Nordic Exceptionalism Research Articles

Chinese System and Nordic Exceptionalism: What Explains the Difference in Economic Development as well as Inequality?

Chinese System and Nordic Exceptionalism: What Explains the Difference in Economic Development as well as Inequality?

“The curse of the refugee”

Drawing on narrative interviews with people who have recently or in the past fled to Denmark, this article examines experiences of being cast as refugees within the Danish asylum and integration bureaucracy. The analysis is situated within a social context formed simultaneously by Nordic exceptionalism and racial colour-blindness, and by increasing restrictions within Danish asylum and integration policy. Within this context, the article analyses narrative accounts of structural violence and racialization within three central sites of refugee management: namely the reception and asylum camps, encounters with municipal integration workers, and in contexts of schooling and employment. The analysis conveys intersubjective perspectives on how being labelled as a ‘refugee’ involves being racialized, managed and controlled and it argues that such forms of legally-sanctioned control measures can be understood as a slow violence that harms the lives of those seeking protection in Denmark. Finally, the article discusses how people labelled as ‘refugees’ respond to and oppose experiences of racism and control, and how such responses are often silenced in ways that further legitimize racism.

Nuances of fragmentation, (mis)recognition and closeness: Narratives of challenges and support during resettlement

The transition from prison to society tends to be tough and painful for people in resettlement and challenging to facilitate for professionals. The Norwegian Correctional Services aim for a continuous reentry focus throughout the prison sentence. Norway has been presented as one of the Nordic exceptional penal states, partly based on ‘the encouraging pattern of officer-inmate interactions’. However, this exceptional picture has been criticized for paying more attention to discourse than to lived experiences. As newly released persons’ experiences of interaction and relationships with staff and of how these facilitate and frustrate their reentry processes have largely been ignored, this article draws attention to their perspectives. Inspired by narrative analysis, in cooperation with persons with lived experience, we constructed three stories of challenges and support during resettlement. Through these in-depth presentations of frustrating misrecognition, ignorance and fragmentation, but also of closeness, continuity, recognition, belonging and de-stigmatization, this study provides important insights into how interaction and relationships with staff enable and constrain reentry to society. By bringing lived experience into the discourse of Nordic exceptionalism, this article adds valuable perspectives to this still ongoing debate. Overall, we argue for a revitalization of the primary officer role and a broader approach to resettlement to facilitate support throughout the prison sentence.

Comfortable conviviality: constructions of unthreatening difference in Finnish media

ABSTRACT Conviviality has travelled and been taken up in various national socio-political and historical narratives. We aim to add to this by examining conviviality in Finland where discourses of ‘Nordic innocence’ regarding colonial histories and racism has created an illusion of ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ regarding race and racism. Here we position media as a form of societal curriculum and a site of learning that reinforce innocence and exceptionalism. We build on their work by using comfort to attend to the affective underpinnings through which these national discourses are maintained. Finally, we use a media example to show how Finnish media use a comfortable conviviality to create and ideal of unthreatening difference.

Comparing deep‐end confinement in England & Wales and Norway

AbstractExtreme forms of custody represent the boundary points of state power. The configuration of the most restrictive corners of prison systems, and what goes on within them, is highly instructive in exposing the objectives, limits, and implications of state coercion at its most severe. Based on data collected in England & Wales and Norway, this article has two main aims. The first is to explore the degree to which “deep‐end” confinement differs between jurisdictions with different penal philosophies. The second is to understand how the most extreme form of confinement in each jurisdiction differs from the more typical carceral experiences within each system and its overall penal ethos. Empirically, then, the article seeks to shine light into the deepest dominions of both prison systems, illuminating the experiential texture of extreme forms of imprisonment. It concludes by asking what can be inferred about Nordic exceptionalism, and about deep‐end confinement more generally, by analyzing these domains.

Shades of technocratic solutionism: A discursive-material political ecology approach to the analysis of the Swedish TV series Hållbart näringsliv (‘Sustainable business’)

This article analyses the Swedish TV series Hållbart näringsliv (HN) to study hegemonic discursive formations over the meaning of the climate crisis. Combining new materialist approaches in discourse studies with a political ecology understanding of the socio-ecological entanglement, we propose the concept of technocratic solutionism to understand how the neo-liberal green economy secures instrumentalist discourses on nature in the Swedish context. The discourse-theoretical analysis of nine HN episodes identifies four nodal points which articulate the technocratic solutionist discourse: capital’s leading role, Nordic exceptionalism, substitutionalism and long-termism. We argue that the climate crisis can be understood as a materiality that dislocates capitalist assemblages, which then, in response, deploy a techno-solutionism discourse to protect the core principles of economic growth and profitability while marginalizing potential radical alternatives.

