Baltic: The Future of Europe

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The Baltic's time has come. It is not only critical to Europe's security and increasingly a centre of political and military power in its own right; it is a reservoir of ideas and experiences that could shape the continent's future.

The Baltic offers by far the most successful examples of the reintegration of Europe's old capitalist and communist blocs. It abounds in pioneering environmental initiatives, ranging from the world's first geological "forever" storage facility for nuclear waste in Finland to its first "zero waste" community, on the Danish island of Bornholm. Brutalised by the twentieth century, the rebounding economies of Poland, Finland and Estonia are case studies in the mobilisation of social resources and the transformative power of technology.

This books explores the history, their culture, their peculiarities and national dilemmas of all nine Baltic countries. At its core is a search for fresh answers to Europe's problems, at a point where the continent's previously dominant powers appear tired and divided. It is structured around reports from 13 places in the hinterland of the Baltic sea, each of which embodies a conundrum of wider relevance but is also fascinating in its own right. Baltic is based on well over a hundred interviews with heads of state and government, ministers, politicians, retired political leaders, military commanders, diplomats, NATO and intelligence officials, scholars, analysts and ordinary citizens. It leaves the people of the Baltic countries to speak for themselves, suspending the twin tendencies to either judge or romanticise them. Now more than ever, the rest of the West needs their perspectives.

Author Bio

Oliver Moody has been the Berlin bureau chief for The Times of London, covering Germany and northern and central Europe, since 2018. He also co-presents The New Germany podcast for the Korber-Stiftung, with Katja Hoyer, and was journalist in residence at the WZB Berlin social science centre in 2024. After an undergraduate degree in Classics and Arabic at the University of Oxford, he joined The Times as a graduate trainee in 2011, spending some years as a lead writer and then as the newspaper's science correspondent. He lives in Berlin with his wife and their two young children.