History and Contextualisation of Nordic Cooperation and European Integration

The narrative dynamic of this chapter lies in the underlying tension between European integration through both European integration, and Nordic legislative efforts. At the outset, there seems to be a friction, but this is hardly surprising. The context is of importance here. In the late twentieth century, Nordic cooperation in law was understood as a kind of an alternative to cooperation, within the EU’s predecessor the EEC. Europe with its legal cooperation was somewhere “over there”. Accordingly, analysis that seeks to present history of Nordic cooperation, and contextualise it against the backdrop of European integration, needs to tell two stories that become overlapped, in that the European dimension expands and grows, whereas the Nordic dimension seems doomed to disappear in the shadows of legal history. Regardless, as it will be concluded, there still seems to be room for legal-cultural Nordic dimension. Albeit it cannot be denied that European integration has had an immense impact on the limits and possibilities of Nordic cooperation in the field of law.