Knowledge on the Nordics

Television and Geopolitics: A Conversation on the Nordics

April 08, 2021 nordics.info Season 1 Episode 11
Knowledge on the Nordics
Television and Geopolitics: A Conversation on the Nordics
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

The interplay between popular culture and the ’real’ world is an interesting one: Can cultural products really have an effect on geopolitics? And can geopolitical actors learn from them? Robert Saunders thinks so. He is Professor in the Department of History, Politics and Geography the State University of New York and is interviewed by editor of nordics.info Nicola Witcombe. Find out more about how TV can be a tool in explaining geopolitics and historical events; and, how it is experimental ground for imagining how to deal with the uncertainty of future events, including relationships between countries and regions – and pandemics!

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Robert A. Saunders:

Popular culture really is making an impact. It's not just about, we watched that and it shapes how we feel about the outside world. Now we're seeing actual artifacts of popular culture triggering events that have real world political and economic impact.

Nicola Witcombe:

The interplay between popular culture and the real world is an interesting one. While it is clear that many creators of television, comic books and songs etc. take inspiration from live events, the influence of popular culture on events themselves is perhaps less obvious. A couple of frequently quoted Nordic examples are the Game of Thrones influencing the increase in tourism in Iceland from around 2010, or how Nordic TV shows have helped to promote the region's progressivism, and subsequently its soft power. But can what are essentially cultural products really have an effect on geopolitics? And can geopolitical actors learn from them? Robert Saunders whose voice you heard just then thinks so. He is professor in the department of history, politics and geography at the State University of New York, and author of Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir: What Television Series Tell Us About World Politics. My name is Nicola Witcombe and I'm the editor of the research dissemination website, nordics.info. And I interviewed Robert over Zoom about some of these issues in February 2021. So Robert Saunders, professor at State University of New York, welcome to this nordics.info podcast.

Robert A. Saunders:

Thank you for having me. And I look forward to our conversation.

Nicola Witcombe:

I know it's always unfair to ask people to summarize the whole book in a few words. It's called Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir and it has the subtitle,What Television Series Tell Us About World Politics, perhaps you could give us an overview of of what it's about generally?

Robert A. Saunders:

I went into this book, looking at at the new ecosystem that we have in the world of television, these series, just constantly moving around the globe and small niche audiences picking up on them and becoming obsessed with them. So what I wanted to do is, is look at it kind of twofold. I wanted to look at a television series, like when you're making a TV series from within Denmark, or Norway or Finland. Why are you telling the story? Why is this narrative important to you? What are you trying to critique? What? Or alternatively, what are you trying to celebrate about about Denmark, or Finland or Norway? So I want to look at it from an internal perspective. And then, arguably, more importantly, I want to look at it from an external perspective. So So when these stories escape the region, right, this is what popular geopolitics is all about, when these narratives kind of leak out of a particular place or a particular setting or particular context. What does it mean? So what does it mean that British people or Americans or Australians are spending all this time watching stories about, you know, daily life above the Arctic Circle in Norway? So this allows for really, as you often talk about puffer culture as a mirror, this allows for kind of a double mirroring situation to go on. So on the one level, you're seeing, you know, how did Norwegian see themselves when they make a series like Occupied or Nobel? And on the other hand, sort of, is looking into that dark mirror? How do how do Americans start to see themselves when they're contrasted against this Norwegian narrative? Right? Do they see themselves in the Norwegians? Do they see the Norwegians as different than them? Are both things going on at the same time?

Nicola Witcombe:

Um, could you give us then a specific example, because quite a lot of people listening will have seen some of these TV programs and some geopolitical issues that it raises.

Robert A. Saunders:

