessed on dry land, without passing through Lithuania. Sure, fantasising further, maybe the Lithuanians fear railway-related ideas by Mr Parts for the simple reason how, over the first days of the year, Estonia’s domestic train traffic did a dramatic flop.
Even so, should both sides now indulge in Parts-style word-flinging, a new railway would never come true. Compared to Lithuanians, we’d be the bigger loser, 600 kilometres away from the heart of Europe. The more so that, from Brussels, the Baltic trio does now look like quite a «gift»: having been promised the money, they just cannot come into agreement, to say nothing about building the thing.
Rather interesting, at that, to follow the domestic trends in assessing Mr Parts and his «jobu». Opposition, of course, sees need to weigh his fitness as minister. Hardly a surprise. Prime Minister thinks it inappropriate, which it surely is as related to international relationships; even so, this just might indicate a tussle over EU commissioner’s seat. IRL refers, not without a reason, to earlier hardships in Baltic cooperation, at which Estonian politicians have had their share of harsh utterances.
And in the latter lies the actual sharpness of the situation – no matter that the three of us put together still amount to a small state in European context, the diplomacy between us is bumpy, to put it diplomatically. And, more than correcting the slip of Parts’ tongue, we’d need to focus on the diplomatic endeavours, trudging towards the common goals.