Paper short abstract:

From around 1970 onwards, people around the Baltic Sea began to worry about its ecological state - especially the quality of bathing water. This paper traces the interconnectedness of the protests in East and West and their trajectories until the end of the century.

Paper long abstract:

The man-made ecological problems of the Baltic Sea became most evident for the millions of tourists who, from around 1970 onwards, could no longer be sure whether it was a healthy venture to plunge into its waters. The image of the sea as a toilet bowl spread along its coasts. Despite the great differences in framing public opinion, the discourses on the ecological state of the Baltic Sea were surprisingly consistent in the liberal democracies and the state socialist societies. In the 1980s, bathing was banned on more and more popular beaches, and waves of protest erupted in Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, and the Baltic Soviet Republics. The policies of Perestroika offered activists in the Soviet Union new opportunities, such as a human chain that was being formed along the coast, termed "Prayer for the Baltic Sea" in August 1988, or cooperation with Western activists such as Greenpeace, which undertook a bus tour to the beaches of the Baltic Republics the same year. However, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, this activism quickly waned. Several interrelated factors such as economic hardships, decentralisation, Western consumerism, and a general weakening of civil society played a role in its decline. The tourists, however, lost sight of the still tremendous ecological problems of eutrophication, environmental toxins, dumped munitions, and nuclear waste, after new sewer systems reduced the bacterial load of the bathing waters in the early 1990s. And so did civil society.