National Independence and Fear of Annihilation

After the French Revolution, the sovereignty of the people became a cornerstone both for constitutions and for the self-understanding of nations. But the nation was not the only thing that the revolution turned into the basis of modern political legitimacy. There was also the individual and the rights of the individual as a citizen. It is not surprising, therefore, that Scandinavianists—and, indeed, German nationalists—had a perception of the nation that was identical with their view of the individual. To quote a lecture held at the Scandinavian Community, ‘nationality in a people’ corresponds to ‘personality’ in the ‘individual’. This view can be traced back to antiquity, where, in The Republic, Plato used the individual as an analogy for the proper organisation of society. This comparison meant that nationalists on the one hand linked their own identity to their community, but on the other saw community as an individual. The nation, like an individual, had its own personality.Footnote 1

When it came to assessing the most important characteristics of the nation, the judgement of Scandinavianists reflected European liberalism of the time. For nineteenth-century liberals, the political ideal was an independent citizen with high capacity, a knowledgeable person who was not dependent on others. This was true not only of British liberalism, which was linked to an empirical and utilitarian philosophy, but also to German liberalism, associated with an idealistic philosophy, whereby a just society should be organised on the principle of individual freedom and independence.

As pointed out by Elie Kedourie, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant had an immense—even if unintended—political impact. According to the former, Kant’s formula ‘that the good will, which is the free will, is also the autonomous will’ made the individual ‘the sovereign of the universe’. ‘The end of man was’ now ‘to determine himself as a free being, self-ruling and self-moved’. This ideal for the individual was superimposed on the state by Kant in his Perpetual Peace (1794) and on the nation by radical students in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. As a result, self-determination ‘became the supreme political good’.Footnote 2

These ideals affected perceptions of citizenship and nationhood alike. Just like liberals of the day believed that full political suffrage should be limited to individuals that were truly independent and had the necessary capacity to understand the implications of his political actions, so many of them believed that the same should hold true for nations and the creation of nation states.

It is no surprise, therefore, that liberals of the time believed that the ideal nation was an independent polity rich in resources. The ideal of independence was, however, not reserved for liberals. It was a commonplace. The challenge lay in determining the degree to which the nation’s independence could be realised. If we understand being independent as having political sovereignty, military capacity, one’s own culture and economic independence, then the point made by Scandinavianists was that the small Scandinavian nations, like weak individuals, risked losing their independence, their distinctiveness and their dignity. It was a fear that arose out of their view of Europe’s political development, their experiences during the Napoleonic Wars and their view of history.Footnote 3

The political Europe that rose from the ashes of the Napoleonic Wars was built around the need for security. At the Congress of Vienna and in the years following, the great powers created common rules designed to prevent one nation ever being able to set the continent ablaze again. As noted by the Dutch historian Beatrice de Graaf, ‘the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had achieved something unprecedented’. They had not only forged a war-time alliance between most European states against Napoleonic hegemony, but also pushed the great powers closer together than ever before. Fear of Napoleon and the revolution created an ‘Allied Machine’ in post-war Europe. A mutual security system that was outlined in Vienna and harmed out in the wake of Waterloo. According to de Graaf and Schroeder, the classic principle of balance of power that had dominated the continent prior to the French Revolution was replaced by a new order designed to secure a common European peace.Footnote 4

The price was that all states had to renounce a part of their independence to the Concert of Europe. It is not hard to understand that the great powers themselves and subsequent international historians saw this as progress. The literature has, almost without exception, been written by men who have descended from the great powers of the time or from today’s single superpower. However, the new security system was highly exclusive and hierarchical. The great powers ‘waged peace’, as de Graaf writes, ‘over the heads and on the backs of smaller nations, minorities, specific factions and regions. With their centralizing and imperial policies, they managed to tame the terror […] in the short run, but sowed the seeds of discord and discontent for the near future’.Footnote 5

This new European order was already in the making during the Napoleonic Wars. The British prime minister William Pitt (the Younger) laid out his plan in 1805, while the Friedrich von Gentz, a student of Immanuel Kant, wrote a thesis on how to create peace on the continent after Napoleon. As de Graaf has shown, these efforts were not merely intellectual excises. In 1815 the Pitt plan was turned into official British policy by Castlereagh, while Gentz had become the right-hand man of Klemens von Metternich. At the Congress of Vienna, both the Austrians and the British argued for:Footnote 6

[A] sharp distinction between the decision makers—‘the four great military Powers’—and the subordinate ‘second-class’ states (like Spain, Portugal, a number of German and Italian states, Switzerland and the Netherlands). The third category, the ‘separate petty sovereignties’, could best disappear form the map of Europe although and not be restored as independent states, since they would only arouse the expansive appetite of the larger states. Their claim—‘either of justice or liberality’—could therefore not be vouchsafed.Footnote 7

These hierarchical thoughts were echoed by the Prussians in the discussion on the future of Germany. Security demanded, argued Wilhelm von Humboldt that there was put an end Kleinstaaterei of the past. Moreover, as the new system was developed in the following years, the great powers made it plainly clearly that they saw no problem in interfering the internal affairs of the minor states in the name of European security.Footnote 8

Hence, it is no surprise that we get a different perspective if we look at post-war Europe through the lens of the minor states. The room for manoeuvre of the great powers was reduced, but they wrote the rules, they interpreted them, and they determined how, when and to what degree they should be enforced. For states of the second or third order, it meant an institutionalisation of the loss of independence.Footnote 9

Young liberal and radical Scandinavianists had a sense that their states had taken a step backwards in a time that was moving forwards. This influenced their view of the future. It left them divided between belief in progress and fear that those states that stood still would leave the future behind them. The continent’s newly won security, therefore, filled political Scandinavianists not with a sense of stability but with a fear of annihilation.

