Impossible! There is insane competition in Lithuania between cities. The ex-Soviets are not able to cooperate being afraid having KGB spy as partner. KGB spies are gone decades ago, but people didn’t learn to work together. Cooperation on state level is impossible. Lithuanians are jealous of Estonian success story and higher wages: https://www.baltictimes.com/estonia_has_highest_gross_wage_i...
I agree, mostly because I think it's just practical for small markets (like ~1 million person countries) to band together but I remember in Estonia everyone always thought of themselves more as a Nordic country rather than a Baltic one
They have similar language to nordic ones, Yes. But the place itself feels and looks totally as Baltic country and there is absolutly nothing wrong with it. (I've been in all 3)
I think the reason is that Estonia and Latvia used to be same country - Livonia but I might be wrong.
Estonian an Livonian are Finno-Ugric. They have a relation to Finnish (but in no way to Scandinavian languages) and Hungarian. This group ist vastly different from any other language in Europe including the Slavic languages. Moreover, Livonian is not to be considered as equivalent to Latvia - Latvian being the official language there.
Same story in Southern Africa (although one couldn't say because of competition). The whole of Southern Africa should be a free trade zone, but isolationist behaviour takes place because of other factors, like for example xenophobia or in the case of Botswana, being pissed off by our (South African) instability vs. their more stable country.
