Knowledge on the Nordics

The Nordics and identity: innate or imagined?

July 07, 2020 Season 1 Episode 4
Knowledge on the Nordics
The Nordics and identity: innate or imagined?
Show Notes Transcript

Despite a growing focus on national identity in and outside the Nordics, the Nordic regional identity persists. The participants of this podcast explore what is takes to make a region consisting of numerous nation states a success, comparing it to other areas, such as the Baltics and Eastern Europe. An important concrete example that is discussed is an advert produced by Scandinavian Airlines in February of this year, which sought to deconstruct and construct identity markers of Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden), and received a wave of feedback, both negative and positive. Listen to this podcast which starts its investigation with ideas of regional identity.

Be sure to also listen to the other nordics.info podcast on identity, which focuses more on national identity!
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Nicola Witcombe:
Welcome to this nordics.info podcast. nordics.info is a research dissemination website based at Aarhus university in Denmark  and publishes material by researchers on many different aspects of the Nordic countries  within the social sciences and humanities. Nordics.info is part of the university hub  Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World, ReNEW, My name is Nicola Witcombe and  I am the editor of the website. This podcast series is based on me  catching up with specialists and experts  at different university events and discussing  particular topics of the day with them. This podcast is about identity in the Nordics and it is called "The Nordics and identity: unite or divide?' It is the first of two podcasts about the subject. It was recorded at the Marienlyst Hotel in  Helsingør, Denmark during an academic workshop  on identity and post-global nordic societies in  March 2020. This podcast is about identity and the Nordics and  is the second of two podcasts about the subject.

It was recorded at the Marienlyst Hotel in  Helsingør, Denmark during an academic workshop on identity and post-global nordic societies in  March 2020. Helsingør was an apt location sitting as it does on the edge of the Danish island Zealand overlooking the narrow stretch of water between Denmark and Sweden. Sweden being  only six kilometers away and the Norwegian border about 4.5 hours drive. Historically important for centuries, Helsingør has overseen ships passing to and from the Baltic  sea for military and economic reasons.

In this second podcast and identity we start by  digging into the concept of regional identity,  but first, a couple of years ago I was on a shopping  trip in Birmingham in the UK with my mother and daughter. I was already used to the Brits' obsession with Denmark and all things Scandinavian due to being aware of the countless books on  'hygge', the quick translation of which is 'coziness' in its many forms, and my friends' obsession  with various Nordic Noir television shows. However, it still struck me, there by the checkout  was what appeared to be a completely normal white candle but its label declared it  provided you with Scandinavian 'hygge' and you were expected to pay 20 pounds, quite a  lot for a candle in UK terms, for the pleasure. How could this be? How come what is perceived  as 'Scandinavian' or 'Nordic' be worth so much? Apparently something to  aspire to by British shoppers. And do people from the Nordic  countries feel this sense of Nordicness? I asked professor Kazimierz Musiał from gdansk  University Institute of Scandinavian Studies and he usefully compares the apparent success of the Nordic region with that of the Baltics.

 

Kazimierz Musiał:

If a regional identity is to be successful, it has to rely on at least three or four frames or shapings and one of them is territorial. it has to be rather unquestioned by the people who live in the area that we have and share  a common territory which is not a problem with the Nordic region because of the long history of  preaching the region in the North as more or less homogeneous region, even though it is  not homogeneous, but it is homogeneous in relation to other parts of Europe, so  the territorial shaping is speaking in favor of the Nordic region in comparison  with the Baltic region where they especially the Eastern border of the region are  not that clear. The other way of framing a region to be successful is institutional framing  or institutional shaping and it is of course uh the Nordic Council of Ministers that comes  to my mind in the first place when we talk about the Nordic region. Several attempts  in the Baltic sea region that was trying to conceive of Balticness could be mentioned  but they are far less successful in the sense of efficient institutions  that are able to impose a certain world view on the inhabitants of a given  area. The third kind of shaping or framing is about symbols; so when we are dealing with  the symbolic shaping of the Nordic Council and we compare it with the Baltic attempts to  shape the region again the comparison is in favour of the Nordic countries because of, well, several  institutions that are easily identified with several of the companies that are identified as  Nordic and several of the symbols that I identified with a united region. And  the final element about the regional cooperation to become a successful frame of  reference is about its contextual perception and if in the context of Europe of regions  see the North as a united one i.e. if we see the Nordic region as part of their regional  system that has been created in Europe, we have to know to notice that it is  much more pronounced than the Baltic sea region, even though the attempts to create  the region in the Baltic sea area have been pretty advanced too, i mean there is  this EU strategy for the Baltic sea region but nevertheless, it is also invested with Nordic  meanings to a great extent.