Conservative Scandinavians did believe that the system ensured stability and gave a certain degree of legal protection. Their belief was rattled in 1848, when the neutral great powers did not live up to their obligations to secure Denmark’s possession of Schleswig, to quell the rebellion of the Schleswig-Holsteiners, and prevent the Prussian invasion that the treaties of 1720 and 1773 demanded of Great Britain, France and Russia (see Chap. 8). In the wake of the Crimean war, many people saw the system as arbitrary. This reinforced Scandinavianists’ suspicion of the great powers, who for centuries had extended that power by suppressing minor nations. Once stability disappeared, they feared that the great powers would prevent the small nations from protecting their own interests and that Scandinavia would suffer the same fate as Poland in the eighteenth century.Footnote 10

This fear was not confined to Scandinavianists. It could be found right across the continent, including among German nationalists, who feared the ‘French danger’, and Italian nationalists, who wanted to chase the ‘foreign’ Austrians out of their country. According to Scandinavianists, however, there was a significant difference. The size of these large states meant that their independence was greater, and they did not need to fear annihilation. While they were nothing new, developments after 1815 meant that the difference between larger and smaller states was greater, and certainly felt greater among those that were small. This was the view that lay behind the words of the Norwegian historian and Scandinavianist Michael Birkeland, who described living in ‘an iron age’ that would do away with the very existence of small states. Such thinking, which closely resembles that of Bismarck, is clearly visible as early as in 1840, when Scandinavianists like Ludvig Kristensen Daa believed that developments in European politics were driven by a striving for unity.Footnote 11

The Scandinavianists pointed out that Great Britain, France and Spain had been created by closely related peoples growing together into one nation. This was true of the English and the Scots, Bretons and Languedocians, Castilians and Catalonians. Other ethnic groups such as the Welsh, the Celts and the Basques were also integrated into the larger nations, but, like John Stuart Mill, Scandinavianists regarded them as being less civilised. They had the same relation to their nations as the Sami to Norwegians and Swedes. This pattern among larger states would be repeated, predicted the Scandinavianists, when Italy and Germany became unified into nation states.

Nations, it was thought, like individuals, had a right to respect and recognition. This reflected not only Hegel’s idea that external recognition of autonomy was a nation’s first and absolute right but, just as importantly, the fact that small and new nations—like insecure individuals—had a constant need for the recognition of others. This can be seen across the whole of Scandinavia but is expressed in different ways. While Norwegians initially strove simply to have their existence recognised, the Swedes and the Danes wanted to restore Scandinavia’s international standing. Until the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark and Sweden had been at the centre of medium-sized polities that included numerous nationalities. This was a position that had been lost in general terms by Sweden and in particular by Denmark. This damaged their self-understanding and created fear, insecurity and isolation.Footnote 12

Like the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars left behind a trauma for a generation that had experienced war and grown up in its shadow. Fear for the future among small and weak states provoked the need for action. In Scandinavia, this led to Scandinavianism. This was the only way, to quote professor H.N. Clausen, that the Danish nation could ‘keep itself free from becoming petty and provincial’ and secure its future.Footnote 13

According to the prominent Swedish official and parliamentarian Erik Sparre, Scandinavians were the weakest ‘branch’ of the ‘European family’. There was, therefore, good reason to fear that Scandinavia would become an object of its neighbours’ rapacity. When Walter Bagehot, founder of The Economist, wrote in 1866 that the death knell had sounded for smaller nations, he was describing the sound that was ringing in the ears of Scandinavian politicians. Alarm bells rang first and loudest in Denmark. Then they rang in Sweden and finally in Norway. This difference could be explained by the countries’ geographical positioning, their political situation and the level of impeding threat. If fear was registered first and most intensely to Denmark, this was due to internal turmoil, its proximity to Germany and to the question of Schleswig.Footnote 14

The question of Schleswig was closely tied up with Danish Scandinavianism and a general fear of annihilation. According to C.C. Hall, council president and foreign minister in 1857–1863, Denmark stood ‘at a crossroads’. It could choose the unitary state, in which case the country would be subject to German influence and risk the re-introduction of absolutism. Or it could choose a ‘Scandinavian policy’ that drew the nation’s southern border at the Eider. There was no other alternative. According to the president of the council, failing to act would lead to the dissolution of the state. There was not purely Danish independence. This view was shared not only by political Scandinavianists from Denmark but also by many from Sweden and Norway. They feared Russia more than Germany, but all three countries were fearful that Scandinavia would be squeezed between Russia and a future united Germany.Footnote 15

Philosophies of History

Political Scandinavianists were all agreed that history demonstrated that developments were moving forwards towards ever larger entities, which for Scandinavia meant unification. However, as with the rest of the continent, Scandinavianists arrived at this conclusion via two very different philosophical schools of thought. One was an Anglo-French empirical and utilitarian philosophy, while the other was German idealism, typically in the form of a Hegelian philosophy of history. Common for both philosophies, however, was an explicit tendency towards determinism. History was rational, it had either a design, a direction, or laws. While empiricist liberals like John Stuart Mill believed in the doctrine of causation, he left some room for free will and individual agency. German idealists, like Hegel, and the materialist successors did not.Footnote 16

