FOREIGN POLICY OF LITHUANIA: LINKING THEORY TO PRACTICE

In 2004, Lithuania successfully implemented its two most important foreign policy goals- becoming the member of both the European Union and NATO. However, the country now has to assert its status and position in the Euro-Atlan-tic community of liberal democracies. Lithuania faces an arguably more complex agenda, which has no clear end-goals or deadlines. The security challenges are difficult to identify and predict. The global and European strategic environment is best characterised by an ever-growing uncertainty: the transatlantic relations continue to be tense, Russia, paradoxically, is balancing between the perspective of disintegration and re-emerging as an expansionist imperial power, and the Eu-ropean Union is undergoing one of the most severe internal crises in decades. At the same time, the major schools of international relations theory disagree on what to make of current world politics. Neorealist authors tend to give alar-mist, apocalyptic accounts of the future, if the nation states would despise the iron logic of geopolitics, whereas reflectivist, constructivist authors argue that the world is "what we make of it", and thus, can be changed. These two visions of interna-tional relations inevitably lead to different policy implications. This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, the authors address the cur-rent state of affairs in international relations theory, in particular, the rationalist