[BRIEF NOTE] The Contingency of the Nation-State

[rfmcdonald]

pompe notes that, a hundred years and two days ago, the Swedish-Norwegian union came to an end. It's not unimaginable, as he writes, that the various efforts to unify Scandinavia might have succeeded in creating a single Scandinavian state. The Kalmar Union might have done it, perhaps a successful Denmark-Norway or a highly successful 17th century Sweden, maybe even a triumphant pan-Scandinavianism in the mid-19th century. It didn't, with the failure of the NORDEK concept in the early 1970s ensuring the definitive separation of the Scandinavian states from one another.

Joseph M. Parent's PhD thesis chapter "E Pluribus Unum: Political Unification and Political Realism" examines of the breakdown of Sweden-Norway. Parent comes to the conclusion that this last common Scandinavian state failed, not only because it was less a union and more of an alliance but because there was no common threat to force the Scandinavian states to unite in the 19th century. Without this pressure, and without a dynamic and powerful Scandinavian state to play the role of Piedmont in Italy or Prussia in Germany, pan-Scandinavianism was doomed. Existential threats are, he implicitly argues, the only things able to create nations out of scattered smaller polities.

This isn't a surprise to anyone who knows anything about Canadian history. In the 1860s and 1870s, the only thing that brought together separatist Lower and quasi-colonialist Upper Canada, the mercantile long-settled provinces of the Maritimes with the plains of the Hudson's Bay Company lands and the outpost society of British Columbia, was the threat felt by the United States. Without this threat, Confederation may not have happened at all. And now in the 21st century, without this threat, Canada may yet end, or at least be radically transformed, with or without all of its component regions.

It all comes down to the point that countries aren't historically transcendent entities by their very nature. They only act this way when people with a vested interest force them, and their citizens, to act this way. If the country stops being relevant or the threat disappears, and if there is no underlying community to keep the country together, then it must vanish, almost as if it never was.