A good example of these two approaches can be seen in the Norwegian professors Ludvig Kristensen Daa and Marcus Monrad. Daa saw world history as a process in which the progress of civilisation created ever larger political units and greater freedom. The unification of Scandinavia was justified by conditions in the present. Like the British philosophers John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer and the father of French positivism, Auguste Comte, Daa saw his philosophy of history as a clear-sighted survey of demonstrable principles of development that avoided speculation and described the world as it was. Scandinavians spoke the same language, had liberal ideals and common geopolitical interests. Scandinavianism, nationality, liberalism and democratic development pointed purely logically towards unification.Footnote 17

A united Scandinavia was, however, not the end goal for all Scandinavianists. Elements of Scandinavianism had a cosmopolitan and European quality. Its proponents saw Scandinavianism as a step in a process of civilisation towards a harmonious and enlightened world. By working together, they would make Scandinavia into a great power of mind and spirit that would stand as an example for the rest of the world. Swedish philosophers accepted that history was moving in the direction of an association of peoples. The Norwegian writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson believed that a unified Scandinavia would one day form part of a European federation, and this was entirely in line with Giuseppe Mazzini’s vision for the future of Europe. Here, nation states were to create the foundation for democratic societies but without these being an end in themselves. Ernest Renan was apparently of the same persuasion. In What is a nation, the French scholar claimed: ‘Nations are not something eternal. They began at some point, and they will come to an end. They will probably be replaced by a European confederation’.Footnote 18

Marcus Monrad’s view of history was founded in German idealism, which dominated Scandinavian intellectual life until the middle of the century, when its influence began to wane. In the 1840s, student youth was in the grip of Hegel’s history of philosophy. For them, world history was a process in which humankind would realise itself through various types of society. Reason propelled history forwards, providing ever greater freedom, justice, unity and civilisation. For Scandinavianists, Scandinavianism was one of the latent ideas of history that would come to be realised.Footnote 19

Marcus Monrad’s focus on the development of the state over the previous century took as its starting point the principle of authority, which found expression in Europe’s multi-national states, whose cohesion was dependent on princely power. After the French Revolution, a principle of individuation had burst open the straitjacket of these composite states. The dismantling of authoritarian and heterogeneous unitary states was seen as a positive development by Monrad, but such fracturing often took place without any clear idea of nationality, which created states that were far too small. This meant that history was now moving towards a new phase. This involved a principle of nationality that did not simply cause non-homogeneous states to disintegrate but also brought together those that were homogeneous into larger entities as nation states and confederations, in which freedom, unity and nationality went hand in hand. It was in this light that Monrad saw Scandinavianism and a united Nordic state.Footnote 20

Regardless of whether political Scandinavianism was arrived at through empiricism or idealism, the result was a deterministic view of history. In the words of the Swedish politician and writer Gustaf Lallerstedt, they were living in a time where the world was full of ‘a striving for unity’, and where unity was ‘the precondition for strength and progress’. Scandinavia had yet to fulfil its historical destiny, and what mattered, therefore, was to ensure for the Nordic countries their ‘appointed place in history’. The Scandinavian peoples should fight for ever greater freedom in the world and should take the lead by setting a good example.Footnote 21

The history of philosophy should be seen in the light of the actual development of history. Scandinavia had originally consisted of a host of small kingdoms, but since the Middle Ages the tendency had been towards the formation of ever larger units. This development has been intensified right across Europe with the wars of revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. According to Eric Gustaf Geijer, humankind now stood facing a new and the greater epoch, which Scandinavian youth saw it as their mission to realise. The Italian wars of unification only confirmed political Scandinavianists in their belief that small states were destined to fall.Footnote 22

The alternative to a united Scandinavia was not three nation states but the dismemberment of Scandinavia. Like Hegel, political Scandinavianists believed that world history unfolded through a process of war and conflict. This also applied to more cosmopolitan Scandinavianists like Ludvig Kristensen Daa, who described mankind’s development as ‘the dawn of history’ and as a process of civilisation driven forwards by conflicts between tribes and nations for power, resources and ‘elbow room’, perhaps better known as Lebensraum.Footnote 23

A Matter of Size

According to Eric Hobsbawm, the threshold principle was so self-evident for nineteenth-century Europeans that it was rarely put into words. In a Scandinavian context, this is clearly wrong. Scandinavianists were obsessed by size. This was true of both cultural and political Scandinavianists. What made them different was the fear of annihilation that was the driving force behind the latter. Michael Birkeland called Scandinavianism ‘fear crying for help and deliverance’, while the Norwegian mathematician, politician and later minister Ole Jacob Broch wrote that other closely related smaller states ‘everywhere in recent times seek to gain through unification the strength of which they feel the lack’.Footnote 24

We encounter such arguments time and again. Individually, the three nations were too small, but united Scandinavia had the necessary resources. They had military resources to resist threats from outside, and they had political, cultural and economic resources to allow them to develop.

