ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates banal Nordism, a series of commonplace suppositions and, by extension, disassociations about Sweden and its neighbours. It explores the banalities of the North and considers the consequences they have for all those entrepreneurs implicated in its construction and continuance. Sweden and its northern European neighbours have been likened to a structure built of bricks. The bricks represent the nations. They are connected by a diffuse Nordic element' which functions as a sort of cohesive mortar'. The centenary of Raoul Wallenberg's birth coincides conveniently with the diamond anniversary of the Nordic Council. It will, to recall Rogers Brubaker, be possible to gauge Norden's balances of hegemony' by scrutinizing the manner in which various entrepreneurs' evoke and invoke the North' during this doubly commemorative year. Normally Norden continues to hum along unremarkably in the background like a 'Muzak soundtrack to the North'.
