While actively running the EU’s foreign policy on the world’s most demanding issues, Kaja Kallas still finds time outside work to read about … more foreign policy. The top EU diplomat and former Estonian prime minister frequently talks about her love of reading, citing her favorite authors in speeches and meeting with them privately to discuss their work. Since taking up her most recent post in December 2024, she has read at least 52 books she has shared publicly — all of which she has posted on her Instagram — most of them related to international affairs.
In total, she has shared more than 200 titles since 2017. The collection closely tracks the subjects Kallas is most involved with in her role, evolving alongside her professional remit: 24 books on Russia and Ukraine, nine on China, and seven on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Further-flung regions pop up only rarely, with just three books on the rest of East Asia and none on South American politics beyond Venezuela.
The reading lists alone have not shaped the full contours of Kallas’ foreign policy, of course. But they provide a view into which political subjects Europe’s chief diplomat is interested in learning more about and where she goes looking for answers. So, what does Kallas’ bookshelf reveal about the person shaping Europe’s diplomacy?
To find out, POLITICO reviewed the 248 titles she has included on public reading lists since 2017 and spoke to 24 of the authors. Kallas is not the only avid reader in Brussels, but few politicians talk about their love of literature quite as often. Since 2023, she has released reading lists twice a year on Instagram, and before that, she blogged about her latest reads monthly.
Political scientist Ivan Krastev, who co-authored 2019’s “The Light That Failed: A Reckoning” on why liberalism failed to spread in Eastern Europe, said Kallas had reached out to him after reading his book. She was trying to find a publisher to translate it into her native Estonian, he told POLITICO. The translation was eventually released in 2022.
While Kallas was prime minister, her government had similarly pushed for the translation of political scientist Mark Leonard’s “The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict,” which she said she would “often cite.” “It’s interesting, particularly when a politician in a high position reads a book,” said Krastev. Visiting Montenegro for the EU-Western Balkans Summit in June this year, the top diplomat had read the memoirs of Richard Holbrooke, architect of the 1995 Dayton Accords in Bosnia, and Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president and mediator of the 1999 Kumanovo Agreement forcing Serbia’s withdrawal from Kosovo. A post shared by Kaja Kallas (@kajakallas) “A lot to learn also today, and actually a lot of parallels,” said Kallas of Holbrooke’s book in July.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
