The Nineteenth Century Norwegian-Swedish Border : Imagined Community or Pluralistic Security System?

• Main Author: Berg, Roald
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Stavanger, Norway 2009
• Subjects: border studies; Scandinavian history; Scandinavian studies; peace and war studies; the Scandinavian union; Scandinavian regionalism; security systems; History; Historia; Norway; Journal of Northern Studies
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-43261

The aim of the article is to study the border between Norway and Sweden during the nineteeth century on the basis of Karl Deutsch’s theory of “pluralistic security community” from the 1950s and modern international border theory and research literature on nation building processes. The establishment of a non-violent border relationship including the development of a shared Norwegian-Swedish belief that political problems must and can be resolved by processes of peaceful change, was an issue that Deutsch dated to the years after the peaceful dissolution of the political union between them—in 1905. Confronted with an overview of the history of the border during the union period from 1814 to 1905, the article claims that the demilitarized union zone was established already in the 1820s. The border was gradually solidified as a consequence of the development of modern cartography, but its significance was weakened as a result of the industrialisation during the nineteeth century. On the emotional level it seems possible to find expressions of bad feelings based on bad historical experiences having political consequences, up till today.