Scandinavian Studies 

About: Scandinavian Studies is an academic journal published by University of Illinois Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Old Norse & Icelandic. It has an ISSN identifier of 0036-5637. Over the lifetime, 555 publications have been published receiving 1782 citations.

Can Small States Influence EU Norms? : Insights from Sweden's participation in the field of environmental politics

Abstract: IN A FORTHCOMING BOOK, Christine Ingebritsen challenges the view that small states lack power in international relations by pointing to the Scandinavian countries' influence on the setting of international norms. For example, since the early 1970s, Sweden has been particularly active in pushing for environmental norms in various international settings. The Swedish government announced it would continue to do so as well in terms of its EU membership. In 1995 the government promised a skeptical electorate that it would not compromise domestic environmental norms (Kronsell 1997A). Looking back at Sweden's six years of EU membership, we note some evidence that these ambitions have at least partly materialized. One important example is the EU acidification strategy (COM 2001); another, the efforts at common legislation on the control of the use of chemicals. The commitment to environmental issues was stressed further as the strategies for the Swedish presidency of the EU during the first part of 2001 were announced. The main goals of the Swedish presidency were enlargement, employment, and environment. The foundation for the arguments in this article is a set of interviews conducted with participants in EU environmental policy making, (1) as well as studies commissioned by the Swedish government. (2) The main goal in this article is to challenge the arguments that small states have little or no influence in global politics by analyzing Swedish relations to the EU in the area of environmental issues. The article will assess that relationship in terms of what kind of influence can be discerned. SWEDEN IN INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL RELATIONS Ingebritsen (2001) suggests that small states like the Scandinavian countries can make important contributions to world politics as norm setters or as "entrepreneurs of good practice" even with limited power and resources. Norm setting can hence be a means of influencing world affairs. Like other international organizations, the EU too is a norm-generating arena, even more extensive than other international or regional organizations. If we take Ingebritsen's thesis as valid for the international context, it may be relevant to the EU as well. Before looking at exactly how Sweden has exerted influence in the EU, I want to briefly outline the background of Sweden's involvement in international environmental politics and highlight aspects that are relevant for the Swedish position on environmental issues in the EU today. Over the years, the pollution problems perceived as particularly threatening and urgent by policy makers and the public have been problems of a transnational kind. Motivations for Sweden's active involvement in international environmental policy making have been largely associated with environmental vulnerability and a perceived threat to national interests. In other words, many of the environmental issues that Swedish policy makers have pursued internationally have also been issues related to environmental problems that could only be resolved by other nations also taking action. A TRANSNATIONAL AGENDA FOR THE ENVIRONMENT In the 1960S, there was an increasing problem with urban air pollution in Sweden. Within a few years Swedish scientists had discovered that urban air pollution could be traced to high contents of sulfur in heating oil. When alerted to the problem, politicians simply outlawed the use of high-sulfur oil. (3) The urban air quickly improved but acidification remained a problem because the jet stream brought winds, particularly from Germany and Great Britain, with precipitation that polluted Swedish lakes and forests. Starting in the 1970S, policy makers and experts, who had exhausted what could be done within the borders, tried to come to terms with acidification by inaugurating international cooperation. The first UN conference on environmental issues was held in Stockholm in 1972, partly on the initiative of Swedish policy-makers, who also presented their position paper on acid rain to the conference. …

Nordic Whiteness: An Introduction

Abstract: to be white is to be nordic; to be nordic is to be white. these are associations centuries in the making. nordics have long functioned as whiteness standard bearers in pseudoscientific race typologies. alternately, in the contemporary world, nonwhite residents of the nordic countries experience themselves as perpetual outsiders—as eternal “immigrants”—regardless of their place of birth or degree of integration (Rastas 2005; Lundström 2007; vassenden and andersson 2011; Kristín Loftsdóttir 2011; Kristín Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012). However, nordic whiteness is by no means natural or static. Majority Swedes, danes, norwegians, Finns, and icelanders have at various times and settings had their whiteness questioned or rejected. Moreover, whiteness in the nordic countries is today in flux due to influxes of nonwhite migrants and the increased mobility and mobilization of domestic minorities like the Sámi, Jews, and Roma. this special issue seeks to examine nordic whiteness as a fluid and contested but also an enduring and powerful phenomenon, one that continues to shape global politics, culture, and social relations. as testament to the multimodal nature of the topic, the disciplinary backgrounds of the authors featured in this edition span multiple subfields of humanities and social science research. combined, their case studies and analyses offer empirically based examinations that reveal how white identities in the nordic countries, like those elsewhere, contain internal hierarchies and contingencies. Moreover, they stand to qualify disciplinary trends that would frame the angloamerican experience

