Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir

What Television Series Tell Us About World Politics

Robert A. Saunders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138368347
• eBook ISBN: 9780429769603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With its focus on the popular television genre of Nordic noir, this book examines subtle and explicit manifestations of geopolitics in crime series from Scandinavia and Finland, as well as the impact of such programmes on how northern Europe is viewed around the world.

Drawing on a diverse set of literature, from screen studies to critical International Relations, Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir addresses the fraught geopolitical content of Nordic television series, as well as how Nordic noir as a genre travels the globe. With empirical chapters focusing on the interlinked concepts of the body, the border, and the nation-state, this book interrogates the various ways in which northern European states grapple with challenges wrought by globalisation, neoliberalism, and climate change. Reflecting the current global fascination with all things Nordic, this text examines the light and dark sides of the region as seen through the television screen, demonstrating that series such as Occupied, Trapped, and The Bridge have much to teach us about world politics.

This book will be of interest to those interested in geopolitics, national identity, and the politics of popular culture in: Scandinavian studies, media/screen studies, IR/political science, human/cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and communication.

1Co-constituting the world

Popular culture and geopolitics

Geopolitical television in the ‘North’

By one reading of the discipline's historiography, it can be argued that geopolitics actually began on the Scandinavian Peninsula. The founder of Geopolitik, Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), obsessed about Norway, arguing that maintaining influence over the country's mountainous geography was fundamental to the security of his native Sweden (Toal and Agnew 2002). His signature text, Staten som lifsform or ‘The State as a Form of Life’, described a roiling world populated with quasi-biological organisms or ‘super-individual creatures [i.e. states] … which are just as real as individuals but disproportionately bigger and more powerful in the course of their development’ (Kjellén 1924, 35). Kjellén's evocative geopolitical imagery impacted a generation of thinkers, including Karl Haushofer whose influence on Nazi ideology is undeniable.¹ More than a century on from Kjellén's foundational work, geopolitics is increasingly on our minds and our screens, functioning as a ‘prime popular cultural and political topic in the new century’ (Debrix 2008, 9). As the French political scientist Dominique Moïsi (2016) reminds us, geopolitically inflected television reveals the ‘emotions of the world’, particularly in times of turmoil and rapid change. Enhanced by new viewing technologies, spread via transnational digital distribution, and defined by ever-increasing levels of quality, television is emerging as the cultural medium for exploring the world.

Since the dawn of the new millennium, television has become more geopolitical, with the proliferation of serious, high-quality dramatic series that are defined by their engagement with international issues including terrorism, the refugee crisis, nuclear deterrence, and climate change. From Game of Thrones to Homeland to House of Cards, big-budget Anglophone series dominate global screens, building realms of imagination that map onto our own, influencing how we see international politics, and informing where one belongs in this geopolitical matrix via calculated delimitations of ‘fictive Wes and Thems' (Gregory 1994, 204). However, English-language series do not possess a monopoly on screening popular geopolitics via serial television. Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other transnational, on-demand content providers are increasingly populating their catalogues with non-English language programming. While Spanish, French, and Russian series are predictably popular owing to their geolinguistic scope, television series from northern Europe, and especially Nordic noir crime dramas subtitled for global audiences, have proven extremely attractive to consumers around the globe.

As the screened scion of Scandinavian detective fiction, Nordic noir – as a regional form of geopolitical TV – is imbued with ethical, social, and cultural concerns that distinguish it from analogue fare in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, or Italy. Rooted in a critical, leftist tradition that ultimately indicts the state and/or multinational corporations (MNCs) through key details that manifest during the investigation (see Stougaard-Nielsen 2017), Scandi-noir as a literary genre endowed its televisual offspring with a fecund reservoir of normative orientations and approaches to crime which have made it especially geopolitical in the current era. As Cinema Scandinavia's editor-in-chief Emma Vestrheim argues, the entirety of the genre exists in the shadow of the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, a real-world embodiment of ‘the righteous welfare state’. Occurring on the streets of Stockholm as the PM walked home from the cinema with his wife, the 1986 murder remains unsolved, laying bare the notion that ‘Sweden is not a perfect country’ (Vestrheim 2015, 16). Palme's killing sent shockwaves across the country and beyond, or as the BBC documentary Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction puts it, this was ‘like the 9/11’ of the North (Murphy 2010). As northern Europe grapples with the post–Cold War challenges of globalisation, neoliberalism, right-wing nationalism, transnational crime rings, international migration, and climate change, noir – both in its screened and print versions – keeps apace. Recent series such as Finland's Bordertown, Norway's Nobel, Denmark's Dicte, Sweden's Blue Eyes, and Iceland's Trapped all have something to say about these issues, and more importantly, they ‘say’ them in a Nordic way (even when using English as the medium of communication as in the case of Netflix’s Young Wallander). Rather than aping models of geopolitical television established by American, British, or German series, northern European programming is leading by example. Stylistically, Nordic noir is being increasingly emulated and/or adapted, and in the process, the value systems that are inherent in the genre are extending beyond Norden (cf. Redvall 2016, Agger 2017, Hill and Turnbull 2018).

