Past and present of the Baltic Conferences on Intellectual Cooperation

The tradition of the Baltic Conferences on Intellectual Cooperation started almost a century ago. In the beginning, the conferences were organised by the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (Paris) at the League of Nations. Since the 1920s, the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) of the League of Nations promoted international understanding and functioned as a cultural centre for international communication, and later became one of founders of UNESCO (https://unesco.libguides.com/IICI). Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland regularly participated in the Conferences on Intellectual Cooperation. Before the Second World War, altogether six Conferences on Intellectual Cooperation had been held in Finland and Baltic countries: the first conference took place in 1935 in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1936 – Tartu, Estonia, in 1937 – Helsinki, Finland, in 1938 – Riga, Latvia and in 1939 again in Kaunas. The last pre-war conference was convened in Tallinn on 15–17 June 1940, in conjunction with the “Baltic Week”. However, the deliberations were interrupted by the USSR aggression against the Baltic States. Almost 60 years later, in 1999, the seventh Baltic conference on intellectual co-operation was organised in Riga, and was convened by the Latvian Academy of Sciences. Since then, 11 conferences have been organised by Baltic and Finnish partner Academies. Conferences always offer a forum for science policy discussion. The topics of the conferences have been rather diverse – from (humanities) history, pedagogy and science policy to mathematics, genome development and energetics. The 18th Baltic Conference on Intellectual Cooperation was devoted to energy for the future society. This time the conference agenda consisted of several directions – three aspects of energetics for society (energy harvesting and sources, energy storage, transmission and secure energy supply, efficient and sustainable energy use), energy policy discussion (lead by Assistant Professor Olga Bogdanova), awarding the medals of the Baltic Science Academies to the best scientists for research results and stimulating Baltic science cooperation, the meeting of the Presidents of the Academies. Besides this agenda, the Academies organised also a meeting of the young Baltic Academies (associations of the young scientists) and offered the workshop on HIAS Research Fellowships, lead by Sonja Gräber-Magocsi, PhD (Germany)