Basing its analysis on extensive research in the diplomatic archives in all the three Baltic foreign offices, the dissertation maps out the parallel paths of development of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian alliance policies in the ten years between 1988 and 1998 and seeks to achieve a theoretically grounded understanding of this process. The study pinpoints and analyses transitions between three more or less distinct modes of the Baltic state s’ alliance behaviour in the post-Cold War period and analyses them in light of competing theoretical perspectives thereby checking the various theoretical arguments’ validity against the actual diplomatic record from Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian foreign policy archives. Overall, the findings of this dissertation are consistent with the general argument made by the realist school of International Relations theory, namely that changes in foreign policy behaviour can be understood primarily as response and adaptation to systemic pressures and incentives and that external factors rather than domestic ones take precedence in determining foreign policy outcomes. The empirical part of the dissertation is based on hundreds of both public and internal diplomatic developments as well as on a wide selection of secondary source material. The study corroborates data from all three countries, by assessing original documents in all three local languages, in addition to materials in English and Russian. Most of this dissertation’s foreign-policy data has been retrieved from the six major collections of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian diplomatic documentation from both the presidential and Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives in all three countries, most of which have so far been inaccessible to academic researchers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:596788 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Bošs, Edijs |
| Publisher | University of Cambridge |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283873 |
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