Nordic Media Histories of Propaganda and Persuasion: An Introduction

Abstract

The introduction to the edited collection maps the overarching aims of the book, discusses the time frame and the geographical focus, and situates the book in a media historical research tradition on propaganda and persuasion. A key ambition with this volume is to advance a transnational approach to media history, highlighting how actors and institutions, ideas and practices, have been shaped by transnational entanglements within the Nordic region and beyond. Further, the introduction lays out the rationale for focusing on the entanglement of things, ideas and actors rather than media representations, cross-border connections rather than national comparisons, as well as the importance of a broad media concept in the study of propaganda and persuasion. Lastly, the introduction provides a short overview of chapters included in the book.

Somethin’ about Scandinavia (Bent H. Barfod) is the title of a short animated film made in Denmark in 1956 to explain economic and cultural cooperation in the Nordic region. Narrated from the perspective of a young boy, the film is ostensibly for children, but in its use of animation to render abstract political concepts through visual metaphor and a rich colour palette, it also functioned as a handy primer for audiences of all ages who wanted to understand how it could be that, as the voiceover concludes, “long ago, we were fighting against each other, but now, the Scandinavian countries are working together”. The film opens with five cartoon Vikings sporting the iconic helmets and lur-horns; working together, they are able to lift a giant rock, and to tear down walls between their respective fortresses to exchange goods. Later, a Danish man is pictured looking for factory work. Turned away in his home country, he is able to travel to Norway to find employment. He takes advantage of his new, mountainous surroundings to go skiing and breaks his leg. But no matter, explains the boy narrator: the man can use his national health insurance here too and can lie in his modern hospital bed, tended to by a Norwegian nurse, and “think about all these Scandinavian things”.¹

This is merely one example of how media were used in the mid-twentieth century to “enlighten”, “inform” and “persuade”—the nomenclature of communication activities was indeed vast and culturally specific—Nordic citizens of the benefits of political cooperation in their region. Somethin’ about Scandinavia also emphasizes the particularities of the individual nations; indeed, Five Small Countries was considered as an alternative title during the commissioning process.² Moreover, the production files show how fraught relations between the Nordic nations sometimes became during the decade that the Nordic Council (Nordiska rådet), established in 1952, was finding its feet. The labour mobility staged in the film was already a reality, but negotiations were ongoing about whether to develop a Nordic common market (a project which was eventually rendered irrelevant by the founding of the European Free Trade Association in 1960). These tensions did nothing to smooth the path of Somethin’ about Scandinavia as copies of the film travelled around the region. In Norway, the film was declared ineligible for the usual tax rebate for educational films.³ In Iceland, no cinemas were willing to screen it.⁴ And in Sweden, a row erupted between the Danish Embassy—which was screening the film for free in Stockholm—and the CEO of the dominant film company Svensk Filmindustri, Anders Dymling. His fury at the Danish diplomats undercutting the Swedish-dubbed version he had funded was visible in the force with which he typed a letter of protest to the distributor Statens Filmcentral about this “illegal competition”: the umlauts on the Swedish letters tore through the flimsy office paper.⁵ Even the English title of the film reveals an ambiguity which still obtains today in discourse about this region: what is referred to in the title and voiceover for the sake of the anglophone market as “Scandinavia” (technically only Denmark, Norway and Sweden) is in fact more correctly called Norden, or the Nordic region (encompassing Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland, and their semi-autonomous territories and islands including Greenland, the Faroes, the Åland islands and Svalbard) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Nordic Vikings with helmets and lur-horns in Somethin’ about Scandinavia. Danish Film Institute. Framegrab

This single anecdote encompasses many things that travelled. The distribution ledgers record that Somethin’ about Scandinavia had been seen by 280,337 cinema-goers by 1964 and remained available for hire until 1968 in 16 mm and 35 mm versions, which were loaned out 1500 times by Statens Filmcentral.⁶ Along with the film reels, the ideas, images and sounds instantiated in the film moved out into the world in less tangible and traceable ways. The paper trail left by the film’s production testifies to innumerable movements of letters, documents, capital and the materials that constitute the medium-specificity of film—but also to the mobility of those people and organizations associated with the film. Together, all this demonstrates how ongoing negotiations of Nordic identities and polities, as well as the stances and positionings of individual countries and organizations, are shaped by, and indeed dependent on, the transnational movement of media, people and things.

