BSR in international politics

1
BSR in international politics

• Dr, Docent Sami Moisio
• Academy of Finland

2
Exam

• The exam will take place on Monday the 8th of
  October, 1012 (the lecture hall will be
  announced on the www-pages of the program)
• The second possibility is on Friday the 9th of
  November 1417 (lecture hall 9) Please, remember
  to register at the BSRS-office!
• The exam will include two essay questions dealing
  with the lectures

3
International politics why?

• The relations between states
• The alliances between states
• The institutional arrangements between states
• The relations between civil societies
  (minorities)
• The boundaries between political units
• The transnationalization of space in Europe
• Regional power structures
• Regional security communities
• Region in a global political landscape
• High vs. low international politics

4
The role of the BSR in international politics

• Major characteristics in the within the past c.
  100 years
• The interaction between the small and large
  states (previously called as empires)
• Constant processes of integration and
  disintegration
• The BSR has been an area between the Western
  Europe and the vast Eurasian landmasses (where
  are the boundaries of Europe)
• The importance of the BSR was emphasized
  especially in the era of wars on territory
• The strategic significance of the area has
  declined in the post-Cold War world

5
From geopolitics to geo-economics?
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The recent political developments

• The enlargement of NATO in 2004
• The enlargement of the EU in 2004
• The energy politics within the past three-four
  years
• the vast Russian energy resources and especially
  the security of energy supplies to Europe have
  become a strategic issue how dependent the EU
  states dare to be on Russian gas and oil given
  the huge geopolitical significance of energy
• The tension between the New Europe and Russia
• The interaction between the EU and Russia
  (Germany and Russia)
• The re-grouping of the Eastern Europe
• The World Bank issues a warning about the
  re-division of the Eastern Europe into two One
  is Euro-centric, comprising the eight new members
  of the European Union (EU-8), Turkey, and
  gradually, the seven Southeastern European (SEE)
  countries. The other is Russia-centric, largely
  comprising the 12 countries of the CIS (World
  Bank 2006)

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The BSR dynamics
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The EU-Russian relations

• Russian politics towards the EU
• Eurasianist tendencies vs. Europe oriented
  policies
• Traditional approach to Russia Russia is the
  other for Europe, Russia is different
  (culturally, politically and economically),
  Russia follows its own track
• Transitional approach Russia is in a process of
  becoming normal state (market economy, western
  democracy, human rights)
• In Russia sovereignty vs. integration (the
  concept of sovereign democracy)

9
Dependencies

• The question of various dependencies
  characterizes the return to Europe discourse
  championed by the new Central Europeans
• The discursive production of state sovereignty in
  the Baltic States has been closely connected with
  an idea of decreasing both political and economic
  dependency on Russia
• This phenomenon may well be called a reverse
  conceptualization of state independence or state
  sovereignty the less a state is dependent on
  Russia the more independent it is

10
Out of dependencies

• NATO memberships of the ex-Soviet republics which
  in the early 1990s refused to join the CIS have
  been crucial to put into action this new
  independence
• Most recently, the issue of dependency has been
  nowhere as visible as in the context of energy
• However, since the double enlargement of NATO and
  the EU, the depiction of Russia as a potential
  geopolitical threat has decreased in intensity in
  the post-Communist states

11
Analysing Russia

• Russia had a special role within the return to
  Europe discourse. From the mid 1990s forward,
  there has been an ongoing debate on the future of
  Russia and its exceptional features
• is it returning to Tsarist authoritarianism
• is it moving towards democratic political culture
  by following the western track
• is it willing to move to more expansive power
  politics
• is it trying to re-establish its central position
  in world politics this time by using vast energy
  resources and military power
• is Russia a European state or another
  civilization
• is Russia trying to preserve its territorial
  coherence by not allowing its neighborhood states
  to fly away from its sphere of power

