The Nordic Mobilization of Public Opinion on Foreign Aid in the UN’s Second Development Decade

Abstract

This chapter contributes to the understudied research areas of Nordic foreign aid media history and Nordic co-operations concerning the mobilization of public opinion on foreign aid. The study asks: What exchanges of ideas regarding information strategies took place between the Nordic aid agencies during the launch of the Second Development Decade (1970s)? Utilizing governmental archive documents the study demonstrates that Nordic co-operations shifted from embracing “Nordicness” in field projects to using Nordic connections as a backstage think-tank for mutual, but domestic, goals of public persuasion, focusing on film as an information device. It is revealed that cooperative efforts were hampered by the agencies’ lack of experience in audio-visual co-production, by different discursive understandings of “development” and by the difficulty to transnationally co-operate around nationally grounded information regimes.

In 1969 the United Nations decided that the coming decade would be launched as the Second Development Decade (DD2). The 1960s had seen an exceptional rise in foreign aid allocations in the global north, especially in the Nordic countries, but as the decade came to a close, so did the predominant belief that financial transfers and economic growth alone could cure underdevelopment and solve world poverty. DD2 signified a discursive shift regarding the understanding of development, as social equality and global interdependence became leading watchwords. DD2 also marked a significantly strengthened demand from the UN that all countries should employ modern media technologies to make an “unprecedented” coordinated effort to mobilize national public opinion in favour of development assistance, suggesting that governments “make every effort to convince their citizens […] rather than following public opinion”.¹

This mobilization of the public was already taking shape in the Nordic countries. During the mid-1960s, the foreign aid agencies, especially Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA) in Sweden, Danish International Development Agency (Danida) in Denmark and Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) in Norway, had established domestic information bureaus whose budgets soared in concert with each nation’s fast-growing foreign aid allocations.² As part of the DD2 agenda, the UN also pushed for increased transnational co-operation among the aid-giving countries to share know-how on public mobilization and coordinate governmental information strategies. As a response to such requests Jørgen Milwertz, head of Danida’s information bureau, wrote the following, in March 1970, to Clinton A. Rehling, an information officer at the United Nations Development Programme:

I quite agree with you that there are a number of areas of productive co-operation between nationally and internationally employed information officers. In fact, it is an entirely new development that national agencies for international development are building up strong information services with fairly liberal budgets—in this country 1.9 million kroner for the fiscal year beginning 1 April and no doubt more for the next. There is no precedence for information budgets of this size in the history of the Kingdom!³

Three days later Milwertz wrote to Rehling again stating that he had initiated a meeting with the Director of Programmes at Danish National Television to discuss “the mobilization of public opinion for the second development decade”.⁴ They had agreed that something needed to be done “to overcome the disinterested attitude towards our topics” among the opinion-making Danish press corps. “Somehow we have managed to bore them”, Milwertz stated and continued to describe a plan to create new “imaginative” audio-visual programmes, in collaboration with Danish national television, featuring “successful social and economic development”, which he hoped would change general attitudes in favour of foreign aid, and, asked Milwertz, perhaps the UNDP could supply them with “a ‘catalogue’ of success-stories and […] examples of successful development” around which they could build their programmes?

The exchange of information and collaborations on material production between Danida, Danish national television and the UN, as displayed in the correspondence above, stands as a telling example of how national and international development actors, along with domestic cultural producers, concerted their efforts to mobilize public opinion as the DD2 was launched. The coming decade would see new transnational collaborations around issues of information and persuasion, often centring around the question of how to locate, produce and employ film as an information device.

Informed by the premise that the Nordic countries have historically shared a similar outlook on aid distribution, which resulted in several co-operations on foreign aid projects and the development of a certain “Nordic aid model”, this study aims to demonstrate that the Nordic countries also shared a common domestic challenge, where co-operation proved even more desirable: legitimizing the spiralling foreign aid enterprise in relation to public opinion.⁵ The study further shows that while the Nordic willingness to co-operate on development field projects declined around 1970, the inclination to share experiences on domestic information strategies only increased, especially as the UN announced the launch of DD2 and pushed for amplified transnational coordination regarding the mobilization of public opinion.

