A return to geopolitics? The future of the security community in the Baltic Sea Region

ABSTRACT

One key question for the European security community is whether today’s confrontation between the EU member states and Russia is the end of its spread to the Baltic Sea region, including Russian districts, and the beginning of a return of geopolitical rivalry in the region. This article investigates the possibilities of avoiding such a negative downward spiral by drawing on security community theory and discussing two different methods of security community building – “top-down” and “bottom-up”. It points to the need for the EU institutions to return to the Monnet method to find a way out of the geopolitical “zero-sum” game increasingly played by the governments in the region. This implies not putting restrictions on participants from the north-west regions of Russia in strategically chosen areas of cooperation, and a more pronounced bottom-up, long-term and macro-regional approach built on joint problem-solving projects and people-to-people contacts that generate “win-win” games.

KEYWORDS:

• Security community
• Baltic Sea
• Monnet method
• geopolitics
• European Union
• Russia

Introduction

One impression predominates my mind over all others. It is this: unity in Europe does not create a new kind of great power, it is a method of introducing change in Europe and consequently in the world … the Europeans have built up the European Community precisely in order to find a way out of the conflicts to which the nineteenth-century philosophy gave rise. (Monnet, 1962, p. 26)

Geopolitics was certainly strongly in the mind of Jean Monnet, the founding father of the European Union (EU), when he declared that European states should cooperate closely “to find a way out of the conflicts to which the nineteenth-century philosophy gave rise”. This way out was to foster a new regional, European identity, to supersede the national identities, by pursuing economic integration and creating supranational institutions. The aim of this new “security community” was therefore precisely to tear down national borders and to reduce the importance attributed to geographic spaces.

The interests of, and actions by, European states should according to Monnet be pursued with reference to common, shared objectives. The decisive means of achieving this change was to turn foreign policies among European nations into “low politics”, to turn the “zero-sum” game into a “win-win” game for all members of this new regional security community, and to establish a European polity that could transcend the geopolitics of European nation states. This approach to building peace and stability stands in sharp contrast to the diplomatic inter-state peace agreements that so many times have failed throughout European history.

The main engine behind the fostering of a security community in Europe has been the EU. The EU’s enlargement in 2004, including Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland, is perhaps the best example of a successful expansion of security community that has reduced the space for competitive geopolitics on the European continent (Epstein & Jacoby, 2014). While the Union successfully has created a security community among its member states, a key question has been to what extent the EU can help to expand this community beyond its own borders (Kavalski, 2008). Since the end of the Cold War it has been debated whether it could be enlarged to the Eastern shore of the Baltic Sea and spread into Russia to form a Baltic sub-regional security community (Mouritzen, 2001). The EU’s “Wider Europe” initiative and European neighbourhood policy have been interpreted as a step towards “post-Westphalian” geopolitics beyond Union borders (Wesley Scott, 2005). Other observers have been more skeptical by pointing out the incompatibility between lingering big power practices of Russia and the practices of functional problem solving and self-constraint within the European security community (Pouliot, 2010). Today the Union attempts to stretch the security community beyond its formal borders through the fostering of macro-regions in Europe based on concrete transnational cooperation projects and policies such as the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR) (Gänzle & Kern, 2016).

The new assertive Russian foreign policy, analyzed by other contributions in this Forum, weakens the possibilities for the expansion of the European security community. Russia has challenged the EUSBSR by pursuing its own strategy of developing Russia’s northwest (Makarychev & Sergunin, 2017, p. 10), and it is debatable whether the Russian-led Eurasian Customs Union and the EU are reconcilable integration models (Dreyer & Popescu, 2014). A new kind of geopolitics of regional strategies and organizations, based on the struggle over being the most attractive model, has gradually emerged (Dragneva & Wolczuk, 2012). The EU is met not only with alternative Russian-led models but with open military aggression in Ukraine and a world view based on geopolitics aimed at undermining European integration. For the EU it has become increasingly unclear whether the aim is to include Russia into the security community or build it against Russia (Mölder, 2011, pp. 158–161; Nielsen, 2007; Wagnsson & Hellman, 2018).

