Thirty-seven years after two million people linked hands from Tallinn to Vilnius, it’s worth asking a less comfortable question than the one commemorative ceremonies usually pose: does the solidarity the Baltic Way symbolised still describe how Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia actually operate together, or has it become more myth than practice?
The uncomfortable gap between symbol and substance
This year’s commemorations, marked today across all three capitals following yesterday’s formal anniversary ceremonies, arrive at a moment when the three states’ coordination on pressing issues — from NATO lobbying to border security response — has been publicly, if gently, criticised as fragmented rather than unified. That’s a harder story to tell on a commemorative date than the inspiring one about 1989, but it’s the more useful one.
Where the myth holds up
To be fair, the comparison isn’t entirely unflattering to the present. The three states do coordinate closely on EU accession-era commitments, joint infrastructure like Rail Baltica, and increasingly on cybersecurity information-sharing. The Baltic Assembly and Baltic Council of Ministers provide institutional scaffolding for cooperation that simply didn’t exist in 1989, when the chain itself had to be organised through informal networks precisely because no such institutions were available.
Where it doesn’t
But institutional scaffolding is not the same as unified action, and this year has offered several reminders of the gap: three separate national pitches at the NATO summit in Ankara rather than one shared position, three different approaches to VAT and cost-of-living policy, three distinct paces of defence spending increases. None of these differences are dramatic on their own. Together, they describe three closely aligned but genuinely separate political systems more than a single regional bloc acting with one voice, a critique also raised around this year’s anniversary explainer of the original chain itself.
Why that’s not necessarily a failure
It’s worth resisting the temptation to treat any divergence as betrayal of the Baltic Way’s legacy. The three countries are, after all, three separate sovereign states with distinct domestic politics, and demanding lockstep unity on every policy question sets an unrealistic bar that even the tightest alliances rarely clear. The relevant question isn’t whether Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia agree on everything, but whether they coordinate closely enough on the issues where fragmentation carries real costs — chiefly security and defence diplomacy.
What the anniversary should actually prompt
The most honest way to honour the Baltic Way’s 37th anniversary might be less about ceremony and more about a candid audit of where the three states’ cooperation has kept pace with 1989’s example and where it hasn’t. The chain that stretched from Tallinn to Vilnius worked because ordinary people didn’t wait for institutions to coordinate them. The institutions now exist. Whether they’re being used to their full potential is the question worth sitting with once today’s wreaths have been laid and the ceremonies have ended. None of this is to diminish what 1989 actually achieved, or to suggest the present moment demands anything as dramatic as a human chain. It’s simply to note that solidarity, once it moves from protest to governance, tends to get harder rather than easier to sustain — and that this year’s mix of coordinated ceremony and uncoordinated policy captures that difficulty rather well.