Media connections—be they between actors, institutions and countries, or between technology, content and ideas—are always embedded in their own specific historical conditions. To establish valuable knowledge about the past, and by extension enhance the understanding of our present time, we need to examine these media connections empirically. This leads us to what Nordic Media Histories of Propaganda and Persuasion aims to unpack. The book’s guiding research question is as follows: how were propaganda and persuasion practices, as well as their associated ideas and the results they generated, shaped and reshaped by transnational entanglements within the Nordic region and beyond? The period in focus centres on what is often described as the classic Nordic welfare epoch, between roughly the 1930s and the 1980s.

Conceptually, the book operates on two levels. On the one hand, the book draws on Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell’s inclusive definition of propaganda as “the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist”.⁷ Moreover, the book draws on their definition of the closely related term persuasion: as a complex, continuing and reciprocal process in which both parties are dependent on one another, a process that focuses both on influencing a given attitude or behaviour and on the co-creation of meaning.⁸ Just as important, on the other hand, is that the chapters work with an empirically situated approach to propaganda and persuasion. In practice, and drawing on the field of cultural historical media research,⁹ the different contributions highlight the communicative visions that the historical actors formulated, the concepts they used to describe these activities and the shifting practices associated with these visions and concepts. These two levels, the theoretical and the empirical, should work together to deepen our understanding of the past.

The Nordic welfare epoch, and its associated epithet the “Nordic Model”, is known for the expansion of the state, influential social and educational reforms, and strong international and environmental engagement.¹⁰ Less recognized, however, is the mobilization of different media that were part of shaping these societal processes during this period.¹¹ Simply put: the so-called Nordic Model was built on propaganda and persuasion just as much as it was built on governance, social security and economic productivity. The expansion of the welfare state, with an increasing number of reforms, needed an inwardly directed media apparatus to generate informed citizens. Only then could the different social, educational and cultural programmes be implemented efficiently and effectively. At the same time, these national projects also became part of countries’ national branding and cultural diplomacy abroad. By further adopting a transnational media historical approach, this present volume offers a different perspective to much scholarly work in the same field, primarily in three interconnected respects.

First of all, the transnational emphasis of this volume focuses not only on the exchange and flow of media representations but also on how visions, technologies and practices travelled across countries and regions. What we mean by “transnational”, and specifically in the Nordic region, requires a few words of explanation. Pierre-Yves Saunier has remarked that although the concept of transnational history is relatively new, there is nothing novel about transnational historiography as a practice: the study of cross-currents between nations can be traced back at least to the work of orientalists in the 1880s. With Saunier, we regard transnational history as a conglomeration of approaches that focus on “relations and formations, circulations and connections, between, across and through” nations and other taken-for-granted social entities.¹² The emphasis on the mobility of people, things and ideas in such definitions goes some way to explaining the distinction between transnational history, comparative history and global (or international) history. While transnational history does not ignore the importance of national units, comparative history tends to privilege national iterations of phenomena and compare them, without looking for the empirical connections and exchanges that might contribute to explaining similarities and differences. Global history, meanwhile, examines dynamics and developments that obtain on the global scale.¹³ Clearly, watertight distinctions between these forms of “relational”¹⁴ historiography are hard to sustain. As a point of principle, however, we are interested in “entanglements” of practices, technologies, artefacts and institutions, drawing on scholarship in histoire croisée or “entangled history”. This approach seeks out points of entanglement or crossing in time and space, examining the actors and circumstances of such interactions, the threads of which sometimes shoot off in unexpected directions, often implicating the researchers themselves in their encounters with archives or artefacts.¹⁵ As discussed below, histoire croisée has been influential in Nordic media history in recent years.

Within these paradigms of transnational or entangled historiography, the Nordic countries, by dint of their close cultural, historical and linguistic ties, evince particular iterations of transnational dynamics. Co-existing with each nation-state’s discourse of distinctiveness is a tradition of cooperation at the regional level. Formalized by the establishment of the Nordic Council in 1952, Nordic cooperation had long-standing grassroots support, as evinced by the formation of national Nordic Associations (Foreningerne Norden) from 1919 onwards¹⁶ and, further back, the mid-nineteenth century pan-Scandinavianist movement.¹⁷ Thus, transnational connections in the Nordic context are often facilitated (or indeed hampered) by extant institutions, networks, affinities or disputes operating on the regional scale. Elsewhere, the Nordic countries tend to be imagined as a nebulous mass erroneously called “Scandinavia”. As Harald Gustafsson notes, Nordic history can be viewed from different perspectives: Norden as part of a broader Western European tradition; Norden as a distinct region within this European constellation; Norden as nations with specific histories; and lastly, Norden as a number of nations with internal regional differences and sometimes regions that cross national boundaries.¹⁸