I'll go with the most obvious one I mean, and that would be Occupied. The Norwegian series. It's set in the near future. A green party comes to power in Norway and then immediately ceases all oil and natural gas production. This then triggers a crisis in a energy hungry Europe, that is the European Union of which Norway is not apart. And basically the EU Brussels kind of to use shorthand signals quietly to Russia that it would accept Russia's help in restarting oil and natural gas production in Norway. The United States has abandoned all of its transatlantic commitments in this near future, which is really interesting because this series starts off before Donald Trump had effectively walked away from NATO and particularly singled out Norway as not, quote unquote, paying its fair share contributing enough to the alliance. So this is the environment in which this show takes place. And it goes over three seasons, basically, you have a kind of, low scale terrorist homegrown terrorist infrastructure developing with these free Norwegians attacking Russians that are moving into the country, attacking the oil and natural gas infrastructure, going after high profile Russian figures, then you have a low scale insurgency developing. And all these questions of loyalty began to emerge in in the series like what are you loyal to? Right? Are you loyal to the Norwegian? The crown? The people? Should you do what the government says? Should you just try and go about your daily life? It dredged up for for Norwegians it dredged up a lot of their sort of historical legacy of World War Two and the German occupation of the country and, and their geopolitical marginality, the United States and Britain do what they can to help the Norwegians. But the Norwegians were really kind of left out in the cold, you know, to use a pretty bad pun there. So that's one issue. But it also looks at Russia and the United States, really, as bad actors. And increasingly, I'm seeing this, you know, across a Scandinavian noir in particular, but this was one of the early shows do that. And I think at the deepest level, though, what the show really shows to me is this kind of Petro guilt, a term that's often used in reference to Norway that a country has become so wealthy since the late 1960s, on the back of discovery of oil in the North Sea. And, you know, the country that feels like it's doing good in the world, is really an international peacemaker, right, is looking towards the future of a post oil future, but at the same time, cannot get away with the fact that basically, everything is dripping, you know, in oil money in Norway. And I think the show does a great job of doing this and ends with this phenomenal scene where the the fourth wall is broken. And the main character Jesper Berg, basically looks at the screen and tells people to go out there and attack, you know, cities and countries that aren't, you know, basically looking out for the environment. So he's basically calling on hackers to move to this next stage of, of environmental responsibility that goes into direct action. So it's a very, very interesting series, I think, from from start to finish.

Nicola Witcombe:

And also it kind of demonstrates that what could be called art or fiction can sometimes deal with very serious issues in a sort of, in a way that basic facts can't. You know, it can imagine different future scenarios, it can deal with people's personal feelings about whether they fly or take the train, it can deal with, you know, energy, politics and so on and so forth which are many different complicated layers which is kind of a bit difficult for even politicians to describe or explain to people.

Robert A. Saunders:

I quote, Dominique Morsi, who was written a book about in French, about some television series, Occupied was one of his case studies, he also focused on Game of Thrones and, and House of Cards. And he reminds us that this type of television right is geopolitically sensitive television really reveals what he calls the emotions of the world particular times of turmoil and rapid change. And it shows us what we fear but it also shows us what's what's coming, right. So it anticipates why we're afraid because, you know, some of these things will will come to pass. And I think at least for me, those TV shows that are willing to go into those places, you know, really are the most compelling. And also highly effective teaching tools. Popular culture often provides an entree sort of entryway into talking about difficult discussions in a really material way that often with students I find they have difficulty grappling with the real, with the holocaust or with the issues of slavery. And if you come at it kind of from the side, from a popular culture angle, it actually creates a space where we can have a much more engaged and sophisticated discussion where you can actually bring them over to talking about what really happened in the past or what's really happening in the present.

Nicola Witcombe:

You've been described as a leading scholar in popular geopolitics. And I want you to explain a little bit more about that in a minute. But before we go into that, it would be useful to explore how you came to be interested in geopolitics, generally, I believe that you did a PhD in international relations?

Robert A. Saunders:

I was studying minority nationalism amongst ethnic Russians who had kind of been beached by the ebbing of the borders of the Soviet Union. So those living in Latvia, Kazakhstan, other countries. This was my focus and how they were using new forms of digital technology to maintain their identity, to communicate with other Russian speakers and other places as long before social media sort of web 2.0 that we know. And I'm finishing up the PhD and into all that mix comes Borat making a splash in 2004 and into 2005, hosting the MTV Music Awards in Kazakhstan, the Republic of Kazakhstan just reacting on this grandiose scale, creating international controversy over a comedian's act. And since I've been focused on Kazakhstan, that kind of pulled me in a particular direction towards towards popular culture. And so the past 15-20 years, this has been my research focus. So I've tried to meld together international relations and studies of popular culture.

Nicola Witcombe:

And so now let's turn to popular geopolitics, as it's called, could you explain what it is, and perhaps giving an example?

