Russian-Norwegian borderland in the foreign historical literature in the 20th — beginning of the 21st centuries

• Published in: Arctic and North
• Main Author: Konstantin S. Zaikov
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English; Russian
• Published: Northern Arctic Federal University 2018
• Subjects: history; border; frontier; historiography; the Russian-Norwegian relations; the Russian-Norwegian borderland; the Sami; Social Sciences; H; Arctic; sami
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.17238/issn2221-2698.2018.30.60; https://doaj.org/article/56abba35b9744d668485acc23684db8a

The article presents a review of foreign research on the history of Russian-Norwegian borderland in 16th — early 20th centuries. The dominance of the empirical positivism and historical nationalism in the history of the Northern frontier delimitation led to the formation of relatively stable and unilateral interpretations of the Russian-Norwegian border in the first half of the 20th century. The state was perceived as an a priori objective phenomenon. That’s why historians and legal scholars understood the “border” as a static instrument of political power, ignoring its multipotential phenomena and variety of its subjects. The Scandinavian historiography has developed a historical tradition of perception of the Treaty 1826 on the delimitation of “common districts” as a fair act of institutionalization of borders over the common possession. As a part of this tradition, it may seem that Norwegian territorial claims did not look expansive in relation to Russia. However, for a long time the Scandinavian historians advocated the theory that the Russian Empire, driven by the idea of permanent territorial extensions, had posed a threat to the Norwegian Finmark. So, the delineation of the Northern frontier was a diplomatic deal aimed at creating legitimate barriers to further Russian expansion in Western Europe through the Norwegian Arctic. Thus, the author concludes that from the methodological perspective, the evolution of the Russian-Norwegian borderlands is still not sufficiently developed in foreign historiography and requires closer attention to create high-quality reconstruction of the Russian-Norwegian borderland evolution from the territory with frontlines configuration of political boundaries in the 13th century — the early 19th century to the space with a sealed political boundary in the 20th century.