Health and human security - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 166

The Task Force was established as a joint venture among the 11 states
surrounding the Baltic Sea for the period 2000-2002. We traced how this
massive international effort was implemented and perceived in the recipi-
ent countries. This discussion is relevant to questions about human security
explored elsewhere in this topic in several ways. First, the Task Force addressed
a problem closely linked to human security, namely the threat to public
health posed by communicable diseases. Second, an analysis of the recipient
countries' perception of the Task Force and its activities may shed light on
their willingness both to acknowledge their own problems as well as their
will to accept solutions from outside. This can inform us about impediments
to the strengthening of health systems in post-Soviet areas, which will need
to be overcome to improve the human security situation. It also illustrates
the difficulties with the transferring of concepts and methods from the more
established foreign aid system in the Global South to what some may call a
'new disaster zone' in post-Soviet areas.
General receptiveness to Western ideas
Two distinctly different perceptions of the Western ideas proposed under the
Task Force emerged between our Baltic and Russian interviewees. On the one
hand, a substantial majority of the Baltic and Russian project participants
expressed more or less total agreement with their Western partners about
basic principles of medical and health care. On the other hand, a number of
the interviewees expressed serious doubts about the Task Force and similar
Western endeavours, emphasizing instead the proud heritage of Soviet medi-
cine. Representatives of the more extreme variant of this view tend to be of a
very specific category: male Russian civil servants of a certain age. However,
as our overview shows, there is a widespread tendency in the post-Soviet area
- even among those generally positive to Western ideals and trans-national
collaboration - to stress that the problems addressed by the Task Force are
'not really ours' and to find the Task Force's focus on certain marginalized
groups in society hard to defend.
'I'm simply amazed…': a welcome assistance
We found many examples of Russian resistance to, and lack of familiarity
with, the Western principles introduced by the Task Force. However, we
believe that it is important to emphasize that such scepticism was not glob-
ally representative, at least judging from our interviews with a large number
of Baltic and Russian project participants. Task Force collaboration was typi-
cally described as follows: 'I'm simply amazed at what we have achieved';
'The partnership has been a unique experience'; 'This is an enormous thing
( ogromnoye delo )'; 'The Task Force has been a gigantic financial support and
a gigantic learning process'; and so on. On occasion we asked interviewees