 

Nicola Witcombe:

So, there appear to be many layers allowing the manufacturers of the expensive candle to charge a lot for it, simply by  it being stamped with the Nordic label including  geography, political will through investment in  regional institutions, the perception as the North, wherever that starts and finishes, being united.

 

Kazimierz Musiał

Companies were also mentioned in our first podcast  on identity namely Maersk, the Danish shipping company

 

Nicola Witcombe:

and IKEA, the Swedish furniture company. An  interesting example of a company that is based on not national lines but regional lines is  Scandinavian Airlines. In February of this year, SAS did something interesting: In an advert, they took  several key attributes of Scandinavia including meatballs and gender equality and tried to  sever their connection with the Nordic countries. They presented them each in turn explaining  how all the attributes had actually originated somewhere else. They faced a backlash. Some people in Scandinavia saw SAS as dismantling what they thought were the  essential parts of their culture and identity. Michael Bennedsen-Hansen, phd fellow at  Copenhagen Business School explores this in the following

 

Michael Bennedsen-Hansen
.. that there's no essential Scandinavian identity, that everything is borrowed, reinvented, shared so there's circulation of ideas  and also the ad was with a tongue-in-cheek  so you people who said:"oh, so that is not even Danish?", "was that not even Swedish?" and still you had a quite strong reaction to it because  it then provoked those, who think of identity and this case national identity as  something in what we call essentialists so that there is something  essential about being Danish, being Norwegian.

 

Nicola Witcombe:

The SAS advert can  be seen in different lights, of course. On the one hand, it could be trying to tell  the viewer that we are global citizens trying to get us to acknowledge that we are all  connected with people from all over the world in different ways. This is perhaps running  parallel to or pushing against the tide of thinking which was explored in the first podcast; namely that people are increasingly identifying with more local or smaller groups and  are rejecting globalization more and more. What is clear, however, is that they are an airline  company but there were no images of planes, smiling air stewards, or similar. Mads Mordhorst, associate professor at Copenhagen Business School:

 

Mads Mordhorst: What I think about SAS and the commercial? I think  that SAS deliberately go into an identity market. I think it's really strategical and I think  they somehow have seen this discussion coming. It's quite close to what you can see in other  commercials, for example Nike and Colin Kaepernick directly go into identity. So, they have targeted  that today is not the product, we are selling. We are selling identity, and that's a  totally new market and a much more important  market, than the other one and I think they  really play on this and therefore it was, I mean I think they could not have wished for a better  discussion, than this one.

 

Nicola Witcombe:

Another way of looking at the SAS commercial is that it is suggesting  that identity is fluid and up to yourself. Professor Kazimierz Musiał, again, followed by Mads Mordhorst:

 

Kazimierz Musiał: 

In a way, what i'm just saying also links to what Mads said about SAS having an interest in either deconstructing the image of Scandinavian brand, in order to sort  of reconstruct it in a new way, in a post-global world order or in the in the post-modern world order where anything goes  and people put like puzzles they're different narratives and also companies  put like puzzles and different narratives, which we thought the nations had in  the past.

 

Mads Mordhorst

And if you take the SAS commercial, then you are on the constant change and fluidity all the time and that becomes your identity to be under constant  change in fluidity.Then you create a problem also for yourself because what are you then? Are you just a product of all the coincidence, right? Of course, from my academic point  of view, I can fully see that, but if you ask yourself, then it somehow becomes a bit difficult. Are you just a circulation product yourself?

 

*laughter*

 

Kazimierz Musiał:

Even if you buy this  narrative we are travellers, right? From where to where to become what, to become who? Of what qualities, or is it just a random collection of you know things that  go or sell well on the market?