Previous scholarship investigating the dynamics of national and regional identities amongst the Nordic countries—and the image of the Nordic countries abroad—has often focused on myth-making and imagology. Studies of myths and images of the Nordics have generally noted that the strong traditions of progressive politics, democracy, equality and prosperity in the region have tended to foster myth-making within and outside the region. For example, Kazimierz Musiał¹⁹ has persuasively shown that these two aspects—a progressive tradition and myth-making—are interdependent. Recent scholarship has sought to unpack these myths and demonstrate their operations.²⁰ Several Nordic works deal explicitly with the representation (“imagology”), images and branding of the Nordic region, such as Musiał (1998), Harvard and Stadius (2014), Jenny Andersson and Mary Hilson’s special issue on “Images of Sweden and the Nordic Countries” in the Scandinavian Journal of History, and the recent volume The Making and Circulation of Nordic Models, Ideas and Images.²¹ Our book also touches upon these dynamics, but puts more emphasis on strategic and hands-on constructions and usage of such myths, images and discourses in the form of propaganda and persuasion, broadly conceived, by following the historical actors from state and non-governmental institutions.

The second perspective, which also distinguishes this book, relates to the fact that the media history of the Nordic countries has primarily been written from national perspectives. Ambitious and empirical studies cover various aspects of the history of different mass media (press, radio and television) in the Nordic countries, yet often limit the scope, as Harvard and Stadius point out, to “single media in a single country”.²² Within the field of media history, there has been a vibrant theoretical and methodological debate on the issue of national and mono-medial perspectives.²³ Media historians Marie Cronqvist and Christopher Hilgert draw on this debate when examining the concept of entangled media histories, which the authors argue can be used to further underline the importance of transnational and transmedial perspectives when writing media history.²⁴ Rather than single-medium studies, Cronqvist and Hilgert note, attention should be drawn to entanglements and “flows of content across different media products, formats, genres, channels or outlets in national or transnational environments”.²⁵ This principle underlies our own approach in this volume. A key distinction between our book and the bulk of works on Nordic media culture is thus that emphasis is placed on transnational entanglements, rather than national case studies or comparative studies.²⁶ This approach allows us, through a range of empirical case studies, to critically reveal a broad range of institutions and actors engaged in communicative activities with various labels—“propaganda”, “education”, “public information”, “public relations” and so on—and to productively map how these engagements and results were constructed outside the bounds of isolated nations at different times in history.

Thirdly, this book foregrounds empirical and media-centric case studies, rather than chapters driven by top-down and grand theory approaches. By committing to following the historical actors and tracing their media-related practices and discussions, the book highlights the importance of not taking contemporary ideas and concepts for granted, for example regarding which media were more important (e.g. traditional mass media), and what the meaning of “propaganda” once and for all refers to (e.g. lies and confusion). Top-down models, which might aim to explain media-related historical change and phenomena, could shed light on individuals’ and organizations’ structural use of media and their strategic intent. However, such models also risk underestimating historical and regional differences that might be crucial in order to make sense of the local or context-specific conceptualization of various communication activities and the practices that were mobilized to persuade different publics.²⁷ These aspects are discussed in more depth in the following sections outlining the book’s cultural historical media research perspective, as well as its empirically situated approach to the study of propaganda and persuasion.

Guided by these three parameters—the focus on entanglement of things, ideas and actors rather than media representations; cross-border connections rather than national comparisons; and archival-driven media history research rather than top-down models—the aim of this book is to contribute to pushing the boundaries of Nordic media historical scholarship, arguing for a more integrative approach that combines the theoretical and the empirical.

Why the Nordics?

In terms of geographical focus, the case studies in this book find their centre of gravity in the Nordic region—particularly Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland—and trace the movement of ideas, documents, images, sounds, people and material goods related to the production, dissemination and perception of activities that can be broadly conceived as propaganda and persuasion. This focus is based on the fact that this region has for a long time—again quoting Harvard and Stadius—“existed as an empirically observable phenomenon, in the form of a set of widespread images and stereotypes, as well as embodied in institutions for Nordic cooperation”.²⁸ This should, however, not be understood as a natural and unproblematic arena for collaboration and exchange between the different countries.

