Baltic: the Future of Europe, Oliver Moody Talks About His New Book

Shaped by the past one hundred years, each Baltic country offers lessons in adaptability, hope, and prosperity in an era of instability. Innovation in Estonia, patience in Finland, resilience in Poland, even poetry in Latvia: with their tumultuous pasts and exposed geography, these poorly understood frontline states are reconfiguring the balance of power around the heart of Eurasia. From pioneering environmental initiatives and world-leading innovations in technology to ever-growing economies, from tackling disinformation to tempering the populist right, the Baltic states are now key to understanding how political events might unfold in the coming years. Blending history, politics, and reportage, this is the first book to explain why these are some of our most imaginative allies, yet most of us know so little about them. Interviewing prime ministers, presidents, generals, intelligence officers, business leaders, and ordinary people, Oliver Moody traces the extraordinary emergence of a new fulcrum of great-power rivalry.

About the speaker:

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 Körber-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 leader writer and then as the newspaper’s science correspondent.

About the chair:

Dr Donatas Kupciunas joined the Centre for Geopolitics in 2021 as a postdoctoral research associate. His research includes modern international history, relations between East/Central and Western Europe in the interwar period, cultural and intellectual history of diplomacy, geopolitics of the Baltic sea region, history of NATO enlargement, international law of global security, and contemporary Russian foreign policy.