 

Nicola Witcombe:

Hmm.. Is identity just things that sell  well on the market? Here is Mads again, this time explaining a little bit about  marketing on the national and regional level  

 

Mads Mordhorst

We have to remember that branding is not a  theoretical concept, it's something that is emerging from marketing and somehow practical  tool how to sell your goods right? It's not a theoretical concept but also the  things that have been developed within branding. We have place branding at one side, and we have got nation branding, But a region brand is a quite different kind of brand because you have got lots of different  interests there and there's been no work that has dealt specific with regional branding  or regional reputation management, for that sake.

 

Nicola Witcombe: 

Regional branding, then, something which the  Nordics appear to have achieved quite successfully seems to be harder than national branding, as  there are so many different messages to send but when we talk about identity being about  external brands or a jigsaw puzzle of pieces that may change at any given time, it is difficult  to reconcile this with our innate or essentialist feelings of identity as Mads said, what are  we then? Examples from elsewhere may be useful; the example of the Baltics at the beginning of  the podcast being a case in point and it being generally acknowledged that it's less successful  than the Nordics in projecting and perhaps feeling a regional identity, due to its heterogeneity  amongst other things. Journalist and researcher Paulina Siegien from gdansk University, has been  following regional identity of a different kind namely that of within a country. The situation  in Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian enclave on the Baltic sea just across from the Nordic countries:

 

Paulina Siegien

Anytime there is a question of regional identity, it doesn't matter in Kaliningrad, or in white sea region or in Siberia, it's very threatening for the central authorities in Moscow, so they're  trying to suppress it in many different ways um   so this is also a very important factor because  this discussion can be skewed and can be like politicized in a very literal way because the  discussion about identity is always a political one but it can be managed also  using very specific political tools.

 

Nicola Witcombe:

Similarly in Belarus and other ex-soviet  countries, the process of re-establishing national identity after the breakup of the Soviet  Union is important, as explained in the following by Lizaveta Dubinka-Huscha, researcher from Copenhagen Business School. She is followed by Larisa Kangaspuro from the center for nordic studies at Helsinki University, who goes on to explain that this is not so very different from the situation Finland found itself in about a hundred years ago  and which can arguably still act like a bridge between East and West.

 

Lizaveta Dubinka-Huscha

Coming from Belarus originally, I can say that as  a newly independent nation, it strives to establish its own identity the question of identity is  extremely important for the Russian society especially if you look at the geographical  position, Belarus is a country which is surrounded by six other nations, so we  have three members of the European Union, to the West and then we have Russia to the  East and that means that for Belarusians to formulate their own identity, they  need to balance the different vectors in different directions and i'm very pleased  to see that, in the recent years, there's been a national revival of the Russian culture and  language and finally I can also see that the Russians are trying to formulate their identity  as something of their own. But, I think one of the key elements of this process has been an attempt  to accommodate the multiculturalism in Belarus and say that it's neither Eastern or Western,  but it's something of its own, something unique.

 

Larisa Kangaspuro

I was born in the Soviet Union and I think  that my identity is multicultural. I can't say that i'm Russian, maybe citizen, but not my  identity because i am so close to Slavic nations and I'm so close to Baltic countries, I mean my  identity, and i'm so happy to accumulate inside me many different cultures and I appreciate  many values, I think, from different national identity. Now I live in Finland and  Finland I think is one of the best example state identity because, like we all  know, sometimes, Nordic researchers take out Finland in Scandinavian context because,  like we know, more than 100 years Finland was under Russian influence, historically,  politically, etc. but Finns kept their identity and not only from Russians  and from Swedish and I'm proud of this nation I live about 20 years in Finland and I can see how they keep their cultural, their political, individual identity and I think  that Finland is good to name "bridge” between East, example, Russia and West.

 

Nicola Witcombe:

So, comparing  perceptions of identity in the Nordics with other countries can be illuminating. Another example  is while the Nordics are often seen from outside as being ethnically homogeneous compared to many  other countries like the UK or the US. Compared to countries like Poland, they appear to be far  from it and important issues of identity politics such as that to do with the LGBTI movement, while  still relevant in the Nordic countries tend to be accepted as part of the discourse, whereas  elsewhere such as Poland, they still must be fought for. Here is Kazimierz giving his distinctive view  as a Polish academic studying the Nordics followed by Paulina explaining the concept of "retrotopia"  that is, when certain feelings of identity can be taken advantage of in times of crisis.

