The Anti-Scandinavianists

The term ‘anti-Scandinavianism’ covered not only Norwegians, Swedes and Danes who were opposed to any form of Scandinavianism but also those cultural and practical Scandinavianists who wanted nothing beyond a closer intellectual and practical collaboration. Any doubt about this can be dismissed simply by taking a look at the public debate. On 22 February 1859, ‘political Scandinavianism’ was ripped to shreds in the conservative Danish newspaper Flyveposten. Its ideology was full of ‘fanatical fantasy’, ‘ingenuousness’ and ‘grand, fluffy phrases’ and it was, according to the newspaper, ‘to our shame and disservice’. Nonetheless, the author had no objections to a ‘natural Scandinavianism’ based on a sympathy between the three nations and closer cultural bonds. We will use this contemporary understanding of anti-Scandinavianism, defined as an objection to any political unification of Scandinavia, as an analytical term encapsulating a more general division in European nationalisms between political and cultural (pan)nationalism.Footnote 1

The boundary between culture and politics was not reserved for Scandinavianism. It was a commonplace phenomenon in European nationalism of the time, where cultural nationalism did not always go hand in hand with political loyalty. In Denmark this was particularly true of the older generation of cultural nationalists. Supporters of the Danish-German absolute monarchy regarded the Schleswig war as a civil war between fellow citizens. Like the prominent Italian cultural nationalist Niccolò Tommaseo, they were ‘nationalists who feared the nation’ in its political form. European cultural nationalists were typically conservatives who, like the German historian Leopold von Ranke, believed that the nation’s cultural unity was sufficient, while its political unity was superfluous.Footnote 2

The political picture was further muddied by two factors. The first was the large middle group of Scandinavians who were neither strong supporters nor opponents of political Scandinavianism. The second was that political positions are not built on stone but on shifting sands. Prominent Scandinavian politicians, academics and writers altered their view of political Scandinavianism, often more than once. The most significant change can be seen in the Swede, Johan August Gripenstedt. As newly appointed minister in 1848, he worked to persuade the Swedes to go to war in support of Denmark, while in 1863 he prevented an alliance between Sweden-Norway and Denmark, and in 1864 played his part in ensuring the breakdown of negotiations for a union.Footnote 3

Norwegians, such as the writer Henrik Wergeland, were also capable of changing their view, while the most striking Danish example is D.G. Monrad. The father of the Danish constitution and president of the council in 1864 was a political barometer that swung between the unitary state, the nation state and a united Scandinavia.Footnote 4

Fear of Change

While political Scandinavianism was fearful of what the future would bring if Scandinavia was not unified, what brought anti-Scandinavianists under the same banner was a fear of political Scandinavianism. Some anti-Scandinavianists were frightened of what the unification of Scandinavia would lead to for their individual nations, while others were afraid of foreign policy activism, which they associated with Scandinavianist policies. Although anti-Scandinavianism covered the entire political spectrum, it was a form of conservatism that united different factions. Anti-Scandinavianism was a defence of the status quo, of the Danish unitary state and the Swedish-Norwegian union. Some supporters of the unitary state and Swedish-Norwegian unionists worked towards a reformation of the two polities, while other anti-Scandinavianists wanted to preserve the polities in aspic. This was particularly true of those who supported absolutism in the unitary state and of those independent Norwegian nationalists who feared that change would lead to loss of independence. Swedish anti-Scandinavianists, on the other hand, were fearful that a union of the three states would either threaten Sweden’s dominance or undermine Swedish independence. They predicted that the Norwegians and the Danes would be able to gang up together against the Swedes.

This occasionally found expression in a form of Swedish nationalism that teetered between Swedish nationalism, anti-Scandinavianism and a particular form of Scandinavianism in which a union would be conditional on the Schleswig question being solved and on a federation being created that, contrary to the existing Sweden-Norway union, would serve Swedish interests. An extreme example of an imperialist Swedish approach was the politician, writer and trouble-maker Magnus Jacob Crusenstolpe. He was convinced that a unification of Scandinavia would fail, like the Swedish-Norwegian union, but he wanted to see the Danish islands incorporated into Sweden. Jutland, on the other hand, Crusenstolpe would not touch with a bargepole, since that would simply involve Sweden in German politics. As we have seen, such views were already present during the Napoleonic Wars, but just as importantly they can be found in men like Ludvig Manderström. Sweden-Norway’s foreign minister made genuine efforts to help Denmark, but this did not prevent him from wondering what would happen if the unitary state collapsed. If that happened, Sweden would be forced to ensure that it held Zealand as a buffer zone, so that Sweden-Norway would not be squeezed between a future united and expansive Germany and a reactionary Russian arch-enemy. Hence, fear of the consequence of Danish Unitary States collapse is vital in understanding Swedish-Norwegian foreign policy. As even the possession of Zealand by Sweden was seen by many as insufficient to protect Sweden and Norway’s security interest, this fear could push some politicians on the Scandinavian peninsula towards accepting political Scandinavianism as a necessity.Footnote 5

Dividing up the Danish state was discussed both publicly and privately in Sweden, Prussia and Great Britain. This generated fear in Danes and Norwegians, who, whatever their views on Scandinavianism, shared a fear of a Greater Sweden. This Swedish version of anti-Scandinavianism bolstered anti-Scandinavianism in Norway and particularly in Denmark—especially among supporters of the unitary state. Their political worldview resembled pre-nationalist state patriotism. For Danish supporters of absolute monarchy, their natural fatherland was the kingdom of Denmark; the same was true for its supporters in the duchies, whether they saw their natural fatherland as Schleswig-Holstein, Schleswig or Holstein. The unitary state was their common fatherland as citizens. It was united under a common royal house, which made loyalty towards the dynasty a crucial factor for unitary statists. They were just as frightened of political Scandinavianism in the kingdom as they were of the Schleswig-Holstein separatist movement in the duchies. Their anti-Scandinavianism was reinforced by a traditional mistrust of Swedes, who for centuries had been their arch-enemy—in the same way as mistrust of the ancient Danish enemy could still be found among sections of the Swedish aristocracy and the peasantry.Footnote 6

Political Rhetoric

Politics are martial arts in rhetorical form. Reasoned arguments were, of course, brought to play, but both Scandinavianists and anti-Scandinavianists consistently attacked their opponents’ character, motives and idiosyncrasies. The terms ‘anti-Scandinavianism’ and ‘anti-Scandinavianism’ were invented by political Scandinavianists, who wanted to expose their opponents’ lack of Scandinavian solidarity. In Denmark, Scandinavianists even dubbed united statists ‘closet Germans’ and spoke of a reactionary German-Danish ‘bastard aristocracy’. Anti-Scandinavianists returned fire in equal measure. They called political Scandinavianists ‘ultra-Scandinavianists’, while Danish united statists branded supporters of a Denmark with frontiers to the Eider ‘ultra-nationalists’ and Scandinavianists ‘closet Scandinavians’.Footnote 7