While the Nordic region is to some extent defined as such by its long history of political cooperation, for example formally instantiated in the twentieth century by the establishment of the Nordic Council, internally the region comprises a patchwork of small nations and territories, the latter enjoying a range of degrees of self-rule. The respective national imaginations of these neighbours are fuelled in no small part by differences, perceived and actual, between them.²⁹ The cultural and political work of defining these differences and similarities can often be discerned in the traces left by processes of collaboration and negotiation (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

A map of Norden from Somethin’ about Scandinavia. The scale of the map is distorted in favour of the Nordic countries. Danish Film Institute. Framegrab

We could think of the different degrees of Nordic collaborativeness as a centripetal dynamic versus a centrifugal dynamic. The centripetal dynamic highlights a tendency towards integration, which some of the contributions in this collected volume demonstrate, for example Ruth Hemstad’s chapter on the attempts to promote Nordic collaboration in the 1930s, and Fredrik Norén’s chapter on the exchange of ideas and practices related to public information between the Nordic countries in the 1970s. Other case studies in the book have a more centrifugal dynamic, following entanglements between the Nordics and the world beyond. This characteristic points to the fact that cooperation within the Nordic region did not exclude collaborations and exchange with the rest of the world. In these processes, we also witness the tension between the idea of the Nordics as a homogenous entity and their ability to act and stage themselves as discrete nation-states. This becomes visible in Emil Eiby Seidenfaden’s chapter about Danish journalists in the UK during World War II, and in Elisabet Björklund’s chapter on the circulation of anti-abortion propaganda between Sweden and the US. In our view, it would be problematic not to integrate both these dynamics in a book that centres on Nordic media history and transnational entanglements.

To unpack the point of the two dynamics, the centripetal versus the centrifugal, it is pertinent to consider how these are shaped by the smallness of the Nordic nations. The trope of the small Scandinavian nation was already in evidence in the 1956 film discussed above, but it has also emerged as a key theme in understanding Nordic exceptionalism in recent scholarship. We build on this notion here for four reasons, each of which is suggestive of crucial political and cultural particularities of the Nordics, and each further impacting the understanding of transnational media histories of propaganda and persuasion in the region.

Firstly, it has been argued that smaller, more homogeneous populations facilitate the construction of “‘total’, consensual national images” that are partly informed by awareness of foreign perceptions of the nation, which can be leveraged by states to engineer shifts in collective self-perception at home and coherent nation-branding abroad.³⁰ This tendency could thus generate attempts by the Nordic countries to shape and reshape their self-images—or defend the nation from foreign counter-images—and convey such messages, within and beyond the region, which in turn can activate various media entanglements across borders. When such actors, institutions and ideas are mobilized across borders, it can in turn generate collaborations, negotiations and potential conflicts. An example of this is discussed in Melina Antonia Buns and Dominic Hinde’s chapter, about how the Nordic countries collaborated to promote a so-called Nordic environmental model, highlighting various frictions surrounding such an undertaking.

Secondly, while in the twentieth century the interests and strategies of the Nordic nations converged as small nations on the world stage, a deeper historical perspective reveals more complex power relations. Miroslav Hroch’s typology of nations differentiates between larger “ruling nations” and “small nations”; the road to national self-determination for the latter, he argues, entailed the people rising up against not just the ruling class but also whichever “great nation” was oppressing them.³¹ In the Nordic context, Denmark and Sweden have historically played the role of “great powers” or, put differently, colonial oppressors of Norway, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes and other regional territories, as well as colonies further afield. Norway, Finland and Iceland gained independence in 1905, 1917 and 1944, respectively, and pitted their national narratives against those of Denmark and Sweden, which in turn were rival regional powers and players in great power politics from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic era.³² In our book, some chapters hint at this power dynamic, for example Lars Diulin’s chapter on Nordic collaborations to produce films about foreign aid.

