Keynote

Juhana Aunesluoma: From Cold War to Post-Cold War Hysteresis. Security and Insecurity in the Baltic Sea Region from the 1990s to the Present

The Cold War ended in the Baltic Sea Region with a bang and a whimper. The three Baltic republics regained their independence in a crisis that finally led to the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991. The dramatic events on the Baltic Sea’s eastern shores were contrasted by the largely uneventful dissipation of the Cold War order in Scandinavia, and with a carefully managed transition of Finland from the shadow of Soviet power towards European Union membership. The experiences of the countries bordering the Baltic Sea were widely different throughout the Cold War, but so were the ways in which they experienced its end and the dynamics of the post-Cold War world until well into the 2010s. This Baltic east-west divide has played a significant part in the conceptualization of security and in policy-making in the region until the present day. While all the small states in the region were EU members by 2004, conceptions of security, threat perceptions, policy choices and institutional arrangements diverged around the Baltic Sea. This could be seen in how novel concepts and a broader understanding of security, including issues such as human, social or environmental security and needs for global crisis management were already in the 1990s contrasted with a habitual sense of the region as a site of great power geopolitical rivalry and the persistence of traditional military threats.

Juhana Aunesluoma’s keynote addresses how historical legacies, past experiences and historical continuities and discontinuities have influenced the understanding of security and insecurity in the region, the contours of policy-making, institution building and assessments of threats and how to meet them from the 1990s to the present, when large scale war has reappeared in Europe.


1 June; 12.30-13.30

Venue: MB416 (MB-building, 4th floor)

See the event in the conference programme


Bio

Juhana Aunesluoma is Professor of Political History at the University of Helsinki, where he has held various research and teaching positions since 2000. His fields of interests include the history of international relations in the Cold War and the Post-Cold War eras, neutrality and non-alignment, economic diplomacy and statecraft and the political use of history. He has authored a number of works on Finland and Norden in the 20th century.