Reconstructing Nordic Significance in Europe on the Threshold of the 21st Century.

The paper deals with examples of reconstructing the significance of Northern Europe (Norden) in the post-modern social reality. After decades of being regarded as a trailblazer of the social modernisation project from the 1960 to the 1980s, the Nordic societal model and the Nordic identity deriving from it experienced a period of crisis in the beginning of the 1990s. As noted by a leading Danish specialist of international relations, the past ideas and self-images of being better than Europe, upon which the Scandinavian model had been founded, started to give way to fears of the Nordic area becoming a periphery in the new geopolitical setting after the Cold War. The European Union and the Baltic Sea region became the nodal co-ordinates of the discourse that aimed at counteracting the alleged peripherization of this area. The paper attempts to point at the actors and sketch the scope of the discourses that contributed to the process of construction of the new identity as a part of the emerging Baltic Sea region identity. This involved reshaping of the Nordic social and geographical space of reference and reconstructing nodal points of the Nordic identity in a post-modern fashion. Institutional and individual actors that constructed the new reality are presented along with the new structures that have arisen as a result of their actions. Particular attention has been paid to the political agenda that made regionalization in the Baltic Sea area a prominent theme of the Nordic identity formation after the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]