Perceptions that they had shared origins, culture, language and history provided the foundation that made it possible to build a political reality. The three peoples belonged to the same ethnic root, they were a natural family, and the differences between them were so slight that foreign countries regarded them as one people. We can, however, also talk of foundations and construction, not in a Marxist sense, where material conditions determine contemporary ideas and policy, but because political ideas were shaped by their focus on the preconditions for the survival of a state. The threshold principle reflected the nineteenth-century perception that a nation was a community of resources. If we are to understand how the threshold principle played a part in shaping the attitudes and actions of the Scandinavianists, we need to take a closer look at how the principle shaped their understanding of defence, politics, culture, economics and national independence.Footnote 25

As far as political Scandinavianism was concerned, the threshold principle was promoted in earnest by the talented Danish officer A.F. Tscherning at the end of the 1830s. The threat of war was in the air, he wrote. And it would be massive and engulfing. The best way to ensure the independence of the small nations and to avoid annihilation was through a Scandinavian federation. Tscherning did not trust the great powers and feared Prussia and Russia. Only through military and political cooperation could the Scandinavians preserve their independence. Their underlying political premise was, in a nutshell—as later formulated by the Danish historian Casper Paludal-Müller—‘more power, more security; less power, less security’.Footnote 26

This doctrine, which gained ground in the 1840s and coloured discussions of security policy in Scandinavia during the 1850s and 1860s, has to be seen against the expectations of the future that had been created by the European revolutions of 1848, the Crimean War and the Italian Risorgimento. These developments weakened the Scandinavianists’ faith in the Vienna system and strengthened belief in the principle of nationhood, but it was the Schleswig question and fear of Russia that fed anxieties that annihilation might be imminent. The changes within European politics in the wake of the Crimean War created a sense that people were living in a time when nothing political had permanence.Footnote 27

The question of security and resources already lay at the heart of the Swedish-Norwegian union. The difference between Swedish and Norwegian two-state Scandinavianists and those advocating a three-state union was that the former believed that Sweden-Norway had sufficient resources to survive while the latter did not. This was clearly in evidence in the analysis of Scandinavia’s military resources made in 1865 by the Scandinavianist Swedish officer Julius Mankell, which was discussed in depth at the Scandinavianist gathering in Stockholm in 1866. Mankell concluded that Sweden-Norway would, indeed, be able to resist a Russian attack long enough for the expected Franco-British support to arrive, but only with the assistance of Denmark. If a threat from Prussia looked likely, it would be necessary to bring together the Scandinavian navies. Together, they would be able to avert any threat to the Danish islands and the Scandinavian peninsula. The capture of Jutland would require significant German resources, and a German army on the peninsula would be vulnerable to flanking attack.Footnote 28

According to Scandinavianists, a Scandinavian union would withdraw Scandinavia from the influence of reactionary Russia and give it ‘a place in the council of Europe beneficial for itself and for freedom and peace on the continent’.Footnote 29

The Scandinavianists wanted not merely to regain the position occupied by Sweden and Denmark prior to the Napoleonic Wars but, through a united Scandinavia, to achieve the same influence as in the days of imperial Sweden or the Kalmar union. Behind their thinking, there was a mixture of ambition and idealism mixed with national ideas of honour, dignity and recognition. The Scandinavian people were, as a Danish student proclaimed in Kalmar in 1843, ‘themselves capable of creating a future so that they did not need fearfully to ask the permission from neighbours of superior power but could themselves determine what they did and did not want, and the expressed will of six million Scandinavians would surely have significant resonance across Europe’. Pursuing the policies of pocket states and neutrality should be abandoned in favour of an active role in European politics.Footnote 30

Scandinavian elites met each other on grand tours and at conferences in Europe, where they could experience the culture of great nations and the progress of science. This fed into an awareness of their own inferiority. And that, in turn, nourished a fear that, for them, culture and knowledge would end up becoming nothing but foreign imports. The lack of recognition was humiliating, but it was also a threat to Scandinavia’s cultural development, spiritual independence and to the very existence of the nations. But if Scandinavians pooled their resources, they would be relevant and interesting to the rest of Europe.Footnote 31

Scandinavianists of all hues—political, cultural and practical—were strikingly united in seeing the need to bring together Scandinavia’s intellectual resources. Notions of a cultural threshold were particularly in evidence among Norwegian cultural Scandinavianists, who in common with the Intelligens party, believed that Norway was too small to have an independent culture. Culture, education and Bildung in Norway and contact to the outside world should be secured through unification with Denmark.Footnote 32

Culture and science were seen in a symbiotic relationship. Creating meetings, societies and journals in common would create the critical mass that was necessary for the ‘development’ of the Nordic countries. Only by uniting forces would they be able, according to the Danish professor Johan Georg Forchhammer, to make their scientific presence felt ‘alongside Europe’s great cultural clans’.Footnote 33

The same way of thinking could be found in literature and art. Danes, Swedes and Norwegians made up part of a larger Teutonic race, but their underlying literary mode was different. Scandinavian divisions had, however, prevented that mode from finding expression. This was why they were subordinate to ‘the great peoples of culture’. Only by uniting could Scandinavians avoid being ‘disenfranchised’. If Scandinavians wished to form part of ‘the European cultural family’ in ‘their own independent right’, they needed to stick together and collaborate culturally.Footnote 34