The best example of this war of rhetoric can be seen in the consistent presentation of political Scandinavianism as a utopia. ‘A beautiful dream that can never be realised’, one Swedish newspaper called it, while Danish anti-Scandinavianists accused Scandinavianists of vague and unrealistic policies that consisted of building ‘castles in the air in a cloud cuckoo mist of the future’. Danish anti-Scandinavianists claimed that Scandinavianists would neither explain what union they wanted, nor who would govern it, nor how it would legally be created. This was a lightly disguised reference to the revolutionary plans and republican tendencies that they attributed to the Scandinavianists.Footnote 8

Political Scandinavianism was portrayed as a student movement gripped by the enthusiasm, fantasy and fanatical folly of youth. ‘Scandinavian’ and ‘Scandinavia’ were tempting terms but, when it came to content, they referred to ‘nothing real’. Scandinavianism was built on ‘illusions’ and the ‘politics of poetry’ adopted at ‘feasts and festive gatherings’ made up of ‘hysterical fantasists’.Footnote 9

According to their opponents, Scandinavianists suffered from an impatient compulsion to make their delusions into a reality, playing hard and fast with reality as they pursued their audacious dreams. They were prepared to tear existing society down so that a new mythical fairyland could flower in its place. This enabled them to parade political Scandinavianism as romanticism in political clothing. The utopian visions of literature here were turned into ‘feverish fantasies’ about the future.Footnote 10

By presenting Scandinavianists as utopian dreamers, their opponents undermined their credibility. Scandinavianism was turned into the antithesis of pragmatism and realism, and Scandinavianists into idealist daydreamers. Even though there might be a grain of truth in such accusations, taken as a whole they were just as misleading as Scandinavianists’ portrayal of united statists as ‘closet Germans’ and traitors. The difference is that, while the accusations made against anti-Scandinavianists have been consigned to oblivion, the accusations made by them have been elevated into a scientific truth by later historians.

Scandinavianist student gatherings were full of song, poetry, speeches and toasts, which romantically cultivated a common past and dreams of a shared future. But Scandinavianism was no different from all other European nationalist movements or from contemporary political ideologies, all of which, across the political spectrum, were coloured by romanticism. Furthermore, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the distinction between romanticism and rationalism was blurred, as, for example, with Carl von Clausewitz.Footnote 11

Just as important is the convenient neglect of three factors in the critique of Scandinavianism. Firstly, romanticism did not constitute a distinction between left and right in politics. There were many prominent romantics among the anti-Scandinavianists, such as the Norwegian Henrik Wergeland and the Danish physicist, H.C. Ørsted. Secondly, political Scandinavianism was not the product solely of German romanticism and idealism but also of Franco-British empiricism, which increasingly moulded the movement after 1850. Anti-Scandinavianists and the majority of historians have overlooked developments within the movement and the fact that, politically, Scandinavianism was built more around foreign policy realism such as we have seen in the threshold principle than it was around idealism.Footnote 12

Thirdly, anti-Scandinavianist portrayals of Scandinavianists as ‘students’ or ‘political dreamers’ presents problems. This narrative was rejected by Scandinavianists as early as in the 1840s. They did not deny that many of them were young, but in their counter-narrative, this meant simply that they were ‘men of the future’. While artists played a central role in cultural Scandinavianism, political Scandinavianism was made up of a core of young academics, officials, lawyers, journalists and sections of the bourgeoisie—exactly as was the case with nationalist political movements across Europe. Just as importantly, they insisted that their political vision was not built around poetry. ‘These opinions are not poetic, and I have never seen them expressed in verse,’ wrote Ludvig Kristensen Daa in 1849. For him, political Scandinavianism was a choice made for sober and solid reasons.Footnote 13

This in itself does not mean that the anti-Scandinavianists were mistaken or that the master narrative is wrong. There were sound arguments against political Scandinavianism, but there is an overlap between the arguments and the rhetoric used by the anti-Scandinavianists and the reasoning and the turns of phrase employed by historians to write off the realism behind political Scandinavianism. It is evident that many Scandinavian historians have taken on board the rhetoric and the criticism of the anti-Scandinavianists and turned the case presented by one side of a political debate into a factual scientific account. This means that there is good reason to examine both in greater depth. The remainder of this chapter, therefore, deals with the more specific reasons that led the anti-Scandinavianists—and the majority of historians since—to claim that political Scandinavianism was doomed to fail. To weigh up the strength of the arguments, this assessment will be discussed in a contemporary context and refer to Scandinavianists’ defence and to nationalist unification movements in Germany and Italy. By comparing the problems that faced Scandinavianism with the similar challenges faced by two successful nationalist movements, it will be easier to determine whether political Scandinavianism was truly utopian.

A Hazy Utopian?

The most consistent accusation made against Scandinavianism was that its politics were hazy. What state would the Scandinavianists establish? How would they create it? And who would decide? If we read all the speeches and toasts made at the student gatherings, we can easily form the impression that the anti-Scandinavianists were right. It was rare for clear political aims to be voiced on such occasions, and when it happened they were couched in loose language. But before we accept the master narrative, we need to put this criticism into its context in time and space.Footnote 14

It is true that the Scandinavianists did not clarify their aims in the 1830s and 1840s, while a whole host of contradictory plans were being publicly debated during the 1850s and 1860s. However, there are several reasons for political Scandinavianists rarely speaking publicly about their aims before 1848. A Scandinavian union placed a question mark both over the Danish unitary state and over its form of government, which would not have been acceptable either to Frederick VI or to Christian VIII. Even though Scandinavianism did not necessarily present a threat to the Crown in Sweden and Norway, Charles John was an opponent of a union, while Oscar I’s views were unknown. Executive power lay in the hands of the king, and this made anyone seeking public office wary. On top of this, caution had to be exercised in respect of Russia, which kept a watchful eye on Scandinavian public affairs and protested to the government of the three kingdoms at the slightest hint of political Scandinavianism.Footnote 15

Respect for powerful political opponents inside and outside Scandinavia meant that within the countries’ borders Scandinavianists weighed extremely carefully any words they spoke in public. By as early as the 1830s, the majority of Scandinavianists had agreed to place a Bernadotte on the Danish throne when the Oldenburg royal house died out with Crown Prince Frederick (king Frederick VII from 1848). Until the middle of the 1850s, this was rarely expressed in writing anywhere except in private letters or foreign newspapers, and even there Scandinavianists were reluctant to write about how the union would be created. This was on account of their strategy, which involved a change in the royal succession that had been introduced in Denmark after the First Schleswig War. This we will return to. The point here is that the Scandinavianists’ plans challenged the great powers and the European order, involved the dissolution of the unitary state, replacing absolutism in Denmark and could be linked to the risk of a major war.

