The Baltic Moment: Why Europe's Edge Is Becoming Its Center?

For most of the twentieth century, the Baltic was seen as Europe's margin: a cold, contested borderland shaped by empires, occupations and wars fought over it rather than by it. Today that picture looks increasingly outdated. The countries around the Baltic Sea are among the most dynamic, innovative and strategically consequential on the continent. They have produced digital states and tech unicorns, rebuilt economies after Soviet collapse faster than anyone predicted, and developed a hard-won resilience that larger Western democracies are only now trying to learn. With Finland and Sweden in NATO and Russia's war against Ukraine redrawing Europe's security map, the Baltic has moved from the edge of European politics to its center. 

Bringing together two Baltic experts, who have followed the region closely, Donatas Kupčiūnas, a research fellow associate (Baltic Fellow) at the Centre for Geopolitics, CRASSH, Wolfson College, Cambridge (UK), and Edward Lucas, founder and director of the Baltic International Security Center, the first pan-Baltic think tank, with Viktoras Bachmetjevas, a Lithuanian public intellectual speaking from within the region, the conversation will set outside and inside perspectives against each other. Does the Baltic recognize itself in the story the West is now telling about it? What do outsiders see that locals take for granted, and what do they miss entirely? Moving across history, security, culture, and ideas, the discussion will invite the audience to reconsider a region that is no longer Europe's periphery, and may well be its most interesting place to watch.