Robert A. Saunders:

What I tried been trying to do trying to reconcile these different sort of fields of research, there were people out there doing it, most of them coming from geography, but also international relations, I discovered this field of popular geopolitics. And in the book I kind of built on my research on Borat published a few years ago, I looked at how Western media and popular culture films in particular, but also video games, comic books, looked at people basically these characters are places from the former Soviet Union, kind of looked at the post Soviet-bad guy, the post Soviet-buffoon of which Borat was an example. And then I also get more and more interested in landscape depiction and how we, being the sort of Anglophone West or cultural producers in US, UK, Australia, represent the former Soviet Union and Russia in particular, you know, whether it was the Siberian wasteland, or whether it's a kind of, you know, post atomic, never-world of Chernobyl, or these dangerous urban grey urban spaces. And so that kind of became a passion of mine.

Nicola Witcombe:

But why is popular geopolitics important? Could you explain a little bit more about that?

Robert A. Saunders:

Really, what we want to talk about here is how important today globalization has brought that which is distant to being near to us, right? We can see it through the mind's eye, whether we talk about film, whether we talk about TV, comic books, etc. I think people today really have to traverse and negotiate identities and subjectivities in the contemporary world, in a way that we didn't need to do 20-30-40 years ago. But really, popular culture has become this battlefield where ideas get played out. The most foreign policy issues, the ones that are most pressing, we see them on the screen, right? We hear about them in songs. I have a piece coming out that I wrote under quarantine that I wrote in lockdown about a television series called counterpart which deals with a pandemic that wipes out, you know, 10% of the global population. So that can be always dismissed in the scholarly community as well, it's, you know, it's just fiction, right? And it doesn't get it right. And it gets it wrong for this reason. And, you know, you didn't take this into account, but that's not what I try and do with the type of research that I undertake. What I try and do is, again, I use it as a mirror, but also as a predictive force. And that was one of the surprises that when I got involved in this, was that the the predictive accuracy of a lot of dramatic television series whether The Bridge kind of you know, talking about the what problems come with unfettered mobility across the Orson straight. And then the adaptation in America is what you know, what are these issues that are associated with the American Mexican border, and then you have to Trump building his whole campaign in the wake of the American Bridge coming out. And then you have the tunnel, the third adaptation, dealing with the quote unquote jungle of Callay. And these migrants that are trying to smuggle themselves underneath the channel to get into the UK, and then you have Brexit, right, like after the first season. So there is a place I think, for those of us who are focused on popular culture and what it can tell us. But increasingly, we see that there is action that comes from that, and this, you know, it has real effects in the real world. So it's not just about representation anymore.

Nicola Witcombe:

I guess I can probably see quite clearly how geopolitics and what is happening in the in the world can influence what people put into those cultural products. But can those cultural products really have an influence on on the real world when they generally are fictional?

Robert A. Saunders:

For many of us, popular culture is the real world. It's our way to connect with those who are distant from us, or those issues that are far away. Because we may never travel to these places, you know, we may never get get real access. So it's a kind of second order world that that popular culture creates. And really, as a field, we're obsessed with, you know, understanding everyday representations and practices and how they permeate geopolitical thought. Now, we're seeing actual artifacts of popular culture, triggering events that have real world political and economic impact. I mean, some examples that I've written about in the past where the popular intrudes onto the real and vice versa. In the case of Borat and Kazakhstan, obviously, I mentioned this one, right. The ninth largest country in the world by geography goes to war with a British comedian over the representation of, you know, what is Kazakhstan. When the movie 300 came out, Iranian bloggers began sort of, you know, attacking servers, we have the more famous attack, and that is North Korea, or those in the service of North Korea, basically going after Sony over the film, The Interview, right, causing all kinds of chaos, both on the economic level, but also to some extent on the political level. And relative to Nordic Europe, even, we have we have Trump going one day and tweeting and talking about this terror attack that's taking place that had taken place the night before, in Sweden, right and creating a diplomatic controversy. When we find out basically, he was watching a rebroadcast of an old special that Fox News had done about about urban unrest in the suburbs of Sweden. When we think about Donald J. Trump, I mean, really more than a real estate figure. He was a figure of popular culture in the United States, and to some extent, even outside the United States. And he comes into the presidency. And he brings that as part of this, this kind of repertoire that he has, whether we're talking about his tweeting, oe his game show style of running the US presidency. This QAnon fantasy world that these this is really a popular cultural world that has been constructed through social media that says people like the Biden's, the Obamas, Kamala Harris, the Clintons, or Satan worshipping, you know, child molesters, sacrificing children and to drink their blood, and there are lizard men running the United States government. And there's a savior that's going to emerge named Hugh, and he's going to come out of basically the shadows, and have all these people arrested by the military and wiped off the face of the earth. So this is a popular cultural world. This is a fantastical world, just as fantastical as the world of Game of Thrones or the world of Star Trek, except in this case, right? We had people breaking into the US Capitol, trying to hunt down the Vice President of the United States who himself is a Republican, really a standard bearer for traditional Republican dies, you know, screaming hang Mike Pence driven by this these what is effectively popular culture. And we need to remember in the midst of that it Ukraine actually elected as its president, someone who had been playing the Ukrainian president on television. So I mean, even going further than right, Donald Trump being predicted by the Simpsons to become president United States. We actually have, how do I get the job as Ukrainian president? Will I play the Ukrainian president on television?