It is clear that this strategy was an open secret, since the anti-Scandinavianists pointed a finger at the Scandinavianists for their intention to alter the royal succession and pursue an activist foreign policy. Seen in this light, it can be difficult to claim that their means were hazy. In other words, historians have believed anti-Scandinavianist spin and failed to see that, for strategy reasons, Scandinavianists were forced to be publicly reticent about the means to achieve their ends.

When it came to their aims, proposals for a future Scandinavia aired in public debate after the Crimean War ranged from a personal union, to a confederation, to a federation, to a unitary state. In that sense, the aims of the Scandinavianists were hazy. But some of these ideas were more serious than others. That of a unitary state, for example, was a marginal idea, while the idea of a federation dominated the debate. The idea of its structure can already be seen in Norway in the 1820s and in the 1850s was expressed in far from hazy terms in Swedish writings close to the Swedish and Norwegian courts.

Common to them all was the wish for a federal state. Each constituent state was to have its own constitution, government and parliament, which would ensure the nation’s internal autonomy, while the federation secured its outer independence. The framework for the federation would be determined by a federal constitution. Matters of common concern for all the states should be determined in a federal capital. Most Scandinavianists favoured Gothenburg due to the city’s central geographical position, but Stockholm and Copenhagen were also mentioned. This would be the home of the federal parliament, the federal government and the sovereign ruler of the union.Footnote 16

A federal state was ideal for leading Scandinavianists due to their views on independence. No state or nation was entirely independent, but large states had a greater degree of independence than those that were smaller. By surrendering some part of their sovereignty to a union of closely related people, they would ensure their independence in relation to the rest of the world while preserving as much as possible internally. This was, therefore, the model that formed the basis for all negotiations about a Scandinavian union between Danish politicians and the Swedish-Norwegian monarchy from the mid-1850s and onwards.Footnote 17

The goal of leading Scandinavianists to create a united Scandinavia underwent surprisingly few changes over these 30 years. In this, Scandinavianism showed itself to be significantly different from movements for unification in Germany and Italy. There were serious differences among German nationalists about the extent to which Germany should be unified and whether they should reform the existing German Confederation, create a federal state or a unitary state, and whether the project should be driven forward by Austria, Prussia, the medium-sized states in concert or by the German people. And if they introduced a republic or a monarchy, who would wear the imperial crown? And how would a constitution be put together? All these problems ended up being resolved, but it was far from clear at the time whether this would happen, or how.Footnote 18

The same was the case in Italy, only even more so. Italian nationalists disagreed about whether the nation should be united under the pope, the King of Piemont or a president, whether their form of government should be monarchic, parliamentary, republican or technocratic, or whether Italy should be a centralist unitary state, a federal state or a loose union under the control of Austria. Should there in the first instance be a unification of northern Italy and Piemont? Or should the entire peninsula be unified as one? And where should frontiers be drawn with France, Switzerland and the Austrian empire? Such questions caused far greater divisions among ‘Italians’ than there were among political Scandinavianists.Footnote 19

Divisions and Opposition

Both anti-Scandinavianists and historians have subsequently claimed that internal opposition in Scandinavia and divisions in the movement made it impossible to achieve its ends. Not all Danish nationalists were Scandinavianists, and among Scandinavianists not all spoke with one voice. Just as importantly, the majority of conservatives and a minority of peasant sympathisers supported the unitary state.Footnote 20

In Sweden and Norway, Scandinavianism was less firmly rooted. Many Swedes and Norwegians opposed Denmark’s incorporation into the Swedish-Norwegian union, while others demanded that Denmark should dispose of Holstein first. The countries were divided, and even among Swedish and Norwegian Scandinavianists there were many who were not prepared to go to war for a Danish Schleswig. Another equally important discussion point was what Danish membership would mean for the existing union.Footnote 21

At the same time, aging anti-Scandinavianists such as Christian Molbech emphasised that the movement consisted of nothing more than a few ‘youthful politicians’ but was not made up of the common people. This perception has been incorporated into the master narrative. After the defeat of political Scandinavianism in 1864, even the Scandinavianists concluded that greater popular support was necessary. Anti-Scandinavianists and Scandinavianists found themselves in agreement, therefore, that political Scandinavianism was elitist. But how many political Scandinavianists were there, in fact?Footnote 22

The question has not so far been investigated, and it is difficult to provide a precise answer. The best way may be to look more closely at the attendance at gatherings associated at the time with Scandinavianism, at the size of Scandinavianist societies, at the number of copies printed of Scandinavianist newspapers, and at the level of support for political groups with a more or less clearly formulated Scandinavianist programme. If we look at student gatherings in 1856 and 1862, between 1200 and 2000 took part in festive events, while Scandinavianist societies in Uppsala and Copenhagen had 300 and 1400 members respectively in the mid-1840s. This is not the same as saying that all of these were political Scandinavianists. When it comes to newspapers, Fædrelandet had 2000 subscribers in Denmark while Morgenposten had 1600. Swedish newspapers, which variably embraced Scandinavianism, included Aftonbladet with 7000 subscribers, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning with 1000, while smaller newspapers such as Frihetsvännen had no more than a few hundred. In Norway, Aftenbladet had 2000 readers, while Den Constitutionelle had 1000. It is impossible to say whether all readers also subscribed to the newspapers’ ideology, but Aftonbladet was Sweden’s largest newspaper, Aftenbladet Norway’s second largest and Fædrelandet Denmark’s most influential.Footnote 23

If, on the other hand, we look at the membership numbers for the three large Scandinavian societies formed in response to the Second Schleswig War, we can say with greater certainty that their members were political Scandinavianists. Nordisk Samfund in Denmark had over 2000 members, Nordiska Nationalföreningen in Sweden over 300 members in 1865, while Skandinavisk Selskab in Norway had 350 members at its height and 428 during its lifetime. We cannot simply add the numbers from these three societies together and assume that they make up the absolute number for all political Scandinavianists. A lot of political Scandinavianists did not take part in the attempt to resurrect Scandinavianism after its failure to make good during the war of 1864.Footnote 24

