Communicating the North

Media Structures and Images in the Making of the Nordic Region

Peter Stadius, Jonas Harvard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409449485
• eBook ISBN: 9781317163565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

What makes a magazine in South Africa promote Scandinavian unity among its immigrant readers and why does a Swedish king endorse attempts to influence pan-Scandinavian opinion through a transnational media event in Sweden, Norway and Denmark? Can portraits of exotic Lapplanders in the British press, enthusiastic accounts of the welfare state in post-war travel literature and descriptions of the liberal Nordic woman as a metaphor for a freer society in Franco Spain really be bundled together under a joint label of 'Nordicness'? How is it that despite the variety of images of the Nordic region that are circulating, we still find this recurring idea of a shared Nordic identity? These are some of the questions the current volume seeks to answer. Covering the time period from the early nineteenth century up until the present and encompassing case studies from Britain, Spain, Poland, and South Africa, as well as from the Nordic countries, contributors to the volume investigate the images that have been presented of the Nordic region in the media in and outside of the Nordic countries, how such images have been shaped by mechanisms of mediation, and the channels through which they have been distributed. The chapters address both specific cases such as media events and individual publications, as well as the structural and institutional settings for mediating the Nordic region.

Chapter 1
A Communicative Perspective on the Formation of the North: Contexts, Channels and Concepts

Jonas Harvard and Peter Stadius

What makes a magazine in South Africa promote Scandinavian unity among its immigrant readers and why does a Swedish king endorse attempts to influence pan-Scandinavian opinion through a transnational media event in Sweden, Norway and Denmark? Can portraits of exotic ‘Laplanders’ in the British press, enthusiastic accounts of the welfare state in post-war travel literature, and descriptions of the liberated Nordic woman as a metaphor for a freer society in Franco’s Spain really be bundled together under a joint label of ‘Nordicness’? How is it that despite the variety of images of the Nordic region, we still find this recurring idea of a shared Nordic identity? These are some of the questions this volume seeks to answer.

Many studies deal with the role of the media in the development of nations. Far fewer look at regions. The impact of the media on the formation of transnational regions thus stands out as a neglected field of study. This book approaches the general theme of the mediation of regions through a study of the Nordic region. Covering the time period from the early nineteenth century to the present and encompassing case studies from Britain, Spain, Poland and South Africa, as well as from the Nordic countries, it investigates the images of the Nordic region that have been presented by the media inside and outside the Nordic countries, how such images have been shaped by mechanisms of mediation, and the channels through which they have been distributed. The following chapters address both specific cases, such as individual publications and images, and the structural and institutional settings for mediating the Nordic region.

The volume develops the idea of the Nordic region as a mediated region, analysing the process whereby mediation can shape and distribute images of a transnational region both within and outside its geographic area.¹ Connections between media companies and their audiences, and the remediation of stereotypes between textual genres and other media forms, contribute to the creation of different concepts of a particular region, oscillating between fact and fiction. In this flux of ideas, informed observations about the traits peculiar to a region can be swamped by a flood of rhetoric that uses it as a model to inspire admiration on the left or incite alarm on the right.

The communication perspective contributes to an understanding of how concepts of a region can be distributed through the media, thus diverging from paths taken in the other volumes in this series, which investigate the distribution of the Nordic region through performance of heritage in the form of traditions, museums and festivals, or the attempted expansion of Nordic territory and scientific hegemony through polar exploration. Taking the role of the media into account reveals a region existing as a set of discursively maintained concepts or images of transnational units, represented in interrelated but independently operated media and connected to a narrative framework based on the notion that this region has a particular and observable character. Such concepts of regions have a dynamic and changing relationship to actual geopolitical boundaries. In some cases, the Nordic region, or Norden, has been defined as synonymous with Scandinavia – Denmark, Norway and Sweden. In others, it has included all five Nordic countries, adding Iceland and Finland to Scandinavia. In other definitions the autonomous territories of Svalbard, the Faroe Islands and Greenland have been included. From an outside perspective the terms ‘Scandinavia’ and ‘Nordic region’ are often used synonymously, something that from an intra-Nordic self-image has been unthinkable.² Scandinavia as a label and brand seems to be the easiest and most versatile form to address this region, even when including Finland and Iceland.

