Baltic Europe, i.e. the sea and inland hinterland, form a unique macro-regional unit. Strong collaboration links as well as competition in the Baltic Sea Region are an inherent feature of the region from the beginnings of its civilization development. The article shows the forty-year-long Baltic integration process and the Polish scientific contribution to the process. Since 2004, the Baltic has become an internal EU sea. This fact no doubt strengthened cooperation of the countries around the Baltic Sea. In many spheres, these ties take the form of networking. An important stimulus for further integrations is the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region. Political stabilisation and economic development may transform, in a longer time span, the emerging transnational Baltic Europe into a new economic and cultural European centre.
In the article, the author presents the basic relations between a nation state and a multicultural society. According to the author, the attitude of the nation state and the dominant nation in the state to the phenomenon of cultural diversity of society is a key phenomenon in the theory and practice of multiculturalism. Namely, the nation state is characterized by two strategies defining the attitude to the cultural diversity of society. It is a strategy of cultural homogenization and a pluralistic. The emergence of a pluralistic strategy begins with the occurrence and eventual growth of phenomena and processes referred to as multiculturalism and multicultural society.