Diverging Horizons? How Citizens and Young Elites Narrate Foreign Policy in Ukraine and the Baltic States

This article analyzes the extent to which the EU’s strategic narrative of regionalism and increasingly global gaze reflect the views of foreign policy actors and citizens in the Baltic states and Ukraine. Based on audience reception analysis in the four states, using the Q-sort method of participant narrative construction and interviews with young elites in each country, our data show that young Ukrainians narrate the future direction of their country with a strong focus on the self and Ukraine’s internal problems. In contrast, young Estonians, Lithuanians, and (to a lesser extent) Latvians offer narratives about the international system. Young people in the Baltic states look to Brussels more than to Ukraine in their foreign policy understandings. The latent solidarity born of shared historical experience between Ukraine and the Baltic states may be in decline because of these diverging horizons.