Gender Equality and Nation Branding in the Nordic Region

Eirinn Larsen, Sigrun Marie Moss, Inger Skjelsbæk, Eirinn Larsen, Sigrun Marie Moss, Inger Skjelsbæk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367861353
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000408201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book explores how gender equality, a central part of the Nordic imaginary, is used in the political communication of Nordic states. The analyses presented move beyond conventional images and discourses of Nordic gender- and women-friendliness by critically investigating how and to what extent gender equality serves nation-branding in the Nordic region.

Nation-branding is an unescapable part of globalisation, which is a market-oriented process dominated by the West and predicated on the creation of winners and losers. Hence, efforts to strengthen the national brand or reputation of specific Nordic countries with the aid of gender equality as a political and symbolic value inevitably help to reinforce already established global hierarchies where the Nordics play the role of moral superpower. This book comprises scholars from various fields of specialisation, and provides evidence and understanding for the growing interaction between gender-equality policies and nation-branding in all five Nordic countries. It does so by exploring a variety of policy fields and issues including women's rights, foreign policy, rape and legislation, female quotas and business policies, in addition to the index industry. The rise of the global indexes has reproduced forceful images of the Nordic countries as frontrunners of gender equality, which indeed help the Nordic countries to further position themselves as 'best at being good'.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Nordic gender equality in political science, sociology, law, criminology, political psychology and history, as well as those interested in nation branding, Nordic studies and exceptionalism.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003017134, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 ‘The gender-progressive Nordics’
A matter of history

Eirinn Larsen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003017134-1

The Nordic countries have worked together for over four decades to improve gender equality in all aspects of society. Gender equality between the sexes is a condition for the success of the Nordic Model and a pillar of the modern Nordic welfare states.

(Nordic Co-operation, n.d.)

History is an important resource in the current attempt to brand the Nordics as pioneers of gender equality. The Nordic Council of Ministers, for instance, explains the success of the ‘Nordic Model’ and the ‘Nordic welfare states’ as the result of enduring Nordic collaboration on gender equality over decades. Yet evoking history to make the region shine in this way, as champions of gender equality and progressive social models, is not simply a reflection of historical developments but also involves contemporary constructions of the past. In fact, the geographical area known as Norden has no common historical meaning to those who inhabit it today. Since the nineteenth century, five distinct nations have belonged to the Nordic area. Each has its own national language, culture and historical identity, its own set of myths and heroes, stars of independence and national events to commemorate. Surely this makes it difficult to claim pan-Nordic ownership of a value such as gender equality in the way that the Nordic Council of Ministers does, on this occasion to enhance the reputation of the region as a knowledge hub.

Besides, for individual Nordic countries, the historical experience of being Nordic is not necessarily a unified memory.¹ Until the mid-twentieth century, the Nordics were more rivals than friends. While Sweden and Denmark were the monarchs, Finland, Norway and Iceland were the underdogs. This historical asymmetry also affects how history is used today to brand the Nordic nations as gender-equal. Rather than showcasing the historical legacy of the region as women-friendly, Nordic countries flash their own individual historical breakthroughs as gender-progressive states and societies. A very telling example in this respect is Finland, which, according to the governmental webpage, is a pioneer of gender equality on account of its early enfranchisement of women (Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Finland, n.d. a). Under the headline ‘Finland Is a Gender Pioneer’, it is declared that ‘Finland is one of the world’s leading countries in fostering gender equality. It was the first county to grant women full political rights’ (Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Finland, n.d. b). Yet Finland’s decision to flaunt its early enfranchisement of women is far from coincidental. Women’s right to vote has been a standard of appropriate behaviour among states, and thus a symbol for the fulfilment of democratic rights in general, since the end of World War I (Towns, 2010: 119–120). This means that the nation-branding of individual Nordic states is not just situated within a historical context in which certain laws and reforms were made to better the gender rights of women and men. The national imagining of individual Nordic countries as gender pioneers is also done by evoking a past that aims to favour them globally in the present. Thus, the key question is what historical times and roles individual Nordic countries currently construct for themselves when branding themselves as gender-equal nations. And, how do the current historical imaginings of the ‘gender-pioneering Nordic nations’ relate to the foreign images made of the Nordic region – and individual Nordic countries – a hundred years ago? The Nordic gender image is not entirely new, yet it remains somehow unclear how it developed and what role external actors played in the process.

