The NEBI Yearbook 2000 aims to provide a balanced picture of both the integrationist opportunities and disintegrationist pressures in the North European and Baltic Sea area - a region with over 50 million inhabitants and great economic and trading potentials. It brings together a wide range of scientific methods and perspectives in addition to a comprehensive statistical section with information found nowhere else. The result is a unique source of up-to-date knowledge of this increasingly important European region.
Thorvald Stoltenberg President of the Norwegian Red Cross Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board Despite the very optimistic language on the imminence of new accessions to the European Union that came out of the June 2001 European Council in Gothen burg, it will serve no good purpose to neglect the fact that EU membership for the Central and Eastern European applicants remains a difficult process. Painful experience makes it prudent to exercise caution in predicting developments with in the European Union. Negotiations may drag out, snags may appear and some thing may happen on the way to ratification. So perhaps it is wise to take a broad er view of European integration - and therefore integration within the North European, Barents and Baltic Sea region that is the focus of this Yearbook. EU membership for those countries that are able to satisfy the Copenhagen requirements - and the chapters of the acquis communautaire that have subse quently been specified - is certainly a prize worth fighting for. But all is not lost if some of the applicants end up not joining the Union as a result of the current enlargement round. Even more important than formal membership is the process of growing together that has taken place simultaneously with the membership negotiations. We are dealing here with integration in the real world of trade, investments, division of labour, politics, environment, hard and soft security, people-to-people relations etc.
Bjllrn Tore Godal Norwegian Ambassador to Germany Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board Several of the contributions to the present volume of The NEBI Yearbook have been inspired by the fact that roughly speaking, ten years have passed since the first steps were taken to initiate cross-border co-operation in the Barents and Baltic Sea areas. One of the most important co-operative organisations in the European Northeast, i. e. The Council of the Baltic Sea States, was launched in 1992. The Barents Euro Arctic Council was established in 1993. An avalanche of co-operative and cross-border initiatives has since hit this part of Europe with all kinds of actors participating - states, regional and municipal authorities, univer sities, national organisations, businesses and private interests. Even international organisations and actors from outside the immediate NEBI area have taken a special interest in this dynamic part of the world. Among the most important is the European Union, whose Finnish-inspired Northern Dimension initiative has become a permanent fixture. As many of the chapters in NEBI 2003 testifY, integration in the NEB I area - across old political and ideological borders and cultural and socio-economic divides that are among the most pronounced anywhere in the world - has on the whole been a great success.
Bjllrn Tore Godal Norwegian Ambassador to Germany Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board Several of the contributions to the present volume of The NEBI Yearbook have been inspired by the fact that roughly speaking, ten years have passed since the first steps were taken to initiate cross-border co-operation in the Barents and Baltic Sea areas. One of the most important co-operative organisations in the European Northeast, i. e. The Council of the Baltic Sea States, was launched in 1992. The Barents Euro Arctic Council was established in 1993. An avalanche of co-operative and cross-border initiatives has since hit this part of Europe with all kinds of actors participating - states, regional and municipal authorities, univer sities, national organisations, businesses and private interests. Even international organisations and actors from outside the immediate NEBI area have taken a special interest in this dynamic part of the world. Among the most important is the European Union, whose Finnish-inspired Northern Dimension initiative has become a permanent fixture. As many of the chapters in NEBI 2003 testifY, integration in the NEB I area - across old political and ideological borders and cultural and socio-economic divides that are among the most pronounced anywhere in the world - has on the whole been a great success.
Within the broad frame of regional research in an international perspective, the contributions of this volume present new theoretical, methodological and empirical results as well as political strategies for the following topics: - ecomomic integration in the Baltic rim, - innovation and regional growth, - economic integration, trade and migration, - transport infrastructure and the regions. Most of the topics deal with the long-term integration process in Europe, with a particular focus on the North European and Baltic Sea integration.
The agricultural privatization strategy adopted in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was based on the premise that family farms are the most effective alternative to socialist large-scale agriculture. In addition, international organizations, particularly the World Bank, made recommendations concerning reform speed, synchronization and ownership rights that would facilitate transferring resources from large-scale producers to family farmers. This book provides a critical and comparative analysis of the implementation of this policy, and in particular the strategy promoted by the World Bank. The preservation of large-scale production is the key to Estonia's success while its eradication from Latvia and Lithuania did not produce a family farm system. Work productivity and the extent of plot farming are the indicators of success or failure. Research findings on deindustrialization, the hardships faced by new enterprises, rural tourism, increasing poverty, and problems in the civil society as presented in this book shed new light on these and other key issues in transition strategy.
The first authoritative account concerning the lack of conflict in the Nordic region, this text evaluates why the area is more peaceful than the rest of Europe and whether there is a lesson to be learned from the area. Looking at cases where parts of the Nordic area have started to break away from the others and how this was achieved without violence, it also explores the settlement of demarcation disputes. By using this region as an example for the rest of Europe, this book tests the hypothesis of the Nordic Peace using a number of approaches including historical, political science, peace research, sociology and law. This highly insightful piece of research is relevant for courses in international relations and European studies.
Thorvald Stoltenberg Ambassador Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board A.5 the second volume of the this yearbook goes to press, Europe faces new and to some degree unexpected dangers of political and ideological division. It is a frightening realisation that not even ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Empire and the democratisation and economic transformation of most of the old Soviet-dominated Central and Eastern Europe, fissures have appeared that threaten to undo some of what has been accomplished in terms of East-West rapprochement. The immediate crisis over Kosovo may well have been resolved by the time this is being read. However, it is hard to escape a foreboding that some of the mutual ill will between Russia and the Western powers that has surfaced in the wake of that conflict may linger for years to come. It is therefore imperative that Russia and the Western powers sit down to discuss what can be done to avoid similar conflicts in the future and how to overcome mutual recriminations so that they do not harden into new political front lines between East and West in Europe. The recent developments make the promotion of integration in the NEBI area even more urgent. So far this process has been based on two equally impor tant platforms: economic integration and political integration, including mea sures to dismantle old conflict potentials.