 

Kazimierz Musiał

I'm from Poland and Poland is a very specific country in comparison to the rest of Europe nowadays  because it is a homogeneous country, so definitely my space of experience is of a country where  there are very few questions of identity politics based on linguistic differences, or ethnic  differences. Nevertheless, this space of experience allows me to look at the Nordic approaches  to identity or Nordic identity politics with some appreciation because of a successful project  that has been carried out in the Nordic countries that despite the national linguistic  ethnic differences, the issues that have been brought as commonality have been framed  to the extent that they created a "we" feeling among the Nordic countries, a successful one, so  that people can identify with certain elements, whereas at the same time  they keep their differences for themselves and they still can preserve their individual identity. Again, my space of experience from Poland makes  it sometimes a bit problematic to understand that certain issues are not discussed  any longer in the Nordic countries. Like biopolitics, gender, sexuality, which are the  issues that have been discussed and have been incorporated in the Nordic politics, whereas  in the country like Poland, they are now becoming issues of contention, they are now becoming issues  where identities are created and constructed.

 

Paulina Siegien

There is this interesting concept of "retrotopia"  by Sigmund Bauman, a Polish sociologist widely known for the concept of  liquid modernity. Bauman is bringing together the spatial element and the historic element of identity showing that retrotopia in modern societies  like Poland is a very good example of it when escape from reality to the utopical history,  to the imagined history, which is always perfect which is always a golden age history, a way of like modern escapism for societies with a high level of insecurity and this is the answer  to the challenges of the future, when you have basically no idea what to do with the future  and I would say Poland is like in that moment that it's not really producing any interesting  concepts of the future development and it's a huge issue for us. For now, the retrotopia is very useful also as something that can be can be exercised by politicians  in terms of memory politics it is also because it's it's retro, so it's about  time, it's about going back to the past, but it's also about topia, it's about place and the place  should be very is like specifically limited to the to the borders of the sovereign nation  state, so it brings together these elements. It's like the perfect realm but said somewhere  in the past that never wasn't in fact.

 

Nicola Witcombe:

And as we heard in the first podcast, idealised images of  the past can also be used in the Nordic countries  such as images of the social democratic heyday  from the mid-20th century being used by a range of political parties as well as arguably  far-right organisations and climate activists. Finally, a brief historical overview of  identity from Kazimierz touching on some of the issues we have dealt with in the two podcasts:

 

Kazimierz Musiał

You're right that the Cold War, up to a point, froze the social interaction and that the countries  and also people in these countries, they were less likely to express their views and to  express their identifications with all the heterogeneous features of their personalities  and their manifesting interest in communist regimes was something that you would  be punished for, so obviously the Cold War brought a window of opportunity, or opened a  window of opportunity for people to manifest their differences, as once they  started manifesting their differences and differentiation, the question of  identity and identification came up. Of course, originally that would be the national  or ethnic but with time, there were also social and sexual and biological differences  that we now discuss, as well parts or just elements of our individual  identities. Probably ,what is characteristic of the day today, 2020, in comparison with 1989,  is that the nation state has come back on the arena, as perhaps, well if not the  primary, but at least as a very important player in our mindset to identify with.

 

Nicola Witcombe:

So, identity is, of course, not just bound up with merchandise and making a profit. The blossoming of national  identities of Soviet bloc states, since the fall of the Berlin Wall being a case in point, individual  freedom to choose one's own identity and to define it is key in many different contexts, most of  them political to a greater or lesser extent. While identity appears to be something  innate, our ideas of our own identity and how we perceive the identity of others, can be  influenced by a plethora of different things, be it political organisations or institutions, such  as the Nordic Council, what we see and read in the media, such as constructions and deconstructions  of different elements of being Scandinavian, our families and social groups, or successful  marketing of things from travel to candles.

To sum up then, the interplay of different layers  of identity means that academics often emphasise the complexity of it and use models and analyses  in political science, cultural studies and other areas to try to understand it. On the other  hand, many people see identity as something that is essential to them. That it is felt  subjectively or is inherent or inherited. Many thanks to the academics  who contributed to this podcast. It was the second of two about identity in the  Nordics. It was recorded at the Marienlyst Hotel  in Helsingør, Denmark in March 2020 and  was introduced and produced by Nicola Whitcombe. This podcast and ReImagining Norden in an  Evolving World (ReNEW) are supported by NordForsk. 

If you would like to know more, please  visit the website nordics.info