Beacons of Nordicity: Nordic Conservation Day 1970 and the reimagination of history

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article shows how a reimagined history of the Nordic countries informed their claims to a common destiny as they sought to give shape to the ‘ecological turn’ and to Nordic cooperation at a critical juncture. A narrative analysis of the uses of history on Nordic Nature Conservation Day in September 1970 reveals that the political needs of governments and environmental organizations required that the region ignore its violent history of intra-Nordic warfare. The applied narratives all depended on a harmonious past. Paradoxically, Conservation Day’s foremost event was the synchronized lighting of 600 beacons dotting the Nordic landscape, explicitly re-enacting the call to arms used in the wars that had shaped each country’s borders and identities. The organizers claimed they were sounding the alarm on behalf of nature itself, as if mobilizing the past to save the future. Along the way, this past had to be sanitized to fit the required narratives of regional harmony. Yet the contemporary disharmony of the Cold War could not be escaped and came to affect how the story was told, which demonstrated the frailty of Nordic cooperation under the pressure of the great powers and the ensuing limitations on regional unity.