Prima facie, Lithuania, a small European country whose membership in NATO and the EU, the two key European integrative structures, started as late as 2004, is an unlikely transformer of the west. However, as the reader delves deeper into this 463-page volume and goes through the narrative supported by well-presented empirical evidence, Darius Furmonavicius’s vision of Lithuania as an important, indeed transformational actor in the events of the past decades becomes clear and compelling.

The book begins with a concise and informative historical analysis that demonstrates Lithuania’s presence in the European milieu at least since the High Middle Ages. It is then that the ancient Lithuanian state started to play an important role in the geopolitics of Europe’s eastern borderlands. Later, in the sixteenth century, when Moscow began to expand westward, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the first target of this expansion. Pressed by Moscow’s relentless aggression into a union with Poland, the Lithuanian state finally succumbed to Russian imperial expansion by the end of the eighteenth century and from then on shared with Poland the trials and tribulations of struggle for national independence.

Lithuania’s political independence was restored in 1918 and lost again in 1940. Between these two events, the country succeeded in crystallizing its national identity, strengthening its national culture, and gaining experience in a modern national political process. The Soviets, who occupied Lithuania in 1940, were unable to destroy these foundations of the Lithuanian nation-state. Resistance, first armed, then peaceful, remained a potent political force in Lithuania throughout the years of Soviet occupation. Specific data regarding both Soviet repressions and national resistance are used by the author to support the argument.

By the time the reader reaches Ch. 4, they will notice the similarities between the political history of Lithuania and other European countries of the region. The author has decisively proven that Lithuania has never ceased to be a European nation in culture, dominant political philosophy, or shared vision of the future. These prerequisites of a viable nation-state, preserved by Lithuanians through decades of the Soviet occupation, were rapidly revitalized in the late 1980s, when Moscow could no longer maintain full control of political situation in the constituent republics of the Soviet Union. The latter was rapidly falling apart, while retaining substantial repressive capacity. For several years it took uncommon levels of civic courage and hope to publicly advance Lithuania’s national revival and independence. The period of the country’s transformation from a Soviet republic to a fully independent nation-state that started in 1987 with the beginning of mass anti-Soviet demonstrations and ended in 1992, when the Russian troops were withdrawn from Lithuania, is the central topic of the book. This is where the author concentrates the core of his rich empirical evidence, much of it made available to English-speaking readers for the first time.

This part of the book also brings in the geopolitical aspect of Lithuania’s closing stages of its struggle for independence. The scale and resilience of the Lithuanian national independence movement helped to shift the geopolitical stance of US foreign policy makers from the long-standing perception of the Soviet Union as the only actor within Soviet borders to the acceptance of Lithuania, other Baltic states, and eventually all Soviet constituent republics as viable political entities. The book’s title is not misleading, Lithuania’s fight for national independence did transform at least one aspect of the foreign policy of western countries.

The book provides a detailed, comprehensive account of Lithuania’s acceptance to NATO and the EU. Again, the wealth of primary sources adds considerable value to this portion of the book. Furmonavicius concludes the book with a very relevant, forward-looking discussion of security problems in the region, with a special emphasis on the potentially dangerous concentration of Russia’s military forces in the Kaliningrad region. Scholars interested in the modern political situation and the strategic security of the Baltic region will find this book useful as a source of information and an example of a historically informed analysis of current and recent trends in the region’s international politics.