ABSTRACT
One of the dominant themes in the Baltic States' rhetorical drive for the EU and NATO accession throughout the 1990s had been the promise of improved relations with their eastern neighbour. The promise looked plausible from more than one angle. Membership in powerful Western organizations was likely not just to buttress the small states' security but also to allay potentially disruptive anxieties and temptations stemming from competing interpretations of their "civilizational" identity. One of the reasons why technocratic commemorative state practices, rather than "civilizational" allegiances. Here politics is seen as being eliminated not through technocratic administration, but on the level of theory through equally technocratic attempt to render scientific an account of the recurrent operation of some "objective" structures of international relations reproducing the practices of great-power politics. The articles suggested that the Government will go for the technocratic one, trying to downplay both the foreign policy dimension of the crisis and the heated public debates that surrounded it.
