Keywords

There is a joke at the beginning of the British comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones, 1975) in which the faux Swedish subtitles—inserted as a nod to the serious depictions of Medieval Scandinavia seen in films like The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, Ingmar Bergman, 1957)—go haywire and begin including random comments suggesting that audiences might consider a holiday in Sweden. The joke is apt. Sweden and the other Nordic countries worked hard during the post-war period both to ensure the international visibility of their culture and to promote themselves as tourist destinations. Their efforts were instrumental in building the present image of that part of the world. The Norwegian political scientist Iver Neumann observed that regions are written and spoken into existence. We could add broadcast and performance to this list.Footnote 1 This anthology illuminates how that process operated in the twentieth century for the Nordic Region and the role of political communication in the building of images both internally and for audiences outside. It gives a compelling account of the past with multiple jumping off points for further productive research both within the region and in parallel cases elsewhere.

Beyond their value for an understanding of internal Nordic identity politics and self-image, these essays tell a wider story and deserve to be read beyond their region and by scholars whose geographical areas of focus lie elsewhere. These essays explore not merely a regional success story but universal issues of communication history including issues of gender (Björklund), generation (Lundberg and Heidenblad) and identity. Global moments are opened from a fresh perspective including World War II (Seidenfaden and Stjernholm), the Cold War (Kortti, Dahlen and Werenskjold) and the political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The chapters gathered here also present cases of key tools of communication in operation, including film (Thomson and Diurlin), radio (Hemstad), television (Saarenmaa, Pajala), photography (Björklund), government information (Norén) and exchange programmes (Kortti). In the course of this anthology global and local merge. One of the key narratives threading through a number of these essays (especially the later ones in the chronology) is the way in which the Nordic region comes to express itself through a distinctive and characteristic take on global concerns. Key regional expressions of global issues include environmental activism (Lundberg and Heidenblad, Buns and Hinde) and attention to human rights. The emergence of a global sensibility within the Nordic region has immense significance for other places, given the significant role it played in multiple global issues of the later twentieth century, including opposing both nuclear weapons and apartheid in South Africa.

This book is published at a unique moment for issues of reputation. It comes at the end of a period of success. Research on the comparative strength of national brands conducted in 2021 by Simon Anholt and the IPSOS organization found a noticeable bunching of Nordic countries at the top of the index, with Sweden placed highest, sitting in ninth position globally. No other region elicits this uniformity of admiration. The Soft Power of the Nordic model was such that during the post-Cold War period the three Baltic republics—Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia—all sought to align themselves with the region even as they worked to distance themselves from each other. The Nordic Council was open to such a relationship and worked formally with the Baltic states from 1992. Since 2000 the partnership has been known as the NB8 (Nordic-Baltic Eight).Footnote 2 But success has a price. Like a lightning conductor, the prominence of the Nordic reputation has drawn criticism from certain quarters. Kremlin-sponsored media such as the Sputnik website have singled out the Nordic region for particular criticism, building a counter-narrative to Scandinavian virtue based on claims of endemic corruption and the abuse of children and animals. The libel is corrosive. The efforts of well-meaning Nordic NGOs to facilitate the adoption of Russian children become, with this malicious reframing, a depraved bid to accumulate more victims or an attempt to offset the population decline in a withering region, illustrated with a photograph of a creepy clown bending over a child.Footnote 3

Of course, the Nordics are not alone in experiencing this attack. I have argued elsewhere that the coincidence of renewed great power confrontation and an era of easily accessible new media has raised the relevance of national reputation to such an extent that we should treat it as an explicit component of security. Reputational security is an issue which is plainly of concern in the Nordic countries.Footnote 4 The government of Sweden has recently reorganized its psychological defence: investing in mechanisms to push back against malign disruption of media and the democratic process, thereby reviving the kind of work described by Øystein Pedersen Dahlen and Rolf Werenskjold in their account of Norway in the 1950s. This threat and its countermeasures underline that the image of the Nordics—individually and collectively—remains a work in progress.

One of the clearest impressions created by the book is the absence of inevitability in the emergence of the Nordic identity and the multiple currents in play around issues of identity. External threats emerge at several points as drivers of identity, both physical and cultural. It is apparent that at its earliest phase for some Nordics the other against which they had to define themselves was their immediate Nordic neighbour. The threat of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia certainly assisted in the recognition of regional commonalities and drove emphasis on internal commonalities. Ruth Hemstad’s essay on the 1930s catches celebration of Nordic identity at exactly this point where the shadow of truly unlike states encourages the recognition of regional similarity. The tensions over the issues of Åland and Greenland show that real limits on regional feeling remained for many years. Moreover, it is striking how the wartime experience itself emphasized local experience even as its aftermath drove regional convergence. Emil Eiby Seidenfaden’s account of the Danish politician Sten de Hemmer Gudme’s wartime career broadcasting from Britain and Emil Stjernholm’s case study of US wartime propaganda in Sweden reveals the way in which political discourse could explicitly be an international co-production. Despite the shared experiences, it remains apparent that there are multiple ways to perform the regional identity and express it locally. It is notable how, with the exception of the Nordic Council, the list of regional signifiers is incomplete. Not all are NATO members, not all use the Euro, not all have joined the European Union.

These essays do an excellent job of unpacking cases of political communication. We see the formal outreach of the state and the role of non-governmental groups like Norden. There are cases of non-state actors taking up slack in a manner of governments elsewhere. C. Claire Thomson memorably compares Tuborg’s image operation to a royal court. It is especially interesting to see the role of physical events like conferences, demonstrations and personal encounters managed through exchanges enduring in the era of electronic media. Jukka Kortti speaks of what practitioners termed “slow media”, and the power of such experiences is implicit in Björn Lundberg and David Larsson Heidenblad’s account of the youth movement around environmental issues in the 1960s and 1970s.

The final point to make is an important caveat to any discussion of international image. This book shows that the strong image of the Nordic region and its component nations is the product of effort and inventive communication; that strong image and effective work have been based on a foundation of positive reality. Simon Anholt, who has consistently reported the strength of the Nordic reputation in the global imagination, has more recently also sought an objective measurement, to log the key contributions of countries around the world to the global commons as revealed in UN data, and to adjust that according to gross domestic product to create an index of which countries do most good in the world. The resulting Good Country Index has—in multiple versions—emphasized the good reality of Nordic contributions to the global good. As of 2021 all four Nordics are in the top ten, with Sweden and Denmark taking first and second place.Footnote 5 The best way to ensure continued international admiration for the region is to maintain this level of relevance to global concerns. Even in a world of fake news and rampant misinformation, doing the right thing matters. As already noted, a good reputation is an invaluable asset. Positive media and speedy rebuttals can help, but the essential foundation must be in fact. Reality will always be the best propaganda.