Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the challenge of absence of transfer of ideas where one would expect its presence, as in development of regional concepts in the Baltic Sea region. Despite it being quite a compact region geographically, regional approaches have had a limited reach among the region's scholars.

Paper long abstract:

Concepts as transfers, exchange, circulation etc are often applied alongside approaches proposing alternatives to a nation state as a unit of historical analysis, for example a region. Both aim to overcome the hegemony of the national approach; historical regions are often defined as networks of interactions and transfers, and their histories as transnational ones. One example is the Baltic Sea region, especially after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the event which encouraged approaches favouring border-defying categories such as transfer, entanglement, not only as the object of research, but also its result, in the sense of connecting the region by a network of transfers of ideas and common regional concepts between scholars.

Yet, setting out to map this network, one notices that while the enthusiasm for the Baltic Sea region was embraced throughout its north-western part, it did not penetrate the south-eastern part, despite it being most affected by the liberation from, among others, restrictions imposed on scholarship and its methodology. Factors of geopolitics, security, economy and intellectual traditions led to some actors staying outside of this epistemological network of shared ideas and concepts pertaining to the region, or forming an alternative one. The aim of this paper is to discuss the surprising absence of transfer where its presence would be expected, and the challenges of making sense of this absence - which can lead to questions about the diffusion of ideas and applicability of certain categories in this geographically compact, but otherwise heterogeneous region.