The afternoon audience at Tallinn's spacious Song Grounds was small, munching tacos from a Tex-Mex stall and clutching plastic beakers of Saku, a local beer. But the performers on stage, six middle-aged women singers dressed in elaborately embroidered, traditional costumes, belted out a succession of Estonian folk songs as if they were playing to a packed Carnegie Hall.
"What pride and wonder it is to be an Estonian," declares a song that was popular in June 1988, when the Song Grounds provided the venue for one of the most unusual political uprisings Europe has ever seen, Estonia's Singing Revolution.
The annual singing festival turned into a series of all-night singsongs when thousands of people kept vigil, waving the national flag in a demand for independence from the Soviet Union.
After nine years as an independent state, Estonia is eager to join another integrated system of states, the EU, but the country's 1.5 million inhabitants have lost none of their national pride.
"We have had a very unhappy experience of being part of an integrated system in the past, and the experience has given us a very valuable idea about identity. It has shown us that you can lose anything but if you keep your language you can still maintain the culture of the nation," said Mr Alar Streimann, one of Estonia's negotiators with the EU.
Related to Finnish and Hungarian, the Estonian language is bewildering to most visitors, full of compound words that look like nothing more than a long string of vowels framed by a few consonants. Hauaoooudused, for example, translates as "horrors of the night in the grave".
Like Latvia to the south, Estonia has given up trying to oblige everyone to speak the national language in private as well as in public, but human rights groups remain unhappy about the disadvantages faced by Estonia's Russian-speakers, who make up 28 per cent of the population.
Apart from the language issue, however, the EU has few complaints about Estonia, which has transformed its economy with breathtaking speed from a communist, planned system into one so liberal that the country was invited to join the World Trade Organisation last year.
In 1992, just a year after gaining independence from the Soviet Union, Estonia abolished all tariffs, including those on agricultural produce. The big-bang approach impressed foreign investors and delighted some economic theorists, but it had a devastating effect on many Estonians, especially farmers. In the past 10 years, the number of cows in the country has fallen by 49 per cent and the pig population has plunged by 72 per cent.
Estonia's centre-right government has promised to spend more on social welfare in an attempt to ease some of the hardship caused by the economic reforms, but Mr Streimann dismisses the suggestion that the reform process was too radical.
"Definitely, it was a painful process, and not everyone has come out of that a winner. So this is why it's important that we devote some resources to the social side now. But we had to earn this money first," he said.
In terms of readiness, Estonia is, with Hungary and Slovenia, one of the leaders in the eastern European race to join the EU. But policy-makers in Tallinn fear that their membership could be delayed while the EU waits for other states in the region to catch up.
If Estonia joins the EU ahead of its Baltic neighbours, it will have to spend millions of pounds reinforcing its border controls with Latvia to conform with the Schengen border agreement. But Mr Streimann argues that such expenditure would be a small price to pay in comparison with the political risks of delaying membership.
"Why should we have to delay our accession date because of some of our neighbours who perhaps have not taken the political decision to change the legislative system, to put money into those gaps where you need to put money? Why should we wait for those countries? We cannot explain that to the people of Estonia," he said.
Estonians, who describe themselves as an emotionally cool, watchful people, will be especially alert later this year when EU leaders meet in Nice to agree changes in the EU decision-making process, aimed at making the Union ready to accept new members.
Mr Streimann acknowledged that Estonia's target date of 2003 may be ambitious, but he warned that, if the first new members do not join by 2005, the entire process of enlargement could unravel.
"Whether it's one, two, three or five countries before 2005 doesn't matter, but if it doesn't start before that, we'll have politically failed in Europe. In that case, it would be almost impossible to explain to the public in the candidate countries why we should go ahead at all," he said.