Introduction *

European integration became one of the most salient issues in Nordic foreign policy in the 1990s. Finland, Norway and Sweden applied for EU membership and held referenda on accession in the fall of 1994 and Denmark witnessed no less than three EU-related referenda, one on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, one on the Edinburgh Agreement in 1993, and, finally, one on the Amsterdam Treaty in 1998. In all four countries, the governments were in favour of integration – and with the exception of Norway, they had the support of almost the entire political and economic establishment – yet, with the partial exception of Finland, this was a policy which confronted serious opposition among the Nordic voters. The Maastricht Treaty was rejected in Denmark in June 1992 by a 50.7 per cent no vote; Norwegian accession was turned down with 52.2 per cent against membership; and in Sweden only a slim majority of 52.3 per cent voted in favour. In Finland, by contrast, a, by Nordic standards, comfortable 57 per cent voted ‘yes’ (Arter 1995; Tiilikainen 1996). At the turn of the millennium, the Nordic EU members continued on their sceptical track: the rejection of Denmark’s accession to the third phase of the EMU in September 2000 was the most spectacular incident, but opinion polls published in July 2000 in the 53rd Eurobarometer supported this trend: Sweden had the highest number of any member country arguing that membership was a bad thing, and in Finland only 40 per cent were in clear support of membership. ¹