Several recent books discuss issues of Nordic modernity. While Nordic history often tends to emphasize the similarities between the five countries , these recent books present the Nordic countries as less of a unitary region that nonetheless lends itself to broader international comparisons. Economic, cultural and political modernity come across as processes that have not been predetermined, but rather are the result of many competing visions and trajectories of the future. These processes have been different in the five Nordic countries. At the same time, the developments in different spheres of society were interwoven due to the practice of comparison and exchange between key agents in politics, culture and economy.

Contesting Nordicness

Image of Progress in the Era of Modernisation, 1998

2009

The paper deals with examples of reconstructing the significance of Northern Europe (Norden) in the post-modern social reality. After decades of being regarded as a trailblazer of the social modernisation project from the 1960 to the 1980s, the Nordic societal model and the Nordic identity deriving from it experienced a period of crisis in the beginning of the 1990s. As noted by a leading Danish specialist of international relations, the past ideas and self-images of being better than Europe, upon which the Scandinavian model had been founded, started to give way to fears of the Nordic area becoming a periphery in the new geopolitical setting after the Cold War. The European Union and the Baltic Sea region became the nodal co-ordinates of the discourse that aimed at counteracting the alleged peripherization of this area. The paper attempts to point at the actors and sketch the scope of the discourses that contributed to the process of construction of the new identity as a part of the emerging Baltic Sea region identity. This involved reshaping of the Nordic social and geographical space of reference and reconstructing nodal points of the Nordic identity in a post-modern fashion. Institutional and individual actors that constructed the new reality are presented along with the new structures that have arisen as a result of their actions. Particular attention has been paid to the political agenda that made regionalization in the Baltic Sea area a prominent theme of the Nordic identity formation after the Cold War.

1992

The nature of Europe is in the Nordic nations." This statement might have been made somewhere in the heartland of Europe at any time from ancient antiquity to the present century. The meaning of the terms "nature", "nation" and "Nordic", however, has changed in subtle ways through time. The history of these changes, in turn, provides a background for an understanding of the meaning of Nordic landscape and culture for Europe, and for the Nordic nations, today.

Global Affairs, 2018

This epilogue offers a critical reflection on the key findings of the six articles in this special issue on "Nordicness" in foreign policy. It engages with the theoretical issues in studying regional security communities, both in terms of the utility of role theory and the implications of the literature on strategic culture for the concept of security culture which this study of Nordicness uses. The main argument developed here is the need to combine analysis of material and ideational factors in order to fully understand the dynamics of Nordicness in security policy. The article also identifies the key dilemmas and ambiguities of Nordic defence cooperation, and the pivotal role of Sweden in determining the future evolution of a shared Nordic foreign policy identity.

Contesting Nordicness: From Scandinavianism to the Nordic Brand, 2021

Contesting Nordicness, 2021

Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, 2012

In conventional images of the so-called Nordic model, the strong state is opposed to markets or civil society and co-operation is opposed to conflict. These opposites appear problematic if one takes seriously the Nordic market- and interest-centered language used for the practices of social regulation, including the stubborn use of “labor market parties” instead of the EU concept “social partners”. Applying an approach sensitive to the historical and political aspects of language and concepts, the paper argues that a particular notion of social citizenship developed in the Nordic countries, in which interests rather than rights were put into the center. Such a notion of social citizenship was associated with two intertwined ideas, important in the development of the Nordic pattern of social reform: the idea of symmetry between workers and employers and the idea of a virtuous circle between divergent interests. With these ideas democracy and citizenship were combined with paid work a...