At the same time, the Russian Foreign Ministry continues to emphasize the importance of local initiatives and the need to put the Baltic Sea cooperation outside political consideration and focus on day-to-day problems for ordinary people (Kapyrin, 2016). Business and local representatives of the north-west regions of Russia have criticized the EU’s sanctions imposed on Russia after the outbreak of the Ukraine war because they argue that these have put a sudden stop to the EUSBSR cooperation they want to engage in (Khodko, 2016) (for additional difficulties experienced from the Russian side, see both Suslov and Tyushka, in this Forum). The Swedish and German Foreign Ministers have expressed their strong support for the promotion of people-to-people contacts with Russia – a bottom-up approach – at the social, cultural and economic level (Gabriel, 2017; Wallström, 2017). Despite the inter-state conflict between Russia and the other Baltic Sea region countries, trade exchanges across the region are still progressing. The EU’s Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme, created in 2014 by the agreement between Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Sweden and the northern parts of Germany, Norway, Belarus and the north-western regions of Russia continues to drive macro-regional cooperation despite the bi-lateral sanction regime.¹ The EU’s cooperation with Russia has become increasingly “sub-nationalized”, involving a growing number of non-governmental actors and sector experts focusing on functional problem solving (Gänzle, 2017, p. 416). City cooperation, such as the one between Turku (Finland), Hamburg (Germany) and St. Petersburg (Russia), has become indispensable in the implementation of EUSBSR projects (Jetoo, 2018). The former Prime Minister of Finland Lipponen – the initiator of the Northern Dimension in 1997 – has spoken in favour of lifting the EU sanctions and increase cooperation with Russian partners within the EUSBSR and the Council of the Baltic Sea States (CBSS) as a way to avoid a military build-up and geopolitical competition between Russia and NATO in the region (Lipponen, 2016).

Thus, the broader question is whether today’s diplomatic and high-politics confrontation with Russia is the end of the EU’s bottom-up spread of a European security community to the wider Baltic Sea region. Or worse, it is genuinely uncertain whether geopolitical rivalry and EU sanctions against Russia present the beginning of the unravelling of already established lower-level and civil society networks and a step back for security community building in this macro-region, as indicated by Schmidt-Felzmann and Engelbrekt (2018, in this Forum). Tyushka (2018) goes even further (in this Forum) and argues that a confrontation between Russia and the “West” is inevitable, including in the Baltic Sea region.

In this article it is argued, however, that such a negative downward spiral can be avoided if the EU’s institutions more strategically and purposefully than today uses the Monnet method as a way of introducing change in the region in order to find a way out of the geopolitical game increasingly played by the governments (including EU member states). The article points to the need for a more pronounced bottom-up, long-term, and macro-regional approach that can turn the foreign policies of the states around the Baltic Sea into low politics. The approach should build on concrete joint problem-solving projects and people-to people contacts, and avoid restrictions on participants of the north-west regions of Russia. Indeed, more than half a century after Jean Monnet’s ground-breaking initiative was launched, we are learning if the European security community, developed over several decades, can also act as a bulwark against a revival of conflicts resonating with nineteenth-century theories and practice of geopolitics.

By drawing on security community theory and focusing on the Baltic Sea region, this article provides some provisional answers to these questions. First, it recapitulates the basic elements of this theory and discusses two different methods of security community building – “top-down” and “bottom-up” – and prospects for establishing a viable security community in the Baltic Sea region. Second, the article critically examines the EUSBSR as a case in point of the Union’s recent efforts to spread the European security community in the region to include Russia. Third, it draws some tentative conclusions on what could be expected in the future from the EUSBSR and in particular: can it help strengthen the development of a Baltic Sea region security community, including the north-west regions of Russia, and prevent the return to geopolitics in the Baltic Sea region?

Security community building: the principles and practices

Karl Deutsch defined security community as a group of people integrated to the point that there is a “real assurance that the members of that community will not fight each other physically, but will settle their disputes in some other ways” (Deutsch et al., 1957, p. 6). His theory was based in transactionalism and the idea that increased transnational interactions (trade, business, communications and civil society exchanges) foster mutual trust among the participants, a “we-feeling” and support of political integration. According to Deutsch and his colleagues, the processes leading to security community need to be triggered by decisions for increased economic and political cooperation between states. This cooperation should be aimed at facilitating cross-border transactions amongst their citizens and civil societies, which in turn establish a sense of community that legitimates decisions for further integration. Thus the security community was the result of a dynamic interplay between top-down decisions and bottom-up integration processes.

Consequently the members of the security community were thought of as political leaders and high-level policymakers at ministries of defence and foreign affairs. The goal was the emergence of the reassurance among these representatives that neighbouring countries would settle disputes by non-violent means. At the same time the community would also grow from below as a result of enhanced interaction, mutual interdependencies and new transnational loyalties among central government officials, trans-governmental (lower units of government, first responders) and transnational actors (business, NGOs etc.), and even military actors. This new type of international community would be based on mutual trust (Deutsch et al., 1957, p. 36).

