A Tale of Two Nordic Powers

• Main Author: Markowitz, Jonathan N.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2020
• Subjects: Arctic; Norway
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190078249.003.0008

Chapter 8 explores Denmark and Norway’s divergent responses to the revelation of Arctic resources in 2007. This chapter employs a natural experiment that exploits the discovery of North Sea oil in the 1960s. The two Nordic nations are extremely similar, but Norway discovered oil, while Denmark did not. Norway embarked on a resource-driven development path, while Denmark, with no oil reserves to exploit, invested heavily in its citizens’ productivity and human capital. As a result, Norway’s economic structure became land-oriented and Denmark’s production-oriented. This provides an opportunity to observe the effect that variation in each state’s economic structure had on its preference for territory and willingness to compete over its control. The findings reveal that Norway’s economic dependence on income from natural resources drove Oslo to invest much more than Copenhagen in projecting power to secure Arctic claims. This finding strongly confirms Rent-Addiction Theory’s predictions.