The 2014 recipient of the Saltups Fellowship for short-term study or research in the United States is Una Bergmane. She recently updated AABS on how the fellowship supported her dissertation research.
In the doctoral thesis that I’m completing at Sciences Po Paris (Paris Institute of Political Sciences), I compare the US and French foreign policy facing Baltic claims for independence in the crucial years of 1989-1991. My work is focused on the process of foreign policy making, thus I am analyzing how state and non-state actors shaped American and French answers to the Baltic Question. My work follows the first steps of Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian diplomacy in 1990/1991 and discusses the Baltic Diaspora’s contribution to the second Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian independence. The Saltups scholarship is instrumental in providing the funding for my last trip to the archives of the US George Bush Library in Texas and National Security archives in Washington before submitting my thesis this summer.