May 27, 2016
For most people, Estonia sounds like some wildly exotic country they may have heard about once or twice.
But for a growing number of others, it is the European country making waves as a digital leader with a bold New Jersey-raised and Penn-educated president standing up to continued Russian aggression in the Baltic region.
Toomas Hendrik Ilves celebrated a homecoming on Thursday night, giving the keynote speech to an Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) conference hosted at Penn. It was his first time at his alma mater since he graduated with a master's degree in psychology nearly four decades ago.
"In some sense, I wouldn’t have been here if it weren’t for Penn, because at Penn I discovered … I really didn’t want to become a professor of psychology.” – Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Penn alumnus
The head of state was born in Sweden to two Estonian refugees after Russia reclaimed their farm following four years of Nazi occupation. At three years old, his parents settled in Leonia, New Jersey – a 1.6-square-mile suburb of New York City just over the George Washington Bridge.
Ilves started to learn computer programming at the age of 13 in the Leonia school system, which he still credits for the high value he puts on technology in “E-stonia.” A savvy, experienced leader, his career in politics started as vice president of student council.
In a 2011 article published by The Guardian, classmate Jamie Kitman wrote that Ilves was a skilled politician even then, as a student walking the hallways of Leonia High School.
"...(T)his tall, long-haired 16-year-old – with a penchant for jeans and tweed sports jackets – managed, while attending to his official duties, to humour an argumentative cadre of awkward first-year student loudmouths whose pimpled number included me,” Kitman wrote.
Ilves eventually would trade the jeans and tweed jacket for a classic three-piece suit and bow tie look — now a fashion staple.
Though the teachers at Leonia High who knew him no longer work there, he will always be remembered as the valedictorian of the Class of 1972. After Leonia, he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Columbia University — a short seven-mile drive from his high school. In 1978, he finished his education at Penn.
“In some sense, I wouldn’t have been here if it weren’t for Penn, because at Penn I discovered … I really didn’t want to become a professor of psychology,” Ilves told a crowd of about 200 Baltic studies scholars at the conference.
“I couldn’t be more pleased. Imagine a U.S. candidate referencing Immanuel Kant and Edward Said. We just don’t have politicians like that.” – Janis Chakars, vice president for conferences for AABS
Welcomed to the podium with a standing ovation, his good humor was immediately evident.
“Please sit down. No one does that in Estonia,” he joked, before speaking at length about the importance of the Baltic States' independence, and the need for a shift in mindset to directly address Russia’s aggression in the region.
In his speech, Ilves said prompt and proper choices, and the leaders who made those bold decisions in the 1990s, have transformed Estonia into one of the most secure, innovative and successful countries in Europe.
"We live under the security and solidarity umbrella of NATO and the European Union, and we are more successful than many in the West once believed possible – after all, based on many indicators, we now outpace many of our friends in 'old' Europe, he said.
Ilves' intellect impressed.
“I couldn’t be more pleased,” said Janis Chakars, AABS' vice president for conferences. “Imagine a U.S. candidate referencing Immanuel Kant and Edward Said. We just don’t have politicians like that.”
After a few years of teaching in Englewood, New Jersey, and Vancouver, Canada, Ilves moved back to Europe where he worked as a journalist for Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich, Germany, whose mission "is to promote democratic values and institutions by reporting the news in countries where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established.”
Fighting for liberal democracies has always been a part of Ilves’s agenda.
“He’s not afraid to speak his mind,” said Eric Suuberg, former chair of Brown University’s Psychology Department and AABS conference attendee. “He’s well-read. You better know your stuff if you challenge him.”
Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves returned Thursday night to his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, to speak at a conference of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. It was the first time he had been on Penn's campus since he graduated with a master's degree in psychology nearly 40 years ago.
Source/Office of President Toomas Hendrick Ilyes
Estonia re-established its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and two years later Ilves’s fluency in Estonian and English helped get him appointed as the Ambassador of Estonia to the United States.
After a series of diplomatic and foreign affairs roles, Ilves was a natural fit for the Estonian presidency in 2006. He did not carry the baggage that dogged other politicians at the time with their connections to the country's older political parties.
He was elected on Sept. 23, 2006, taking over as leader of a territory comprising a mainland and 2,222 islands and islets in the Baltic Sea. A nation of 1.3 million, Estonia is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia, and to the east by Russia.
As president – he will be looking for other employment in August as he is limited to two terms – Ilves has helped turn the Baltics' smallest state into a digital leader.
Estonia made international headlines in 2007 as the first nation in history to successfully defend itself against a large-scale cyber attack. Its capital, Tallinn, is home to NATO’s Cyber Defense Center. Now heading into a third decade of developing an "e-society," the country has become the training ground for other nations who want to adopt powerful digital governing solutions. In fact, more than 40 international countries use Estonian e-solutions.
Even Barack Obama admitted in a joint press conference with Ilves that “I should’ve called the Estonians when we were setting up our healthcare website.” The healthcare.gov web site, of course, was plagued by design, operational and management problems when it launched in October 2013, making it difficult for Americans to sign up.
Estonia has been voting online since 2005, and the entire country, about twice the size of his home state in the United States, has access to WiFi.
