What CBSS is and how it works

A declaration, and no treaty under it

The Danish and German foreign ministers invited their counterparts from Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Russia and Sweden, together with a member of the European Commission, to Copenhagen on 5 and 6 March 1992. What came out of the meeting was a declaration. It was not opened for signature or ratification, and no depositary holds instruments of accession for anybody admitted afterwards.

That is the fact the rest of the arrangement hangs from. The Council has no founding treaty, so it has no accession clause, no reservation procedure and no withdrawal procedure. A state deposits nothing to become a member and denounces nothing to stop being one. The work a constituent instrument would do is done instead by Terms of Reference the Council writes for itself, last revised in 2024.

The furniture

The Council proper is the foreign ministers of the member states and the European Union's High Representative, meeting at a Ministerial Session. Between sessions the Committee of Senior Officials carries the business: one senior official from each member and one from the European Union, chaired by whoever holds the presidency. That presidency rotates by the year, from 1 July to 30 June, and runs in a trio of the outgoing, current and incoming chairs, so a twelve-month turn does not restart the agenda every summer.

The ministers agreed at Nyborg on 23 June 1998 to give the Council a standing office. The Permanent International Secretariat has sat in Stockholm since, and it supports rather than decides; its Director General is appointed by the Committee of Senior Officials.

Under that sit the working bodies where most of the year's activity happens, and they are narrow and named: a Civil Protection Network, an Expert Group on Children at Risk, an Expert Group on Sustainable Maritime Economy, a Task Force against Trafficking in Human Beings, a regional youth forum. The three long-term priorities they answer to were set out in the Reykjavík Declaration of 5 March 2017, on the Council's twenty-fifth anniversary: regional identity, a sustainable and prosperous region, and a safe and secure region. The Vilnius II Declaration of 1 June 2021 carried them forward.

Observer status, which is not membership and carries no part in decisions, is held by France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The member that is not on the sea

Iceland was admitted on 19 May 1995. No part of it drains to the Baltic and no part of its coast stands on it, and Reykjavík is about 2,100 kilometres from the city where the Council was founded.

Set the roster beside the treaty body for the same water and the difference is legible. The Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area was signed at Helsinki on 22 March 1974 and entered into force on 3 May 1980; a replacement was signed on 9 April 1992 and entered into force on 17 January 2000. Its contracting parties are Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Sweden and the European Union. Iceland is not among them, and neither is Norway.

So the water has one list and the Council has another. The convention is an environmental obligation and it follows the drainage. The Council is a political forum and it follows an invitation. Membership here has never been a coastline.

The seat that emptied

Russia was at Copenhagen in 1992 and held the presidency in 2012 and 2013. For the first thirty years Russian ministers sat in this body alongside ministers of NATO and European Union governments on the same footing, which few other bodies in the region arranged.

That ended in stages. The Baltic Sea States Summits of heads of government, begun at Visby on 3 May 1996, stopped being held after 2014, and the Ministerial Sessions lapsed with them. On 3 March 2022 the other members suspended Russia from further participation, and Belarus, which had held observer status, was suspended in the same month. Russia withdrew on 17 May 2022. The 19th Ministerial Session met at Kristiansand on 24 and 25 May 2022 and adopted a declaration there; it was the first ministerial session in nine years.

What is left is a roster that no longer straddles anything. Finland acceded to NATO on 4 April 2023 and Sweden on 7 March 2024, and every member record filed here now carries NATO, Schengen, the Council of Europe, the OSCE and the World Trade Organization besides. A forum founded to hold both sides of a former line now seats one side of it.

What the arrangement does not cover

There is no common currency here, no tariff schedule, no court, no assembly and no travel arrangement. Where the members share those things they share them through something else: the euro through the European Union's monetary arrangements, open internal borders through Schengen, collective defence through the North Atlantic Treaty. Iceland and Norway sit outside the European Union and inside the European Economic Area, and that difference is recorded on their own pages rather than on this one.

Nor is there a written qualification to meet. Nothing in the founding declaration states a test on population, coastline, drainage or trade. Admission is a decision the members take together, which is how a North Atlantic island came to sit on a Baltic council, and why the roster below is the one the Secretariat publishes rather than a list anybody could derive from a map.

Where the edges are argued

The M49 standard published by the UN Statistics Division has no Baltic grouping at all, and it files the members here across three of its own: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden under Northern Europe, Germany under Western Europe, Poland under Eastern Europe. M49 states that its groupings are a statistical convenience carrying no political meaning.

Narrower readings are in print beside it. The Baltic states, on the usual reading of that phrase, are Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania alone, which leaves out every other member of a council named for the same sea. The Nordic Council seats Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden with three autonomous territories, overlapping this roster without matching it. The Helsinki Convention draws a third line, and the drainage basin of the Baltic reaches inland to countries that appear on none of these lists. The catalogue records the roster the Council itself publishes and settles none of the rest.