Estonia punches above its weight in culture, says diplomat Merit Kopli

Merit Kopli, who spent ten years representing Estonian culture in Germany, says Estonia has a disproportionately large number of talented creators for such a small nation. She argues that cultural diplomacy is directly tied to national security, and that bringing German festival organisers to Estonia, including visits to a sauna, a bog, and the Arvo Pärt Centre, wins lifelong friends for the country.

Merit Kopli, Estonia's cultural representative in Germany for the past decade and a former editor-in-chief of Postimees, is returning home this August, and she is bringing back a sharply optimistic view of what small Estonia has to offer the world.

Estonia's cultural reach exceeds its size

Speaking in a wide-ranging interview, Kopli said the sheer quality of Estonian creative talent has made her job easier than it might seem. «Considering our small population, Estonia has a disproportionately large number of outstanding practitioners,» she said. «If I had nothing to sell, I simply would not have broken through. You can recommend someone once, but if the quality is not good enough, there will be no second time.»

She praised Estonian cultural figures across disciplines, music, film, art and theatre, for their consistency and professionalism. In ten years, she said, not a single Estonian artist or ensemble had let her down, behaved rudely, or failed to show up. «Estonians are always extremely disciplined and correct. That quality is genuinely high, and that is why Estonia has been easy to sell, because we have something to sell.»

In music, Estonia is best represented by names like Arvo Pärt, Paavo Järvi, Tommy Cash, and folk musicians such as Kadri Voorand, Tuulikki Bartosik, Mari Kalkun and Puuluup, all known and in demand in Germany. Theatre has been harder since the closure of NO99, and literature is constrained by the fact that only two translators currently work between Estonian and German.

Culture as security policy

Kopli was emphatic that cultural diplomacy is not soft decoration around hard politics, it is a direct investment in security. «This is actually our security,» she said. «When people know us, they will not abandon us.» She drew a sharp lesson from her Ukrainian colleagues: «They told me that their biggest mistake before the war was not talking enough about their language and culture. When the full-scale war broke out, many people in Germany asked: what is the difference between Ukrainians and Russians?»

Every Estonian artist who takes the stage abroad and says «I am from Estonia» is acting as an ambassador, she argued. Unlike performers from many other countries, Estonians never skip that introduction, and that habit, she said, quietly builds the country's international presence year after year.

Among the highlights of her decade in Germany, Kopli singled out a major joint art exhibition, «Spiegel im Spiegel», opened in Dresden in 2025, which she described as a landmark in Estonian-German cultural cooperation. The show later travelled to Kumu in Tallinn. She also cited the Estonian Film Days in Berlin, which this year mark their tenth edition.

The secret weapon: bring them here

The single most effective tool in Kopli's arsenal was not concerts or press releases, it was bringing German cultural decision-makers to Estonia in person. «German festival organisers often imagine Estonia as Eastern Europe in the pejorative sense,» she explained. «But once you get them here, you already know you've won, because they fall in love with Estonia at the airport. Take them to a sauna, a bog, and the Arvo Pärt Centre, and you have a friend for life.»

Germany through Estonian eyes

Kopli also reflected on Germany's transformation over her ten years there. She described the country's economic difficulties, high energy costs, declining auto industry, slow digitalisation, and the shock of weaning itself off cheap Russian gas, as serious but not fatal. She noted that Germany is re-arming at speed, with Defence Minister Boris Pistorius pledging a combined active and reserve force of 460,000 troops, and that this shift is broadly accepted by the public even if it runs against deep historical instincts.

On the political fringe, she flagged the rise of the AfD (Alternative for Germany), which polls around 40–42 percent in some eastern states ahead of autumn regional elections. «From an Estonian perspective, the most dangerous aspect is their friendliness toward Russia and their contacts with Moscow,» she said. That concern, she argued, matters directly for Estonia's own security environment.

Kopli is sanguine about returning home. She does not yet know what role she will take on in Estonia, but she leaves Germany having built what she describes as a decade-long web of contacts, one concert, one exhibition, one festival at a time.