How Sweden Became So Secular

Abstract: Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before. T.S. Eliot, Chorus from The Rock NORDEN IS THE MOST secular region of the Western world. Church attendance is extremely low while membership is high; religious beliefs are vague, held with low intensity, and the level of nonbelief is high; religious authorities have little influence on public opinion and policy, yet there is little anti-clericalism. None of these five countries has shown signs of any renewed religious vitality in recent decades, a phenomenon some scholars of religion claim to be world wide. (1) This article provides a description of the religious situation in Sweden at the end of the twentieth century and explanations of how it got that way. The Nordic countries are similar and unique in having had histories of Evangelical Lutheran state churches to which virtually all their populations belonged. Since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, they have each gone their own way, though there are two parallel state configurations in this history: Denmark/Norway/Iceland and Sweden/Finland (Gustafsson 1987, 146). The history of the relationship of state to church in Denmark, however, is sharply different from that in Sweden. In Sweden the separation of church and state has been an issue since the late nineteenth century culminating in their divorce on 1 January 2000. In Denmark, by contrast, the Church has remained closely bound to the state with only slight agitation for their separation. A thoroughgoing secular society has been imagined by Alan D. Gilbert, historian of religion and secularization in Britain, as one in which norms, values, and modes of interpreting reality, together with the symbols and rituals which express and reinforce them, have been emancipated entirely from assumptions of human dependence on supernatural agencies or influences. In it the natural world would be regarded as autonomous, and knowledge, values and social structures would be ordered upon purely mundane principles. (1980, 9) Formal religion would be marginalized. To be non-religious would be universal. Individuals would act and think in wholly secular, cause-and-effect terms. Status or respectability would in no way be associated with religious belief or practice. This extreme formulation does not fit any modern society, but Sweden comes as close as any. David Martin (1978) in A General Theory of Secularization holds Sweden to be the most secular of Western societies. Goran Therborn presents data showing Swedes to be the lowest of western Europeans in "belief in God" (45%) and church attendance (1995, 275). In Sweden during the 1990s, 15 percent of the population claimed belief in a personal God and 19 percent in an afterlife, two cardinal beliefs of orthodox Christianity. One would be hard-pressed to find such a low level of belief in any category of people in any Western society outside of Norden. For example, this is a level of belief well below that of the most non-believing category of Americans: physical and biological scientists. Their belief in a personal God has been a constant 40 percent over more than eight decades. Their belief in an afterlife declined from about 50 percent in 1914 to 40 percent in the 1990s. (2) According to official Church of Sweden statistics: "Somewhat less than 4 percent of the Church of Sweden membership attends public worship during the average week; about 2 percent are regular attenders." (3) In 1998 the 8.35 million members of the Church of Sweden attended morning services 7.0 million times (Alin and Sundberg 1999, 524). Disregarding children, that figure is equivalent to about one attendance per year per church member. Church attendance has continuously declined throughout the century. It is lowest in Stockholm and central Sweden and tends to vary inversely with population (Martin 1978, 65). …

Concubinage and Slavery in the Viking Age

Abstract: notions of what constitutes valid marriage have been shaped by the teaching of the medieval Church. Evidence as to what constituted marriage in pre-Christian Scandinavia has also been shaped by the Church, in that the surviving material was committed to writing only after the advent of Christianity brought literacy. Nevertheless it is possible to step aside from the modern definitions of marriage and legitimacy and to look behind the documentary remnants of pagan times as recorded by Christians, in order to examine the variations in the legal and social status of women involved in different sorts of conjugal or sexual relationships during the Viking Age and in the status of their children.1 The status of the concubine has been much debated and equated with that of the wife. While many Germanic peoples, including Scandinavians in the Viking Age and before,2 did practice plural marriage at least among royalty, that does not mean that all women in plural relationships were plural wives. This article proposes that in the Viking Age concubinage and slavery were intimately and intricately connected. Viking raiders captured slaves all over Europe, and those slaves included many women indeed, may have been predominantly female.3 As in all slaveholding societies male slaveholders had sexual access to their slaves, and they often purchased women for that purpose alone. Slaves who became concubines clearly were not counted as plural wives. But all evidence points to a lack of distinction between slave and free concubines. The position within a couple of a free woman who had not gone through marriage rituals was no better than that of a slave. Concubinage as known in Viking Age Scandinavia had at least its conceptual roots, if not its historical origins, in slavery. The status of women who were not official wives must be clearly distinguished from the separate issue of the status of their children. The question of whether children not born in lawful wedlock those who came to be labeled as "illegitimate" could inherit their fathers' lands and titles was a subject of some dispute throughout western Christendom as the Roman church attempted to impose its model of monogamous,