Scandinavia After Napoleon

Book excerpt: This is a stunning book about Scandinavianism, based on huge archival work, demonstrating that a unification nationalism was close to the success enjoyed by Italy and Germany. Another consideration deserves stark highlighting: this is the most exciting book in nationalism studies to have appeared for many years, offering a novel realist theory of nationalism that destroys many taken for granted assumptions, about the nineteenth century for surebut with implications quite as much for present circumstances as well. -John A. Hall, Professor emeritus, McGill This book explores the intellectual grounds of Scandinavianist ideology and its political development into a national unification movement. Denmark, Norway and Sweden were nearly annihilated during the Napoleonic Wars. The lesson learned was that survival was a matter of size. Whereas their union of 1814 offered Sweden-Norway geostrategic security tempered by fear of Russia, Denmark was the biggest territorial loser of the Napoleonic Wars and faced separatism connected to German nationalism in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. This evolved into a national conflict that threatened Denmarks survival as a nation. Meanwhile, a new generation of Danes, Swedes and Norwegians had come to regard kindred language, culture and religion as a case for Scandinavian union that could offer protection against Russia and Germany. When the European revolutions of 1848 unleashed the First Schleswig War, the influence of Scandinavianism was such that it nearly turned into a Scandinavian war of unification. Rasmus Glenthj is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern Denmark. Morten Nordhagen Ottosen is Professor of History at the Norwegian Defence University College.