At the international and interdisciplinary conference "Cooperation and Integration in the Baltic Region and Southeast Asia: A Comparative Perspective" researcher from Vietnam, Japan, Singapore/Cambodia, the Philippines, Sweden and Germany presented their research results on regional security architectures in the Baltic and South China Sea regions.
Political scientiests and historians discussed, among other things, actual security threats in the respective regions, using Russia and China as examples. Furthermore, institutions and institutional structures and their impact on region building and security architecture had been in focus of the discussions. In this context Vietnamese and German colleagues compared the influences of ASEAN, NATO, the Council of Baltic Sea States and the European Union.
Margit Bussmann (Greifswald) presented her research on crisis escalation in the Baltic Sea region based on interstate military conflict situations. In another contribution at an USSH round table, she exemplified the security architecture in the Baltic Sea region between Russia and NATO.
Pham Quang Minh (Hanoi) illustrated the power shifts in Southeast Asia using the example of the rise and fall of world powers and the importance of the EU. His specific Vietnamese perspective on institutions provided a detailed insight into the complex security structure of a region in which several great powers make power political claims.
Bo Peterson (Malmö) provided the specific Swedish discourse on security problems in the Baltic Sea region. He hereby drew not only on Russian military provocations, but also bilateral economic, cultural and historical relations between states in the Baltic Sea region.
The historical dimension of region building and the creation of institutions in the Baltic and South China Sea regions differ to a large extent. While an analysis of the development of borders (Alexander Drost, Greifswald) revealed certain parallels between the 15th and 19th centuries, regional integration, especially in the 20th century, shows great differences. In their presentations, Nguyen Thi Thanh Thuy, Nguyen Thi Thuy Trang and Do Thi Thuy exemplified in particular the role of world powers. Southeast Asia had been much more influenced by diplomatic and power-political relations between China, the USA and Russia than the Baltic region, in which NATO balanced Russia's dominance. Charmaine Willoughby (Manila), among others, examined the role of the major powers in Southeast Asia with regard to the US security strategy in the Indo-Pacific region. This was differently received in Southeast Asian states, depending on their political orientation. Vannartih Chheang (Singapore/Phnom Penh) took up on these different political orientations as well in his research on the diplomacy of the small Southeast Asian states between unilateralism and multilateralism.
The conference was the second of its kind and will publish the results in a special issue. We kindly thank Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Hanoi, the USSH Hanoi and the IFZO Greifswald for organisation and financial support.