Whenever Estonians and Finns try to characterise their nationalities, they usually end up citing the influence of 'The Sea', and the climate more broadly, on their collective psyche.
The Sea for us is, of course, the Baltic Sea – and this sea touches the lives of altogether 85 million people, far beyond the populations of the two small Nordic nations we come from.
That is around 17 percent of the population of the EU – living also in Germany, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania a...
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Matthew is EUobserver's Opinion Editor. He joined EUobserver in June 2018. Previously he worked as a reporter for The Guardian in London, and as editor for AFP in Paris and DPA in Berlin.