Why is this important? As screen studies scholar Milly Buonnanno states, flows of television across international borders ‘widen the range of our imaginative geography, multiply our symbolic life-worlds, familiarize ourselves with “the other” and “the distant” and construct “a sense of imagined places”’ (Buonnano 2008, 109). Residing in such imaginary worlds is not neutral with regard to how people view world politics; rather, exploration and co-creation of such imaginaries produce what cyberpunk novelist William Gibson (1984) terms consensual hallucinations that, like anthropologist Benedict Anderson's (1991) imagined communities, have acute ramifications on geopolitical thinking.² Put another way: ‘The countries of the mind are real countries, legitimate to build, legitimate to inhabit’ (Wagenknecht 1946, 437, see also Saler 2012). This brings to mind geographer Mary Gilmartin’s trenchant maxim: ‘Earth writing [i.e. geography] takes the world as we experience or understand it, and translates it into images' (Gilmartin 2004, 282); however, as the growing scholarship of popular geopolitics demonstrates, this relationship is increasingly inverted, whereby the images we see are translated into how we experience and understand the world around us. While the anticipatory capacity of popular culture remains a topic of some debate, it is abundantly clear that media, with its ability to generate ‘affect-saturated memory’ (Ó Tuathail 2003, 858), prepares citizenries for potential outcomes, including geopolitical ones. More than just representing and predicting political outcomes, television series have been recognised as making meaningful contributions to how space and place are seen, experienced, and understood. Importantly, as television series – especially the sorts of geopolitically inflected dramas investigated herein – cross borders, they complicate, comment on, and increasingly challenge established geopolitical visions, orders, and codes (Dijkink 1996). Via exposure to these new narratives, which provide the viewer with choice in what sorts of ‘fictional space-times' they want to affectively engage with (Tischleder 2017, 121), we are seeing important ramifications for world politics.

As such, the increasingly popular ‘northern’ style of dramatic television – whether in the form of rather straightforward crime dramas like The Killing or more geopolitically inclined series such as Occupied – is making an impact around the globe as a de facto extension of the so-called Nordic model of good governance, social and gender equality, and the provision of welfare to its population (see Marklund 2017). Counter-intuitively, it is through a medium that is drenched in blood and strewn with corpses that such influence is being wielded, playing on what historian Michael Saler calls ironic imagination, a form of ‘double consciousness' that allows for embracing multiple worlds and multiple truths without ‘losing sight of the real world’ (Saler 2012, 14). Going beyond the genre of noir crime fiction, transnational television studies scholars increasingly recognise Nordic programming as a paragon of high quality television, and one with an enormous global reach that has produced significant impacts that stretch far beyond its viewership of primarily cosmopolitan, niche audiences (Jensen and Jacobsen 2020). Abetted by advances in the production and distribution, particularly via transnational streaming platforms, programmes like Borgen and Skam are taking the world by storm, while also serving as exemplars of what contemporary television can and should be.

Recognising this state of affairs, the New York Times recently noted that ‘Netflix's colonization of international television continues' (Hale 2018), highlighting the company's recent decision to fund its first production in Scandinavia, the apocalyptic near-future series The Rain (2018–2020). In using such language, it is clear that the medium of television represents a new field of power in International Relations, as the images depicted, stories told, and landscapes screened help shape reality, and thus play a part in determining world politics in the twenty-first century. Moreover, the North – in its many forms, especially those associated with the Arctic – is increasingly prevalent in the global geopolitical imagination, especially via the tendency to engage in ‘spatial spectacle’ or ‘geographic dramaturgy’ (Toft Hansen and Waade 2017, 89, 182), a trend that is being emulated in other national and regional television productions. The most pressing issue of our time, climate change – alongside its concomitant outcomes including extreme weather events (i.e. hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, intense storms, etc.), extinction of species, rising sea levels, reduction in crop yields, and the displacement of peoples and disruption of their lifeways – is finding purchase in Nordic-produced popular culture, not least of which with the ecocritical series Thin Ice and Ragnarok. It is important to note that different regions possess different concerns when it comes to scripting, scaping, and scrutinising world politics on the small screen. Just as geopolitical television programming from South ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Preface
• 1 Co-constituting the world: Popular culture and geopolitics
• 2 Why Norden? Why now? A geopolitical foregrounding
• 3 Northern places, dark spaces: Norden as a realm of imagination
• 4 It's the little things: Bodies, communities, encounters
• 5 In/Out/In-between: (B)orders, liminality, and us/them
• 6 Ideology versus idylls: Neoliberalism, nationalism, and nature
• 7 Beyond Norden: The global geopolitics of a genre
• Appendix: Television and TV film series
• Index