This chapter revolves around two main research questions: what exchanges of ideas regarding information strategies took place between the Nordic aid agencies during the launch of DD2 and how did the agencies’ information bureaus coordinate their efforts? As will be revealed, a central issue for the bureaus was the pressing need to generate audio-visual opinion-forming information. Considering the importance that the agencies applied to the film medium, the study will also investigate how opinion-forming audio-visual strategies were discussed as an essential part of the mobilization of public opinion. This strategic area was given special attention by the agencies and resulted in a Nordic film competition which was to commemorate the launch of DD2. The competition was mainly administered by Danida, but since the winning film En sluten värld (An enclosed world, Rolf Bolin, 1974) was a Swedish production, SIDA also became involved in the process. Norad and the Finnish Foreign Ministry were not as involved in the production.

Inspired by Sunniva Engh’s statement that the phenomenon of development aid can be “better grasped if viewed outside the national and regional frameworks, and placed within the partially overlapping ones”, this study aims to highlight a less discernible transnational component regarding development assistance (the more obvious one being the donor-recipient relationship).⁶ Relating to the discussion on centrifugal and centripetal dynamisms in Nordic collaboration in this volume’s introduction, foreign aid could be seen as cogently centrifugal, especially considering how aid has been discussed as a form of “nation branding”, making aid-giving an essential part of “being Nordic” in the eyes of the world.⁷ Although foreign aid information was a domestic and thus centripetal matter, this study will show that the strategies behind the information were often conceived and transnationally circulated among the Nordic countries.

The study builds on archival material—mainly minutes and correspondence—drawn from the sections covering domestic information in the Danida subdivision of the Foreign Ministry archive. Similar sections on domestic information in the SIDA archive have also been systematically checked, but since the Danida archive is more comprehensive on both Nordic information co-operations and audio-visual strategies, SIDA’s archive has been of lesser importance.

Transnational Media Histories of Nordic Foreign Aid Information Policy

The study finds itself in an intersection where research on governmental information in the post-war welfare state converges with historical research on Nordic foreign aid policy. When merging these areas, the field of foreign aid information policy appears, allowing development agencies to be studied as a form of media producers. This study adds two further demarcations, focusing on the media history of Nordic foreign aid, as well as the transnational co-operation between Nordic aid agencies regarding the mobilization of public opinion.

Foreign aid information policy has been sparsely covered in the major historiographies of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian foreign aid.⁸ When compared, it can be deduced that as the Nordic aid agencies strengthened their information drives, they employed similar attitude-shaping strategies where most information funds would be channelled to NGOs, such as unions and popular movements, as well as to opinion-forming journalists and cultural workers, which came to function as proxy information creators. The public was then thought to perceive the information as more personalized and less bureaucratic.⁹ As this study will show, this information-by-proxy strategy was an integral part of the UN’s international DD2 mobilization, which came to influence Nordic governmental information strategies. As research in Swedish cultural policy history has shown, the strategy was also used in other policy areas during the 1970s, such as in the health and treatment sectors.¹⁰

In many studies covering the relation between Swedish foreign aid policy, public opinion and news media, it has been standard fare to adopt a narrow contemporary focus as well as overlooking SIDA’s crucial role in constructing knowledge of and attitudes towards aid-receiving countries through the use of governmental information funds.¹¹ In his studies on the formation of public opinion on global solidarity and foreign aid, historian Tor Sellström adopts a historical perspective, but misses SIDA’s, and thus the Swedish government’s, fundamental role in this formation.¹² Other studies have pointed towards such issues and concluded that public demand was never a driver behind Nordic governmental aid choices.¹³ Although interest in global questions slowly grew during the 1960s, the majority remained uninterested. More to the point, the public’s alleged lack of knowledge on global problems and engagement in global solidarity was considered a major obstacle when aid policies were to be legitimized. The implementation would depend on opinion-forming governmental actions.

