Fear and Survival in Scandinavia, 1809-1905
Morten Nordhagen Ottosen, Professor of History, Norwegian Defence University College at the Military Academy Campus
“Moods and relations can always change”, wrote an officer of the Swedish General Staff to a Norwegian colleague in May 1903, but “what certainly does not change is the danger that equally threatens Sweden and Norway from the neighbour in the east”. At this point, the conflict-ridden Swedish-Norwegian union, established in 1814, was entering its final stages. But even the most ardent opponents of the union acknowledged its security value for both countries. Indeed, its geostrategic value had very much been the union’s raison d’être from the outset. To Swedes reeling from the loss of Finland to Russia in 1809, and the consequent move of the Russian border (and guns) virtually to Stockholm’s skerries, the union with Norway offered security by virtue of its geography and the combined resources of the two kingdoms. The union’s creator, Crown Prince Charles John (the former French Marshal Jean Baptiste Bernadotte) styled the union as a Scandinavian peninsula, on which Swedes and Norwegians would eventually merge into a single nation.
This never happened, but their union still ensured that the united kingdoms of Sweden-Norway could claim to be above the ‘threshold’ perceived by many as a precondition for the viability of nations – that is, possessing sufficient political, military, economic and cultural resources to constitute viable nation-states. The ‘threshold principle’, as Eric Hobsbawm has termed it, appears to have been highly influential on national thought in nineteenth century Europe, although its significance has hitherto not been sufficiently studied and gauged. Its influence is certainly highly evident in the Scandinavian case, although Scandinavian historiography has mainly been preoccupied with the individual Scandinavian nation-states, no doubt as a consequence of their development following crucial events such as Denmark’s defeat and loss of territory to Prussia and Austria in 1864 and the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union in 1905. However, to many contemporaries, nineteenth century Scandinavian nationhood was more a question of uniting the Scandinavian countries than keeping them apart. Fear of national annihilation in the face of foreign expansion bore much influence on Scandinavianist ideas, and this fear was in no small part borne out of defeats. Much like the defeat to Russia in 1809 was a trauma to the Swedes, even though it was tempered by the acquisition of Norway in 1814, the very loss of Norway that year was a trauma to the Danes that seemed to confirm that Denmark was on a downward spiral, which made the prospect of losing the duchy of Schleswig to Germany even more daunting and thus made their conflict even more pressing. In a slightly ironic twist, the Norwegians were able to conceive the events of 1814 as a national victory that provided them with sufficient institutional leverage to resist Swedish attempts at national amalgamation, but at the same time this goes to show that fear of national annihilation was also very much part of contemporary Norwegian perceptions.
Whereas Danish adherents to Scandinavianist ideology for obvious reasons looked to unite with Sweden and Norway to counter the threat of German expansion, several Swedes and Norwegians agreed that the union of all of Scandinavia was a prerequisite for national survival against looming threats of foreign expansion. In this respect the apparent threat of Russian expansionism, for which Pan-Slavism was seen as a vehicle, made a deep impression on many Scandinavians throughout the nineteenth century. In 1870, Prince Oscar (soon to be King Oscar II) of Sweden and Norway confided his fears to a leading Danish politician friend that, “In my opinion the European civilization finds itself in a crisis. The Migration Period is not over; it continues like an undertow, from east to west. The Slavic race possesses the expansive force of youth”.
Oscar’s ardent Scandinavianism was driven by both the threshold principle and a Darwinist perception of a struggle between nations, races and civilizations – a struggle between living and dying states that would eventually determine hierarchies and demises. Thus, whereas Denmark’s defeat in 1864 – a national trauma by itself – was ultimately followed by an end to Scandinavinist unification efforts and an introspective turn in Danish national thought, the Darwinist discourse of living and dying states and the threshold principle serving as a line of demarcation between the two, as it were, remained very much a part of the vocabulary of those striving to preserve the Swedish-Norwegian union, which from the 1870s came under increasing pressure from Norwegian secessionism. Yet, the ultimate transformation in 1864-1905 of Denmark, Sweden and Norway into the nation-states we know today was not an inevitable course of events. Perhaps more importantly, it should not cloud or belittle the assumptions of contemporaries who genuinely believed that Scandinavian unification – it being of two, three or four states (Finland being the fourth) – was the only means to prevent the kind of defeats that could jeopardize their national survival. Thus, whereas the Danes preferred not to rock the boat following their defeat in 1864 and German unification in 1871, Swedes and Norwegians engaged in vivid exchanges over their national futures as Russia appeared to some to be bent on expanding to the west and north in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.