A third reason for taking the smallness of the Nordic states seriously is that small nations observably do not function simply as scaled-down large nations. As many of our case studies show, the dynamics of civil society and government, not to mention the circulation of people, material goods and media objects, function in particular ways in a small population. In the Nordic context, distinctive factors might be said to include a high degree of collective socio-political trust, mass participation in civil society and grassroots organizations, the role of cooperative traditions or the state churches. This tendency is, for example, visible in Björn Lundberg and David Larsson Heidenblad’s chapter on a travelling environmental campaign, revealing the closely intertwined cooperation between various societal sectors. A similar observation has been explored by scholars working on a variety of aspects of small-nation cultures, with the caveat that it is difficult to differentiate between local peculiarities and genuinely generic functions of scale. Elsewhere, for example, Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie propose that a comparative approach to the study of small-nation cinemas can identify which aspects of film policy and circulation of films are effects of or responses to scalar conditions.³³ They cite the sociologists of education Mark Bray and Steve Packer, who also assert the value of unpacking which aspects of small-nation governance might indicate a distinctive socio-political “ecology”.³⁴ Our own book asks similar questions, tracing the specificities and peculiarities of how the tools of propaganda and persuasion are commissioned, designed, circulated and received within and between a constellation of small nations. For example, C. Claire Thomson’s chapter on the role of the Carlsberg and Tuborg brewing companies in funding science and the arts in Denmark, and their pursuit of nation-branding abroad, is suggestive of such small-nation dynamics.

A fourth and related point is concerned with language. Any study of Nordic transnational media history must wrestle with the implications of the patchwork of languages in the region, given that many types of media feature at least some verbal or written content. The countries of the region share the condition that their national languages are understood by very few people outside the territories in question. This impacts media entanglements that stretch beyond the Nordics, necessitating the use of world languages, especially English and German, in international communications, trade and diplomacy. Less obvious to outsiders are the linguistic tensions internal to the region. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, at least in their written forms, are in theory mutually comprehensible, and the policy of the Nordic Council has long been to promote language cooperation as a driver of cultural affinity and mobility of citizens.³⁵ In practice, Scandinavians today tend to find it easier to converse in English as a lingua franca, and translation of popular fiction and subtitling of films between the languages are common. That Finnish is a Uralic language and Icelandic derives from Old Norse complicates the ecology of languages in the region and stymies smooth communication, as do the many dialects and indigenous languages, not to mention Norway’s alternative national language, Nynorsk.³⁶ The issue of language within the Nordic region is also touched upon in Mari Pajala’s chapter, regarding the difficulties surrounding Nordvision and the attempts to stimulate Nordic television exchange. In short, every act of intra-Nordic communication in our case studies is predicated on complex language politics and accommodations, which shape, and are shaped by, uneven dynamics of political power and cultural capital.

The regional scope of this book is, then, rather easy to delineate, but throws up a range of complexities regarding intra-regional relations. The temporal scope of the book was harder to determine; the transnational history of media in the region, after all, could be said to stretch back in time to, for instance, the earliest known runic carvings of 150 AD.³⁷ Equally, the digital turn and the proliferation of new media in the twenty-first century, and its impact on governance and popular culture, are being amply mapped by Nordic scholars.³⁸ The focus of our book is the role of media in a particular and formative period in Nordic history: the emergence and consolidation of what became popularly known as the Nordic Model, in the period stretching from the inter-war years to the welfare state’s decline, or at least transformation, in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Nordic Model is an imprecise and contested term, but in a broad-brush sense it refers to “the similarities in social and political development in the Nordic countries, including, among other things, the stability of parliamentary democracy; the preference for consensual solutions to social conflicts, especially in the labour market; and the universal, tax-funded welfare state”.³⁹ Our point of departure is that the development of this model and the dissemination of ideas about it domestically and internationally were also shaped by transnational deployment of media that was sometimes strategic and targeted, sometimes improvised and messy, but often distinctive. As mentioned previously, cultural and media policies have of course been explicitly recognized by scholars as levers and vehicles in the development of the Nordic “middle way” since its first articulations between the World Wars. One example is the scholarly attention to the notion of the media welfare state, emphasizing, among other things, a public service ideal embedded in a corporatist-oriented political system, shaped by media regulations and media subsidies.⁴⁰ However, and as stated before, this has most often been done from a national or comparative perspective, and not from a transnational horizon highlighting the entanglement of media, technologies, ideas, institutions and actors within the Nordics and beyond. Further, drawing on the field of cultural historical media research, this book brings media to the foreground of analytical attention—another feature which distinguishes this volume from related scholarship. In the following, the break with a tradition of both mono-medial and national Nordic media history is introduced in more detail.

