Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

Correlates of War (COW), an ongoing project initiated in the United States to monitor all the wars around the globe, covers the Estonian and Latvian wars of independence, and the war between Poland and Russia, but does not represent the Lithuanian War of Independence in detail. It only includes one episode of the war, the Polish-Lithuanian war. The article points out that this is partly correlated with the lack of a single term for these events in Lithuania. The author assesses the names of the war or wars of independence circulating in Lithuania, asking to what extent their differences have had an impact on the external (non)recognition of the War of Independence. After reviewing the paradoxical situation with war names circulating in Lithuania, the essay concludes with a reflection on what caused the establishment of the plural name in Lithuania. Despite this, the author argues that, from the perspective of external recognition, a singular name would better represent the nature of the processes that occurred in 1919 and 1920, and would contribute more to the consolidation of the national identity.

The war which covered the future territory of Lithuania in 1919 and 1920 after the end of the First World War has already been described several times by historians. The army loyal to the Lithuanian government in Kaunas took part in military action against three enemies: the Red Army, the Polish army and the West Russian Volunteer Army (a military formation of the Bermontians). When considering parallels, continuity and differences between the First World War and the three conflicts in Lithuania known as ‘the War of Independence’, historians have pointed out a crucial difference: the relatively small Lithuanian army was engaged in low-intensity military action. However, the question of the intensity of the combat has not specifically been addressed in research so far. This paper offers a new approach to analysing the intensity of the two-year war. For the first time, the authors have juxtaposed three data sets: analysing the number of days of combat, assessing the frequency and impact of the use of heavy weapons (artillery and/or aviation), and comparing it with data on the losses of the Lithuanian army’s manpower.

In the interwar years, Finland and Estonia were characterised by the fact that in both countries exceptionally broad linguistic and cultural rights were given to national minorities, compared with the situation in the rest of Europe. There were several factors behind this. One was the relationship between ethnic groups from a historical perspective. Another was each country’s internal debate on the kind of social order in general that was to be built. The third was how politics in Finland and Estonia was influenced by international trends and theories on how national minorities should be treated. The article analyses how national minorities were taken into account in the Finnish and Estonian constitutions which held true in the period between the two world wars, and why account was taken precisely in a certain way. At the same time, it considers what kind of views in this regard were presented by different political parties, what kind of debates were held in the parliaments of both countries, and how the matter was dealt with by other significant interest groups.

The article analyses issues related to the participation of national minorities in the Estonian War of Independence of 1918–1920. Due to the low numbers of national minorities, they were not treated as a serious problem in the Republic of Estonia during the war, but the question of their involvement was important in the principle of the strategy of active defence. This article is based on a doctoral thesis that was defended at Tallinn University in June 2018. The involvement of national minorities in the national units of the Estonian national army in the Estonian War of Independence is investigated from a cultural studies approach. The article aims to show the attitude of national minorities towards the Estonian state and the army, and to evaluate their role in the struggle by the Estonian army in the War of Independence.

In the course of the First World War, ‘the nationalities question’ exploded in Eastern Europe. By the fall of 1918, the Eastern Europe of the three empires had collapsed, and national states were rising. During the war, the nationalities question as perceived in Switzerland, a neutral country, had developed from an initial concern about the loyalty of the minorities in the borderlands of the three East European empires into a battle royal for recognition as individual states. The article focuses on the activities of the German ambassador in Bern who was the most active force in the development, and he gave special support for the nationalities on Russia’s western border. Poland’s future quickly became the major issue but this threatened Germany’s own ambitions in Eastern Europe. The Lithuanians and the Ukrainians particularly opposed Polish dreams of establishing a large state. The Germans, however, considered the future of Ukraine to lie mostly in the hands of the Austrian Empire, and therefore Lithuania appeared to be the more promising force to limit any new Polish state.