The Baltic States return to Europe: the Baltic Re-integration Problem between the Nordic and the EU Option. JMWP No. 11.97, September 1997

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War generated a multilateral order in which new actors are looking for their reintegration in the new international system. In this context, the situation of the Baltic states (i.e. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) is rather peculiar when looking at geography and history. Geographically closed to the Nordic democracies and historically linked to Germany, the young republics have been attempting to reinsert themselves internationally by revitalising these connections. In order to achieve this goal, the Balts were likely to go through two possible avenues (i.e. the creation of a Nordic-Baltic regional organisation and the Baltic integration in the European Union - EU). In this paper, the choice of the latter will be explained by two main arguments: the recent integration of Finland and Sweden in the EU as well as the attraction for the stable institutionalisation of the EU integration as an historical factor