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Analysing Russia

• One of the central characteristics of the
  aforementioned debates is the need to make
  diagnoses of Russia in order to disclose its
  anatomy
• This includes identifying symptoms in Russian
  politics and then connecting them to the
  determining factors of Russian politics
• Policies of president Putin, for example, are
  often diagnosed to be symptoms of the
  authoritarian political culture, an underlying
  presumption being that politics in Russia
  proceeds in vicious cycles
• The columnist of the Financial Times, Neil
  Buckley (2006), for example, calls Putins Russia
  a managed democracy because it is a system that
  preserves competitive election while doing
  everything possible to predetermine the outcome

13
Between the east and west?
14
The major policies of the US in the BSR

• The Northern Europe Initiative (NEI) of the
  United States emerged in 1997
• In September 1997 at a meeting of the Nordic and
  Baltic foreign ministers in Bergen, Norway,
  Assistant Secretary of State Marc Grossman
  introduced the Northern Europe Initiative
• The NEI was originally concerned with traditional
  security questions
• The US decision-makers sought to signal to Russia
  that even though the Baltic states would not be
  included in the initial round of NATO
  enlargement, this did not mean that the US
  regarded them as lying within the Russian sphere
  of influence
• The NEI aimed at avoiding any short-term
  emergence of security vacuum in the region

15
The major policies of the US in the BSR

• The NEI's objectives
• stability, prosperity and security
• the bolstering of the U.S. trade and investement
• the integrating the countries of the region in
  order to avoid the dependency on Russia
• The NEI emphasizes the regional approach in
  dealing with the environmental challenges in the
  region
• nuclear and non-nuclear challenges
• nuclear waste management projects in the Russian
  northwest

16
The major EU policies in the BSR

• The Wider Europe policy by the European
  Commission
• The New Neighborhood Policy by the EU commission
• The Northern Dimension Initiative
• The Eastern Dimension Initiative by Poland
• Various EU programs (structural funds) such as
  the Interreg and TACIS

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The post-Cold War BSR the epoch of transition
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The post-Cold War BSR the epoch of transition
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Imagining the BSR

• The area around the Baltic Sea region can be
  treated in several ways
• 1. A European megaregion consisting of various
  states
• 2. A European sub-region consisting of regions
  and some parts of states
• 3. A network of various interest groups
• 4. An imagined community created by region
  builders (top down regionalization)
• 5. An area of increasing interaction between
  civil societies (an everyday form of regionalism)

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Imagining the BSR

• The BSR has been back on high political agenda
  since the early 1990s (after the end of the Cold
  War)
• The revival of the interest is often connected to
  an understanding that the East and the West
  somehow meet in the area around the Baltic Sea
• The Baltic Sea has recently been narrated as an
  internal sea of the EU which consists of various
  corridors and networks increasing both the
  movement of capital or goods, and compressing
  functional space of the region
• The political bolstering of the Baltic sphere
  obviously aims at transforming the centre of
  gravity within the EU, but it also unfolds a
  naturalist logic according to which the region
  serves as a natural economic entity

21
Imagining the BSR

• The post-Wall Baltic Sea region is also scripted
  as a living example of various political
  post-isms.
• an illustration of post-modern geopolitical
  regionalisation of overlapping boundaries and
  loyalties
• a post-political model area as far as
  cross-border co-operation and regional
  integration are concerned
• territoriality is unbundled, state sovereignty
  pooled, borders de-securitised and classical
  military threats replaced by new soft threats
  which are now called risks
• The Baltic Sea region is therefore argued as
  highlighting a new Europe of inclusive
  regionalities where regions are gradually
  achieving political subjectivity

22
The BSR integration

• The BSR is a region of institutional networks
  which are loosely connected to each other (the
  new Hansa)
• 1. Intergovernmental institutions (e.g. Baltic
  Region Healthy Cities Office and the leading
  global IGOs)
• 2. European Union projects (BSR Interreg IIIB)
  and institutions (European Investment Bank)
• 3. BSR intergovernmental institutions (e.g.
  Baltic Council of Ministers, Nordic Council,
  Helsinki Commission)
• 4. Local authorities (e.g. Union of Baltic
  Cities) gt more than 100 members
• 5. Educational networks (e.g. Baltic Study Net)
• 6. Civil society institutions (e.g. Baltic Music
  Network)

23
The BSR integration

• The Baltic Sea region has its own institutions,
  territorial shape following the drainage basin of
  the Baltic Sea, and even a set of ideas that are
  connected to the region
• Economic transactions within the region are
  increasing
• The has been a notable intensification of
  networking in the region (business, city regions,
  etc.)
• The Baltic Sea region, therefore, obviously
  consists of various features which together form
  at least a seed of a region.

