Authors

Andres Kasekamp²; Katarzyna Biersztańska³; Magdalena Tomala⁴; Damian Szacawa¹; Joerg Hackmann⁶; Marcin Fronia⁵;  ¹ Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland;  ² University of Toronto, Canada;  ³ The branch of the University of Bialystok in Vilnius, Lithuania;  ⁴ Politechnika Świętokrzyska w Kielcach, Poland;  ⁵ Zentrum für Historische Forschung Berlin der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Germany;  ⁶ University of Szczecin, Poland

Discussion

Recent discussions about the Baltic Sea Region, not least since the Russian full-scale invasion in Ukraine and the subsequent NATO accession of Finland and Sweden, first of all focus on geopolitics and military security. This reflects an unprecedented disruption in conceptualizing regionality of the Baltic Sea Area. Before, Baltic Sea Region discourses had been shaped by concepts of Nordic neutrality, of rapprochement through mutual understanding, of focusing on peace and conflict research, and by a wide range of soft security aspects including e.g. environmental, minorities, and memory politics. Besides, there has been a long tradition of institution building of Baltic Sea regional cooperation, which is also affected by the Russian attack on Ukraine since 2014. Instead of following an oversimplified image of the Baltic as having now become a “NATO lake”, this roundtable will discuss the relevance of and the changes in identity and security discourses of the Baltic Sea region. Against this background, firstly recent changes in discourses on Baltic (Sea Region) identity and the impact of inter-organizational relations between major institutions as HELCOM and CBSS on Baltic Sea regional cooperation will be discussed. Second, the roundtable will focus on security discourses and ask what happened to concepts of soft security, which were strong in the region since the Helsinki Conference in 1975. Furthermore, the paradigm shift in security discourses among the major political actors in the region (EU, NATO, and Russia) since the large scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine will be addressed.