Ubiquitous internet usage and Estonia , the 4 scenarios

The initial 4 scenarios that were proposed for Estonia for the year 2010 were the following:

1) "Militaristic information oasis" - "little angry country" (like the one in Middle East) with good technological progress but little openness and overall freedom. "Military Estonia".

2) "South Finland" - soft-spoken, well integrated into Europe (and decisively distanced from Russia), but with low innovation capacity. "Subcontractor Estonia" - perhaps the closest to current reality.

3) "The Ferryman" - well-developed, but fully transit-based economy. Innovation and ICT are only to serve the main goal and thus of inferior importance. "Merchant Estonia", which is quite alike to the 'Singapore' scenario of Himanen seen in a previous lecture.

4) "Grand Slam" - the best realisation of both geographical location (transit) and innovative and educational potential. "Innovation/ICT Estonia".

It can be said that “The Ferryman” scenario was cut off by the Russian government , the oil transit has mostly stopped and Russian government does not encourage the transit through Estonia in any way. It changed dramatically for the worse in 2007 when the notorious bronze soldier statue was removed from the center of Tallinn, angering many of the Russian population and the Russian government as well. Or was it vice versa – the anger of the local Russians created the need to remove the statue from the city center. Who knows.

As Ferryman did not work out at all – the Grand Slam is out of the question also. Grand Slam scenario seems to be possible with social cohesion and with the states active participation but as the prevailing political policy has been the ultra-liberal market economy the free-market forces have not turned out to be grand slam for the economy as a whole.

The current situation in Estonia is closest to the “South Finland” scenario – the country has distanced from Russia quite effectively , while the rest of the Europe and NATO are moving closer and closer to Russia and try to cooperate with Russian in any way possible ;) Germans even thought about selling their industrial giant Opel to Russians. The innovation capacity is really low compared to the Scandinavian countries , in terms of registered patents per person for example. This leaves out only simple sub-contracting work ( mostly to Scandinavia ) as the main trend in the society.