ABSTRACT
The EU’s encounter with Norden took full shape only in the early and mid-1990s when Denmark’s EU membership was complemented by the emergence of a wider Nordic attention in the Union’s direction. This wider EU-Norden encounter constituted the early stages of the Union’s north European engagement. In the case of Norden, the Union encountered a historically developed, primarily sociocultural but also partly political group consisting of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Norden represented the main regional project in northern Europe during the Cold War era. Underlying the wider EU-Norden encounter must be seen the broader context of post-Cold War structural changes in global and European politics, such as the end of the bipolar rivalry between the West and the Soviet Union (USSR) and the eventual collapse of the USSR. Although the effects of these changes for the EU relations of a northern country like Denmark PHPEHURIWKH(&VLQFHZHUHQRWSURIRXQGO\GUDPDWLFIRU)LQODQGLQSDUticular, and to a lesser extent for Sweden, the collapse of the Soviet Union was of importance and for its own part helped to prompt the EU membership application. And for the EU-Norden relationship on the whole, the post-Cold War strategic changes created an entirely new situation, erasing the geopolitical arrangement known as ‘Nordic balance’.