Nicola Witcombe:

So now I'd like to turn to your main area of expertise, television, and bring it more towards the Nordics. So what led you to research the Nordics and Nordic TV?

Robert A. Saunders:

I was actually at a conference at the University of Copenhagen and we were focused on the popular geopolitics of Putin's Russia. And while I was there, Jason Dittmer actually kind of pulled me aside and said, "Hey, have you seen this television show, The Bridge?" he goes, "you really should watch it". And the next day, I watched a couple of trailers about it. And I actually got on the train from Copenhagen, I went over the moment, and came back. And that was very recently, the border controls had been basically installed. And so it wasn't the passageway that you know, had been promised in the show. You basically have to get your passport check, because this was 2015. And the migration crisis was peaking. And so there's this introduction of border controls. And so I'm watching the show and seeing this, this mobility back and forth, but in my own personal life, I'd experienced it. And I had to have my passport with me and I had this border check. And so it was that event really, that kind of triggered my interest.

Nicola Witcombe:

And could you say something a little bit more about how Nordic crime TV and perhaps Nordic noir capture captured your attention and how you became why you were so interested in it,

Robert A. Saunders:

To me, Nordic noir, what's special about it is it always has something to say. There's there's a mission. It comes out of the Swedish tradition of social and political critique, which was in their their crime novels and that gets transferred to Nordic noir over time. And what's interesting to me is the double storytelling, which Eva Redvall has identified, that it's not just about the crime, it's not about one person's personal motivation, why they killed this person, right? There's always something deeper there.

Nicola Witcombe:

Colleagues at Aarhus University have sort of perhaps said that Nordic noir had its heyday sort of maybe a decade ago, or perhaps even longer, and that it has actually influenced a lot of other detective and crime and maybe other types of drama around the world. That it's become mainstream and kind of lost its edge. I mean, would you agree with that assessment?

Robert A. Saunders:

Yeah. So I really think it matters on your perspective and your obsession with purity, right. And there's obviously an inside outside issue there. So coming from the region, particularly those scholars who've been working on, you know, noir of some sort, whether it's literary or whether it's film, then you have the kind of TV explosion with The Killing and then later on with The Bridge and other series. So it really depends on what your perspective is. In the UK, they market Borgen as Nordic noir, even though has nothing to do with the tradition. Like I said, there's this elasticity, I think Nordic noir's importance continues to grow. I've been watching a number of Italian series crime series lately and you see the kind of the imprint of Nordic noir, northerly feel, at least from for the Italian eye. So I think aspects of Nordic noir continue to filter out, continue to have an impact. So it's this strong growth by osmosis. But, you know, when does something really become mainstream? And at that point, I think it has its biggest impact. So the greatest effect for Nordic noir may still be in the future, that they're, you know, at least if you look at Netflix, or you look at SBS, which is an Australian broadcaster, or Amazon has its channels, there are many, many of these providers of television content, that basically are pooling Nordic noir series and also kind of inserting series that aren't Nordic nor into the mix, whether you're talking about Polish series, like the border, or Welsh series like Hinterland so that they're all kind of being put into this box, because it really is an excellent marketing tool, because there is that interest there. And I think that interest is bigger than crime drama. This is just sort of generalized interest in Northern Europe as a concept, as a place, as a space, the people, the Nordic people.