Scandinavian Exceptionalisms: Culture, Society, Discourse

Scandinavian Exceptionalisms: Culture, Society, Discourse

Diverging Like-Mindedness? Development Policy Among the Nordics

The ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ in development aid is well known and characterized by its generosity and focus on poverty reduction and sustainable development. However, the individual Nordic countries’ development policies differ significantly, as the contributions to this special issue have uncovered. For example, Sweden and Norway have continuously upheld the volume of aid at above 1 per cent of GNI, while Denmark in the new millennium has cut the aid budget by almost one third, and Finland has struggled to surpass 0.45 per cent. Sweden maintains a strong focus on poverty reduction, whereas Norway’s and Finland’s poverty focus has been diluted somewhat by several competing goals, and Denmark’s even more so. This article compares the volumes, instruments, and goals of the four Nordic countries’ development policies. We find that if there ever was such a thing as a Nordic model in development aid, this model has been significantly weakened in the 00s and 10s, when the four countries have grown apart. The main explanations behind these differences, we posit, are the particular domestic political coalitions behind aid policy, which affect the extent to which development policy is politicized.

From ‘Something in Between’ to ‘Everything All at Once’: Meditations on Liminality and Blackness in Afro-Finnish Hip-Hop and R&B

Since its global spread in the 1980s, hip-hop has been a crucial cultural sphere in which Europeans of color have engaged the experiences of race and racism, gender, and national belonging, with hip-hop music and culture often considered to function as the cultural lingua franca of the African diaspora. Given the continued dominance of Nordic exceptionalism and formal color-blindness in both the Finnish national imaginary and public discourses, hip-hop emerges as an important site for examining the production of counter-discourses and -narratives by Finns of color, and Afro-Finns in particular. This article approaches Afro-Finnish hip-hop as an alternative archive of Afro-Finnish experience and thought. It centers three works by the Afro-Finnish R&B singer Rosa Coste and Afro-Finnish rapper Yeboyah to examine articulations of liminality in relation to Blackness, mixedness, and Finnishness. Exploring the multiple readings of liminality discernible across these works, the article shows that they offer meaningful meditations on Afro-Finnish identity and experience. In raising the multiple forms of liminality that shape the Afro-Finnish experience, these works also raise questions about the potentials and limitations of multiraciality as a category of analysis in the Finnish context.

Heritage with cows. Conserving Nordic human and nonhuman animals

ABSTRACT This paper takes a critical heritage approach to understanding the ways that the conservation of Nordic Mountain cows gets animated as a form of Nordic heritage. Today, Nordic Mountain cows are found in the Northern regions of Norway, Finland, and Sweden. Based on an archive of mediated material (websites, YouTube videos, and social media activism), policy documents as well as interviews with Nordic farm animal genetic resources directors, the paper analyzes how conservation becomes imagined. Viewing the conservation of Nordic Mountain cows as entangled with imaginaries of traditional ways of life, a Northern Nordic (endangered) landscape, and the potential for high quality, ethically sound Nordic heritage products; conservation gets imagined as a rescue technology preserving ‘native’ and ‘endangered’ breeds in the making of sustainable consumer goods and Nordic cultural heritage. The conservation of Nordic Mountain cows goes beyond the potentially endangered species, however, to the reiteration of Nordic exceptionalism and the promise of a pure (and white) Nordic biocultural refuge of human-nonhuman animal relations.

Views on “Good English” and “Nordic Exceptionalism” in Finland

In the Nordic countries, widespread proficiency in English is positioned as a positive and even critical component of overall global competitiveness and competence. Indeed, maps illustrating who speaks the “best” English in Europe show a swath across the Nordic countries, and the number of people in the Nordic countries claiming proficiency in English is only a few percentage points below those in places such as the UK and Ireland. At the same time, the Nordic countries are routinely listed as the “happiest,” the most egalitarian, the most classless, least corrupt, and an epicenter for so-called “tender values.” In recent years, there has been a spate of publications highlighting how Nordic exceptionalism carries with it some unfortunate downsides, including the possibility for people to ignore or fail to acknowledge issues such as racism, sexism, and other social inequalities because of the affordance: “But our society is equal.” There is a parallel in the use of English. The entrenched notion that “everyone is good at English” overlooks that certain segments of the population—such as the elderly, immigrants and rural inhabitants—do not have the same level of access to the symbolic capital represented through facility in English. In this sense, the use of English presents social/class-based barriers that the national languages do not. This article offers a critique of the social realities relating to the use of English in the Nordic Countries within the context of the social welfare system and “Nordic exceptionalism,” focusing mostly on Finland. Making use of examples of discourse in newspapers, previous research and language policy documents, the chapter highlights how aspects of the use of English in Finland parallel other potentially hyped yet unequitable social issues.