Like nationalists right across Europe, Scandinavianists derived inspiration from the German customs union, which was established in 1834. The idea of a Scandinavian customs union was first tabled by Danish liberals in 1838 as a step towards collaboration on defence and on political union. After travels in Germany, Sweden and Norway, the Danish civil servant Viggo Rothe published a two-volume book about how a Scandinavian customs union could be organised. It received good reviews, but sales figures reflected the fact that the idea did not catch on.Footnote 35

The failure of Rothe’s proposal to make an impact in the 1840s was because it put the interests of industry above those of trade—and Danish interests above those of Sweden, Norway and Scandinavia. The Swedes had no wish for customs legislation that strengthened Danish shipping. These diverging interests can be seen even more clearly in the negotiations on customs duties and economic integration that took place between the union countries of Sweden and Norway, in which neither would sacrifice their economic self-determination for Scandinavian independence. Like most political Scandinavianists in Denmark, the Norwegians felt that economic integration took second place to political, military and cultural factors. This prioritisation can be seen as an indication that the core of the movement was dominated by academics rather than people in the trades or business. It may also be because financial dealings between the three countries were limited.Footnote 36

At a time when ‘steam and the railways’ made ‘of the whole world one city in a commercial sense’, however, thoughts of economic collaboration did not evaporate. On the contrary. They became an integral element in the renewed Scandinavianist drive that took place in the second half of the 1850s. Between the three nations, communication improved, trade increased and there was ever greater movement of capital across borders. It was because he feared Norwegian stagnation and isolation in a time characterised by ‘steam and energy’, that the Norwegian newspaper editor Andreas Munch became a Scandinavianist. At the beginning of the 1860s, the Swedes were pressing to effectuate the economic aspect of Scandinavianist ideology. For financial barons like André Oscar Wallenberg, Scandinavianism was the means to procure the necessary economic resources for Sweden and Scandinavia that would allow them to break away from their dependency on banks in Hamburg. As chair of the Riksdag’s finance committee, Wallenberg pushed for Scandinavian monetary union. Elements of the Swedish bourgeoisie regarded practical Scandinavianism as an area of Swedish interest. This could be seen clearly at the large meeting of national economists in Gothenburg in 1863, where there was support both for monetary union and for a customs union. Opposition remained strong, but monetary union became a reality in the 1870s.Footnote 37

Fear as Unifying Force

As the threshold principle maintained its grip, the small Scandinavian states were left with neither power nor a voice, politically and culturally sidelined and militarily under threat. Even though the economy played a smaller role in Scandinavianism than in German and Italian nationalist movements for unification, the idea of the necessity for economic integration was still in the air. In Scandinavianism, people could find hope for a better future in bonds of togetherness, and among some Scandinavianists we can also find the prospect of the conclusion of a story in the form of a perpetual Nordic peace. The strongest feeling among political Scandinavianists was, however, not hope. It was fear.

This should come as no surprise. For political realists, the aim of the state is first and foremost to ensure survival in an anarchic and inimical world. In this power struggle, it was crucial that the state possessed the necessary resources. Like individuals, states want to be independent. They serve their own interests and try to extend their power. This often makes them act out of fear of anything and everything that threatens their interest, their power or their independence.Footnote 38

An account written by the historian Ludvig Kristensen Daa concludes that the origin of the state was fear. The individual had to recognise that it could not withstand the violence of others on its own and was therefore obliged to submit to common and protective laws. The same, according to the Norwegian, was true of states and nations. A people that was not able to defend itself existed at the mercy of its neighbours. It could survive as a vassal of the larger powers or become a province. For small states on their own, independence was not only limited but risked being forfeited. On the other hand, a union of states could ensure the independence that smaller states would never be able to achieve on their own.Footnote 39

The same conclusion is reached by politically active Swedes like Erik Sparre and Gustaf Lallerstedt and royals such as Oscar I and his son Prince Oscar. It is most clearly expressed in the thoughts of Charles XV’s librarian and political agent, the Swedish-Finnish Emil von Qvanten. The freedom and independence of the individual are guaranteed by society and its laws, while the state protects the independence of the nation. Weak states, according to Emil von Qvanten, were obliged to join together in unions that protected their common interests and independence from the outside world. However, just as society should respect the personal freedom of the individual, so the union should not abuse the states’ internal freedom. If Qvanten, as a Finnish nationalist, was Scandinavianist, it was because he saw a Finnish nation state as being untenable. Positioned right up against the Russian border, 1½ million Finns would never achieve independence on their own.Footnote 40

Daa’s and Qvanten’s thinking reflected the underlying perceptions of political Scandinavianists. No nation was fully sovereign, and the independence of small nations was extremely limited and constantly under threat. But if the smaller nations surrendered part of their sovereignty to a union or a federation, they strengthened their security, inner autonomy and identity. External independence in a wider geopolitical context, which was a precondition for inner freedom, they regarded as being under threat. This made unification an absolute necessity, since without it any form of independence would be lost. For all leading Scandinavianists, it was just as important to create a federal state in which unity would be maintained outwardly, while internally states would manage their own affairs. In matters relating to themselves, nations were sovereign. According to Marcus Monrad, the federal principle allowed room for the individualistic Teutonic Volksgeist or ‘spirit of the people’ and went hand in hand with equality between the nations, which was crucial, particularly for Norwegian Scandinavianists.Footnote 41

From the mid-1850s onwards, proposals for a Scandinavian federation were no abstract, academic armchair exercise. These were concrete proposals and not simply part of political negotiations on the development of the existing Swedish-Norwegian union. They also, according to Qvanten, formed the basis for a draft treaty for a union prepared as part of negotiations for a Danish-Swedish union in the spring of 1864.Footnote 42