Nicola Witcombe:

And that's more from a sort of research perspective. Perhaps you could say a little bit more about why people generally have been interested in the Nordics and the Nordic crime drama?

Robert A. Saunders:

You know, I talked in the book a bit about, particularly for Brits and Americans and to a lesser extent Australians, watching and immersing yourself in the quote unquote, small problems of Denmark or Norway or Sweden, at a time where you have Brexit at a time where you have Trump on one side and the Democrats on the other side, and we've got these issues, major issues of climate change and poverty and war, it's reassuring to sit and watch an hour long drama about a murder that takes place in Stockholm or Oslo. Because it's an escape in some way. And I think that goes alongside having the sort of obsession with anything Scandinavian, whether it's the sweaters or the candles, or, you know, all of these things that are associated with this "hygge" phenomenon that now is, you know, being marketed by companies like IKEA, but, you know, it's being picked up by countries outside the region, as well to kind of sell that Nordic feeling to people around the world who like the difference is different enough from what they know, but it's also something that can recognize. So that it's not a threatening sort of otherness and a lot of the writing, particularly and Kim Toft Hansen has talked about this quote, unquote, noirientalism, right, this accessibility of Scandinavia, that's different enough to make it exotic, but not so different that it makes it threatening to particularly the Anglophone world.

Nicola Witcombe:

Why didn't we dwell on the Nordic branding, then? As we've hit upon that now. I mean, you've explained it through this sort of both normality and exoticism. Is there any other reason why there's been this interest in the Nordic countries?

Robert A. Saunders:

You know, I think the Nordic countries care very much about their perception outside. This is something that matters, the countries tend to be small, tend to be culturally homogenous, tend to be wealthy, have clear connections between the culture industries, whether we're talking about television production, film production, or music, etc, between tourism, the tourism industries which are pretty vibrant. And I think they these countries do very, very well, particularly considering how expensive they are for someone from Italy or for someone from the United States to go to Iceland or even go to Denmark, you know, that decision is made to spend lots of money, if you don't need to spend, don't to go to these particular places. And then policy like government policy, to reinforce cultural industries, to reinforce the tourism industry. And to project this kind of image of a responsible societies that understand their place in the world, their place in Europe, are generally speaking, proud of those positions, whether we're talking about peacemaking whether we're talking about sustainability, these issues. So I think as a region, Nordic Europe has an enormous amount of benefits that they actually act on. And this to use the terminology of nation branding allows a country like Finland or Denmark to really punch above its weight. Sweden is kind of the service of the big boy in terms of population and sort of the historical center of the region. And being a historically neutral country, a country that can talk to, you know, during the Cold War could talk to both sides, there's been a lot of benefits that have really accrued to the region and very few wasted opportunities, I would say.

Nicola Witcombe:

Is it just chance that for one of the better words, you know, slightly moralistic, perhaps messages are communicated in Nordic drama series, or crime series, because I'm thinking here of, you know, the public service broadcasting.

Robert A. Saunders:

For me as part of the research process, discovering how important that was and how embedded that tradition is, of challenging the viewer. Not dealing with things that are hollow, right, this not just for fun, it's not just for entertainment, that there's something there, that'll make you think, right, that encourage you to be kind of critical in your orientation. And one of the things that I've noticed and frankly, I'm somewhat saddened by with speaking specifically about popular cultural and television content coming from the region is now with the emergence of of viaplay. We're seeing these more commercialized series starting to be produced and I'm not interested in the resolution of the narrative, right? Because there's not this compelling, there may be influence from the ecosystem, ehat's around it that's being produced by DR, or some of the other public service broadcasters, but they're built to make money, right? They're built to be distributed beyond the region rather than providing that value to the citizens of Denmark or Iceland, or Finland. So it also shows I think, looking at kind of holistically looking at television production across the region, we can see the encroachment of neoliberalism into actually the production side of it. And that's one of the great things that's criticized in good Nordic noir, is the the power of neoliberalism, the power of the dollar of the pound of the yen, what have you, in turning everything kind of sour. This is often in a show whether you're looking at follow the money or deadwind, or what have you, global capitalism is really the great evil. And this kind of new, more commercialized production, it's that aspect of the narrative isn't necessarily there. Not that it's completely absent, but it's not a driving force. So I think there, you know, there's some interesting things to look at from a production standpoint, when it comes to the geopolitics, internally speaking, within Scandinavia and Finnish crime dramas.