The information strategies of Danida and SIDA should be discussed in the larger context of an intervening governmental approach adopted by welfare states after the Second World War, with the intention of influencing citizen behaviour using information as a controlling device, as has been studied in a Swedish context by Hanna Kjellgren and Fredrik Norén.¹⁴ Historical research on Danish governmental information policy is rare, but Jesper Vestermark Køber’s study on local democracy in Denmark states, as do Kjellgren and Norén, that the 1960s and 1970s were expansive decades for public information aimed at changing behavioural patterns.¹⁵ Previous research on the cultural history of media has highlighted that, in Sweden, such approaches unified several political areas. What was deemed dubious or too commercial demanded political action whether it concerned the “right” consumer products, citizen health, “quality” feature films or images of aid-receiving countries.¹⁶ Furthermore, this study is informed by Norén’s argument that the state often operationalized media with its media-specificity in mind.¹⁷ The belief in (and use of) film as a sympathy-strengthening medium by foreign aid agencies should be seen in this context.

The media history of Swedish foreign aid information has recently received scholarly attention. Lars Diurlin has examined the information strategies of SIDA and concluded, much in line with both earlier and subsequent research on Nordic foreign aid history, that the agency used information, and particularly proxy creators, with the intention to sway public opinion in favour of foreign aid, for example by funding films on development issues.¹⁸ Diurlin’s argument, that SIDA-funded films thus can be situated in a problematic borderland between information and propaganda, has been criticized by Ingrid Ryberg in a study focusing on a selection of SIDA-funded documentaries made by women filmmakers.¹⁹ Ryberg finds it problematic to speak about SIDA-funded films in terms of propaganda or even as state-funded information. Instead, the material should be considered in a broader context of protest movements and transnational leftist documentary and “solidarity film” culture. Importantly, Ryberg’s film cultural perspective can neither elucidate the fundamental prerequisites which made the documentaries in question possible nor clarify SIDA’s objective to fund them, but rather adds insight into the artistic intentions of the filmmakers and how the films relate to transnational documentary movements. This study will show that audio-visual material funded by aid agencies was also part of a transnational group of intergovernmental organization (IGO)- or state-funded films on development, intended to strengthen public awareness of the need for global solidarity and aid. Contrary to Ryberg’s definitive categorization and dismissal of the funder’s objectives, we should consider Norén’s argument that governmental information was rarely unmitigated, but a “mixed product” that could generate diverse expressions depending on the information actors the state decided to employ.²⁰ Still, it was an economic imperative for audio-visual foreign aid information, including the documentaries Ryberg discusses, that the funder saw an information value in the material and that this value corresponded with national information objectives of public persuasion regarding global solidarity and foreign aid. As this study will show, such objectives and strategies were influenced by the UN’s global DD2 agenda for the mobilization of public opinion. Preferably, Diurlin’s and Ryberg’s perspectives can be combined to underline that welfare-state information policies have tended to benefit both cultural workers in need of funds and state agencies in need of creative opinion-making information.

The 1 Per Cent Target and the Nordic Like-Minded Frontrunners

In 1961 the UN declared the 1960s the Development Decade. The Second World War had weakened the colonial powers and made way for a decolonialization process that gained momentum during the 1950s. In 1960 the global landscape was not only reshaping at a tremendous speed—seeing 13 independent African states that year alone—but distances between countries that had had few historical connections were shrinking due to the UN’s diplomacy efforts.²¹ The idea of development through financial aid became an established policy field in western countries in the immediate post-war years: in the US, mainly as a Cold War strategy to contain the spread of communism, and in the UN as a way to maintain peace and reduce global inequalities.²² Impelled by the predominant paradigm of modernization—that all societies go through similar phases and that economic growth alone is key to development—aid was thought to automatically speed up the process.²³ As part of the 1960s’ Development Decade scheme, the UN therefore pushed rich states to increase aid levels, proposing a target of 1 per cent of GDP. Over the decade this target became a standard reference in western aid discourse—a kind of well-rounded “catchphrase” with transnationally competitive as well as domestically propagandistic qualities.²⁴