Building on Deutsch, Adler and Barnett defined a security community as “a transnational region comprised of sovereign states whose people maintain dependable expectations of peaceful change” (1998, p. 30). Integration theory explained how the creation of the European security community was not simply the result of growing interdependence and trust between Euro­pean states but the outcome of a complex interplay between economic integration, political decisions and com­mon institutions (Hodges, 1972; Lindberg & Scheingold, 1970; Stone-Sweet, Sandholtz, & Fligstein, 2001). This explained why the increased transnational interaction in Europe did not lead to an automatic growing public support for European integration.

The methods of spreading the European security community beyond the Union’s borders mirror these general mechanisms behind security community building. Mouritzen has labelled them the bottom up Nordic method and the top-down EU method (2001). In the bottom-up case mutual interdependencies and new loyalties and identities develop over longer periods of time within a region and grow spontaneously from the bottom-up, starting at lower levels of government, in civil society and through economic exchanges. This method may (or may not) lead to common institutions that manifest the security community. In contrast, according to Mouritzen, the EU method starts with political-strategic decisions, visions and common norms and institutions laid down on countries and populations from the top-levels of government, with the aim to initiate processes of cooperation within and beyond the region. The security community expands when the EU and non-member state representatives start to share a practice of peaceful problem solving, that is, when common problems are no longer resolved as part of a zero-sum logic, but when cooperation turns into a win-win game of mutual gains. For example, when transnational groups of likeminded people – communities of practice – are devoted to solving jointly the environmental problems they all are faced with. One such case in point in the Baltic Sea region was Kaliningrad, with regard to which decision-makers and analysts believed that addressing the shared problems could act as a catalyst of security community building and that joint efforts to address practical issues and search for common solutions might bind the countries of the region together (see e,g., Mouritzen, 2001, p. 307). In this context Mouritzen pointed to the success of the top-down approach in creating a security community between the “arch enemies” France and Germany, which had had relatively little in common from the outset, but also to the experience of the Baltic states, where the attractiveness of membership created preconditions for an EU/NATO top-down spreading of norms, thus spawning the origins of a new security community (Mouritzen, 2001, p. 305).

By contrast, Adler (2008) has illustrated the strength and dynamics of the non-strategic, bottom-up approach in building a security community by referring to the period after the end of the Cold War. At this point in time possibilities for practical cooperation opened up at lower levels of governments in Western Europe and the Baltic States, an opportunity seized by NATO and EU officials and expert staff, who started interacting with non-member state civil servants. He argues that this everyday cooperation subsequently became a decisive driver for including the former Warsaw Pact states into the European security community. In Adler’s view, lower-level contacts and common practices were more important than these organizations’ official declarations, policies and strategies aimed at starting a process of security community building top-down. According to Adler, the interaction at the grass-root level created a transnational community of practice that endowed European institutions with cooperative practices that could then spread the security community (Adler, 2008, p. 197; c.f. Wenger, 1998 on community of practice).

Langbein has similarly suggested that the effective spread of security community is highly dependent on a bottom-up approach involving actors at all levels and external actors’ ability to empower non-state domestic reformers (Langbein, 2014, p. 15). Others have shown that it is the Union’s “people-to-people” projects and concrete “doings” that mainly help bring new regions and states into this community (Adler & Pouliot, 2011; Pouliot, 2010). The bottom-up creation of transnational communities can thus be regarded as a “geopolitical eraser” that reduces stark dividing lines between EU and NATO members and non-members (c.f. Mouritzen, 2001, p. 306).² Ekengren (2018) has shown the need to integrate top-down transnational and bottom-up local – translocal – driving forces in the analysis of transnational communities of practice.

Security community building in the Baltic Sea Region: “top-down” or “bottom-up”?

Over the years, the spread of the European security community in the Baltic Sea region has proceeded through both the top-down and the bottom-up methods. From the 1990s onwards, the European states located in the Baltic Sea region pursued cooperation and integration policies encouraging regular dialogue with Moscow and the deepening of regional and subregional ties with the regions of Russia bordering the Baltic Sea. Their approach gave priority to infrastructure, environment and investment promotion, financial EU support and the stimulation of cross-border exchanges between subregional, local and private entities (European Commission, 1994, p. 9).

