BARCELONA TO TALLINN

Es­to­nia is one of the EU’s least pop­u­lated coun­tries – just above 1.3 mil­lion – and its cap­i­tal Tallinn is the clos­est EU cap­i­tal to Saint Pe­ters­burg, just nearer than Fin­land’s Helsinki. First named Sankt-Pieter-Burch, in the Dutch man­ner, and later tak­ing the Ger­man form of Sankt-Pe­ter­burg, the city was the cap­i­tal of tsarist Rus­sia for 300 years; Peter the Great founded it at the start of the 18th cen­tury, mak­ing it the cap­i­tal of Mus­covy as part of his ef­forts to mod­ernise and Eu­ro­peanise his king­dom.

In his ex­pan­sion of the newly founded “Russ­ian Em­pire”, the self-pro­claimed Tsar (as in Cae­sar, akin to em­peror) ab­sorbed many na­tions, east­wards and west­wards, in­clud­ing Es­to­nia, which had al­ready fought back pre­vi­ous at­tacks from the hordes of the Duchy of Moscow, helped by the Danes and the Swedes. Sub­se­quently, Es­to­nia only gained state­hood fol­low­ing the tur­moil of the So­viet rev­o­lu­tion, and kept it for only 20 years, until 1941, when it was in­vaded by the Red Army – after the in­fa­mous Ribben­trop-Molo­tov pact, in which the Nazis and the So­vi­ets di­vided East­ern Eu­rope up as if it were a cake to serve their im­pe­ri­al­is­tic pur­poses.

A few decades later, the Baltic re­publics, Latvia, Lithua­nia, and, es­pe­cially, Es­to­nia, cap­i­talised on Gor­bachev’s gen­uine quest for a Com­mu­nism with a “human face” – added in the le­git­i­macy of their own cause. The win­dow opened with “Glas­nost” (open­ness) and “Per­e­stroika” (re­form), and shrewd Es­ton­ian politi­cians, led by Lennart Meri, un­locked a slow-mov­ing but solid path to free­dom. Once the So­viet’s usual threat of vi­o­lence and de­struc­tion was re­moved, minor en­vi­ron­ment is­sues were raised first, to be fol­lowed by calls for fi­nan­cial in­de­pen­dence, and fi­nally a uni­lat­eral ref­er­en­dum on in­de­pen­dence.

Today, Es­to­nia is a mem­ber of the EU and the Eu­ro­zone, its sov­er­eignty shared will­ingly, its se­cu­rity as­sured by NATO. The coun­try epit­o­mises the de­ter­mi­na­tion for sur­vival of a peo­ple against all the odds. This can be seen by the wealth of melodies and tunes, kept alive by hun­dreds of choirs around the coun­try dur­ing the days of So­viet re­pres­sion, and which today gather openly every few years for its fa­mous Song Fes­ti­vals.

In a way, Cat­alo­nia’s his­tory par­al­lels the Baltic coun­try’s, its re­solve in­tact de­spite also falling vic­tim to the geopol­i­tics of the early 18th cen­tury, in what many con­sider the first truly in­ter­na­tional con­flict, Spain’s War of Suc­ces­sion. Aban­doned by its then nat­ural ally, Eng­land, Cat­alo­nia faced the Castil­ians, and, chiefly, the much stronger French Bour­bon army. As a re­sult, the Cata­lan-speak­ing na­tions of Va­len­cia, the Balearics and Cat­alo­nia, were crushed, their core in­sti­tu­tions sup­pressed and ruled from and for Madrid ever since.

Granted, some re­gard this as only a mat­ter of stub­born ir­re­ducibil­ity, per­haps un­con­sciously par­rot­ing the cen­tral­ist view from the cap­i­tal, which in­cludes a servile for­eign press. In fact, the in­ca­pa­bil­ity of propos­ing much of an as­pi­ra­tional na­ture to the Baltic coun­tries is mir­rored down here; for Madrid, like Moscow be­fore it, does not se­duce, but threat­ens, im­poses and ex­ploits. Only the means are dif­fer­ent, as the so­ci­eties and con­texts are not the same. Yet, the in­stru­ments of re­pres­sion are here for any­one to see, such as the mass use of law­fare, the tor­ture of ac­tivists, prison sen­tences for se­nior cadres on mock charges, and a brutish use of force when needed, such as in the 2017 Uni­lat­eral ref­er­en­dum.

As the Baltics were the wealth­i­est within the So­viet Union, so are the Cata­lan-speak­ing re­gions within Spain. Madrid only takes ad­van­tage of this dis­tinc­tive­ness as its cash cow; not to build a bet­ter more mod­ern state, but to pre­serve its sta­tus quo, to, ul­ti­mately, at­tain a sta­tus be­yond its pos­si­bil­i­ties.