Owen Matthews at Literary Review:
Are the Baltic Sea states, as former Estonian president Lennart Meri once put it, the factory of Europe’s future? Oliver Moody’s brilliantly written, convincingly argued and compelling book makes a good argument that it is in the plucky, resilient and often overlooked littoral states of the Baltic that the spirit of Europe burns strongest.
According to Moody, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine the Baltic countries – encompassing here not just Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but also Finland, Poland and Sweden – have ‘articulated and realised a positive vision of how to put the West back on the front foot, and a compelling idea of what Europe could be: more hopeful, more assertive in defence of its values and interests, more conscious of solidarity with other liberal democracies, more open to the potential of technology, more confident of its own distinctive strengths, less constrained by fear’. Echoing Robert Graves’s characterisation of the dying Roman Empire in his poem ‘The Cuirassiers of the Frontier’, Moody argues that the rotten tree of Europa lives only in its rind.
more here.
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