| Scandinavian economic cooperation, as Nordic cooperation in general, is traditionally characterized by failures in every attempt to carry out far-reaching cooperation schemes. The breakdown of Swedish-Norwegian negotiations on merging the two countries’ telecommunication companies Telia and Telenor is a recent example, as has been the failure in establishing Volvo as a common Swedish-Norwegian enterprise in the late 1970s. Nonetheless, following each of these failures incremental progress could be made in practical cooperation adding up to a quite considerable amount. It seems that Nordic cooperation is hampered by a direct but still unresolved relationship between the national identities on the one hand and a common Scandinavian/Nordic identity on the other, where strong nationalist commitment and feelings of inferiority among each other tend to bloc some of the most promising opportunities for integration. |