Breaking with Mono-medial Media History

During the twentieth century, mass media such as radio, television, film and the daily press became both an integral part of ordinary people’s lives and important tools to reshape modern society. Traditionally, scholars of media history have had a tendency to study these traditional mass media, and their institutions, as isolated from each other. This is also true from a Nordic media history perspective. In the last decades, a number of books exploring the film, television and journalism cultures of the region as regional phenomena have emerged, also relating to the topic of propaganda and persuasion, but these tend to have a mono-medial focus and to be organized into national case studies, as noted previously.⁴¹

Our volume draws on the field of cultural historical media research, an interdisciplinary branch of study which has gained momentum over the past decades. Solveig Jülich, Patrik Lundell and Pelle Snickars define it as “a multidisciplinary research field that studies relationships between media forms, media use, discourses and cultural contexts from a historical perspective”.⁴² Scholars within the cultural historical media research tradition go against the grain of mono-medial disciplinary boundaries and a media history privileging teleological narratives of progress. As Asa Briggs and Peter Burke argue in A Social History of the Media:

To think in terms of a media system means emphasizing the division of labour between the different means of communication available in a given space and at a given time, without forgetting that old and new media can and do coexist and that different media may compete with or echo one another as well as complement one another.⁴³

Moreover, a key aim within the field has been to broaden existing definitions of the media concept. For example, media historian Lisa Gitelman has argued that “media are unique and complicated historical subjects. Their histories must be social and cultural, not the stories of how one technology leads to another, or of isolated geniuses working their magic on the world”.⁴⁴ Drawing on this principle, scholars working with a cultural historical perspective on media history tend to emphasize the social, cultural, economic and material conditions shaping communication, circumstances that have changed and transformed over time. In this vein, Pelle Snickars argues for the importance of empirical studies of the relations between media, and that media forms should be approached as “transnational, entangled and dependent on each other”.⁴⁵

Unavoidably, the scholar of propaganda and persuasion deals with a wide range of media forms, since the phenomenon is inconceivable without a process of mediation. The contributors to this book deal with a plethora of media used to propagate and persuade, often carefully orchestrated, such as radio, film, newspapers, posters, pamphlets, brochures, meetings, events, debate books, study circles, public hearings, competitions, textbooks, letters, telegrams, autobiographies, lectures, rumours, networks of informers, underground news, pirate radio, television, exhibitions, educational films, illustrated magazines, bulletin boards, architecture, photography, opinion polls, shop window displays and much more. Besides this broad concept of media, scholars working with a cultural historical media research perspective also pay attention to the cultural practice of mediated communication, which is integral to the media system approach. On the one hand, emphasis is placed on spatial and material dimensions such as the communication settings, the conceptions and ideas surrounding the choice of media in the efforts to persuade, the material conditions shaping the production and circulation of the media, as well as the use of the media in everyday life. On the other hand, focus is devoted to the social dimension, most notably the negotiations between historical agents and institutions, in their use of media. Going beyond a media history of “winners”, to borrow Thomas Elsaesser’s notion, this book attempts to also highlight media practices and media practitioners that are unfamiliar to a more conventional media history.⁴⁶ Using this as a starting point, a central aim of this volume is to identify previously neglected connections and transmedial relations between media, as well as alternate histories of propaganda and persuasion beyond canonical media texts. In the next section, our approach to the concept of propaganda and its rebranding during the twentieth century is delineated.

An Empirically Situated Approach to Studying Propaganda and Persuasion

In today’s debates, “propaganda” seems almost exclusively associated with hatred, lies and disinformation. Often, the term is used to apportion blame, make issues illegitimate and erase them from the political agenda. However, the conception of what is perceived as persuasive communication activities, as well as what is considered ethical and unethical communication, has changed over time and differs between contexts within a specific period. Researchers have, for example, demonstrated that “propaganda” was used in a predominantly negative sense long before the twentieth century.⁴⁷ Meanwhile, others have shown that it was still possible to use the propaganda concept in a positive and neutral sense in some liberal democracies, including Sweden, in both the inter-war period and the post-war period.⁴⁸ Still, while practitioners of persuasive communication have occasionally given their work more legitimate labels—from “propaganda” to “public relations” to “strategic communication” and so forth—the actual practices may have been more stable.⁴⁹ Today’s negatively preconceived notion of propaganda risks clouding historical developments of parallel and associated synonyms and practices—and how these too were connected and shaped in meetings between different national contexts. The reason why we have chosen to put “propaganda” in the book title, accompanied with the seemingly softer term “persuasion”, should partly be understood as a somewhat provocative reminder of this historical development.

