Nordic Peace Revisited

The idea of ‘Nordic peace’ has become something of a rhetorical commonplace in both political and scholarly discourse, but it is surprisingly little explored by critical research. This chapter revisits the literature, identifying several stages in the development of Nordic peace, starting from its role during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of small-state internationalism, through the Cold War period when the Nordic countries occupied a special mediating role between both the West and the East, and the global North and South. While notions of Nordic distinction from Europe broke down with end of the Cold War, more recent developments and, ultimately, the Russian war on Ukraine has challenged established notions of Nordic peace, both with regard to regional security and global humanitarianism. Instead of declaring Nordic peace as empty rhetoric, the chapter investigates how the notion has been reinvented and redescribed to serve new purposes in an era of increased tensions.