These numbers need to be seen in the light of the number of inhabitants in the three states. In 1850, the population of the kingdom of Denmark (excluding the duchies, dependencies and colonies) was around 1.4 million, that of Norway 1.4 million and that of Sweden 3.5 million. Political Scandinavianists made up a very small proportion of the population of Scandinavia. The Swedish historian Åke Holmberg has accurately remarked that in Sweden they consisted of members of the government and diplomats with aristocratic names and titles, students, academics, men of letters and journalists. By contrast, there were few among the 95% of the population made up of peasants and workers. The same can be said about Norway and Denmark. There are however, six reasons why this is not sufficient to write off the movement as lacking support and elitist and therefore unrealistic.Footnote 25

Although these Scandinavian countries were among those with the broadest active suffrage in Europe, there were only few who could vote, fewer who actually did so, and among them only a minority who were politically active. From 1849, only 18% of the population of Denmark had the right to vote, and in the election of 1855 only 15% of them actually voted, corresponding to 2.7% of Danes. Electoral participation was higher in Norway averaging around 40%–50%, but only 5.21% of Norwegians were eligible to vote. This means that the politically active part of the population in these two countries was made up of around 35,000 people. Riksdag’s division into estates makes it difficult to set out a comparable number for Sweden, but after the Riksdag was reformed in 1866, 5.6% of Swedes had suffrage. As Holmberg made clear, the Scandinavianists had got hold of the segment of the population that took decisions in Swedish politics. The same can be asserted for Denmark, while the increasing influence of the peasantry on Norwegian politics muddies the picture. But even in Norway, political life was extremely elitist by today’s standards.Footnote 26

Secondly, nationalist movements in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century were not yet mass movements. Most were either in the first or the second of Miroslav Hroch’s phase of nationalism. That is the either initial phase, in which scholars, intellectuals and artists begin to regard the nation as pivotal, or the second phase in which nationalists attempt to spread the word and to mobilise the population, both culturally and politically. In Italy, around 50,000 of the peninsula’s total population of 27 million wholeheartedly supported Italian nationalism. The same can be seen in Scandinavia. According to Miroslav Hroch ‘national consciousness penetrated very slowly into the countryside’. While mass nationalism was realised in his view by the mid-century, it was not the case in the countryside until the 1870s.Footnote 27 Moreover, the nationalism found in the Norwegian cities and towns at the time was often compatible with Scandinavianism. Charles XV’s political agent, Gustaf Clemens Hebbe, could maintain that the great majority of Danes did not fundamentally care whether Denmark became part of a Nordic union or not. Mass nationalism only made an impact in earnest in Denmark in the 1880s. This prevented it, however, neither from being a powerful political factor from the 1840s nor from dominating the Danish parliament from the 1850s. If we look at parliament between 1858 and 1864, national liberals and the agrarian nationalists (e.g. the nationalist wing Denmark’s peasant party Venstre), occupied between two-thirds and three-quarters of seats. These were the very political groups that were promoting Scandinavianism. This did not mean that all politicians from these parties were political Scandinavianists—but most of their leaders were.Footnote 28

While it is possible to create a picture of the strength of Scandinavianism in the Danish parliament, it is difficult to do the same for the Norwegian Storting and almost impossible for the Swedish Riksdag of the estates. In the Norwegian Storting, the peasants were generally against Scandinavianism, while artisans, academics and civil servants were divided. In the Swedish Riksdag, the peasants and the conservatives among the noble and ecclesiastical estates were generally anti-Scandinavianist. The liberal nobility and academics in the ecclesiastical estate, on the other hand, could be professing Scandinavianists, but taken as a whole the civilian estate was most sympathetic towards Scandinavianism. It is, however, difficult to say whether one party was for or against Scandinavianism in these two countries, for there can scarcely be said to have been political parties during this period.

Thirdly, internal opposition and divisions were not peculiar to Scandinavianism. It was the norm for all nationalist movements in Europe. In the case of Germany, divisions in 1866 led to a war in the German Confederation, while almost all Italian governments actively opposed unification. If we look at Prussia and Piemont, their governments were conservative, their ministers not necessarily nationalists and their politics characterised more by territorial expansion than unification of the nation. In the case of Italy, many people regarded the unification of the peninsula either as impossible or as a distant goal for the future. When it happened in 1860, it came as a shock to the majority.Footnote 29

In the fourth place, on paper the task facing the Scandinavianists was easier. It consisted in the unification of three states and two monarchies, of which two states were already united under one dynasty and where the other was facing extinction. By comparison, the German Confederation consisted of four sovereign free cities and 35 princely states, two of them being rival great powers. They were governed by innumerable city councils, dukes, kings and an emperor who had no wish to relinquish power. Italy consisted of 15 different states, two of which were ruled by Habsburgs and one by the pope. There was no Italian confederation, and the majority of Italian rulers—including the Austrians and the Pope—were entrenched opponents of Italy’s unification. Furthermore, the northern Italian state of Piemont, which played a crucial role in the unification, had both a population and a geographical area that were a third smaller than the conservative southern Italian state of Naples.

In the fifth place, Scandinavianism’s internal challenges should not make us lose sight of who was supporting a Scandinavianist federation. This consisted of a large group of the younger elite in all three countries, the Danish government, several Swedish and Norwegian ministers, two kings of Sweden and Norway, a successor to the throne and a Danish king (Oscar I, Charles XV, Prince Oscar and Frederick VII). In contrast to both Germany and Italy, there was a period in Scandinavia (around 1855–1863) when all the monarchs involved supported a project of unification. And the Swedish government was, in principle, not averse to the idea, while several Norwegian ministers and almost half of the Norwegian Storting in 1864 supported Charles XV’s Scandinavianist war policy.Footnote 30

The sixth point that needs to be emphasised is that it was neither national liberals nor a plebiscite that created a united Germany. Quite the reverse, it was a conservative nobleman. Meanwhile, in Italy unification came about thanks to the cynical politics of the Piemontese statesman, Camillo Cavour, the daredevil (and often failed) uprisings of the republican nationalist and general Giuseppe Garibaldi, and French and Prussian alliances. The role played by international politics and major figures in the unification of Germany and Italy has an echo in the thinking of political Scandinavianists. D.G. Monrad’s explanation for Scandinavia not having been unified was that it lacked a political genius, while the Swedish diplomat Carl Wachtmeister felt that what was needed was a Scandinavianist Cavour. This reflects ‘the great man theory’ symptomatic of nineteenth-century thinking and marks a contrast to current tendencies towards ‘a history from below’. Regardless of where we stand in this debate, it can be difficult to deny that German and Italian history would have looked different without men like Bismarck, Cavour and Garibaldi.Footnote 31