David Welch notes that although there exist various definitions of propaganda, some more useful than others, most scholars would agree that “propaganda is concerned with influencing opinion” and is often related to messages disseminated to a wider public, with an intended purpose, target and some kind of benefit for at least the sender.⁵⁰ Understood in this way, propaganda can be viewed as a “hammer that can be used to build a house or strike a victim”.⁵¹ Hence, the aims and goals of propaganda can be more or less explicit, its tools and expressions more or less effective, and the ambition to reveal, conceal or distort facts more or less accentuated. Like Jowett and O’Donnell, we find such a pragmatic and open-ended conceptualization fruitful to apply in cultural historical media research.

This inclusive definition of propaganda and persuasion also allows researchers to work with an empirically situated approach and to follow the historical actors’ communicative practices, and how they conceptualized these activities, with a direct or an indirect intention to influence their publics. Furthermore, in this edited volume, the contributing authors highlight, on the one hand, the terminology and ideas that are articulated by the historical actors. On the other hand, they employ different theoretical concepts and perspectives—such as public diplomacy, region-building, circulation of knowledge—to unpack and analyse the communicative notions and practices that are revealed in the archival sources. Moreover, by adding a transnational perspective, the individual chapters shed light on how these communicative concepts and practices were shared, discussed, contested and shaped as they travelled across borders.

The book’s empirically situated approach to the study of propaganda and persuasion is important from a historiographical point of view. Traditionally, the scholarly field of public relations history, which should be understood as a field intertwined with propaganda studies, is often written and understood from an Anglo-American perspective. Attempts to write general historiographies of public relations, for example, have thus had a tendency to emphasize the importance of the industry, especially in American contexts.⁵² From a European and Nordic perspective, however, the state and civic organizations should be regarded as of at least equal importance to corporations in the development of such external communication activities.⁵³

Established historiographical narratives of how different communication concepts and practices developed during the twentieth century should not be taken for granted, nor uncritically adopted from one context to another. While propaganda is often thought of as a phenomenon deployed in extreme circumstances, this book shows that in the Nordic context “propaganda” (alongside terms such as “oplysning”, “information” and “public relations”) was also conceived of as a mundane tool in the construction of the welfare states. In the post-war Nordic welfare states, for example, utopian visions were often coupled with attempts at persuasion, and media were used to demonstrate the importance of certain virtues and to steer the private life of individuals.⁵⁴

Outline of the Book

We have consciously used the plural form of media histories in the book title. Consequently, this volume does not present the transnational media history of propaganda and persuasion in the Nordic region during the short twentieth century. Instead, the book presents different aspects of how such a history could be written. The different contributions have been divided into three broad thematic sections: the first on cultural diplomacy and public information, the second on politics and security, and the third on internationalism and environmentalism. The structure of each section is based on a rough chronological progression.

The section “Cultural Diplomacy and Public Information” addresses a range of central questions, such as what was the role of different media in transforming the Nordic into an imagined community? To what extent did different national projects borrow from each other? How were best practices shared regarding how to provide citizens with information about topics such as welfare provision, national security and public health? How was gender equality translated and mediated into notions of decaying family life? In the first chapter, Ruth Hemstad applies a region-building approach to discuss attempts to promote Nordic cooperation in the 1930s and further highlight the historical development of this idea. Hemstad shows that different, predominantly social democratic, transmedial manifestations such as mass meetings, events and festivals were orchestrated and mediated in various ways to advocate for and circulate the message of Nordic cooperation. While Hemstad’s chapter has a centripetal characteristic, the second chapter takes on a centrifugal dynamic. In C. Claire Thomson’s chapter, analytical attention is directed towards the philanthropic diplomacy that the Danish brewing companies Carlsberg and Tuborg engaged in during the inter-war period as well as during the 1950s—especially through films—to promote Danish science and arts outside Denmark, in general, and in the UK, in particular. Moving on to Fredrik Norén’s contribution, he traces the Nordic and international contacts that the Swedish Board for Civic Information established through study visits, seminars and conferences during the 1970s. Using the concepts of epistemic community and circulation of knowledge, Norén shows how various actors from different societal sectors were drawn to each other to discuss and address issues of public information. In the section’s fourth contribution, Elisabet Björklund examines the circulation and reuse of American images of foetuses in Swedish anti-abortion campaigns from the 1970s and the 1980s. Björklund further analyses how terms such as truth, information and propaganda were used by different actors that engaged in discussions about these images.