To answer these questions, I draw upon literature that understands history and the use of history as a contemporary process of commemoration and nation-building. Pierre Nora, for example, speaks of lieux de mémoire – that is, sites of commemoration – and argues that this process makes history stand still in accordance with the political aims and needs (of the nation) of the present (Nora and Kritzman, 1996). In this chapter, I investigate the gender progressiveness of the Nordic countries both as a contemporary historical imagining of the Nordic nations and as a foreign image first made when women’s demands for political rights intensified at the turn of the nineteenth century (Clerc and Glover, 2015: 6). The sources used are predominantly official and governmental webpages from the five major Nordic countries. In addition, historical sources and material from the international suffrage movement, represented by the International Council of Women (ICW), the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) and the Norwegian National Suffrage Association (NNSA), have been consulted.

Best at being first!

The consistent external representation of the Nordics as gender-equal is key to understanding why individual Nordic countries now turn to history in their gender-branding discourse. We know that international interest in the small Nordic countries intensifies when the annual global indexes on gender equality are released – most often with similar results: The Nordics take it all, year after year, when it comes to gender equality. So, what can be learned from them, the American weekly Forbes asked in 2018 as journalist Shelley Zalis (2018) wrote up ‘Lessons from the World’s Most Gender-Equal Countries’. Evidently, this strong and stable external image of the Nordic region makes it more than a challenge for its five different states to be recognized as individual stakeholders of gender equality. This has made history an important source of differentiation, a key element in all forms of branding.

Although the historical imagining of the gender-progressive Nordics has a foot in the real, it is predominantly a contemporary construct made to distinguish the individual Nordic state from other states. Wordings of differentiation are therefore frequently used when the Nordic countries present themselves to foreign audiences as gender pioneers today. This most often takes the form of self-assertive comparative statements, wherein the world or other continents hold the role of the laggard. Such statements follow a specific pattern that provides the imaginary of a historical frontrunner of gender rights: for example, ‘X was the first in the world to do Y’, ‘X are or were the first to Y’, or, more modestly, ‘X did Y in time’. The webpage Guide to Iceland, for instance, presents Iceland as ‘the first country in the world to grant equal inheritance rights to both men and women [in 1856]’, as well as the country that ‘had the world’s first democratically elected head of state’ (Chapman, n.d.). On the country’s official webpage, the message is similar, although the role of Iceland as a historical gender pioneer is not linked to women’s rights but to men’s rights as fathers. It states: ‘Iceland celebrated the millennium by introducing the first exclusive paternity leave in the world’ (Iceland.is, n.d.). Yet, on the official governmental page, none of these examples are mentioned. Here, the image cherished is simply that Iceland remains at the top of most global rankings of gender equality. For instance, on 18 December 2019, the story created and published by the Prime Minister’s Office was ‘Iceland Remains the Top Country on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index’ (Government of Iceland, 2019).

The second way in which history is used to enhance the credibility of the Nordics as nations with a long tradition of gender equality is by providing explanations as to why they became so gender-equal in the first place. Such use seeks to connect the countries’ historical gender progressiveness to their societal, geographical, commercial or even climatic qualities. For instance, the site Guide to Iceland turns to Iceland’s role as a seafaring nation to explain why women in old Iceland had the reputation of being strong and independent, a notion that is also supported by two of the Icelandic sagas. It elaborates:

women in Norse society could be granted a greater level of respect and freedom than their European counterparts. Women managed the finances of the household, ran the farmstead in their husband’s absence and could become wealthy landowners in widowhood. They were also protected by law from unwanted attention or violence.

(Chapman, n.d.)

However, larger historical explanations of why the Nordic countries are gender-equal do not fit well within the tight format of nation-branding. The language of branding is more about declaring and exemplifying a product’s qualities, not explaining why it possesses them. Accordingly, few of the Nordic states turn to history to explain the current situation in the way Iceland can be seen to do above. Denmark’s official webpage provides a good illustration. This page simply affirms that Denmark is a gender pioneer by stating that such a role is old news to them: ‘Women’s influence in Danish politics is nothing new. In 1924, Nina Bang became the world’s first female minister in a country with parliamentary democracy’ (Denmark.dk, n.d.).

The third use of history on Nordic country webpages addressing gender equality relates to the imagining of time and progress itself. Whereas gender-equality discourses formerly focused mostly on women and sometimes men, this is no longer the case. Today, gender has become something far more diverse and fluid than it was previously. Consequently, measuring gender equality means taking into account a range of different issues, such as the rights of fathers and previously marginalized sexual groups, most often referred to under the umbrella term ‘LGBTQ’. Historical landmarks are mentioned, however. For example, on the Norwegian governmental webpage, for instance, it is stated that in Norway a ‘Common Marriage Act entered into force on 1 January 2009. This Act gives all lesbian and gay persons the right to enter into marriage irrespective of sexual orientation’ (Government.no, 2019). In this way, the achievement of gender equality is not presented as a linear development, running from zero to advanced according to one dimension only, but a multi-dimensional undertaking. This supports the image that Norway, in this case, remains on top of all things related to gender.