Spirit of the Nation

The anti-Scandinavianists claimed that, if it had not been possible to make a union of Scandinavia function under the Kalmar union (1397–1523), it was difficult to see how it would be possible to do so in the nineteenth century. National identities and cultures have become far more developed and entrenched. As a national project, Scandinavianist efforts were doomed to failure.Footnote 32

This way of thinking was already discernible in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. At that time, the historian Christian Molbech rejected the idea of a rapprochement between Danish and Swedish languages as a threat to the nation’s ‘sacred’ language, in which lay its ‘spirit’ and the root of its independence. The conflict between Scandinavianists, who wished to integrate the three Scandinavian languages, and nationalists, who saw such identification as a threat, can be seen throughout the nineteenth century. This applied not only in Norway, where cultural nationalists such as the linguist Ivar Aasen wanted to strengthen the Norwegian national spirit by (re)creating an independent Norwegian language by fusing rural dialects, but also in Sweden. Here, there was significant opposition to the idea that Scandinavia’s largest nation should adapt its language to Danish and Norwegian. The nationalist conservative philologist Johan Erik Rydqvist railed against attempts by Scandinavianists to smuggle Danish loanwords into the Swedish language.Footnote 33

Linguistic anti-Scandinavianism derived from the same romantic nationalism that cultural Scandinavianism was based upon. In both cases, a parallel was drawn between the nation’s language, its spirit and its identity. There are not many Scandinavian historians since who could be called nationalist romantics. Nevertheless, the master narrative is built on the same arguments as those used by Molbech, Aasen and Rydqvist. The strength of the individual national cultures was an impediment that it was impossible for Scandinavianism to overcome. Furthermore, understanding and communication between the countries was limited, their differences were too great, and they did not have a state infrastructure that could support a Scandinavian culture. The challenges faced by Scandinavianism were only increased by competition between the countries’ national movements for rights to their common Old Norse antiquity and by the Norwegian nationalist democratic reaction against Scandinavianism in the latter half of the 1860s.Footnote 34

On the face of it, these objections found in the master narrative—and among anti-Scandinavianists—appear reasonable enough. On the other hand, we need to avoid methodological nationalism by taking present-day national identity and languages for granted. We should keep in mind that the Serbo-Croatian language was meet with fierce resistance from cultural conservatives and it was not until the creation of Yugoslavia that it became uncontested. Moreover, such criticism was hard for proponents of strong Scandinavianism to swallow, for they were intent on creating a common Scandinavian identity. The majority of political Scandinavianists, however, supported the weak form of Scandinavianism, which saw a common identity as an extension of national identity. It did not avoid the problems, but its challenges were not peculiar to Scandinavianism. They were common to all national movements across the continent. Few, if any, nineteenth-century nations were homogeneous, and communication between their various parts, even in the more centralised states, left much to be desired. A quarter of all Frenchmen did not speak French at the beginning of the 1860s. For French peasants, their birthplace was their homeland, and anyone born outside it was a foreigner. This was the rule rather than the exception in Europe at that time.Footnote 35

National sentiment was to be found primarily in the cities and in the country it was often reserved for the aristocracy—for example, in Poland and Hungary. Communication was also a significant obstacle in creating a sense of national community. This was not true solely of a country like France but also in Norway, where all towns had traditionally looked towards Copenhagen for their lead.Footnote 36

If we are to test the claim of anti-Scandinavianists and historians that cultural differences made it impossible to create closer Scandinavian ties, we need to set it against German and Italian unification nationalism. There is no doubt that German nationalism linguistically, culturally and historically had better foundations. The Germans had a common orthography and literature, and to a certain extent the public sphere of the German states was interlinked. In Scandinavia, there were two orthographies and the public spheres in the three countries were not as closely integrated as those of the German states. However, it is possible to argue that an imagined community was under construction. Steamers increasingly linked the three countries, intellectuals and students corresponded, read and met each other, Scandinavian societies and journals were established, work was in process to combine orthographies and established a common book market, newspapers were more attentive to developments in the other countries and regularly quoted each other, and, as part of the student gatherings, the public from the various countries gathered together to share a Scandinavian togetherness. Media events can be seen as ‘bubbles’ that only lasted for a brief moment, but, as the American sociologist Randall Collins has shown, it is in such ‘time bubbles’ that the national spirit is brought to the boil. A constant mental mobilisation is impossible, since the pot cannot constantly be kept on the boil. Awareness in the time bubble can, however, have a lasting effect on a collective identity.Footnote 37

From a historical point of view, the Kalmar union did not constitute as strong a foundation for a union as the Holy Roman Empire or the German Confederation. On the other hand, the difference between spoken languages in Scandinavia was no greater than in Germany, and the Scandinavians, unlike the Germans, were not divided in their religious faith. German national unity should not be exaggerated, as can be seen not only in the culture war of the 1880s, when Bismarck and the Protestant National Liberal Party attempted to suppress the Catholic church and the Catholic Centre Party, but in the whole of German history. For a thousand years German states had waged war against each other, and concepts such as ‘patriot’ and ‘nation’ were used about everything from city states and principalities to the German federation and a unified Germany.Footnote 38

In Italy, there had been a common language since the Middle Ages. The Napoleonic Wars had created a cultural nationalism, while nationalists created a new imagined community with the aid of newspapers, pamphlets and national societies. The national community was, however, limited to an elite, and, in contrast to Scandinavia, levels of illiteracy were high. Italians had not been united since the fall of the Roman Empire, and Italian history had staged at least as many wars as Scandinavia. Before unification, the majority of Italians did not see themselves as Italians but as Sicilians, Venetians or Piemontese.Footnote 39

In Scandinavia, there were—and are—significant differences between the various countries and regions, but they were considerably less pronounced than in Italy. The viceroy in southern Italy in 1860, Luigi Carlo Farini, believed that the area really belonged to Africa and that the Bedouins where the flower of civil virtue compared with the Neapolitans. According to Farini, virtually none of the region’s seven million citizens desired a united Italy. The truth of the statement is debatable, but shortly after unification, parts of southern Italy rose up in a rebellion that it took 120,000 soldiers and 2500 dead to put down.Footnote 40

If we look at the language, Italian was first standardised on the basis of the Tuscan dialect in the nineteenth century. A dialect, spoken by between 2% and 10% of the population. Just as important, the language was not crucial for their national identity. Some spoke an Italian dialect but did not see themselves as Italians, while a whole range of other languages and dialects were spoken on the peninsula. Religion could have been a unifying factor, but when the popes—as Italian princes—opposed unification, Italian nationalism was forced to represent opposition to orthodox Catholic faith.Footnote 41

We should not draw wide-ranging conclusions from this historical overview, but on the surface Scandinavianism would seem to have a weaker cultural basis than German nationalism, while it is not necessarily worse than that which Italy was built upon. According to the American sociologist Charles Tilly, ‘war made the state, and the state made war’.

