Nordic Ideas and Realities. Dynamics and Images of Nordic Cooperation

Abstract

In the learned discourse on European integration, the language abounds with metaphors such as the ‘construction’ of Europe, the ‘building’ of a union, of pillars and foundations. One can almost imagine Jean Monnet, Paul-Henri Spaak and Walter Hallstein, entering a building site, with hammers strapped to their overalls. This metaphor of a building site bustling with activity is strikingly different from the images of a Nordic cooperation, which went through its formative phase of institution-building in the same decade, the 1950s, as the European Community. The political discourse on Nordic cooperation is remarkably devoid of terms such as ‘union’, ‘community’ or any precise term other than ‘cooperation’. There do not seem to have been any architects, blueprints or foundation pillars in Nordic cooperation, traditionally being presented as pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, void of tension and fixed political concepts. It must seem that, after 1945, the Nordic countries could not help but cooperate.