Abstract
The ‘return to Europe’ was on the Baltic agenda early on, and this chapter applies a longitudinal perspective. The surveys used in this book give us important information about the trajectories of the three Baltic countries during the formative years leading up to European Union (EU) accession and beyond. They include questions tapping attitudes towards democracy in theory and at work, which often overlap with the political conditions for EU membership. In the second part, the chapter turns to the large question about the state of democracy in the region by asking if there is support for alternatives to liberal democracy and other values embraced by the European Union. Has there been a democracy backlash or not? If not, has the support for liberal democracy been rather hollow all along? In the final section, the question of political socialisation is raised. Are young people in the region more responsive to liberal democracy than the upper-age cohorts, and if so, what happens to them over time?
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Notes
- 1.
The original text refers to minorities in general, but this was subsequently narrowed down to national minorities, as defined by the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities of the Council of Europe. Its definition of national minorities left room for different interpretations; and before signing the treaty, Latvia and Estonia narrowed it down to citizens belonging to historical national minorities.
- 2.
Homosexuality —understood as male same-sex sexual intercourse—was made a criminal offence in the Soviet Union in 1934 and remained illegal in Estonia and Latvia until 1992 and in Lithuania until 1993.
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Duvold, K., Berglund, S., Ekman, J. (2020). European Values Under Attack?. In: Political Culture in the Baltic States. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21844-7_6
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