The case of Italy makes it possible to claim the same about the nation. More generally, Tilly believed this to be true as the military revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth century forced through not only a state centralisation, but also a homogenisation of the population that shaped national identities. Whether this holds true is something that we shall return to in Chap. 9, but no matter what we should not be too hasty to conflate culture in mid-nineteenth-century Scandinavia with an unwavering mass nationalism.Footnote 42

Resources

The Scandinavianists actively used foreign models in their propaganda. This was something anti-Scandinavianists used against them. In their eyes, it was unreasonable to compare the attempt to bring Scandinavia together with events in Italy and Germany. Scandinavia’s strong state, Sweden, unlike Prussia and Piermont, did not have the necessary resources, and this is an assessment that has being adopted by historians without much reflection.Footnote 43 Two questions arise here. First, was Sweden’s material capacity to bring Scandinavia together inferior to that of Prussia in Germany or Piemont in Italy? And secondly, can the creation of new states be reduced to a question of material resources?

If we look at Prussia, the state’s political, economic and military resources far exceeded Sweden’s. Sweden did not have the same forces as in its period as a great power (1611–1718). Its finances were limited, and its army was in historically poor shape. In Prussia, however, the anti-Scandinavianist view that Sweden was too small to be behind the unification of Scandinavia was not shared. Prussia proposed in 1860 that Sweden was recognised as a great power, and the Prussians clearly saw the unification of Scandinavia under Sweden as a solution to the Danish-German conflict. If we compare Sweden with Piemont, their populations were equal in size and they were plagued by the same problems of debt. Cavour regarded both as second-class states, and both he and the Italian nationalists often compared Italy with Scandinavia and the roles of Piemont and Sweden in the two unification projects.Footnote 44

The difference was that Piemont was borrowing money for extensive rearmament. This was something Sweden only did after 1864. Northern Italian rearmament was not, however, rewarded with success on the battlefield. The unification of Italy was to a large extent the result of French and Prussian weaponry, support that was gained through diplomacy and common interests. At the same time, the failure to rearm in Sweden was not without consequences. Anti-Scandinavianists and opponents to the war in the army and the government used the lack of military resources as an argument against Swedish participation in the Crimean War and in the Second Schleswig War in 1864.Footnote 45

In the comparison with Piemont, resources in themselves cannot be seen as a decisive argument. Sweden was regarded as equivalent to Piemont both by Prussia and by Piemont itself. What differentiated them was determination and the use of their resources. Unlike Prussia, which used the German customs union to promote its political agenda, Sweden ultimately did not make sufficient use of economic integration and a common infrastructure to promote a Scandinavianist or Greater Swedish policy.Footnote 46

If we turn to Italy, former historians have correctly pointed out that Italian nationalists like Cavour placed great emphasis on the creation of a comprehensive Italian railway network. But, as in Scandinavia, financial interests in Italy did not always accord with national interests, and in both cases we find the individual states building railways for their own interests and often without coordination. A common Italian railway network only became a reality after the peninsula had been unified.Footnote 47

The Great Powers

For centuries, the Baltic played a crucial role in European politics and trade. This made the great powers extremely conscious of power relations in the region and of the control of access to the inland sea through the Danish straits. Oresund was compared at the time with the Bosphorus. After Denmark lost Scania to the Swedes in 1658, no single country had control of these strategic waters, and it is a persistent motif throughout the history of Danish foreign policy that the great powers would prevent any one power possessing both sides of Oresund. This was why, after 1660, they prevented Sweden from conquering Denmark and Denmark from reconquering Scania.Footnote 48

This acknowledged ‘truth’ of the official history is one that requires some qualification. During the Napoleonic Wars, France and Austria were open to the idea of a Scandinavian union, while Prussia, Great Britain and Russia were gambling on a Swedish annexation of Zealand. However, this has not influenced historians’ analysis of Scandinavianism’s international political potential. It has constantly been claimed that Scandinavia’s geostrategic situation at the entrance to the Baltic meant that the great powers as a whole and Russia in particular opposed any unification of Scandinavia.Footnote 49

Russia’s position in European politics and its influence and interests in Scandinavia appear to have been more ambiguous than the perception among anti-Scandinavianists and historians suggest. In their view, Scandinavianists failed to understand power relations in European politics when they believed they could force through unification of Scandinavia against the wishes of Russia. However, this interpretation needs to be nuanced. On the one hand, it is true that Russia preferred the preservation of the status quo in Scandinavia, above all on grounds of legitimacy and the principles of the Vienna system. Scandinavianism was seen—and detested—in St. Petersburg as an ideology and movement with revolutionary aspirations. Russia was obviously also aware that Scandinavian unification could represent a challenge to Russian geopolitical interests, especially in the Baltic Sea. On the other hand, the Russian scholar, Evgenii Egorov argues that Russia’s stance towards Scandinavian unification was more flexible than contemporary anti-Scandinavianists and many historians would have it. St. Petersburg tended to regard Scandinavianism as a movement on the wane and as such came to experience it as something of a ‘moving target’, but when push came to shove during the crises of 1848 and 1864, and the prospect of Scandinavian unification appeared as imminent, St. Petersburg appears to have accepted it as a fait accompli. Although rarely shy of exerting diplomatic pressure, Russia ultimately appears to have been very reluctant to intervene directly to forestall or prevent Scandinavian unification. W.E. Mosse may be right in asserting that next to Poland, the preservation of the integrity of the Danish state was the most important point on the Russian diplomatic agenda in 1848, but according to Egorov it was still one on which St. Petersburg was prepared to negate. Indeed, if the preservation of the Danish unitary state was so important to Russia as the critics of Scandinavianism have claimed, to say nothing of Russia’s ability to determine what was possible in Scandinavia, it must be questioned why Russia abandoned the unitary state in 1864. On the surface, the answer may be relatively simple: The unitary state was not seen as vital enough to Russian interests to warrant direct intervention to preserve it. A more complex answer would have to take Russia’s standing in 1864 into account, including its emphasis on internal reform, financial problems, defeat in the Crimean War eight years previously and relations to the other great powers into account. But the point is that the traditional view of Russia as bent on suppressing Scandinavianism and all its works needs to be reconsidered in the light of recent research. Footnote 50