In the mid-1990s, the European Commission presented initiatives that focused on the Baltic Sea region (European Commission, 1994; European Parliament, 1995). The EU Commission participated as a full member in the work of the Council of the Baltic Sea States (CBSS), set up in 1992, and other regional organizations that included Russia as a full member, such as the Helsinki Commission (HELCOM). The CBSS served in particular as a meeting forum and vehicle for cooperation, signalling a political commitment to the region, rather than constituting the main decision-making arena (Stålvant, 1999). The CBSS coordinated economic support for projects of regional or cross-border interest and also developed a collaborative Higher Education establishment, the Euro-faculty in Riga with links to Tartu, Vilnius and Kaliningrad to promote educational cooperation and cultural exchange across the region (European Commission, 1994; European Parliament, 1995). A regional dimension of the EU-Russian relationship could in this way grow from below among a variety of economic, civil society and professional actors. In conjunction with the many other cooperation initiatives in the Baltic Sea region, the CBSS served as a means of facilitating the creation of a security community from the bottom up.

In parallel to the developments in the Baltic Sea region, Russia was also invited as a partner to high-level summit meetings by EU governments, joint declarations, and different dialogue formats where a range of sectoral policy initiatives were adopted (Haukkala & Forsberg, 2016; Schmidt-Felzmann, 2016). The two sides met on an equal basis and decided on the highest political level what both parties should implement at home. Ahead of the Central and East European states’ accession to the EU, already in 2003, the EU and Russia agreed on the legal basis of the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) from 1994 to create a “Common economic space” (European Commission, 2007, p. 3) alongside three other other common spaces (Haukkala, 2010). The PCA anchored the basic values of democracy, human rights, rule of law, and market economy principles as the foundation of the partnership. The expectation was that this common foundation of shared values would support the security community building, including in the Baltic Sea. The EU-Russia agreement on four “Common Spaces” was established in 2005 with the aim of promoting concrete cooperation in the areas of economic cooperation, “freedom, security and justice”, external security (civil protection), and environment, social welfare and health. The “Spaces” were negotiated in parallel with new EU agreements with the other Eastern and Southern neighbours, under the umbrella of the EU’s European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) initiative, adopted in 2004.

In 2001, Mouritzen argued that the Nordic bottom-up approach could not work in the Baltic Sea region with Russia since the basic pre-conditions, such as a common language, shared political culture, and well-developed civil societies, were lacking. In addition, the long conflictual history of the Russian – Baltic States relationship meant that the top-down approach would have better chances of spreading the European security community to the Eastern shore of the Baltic Sea (Mouritzen, 2001). Nielsen challenged this view by pointing to how the bottom-up creation of security community – in the Deutschian sense of transnational peaceful conflict solution – has included Russia and seemed to be successful. EU membership of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia opened up new multilateral cooperation channels with Russia and led to a growing number of joint projects led by the European Commission. EU accession of these four states helped to de-politicize the Baltic Sea states’ relationship with Russia (Nielsen, 2007, p. 126).

From 2014, the worsening conditions for top-level cooperation between the EU governments and the Russian central authorities, as well as the increasing military tensions in the Baltic Sea region, put into question whether Mouritzen’s top-down logic can work today. Indeed, the current high-level political and diplomatic conflict between the EU and Russia has seriously weakened the possibilities for a joint strategic approach to spreading security community to Russia (Schmidt-Felzmann, 2016). At the time when the EU and Russia seemed increasingly to share the basic values of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and market economy principles a joint top-down method was possible. Today, Russia criticizes intergovernmental agreements with the EU as an attempt to impose a Western political order on Russia and its neighbours. This perceived one-sided top-down approach and asymmetrical power relationship in favour of the EU has provoked a strong reaction from Russia that has always emphasized the importance of an equal partnership (Haukkala, 2015, p. 26, 36).

Unfortunately, the Union’s own “foreign politicization” of its relationship with Russia has cemented the top-down approach and weakened the possibilities of turning this relation from foreign policy into low politics – the aim of the Monnet method. In the recent decade, the EU has strengthened its intergovernmental Common Foreign and Security Policy and established the European External Action Service (EU “diplomatic service”). This has enhanced the role of national foreign ministries in the EU’s policy vis-à-vis Russia and led to a stronger emphasis on the values and norms of traditional foreign policy, including “Westphalian” instruments such as economic sanctions against a state in its entirety (Jørgensen, Kalland Aarstad, Drieskens, Laatikainen, & Tonra, 2015; Keukeleire & Delreux, 2014; Spence & Bátora, 2015). The high politicization has furthered a state-like EU approach at the cost of the EU Commission led “technical” cooperation for the erasing of geopolitics. The development towards a more norm based – in contrast to problem-solving – EU policy has made it easier for the Russian government to justify its more confrontational foreign policy with the claim that there is a fundamental clash of norms between the West and Russia. To avoid the clash of world views and norms that runs the great risk of bringing back geopolitics in the region there is a strong case for a return to the truly transnational and macro-regional approach of functional cooperation used in the 1990s.

