Thorvald Stoltenberg President of the Norwegian Red Cross Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board The 2000 edition of the NEBI Yearbook goes to press a few weeks before the of the fIxed 0resund Link between Copenhagen and Malmo, and the opening celebrations of this magnifIcent construction have already begun. Way back in the nineteenth century visionaries started dreaming of this connection between lands that used to belong together but had been torn apart by the visitations of the modern era: fanaticism, war, genocide and competing nationalisms. To be sure, the 0resund Link will have major economic impacts in both halves of the Zealand-Skane 0resund region, and the benefIcial consequences can already be detected in the shape of rising investments and falling unemployment in both the Greater Copenhagen and the Malmo-Lund areas. But to understand the true measure of the Link, one has to consider its political and even symbolic implications.
The bridge is nothing less than the physical embodiment of a most welcome reversal of historical trends towards division, isolation and strife that have for too long afflicted not only Denmark and Sweden bur influenced rela- tions all around the Baltic Sea and in the territories adjacent to the Barents Sea in the far north - in short the entire NEBI area.