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GLOBAL-LOCAL INTERPLAY IN THE BALTIC SEA REGION Pärnu, Estonia, October 1-4, 1998  Dr. Oleg Reut
and Security Agenda Abstract No part of Europe has suffered from the old patterns of geo-politics more than the Baltic states. These countries lost their security, their independence and their prosperity. And no part of Europe will benefit more if European integration is successful in overcoming these old patterns and replacing them with new habits of sub-regional co-operation in the Baltic region. European integration has a rich history when it comes to military affairs, and hardly any history when it comes to sub-regional affairs.
The first integration successes in the military sector immediately followed the Second World War. In 1948, the Treaty of Brussels was signed, in 1949 the North Atlantic Organisation was founded, and the Western European Union was created in 1954. Also after the recent end of the Cold War - or someone could call it the First Cold World War - these organisations reacted assertively by inviting the former member states of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation to establish closer ties - to be on varying conditions. The North Atlantic Co-operation Council was initiated in 1991, and the Partnership for Peace agreements stem from 1994.
Within the European Union area, the military have lost their traditional role in inter-state relations, their legitimacy and social foundation once the threat perceptions on which defensive security blocks and organisations are founded disappear, when de-securitisation has occurred.
At present, the security development in the Baltic Sea region and, with some reservations, in the countries of Northern Europe is dependent on choices made internally, but they are being made as a reaction to the factors that are external in regard to state and society. External is used here as opposite to domestic, or local, being a conceptual phenomenon, it emerges and comes from outside the society which is being analysed.
The geo-political perspective provides with conceptual tools for analysis of the initiatives taken by the state themselves in international and regional competition. Using these tools, we can see that both the Norden and Baltics have become a renewed focus of European geo-politics since the historical upheaval of the years 1989 to 1993. The proposed paper examines the characteristics of the Baltic subregional co-operation as well as the security spectrum (existential, soft, explicit, hard) reflecting the contributions sub-regional co-operation can make to the new European security agenda.
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