In summary, many factors speak in favour of a bottom-up, de-politicized, Commission-led and problem-focused approach to the creation of security community in the Baltic Sea region (but see Suslov (2018), in this Forum, and Tyushka (2018), in this Forum, who illustrate the potential difficulties in the bottom-up approach for Russia). So in what direction do the EU’s current policies in the region go?

The Northern Dimension initiative and the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region

The Northern Dimension (ND) initiative, which was the first systematic security community building exercise in the region, was launched in 1997 by the Finnish Prime Minister Lipponen (Lipponen, 1999). The stated aim was to avoid new dividing lines in the Baltic Sea region as a result of the EU enlargement to Finland and Sweden in 1995. The aim of the new and broader ND presented in 2004 was the same – to avoid the risk of divisions due to the inclusion of the three Baltic states and Poland into the Union. The ND is based on a wide range of actors in the region such as EU member states, international financial institutions, the private sector, the CBSS, the Barents Euro-Arctic Council (BEAC), the Arctic Council (AC), the Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM). Since 2004, the ND is a “Common policy” of four equal partners: the EU, Russia, Norway and Iceland. It is built on cross-border cooperation and joint projects in fields such as trade, environmental protection, infrastructure, the combatting of organized crime, and health cooperation. The ND is a regional expression of the four Common Spaces between the EU and Russia described in the previous section. The ND projects are implemented and financed by a great variety of actors, including EU programmes, such as the Interreg programmes, funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the European Neighbourhood Initiative (ENI) and led by the EU Commission. Two of the ND’s most important projects are the Environmental partnership and the Public Health and Social Well-being partnership, which promote environmental and health projects in northwest Russia. The projects, which are implemented through “sectoral” partnerships with local and regional Russian actors and funded by national, bilateral or multilateral financing, have contributed to the emergence of transnational regimes in the region (Haglund-Morrissey, 2008). Some observers have noted that the ND is fostering a process resulting in an integrated and peaceful borderland to the EU (Laitinen, 2003).

The most recent initiative for a renewed impetus into the Baltic Sea cooperation was taken by the European Parliament, which adopted in 2006 a resolution calling for a Baltic Sea Strategy within the framework of the ND (European Parliament, 2006). In June 2009, the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR) was launched (Bengtsson, 2009; European Commission, 2009; European Parliament, 2016). It includes several hundreds of policy proposals addressing challenges in the fields of environment, economy, safety and security.³ One of the purposes of the EUSBSR was to provide new impetus to the promotion of Russia’s participation in the regional cooperation that was perceived to have been successful before 2004 (Ketels & Lindholm, 2010; Ketels & Sölvell, 2006; Nikolova, 2010).

The EUSBSR does not add many new sectors for functional cooperation to what has already been available under the ND. The added value is that it provides a comprehensive and integrated framework for existing cooperation in the region. The EUSBSR and the coordinating role of the European Commission open up for deepened cooperation within and between the many regional organizations through the fostering of systems of multi-level governance that avoid overlaps and collective action problems (Gänzle, 2017).

The EUSBSR is oriented towards the solution of common problems shared by the Baltic Sea states, including measures to reduce nutrient inputs to the sea, to preserve biodiversity and reduce the risk of pollution from oil spills. The EUSBSR also encompasses areas of civil security cooperation such as the development of a common maritime surveillance system, projects against cross-border crime, response capacities for maritime accident and major storms and preparedness to respond to cross-border health threats (Martynenko, 2018). One of the projects, called “From Gaps to Caps”, deals with risk management capability assessments based on the identification of national and local gaps in the Baltic Sea Region (Karlsson, Olsson, & Riedel, 2016). The cooperation is inspired by the concept of societal security (Sundelius, 2005) covering the management and avoidance of threats to individuals and societies’ essential functions.⁴ The EUSBSR also has the objective of promoting innovation and entrepreneurship and the integration of the labour markets.⁵ Another ambition is to support interconnecting infrastructure projects, such as ending the isolation of the Baltic States regarding energy supply and improving the transport links across the Baltic Sea region as an extension of the EU’s Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) initiative (EUSBSR website).