Heeding the call, a group of like-minded frontrunners emerged, mainly consisting of Nordic countries. Nevertheless, the Nordics had a long way to go. For example, in 1962 Swedish foreign aid stood at 0.12 per cent and in 1965 the Danish number hovered around 0.13, which was “distressingly low” according to the newly founded UN Development Aid Committee (DAC), which made a strategic case for publishing donor statistics.²⁵ As both nations set their dates for reaching the target—Sweden’s goal was 1974 and Denmark’s 1972—aid budgets had to be increased enormously every fiscal year.²⁶ Sweden eventually reached the target in 1977, Norway in 1982 and Denmark in 1992. These globally unique achievements, and the supposedly altruistic motivations behind them, have led observers to describe the frontrunners in terms of humanitarian or moral “great powers”, often downplaying self-interest and questions of trade, foreign policy and global security as motives for aid generosity.²⁷ Still, such more realistically grounded reasons have been emphasized in later research, often underscoring the vulnerable sandwiched position of the Nordic states between two Cold War blocs in the post-war decades, where it became apparent that small states, for which “hard-power” was not an option, could benefit from a rule-bound and mutually supportive international order.²⁸ The historical formation of Nordic foreign aid has thus been characterized by tensions between moral altruistic ideals and harsh political realities. Importantly, researchers concur that foreign aid became an unavoidable necessity. Joining the aid rush was deemed the only realistic way to gain a platform in a new post-colonial and globalized world.²⁹

Nordic Foreign Aid Co-operation: From Field Projects to Information Strategies

During the early 1960s the Nordics shared the conviction that as individual countries they were too small and inexperienced to engage in bilateral development co-operation. Still, the Nordic Council (est. 1952) recurringly stressed that foreign aid could grant the countries international standing as role models for newly formed states—an argument that echoed frequently as Nordic aid policy discourse evolved.³⁰ Consequently, the Nordic Council launched several collaborative field projects, the most elaborate being the Nordic Tanganyika Centre established in 1962, the same year as Sweden and Denmark signed the first official foreign aid bills of each country. The continued high-profile engagement in Tanzania during the 1960s has been described as a form of political marketing of the Nordic countries.³¹

An important motive behind Nordic co-operation was that results could become more visible, generating goodwill abroad and positive opinions at home. Just as the Nordics shared a similar outlook on aid distribution, they shared the issue of how to domestically justify soaring aid budgets, a concern aggravated by the long-term enterprise of development operations, the sheer distance between donor and recipient (which made it difficult to communicate accomplishments), and the aid’s relative insufficiency on a global scale.³²

As it turned out, joint projects instead tended to obscure each country’s own achievement.³³ Moreover, as the aid agencies gained experience, the need for field co-operation gradually vanished. Additionally, development aid increasingly became an integrated part of each country’s foreign policy. This stymied joint ventures, since the Nordic Council was not allowed to engage in foreign policy.³⁴ Consequently, various national preconditions overrode the potential strength gained from transnational collaboration, especially regarding domestic opinion, since there needed to be a clearer link between taxpayers’ money and the outcome of the national aid effort. Therefore, the domestic reasons that saw the Nordics tone down their field collaborations, also led to an increasing need for expanded exchange of know-how regarding information strategies. Nordic collaboration on foreign aid issues did not come to a halt around 1970, it simply changed areas of significance and stepped out of public view.

The Escalation of Domestic Information and Transnational Exchange

At a 1970 DAC meeting for national development information officers, the main conclusion was the necessity to “convince ‘thinking’ people” in each country, since it was “they who influenced decisions and not the masses”.³⁵ This was in accordance with the Nordic strategies already taking shape, and since the governments based their forthcoming aid policies on the DD2 strategy—including public mobilization—they only needed to expand the scale.³⁶ Consequently, around 1970 SIDA held one of the largest spending budgets for domestic information of any Swedish authority, growing from SEK 183,000 to 22 million from 1965 to 1981.³⁷ Norad went from NOK 1 to 15 million between 1969 and 1982, and Danida doubled its information budget from 1969 to 1976, to over DKK 4 million.³⁸ Governmental evaluations and foreign aid research have concluded that the systematic efforts that resulted from these allocations were instrumental in creating public support for development assistance.³⁹