The contested spatial reach of the concept of Norden is well illustrated by the political changes that have made the competition for polar domains an issue in the North, as well as the continuing renegotiations of the relation between the Nordic countries and those around the Baltic Sea, which has recently been discussed from political, as well as cultural, perspectives.³ Different concepts of the Nordic region, or the ascribed traits of shared character, have had fleeting and unstable relations to such discussions of territorial inclusion and exclusion.

Another crucial point when discussing Nordic issues is the extent to which such a compound transnational regional entity can replace the sum of five nation-states. That the nation still serves as the basic unit for cooperation or competition in the global arena can also be seen in Nordic cooperation where most fields of cooperative support are built around the idea of individuals representing their country, defined as one of the five Nordic nation-states. This idea of the Nordic region as the sum of the five states, the ‘Olympic Games principle’, as the historian and Nordic Studies scholar Henrik Stenius has put it, has recently been called into question.⁴ In this volume a certain dominance of Sweden and Swedish themes can be observed, which can obviously be taken as a fault detracting from the intended all-Nordic approach. However, the Swedish examples and cases are not only national, but, in many empirical instances, seen as representative of particular Nordic traits, and images of Sweden, as the biggest of the five of the Nordic countries, have significantly influenced the Scandinavian brand. National interests and Nordic thinking are often closely tied together, for example, when marketing nations globally.⁵ In yet other instances, such as during scholarly debates on the welfare systems of the countries in northern Europe, the interchangeable labels of such systems as either Nordic, Scandinavian, or pertaining to particular countries, display the existence of competition between the Nordic countries. The image of the Nordic welfare system was more heavily influenced by notions of Sweden than, for example, of Denmark or Norway.⁶

Is it possible, then, to study a transnational region as a single unit, rather than as the sum of its constituting countries? Or does that preclude a deeper understanding of the interplay between part and whole? The focus of this book is on neither. It departs from the basic observation that the Nordic region has historically existed as an empirically observable phenomenon, in the form of a set of widespread images and stereotypes, as well as embodied in institutions for Nordic cooperation. We approach these historical representations of the Nordic region from the perspectives of communication and representation, with the goal of achieving a deeper understanding of how such phenomena take communicative form and are shaped by conditions for mass communication.

Of course, any analysis of such a historical region, if it is based on an assumption that the region in question has existed and can be defined by a set of distinctive traits, runs the risk of implicitly participating in the reification of the said region, with the study itself adding to the instances of observations of its historical existence. However, instead of participating in the reproduction of any homogenous notion of the Nordic region, the studies in this book strive to critically question such notions and show how they have been shaped by communicative conditions and political and cultural circumstances. In fact, we may even propose that this striving towards simplification and presentation of unifying traits is to some extent a function of the pressures towards narrativization and dramatization intrinsic to the media ever since the nineteenth century.

Mediation and Space

It is fitting here to begin with a brief discussion of definitions. A key concept in this book is that of ‘mediation’. It has often been used as a catchphrase, sometimes connoting the decay of politics. Here, it is used in an analytical sense, referring to processes of representation. It thus signifies situations or processes in which media ‘constitute the most important channels for information exchange and communication’.⁷ In the field of politics, mediated politics then represents something different than politics which is experienced through interpersonal communication. However, in this book we are concerned with regions. Scholars of geography have been concerned with the mediation of landscapes. Karen M. Morin, among others, has emphasized that landscapes have both material and ideological aspects; they are ‘literally produced through labour and other lived relationships’ but also represented in various media forms, which ‘themselves are representations of lived relationships’.⁸ The idea of a region thus rests on experiences of place or landscape and its mediation. To the extent to which such a region is experienced mainly or exclusively through channels of mass communication, we may say it exists as a mediated region.

