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

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
perspective is usually missing in the INTERREG priority listings, drafted in the
spirit of rather traditional spatial planning; an issue which should given attention
by the Commission.
Why would this regional multilateralism be important from the CIP
perspective? As discussed above, most of the CI interdependencies are regionally
determined in one way or another. The regional particularities and the complexity
of the issues at stake make these interdependencies such that it seems not possible
to address them and coordinate the relevant efforts only ‘in Brussels’ by the EPCIP
structures. For instance, the electricity supply of Finland is directly – and
physically – connected to Sweden, Russia, and Estonia; oil transportation goes
through the Baltic Sea and a major tanker catastrophe would affect several if not
all the coastal countries; geographic proximity easily makes national health
problems regional; or banking and financing related activities, as well as those
related to ICT services, are in many times taken care by companies which operate
in several BSR countries through the same web-based systems.
One particular feature of BSR cooperation is that Russia, or a respective
Russian administrative level, is involved as full-fledged partner and member in
many cases, like in the CBSS, AI, BEAC, BASREC, VASAB, BSSSC. EU-Russian
cooperation does not always provide the necessary – detailed or concrete enough –
multilateral framework for cross-border cooperation in the field of CIP in the BSR.
At the same time, many threats to the very central fields of CI, such as energy
supply, nuclear safety, or transport, are necessarily connected to Russia.
As discussed above, this regional cooperation is active but based on a very
fragmented and complex network of actors. While it would be impossible to
follow or monitor all of these multi-level simultaneous activities from Brussels,
coordination is a real regional challenge as well. The challenge and the necessity
of coordination arising from the organizational fragmentation has been a widely
discussed theme already a longer time, as there seems to be a considerable
overlaps both in terms of geographical area and memberships, as well as activities
and issue areas.
As such, no-one suggests the establishment of a hierarchic system. Thus,
Mariussen et al. (2000), for instance, have argued that there is a trend during
recent debates indicating that the classic mode of hierarchical control between and
within international organizations is loosing ground, and that information flows
and incentive systems, enabling autonomic operation of the different entities
working in the same field is preferred. Cooperation and coordination are
emphasized mainly at the level of implementation. Though basically supportive
towards this trend, Mariussen et al. list several problems arising from this scheme.
1) Insufficient learning may result from the fact that the same lessons may have to
be learned over and over again by different agents; 2) Harmful competition and
power struggles can lead to wasted resources and the loss of overall objectives; 3)
Avoidance of responsibility can be caused without a clear division of tasks; 4)
Opportunism, caused by the unclear structures, may influence the agents to go in
wrong directions; 5) Information overload is caused by the autonomous agents’
efforts to coordinate their activities at the grass-root level, resulting in too many
meetings; 6) Wrong (investment) decisions can be made because of a lack of
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