Overview of the conflict

Towards shared space

This chapter covers Europe's North in a region-specific perspective, exploring the European Union's role as a ‘perpetuator’ of conflicts in a broader, regional context. In the first place, as the relevant issues of the post-Cold War period have been – almost without exception – dealt with in a fairly peaceful fashion, the proper term to be used might be disputes rather than conflicts. It is also worth noting that although the EU broadly covers the region, the intra-regional forces seem to have impacted on the various conflictual issues at least as forcefully as the EU.

In general, Europe's North has been quite quick in capitalising on the option of change that opened up with the end of the Cold War. Having been profoundly divided by the conflict between East and West with region-formation not even existing as an idea (with the exception of Nordic cooperation), the North has not merely caught up with the rest of Europe, it has, in fact, turned into one of the most regionalised parts of the continent. Borders, previously seen as lines of exclusion and defence, have changed in meaning with the emergence of a rich patchwork of various Euro-regions, trans-boundary arrangements, cross-border projects and contacts of twinning. Old divides and suspicions have to a large extent been replaced by building a new sense of regional community as exemplified by Baltic Sea cooperation, Barents Euro-Arctic cooperation and Arctic cooperation.