The Future of the Council of the Baltic Sea States

I recently had the honour of being tasked with preparing a report on the future of the CBSS, co-authored with President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Our report was handed to the ministers of member states last week for their consideration.

The CBSS was originally founded after the Cold War to help newly independent countries like Lithuania and Poland integrate into the EU, and to bring Russia closer to the standards of Western-style multilateral diplomacy.

Thirty-three years later, most member states are in the EU, all are in NATO, and Russia is out. And one small detail—even if you leave Germany out of the calculations, the CBSS now unites one of the most prosperous regions in the world.

So what should this organization do today?

That was the question we were asked to answer.

But we didn’t approach the task as an effort to restructure an outdated format. Instead, we asked a basic question: what kind of organization would we create if we were starting from scratch today?

Most of the issues discussed within the CBSS back in 1992 have since moved to the EU. Today, the main item on every country’s agenda is security—specifically, the threat from Russia. If you were to draw a hybrid threat intensity map, the Baltic region would be entirely red. And unfortunately, neither NATO nor the EU has been able to respond effectively to these types of threats. In fact, the prevailing assumption is that countries should handle hybrid attacks on their own.

But the ability to respond to such threats varies significantly between, say, Poland or Germany and a country like Estonia. That’s why our proposal is to treat hybrid threats that fall below NATO’s Article 4 or 5 thresholds within a regional format. If such a grouping cannot manage them, the issue should then be escalated to NATO or the EU.

Our working title for this revamped CBSS is: Regional (Hybrid) Security Organization.

Additionally, the entire Western alliance is in flux. We know Europe can no longer take for granted that the US will remain its primary security guarantor. What this means in concrete terms is still unclear—will troops withdraw, will NATO’s role change? Everything is on the table. But if the transatlantic system fractures further, the region most affected by Russian aggression must be prepared to work even more closely together, and the CBSS could be the platform for exactly that.

Read the full report here: https://icds.ee/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2025/05/Report_The_Future_of_the_Council_of_the_Baltic_Sea_States_Ilves_Landsbergis_May_2025.pdf