Since its announcement in 2015, Nord Stream 2 (NS2) has fueled European public debate about the EU’s role in a multipolar world, the scope and limits of transnational governance, and the trade-off between environment and climate protection vs. economic growth and fossil fuel lobbying. Whereas much has been said and written about the security and military risks issued by the project, the environmental and climate impact of the Russian pipeline has received limited attention. This article analyzes to what extent both institutions and civil societies of the Baltic countries (in particular, those directly involved in the permit process) developed forms of transnational cooperation in order to tackle environmental and climate challenges issued by the planned pipeline. The aim is to contribute to the following research fields: the role of environment and climate in international relations; multiple notions of “security” in the Baltic region; and transnational governance in the face of global challenges. The sources are ENGOs’ publications and statements, official reports as well as media, which are analyzed according to Critical Discourse Analysis.

Since the 2010s, it has become common to view the European project as troubled by crisis. As the EU historical narrative is selective, the problems that we perceive today in the EU seem to be exceptional and unusually dangerous, not the least from the perspective of Europe’s peripheries. In order to assess the current challenges and future prospects of the European project, we need to understand better the complexities of European integration in Southern and Northern Europe in the recent past. 

By bringing together three relevant political actors, deeply involved in these historical events – Esko Aho (Finland), Mats Hellström (Sweden) and Juan Antonio Yáñez-Barnuevo (Spain) – this witness seminar provides important insights into the negotiations concerning EC/EU integration as well as the similarities and differences between the Northern and Southern European experiences.

The concept of the Nordic model played an important role in the ideological and political rejuvenation of the Northern and Southern European political left from the 1970s to the 1990s. 

In a witness seminar organized by the Centre for Nordic Studies at Helsinki University, the Institute for Contemporary History at Södertörn University and the Department of History and Classical Studies at Aarhus University, key political actors for the development of European social democracy and Northern and Southern processes of European integration discuss the fortunes of the Nordic model from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Participants included: Allan Larsson (former Minister for Finance of Sweden), Mogens Lykketoft (former  Minister of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, leader of the Social Democrats) and Joaquín Almunia (former Minister of Public Administration of Spain and leader of PSOE). The witness seminar is funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS).

In intellectual histories of geography as well as in international relations, geopolitics is usually the business of great powers, understood as the expansion of hard power through territorial control. However, the existence of a ‘Geopolitik of the weak’ has also been theorised, premised on the ability of smaller states – such as the Nordic countries – to secure their survival through a wider range of policy instruments. In this chapter, we analyse key themes in the work of two Nordic geographical thinkers deeply concerned with the place and status of their home countries in the era of high modernity – Rudolf Kjellén and Gudmund Hatt. Relying upon their scholarly works as well as relevant public debates circa 1905–1945, we trace the ‘small-state geopoliticking’ of Hatt and Kjellén, identifying three key characteristics of their style of small-state geopolitics: (1) determinism is qualified by voluntarism; (2) space is complemented by future; and (3) external expansion is sublimated into internal progress. In its reconceptualisation of living space as primarily concerned with existential survival as premised upon future progress, rather than outward-oriented territorial expansion, small-state geopolitics emerges as a highly situated, somewhat quaint but nonetheless significant element in Nordic theorising of geography.

The concept of soft power, as introduced by Joseph S. Nye in the early 1990s has become popular in academia and media since the end of the Cold War. It addresses the influence of attraction through culture, policies, and values—as in “getting others to want what you want” and as distinct from hard power through coercion by means of economic strength and/or military force. As such, the concept reflects the growing significance of immaterial factors for exercising power under conditions of globalization, financialization, and mediatization, when physical control of territory, trade, and transport is increasingly supplanted by the significance of controlling digital infrastructures, ideational languages, and norm systems, allowing nonstate actors more influence, diffusing the power of the state and affecting coupled human–environment systems in diverse ways. While soft power has sometimes been reduced to imply an idealist outlook on global affairs, its main contribution lies in nuancing the concept of power in international relations, illustrating the significance of the whole spectrum of power, ranging from coercive hard power to attractive soft power. As such, it’s usage in human geography and other social sciences also requires attention to the complexity of the concept as introduced by Nye to avoid the risk of reproducing the binary separation between nature and humanity, material and immaterial factors implied by the dichotomy between hard and soft forms of power.