The NEBI Yearbook 1999 again aims to provide a balanced picture of both the integrationist opportunities and disintegrationist pressures in the entire North European and Baltic Sea area - a vast region with over 50 million inhabitants and great economic and trading potentials and crossing some of the most formidable historical and current divides of Europe. For this purpose it brings together 30 scholars from 10 countries covering a wide range of scientific fields that do not usually collaborate.