One can view it as a stroke of luck for the political and cultural development of European civilisation that the ,discovery' of a new European region - the Baltic Sea region - has coincided with the establishment of a new paradigm for the scientific interpretation of social and political (not to mention economic) processes: The concept of a ,knowledge society' - the phenomenon itself was not new - entered the scientific and political conflicts and analyses with such élan in the 1990s that today it no longer requires any further justification.