Towards a Baltic Sea Region Strategy in Critical ... - Helsinki.fi

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
Another territorially extended form of EU-funded cooperation is the INTERREG
programme, where in its current form also relevant Northwest Russian regions as
well as Belarus are full-fledged eligible members with the help of the EU’s
European Neighbourhood Policy Instrument (ENPI). 37
This situation might be interpreted as one where the EU is enough to
coordinate the regional activities even in the BSR. However, there are plenty of
non-EU regional cooperation forms, which all are reflecting to real needs and in
that sense show the opposite. While some of these institutions have been based on
decades-long traditional Nordic cooperation, most of them were created in the
aftermath of the end of the Cold War, and aimed at bringing the ‘West’ and ‘East’
of the BSR together. Since then, their profile has been developing and changing,
and even now there is a kind of confusion and search for new roles of the regional
institutions and networks in the midst of growing overlaps and complexity.
The main actors are the four territorially organised intergovernmental
councils dealing with several issue areas simultaneously: the Council of the Baltic
Sea States (CBSS), Barents Euro-Atlantic Council (BEAC), Arctic Council (AC),
and Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM). Some intergovernmental regional
cooperation is functionally organised as, for instance, the Helsinki Committee
(HELCOM) dealing with marine environment and maritime safety, the Baltic Sea
Region Energy Co-operation (BASREC), and Vision and Strategies for the Baltic
Sea Region 2010 (VASAB) in the field of spatial planning and development. In
some cases these councils or institutions include other than BSR non-EU
countries, as in the case of the AC, of which the USA and Canada are members.
The Commission of the EU also participates actively in the work of these councils,
as a full member as in the case of the CBSS, or as an observer in some other cases.
Several other European countries and organizations are usually more or less active
observers in the BSR intergovernmental bodies. The different regional
organizations tend also to be official observers or strategic partners of each other.
The parliamentary level of this regional cooperation is the Baltic Sea
Parliamentary Conference, being a forum for national and regional parliaments.
The most integrated and developed regional cooperation forums, both in
terms of organisational and financial resources as well as policy programmes, are
however founded around traditional Nordic cooperation, such as the NCM and its
parliamentary counterpart Nordic Council (NC). Although these organizations
have been open to all kinds of cooperation with the ‘outsiders’ and have signalled
this inclusive strategy by establishing information and coordination offices in
Northwest Russia and the Baltic States and cooperating closely with a wide range
of other actors, they so far have decided not to endanger this very well established
cooperation by taking, for instance, the three Baltic States as members of this
Nordic ‘family’. Thus, Nordic cooperation is that taking place between Denmark,
Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
In any case, this tradition of Nordic cooperation has led to the fact that the
three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have established their own
37
Concerning Russia’s participation in regional EU-funded cooperation, the current
ENPI/INTERREG IV system for 2007-2013 replaced the rather complicated system of TACIS
programme, the former EU funding source for involving Russia, which was difficult to coordinate
with the INTERREG priorities and funding.
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