For financing, the EUSBSR partly relies on the EU’s Interreg programmes. The EU’s Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme was created in 2014 by the agreement between eight EU member states, Norway, Belarus and the north-western regions of Russia.⁶ The declared aim of the Programme is to co-finance projects “to find joint solutions to common problems”.⁷ To be funded projects must involve at least three partners from three different programme member countries. Four areas are prioritized: innovation, natural resources, transport and “EU strategic support” (so called “seed money”). The participating organizations are from the areas of education, local and regional public authorities, small and medium sized enterprises, interests groups and NGOs, infrastructure and public service providers.⁸ The projects are co-financed by the Interreg Programme, which covers up to 85% of the total project cost.⁹ In November 2015 the Programme for 2014–2020 allocated 90 million Euro for the implementation of 35 cooperation projects. In 2018, Russian partners on local, national and regional levels participated in 15 of 39 projects, including cooperation on innovation for the BSR environment and security and the promotion of circular economy and “Baltic smart city areas for the twenty-first century”.¹⁰

It is of course difficult to know more precisely how far the Baltic Sea region had developed towards a security community before the crisis of 2014 without a more thorough empirical investigation of the degree of mutual trust in non-violent means of conflict-solving. By drawing on the different phases of the evolution of a security community (nascent, ascendant and mature) elaborated by Adler and Barnett (1998, pp. 50–57), a rough estimation would be that the region had reached the ascendant phase. This phase is defined as a stadium where there are increasingly dense networks, new institutions and organizations, decreased fear that the other represents a threat, and cognitive “friendly” structures that promote “acting together” (53). However, the criteria of a shared expectation “that security, broadly defined, can best be guaranteed only among members of the region” (53) has not been met in the region.

The future of EUSBSR and the prospects of top-down and bottom-up

The EUSBSR includes elements of both a bottom-up and top-down approach for the spreading of a European security community beyond the EU’s borders and including Russia. In line with a bottom-up approach and drawing on the experiences of the 1990s, the EU, through the Commission, acts as a facilitator, while the main responsibility for the development and implementation of joint projects rests with the EU’s member states, regional organizations, non-governmental actors and non-member partners (European Commission, 2013a, p. 10). The EU’s Strategy uses existing organizations in the region as a way to avoid a sharp division between EU members and non-members, which could have been the case with a more pronounced top-down approach. The main organizations for the implementation of the EUSBSR are the HELCOM, CBSS and the Visions and Strategies around the Baltic Sea (VASAB) as well as the EU’s Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme. In this way Russia, which is a member of CBSS but not of EUSBSR, can be a partner in specific projects promoted by the EUSBSR (European Commission, 2013b, p. 7).

Nevertheless Schymik and Krumrey (2009) ask whether the main goal of the EUSBSR is to turn all the Baltic Sea cooperation into EU policies, and thus exclude non-members – notably Russia – to a larger extent than before, or whether the strategy is genuinely designed to promote region building that includes Russia and Norway on equal terms with the EU’s member states (c.f. Klein & Makarov, 2009, pp. 3–4). Due to the fact that Russia is not member of the EUSBSR and its decision making structure, there is a greater risk of excluding Russian partners and views than in the ND where Russia participates as an equal member (c.f. Makarychev & Sergunin, 2017, p. 2). Furthermore, the funding of joint projects through the EUSBSR has been restricted because of the EU’s sanctions on Russia after the aggression against Ukraine in 2014 (see more details below). This has in practice led to the exclusion of Russian partners in these projects which are heavily depending on EU financing programmes.

Browning early warned that the EUSBSR risks a foreign politicization of the cooperation with Russia in the Baltic Sea region that could be detrimental for the de-politicized approach that facilitates the creation of a security community. By not including Russia as a full and equal member, the EU risks to lose its transformative power and divide the region into an “EU’s inside and outside” (Browning, 2010, p. 407). The risk of excluding EU non-member states spurred already early on a debate about the need to create new bodies that could implement the strategy. In response to concerns about excluding Russia, “The Baltic Sea Forum” was set up and new arrangements for the cooperation with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine were developed that more clearly link the strategy with the Northern Dimension and the Council of the Baltic Sea States (CBSS) (Schymik & Krumrey, 2009).

