Final reflections

It is high time to revise the notion that the Baltic Sea region is somehow distinctive and has successfully managed to move beyond sharp rivalries that originate in the politics of geography and the political economy of space and place. The impression that the Nordic and Baltic countries and their closest neighbours – most notably Russia – no longer harbour historic grievances and deftly manage regional relations was always an oversimplification, created in the aftermath of the Second World War in order to induce great powers to tolerate a higher level of political autonomy than in many other parts of Europe. As the contributions to this Forum demonstrate, rivalries and conflicts in the Baltic Sea region were profound throughout modern history (see Åselius, 2018), and they have since the end of the Cold War been reinvigorated over foreign, security and defence policy. So far they have largely materialized in the shape of friction at the declaratory level, not always raising much concern outside the circle of directly affected policymakers. But there is today enhanced contingency planning that clearly reflects growing mutual suspicion between, above all, the Russian Federation and NATO member states but also involves nonaligned Sweden and Finland. It is therefore becoming easier to demonstrate a considerable extent of historical continuity in this regard, a longue durée in Fernand Braudel’s terms, that should make us attentive to dynamically shifting patterns of amity and enmity in this part of Europe. But at the same time, are old frames such as that of “geopolitics” really useful or do they ultimately obscure the substance of contemporary rivalries? And do we know what we mean when we resort to the terminology of geopolitics in order to analyse a set of relationships within a particular region? Considering that the study of geopolitics encompasses several distinctive intellectual traditions from which to theorize and analyse what is going on in the Baltic Sea region (see Engelbrekt, in this Forum), students may be well advised to acquaint themselves with more than one of them in order to better be able to sort out what is relevant and what is not. Land-oriented geopolitics that emphasizes territory, natural resources and the topographic conditions of northeastern Europe does not imply what it used to at the turn of the nineteenth Century, when it emerged as an academic field of study. The late nineteenth Century and early twentieth was an era in which most economies – and certainly not least those of the Baltic Sea region – were heavily reliant on agricultural output and on extracting natural resources on an industrial scale, resources which subsequently were processed by industries