The Baltic Experience in Post-Cold War European Integration

When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, followed shortly afterwards by the fall of Communist governments across Eastern Europe and culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, Europeans on both sides of the Iron Curtain began looking for ways to heal the divisions that had developed over more than four decades of forced separation. Ultimately, the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) became two of the primary mechanisms for the reintegration of the newly democratic Eastern states. Between 1999 and 2007, nine states formerly part of the Eastern bloc – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia – joined first NATO and then the EU.