The Russian annexation of Crimea and Russia’s violations of Ukraine’s territorial integrity in the East poses a particular challenge to the EUSBSR and the spread of the European security community to Russia. There are a number of areas where “business as usual” is no longer possible. For example, it has become increasingly sensitive for some Baltic Sea states participating in the EUSBSR to include Russian partners in security related projects. There is a fear that this cooperation could reveal gaps in areas such as national civil protection capacities that Russian counterparts may take advantage of should the relationship with Russia become more confrontational in the future.¹¹

Another consequence of the Russian aggression against Ukraine is that EU member states and Norway, together with the US and other countries, have put restrictions on Russia in the form of asset freezes and visa bans on persons and companies deemed responsible for the violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Sanctions include also a ban on exports of dual-use material (civilian products that can be used for weaponry) and certain energy equipment (European Commission, 2015). Current heads of state and key decision-makers in the other Baltic Sea region countries are adamant that the EU sanctions will stay in place until Russia implements its part of the Minsk Agreement and returns Crimea to Ukraine (Council of the European Union, 2017; Ratas, 2017; Sipilä, 2016). The decreased level of trust between the federal Russian leadership and its European partners at central level places constraints on the development of future cooperation projects and security community building. The reduction of high-level meetings reduces the possibility for using the top-down approach to open up for increased transnational transaction and the spread of security community.

As part of the EU’s general sanctions on Russia, the European Investment Bank and the European Bank of Reconstruction suspended the signature of new financing operations in the Russian Federation as a whole (Council of the European Union, 2017). This affected also the financing of joint projects with partners in the Russian Northwest Federal District and hampered a renewed bottom-up, macro-regional approach to security community building. In July 2016, the Russian government allocated Euro 4 million to the Interreg Program for financing the participation of Russian partners.¹² Due to sanctions discussions the EU postponed the signature of the financing agreement regulating the Union’s contribution to this programme which meant that 24 Russian project partners from 15 projects had to wait for more than one and a half year before they could start. It was not until February 2018 that the European Commission, the Russian Federation and Germany agreed that the Commission and Russia should earmark Euro 4,4 million each to finance projects in Russia.¹³

Conclusions

The article has described how the Baltic Sea has served as a geographic arena in which EU and national actors have had for more than twenty-five years the possibility of building a security community, including Russia. As the development of the Council of Baltic Sea States, the EU’s Northern Dimension initiative and the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea region illustrate, both a top-down and a bottom-up “Nordic” approach to security community building with Russia have been in progress since the early 1990s. Actors from the EU and their Russian counterparts have developed and taken part in multiple projects in the Baltic Sea region, addressing common challenges and jointly pursuing opportunities for the benefit of the whole region.

The question is whether a quarter century of intense activities across the whole region has created a strong enough basis for the evolution of a Baltic Sea region security community that includes Russian regions. Indeed, the 2004 accession of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to the EU, and the development of the EUSBSR could be regarded as consecutive points at which a gradual shift took place towards the construction of a Baltic Sea region security community against, rather than with Russia. The progressive shift in the Russian central government’s rhetoric and increasingly antagonistic behaviour towards the EU and its NATO-member states puts into question the extent to which trust can be fostered between the European Baltic Sea states and today’s Russian leaders. The consequences of the annexation of Crimea also put into doubt whether the inclusion of Russian economic and lower-level actors in Baltic Sea region cooperation can generate a macro-regional Baltic Sea security community the bottom-up way.

What is clear, however, is that if the EU wants to change the increasingly geopolitically defined relations between the Baltic Sea states it will have to approach Baltic Sea regional cooperation by being more true to the Monnet method. This means that the Union should try to do everything it can to turn the foreign policies of its member states and Russia into low politics and a bottom-up approach to security building. To achieve this, the Union will have to enhance its efforts to define common problems together with Russian partners in general and north-west Russian colleagues in particular, and design and support joint projects that can generate “win-win” games. This process will be strengthened if the EU tones-down the role of national foreign ministries and the EEAS and makes the specialized Directorates-General (DG’s) of the European Commission the main driving force behind cooperation in strategic areas such as social, economic and cultural cooperation, and environmental, health and civil protection. In this way, the Union can shift the basis of the Baltic Sea cooperation from today’s national interests and the EU’s norm-based foreign policy vis-à-vis the Russian central government to concrete problem-solving projects with sectoral partners in the north-west regions of Russia. This implies to design the sanctions on Russia in such a way that they do not put restrictions on participants of these regions in strategically chosen areas of cooperation. It also means taking a long-term perspective and assessing the potential and economic benefits of policies and programmes beyond today’s inter-state political confrontation between the EU member states and the present Russian government. We cannot know whether the EU will be able to prevent, through a continuation of joint projects in the framework of its Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, a full-scale revival of geopolitical conflict. What we do know, however, is that this method historically has been the EU’s best tool for the creation of transnational loyalties and identity, and that there is little alternative to the continuation of this approach to security community building in the region.

