Call for Abstracts
Special Issue
”The European Union pro and con campaigns in 1990s Nordic countries: Experiences and the politics of emotions”
Editors: Tuomas Tepora, Aapo Roselius & Ville Yliaska (Tampere University)
The year 2025 will mark the 30th anniversary of Finland and Sweden joining the European Union, and Norway opting out. The post-Cold War geopolitical changes triggered and enabled the political and economic change in Scandinavia. Along with many long-term effects, the change affected the experienced and perceived identities across the Nordic societies. The campaigns and public debates that accompanied the EU negotiations and preceded the EU referenda in the Nordic countries (and in Denmark, the referenda on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and 1993) reflected and produced a variety of experiences and emotions from the dawn of a new era to anxiety, and from hope and pride to fear of losing out and the desire to defend one’s community against alien influence.
This special issue is dedicated to the comparison of the Nordic experiences of European integration in the early 1990s. All the three EU debates in Finland, Norway and Sweden had their unique characteristics, yet all of them involved rather emotional rhetoric and strongly felt experiences of change that connected the individual and shared identities. Campaigns for and against joining the EU promoted certain emotions, attitudes and actions, yet at the same time they responded to the hopes and anxieties from below.
We are particularly interested in exploring the experiences and the politics of emotions in the EU referenda campaigns and the public discussions, and debates on European and local identities in the Nordic countries. We welcome abstracts that deal with certain aspects of the debates or campaigns, Nordic co-operation networks as well as broader analyses of the 1990s European integration in respective societies. We are also interested in exploring the EU campaigns or parts of them as public performances. Rather than focusing on the diplomatic history and international relations we encourage the authors to look at the history of experiences and emotions of (un)joining the EU.
Methodologically we are looking for proposals that address the ‘lived experiences’ of the EU campaigns. The history of experiences traces the socially shared, culturally rooted and narrativized meanings of actual events and first-hand experiences. However, we do not intend to limit our approach solely to experiences and emotions but are open for related approaches that address the question of European integration and Nordic identities in the early 1990s. These approaches include conceptual history.
The special issue consists of five research articles and an Introduction by the guest editors. The volume based on the qualified abstracts is offered to Scandinavian Journal of History. The published issue will be part of the Academy of Finland project “A Dim Light of Dawn: Post-Cold War Finnish Experiences between East and West, 1989–1995” (2021–2025), Tuomas Tepora (PI), Aapo Roselius & Ville Yliaska (Tampere University, Finland). The project is affiliated with the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (HEX) at Tampere University.
The deadline of the call for abstracts is 15 December 2022. Proposals of 500 words and a one-page CV should be e-mailed to tuomas.tepora@tuni.fi, aapo.roselius@tuni.fi and ville.yliaska@tuni.fi. The selections are announced by 15 January 2023.
Selected articles should be submitted for editors in the autumn 2023 and the entire issue is scheduled for peer-review in January 2024.