Julia Håkansson
PhD Candidate in History and History Didactics
Malmö University
julia.hakansson@mau.se
Victories and Defeats in the Sweden Democrats’ and the Danish People’s Party’s Historical Narratives
This paper analyzes how the two nationalist parties the Sweden Democrats and the Danish People's Party use gains and losses in their historical narratives during the period 1988–2022.
Historical wins and losses, victories and defeats, have great potential to become key symbols within a historical culture in nationalist narratives. Nationalists look to the past to look for evidence of the existence of both a national character and a continuity-bearing community within the nation. A victory on a battlefield, as well as the management of a loss of a land area by the remaining population, can symbolize manifestations of a national sentiment.
A discussion of how the Sweden Democrats and the Danish People's Party connect the past with the present and the future is continuously conducted in this paper, as the events that are considered to have strengthened national feeling are consistently placed in relation to threats to the national culture of the present. This is how history becomes important for the parties' meaning-making in relation to wins and losses. The historical victories and defeats discussed in this paper are analyzed with regards to which historical cultural traditions the parties' historical interpretations can be traced.
The Sweden Democrats and the Danish People's Party relate in different ways to historical gains and losses of people and land. In the Sweden Democrats' historical narratives, the goal is above all to keep the national culture intact. In the historical narratives of the Danish People's Party, the nation has to deal with substantial losses of both people and land. The Sweden Democrats pay tribute to events and people from the Swedish great power era and Swedish fighters in the Finnish Winter War 1939–1940. A shift from the former to the latter takes place around the turn of the millennium in 2000. The Danish People's Party draws particular attention to the fact that Denmark lost the Scanian provinces in the 1600s and Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg in the 1800s. The Danish People's Party also often refers to Germany's occupation of Denmark during World War II.
The gains and losses that occur in the Sweden Democrats' historical narratives change over time. The contextualization of historical culture shows that it probably has to do with which ideological movements some of the key symbols within their historical culture risk being associated with. When the Sweden Democrats change ideologically, they no longer want to risk being associated with the Great Power era, which has been referred to extensively within the Swedish far right. The Danish People's Party, due to widespread defeat nationalism in Danish historical culture, can use well-established key symbols of historical culture without risking such connotations. In their national context, however, they stand out with their references to the loss of the Scanian landscapes, which are not usually touched upon to a large extent in Danish historical culture, compared to other historical losses. In addition to the fact that the Sweden Democrats are primarily based on wins and the Danish People's Party almost exclusively relates to losses, an obvious difference between the parties is that the Danish People's Party makes greater use of physical memorial sites in its references to key symbols within their historical culture.
Every utterance of a historical account assumes that there are events and people from the past that are more important than others. The elements of gains and losses – and the silences that prevail about it – in the parties' historical narratives say something about how history is used to reinforce a sense of belonging within their ideologies. This paper therefore also examines when something can be said about what silences arise regarding gains and losses in the parties' historical narratives.