What this article has demonstrated is that research into the framework conditions and specific factors potentially aiding the creation of the European security community can contribute to a better understanding of the prospects for a return to geopolitical conflict in the Baltic Sea area. The EU faces a range of political choices and alternative ways forward that may be decisive for the success or failure of the project of establishing an inclusive security community in the Baltic Sea region. In view of the fundamental conflict regarding values and principles, the Baltic Sea states’ relationships with Russian civil society and economic actors should focus on practical, functional problem solving, because “top-down” attempts to transfer values and norms are rather unlikely to be successful. There may still be room for the Union to build on its successful Monnet model of cooperation, if it focuses on questions such as: What are the common challenges for the Baltic Sea states? How can the states find an agreement on what the long term problems are? How are shared practices and routines – peaceful solutions – created and developed with Russian regional economic and civil society partners? How can these practices be made to “trickle upwards” to higher and federal levels of government to create trust and help erase geopolitics? To what extent are the governments ready to put people to people contacts and economic integration outside political consideration and to grow bottom-up? How can the EU adapt its security community of practice to make it resonate with local and macro-regional practices in the Northwest Federal District of Russia? In order to be able to respond to those questions, we need to better understand what the driving forces have been behind Russia’s polices and actors in the Baltic Sea region across the past twenty-five years. Has the EU and its Baltic Sea members been facing a “revisionist Russia”, a “victim Russia”, or a “trouble maker Russia” (Götz, 2016)?

If Russia’s goal is indeed to recreate great power dominance in the Baltic Sea region it will be hard for the EU to spread its security community, even with a bottom-up approach, because this would inevitably be perceived as an intrusion into the Russian sphere of influence. On the other hand, if the central driver of Russia’s approach in the Baltic Sea region ultimately is defensive (“victim Russia” or “troublemaker Russia”), the pre-conditions for a rapprochement with Russia through working on joint solution of common trans-regional problems are more favourable. It is obvious that the nation-states of the Baltic Sea region are faced with considerable difficulties in promoting cooperation with Russia under the current conditions. This, however, is not a reason for the European Union and its institutions to give up Jean Monnet’s spirit of promoting change in European inter-state relations and geopolitics to find a way out of conflict.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Magnus Ekengren is Professor of Political Science at the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe, Bruges, Belgium. He is a former Swedish diplomat and was previously Deputy Director at the Policy Planning Unit of the Swedish Foreign Ministry. Professor Ekengren specializes in the foreign and security policy of the European Union. He writes on the value of “experimentalist governance” as a way to understand how governments should build capacity to manage transboundary crises. Ekengren is currently using practice theory to explain the driving forces behind EU foreign policies and the transformation of the European security community. Recent research projects include a study of EU crisis cooperation practices and the way they foster a new type of security community based on mutual assistance in transboundary crises. His publications include The Politics of Security Sector Reform: Challenges and Opportunities for the EU’s Global Role, co-edited with G. Simons (2011), The EU as Crisis Manager: Patterns and Prospects, with A. Boin and M. Rhinard (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Explaining the European Union’s Foreign Policy: A Practice Theory of Translocal Action (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (Myndigheten för samhällets skydd och beredskap (MSB)). I am very thankful to the Agency for its generous support and funding of the project “Crisis Management Cooperation in Europe: An Empirical Investigation of Comparative Advantage” (2014–2017) of which this article is a part.

Notes

1 Interreg Baltic Sea Region (2018a); see also Nilsson, Eskilsson, and Ek (2010).

2 Mouritzen points to the example of NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) that includes both NATO members and non-members.

3 http://www.balticsea-region-strategy.eu/.

4 EUSBSR, Secure in the Baltic Sea Region, KOPA 2014, p. 81.

5 European Commission (2011).

6 Interreg Baltic Sea Region (2018a); see also Nilsson et al. (2010).

7 Interreg (2018).

8 Interreg Baltic Sea Region-Programme Fact Sheet 2017, pages 2–4.

9 Programme of the Interreg Baltic Sea Region (2018).

10 Interreg Baltic Sea Region (2018b).

11 Interview of representative of a national emergency management agency of a Baltic Sea state (November 8, 2016).

12 Interreg Baltic Sea Region (2016).

13 EEAS Press releases, Bruxelles, 09/02/2018. UNIQUE ID: 180209-4. ”Signature of Financing Agreement to boost the participation of Russian partners in the Baltic Sea Region Programme”. https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/39631/signature-financing-agreement-boost-participation-russian-partners-baltic-sea-region-programme_en.