We had a few Estonians in town this week to look at our web operation and exchange ideas. In addition to lots of interesting online discussion, Kristjan, who works for the Eesti Ekspress weekly newspaper, told us that he had voted in the Estonian parliamentary elections just that morning. He promptly pulled out a voter ID card with a chip in it that he passed around, explaining how we was able to log in on the Internet and securely cast his vote in the elections.
I guess this shouldn’t be too surprising. After all, these are the folks who launched a “singing revolution” to free themselves of Soviet rule. Since then, they’ve taken democracy and capitalist ideas and completely embraced them. When Lara and I visited Tallinn a few years ago, we were struck between the vast contrast between signs of the decaying Soviet Empire and the still-solid Estonian structures that date back hundreds of years.
Another interesting side discussion we had was about the Estonian language. It’s a difficult tongue, linguistically related to Finnish, and Ragnar, Kristjan and I were talking about whether Estonian would be able to survive in a 21st century where the world is contracting. A stock market burp in Shanghai rattles Tallinn and New York. How can a lanaguage with only 1 million native speakers manage to thrive and surive? I hope it does.
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— Here’s a link to Ragnar’s paper, the daily Eesti P