A more elaborate typology is presented by Nigel Thrift, who speaks of four different forms of space: empirical constructions of space, space as flows and connections, space as images and space as place. Such distinctions may seem subtle, but they have a distinct bearing on the discussion of how media has contributed to the formation of transnational regions. Empirical spaces represent man-made attempts to organize the world around us, such as infrastructure, maps, measurements, roads. Such empirical spaces organize the spaces of flow, meaning the circulation, migration and transport of goods and ideas. Then there is space as image, which connotes both graphic and textual imagery and the associations it evokes in people’s minds. We shall return to the theme of space as image later in this introductory chapter. Finally there is the perspective of space as place. In geography theory, this is less obvious than it might seem, but in essence it refers to sensory experiences of being in person at a particular place.⁹

Using this typology as a framework for this book, we may then start out in an exploratory manner by saying that we are investigating the Nordic region as a mediated region, addressing the different aspects of (a) the region as empirical space, referring to the material structures and forms of the media; (b) the region as a space of flows, referring to the migration of stereotypes and ideas across borders through the media; and (c) the region as a space made up of images, referring to the content of such stereotypes. In a way, but in a less systematic manner, the fourth spatial dimension, the idea of the region as place, also comes into play, as individual experiences linked to particular geographic locations are absorbed by the media and made into building-blocks for the larger concepts of a mediated region.

Contexts: Media Systems and Political Pressures

We move on to the different circumstances that affect the formation of images of the Nordic region. For obvious reasons, political and cultural contexts have provided different settings for articulating ideas of a shared Nordic identity, and different environments around the world have activated different images of the Nordic region, adapted to local needs and priorities. Different periods, such as the periods of Romanticism and Scandinavianism of the nineteenth century, or that marked by expressions of ‘Nordism’ around 1900, have been especially pronounced high points for expressions of Nordic unity. The radically differing Nordic experiences during the Second World War, as well as the Cold War and post-1989 phases, have provided different kinds of contexts. Throughout these time periods, media outlets and publics within and outside the Nordic countries have frequently interacted with each other within a conceptual framework of Nordic particularity, thereby contributing to the mediated establishment of different concepts of the Nordic region.¹⁰

In many cases, state policies and relations to foreign nations have created implicit or explicit boundaries determining which images and ideals could be expressed with regard to the Nordic region. A case in point is the Finnish press under the tsarist period, which was given considerable freedom as long as it didn’t explicitly challenge the Russia’s policies.¹¹ In other settings, the ideological outlook of the party press has determined perspectives: a striking example is the newspapers of the social democratic parties in the Nordic countries, which were often supportive of ideas of brotherhood across borders.¹² To understand the role of the media in the creation of a Nordic community, we must also take into account the uneven acceptance of shared perspectives among the different national publics. In some periods, such as those of crisis, the media facilitated the creation and distribution of transnational narratives favouring closer coll...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Series Preface
• Series Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A Communicative Perspective on the Formation of the North: Contexts, Channels and Concepts
• 2 Nordic Media Systems 1850–1950: Myths, Mixtures and Metamorphoses
• 3 Connecting the Nordic Region: The Electric Telegraph and the European News Market
• 4 Media Scandinavianism: Media Events and the Historical Legacy of Pan-Scandinavianism
• 5 Nordic Solidarity in Print: The Nordens Frihet Association and its Magazine, 1939–4599
• 6 Expressions of Pan-Scandinavian Sentiments in the Magazine Fram among Scandinavian Migrants in South Africa, 1914–54
• 7 ‘One Valhalla of the Free’: Scandinavia, Britain and Northern Identity in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
• 8 Selling the Sami: Nordic Stereotypes and Participatory Media in Georgian Britain
• 9 The Valkyrie in a Bikini: The Nordic Woman as Progressive Media Icon in Spain, 1891–1975
• 10 Unity Exposed: The Scandinavia Pavilions at the World Exhibitions in 1967 and 1970
• 11 Happy Countries: Appraisals of Interwar Nordic Societies
• 12 A Swedish Norden or a Nordic Sweden? Image Politics in the West during the Cold War
• 13 Constructing a Nordic Community in the Polish Press – Past and Present
• 14 Conclusion: Mediating the Nordic Brand – History Recycled
• Index