From July 1, 2013, Lithuania holds a rotating six-month presidency of the European Union. This week, a final decision is expected on Latvia joining the Eurozone. At the same time, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus are seeking to create a Eurasian Union. Azerbaijan, where a decade ago son succeeded father as the country’s president and where his wife is a potential successor while the children are still too young, sits next to Georgia, which is in the process of managing its first constitutional power transition since independence. Today’s students may know it for a fact, but still can hardly imagine that only a quarter of a century ago Estonia and Turkmenistan were part of a single, tightly unified country.

Democratization of the Soviet Union and then Eastern Europe which began in the late 1980s has produced, by now, not only strikingly different political regimes in the formerly communist-ruled nations, but a number of new geopolitical combinations and dividing lines. The three Baltic democracies which have emerged from the former Soviet Union have all acceded to the European Union and NATO. The three states still ruled in an authoritarian manner, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, are in the process of forming a common economic space and tightening their military alliance. The three countries lying between the EU and the Eurasian Customs Union: Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, are also half way between them in terms of their politics.