It can thus be asked whether Russia possessed the strength attributed to it, whether opposition to unification from one or more great powers was reserved for Scandinavia, and how any Russian opposition to the project compared to that which movements for unification encountered from other great powers. After its victory in the Napoleonic Wars, thanks to its massive army, Russia dominated as the continent’s strongest power—a power that could prevent any radical development. But Russia rarely exercised its power, and when this happened the result was not always impressive. The Crimean War altered the balance of power on the continent. After its defeat, Russia focused on internal reforms, while France took on the role as the strongest military power in Europe. France’s foreign policy was guided by a combination of self-interest and belief in the principle of nationality and the threshold principle. French policy and Russia’s lack of ability to maintain things as they were created an instability in the system that had been created at and especially in the wake of the Congress of Vienna. The French emperor, Napoleon III, played a decisive role in the unification of Italy and actively supported a unified Scandinavia.Footnote 51

If the nation states that came into being in the mid-century had one thing in common it was that they were born through violence. Germany and Italy are good examples. They were both unified after a whole series of revolutions, wars and civil wars extending from the 1820s to 1870, as several great powers attempted to prevent unification. The master narrative only makes sense here if the opposition of the great powers to Scandinavianism was markedly different from their opposition to ambitions for unification in Piemont and Prussia.Footnote 52 The unification of Italy offers a case in point. Of course, Austria opposed this to the point of having to be defeated on the battlefield, whereas tsar Alexander II was anything but pleased at how Italy was united through methods that he considered as revolutionary, illegal and subversive. French support for Piemont made relations between Paris and St. Petersburg deteriorate, and Napoleon III was increasingly considered as an unpredictable and insincere diplomatic conspirator. Still, Russia’s foreign minister, Prince Gorchakov, argued that international political constellations dictated that Russia accept events in Italy—even if he later regretted it—and nurture relations to France, although these broke down only two years later owing in part to Russian distrust of Napoleon III after the Italian debacle. The point is that the Italian case shows that Russia, under given circumstances, was prepared to accept a major international upheaval that St. Petersburg opposed in principle.Footnote 53

The challenges presented by a united Germany were, if possible, even greater than Italy. A united German state would be a colossus that would alter the balance of power in Europe. The future of Germany had crucial significance for all the great powers. However, conflicting interests among the great powers allowed scope for statesmen prepared to take risks. Germany is an example of how, confronted with critical situations, the great powers were willing to accept solutions that in times of peace they would have opposed. Reactionary Russia had no wish for a united Germany, but in 1848 the tsar would not oppose a union under Prussia, whose form of government was conservative and whose base was dynastic. The crucial aim was to avoid a liberal Germany. This is not a far way off Russia’s approach to Scandinavian unification during times of war and crisis in 1848 and 1864.Footnote 54

The attitude of the great powers towards a united Scandinavia features regularly in this book (and even more so in its sequel, Scandinavia and Bismarck). In this chapter, it will be enough to assert generally that, like Russia, Austria was against a united Scandinavia but that the Habsburgs had no vital interests at stake. France and Prussia both supported Scandinavianism and saw it has a possible solution to the Schleswig question. A condition was that any union should be compatible with Prussian political interests. When it came to Great Britain, there was, as we shall see, no clear answer. But it is worth emphasising that central figures such as Queen Victoria, Lord Palmerston, Lord Clarendon and Lord Russell at various times expressed their openness to the idea of a united Scandinavia.

This quick survey of European politics shows that we should preserve a degree of scepticism towards the idea that the opposition of the great powers made a united Scandinavia impossible. The only great power to oppose the unification of Scandinavia in any capacity was Russia. But already indicated in the previous chapter, Russia’s resistance towards Scandinavianism was more for ideological than geopolitical reasons, and as we shall see below, Russian policy towards Scandinavian unification was flexible Moreover, Russian power was in decline after the Crimean War. This means that it was no coincidence that Sweden-Norway changed its foreign policy from one of neutrality founded on fear of Russia to one that was pro-Western and Scandinavianist. The political resurgence of Scandinavianism in the second half of the 1850s has to be seen against a general shift in European politics. Political Scandinavianists believed that a united Scandinavia should be a useful ally for Western powers, a bulwark against Russia and a sustainable bolster state between East and West at the entrance to the Baltic. The idea of a viable bolster state was in no way foreign to the great powers. The Kingdom of the Netherlands and Romania were established, in 1815 and 1870 respectively, to act as bolster states, and in the same way Russia, among other countries, felt that the German Confederation or Poland should function as a bolster or a bulwark between the great powers in the East and the West.Footnote 55

It is worth noting some of the arguments that lay behind the creation of these buffer states mirrors that of the Scandinavianist and correspondence with the threshold principle. Indeed, Dutch and Flemish nationalists were directly inspired by Scandinavianism as they shared many of the same concerns as regards national survival and viability. One of the reasons for uniting the Burgundian Netherlands (Belgium) with the Netherlands into a united kingdom was it would become a ‘viable’ state, while the German Confederation was created to secure the survival and independence of the middle and smaller German states. This ‘third Germany’ was meant as a counterbalance to Austria and Prussia and specially to keep the latter in check. In all case, size—and resources—very much mattered as seen by the fact that the negotiations for a post-Napoleonic peace order in many cases were centred around maps, statics and tables supplied to the diplomats by a Statistical Commission. The Kingdom of the Netherlands and the German Confederation were together with medium states such as Switzerland, Piemont and Spain seen as important to the European security system as their size prohibited them from being overrun in an initial attack.Footnote 56

Different Futures

If Scandinavian political relations resembled those that applied among German and Italian nationalists and statesmen, and if foreign policy challenges were the same for Scandinavianism as for the Italian and German movements, why did the anti-Scandinavianists write it off as delusional? The explanation is that these two opposing factions interpreted the past and their own time in radically different ways. This affected their notions of what was politically possible and desirable and meant that they had widely divergent visons of the future.

Anti-Scandinavianists adopted the same position as those Germans and Italians who were working against a unification. They wanted to uphold the status quo, to reform existing structures or else they were looking for a unification on radically different terms to those under which Italy and Germany were to be unified. This latter group consisted of the more radically minded, while the two former were primarily to be found among conservatives who opposed revolutionary upheaval. They wanted the stability and the rule of law that the Congress of Vienna had created to avoid war and chaos. The way in which Italy was unified was to many conservative Europeans despicable. It broke both the dynastic order and the international rules that formed the foundation of European politics. This meant that many countries hesitated to grant diplomatic recognition to the new Italian state.Footnote 57

The Scandinavianists saw history as being in the process of rapid change. Instead of obstructing this movement, they wanted, like Cavour and Bismarck, to shape the changes. The Scandinavianists’ belief that they were living in an ‘iron age’ that marked the end of ‘the existence of small states’ convinced them that the alternative to unification was annihilation. The unavoidable consequence of this process was war. The aim of the state was to ensure its own survival, and the Schleswig wars threatened not only Denmark’s existence but the independence of the whole of Scandinavia.Footnote 58