Dangerous Liaisons

In the final phases of the Napoleonic Wars, the German writer Ernst Moritz Arndt wrote in his On the Hatred of Peoples (1813) that a nation becomes conscious of itself in its encounter with the enemy. Scandinavianists rarely went to the same extremes as Arndt, but the underlying attitude had already found expression in the work of the Danish professor Frederik Sneedorff in 1792. Squeezed between the Russian bear and the German eagle, Scandinavia’s existence would be threatened. Sound common sense demanded that the Kalmar union should be revived, and Scandinavians should be given a common fatherland.Footnote 43

Scandinavianists did not, however, see the eagle with the same eyes as the bear. Russians belonged to a different racial group. They were Slavs and were regarded not simply as a threat to Scandinavia but to the whole of western civilisation. The Germans, on the other hand, belonged to the same Germanic racial group as Scandinavians and the English. There was dispute, however, about how close the kinship was and which consequences it should have. Were Scandinavians, Germans and the English all branches from the same Germanic root? Or were Scandinavians and the Anglo-Saxon English simply shoots from a broader Teutonic tree?Footnote 44

The burning question was whether these close ties represented a threat for Scandinavia or not. The idea of a racial community meant that, well into the 1840s, Swedish and Norwegian Scandinavianists took it for granted that Scandinavians and Germans would join together as allies against the Slavs. On the Scandinavian peninsula, there was at times no clear distinction between Scandinavianism and Pan-Germanism. In the 1840s, the Swedish journalist O.P. Sturzen-Becker imagined a Nordic confederation, while other Swedish Scandinavianists felt that it was Scandinavia’s task, in a union with Germany, to achieve freedom; that is national and political independence. Even though Denmark was most powerfully influenced by German culture and intellectual life, Danes were sceptical towards Pan-Germanism. Scepticism grew into antipathy and finally turned to hatred when Danish and German nationalism clashed in Schleswig.Footnote 45

In the 1840s, the idea of an alliance between a united Scandinavia and Germany directed against the Slavs was a recurrent theme in the Nordic countries and Germany.

The idea was neither foreign nor without appeal for German nationalists. The national liberal German press were positive towards a Scandinavianism that was combined with a Pan-Germanic defence against the Slavs, while prominent German nationalists like Friedrich Ludvig Jahn, Ernst Moritz Arndt and Jacob Grimm expressed their support for the idea. Such thoughts were also to be found amongst prominent Schleswig-Holsteiners, who believed that, although Denmark’s future belonged in Scandinavia and the duchies to Germany, both formed a natural alliance against the Slavs. Scandinavianism could go hand in hand with German nationalism and Pan-Germanism, and ideas of an alliance appear regularly in the public domain over the following decade and among a number of Prussian and Scandinavian statesmen and royals. It was Schleswig that made a Prussian-Scandinavian understanding difficult. A form of Scandinavianism that encompassed a Denmark extending to the Eider was not acceptable to German nationalists, while for many Danish nationalists it was an unshakeable principle.Footnote 46

Far from all Swedish and Norwegian Scandinavianists shared such Pan-Germanic ideas, but among their supporters there were three different groupings. One group relinquished it out of respect for the Danes, from whom they adopted the image of Germans as the enemy. The second group was made up of men such as the newspaper editor S.A. Hedlund, who held onto the idea of a Scandinavian-German alliance directed against Russia. This made them critical of the anti-German faction among Danish nationalists. The third group regarded a rapprochement and alliance between Scandinavia and Germany as desirable, but it was conditional on a solution to the Schleswig question.Footnote 47

The fact that the Danes adapted their policy after the defeat of 1864 did not alter their underlying suspicion of everything German. The reason for the explosion of Danish antipathy in the 1840s was not simply the Schleswig-Holstein question. The cause is to be found in the German attempt to promote Pan-Germanism and its own strategic interests in the north.

The Admiral State

In 1841, Friedrich List published National System of Political Economics (1841). The book is the embodiment of the threshold principle. In it the German economist argued that lack of movement meant the wilting and death of the nation, while growth meant evolution and expansion. Nations should be enclosed in natural frontiers. Nations without natural frontiers would have to secure them by conquest, dynastic rights of succession or voluntary unions. He saw the German customs union as a necessary though insufficient step towards the development of the nation. Germany would have to control the coast between the mouth of the Rhine and its border with Poland. Holland and Denmark would therefore have to be incorporated into the German Confederation, so that Germany would acquire the navy, the fishing, the trade and the colonies that the nation needed. The Dutch and the Danes would soon realise that this was both necessary and desirable. Small states did not have the resources to be independent. Therefore they should be united with a larger people to whom they already belonged through blood and history.Footnote 48

List’s book threw further fuel of the fire of Danish fears of annihilation, not only because of a Danish inferiority complex but also because his ideas were taken up by Germany’s leading newspaper. In September 1841, Allgemeine Zeitung supported the idea that Denmark should be turned into what they called a German ‘Admiral state’. Instead of retaining their ‘pseudo-independence’, Danes ought to become part of the German Confederation. ‘Young Denmark’ accepted that Denmark was not an independent state, but the young Danes regarded unification with Germany as a threat to the existence of their nation. Deliverance was to be found in a Scandinavian confederation.Footnote 49

