Building Democracy in Estonia

Extract

“How to Recognize Democracy” and “How to Recognize Political Parties”—such were some of the newspaper articles I published after arriving in Estonia in November 1990. People expected the new freely elected Supreme Council (parliament) to pass laws quickly and with large majorities, and parties to have card-carrying mass memberships. Besides the ever-present threat of suppression by the Kremlin, democracy in Estonia was challenged internally by such superdemocratic expectations, rooted both in the earlier Soviet fake democracy and a reaction against its actual concentration of power.

Parliamentary democracy had been introduced, but parliament members were prohibited from becoming cabinet ministers. Unrealistically high quorum and majority requirements risked paralyzing legislative action, now that disagreement and absence had become possible. Perfectly sound democratic practices were denounced as dictatorial. The parliament produced major legislation at a breakneck pace, compared to its Western counterparts, yet was widely seen as too slow. Newly formed centrist parties were thought to be deficient because they lacked mass membership in the Marxist image.

While relentlessly knocking down Soviet-style authoritarian patterns, especially in attitudes toward women, I increasingly found myself reassuring Estonians that they were further along in building democracy than they dared to believe.