Estonian President Ilves' 4th of June speech in a conference on democracy

Lack of democracy is a pre-condition for aggressive international behaviour – would North Korea, Iran, Saddam’s Iraq, Sudan or a host of other despotically ruled countries engage in or threaten war if they were democratic? – it’s unlikely. Our question at this conference is what do we, the community of democratic countries do about this?
Since the liberation of Eastern Europe from undemocratic communist rule we have come to accept as a truism that Democracies do not go to war with each other. Before I look more carefully at what this idea entails, allow me to begin rather bluntly by asking a question I couldn’t even imagine asking when I wrote my talk: if it is true that Democracies do not go to war with each other, then what is a country that threatens to target its nuclear missiles at Europe doing in the G-8, the club of large industrial Democracies? Either the proposition is wrong or the G-8 is based on something else than a common commitment to democratic rule.
I used to think that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were disliked because of something we did wrong. I realize now that it is because we did something right. At the same time, all of these small or smaller countries – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, have problems with only one country, Russia. Russia on the other hand seems to have problems with lots of countries. Perhaps it is time to wonder why, and why they all happen to be countries that have chosen democracy.