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Sweden, Finland and Norway. Cooperation in the Barents region was established in Kirkenes on 11
January 1993. The Kirkenes Declaration was signed by the Nordic countries, Russia and the
European Commission. These have also been the members of the Barents Euro-Arctic Council
which convene at the intergovernmental level to foster co-operation. The regional level of this co-
operation includes the political leaderships of the counties of Nordland, Troms and Finmark in
Norway; Norrbotten and Västerbotten in Sweden; Lapland, Oulu and Kainuu in Finland; as well as
Arkhangelsk, Karelia, Komi, Murmansk and Nenets in Russia (Barents Euro-Arctic Region, 2009).
The primary objective for the Barents institutions has been to ―achieve as great a degree of openness
and as much contact as possible across national borders, thereby promoting normalization and
stabilization in an area where the Cold War was at times extremely cold‖ (Holst, 1994: 12). The
Barents region is situated far from the national capitals of the states that project direct geopolitical
power in the European North. As capitals of modern nation states, Moscow, Stockholm, Helsinki
and Oslo have regulated the daily life in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region before and after the end of
the Cold War.
The roots for the peripheral status of northern frontier regions situated in the Barents Region are to
be found in the history of the European state-system. The states have conquered the regions from
the Middle Ages onwards. In this conquering process the northern regions were firstly more than a
frontier of the northern states. The regions were ―in front‖ of or beyond the states as the
―spearhead of civilization‖. Later the states defined their mutual use of ―boundaries (bounds)‖ for
the regular power in the area (see Taylor & Flint, 2000: 162). This has been a problem for the area's
historical east-west relations from the Atlantic via the Baltic Sea to the Barents Sea. As is easy to
notice for example from the point of view of the indigenous people in the European North, the
Sámi. The area traditionally inhabited by the Sámi people has included the northern parts of the
whole Fennoscandia (see e.g. Lehtola, 1997: 43–75). During the above mentioned conquering
process and the state centric modernization, the Sámi peoples‘ areas have been divided into the
national territories of four states. The borders of these states have for example complicated the
nomadic reindeer herding in the North (Nickul, 1970: 208–209). Since 1917 the people on the
western side of the border in the Torne valley have lived in the Swedish living environment and
people on the eastern side in the Finnish living environment, including for example media,
education and sport and economy. This is a problem-producing periphery because traditionally the
people in the Torne Valley have lived in the same cultural sphere sharing dense and tight contacts
between the inhabitants in the valley.
During the Cold War the borders of these states divided the Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and
Soviet living environments in the European North. The borders of states posed not only economic
and cultural barriers in the area. The impact of the Iron Curtain between the (communist) East and
(capitalist) West was of course extremely significant. Even during the Cold War there were rare
spontaneous contacts between the civil societies in the west (Norway, Sweden and Finland) and the
east (Soviet Union). As the term ―Iron Curtain‖ indicates, the states (especially the Soviet Union)
forcefully restricted border-crossing relations at the civil society level in the states. This was the
reality also in the European North. The conflict between communism and capitalism affected the
relations between civil societies in northern Finland as well. There was a continuous inner-state