After Napoleon

This chapter recounts the upheaval brought upon the Scandinavian countries by the Napoleonic Wars, which led them all to the brink of annihilation, before it assesses the impact of the Napoleonic experiences on their short- and longer-term development. A general sense that they were too small to survive as individual countries gave them impetus for unification. What Eric Hobsbawm has labelled as the ‘threshold principle’ thus fundamentally impacted ideas about nation-statehood. But whereas Sweden and Norway were united in 1814 and Finland was granted autonomy and protection after Russia’s conquest of that country in 1809, Denmark fought for its very existence at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815. Its German possessions brought the Danish state into the orbit of the German Confederation and triggered national conflict over Schleswig. Situating the post-Napoleonic political and national development in Scandinavia in a context of international politics and a European ideological landscape, this chapter traces the advent of the Danish-German conflict and explores the uneasy relationship between Sweden and Norway, arguing that the different constitutional paths embarked upon by the Scandinavian countries and the influence of liberal nationalism facilitated the emergence of Scandinavianist ideology from the late 1830s, at which point Denmark, Norway and Sweden had reconciled and ended several centuries of rivalry.