ABSTRACT
The fall of real socialism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought several newly independent countries to the map of Europe. Whereas there were thirty-three nations competing in football’s European Nations’ Cup in 1992, the number of contestants in 1996 was 48 (Pierson, 1996, p. 13). Estonia was one of the ‘new’ countries, but Estonian independence has a longer history. Its tradition of independent statehood dates from the years 1918–1940 (see Raun, 1987). The country, which was previously successively ruled by Germans, Danes and Swedes, became a Russian province in 1721 and remained as such until it was declared an independent republic on 24 February 1918. Between 1939 and 1940, the Estonian Government found it impossible to refuse to give its consent to the Soviet Union’s demand to locate several military bases in the country. These concessions were soon followed by outright occupation and the country’s incorporation into the Soviet Union as a new Soviet Socialist Republic. Estonia shared this fate with its southern neighbours Latvia and Lithuania, the two other Baltic republics. Like many other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, in the late 1980s they became the scene of mass movements for democratization and national liberation. Estonia was able to free itself from the collapsing Soviet central government on 20 August 1991, shortly before the final dissolution of the Union itself in December 1991 (see, for example, Lieven, 1993/94).
