Introduction

The Nordic countries have a long tradition of contributing to peace support operations. Several of the contributions to this book deal with the varied motivating forces behind the Nordic countries’ participation in peace support operations. Nordic cooperation is the topic of Peter Viggo Jakobsen’s article. He asks whether the Nordic countries have managed to establish a new model for cooperation that may enable them to reassert the influence and prestige they enjoyed in the field of peace support operations during the cold war. The notion of a specific Nordic approach to peace support operations rests on the underlying assumptions that the Nordic countries as a group behave differently to other countries and that there is homogeneity within the Nordic group. For all Nordic countries, the end of the cold war resulted in a change in how participation in peace support operations was viewed.