Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Why the Baltics Want to Move to Another Part of Europe

If Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia succeeded in rebranding themselves as Nordic, foreign investment would follow.

January 10, 2017 at 6:40 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

All mapped out.
Photographer: Raigo Pajula/AFP/Getty Images

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If you happen to think the three Baltic nations -- Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia -- are East European, post-Soviet states, be careful not to say so to politicians from the three small nations. They are proud North Europeans or even Nordics, and they will take issue with those who disagree.

Last week, the ambassadors representing all three nations in Germany signed a letter to the editor of the daily Die Zeit asking him to exclude the Baltic states from a series on the Soviet Union's "successor states" tied to the 25th anniversary of the empire's fall. The missive, widely reported back in the Baltics, explained that Soviet Union's occupation of the three nations was illegal and also never formally recognized by the West.