What is Conspicuous about the Nordic Countries in Poland? Past and Present Constructions of Norden in the Polish Press

From being regarded as an insignificant and relatively poor region of the continent and on the outskirts of European affairs in the beginning of the twentieth century, a hundred years later the Nordic countries have gained a reputation for being some of the most advanced, prosperous, progressive, and happy nations in the world. The real and palpable achievements of the Nordic economies and societies notwithstanding, the changing image of both the individual countries in the region, and of the Nordic community as a whole, has been constructed by the international print media in relation to their political affiliation or current political and social developments. This analysis looks at the Polish press and demonstrates that the Nordic stories, especially those concerning the present, tend to be constructed as utopian and progressive, rather than as dystopian ones that would be more characteristic of Western European discourse. Accordingly, the Nordic exceptionalism that is covered by the term the Nordic or Scandinavian model still serves more often as inspiration rather than a bogeyman in the general discourse of western-style modernization in Poland.

Challenging Nordic Exceptionalism: Norway in Literature by and about Irregular Migrants

According to social scientists, the Nordic countries have claimed to have a unique humanitarian and peace-loving relationship to the colonialized or poor parts of the world, and, according to criminologists, the Nordic countries have exceptionally humane punitive systems. This article asks whether the native Norwegian author Simon Stranger’s fictional account of the life of an irregular migrant in Norway may contribute something to the problematisation of the image of Norway as representative of a so-called Nordic Exceptionalism that two autobiographical accounts written by the irregular migrant Maria Amelie do not – or cannot – do, and vice versa.

This is Denmark: Prison Islands and the Detention of Immigrants

Abstract According to mainstream criminology, Nordic societies with their generous welfare states are supposed to moderate, if not restrict, penal powers. In the case of migration, we see the opposite pattern. In Denmark, we see extended use of penal institutions and penal harms to contain and remove unwanted populations from the region, including proposals for a prison island and the confinement of migrants in 19th century prisons. To make sense of these developments and interpret its social meaning, we unpack the logic of the punishment–welfare nexus and Nordic exceptionalism. We find that Denmark expands penal power to regulate non-citizens, deter migration and uphold national interests. These repressive practices are not exceptions to the rule but rather illustrate the exclusionary edge and very nature of the penal regimes in Denmark, a Nordic welfare state.

The Nordic Model of Whiteness and Exceptionalism: Representation of Otherness in Some Nordic Film and Television

Race is a controversial question in the Global North, especially in those environments that consider themselves to be colourblind, while in fact they are predominantly white. This seems to be particularly the case in the Nordic countries, where the concepts of equality and egality are central to the mutual feeling of identity and where the racial discourse is marked by the prohibition of racial discrimination. By reducing the category of race to something fictive, one cannot address it openly in the contemporary Nordic societies. Therefore, this paper deals with the representation of Otherness – external and internal – in the Nordic film and television. As the paper focuses on the closely related notions of Nordic whiteness and Nordic exceptionalism, it is based on the categorial apparatus of postcolonial studies. The main hypothesis is that the widely spread positive hetero image of the Nordic region as socially open, tolerant and free, is undermined by the media representation of the identity of Other, where the prejudices, racism and paternalism towards the non-white population (and especially the non-white immigration) are being disclosed. The aim of the paper is to reveal how film and television, as potential correctives of the existing stereotypes, can reflect the ever changing political, cultural and social circumstances and by that, how (and whether) this image of Otherness necessarily corresponds to the narrative of exceptionalism and whiteness of the Nordic region.
 Nordic exceptionalism, together with Nordic whiteness as the integral part of the broader feeling of the Nordic identity, has become a part of the common political discourse and an object of discussion within the field of popular culture, literature and film. Still, the sense of one own’s exceptionalism has become a subject of critical debate, a myth to be debunked, as the phenomena such as the escalation of ethnic violence have marked the recent years in the Nordic societies. This development of the social, cultural and political circumstances has been reflected in the contemporary Nordic media production (film and television) and continues to be analysed. The image of the Nordics, as being inherently white and homogenous, has thus been exposed as artificial and constructed.

