Networking in the Baltic: The ‘Kieler Modell’

Abstract

Before the Second World War the German province of East Prussia extended beyond present day Kaliningrad to the borders of Russia. After the First World War some land in the east had been lost to the newly created state of Lithuania and the province was cut off from the rest of Prussia and Germany by a strip of Polish territory known as the Danzig corridor. The Baltic States had been conquered and converted by the German monastic military orders of the Knights of the Sword and the Teutonic Knights from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth century. The Old Prussians from whom the German state derived its name were in fact eradicated during this process of forcible conversion. The result was first a German domination of Baltic trade in the mediaeval period through the Hanseatic cities and later the emergence of the militarily and economically advanced Prussian state along the shores of the Baltic. Before the Second World War, Königsberg, the capital of Prussia, was a flourishing university city with a population of over a quarter of a million. During the war over 90 per cent of the city was destroyed by bombing and shelling, and in 1945 its population was driven out and replaced by Russians. Königsberg’s fate is typical of that of the whole of East Prussia which disappeared from the post-war map. The territory was divided between Poland and Russia.

The material for this chapter is taken from the publications of the Kiel Chamber of Industry and Commerce and from the Baltic Sea Chambers of Commerce Association. In addition the author visited the Kiel Chamber and interviewed Werner Koopman, Assistant to the Secretary General, with particular responsibilities for links with the BCCA, and Rainer Wiechert, Foreign Affairs Adviser in the Economics Ministry of Schleswig-Holstein. The author also interviewed Malcolm Vaughan, Deputy Director of the Coventry Chamber of Commerce.