Fucker of the Books

paper for the Borders and Transnational Governance workshop of the "State Borders and Border Regions" division)
Noel Parker
DRAFT ONLY - NOT FOR QUOTATION
(22 August 2001)
The paper examines "nordicness" as an instructive instance of maintaining difference without independence (in the sense of national autonomy without independence from Europe or from the nordic area as a whole), and considers what that suggests about the terms available for the establishment and/or maintenance of boundaries to group identities.
The contemporary problem of boundaries is their unfixedness under globalizing conditions. The consequences are an increasingly explicit choice of identity without the boundedness provided by the primacy of national-state borders or easily visible independent cultures, and a proliferation of instances of existing on the margin.
A brief account of the coherence of Nordic distinctiveness over recent centuries suggests that its necessary conditions are those of a strategic ...