The debate continued in the German press, which saw good sense in forming closer bonds. Danish liberals, on the other hand, wanted to see them severed. This was thanks in large part to the Oriental Crisis of 1840–1841. In it, the fact that the unitary state’s German duchies were members of the Confederation came close to dragging the kingdom of Denmark into a war between Germany and France. Even though any Franco-German war would, in formal terms, only involve Holstein and Lauenburg, the unitary state’s army was comprised of both Danish and German troops. A growing number of liberals had, therefore, reached the conclusion that Holstein should be separated off from the state. This meant that there could continue to be a common royal house but that militarily and administratively everything should be separated to prevent German influence in Denmark. Supporters of the unitary state, on the other hand, regarded the exclusion of the German duchies and a breach of links to the German Confederation as a weakening of the state’s defences and of the chance of remaining neutral in a war between the great powers.Footnote 50

According to the national liberals, the answer was to seek security in a Scandinavian union and break links with the German duchies before the inevitable unification of Germany. It was vital, therefore, to get rid of Holstein and Lauenburg quickly, so that Denmark was not caught in the process and the Schleswig question was settled while Germany was still divided. For supporters of the unitary state, on the other hand, Denmark’s continued existence was conditional upon retaining Holstein. The kingdom could not survive alone. It would be incorporated into Sweden.Footnote 51

In Germany, advocates of Denmark as an Admiral state attached to Germany also used arguments of political security. The Jutland peninsula divided the German coastline in two and constituted a potential fulcrum for an attack on northern Germany. The article Deutschland, das Meer und Dänemark made it clear that Denmark belonged to Germany’s sphere of interest. According to the writer of the article, the only choice open to Denmark was between a German and a Scandinavianist political line. The author was perfectly aware that, with national liberals at their head, Danes would prefer to become Scandinavians in order to avoid becoming German, but he issued a warning to ‘the king of Denmark’. That would cost him Holstein. The Danish government had to understand that the German Confederation would be a power factor. It would become a naval power, and when that happened it would be unthinkable that little Denmark would be able to resist its magnetic power.Footnote 52

German articles about the Admiral state were printed in newspapers and journals that were often used by the Prussian government and its supporters. In Denmark, therefore, plans for an Admiral state were read as Prussian policy. The article Deutschland, das Meer und Dänemark was signed ‘a Dane’. The historian Troels Fink has shown that in all likelihood this was Helmuth von Moltke. Moltke had grown up in Holstein, was educated in Copenhagen and served in the Danish army before, with the permission of the king, entering Prussian service in 1821, in the hope of further improving his skills, ostensibly for the benefit of Denmark. And so he did. To the extent that in 1857 he was appointed chief of staff of the Prussian army that planned the war against Denmark in 1864.Footnote 53

Addressing the article to ‘the king of Denmark’ has to be seen as Prussia’s attempt to persuade Christian VIII to bring either his German duchies or his entire state into the German customs union and into a military collaboration. The king was not prepared to do the former but he was open to an alliance that made the Danish fleet into Germany’s marine protection. On the one hand, King Christian wanted to extract the state from its constricted position, wedged between Great Britain and Russia. On the other hand, an alliance must be seen as part of the king’s attempt to gain Prussian support for his interpretation of the line of succession within the unitary state (cf. Chap. 6).Footnote 54

Empire of Evil

In the 1820s and 1830s, European intellectuals debated ‘the great parallel’, inspired by Edward Gibbons’ seminal The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788). Not only Great Britain but large parts of western and central Europe were seen as the heirs of the Roman Empire, which stood for progress, civilisation and culture in the struggle against an enveloping barbaric and regressive darkness. In a contemporary European context, civilised Germans and Latins were distinguished from the barbaric Slavs of Eastern Europe. The civilised western and central Europeans were fearful of the vitality and primitive energy of the Slavs that Russian troops had unleashed in the fight against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. They were also fearful of the limits to their own power. European intellectuals believed that the Roman Empire had fallen due to cultural decay. They feared that history would repeat itself, and that the Russians would overrun the continent.Footnote 55

This attitude lay at the heart of the pronounced Russophobia that marked nineteenth-century public opinion and it had ramifications deep in the workings of government. In 1812, a document was published in Paris that was reported to be Tsar Peter the Great’s final will and testament, in which his successors were enjoined to expand and force Europe to submit to Russia. The document created a sensation, even though it was ultimately shown to be a forgery. For Oscar I, his sons and his generation, the will was evidence of Russian plans to gain world domination, and of immediate threat to Scandinavia.Footnote 56 Russophobia was also related to the autocratic Russian form of government. For Europe’s liberals and radicals, Russia was the empire of evil, which, as ‘the gendarme of Europe’, appeared as bent on crushing any revolt or uprising. For conservative circles, on the other hand, Russia could represent a necessary bulwark against revolution.Footnote 57

Russia and Pan-Slavism were seen as two sides of the same coin, for the idea of a Russian threat was linked both to a national struggle for existence and to a wider fight for civilisation. For Swedish, Danish and Norwegian liberals, it became a common denominator, an integral part of an ideological worldview, where Russia represented a national and political antithesis. The Swedish Scandinavianist Emil Key anticipated in 1843 that there would be a major confrontation between East and West, in which Scandinavia would play a key role, but in order to do so Scandinavia would have to unite as ‘all other peoples in our times into an even larger entity’—as would be dictated by the threshold principle. Danish liberals put forward the same arguments and saw German and Russian threats against Scandinavia as two of a kind.Footnote 58