To meet the UN’s petition, the Nordic countries employed the above-mentioned information-by-proxy strategy, which could be understood as a certain “Nordic information model” corresponding to welfare-state corporatism in its use of interest groups. Nevertheless, around 1970 this set-up was not specific to the Nordics, but a recommended foreign aid information structure in the UN organizations, particularly championed by like-minded forerunners such as Canada and the Netherlands.⁴⁰ Still, at least SIDA’s information officers did not engage in this set-up as novices, since they could build on the opinion-forming corporatist tactics developed in the 1950s by its semi-independent precursor, The Central Committee for Technical Assistance (est. 1952). Interestingly, during the 1950s and early 1960s, the Central Committee also functioned as a role model for the simultaneous development of a Danish information strategy.⁴¹ Thus, the underlying ambition to let the idea of foreign aid seep into all levels of society and into public consciousness was not new at the start of DD2; what differed was the economic scope and the fixed 1 per cent target.⁴²

Another major difference was the amplified transnational coordination efforts regarding domestic information strategies that were initiated in 1969 by UN organizations such as the DAC and the Centre for Economic and Social Information (CESI), which, for the first time, gathered together information officers from the global north.⁴³ The CESI was established with funds from Canada and the Netherlands as “a clearing house for the flow of ideas and information between development information officers” and became the UN body in charge of executing the DD2 public mobilization.⁴⁴

Nordic Information Collaborations and the Common Pursuit of Films on Development

The interchange of foreign aid information strategies in the UN saw a simultaneous Nordic development. In 1969 the foreign aid information chiefs of SIDA, Danida, Norad and the Finish Foreign Ministry initiated quarterly meetings to discuss material production and coordinate international press trips, opinion polls, and image and article archives. An important catalyst was the Swedish Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, which arranged a Nordic symposium on governmental development information as a response to the implementation of the 1 per cent target.⁴⁵ Furthermore, the foundation and the information chiefs established a Scandinavian Development Society with the purpose of promoting “inter-Nordic exchange of foreign aid experiences” and facilitating the flow of information to and between the Nordics, and the dissemination of information from the Nordics.⁴⁶

The information chiefs soon acted as a Nordic collective, as the collaboration became parallel to other fields in which the Nordics co-operated with the UN and was regarded by the CESI as “an outstanding example of the kind of co-operation […] envisaged in the strategy for [DD2]”.⁴⁷ An example of such concerted efforts is a mutual trip to New York in 1972, where the chiefs met with representatives from eight UN information divisions to discuss what the chiefs saw as the main problem regarding the DD2 mobilization: the need for films with attitude-shifting potential. Danida had recently concluded that around 100 films on development were produced globally each year, so it was a question of access and assessment, not of shortage.⁴⁸ Most meetings in New York revolved around this question, with the visitors pushing for internationally coordinated stocktaking and UN-supported audio-visual distribution networks.⁴⁹

Where books or exhibition material had to be reworked to cross language barriers, information films usually only needed a new narration track. Furthermore, the UN had advocated the employment of modern media technologies in the DD2 scheme. Coupled with the media-specific costliness of film, these are likely reasons why the Nordic agencies saw it as imperative to locate existing material, but also a motivation to engage in possible Nordic co-productions. Another reason for the use of film was the awareness among the agencies that moving images had an unmatched potential to activate people into discussions and create an emotional experience of life in poor countries.⁵⁰ The latter effect had recently become particularly apparent when televised images of skeletal Biafran children entered western living rooms.⁵¹ Nevertheless, information spread by mass media was primarily apocalyptic, creating a “psychological resistance” among citizens towards the possibility to help, as contemporary research stated.⁵² On the other hand, mediating only facts was not enough. The 1 per cent target had to be situated in an explanatory and—as the board of SIDA phrased it in 1969—“interpreted” context, creating “imaginative programmes” as Milwertz had called for in 1970, preferably presenting “examples of successful development”.⁵³