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The limits of the BSR integration

• There are several spatial obstacles in the
  Baltic Sea region which would deserve systematic
  research. Among these are 1) the lack of social
  capital, 2) differences in national geopolitical
  cultures, traditions and experiences and the
  perpetual domination of state-centricity at the
  state scale, and 3) the boundary construction at
  the EU level.

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The lack of social capital

• As far as social capital is concerned, mutual
  dependence works as guarantee which further
  increases the sense of trust among political
  subjects.
• If we consider the Baltic Sea region as a
  community in the making, we find out that even
  though the quantity of the networks consisting of
  social relations is considerable, the lack of
  social capital is however pervasive. This
  especially considers high politics.
• The persistence of geographical memory, which is
  inevitably attached to the painful experience of
  the 20th century, causes strong difficulties in
  the process of creating trust within the Baltic
  Sea region.
• Political affects, in particular feelings of
  hate, pride, distrust, fear, anger and even
  shame, form an integral part of political life
  within the area.

26
Variety of national geopolitical cultures

• The Baltic Sea region is a diffuse collection of
  geopolitical traditions, most of which are deeply
  based on national historiography and imaginative
  geographies written by strategists.
• Given the great variety of states in the Baltic
  Sea region in terms of size, population,
  orientation, political geographical belonging,
  power resources, memberships and relative
  location in the world economy, interstate
  relations are not only heavily asymmetrical but
  also deeply accumulated to national geopolitical
  histories.
• Even though Donald Rumsfelds division into new
  and old Europe may not work well as an analytical
  tool, it nevertheless unfolds the complex
  geography of the Baltic Sea integration (NATO)
• It is hard to imagine the Baltic Sea region as a
  regional security complex within which it is not
  reasonable to treat the security of different
  actors as separate issues.

27
Variety of national geopolitical cultures

• National geopolitical traditions locate the
  states of the Baltic Sea region to rather
  different places on the political map of Europe.
• Estonian politicians seem to be willing to locate
  the country in Central Europe, an action which
  aims at both drawing a boundary between Russia
  and Europe and emphasising the importance of the
  Baltic states on the value map of Europe.
• The hegemonic geopolitical traditions in Latvia
  and Lithuania locate these states in the reborn
  Central Europe rather than Northern Europe,
• The Northern Dimension of the European Union,
  originally launched by Finland in 1997, has not
  attracted the Baltic politicians.

28
The EU as an obstacle

• The future of the integration at the EU level
  will have several outcomes as far as the Baltic
  Sea integration is concerned.
• One of the most crucial outcomes is the one
  attached to the internal and external boundaries
  of the EU whether they become permeable,
  securitised, de-securitised, closed, hard,
  blurred or networked regarding people, goods and
  capital.
• Two kinds of boundaries in the context of the
  Baltic Sea integration.
• 1) networked non-borders, such as the Schengen
  boundary system which currently carves up the
  Baltic Sea region states into insiders and
  outsiders.
• 2) Colonial frontier describes the point where
  the EU meets the East and, indeed, this identity
  political frontier is very much bolstered in the
  context of the EU foreign policy.

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The EU as an obstacle

• The boundary dynamics of the EU may have dramatic
  impact on the future of the Baltic Sea
  integration.
• There is now a danger of creating soft borders
  within the EU region and hard ones between the EU
  and its outside.
• This is to say that the federalist agenda may
  lead to a formation of new borders in Europe that
  not only divide the member states into
  first-class and second-class members, but also
  leads to a construction of the eastern boundary.
• As a consequence, the third class Europe a
  fringe of new friends as the New Neighbourhood
  Initiative puts it would be excluded from the
  EU self gtThis would seriously jeopardise the
  Baltic Sea integration.