ABSTRACT
Nilas is a thin elastic crust of ice, easily bending on waves and swell and under pressure thrusting in a pattern of interlocking ‘fingers’. Regardless of deliberate attempts by several policy-makers to use historical metaphors to trigger region building, it can be argued that the region building process in Northern Europe has made the least progress regarding what may be called a mnemonic region, i.e. one that acknowledges that different groups of people have different sets of memories that are equally valuable. Subjectivity requires collective memories be translated into a collective identity. The relation between identity and memory has been firmly established in the literature on social memory. To paraphrase George and Campbell to remember is to ‘do’: to engage in remembering is ‘to give meaning to the activities which make up social reality’, not only past reality but also present reality.
