ABSTRACT
Introduction At the outset of the Swedish and Finnish EU membership, a report by the Nordic Council of Ministers stated: ‘We do not recognise an official Nordic bloc in the Union but we do love the informal one’ (Stenbäck 1997: 109). This quote accurately expresses the spirit of the Nordic interaction in the EU Council of Ministers with abundant ‘shared success but also hesitance’ (Selck and Kuipers 2005). To what extent do the Nordic states cooperate in the EU legislative process? What, if any, are the effects of this cooperation? Being so different in terms of the preferences of their domestic policies and how they interact with the EU, the Nordic countries also share extensive commonalities that allow them to prioritise neighbours when selecting partners. The perception among others that the Nordic group is influential in EU decision-making has given rise to some anecdotal experiences. After the EU accession of Finland and Sweden in 1995, for example, the Danish Foreign Minister had to give assurances that the admission of two additional Nordic neighbours would not lead to the creation of a Nordic bloc in Council negotiations (in Jakobsen 2009: 85). Since Sweden and Finland joined Denmark as members of the EU, the question of Nordic cooperation in the EU has frequently been posed by politicians and scholars alike (Naurin 2007; Strömvik 2006). Given the tradition of Nordic regional cooperation, the question of collective action appears highly relevant. One might assume that the existing, highly institutionalised regional formats, such as the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Nordic Council, provide individual countries with additional leverage to network compared to other international actors outside the partnership. Previous studies of the UN have captured the capacity of the Nordic countries ‘to punch above their weight’ in multilateral diplomacy by framing a coalition and speaking with a single voice, as in UN meetings in the 1970s (Jakobsen 2006, 2009; Laatikainen 2003). Due to regular Nordic coordination meetings, the countries have cast similar votes in 85 per cent of voting occasions and issued numerous joint statements in the UN. One could expect this pattern to continue and be widely applied within the EU Council framework, where the member states must agree on future EU legislative proposals and push through national and regional interests.