Nicola Witcombe:

The BBC certainly has been criticized for being full of left wing, left leaning producers and people that commissioned television programs, and so on and so forth. And I can imagine that there's a similar debate in the Nordic countries about the Public Broadcasting Services. Shouldn't they also be, I don't know, they should also be supporting a whole range of political views and not just being critical of the overriding globalization and neoliberalism, shouldn't they?

Robert A. Saunders:

Well, yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. And I immediately kind of pivot to the Wallander kind of phenomenon, right? So you have this character, I don't write a lot about him in my book, because his ground has been well covered by others, but he basically emerges as a kind of mouthpiece for a particular type of Swede, who really is resentful about immigration, resentful about neoliberalism and coming from the right. So I don't think it's a clear cut left, right, you know, liberal progressive sort of structure in in the region. But again, this is speaking as an outsider so I'm not privy to really the cultural nuances there. But it's in the eye of the beholder. So when you're watching a series that deals with immigration, particularly 2015, and onwards, two sets of eyes are going to see a very, very different sort of narrative, as long as that narrative is sophisticated, and allows for different interpretations in the field of popular geopolitics, Klaus Dodds in particular, has written a lot about kind of post 9/11, post Aubrac cinema that dealt with the war on terror. And he looks at movies that dealt with sort of patriotic kind of films. And they did very, very well at the box office. And then he dealt with films that were more preachy, you know, progressive, critical of the United States, and they just did horribly at the box office. So one model was prescriptive, and it falls flat, particularly with an audience that isn't interested in that politics. Whereas the other is very successful. I think one of the things that makes Nordic noir particularly interesting is, is it allows for multiple types of interpretation. So you see what's on the screen, you see the narratives that are being told, but it leaves space for that critical thinking, whether you're left, right or center. And so, really at the end of the day, these series or much more sophisticated products, I think, than you know, sort of American analog to that or even like a broad church, like, the sort of often referred to as a Nordic noir import, at least in terms of style and music and things like that. But at the end of the day, it doesn't have that kind of political, political content, even if informed it mirrors some aspects of a Nordic noir series.

Nicola Witcombe:

Are you able to say some of the things that are commonly assumed about the Nordic countries in the US? and whether you think though assumptions that are justified?

Robert A. Saunders:

My students, you know, if I go and ask them there, they're going to, they're going to give me a pretty predictable slate of answers. It's clean, it's orderly, it's expensive. That's pretty cool, right? It's got this style, and certainly progressive right. So with a feminist foreign policy that's been put forth by Sweden and despite all the criticism that you'll get from from Scandinavians, or Finns, about the lack of gender equality or issues with domestic violence, etc, these are all internal critiques, right? Critiques from within the region of the region, in the same way that the narratives of Nordic noir are internal critiques of the region from within the region, right? They're saying, "this is what's wrong,, we need to fix this". And "if only we had these problems in the United States, or if only Brazil had these problems to deal with". There's a fair amount of truth to the stereotypes, a number of my students are, I find, are watching these shows, they would watch the quote, unquote, American versions and find them, you know, not very palatable, whether it's The Killing or whether it's The Bridge, and they would go and seek out the source materials. This is going back to say, you wouldn't have seen 10 years ago, I mean, you wouldn't see an American kids sitting there with an iPad watching, you know, The Bridge in Swedish and Danish in dialect. Unheard of. So what do they think about the region very different from from the United States. Americans like, oh, yeah, they pay high taxes, they pay almost all their money in taxes. Whereas when you talk to someone from the region, I mean, obviously, you get someone who's a bit more libertarian, you're gonna get a different view. But they say we don't see it really as paying taxes, we're investing in society. This is something so we can all live together in a certain level of comfort and security. So we don't have to worry every day when we wake up, that you know, something could go wrong. And really as an American, particularly if you live in a sort of New York metropolitan area, every day, something could go wrong. You get in a car accident, someone could trip and fall on your property. Right? It could you could get fired from your job that day, showing up to work, pack your box, go, you know, it's like, you got two weeks severance. That's it. This is not the world of Scandinavia, right. Even with all the problems that bubble up in Nordic, noir, this is not what it's all about. And so I think there is a an attraction to that, especially with this generation today. You see in the Democratic primary race, ultimately leading to Joe Biden, the most traditional Democrat getting the nomination in the presidency, but you had the sparring match between Pete Buttigieg on the one side and Bernie Sanders on the other side, and they're actually fighting about Scandinavian policy and Danish, like fiscal and taxation policy. They're fighting about these things in American primary presidential debate with Buttigieg is saying, well, the American dream really only exists in Denmark today. And he's trying to use that as a way to critique Bernie Sanders his health care plan, but Bernie Sanders is saying I want a Danish style health care plan, so everybody's insured, and no one has to worry. That is one of the things I use as an example of why the region matters today. I mean, why people from the outside are looking in.

