Goals
Since the «working summer» of 2001 «Baltic Practice» - as a mobile research team - once having raised its sales over the Baltic Sea, for more than 9 years now is moving from one sea-coast to another, changing themes of working groups and the focus of heated debates, but still heading to our final destination – Europe.
The team of our project is carefully preserving the main goal – to involve young researchers in creative work of analyzing and problem-solving in the field of Russian cooperation with European countries and with EU at large. For almost a decade now, in good and bad times in Russian-European dialogue, we are sailing, like a small ship in unknown waters, gaining more experience in facing the storms and keeping our flag high up in the sky. Just the list of cities and countries, that we had visited and explored, is contributing to our pride – Svetlogorsk and Peterhoff, Kaliningrad and Viborg, Jurmala and Helsinki, Witten-Herdeke and Stockholm were all the unforgettable destinations of our intellectual – as well as the real – research travel. And each of those destinations provided an absolutely unique experience.
So, what was there special about Stockholm? Why and how was Sweden chosen to be the host of the 8-th summer session of Baltic Practice? There were several serious reasons. First of all, Sweden perfectly «qualify» according the number one rule for the summer sessions we have each year – it is to sail to the BEAUTIFUL place, as we have to keep our sessions attractive for the participants.
Sweden is so special for its natural beauties, that it was an easy argument to pack the travel bags. No less important is the «subject matter», that we wanted to focus on in the year 2008, and how does the chosen country fit under this criteria. As we had agreed in the numerous brain-storms with the Student Organizing Committee, we should add to our curriculum the new theme, that we had not explore properly before, but which lies beneath many other studies we do – the theme of DEMOCRACY.
Thinking of the European country, that would really take this issue seriously – both on internal and international level – one can not surpass Sweden, having a very firm consensus in both society and the state level of not only «promoting», but really «practicing» democracy. Sweden was hosting a Forum on the Future of Democracy this year, co-organised by the Council of Europe, as the year of 2008 was Swedish Chairmanship in the CoE.
Another important factor was our new status with the Council of Europe and its INGO Conference, that had included «Baltic Practice» into their «Three year cooperation plan», focused on developing civil society in Russia.
Working with the Council of Europe INGO Conference and the CoE Secretariat had become an important resource for us, as it is solely for their support, that Baltic Practice was introduced to the Swedish Ambassador to the CoE – Mrs.Aurora Lundquist, who provided a necessary connection to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that agreed to act as the main host for Baltic Practice in the country.
We want to specially recognize, that we could not have a better host – in terms of the example of a state Ministry work as DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION. The meeting organized by Mr. Jan Nyberg, Head of the Division for Russia and Central Asia, was in no way «formal», but instead an academic event, for which all the participants – students and foreign experts – were really grateful, naming it one of the most memorable events – and a unique characteristic of the State institutions work in Sweden.
So, we want to cordially thank Jutta Gutzkov and Plamen Nikolov – members of the NGO unit of the Secretariat for organizing the meeting with the Swedish Ambassador, that made this experience possible. Our thanks also goes to Mrs. Annelise Oeshger, then-President of the INGO Conference, for her personal support, as she participated with us in one of our student organizing committee meetings in Moscow, during one of her visits, as well as her organizational contribution, providing support to the prominent INGO Conference members to come with us to Sweden, making our final debates truly all-European exercise.
The role of the European expert team at the «Baltic Practice» in Stockholm needs to be mentioned separately and all the members of this exclusive group should be personally named. Sylvia Geise from Germany, Izrael Mensah from France, Christine Cromwel-Ahrens from Great Britain and Chuck Hurt from Slovakia – this is to you, who agreed to work on the volunteer basis with our student research groups as co-chairs, who provided their expertise in response to the presentations and most of all – to your participating as a jury evaluating the final debate results, we owe our best moments in Stockholm. Thank you!
We have also broadened out network of scholars who are interested in cooperating with Baltic Practice – both from Universities and practicing experts. Vladimir Petrovsky from MGIMO and Vladimir Brushinkin from Kaliningrad University provided their papers, respectively, on new international order and on Russian-European identity. We are also strengthening our CoE and OSCE connections, that allowed us to invite more expert texts on the topic of Democracy and Human Rights – by Neil Jarman from Northern Ireland, chair of the OSCE/ODIHR Panel on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Edouard Yagodnik, chair of the Committee on Culture, Science and Education of the INGO Conference, – that allowed to bring more expert value to our publication.
We are also very greateful to our main academic team – leaders of the student working groups – to both «experienced veterans», like Shota Kakabadze and Olga Melitonyan, and the «newcomers» – Aleksander Chepurenko and Alexey Belyanin, who were able to assemble creative and devoted working groups, significantly adding to the academic level of presentations and debate.
This is the SECOND book of ACADEMIC PAPERS that «Baltic Practice» is publishing as a result of its yearly studies and summer session in 2008 (after the one we had published after our session in Germany in 2007), and we recognize the significant progress in the quality of the texts, specifically in the quality of the contributions of the young researchers. This allows us to place this publication as our contribution to the HSE research reputation.
We are looking forward to the next Baltic Practice session in coming summer of 2009 – in Bruges, Belgium – and are welcoming all the interested researchers to join us in our exiting intellectual journeys to Europe!
