Scandinavism
A perspective on a
failed nationalism ca. 1838-1845
Master’s
thesis
Nicolai Sichlau
European Ethnology, Saxo Institute, Faculty of
Humanities, Copenhagen University 2009
In the mid
1830s, Scandinavism emerged on the European stage
amongst its other nationalistic siblings, in Germany, Italy, and Poland. The
Scandinavian movement was by and large isomorphic to these nationalistic and
liberal unification movements for autonomy, and constitutional rights, on the
basis of common culture and common language. And much like these its was mainly promoted by the academic and liberal
Avant-garde bourgeois, idealistically invoking the common old Norse Viking
identity perceived to be an age of freedom, as a means of politically opposing absolutism, and argue
for a Scandinavian union of Denmark and Sweden-Norway.
The
sway Scandinavism
held over the young academics, is quite tantalizing given the fact that Danish
Swedish relations from the late middle-ages up to 1813 was more or less a state of perpetual war, resulting in a deep
seated hate and distrust between the populace of the two kingdoms. Amongst other things this thesis sets out to understand the logic behind the development of this rapid
metamorphosis from arch enemies to a union of the two brethren-nations.
But on a more general level the thesis takes a
“natives point of view” on the movement, and understand it on its own terms.
The theses applies a combination of the
Ethnosymbolic approach as a comparative framework to
understand nationalism and New Cultural
History to establish what Robert Darnton calls a “social history of ideas” to
gain a deeper understanding of how the ideas of the ethnic nation travelled,
and was established as a new “order in the world”. It is an investigation of
how the ideas of the “national” was sought to constitute a joint Scandinavian
identity, on a very concrete level in time and space. Furthermore I seek to
understand why Scandinavism appealed widely to the academic
bourgeois as a structure of
meaning, perceived by them to end the calamity’s of their time. I also
criticise the major scholarly works of
nationalism, for having a strong Anglo-Saxon- French bias when looking for
empirical ground to prove their hypothesis. The “Sturm und Drang” movement, and major German liberal
thinkers like Turnvater
Jahn, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ernst Moritz Arndt, Friedrich Schiller, Ludwig Börne, J.G. Fichte and Hegel, are largely ignored in the
influential works of Bennedict Anderson, Ernst Gellner, Erik Hobsbawm, and
Anthony D. Smith. This is quite surprising given the fact that German thinkers
were read extensively in Northern Europe, the Slavic countries including
Russia, Sweden and Denmark, these where all countries where German was the
lingua franca of the educated bourgeois. I suspect though this ethnocentric lacuna to be caused by a
linguistic barrier.
In conclusion I argue that the Heglian
understanding of history, is pivotal to understanding Skandinavism, and that the entire movements argumentation and
reasoning for its relevance is tied up to a Hegelian teleological understanding of history. The Swedish
and Danish Scandinavianists seek reconciliation in
their newfound brotherhood. - Not by forgetting, (as Ernst Renan is famously know to have remarked); their
former mutual animosity but by remembering it, do they take comfort in the
future hopes of their utopian dreams. Seeing the former animosity as the
workings of the metaphysical “Weltgeist” proves to the Scandinavianists
that their miraculous reunification is the synthesis leading towards man´s
freedom (the perceived goal of the “Weltgeist”). The
enthusiasm over the Hegelian system of thought
is enormous in the period, and the systems sway, and the quasi-religious
pathos surrounding history and the “weltgeist” in it,
is in my opinion what gives the ideas of
the national, their sanctimonious aura or essence, and thus explains the
enthusiasm and momentum of the newly awakened nationalist. From my admittedly
narrow point of view, the lack of understand or interest in Hegelian
philosophy, when dealing with the idealistic/romantic nationalistic movements
of the Nineteenth century, seems almost grotesque.