“What does Lithuania look like in the eyes of the world?” is the question posed by a recent data analysis study. The results revealed which countries are most interested in Lithuania and how much influence it has in the world – but also that it is no longer seen as first and foremost a land of basketball.
From Poland to Japan
The study, conducted by Repsense, analysed 150,000 media articles about Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in 39 countries. According to Repsense head Rugilė Ereminaitė, the research looked at how many people and from which countries searched for information about Lithuania, the most popular search words and the most popular search results they saw.
“It will probably not come as a surprise that geopolitics is the dominant topic, and Lithuania is visible in this area. From both good and less good perspectives. We are seen as having some diplomatic problems with Belarus and Russia, and China is less of a topic this year. Our country’s leader is often quoted in the media, and Lithuania dominates in the context of the NATO summit and as an active defender of Ukraine’s interests,” she told LRT KLASIKA radio.
As to which countries are most interested in Lithuania, Ereminaitė says that after analysing searches in both English and local languages, the findings were not unexpected. The USA has been the country with the most online searches for information about Lithuania, followed by Germany, the United Kingdom, and Poland.
“However, India and Japan have also appeared among the top ten countries with the highest interest in Lithuania,” said Ereminaitė.
Moreover, Germans were significantly more active in searching for information about Lithuania than before.
Berlin’s plans to deploy a brigade in Lithuania by 2027 have been the main driver. Germans often sought information about living conditions in Lithuania. “In the general narrative, there is a less positive theme: that the Germans are not altogether eager to come serve in Lithuania,” she said.
Foreign policy stances
The Lithuanian government has also been conducting a visibility study since late 2019. Marius Gurskas, head of the Government’s Communications Department, notes that most interested in Lithuania are the big Western European countries, although surprisingly few searches come from Scandinavia and Israel.
Over the last five years, according to Gurskas, Lithuania’s visibility has been on a significant rise.
“If we compare, for example, 2021 and 2022, the amount of information about Lithuania has doubled. In 2022, there were around 120,000 mentions of Lithuania in online media, of which around 26,000 were significant – with a large potential audience and a lot of information about Lithuania.
“Almost 80 percent of these reports were about domestic and foreign policy. It is mainly the speeches of our leaders, various initiatives by Lithuania, and the ‘values-based’ foreign policy that shape the visibility of Lithuania. In the second place was information on culture and the economy,” he said.
A good example of raising the country’s profile is the Lithuanian season in France. After its opening, Lithuania received a lot of attention and publications in the French media.
“We can also recall the pandemic period, when the Baltic travel bubble […] was well publicised. There was a lot of coverage at the time about how the three Baltic countries made good use of that period and came up with some kind of solution to avoid isolating people and businesses,” Gurskas said.
Visibility largely depends on how much institutions invest in communication, he added, although geopolitical circumstances can also give a boost, as happened in recent years.
Gurskas said that the appearance of India and Japan among the top ten countries most interested in Lithuania is the result of a strategy that has been in place for several years. Lithuania’s growing geopolitical activity in the Pacific region is also a contributing factor.
“Last year, Lithuania signed a strategic partnership agreement with Japan, there will be a separate action plan, and I think this has given and will continue to give impetus. Moreover, next year there will be the International Expo in Osaka, Japan, so we are definitely interested in having more relations with Japan,” Gurskas said.
Still a basketball country
Repsense’s analysis looked at the visibility of not only Lithuania, but also the other Baltic countries. According to Ereminaitė, Estonia is the best-seen Baltic country, although Lithuania is a close second.
“Estonia is still ahead of us. However, the difference is very small, only a few dozen searches out of the ones we analysed. Latvia is far behind Estonia and us,” said Ereminaitė.
Both Lithuanian leaders and the Estonian prime minister have been making loud statements about Ukraine, which drew considerable attention. “And we should recall that Estonia has had a good public image for a long time, communicating a lot about its technological progress and the digitisation of public services,” according to Ereminaitė.
However, geopolitics is not the only context in which Lithuania is discussed.
“When we analysed the discoverability of data, that is what people find and what Google indexes as the most important news about Lithuania, especially in countries […] such as Serbia or Croatia, news about Lithuanian basketball and the narrative of Lithuania as a basketball country dominates,” she said.
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