Compared to its Nordic counterparts, Danida was at the forefront when it came to issues of audio-visual information. For example, in 1970 Danida decided on a tenfold increase in film allocations to DKK 441,978 (one-fifth of the information budget).⁵⁴ This can be compared to the SEK 100,000 assigned by SIDA for inhouse film production as late as 1974, a sum mainly used for re-dubbing.⁵⁵ Although discussions on global film inventory and assessment were frequent in the Swedish bureau, a developed film strategy was not launched until 1979—still only allocating SEK 325,000 annually.⁵⁶ The fact that Danida could boast such numbers can be explained by the existence of a highly developed state-funded structure for production and distribution of information films which was established back in the 1930s.⁵⁷ During the 1960s and 1970s the agency Statens Filmcentral (SFC) handled domestic distribution and production of information films and was therefore closely tied to Danida. In fact, all Danida films were checked by the SFC for a final decision on distribution.⁵⁸

To solve the question of global inventory and assessment of opinion-forming potentiality, Danida appointed a film committee in 1969 consisting of representatives from, among others, the SFC, the Ministry of Education and the NGO Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke (Danish Association for International Co-operation), which handled half of Danida’s information budget as part of the information-by-proxy strategy.⁵⁹ The committee watched six hours of film per month and oversaw re-dubbing and production. Additionally, experts from the educational field were frequently called in to evaluate “pedagogic” qualities.

The need for films on development was the principal issue when the chiefs initiated their trans-Nordic meetings. The first major collaboration was Milwertz’ idea to organize a Nordic film competition and simultaneously acquire an information product that could explain “what we really mean when we talk about international development”.⁶⁰ Among 67 proposals, Swedish filmmaker Rolf Bolin’s Akvariet (The Aquarium), later retitled En sluten värld, was selected. The synopsis of Akvariet aptly connected to a DD2 discourse, criticizing growth-focused paradigms, and instead promoting social equality and redistribution of wealth as important development factors.⁶¹ Bolin furthermore made use of the “spaceship earth” analogy of global interdependence, popularized in DD2 literature and in the growing environmental movement, symbolized by the enclosed world of a small globe-shaped aquarium graphically intercut with a photograph of a vulnerable earth with nothing differentiating its surface, thus accentuating unequal development as a crisis involving all humanity (Fig. 1).⁶²

Fig. 1

The globe-shaped aquarium floating in space as the speaker of En sluten värld claims that “all living beings are dependent on each other”. From National Library of Sweden. Copyright: Centralfilm

The collaboration would point to several aggravating circumstances that made Nordic co-productions of foreign aid films scarce, even though film was considered a crucial area for co-operation by all agencies. Etching out contract details regarding copyrights and transnational tax issues became particularly problematic, resulting in delays and capital being wired back and forth by mistake.⁶³ Moreover, the process would encompass five years of painstaking script revisions as the 12-minute film was to be finalized in “intimate and continuous contact” with the information bureaus.⁶⁴ In particular, the procedure was obstructed by the complex Danish audio-visual strategy with its numerous experts and gatekeepers, since they all emphasized different views on which development problems the film was to “talk about”. Areas would include the arms race, pollution, education, urbanization, communication problems, health, trade issues, economic growth, and the population explosion, as the experts simultaneously criticized the script for incorporating either too few areas or too many.⁶⁵ In 1973, as the film script was still under development, Danida’s new information chief, Richard Lydiker, listed as many as 15 “essential development areas”, including an assessment on how these areas were illuminated in the script “and the quality of that illumination”.⁶⁶ The level of detail in the Danish critique of the script and finished film is often striking. Bolin’s suggested superimposition of crying infants, which was to imply exploding birth rates, was, for example, criticized by Lydiker and the Danish experts for leaving out that the population explosion can also be seen as connected to lower death rates (Fig. 2).⁶⁷ Over the years the Danish experts furthermore deemed the film everything from too “chaotic”, “kaleidoscopic” and “lyrical” to too “smart”, “popular” and “weird”, calling for relentless revisions and reediting of both script and finished film.⁶⁸

