ABSTRACT
The European Union has been furnished with a Northern Dimension (ND). The initiative, taken originally by Finland in 1997, has landed on the Union’s agenda yielding policy documents, high-level conferences and some projects pertaining to Europe’s North. It outlines, in terms of the spatial markers used, a sphere that reaches far beyond the northernmost North. The initiative aims, in one of its aspects, at turning northemness into a representational frame and regime that nurtures communality and influences the relations between the Union, its northern member states, some accession countries and Russia as well as Norway as non applicants. The neo-North embedded in the move offers a joint arena for those already ‘in’, actors on their way ‘in’ and the ones that remain ‘out’. In essence, it mediates in their relations and contributes to what Christiansen, Petito and Tonra have called the “fuzziness” of the European Union by blurring established divisions.2
