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Lady Sarah Lyttelton, best‑known for her late roles as Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria (1837‑1842) and Governess of the Royal Children (1843‑1850), is notable for having travelled to Sweden and Russia on her honeymoon in 1813, a period still beset by the conflicts and tensions caused by the Napoleonic Wars. Although her presence in the historical context of the Baltic has been largely neglected, her personal correspondence and travel diary, both of which were partially published by her niece Maud Mary Lyttelton Wyndham in 1912 as Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, Lady Lyttelton, 1787‑1870, offer a unique and interesting perspective on Anglo‑Swedish and Anglo‑Russian relations during this tumultuous period. By examining Lady Lyttelton’s journey and unpublished correspondence, I aim to reconstruct her narrative within the Baltic region and to grant her mostly overlooked written account recognition in the field of travel writing. Indeed, Lady Lyttelton’s remarks provide an insight into the political and social situation of the time. The very route of her honeymoon is telling. She and her husband travelled directly to Gothenburg, bypassing Denmark, Napoleon’s ally, recently defeated by Britain at the Battle of Lyngør (1812). The couple then crossed the Baltic Sea to Finland, recently annexed to Russia, now a safe destination after the latter’s changes of allegiance. After a wintry sojourn in St Petersburg, they made their way back by land, through the recently besieged and burned Riga (1812) and the weakened Prussian provinces.

Mainly based on a field research carried out in 2012 by an international research group, this paper aims to understand why it seems so difficult for Kaliningrad to get fully integrated in the Baltic region, although the conditions for the development of cross-border cooperation (CBC) and regional integration exist. The relative isolation of Kaliningrad from the rest of the Baltic region is caused by its particular status as a subject of disagreement between Russia and the European Union and by institutional policy. But there are also purely local reasons for that situation. The weak integration of Kaliningrad in Baltic exchange networks is also caused by the persistence of adverse geopolitical orientations in the local populations and persistent stereotypes in the public opinion.

The numerous studies on global cities published over the last thirty years have failed to consider a large category of cities impacted both by globalization and by the widescale competition between urban projects it engenders. Baltic cities, which are often small urban areas, do not always have sufficient funds and leverage to become directly integrated into global and European processes. However, if they want to attract tourists, investments, and inhabitants, they have to highlight their comparative advantages by implementing active international policies. The Baltic scale may thus provide a stepping stone leading to larger scales. The intense cooperation among municipalities in the Baltic Sea Region since the 1990s and the fall of the Iron Curtain is part of this issue. This has led to the emergence of inequalities between large metropolitan areas which have obtained a very high level of internationalization, and medium-sized cities whose influence is currently limited to the Baltic region alone.