ABSTRACT
Lithuania’s security situation and security policy are closely linked to the processes and challenges that have accompanied the emergence of the new European security environment. Lithuanian security policy, after the withdrawal of Russia’s troops in 1993, has unambiguously turned to an alliance policy. In the 1990s Lithuania entered its new stage of state formation in a much better geopolitical situation than compared with 1918. The end of the Cold War seemed to promise that Lithuania’s strategic position in the confrontation between East and West would no longer be of relevance. Lithuania and Poland have old historical links. By taking inter-war Lithuania as the model, the image of Poland as Lithuania’s malicious enemy was also naturally embraced. Lithuania straddles the cultural watershed between Eastern and Western Christianity, as well as that between Catholicism and Protestantism; with some qualifications one could even speak about the ideological watershed between communism and capitalism.
