The Challenge of mobility in the Baltic Sea Region

Mobility is rapidly becoming one of the most salient features of European societies. This process is particularly visible in the Baltic Sea area. Here, the European Union meets its immediate neighbours; a wealthy Scandinavia meets struggling post-communist economies; long-established democracies meet developing ones; secularised Protestantism meets fervent Catholicism and Orthodoxy; and post-modernity meets traditionalism, modernisation and nation-building. The mobility around the inner sea of Europe is thus fraught with challenges and uncertainty. There is a transfer of know-how, but also of drugs; of development aid, but also of trafficked women and children; of international civil servants, but also of economic migrants. The mobility of people and capital creates pockets and corridors of wealth, but will it also lead to brain-drain, rural exodus and outbursts of xenophobia? The mobility of ideas enriches the cultures, but is it also bound to generate clashes between competing and contradictory values, provoke discontent on the part of those who perceive their lifestyles as threatened by the contact with others? To explore these issues The Challenges of Mobility in the Baltic Sea Region puts the political, economic, cultural, and spatial dynamics of Baltic Sea region in the spotlight through the theoretical prism of mobility.