The gender binary man–woman still dominates in Nordic gender-branding discourse. This is an aspect that will be elaborated on further in several chapters of this book, including in relation to the disparity between Nordic images made for foreign audiences and those produced for domestic political purposes (Danielsen and Larsen, 2015). Regardless of this, a very striking feature of the ways in which history helps to brand the Nordic states as gender-equal, however, is the degree of conformity seen in this area. All five Nordic countries highlight their historical legacy as gender-equal nations by flashing that they were the first to commit to the new political value of gender equality in areas that range from politics and welfare to equalized economic rights for women and civil rights for gays and lesbians, etc. As a result, the main slogan within Nordic gender-branding discourse would appear to be that the Nordics are best at gender equality because they were the first to adopt current standards of gender equality. To maintain this image, however, the Nordic countries have had to mobilize or evoke remarkably different pasts.

Different pasts evoked

History helps countries to distinguish themselves from others, at the same time as its use for purposes such as nation-branding closely relates to the nation as an imagined community. This means that the pasts adduced when the Nordic countries communicate their gender-friendliness are never random but are instead used in various processes of nation-building and nation-branding. We have already mentioned Finland, which on its governmental webpage brands itself as the first country in the world to introduce equal political rights for men and women. This historical imagining of the Finnish nation-state is related to a 1906 amendment that was made possible because Russia, to whose empire Finland then belonged, was going through a time of revolution. Finland’s role or self-imagining as a pioneer of female suffrage is thus closely related to the Finnish struggle for national independence from Russian control: universal suffrage was introduced in the same year that the country gained home rule. Yet the current use of history does not stop there. On the same webpage, Finland is presented as a country in which the struggle for gender equality began even prior to the birth of the new Finnish nation-state. The webpage states: ‘A move towards the equality of women and men was taken in Finland long before the country became independent. In the 1850s, Finnish women activists read John Stuart Mill and spoke about the importance of education for girls’ (Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Finland, n.d. b). This historical representation of Finland is interesting for several reasons. First, it illustrates that the struggles for national independence and women’s rights coincided in Finland (Hagemann, 2009; Blom, 2012: 611; Sulkunen, 2015: 94–96). The emancipation of women thus became a more integrated part of the Finnish national memory simply because it overlapped with the country’s liberation from Russian power. Second, the image produced of Finland as an early mover on women’s issues overrules the historical facts referred to in the actual branding text. One major anachronism is that Mill’s book The Subjection of Women was first published in 1869, not in the 1850s. Of course, Mill published his On Liberty in 1854, which later was referred to both by supporters and opponents of women’s liberation. However, this book did not explicitly address the issue of women’s liberation in the way that his later book did, which sparked the first explosion of the women’s movement in many countries. Hence, to argue that Finnish women were reading Mill and discussing the importance of educating girls in the 1850s is probably not historically correct. In nation-branding discourses, however, the specific serves the general, not the other way around, and the historically accurate gives way to how the nation is being imagined now. In fact, it is the delicate combination of being sufficiently specific to be trustworthy and general enough to get the quality of the nation across that characterizes the use of history in Nordic gender-branding discourses.

The Norwegian example is illuminating in this respect. According to the webpage of the Norwegian government, Norway’s pioneering role as a gender-equal country can be communicated simply by declaration. The webpage states: ‘Norway has a long tradition of working for women’s rights and gender equality’ (Government.no, 2020a). What this tradition consists of, however, is more unclear. Notably, when former Norwegian foreign minister Børge Brende launched an international plan for women’s rights in front of a national audience in 2016, he also justified this without explaining how Norway had become a historical pioneer of gender equality. Brende simply stated that ‘Norway is a forerunner of gender equality and this legitimacy gives us the opportunity to take a lead, globally…. Norway is a gender superpower’ (Van...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 ‘The gender-progressive Nordics’: A matter of history
• 2 Variations on shared themes: Branding the Nordics as gender equal
• 3 Applying the brand or not? Challenges of Nordicity and gender equality in Scandinavian diplomacy
• 4 Keeping Sweden on top: Rape and legal innovation as nation-branding
• 5 Trouble in paradise? Icelandic gender-equality imaginaries, national rebranding and international reification
• 6 Protecting the brand? The hesitant incorporation of gender equality in the peace nation
• 7 A useful tool? Images of the Nordics in Swiss quota debates
• 8 Silenced at the border: Norwegian gender-equality policies in national branding
• 9 Not so exceptional after all? Nordic gender equality and controversies linked to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
• 10 Creating gender exceptionalism: The role of global indexes
• Afterword: Gendering the brand?
• Index