this remote, forested place

I do wonder sometimes about the flow of Estonian foreign policy, and the idea of the independent state in general. The idea of Estonia, going back to 1918, was to separate the country from the "rotten foundations" of the Russian Empire. Essentially, they decided their statelet was better off alone (and they were right). The story of each Baltic country's path to independence is different and involves different regional players. Consider that the first Lithuanian declaration of independence occurred under German occupation. The reemergence of the Lithuanian state on the map of Europe was a byproduct of First World War German foreign policy. One might see Lithuanian EU membership in a different light given that particular tidbit. Or that the headquarters of the Latvian Republic were for a time aboard a British vessel moored off the coast, at a moment of political upheaval at the end of the war when there were three governments in what became Latvia -- a pro-German and a pro-Russian one as well. Latvian independence owes a significant debt to the British navy. Estonia actually fought to remove foreign armies from its soil, which gives its independence a rather local, robust flavor. Yet, in 1917, when Estonian servicemen demonstrated in Petrograd, they were demanding autonomy within the Russian Empire -- the desire to manage their own affairs, not to be aligned in various military alliances. In the late 1980s, the country again demanded independence, encouraged by the example of Finland. And yet today it is Finland that remains "Finlandized," while Estonia is constructed to either the front line in the "New Cold War," or some kind of symbolic "West Berlin." As additional NATO backing arrives to this remote, forested place of 1.3 million souls, I do wonder how this all fits into the concept of Estonian independence. The people of this land just wanted to manage their own affairs. Somehow they keep getting caught up in problems many times larger than themselves.