Nicola Witcombe:

Are you able to say what some of the key research questions are that you would like to see explored in the next few years?

Robert A. Saunders:

You know, I think the North is a very interesting place to look at. Scandinavian countries, though, generally speaking, and kind of well position are also very, very closely attached to the impact of the Anthropocene and the changes that are going on. Whether we're talking about Denmark and its connection to Greenland and the melting glaciers, whether we're talking about issues of reindeer populations dying off for the northern parts of Sweden and Norway, where the Sami people are dependent on this population. The region pats itself on the back for doing so well, right, the kind of promotion of the good Anthropocene. That we can be ahead of everything, and be forward looking and develop technologies. But at the same time, you know, is this really what we want? Because alongside that comes all this focus on the region and tourism is a big part of that. So people going to visit the Lofoten islands in the far north of Norway. I mean, places that really shouldn't be overrun with tourists. All these things get kind of mixed up in a pot. So the more attractive the region becomes, the more people want to go there and can create in the long term, you know, some of the very issues that are worse than some of the very issues that the region kind of prides itself on know, when it comes to sustainability and issues like that. Copenhagen as a city is planning 50 years out for this increase in flooding that's coming from increasingly unpredictable rainstorms. Greenland has to start thinking about, sort of as they're gaining, gaining more and more autonomy from the Danish crown, you have the Chinese, the Russians,, the Americans who are all interested in exploiting Greenland. So these are very, very interesting issues. And another thing that kind of came up in my researches is definitions of freedom, in a time of intense political change. So Partanen writes about having lived in Finland and having lived in the United States, Americans want the freedom to do and Nordics want the freedom to be. And I think this is really a kind of big, you know, philosophical question for the 21st century. Do you want to be free to own guns and not have the government in your business? And, you know, this American version of freedom. Or do you want the freedom from insecurity, the freedom from want that you have in in the Nordics, and I think many people not just in the US or Scandinavia, are grappling with these questions, it's around the world that some big choices have to be made. And a lot of us are looking to Northern Europe to at least provide, one sort of laboratory, one sort of hothouse for answering some of these questions in a responsible and sustainable way. But you know, are the Nordics perfect? No, right? Obviously, not because we have Nordic noir we have Scandinavian sort of crime fiction that gives us this critique and gives us food for thought.

Nicola Witcombe:

Many people, particularly in the English speaking world, have become more aware of the Nordics through watching TV over the last 10 to 15 years. So it's no surprise that researchers from different academic areas have wanted to find out why this is and analyze it. Robert's approach and that of his colleagues in popular geopolitics helps us to make sense of some of the issues raised by these programs. I see the two key ingredients as being, firstly, how real or imagined, past or present geopolitics are included in the storyline of TV shows and other cultural products. And secondly, how popular culture can influence contemporary geopolitics. But there are a lot of other things to throw into this interdisciplinary mix. Most of which are not consistent and can often be contradictory, like technological advances, meaning TV shows reach global audiences, the playoff between public broadcasting and competing streaming companies, what hangups and worries the Nordic people have, some of which they share with other people from around the world. The perception of the Nordics, its branding, both intentional and unintentional, both by people from within the Nordics and outside by institutions and through popular culture, and the content and artistry of the shows themselves. But I guess we must enjoy many of these challenging ingredients as we continue to watch and consume cultural products. And they in turn, at the very least, can help us digest and come to terms with complicated events that are taking place in the world. You've been listening to a nordics.info podcast. If you want to hear more about Nordic noir, please listen to our podcast on Global Audiences of Danish TV drama, or visit our page on Nordic Noir. Thanks, go to Robert and to our very own research hub Reimagining Norden in Evolving World, ReNEW, and our funders, Nordforsk.

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