ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two regions that have come to be associated with the Nordic area the Barents region and the Baltic region in the light of the rethinking about security that has occurred in Europe. The Baltic Sea has historically been both a battleground for Great Powers, including Denmark and Sweden in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. From the thirteenth century, the tentacles of the Hanseatic towns and later their Federation stretched out from the Baltic's southern shores from Norway and Sweden down into the Rhineland, and from the east coast of England to Russia. With the formation of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and its later extension to the Federal Republic of Germany and the subsequent creation of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) to include the Soviet Union, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic, the southern shore was ideologically and politically divided between the Soviet bloc to the east and the Federal Republic and Denmark to the west.