Swedish revanchism after the loss of Finland meant that views of the Russian danger were not only defensive in nature. While Scandinavian nationality was to be shielded against the Germans in Schleswig, defence against Russia and Pan-Slavism was overlaid by an element of aggression. The Swedish press, contemporary poets and the policy of Oscar I during the Crimean War all provide evidence of an aggressive element in Scandinavian Russophobia. In August 1863, as the Polish uprising of that year seemed likely to trigger a general European war, Charles XV declared to a British diplomat that St. Petersburg should be made a free city, the Russian Baltic fleet should be destroyed, and Finland should be reunited with Sweden.Footnote 59

Scandinavian images of Russians and Germans as the enemy were not mutually exclusive or rival perceptions. These threats could also be regarded as intertwined, especially after Russia and Prussia came to an understanding in early 1863. Nor did perceptions of threat always have to be proxy arguments, such as when anti-Russian sentiment expressed by Danish Scandinavianists was claimed to be a way of stirring up Swedes and Norwegians to win their support for a united Scandinavia and, hence, commit them to hostility towards Germans. Even though there was sometimes truth in these accusations, Scandinavianists’ perceptions of threat from Germany and Russia were first and foremost complementary and dictated by the situation. And such threats were felt to affect the whole of Scandinavia.Footnote 60

The anti-Russian sentiments expressed among the Scandinavian public attracted the attention of the Russian tsar. This placed the Scandinavian governments in an awkward position. In Sweden, it was only when Oscar I took a stance against Russia in the mid-1850s that complaints about the regime’s friendly relations to Russia ceased, while for Denmark Russia remained a guarantor of the regime, for the unitary state as a whole and for Christian (IX) in particular. One Danish newspaper in 1857 felt that the tsar ‘in glorious harmony’ with the conservative Danish government had made Denmark into something approaching a puppet state.Footnote 61

Norway’s geographical position meant that Norwegians did not have quite the same immediacy to their appreciation of the threat. Nevertheless, a number of Norwegians did regard Russia as a threat to their constitution. At the same time, from the 1820s and 1830s onwards, there were suspicions of Russian territorial ambitions in Norway’s northernmost parts. Here lay the seed for collaboration with Swedish and Danish Scandinavianists, which took root in earnest after about 1850. Influenced by Danish and Swedish Scandinavianists, Norwegians such as the writer and later parliamentarian Wollert Konow began to argue in favour of ‘a union in the form of a treaty, a union in arms, an offensive and defensive interlocking between the kingdoms of Scandinavia’ that could frighten Russia into abandoning its alleged plans of expansion into Scandinavia.Footnote 62

Russophobia did not unequivocally equate with the Scandinavianist aim of a unification of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. For many Swedes and Norwegians, their Scandinavian peninsula remained the best defence against enemy forces. This was not, however, a consistent Norwegian view. While those on the Swedish side imagined a Russian attack across the Baltic, leading Norwegian strategists argued that the Russian threat to Norway was primarily directed from the sea in the northern parts of the country. Set alongside their traditional fear of amalgamation with Sweden, this assessment played a part in underpinning Norwegians’ opposition to unionist moves towards military integration, even if they agreed that Russia constituted a threat to Sweden as well. But fear of Russia led Norwegians such as the influential historian Peter Andreas Munch to have reservations about Scandinavianism, as they felt that the picture promoted by Scandinavianists of the Germans as the arch-enemy stood in the way of a common Scandinavian-German fight against Pan-Slavism.Footnote 63

Did the Scandinavianists ultimately have anything to fear from Russia? Research by the historians, Jens Petter Nielsen and Gunnar Åselius conclude that, during the nineteenth century, there is no evidence of Russian designs to expand into Northern Scandinavia at Sweden or Norway’s territorial expense, such as to acquire ice-free harbours. As for the Oresund, the historian, Andrew Lambert maintains that the main concern, at least for tsar Nicholas I, was to prevent any great power from controlling it, but that Russia had no desire to hold these straits herself. This view is supported by the Russian historian Evgenii Egorov, who argues that geopolitics generally counted for less in Russia’s stance towards Scandinavianism than did concerns that this movement represented an ideological threat. As such, Scandinavianist fears of Russia were not entirely unfounded and certainly not merely phobic, but ultimately Russia does not appear to have been prepared to use anything beyond diplomatic means to thwart Scandinavian unification. Rather, in a worst-case scenario as seen from the perspective of St. Petersburg, the Russian administration even appears—if only at critical junctures—to have been prepared to accept it.Footnote 64

Self-Esteem

Political Scandinavianists were children of their time. Their ideology grew out of the Napoleonic Wars and the international political system created by the Congress of Vienna. This shaped their aims and their politics. Political Scandinavianism was characterised, on the one hand, by fear for the future and, on the other, by a need for recognition. Sweden and Denmark had lost their former status. Scandinavianism can be seen as a means to regain the self-esteem that Swedes and Danes in particular felt they had lost in the Napoleonic Wars. Like Norwegian nationalists after 1814, Scandinavianists wished to be acknowledged as equal members of the international world order. They differed on one issue. Unlike Norwegian nationalists, Scandinavianists believed that recognition was conditional on achieving a sufficient size.