‘It’s Like a Sentence Before the Sentence’—Exploring the Pains and Possibilities of Waiting for Imprisonment

AbstractThis article explores the implications of the ‘imprisonment queue’ in Norway. Based on interview data (N = 200), we show that while interviewees waiting to serve their sentences enjoy certain benefits such as being able to prepare for or negotiate the terms of their imprisonment, they also suffer from uncertainty and powerlessness. The suspension of their lives while they wait hinders them in pursuing their ground projects, things that really matter to them. This peculiar phenomenon has not received attention from prison scholars generally, as well as scholars writing on Nordic Exceptionalism specifically. This article addresses that gap and poses questions about the relative mildness of the short Norwegian sentences, and more broadly, about what constitutes punishment.

‘So, Why Am I Here?’ Ambiguous Practices of Protection, Treatment and Punishment in Danish Secure Institutions for Youth

Abstract This article explores how a nexus of punishment, treatment and protection creates unique mechanisms of control in secure institutions for young people. It is based on a study in Danish secure institutions, which accommodate young people confined on legal and welfare grounds. In these hybrid institutions, protection, treatment and punishment merge in ambiguous and contradictory practices that are experienced as unjust or even harmful by the young people and possibly breach the UN Convention of the Child. These practices are explored through a Foucauldian theorization highlighting the disciplinary practices unique to the confinement of minors. The article contributes to wider debates on the treatment–punishment nexus, Nordic exceptionalism and criminal justice for youth in an era of neoliberal penal-welfarism.

Introduction to special section: from Nordic exceptionalism to a third order priority – variations of “Nordicness” in foreign and security policy

ABSTRACTThis introduction presents the rationale for studying Nordicness in Nordic foreign and security policy with an overview of the renaissance of the Nordic dimension in research on Nordic foreign policy. The introduction also includes an analytical framework on Nordic security culture, developed from Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein [1996. Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security. In P. J. Katzenstein (Ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (pp. 33–75). New York: Columbia University Press.]. This framework is used throughout the special section.

Fortellinger om 1814: Forestillingen om det eksepsjonelle norske demokrati

The focus of this article is an educational encounter during a social science project at a junior high school in Norway. The topic of the school project was the Norwegian Constitution of 1814. In this Constitution, many of the ideas of the French and American revolutions had been adopted, e.g. popular sovereignty and the separation of power. Nevertheless, the Constitution also reflected intolerant ideas, especially with regards to the so-called Jews-paragraph, whereby Protestantism was proclaimed, and Jews were excluded from the Norwegian state. In the educational encounter analyzed in this article, I argue that the notion of an exceptional Norwegian democracy affects the narrative constructed about the Norwegian Constitution. This notion serves to exclude the Jews-paragraph from the narrative. The postcolonial concept of Nordic exceptionalism constitutes an important theoretical framework for the analyses of the educational encounter. In the contemporary Norwegian society, immigration regulation by laws again has relevance. This article, therefore, discusses the critical classroom conversations thematizing the Jews-paragraph could have led to, by pointing at different historical and present-day topics of relevance. The discussion implicates the importance of recognizing the role and impact state-led control, violations and exclusion of minorities have in Norwegian history. Not recognizing these aspects of history can lead to the production and reproduction of idealized and exceptional national narratives.

True Kvlt? The Cultural Capital of “Nordicness” in Extreme Metal

In this article, we respond to the question of, "What is the cultural capital of Nordicness in heavy metal?". Through examining the popularity of Nordic symbolism in metal music, scenes and practices, we argue that the Nordic has been ascribed significant value in metal, wherein it offers a vehicle for narratives of masculinity, nationalism and ideology. Here we contend that the cultural capital given to Nordicness underpins not only the prevalence and market success of metal in Northern Europe, but also the ongoing circulation of narratives about the North in metal scenes across multiple global regions. Through analysing the repeated motifs of Nordic mythology, ecology and imagery as they emerge throughout metal's historic and contemporary manifestations, our article demonstrates the cultural capital with which the North is continually imbued in heavy metal. We call into focus how metal's aesthetic fascination with Nordicness as a site of heathenism, resistance and frontier landscapes is intertwined with a longer thematic history of masculinity, rebellion and affective community. This article therefore interrogates the cultural capital of Nordicness in metal scenes, and how this continues to shape the trajectories for the genre both in Northern Europe and throughout the world.