Fig. 2

The image of superimposed crying infants was included in the finished version of En sluten värld despite the Danish critique. From the National Library of Sweden. Copyright: Centralfilm

In comparison, I have found no traces in the archive of SIDA’s information bureau that the film’s aesthetics, definition of development or opinion-forming impact was as thoroughly discussed. As no film committee or articulated audio-visual strategy yet existed, the script was accepted in 1972 (as in Finland and Norway), and subsequently used in the DD2 mobilization.⁶⁹ Ironically, as the idea had sprung from Danida, classroom test-screenings of the Swedish version, arranged by a Danish pedagogic expert in 1974, provided the nail in the coffin for a Danish release as the audience had considered it “propagandistic”.⁷⁰ The SFC therefore decided against distribution, even sticking to its verdict when a commercial company wanted to distribute the film in 1975, claiming that it “would do more damage than gain the opinion-forming efforts” if the film was shown.⁷¹

Concluding Remarks

This study has demonstrated that as the interest in common Nordic aid ventures declined around 1970, there was a simultaneous surge in collaborations regarding the domestic side of foreign aid policies, that of public image-building and attitude-shifting information. The Nordic co-operations shifted from openly embracing a collective Nordic power to mainly using the Nordic connections as a backstage think-tank to pursue mutual goals of public persuasion, specifically focusing on how to locate, produce and employ film as an information device.

The study has also pointed to the significant influence of the UN on the opinion-making efforts in the Nordic countries, following the implementation of the 1 per cent target and the launch of DD2, and moreover showed how the Nordic aid agencies communicated with several UN branches on issues of public information. The simultaneously transnational and national aims of the Nordic information collaborations are interesting as they point to the previously discussed centripetal and centrifugal dynamics inherent in Nordic entanglements. In the earlier quoted correspondence between Milwertz and UNDP’s information officer, Milwertz continued to point out the inherent dualism that characterized his swelling foreign aid information budget, as it was a domestic allocation used for international purposes:

[I]t is quite clear that the funds are meant for promoting international co-operation in the field of constructive social, economic and cultural development—in other words, to further international rather than national interests, or, if you wish, to show that national and international interests in the field of development are identical.⁷²

The dualism of these aims and fiscal allocations can be seen to correspond with the duality in the “Nordic” concept in relation to the national, which makes it “possible for the Nordic societies to be different and similar at the same time”, as pointed out by Pauli Kettunen and Klaus Petersen.⁷³ As much as the collaborations generated a shared face outward (e.g. towards UN organizations), the inward-pointing, domestic information needed to be nationally customized and drained of its “Nordicness”, as had been proved by the opinion-making non-value of field co-operations. The complications around the DD2 film competition further established that Nordic development collaborations were best held at the strategical level, as information material needed to be adjusted to national preconditions.

The DD2 film competition became a one-off audio-visual collaboration with an anti-climactic culmination in Denmark. This was partly due to the agencies’ lack of experience in audio-visual co-production, but also a result of the over-developed Danish audio-visual strategy, where too many cooks often spoiled the broth. The film’s fate was not unique. The SFC repeatedly blocked finished Danida films whenever experts considered them unsuitable as opinion-making vehicles.⁷⁴ It is understandable that such nationally grounded regimes were difficult to transfer into a Nordic collaborative effort. Furthermore, the production was not eased by the discursive shift which occurred as DD1 turned into DD2, where a mainly growth-focused definition of development was superseded by diverse, and therefore more imprecise, understandings of the concept, which hampered consensus among the commissioning actors. Related to this, the aspiration to acquire a decisive 12-minute piece that could explain what the Nordic agencies really meant when they talked about international development displays an almost naïve credence in the possibilities of the cinematic medium, which indeed signals the importance the agencies put into film as an information device for the mobilization of public opinion.