The second thematic section of the book is “Politics and Security”. From the inter-war period to the Cold War era, the Nordic countries’ vulnerable geopolitical position has fostered encounters with other ideologies and systems. Chapters in this section of the book discuss Norden as a geopolitical bloc where national and regional interests both overlap and conflict. Hence, how did the Nordic countries navigate outside threats? How did the involvement of Nordic actors in inter- and post-war international institutions such as the United Nations and NATO impact the use of communicative strategies in the Nordic countries? In what way did media from other parts of the world contribute to Nordic citizens’ self-understanding? In the first chapter in this section, Emil Stjernholm examines the media production of the Office of War Information in Stockholm during World War II. Drawing on overlooked archival material from Swedish counter-espionage, Stjernholm maps the plethora of Office of War Information-supported media that were circulated in Sweden as well as in the neighbouring Nordic countries, highlighting Stockholm’s status as a transnational, entangled propaganda hub. Emil Eiby Seidenfaden’s chapter studies the work of Danish journalists in cosmopolitan London during World War II. In his analysis, Seidenfaden shows how Danish correspondents navigated between the interests of British intelligence agencies and different factions of the Danish Free movement, thus making a contribution to a neglected aspect of the history of journalism in Scandinavia. In the third chapter in this section, Øystein Pedersen Dahlen and Rolf Werenskjold explore the role of the organizations People and Defence and the Norwegian Atlantic Committee in the public debate on Norwegian defence and security policy in the 1950s. Particular emphasis is placed on the interactions between the Scandinavian security policy organizations, as well as the Norwegian organizations’ collaboration with Norwegian news departments and journalists. In doing so, Pedersen Dahlen and Werenskjold argue that even though People and Defence and the Norwegian Atlantic Committee appeared as civil non-government organizations, they functioned as information agencies of sorts for their governments. Lastly, in his chapter, Jukka Kortti describes the Fulbright programme and the grants provided by private foundations to Nordic social scientists as an influential part of the systematic and extensive American soft power politics in the Cold War era. In his study, Kortti shows how visiting scholars, upon their return, contributed to the introduction of American-based scientific terminology in the Nordic press, while also influencing the post-war building of the Nordic welfare states.

From access to nature and its resources, to planned suburbs, to the world-leading industries that underpinned prosperity, the third section “Internationalism and Environmentalism” builds on the fact that concrete manifestations of the Nordic welfare states have been mediatized in various compelling ways. How did landscapes, landmarks and machines function to articulate a mediated notion of, for instance, long-lasting social democratic-oriented projects to domestic and foreign publics in different media? How did different actors collaborate on public information campaigns related to cross-border issues like economic growth and environmental challenges? How did Nordic foreign aid organizations convey their work to domestic audiences, and how did this contribute to the image of the Nordic region as internationalist? These are some of the questions that relate to the third section. The first chapter, written by Mari Pajala, deals with Nordic television culture, however, from a production studies vantage point. In doing so, Pajala maps the establishment of an information infrastructure within the Nordvision network, highlighting the arduous task of developing Nordic transnational exchange. In the second chapter, Björn Lundberg and David Larsson Heidenblad focus on an early transnational media campaign aimed at bringing attention to environmental issues in the Nordic countries. In doing so, the authors trace how the campaigns mobilized civil society organizations and schools, as well as a broad range of media, all in an effort to transform information into awareness and political action. In their chapter, Melina Antonia Buns and Dominic Hinde critically discuss the image of the Nordic countries as green and modern, zooming in on the performativity of such a self-image at media events such as the international Nordic Council conference in 1975. In the mid-1960s, several Nordic foreign aid agencies, such as Swedish SIDA, Danish Danida and Norwegian Norad, had established information bureaus. Lars Diurlin’s chapter explores the exchanges of ideas regarding information strategies that took place between these aid agencies, particularly focusing on their audiovisual strategies. While Laura Saarenmaa also tackles the issue of internationalism, she does so in the context of Nordic public service television. Focusing on the YLE Film Service, Saarenmaa scrutinizes the broadcasting of East Asian propaganda-oriented films in Finland during the 1970s and 1980s, showing how this was the result of a firm belief in geo-cultural diversity in film programming for television.

Taken together, it is our hope that the different chapters can shed light on an under-represented aspect of media history: an attempt to write transnational media histories of propaganda and persuasion in the Nordic region.