This meant that war became a legitimate political instrument. ‘War is what creates states,’ Ludvig Kristensen Daa told Scandinavianist students in 1852, ‘just as it is only in the fire and in its molten state that iron can be turned into noble forms’. This way of thinking about the creation of states is not that of an idealistic foreign policy. It reflects the school of realism within international relations as number of prominent sociologists from Max Weber to Charles Tilly. This does not mean that the Scandinavianists’ foreign policy was devoid of any form of idealism. The Scandinavianists’ belief that they were fighting for freedom against despotism in the east was shot through with liberal idealism. The same was true of the belief in a lasting peace and a future European federation that the more cosmopolitan Scandinavianists stood for. Nonetheless, in the short term, political Scandinavianism, especially in Denmark, was linked to what contemporaries Scandinavians termed ‘a war principle’—a principle that can be compared to Clausewitz’s maxim that politics is a continuation of politics by other means. This was of the reasons why P.A. Munch turned his back on the movement. The politics that had dominated Europe would, according to the Norwegian historian, disappear in the future, when the progress of liberty, equality and nationality would undermine the war principle and create a peaceful and democratic world. This thesis of a democratic route to peace was not unfamiliar to all political Scandinavianists, but for them it could only come once a unification of Scandinavia had been achieved. Munch’s fellow historian, Ludvig Kristensen Daa, dismissed the thesis as idealism.Footnote 59

The public debate between the two nineteenth-century Norwegian historians in many ways anticipated later clashes between ‘realism’ and ‘liberalism/idealism’ within the study of international relations. Whereas Daa was clearly a hardnosed realist, Munch’s point of view has a striking resembles to the democratic peace theory. This does not mean that all anti-Scandinavianists were out-and-out idealists. The threshold principle and fear of annihilation are also to be found in Danish supporters of the unitary state, in Swedish and Norwegian anti-Scandinavianists and in Scandinavians who were undecided or indifferent. The foundation of the Swedish-Norwegian union was what we have called the threshold principle and the belief that together the two nations were strong enough to defend the Scandinavian peninsula. The reason for Danish supporters of the unitary state wishing to preserve the Danish-German polity intact was, amongst other things, their fear that Denmark would be too small without the German duchies.Footnote 60

Conflict between Scandinavianists and anti-Scandinavianists was not just about the unification of Scandinavia. It was also about the security and opportunities available to the Scandinavian states and their role in European politics. Anti-Scandinavianists wanted to see the existing order preserved. The Scandinavian states had to accept the status as small states that they had come to occupy after the Napoleonic Wars and to conduct a policy of neutrality that did not provoke the great powers. This was significantly easier for Sweden-Norway than it was for Denmark, as we shall see.

Despite their differences, anti-Scandinavianists were in agreement that they had to adapt to the great powers within whose sphere of interest they found themselves. Creating a medium-sized state would simply increase the risk of being involved in the wars of the great powers. In the eyes of the anti-Scandinavianists, this was what made the Scandinavianists’ foreign policy aggressive, revolutionary and dangerous. It upset the European order and unnecessarily provoked Russia and Germany.Footnote 61

This lack of resolution that characterised especially the older generation of anti-Scandinavianists acted as a provocation to political Scandinavianists. Instead of grumbling about their status as a pocket state, they should alter it. A policy of neutrality and adaptation would not stop the development of world history. Scandinavia’s future should be secured through unification, which should in turn be achieved through an alliance with one or more great powers. Conversely, the pessimism expressed by Scandinavianists on the part of the small states sparked a counter-reaction among independent Norwegian nationalists, who did not except that without a larger and stronger union their nation was doomed.Footnote 62

Inadequate Explanations

If the master narrative within Scandinavian historiography follows the anti-Scandinavianist line, this is not because they were greater realists or because their political analyses were better than the Scandinavianists, but because history appears to have proved them right. Political Scandinavianism failed. However, history books have overlooked the fact that the same could also be said for the majority of the visions that anti-Scandinavianist had for future. The fatherland of the Danish supporters of unitary state was not just wiped out. The victory of the nation state that succeeded it has been such that Danes today scarcely know what the unitary state was.Footnote 63

Almost all Swedish and Norwegian anti-Scandinavianists of the time supported the existing Swedish-Norwegian union or saw no alternative to it. Fifty years later, the union had disappeared and, even though Norwegians and Swedes today are aware of the union, only few of them have an understanding of their ancestors’ political worldview. The only anti-Scandinavianists to have their ideas of the future realised were the true nationalists. But they made up a minority in Sweden and a small group in Norway in the middle of the nineteenth century. In Denmark, the nationalists made up a relatively large group, but the more Denmark was threatened, the more receptive they were to Scandinavianism. Their aims became a reality as early as 1864, but the new nation state was born out of defeat. This left Danes with a burning question of guilt, was German or Danish nationalism to blame the loss of Schleswig? There is no distinction here between a national and a Scandinavianist policy since in Denmark’s case they were inextricably linked.

The anti-Scandinavianists were no better at predicting the future than political Scandinavianists. Nevertheless, they and their arguments are presented as being more rational in the master narrative. The accusations of anti-Scandinavianists have not been seen by historians as one side of the argument but, on the contrary, have been incorporated into the historical account as fact. Political Scandinavianism, for its part, was neither as hazy nor as disjointed as claimed by anti-Scandinavianists initially and, later, by historians.

The anti-Scandinavianists were undoubtedly right when they pointed out that political Scandinavianism faced serious problems. All the anti-Scandinavianist arguments were plausible, and there are good reasons for them having been directly incorporated into the master narrative of political Scandinavianism. The point is simply that the challenges facing political Scandinavianism were commonplace. They applied to more or less all nationalist movements in Europe. It is, therefore, difficult to claim that one of these challenges in itself was a sufficient reason for the failure of political Scandinavianism. Even if we look at the whole gamut of challenges, it is an open question whether, taken together, they rendered political Scandinavianism unachievable. This does not mean that we need to reject the significance of structural explanations for the failure to unify Scandinavia but only to accept that in themselves such explanation are not sufficient. A preliminary conclusion is that domestic and especially international politics, agency, chance events, and timing had to be considered as well. If we want to understand, in the words of the student of nationalism Ernest Gellner, why the dog did not ‘bark’, we will have to delve into the history of the events themselves. This we will do in the remainder of the current book (and its sequel, Scandinavia and Bismarck). In the books last chapter, we will return to these questions and discuss whether structuralist conditions—and if so which—or individual agency, politics, and chance events were the primary factors in the downfall of political Scandinavianism.Footnote 64