Roads Not Taken

This introductory chapter situates the book in the context and aftermath of the great upheaval brought upon Scandinavia by the Napoleonic Wars. The chapter’s point of departure is the efforts to unite the Scandinavian countries in conjunction with the Swedish crises of succession in 1809 and 1810, before the emergence from the late 1830s of an articulated Scandinavianist ideology and movement marked the beginning of more concerted attempts to bring about Scandinavian unification. The chapter also offers a brief overview and a crude typology of Scandinavianism, as well as a historiographical and methodological perspective, arguing that emphasis on structural conditions and tendencies of methodological nationalism has contributed to somewhat deterministic and generally negative depictions of Scandinavianism in traditional Scandinavian historiography. This book offers a reappraisal of Scandinavianism by assessing the grounds, emergence and content of the ideology in the context of its own time, as well as regarding the course of Scandinavian history as more open-ended than the advent and ultimate triumph of the modern Scandinavian nation states suggests.