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In 1266, Norway and Scotland entered into an agreement aimed at pacifying a long tradition of competition over control of the islands and waterways along Scotland’s seaboards. This paper examines how the two kingdoms developed diplomatic strategies aimed at regulating social, economic and political developments along their common maritime frontier, and seeks to show how effective diplomacy was in ensuring long-term peace and stability in the region throughout the Late Middle Ages. It focuses on three issues which were addressed more explicitly in Norwegian–Scottish accords: first, the question of dominion over the islands around Scotland’s seaboards; second, the question of mobility to and from those islands; and third, the question of how to protect and limit the threat of piracy in and around those islands. Although largely unprecedented in a Northern European context, this case reveals emerging concepts and strategies of maritime sovereignty in the Late Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The island province of Orkney played a crucial role in Norway's overseas expansion during the Early- and High-Middle Ages. Located just offshore from mainland Scotland, it provided a resort for westward-sailing fleets as well as a convenient springboard for military forays into Britain and down the Irish Sea. The establishment of a Norwegian-Scottish peace and the demarcation of fixed political boundaries in 1266 led to a revision of Orkney's role in the Norwegian realm. From that point until the its pledging to the Scottish Crown in 1468, Norway depended on Orkney as a hub for diplomacy and foreign relations. This paper looks at how Orkney figured in Norwegian royal strategies in the west and presents key examples which show its transition from a tool of war to a forum for peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Norway has been a firm supporter of, and contributor to, UN peacekeeping operations. However, while increasing its financial support since the end of the Cold War, Norway has significantly downscaled its troop contributions to the UN, focusing on NATO operations. Rather than interpreting this as lessened interest in the UN, we point out that support and commitment cannot be measured solely in numbers of troops deployed. Norway’s commitment to UN peacekeeping should be understood as part of its strategic culture, here read as a synthesis between self-interest and solidarity, and between the UN and NATO. This article details the institutional, political and material challenges and opportunities for renewed engagement in UN peacekeeping. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the example of William Cecil Slingsby (1849–1929), one of the leading British alpinists active before 1914, this article reassesses late-Victorian and Edwardian mountaineering. It is particularly concerned with the motivations of mountaineers: what drew individuals such as Slingsby to the heights of Norway and elsewhere? Engaging with recent trends in scholarship, the article argues that interpretations which assign priority to aggressively masculine and imperialistic factors can be problematic. As Slingsby’s example shows, climbing was closely associated with a particular form of manliness throughout the period between the 1870s and the Great War, but the performance of this manliness involved embracing a cheerful domesticity as well as valorising robustly male derring-do and toughness in adversity. As for imperialist motivations, by the late nineteenth century these mattered less than might be thought, even to mountaineers who—like Slingsby—were ardent imperialists. A second and important aim of this article is to shed light on British cultural interactions with Norway. In his day, Slingsby was perhaps the best-known Englishman in Norway, and he was certainly one of the leading promoters of Anglo-Norwegian exchange in Britain. His mountaineering was importantly connected to the ethnic and philological ties he and other contemporaries (such as W.G. Collingwood) discerned between the two countries. Finally, the article also seeks to draw attention to Slingsby himself, a figure about whom almost nothing has been written by professional historians, despite his significance as a mountaineer and the existence of a considerable body of archival evidence relating to his life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

1814 is the ‘year of miracles’ in Norwegian history. The transition from Danish to Swedish rule was transformed into a union between a Norwegian kingdom and the Swedish one. Seen in a contemporary and regional perspective, the outcome of 1814 seems less of a Norwegian victory, but even less of a Danish tragedy or a Swedish triumph. It was a geopolitical and geographical adjustment from one set of imagined ‘natural’ borders – in which Sweden/Finland were tied together by the Baltic Sea, and the Kattegat and the North Sea tied together the Danish composite state from the Danish islands and the Jutland peninsula to Norway and the North Atlantic islands – towards a new definition of ‘natural borders’, in which the Baltic and the Kattegat were the enemy areas. The Scandinavian state system became split between two peninsula states that turned their backs on one another. Denmark was banished southwards; Sweden gravitated northwards. She was compensated with Norway in a twin union, explained as geographically ‘natural’, held together by the Scandinavian mountain range that had been nature’s own fortification wall for centuries. The renegotiation processes of ‘natural’ borders in connection with the upheavals in 1814 shows the predominance of politics over nature in region formation. 1814 is, in the Scandinavian region-building history, a manifestation of the political changeability of constructed state borders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article begins with an outline of how the Norwegian government in exile perceived its position towards its great power allies in the final year of the war: a feeling of uncertainty if not outright abandonment, as Britain and the United States failed to understand or share Norwegian concerns at being left alone to face a possible Soviet ‘liberation’ of northern Norway. After the end of the war Norway's interim solution to its security dilemma was to put its trust in the United Nations while seeking to develop practical military cooperation with the United Kingdom. Seeking to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, Norway tried to stall Molotov's claims for shared sovereignty over Svalbard before finally rejecting the proposals in February 1947. That combination of formal non-alignment and informal ties with the United Kingdom broke down under the pressure of events beginning with the coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. Initial moves to seek reassurance of Western support, in parallel with ultimately unsuccessful attempts to construct a Swedish-inspired Nordic defence alliance, ended with Norway joining the Atlantic Pact in April 1949. The documentary evidence now at hand, in the volume just published, suggests that it took quite some time before the British government came to understand and share Norway's concerns. Initially swayed by the self-fulfilling prophecy of a Norwegian return to isolationism and pacifism, a realization of Norway's determination to stand and be counted against the Soviet challenge only gradually began to emerge through 1947. Yet Britain's own inability to offer substantial security assistance to the Scandinavian region meant that any reassurance of Western support had to await a political commitment from the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines Norwegian policy vis-a-vis the United Nations (UN) through the end of 1945. From here it will become clear that framing foreign policy orientations of the 1940s along conventional lines exaggerates the commitment of Norwegian politicians to two grand ideas. The novel idea of Atlantic alignment, developed by Norwegian circles in London exile, was more ambiguous than generally acknowledged and left room for universal extension. By contrast, the alleged turn in the mid-1940s toward support of the UN was in the form of lip-service as opposed to action that would have engaged actors from Norway. The government outsourced policy-making on the issue to a small circle of experts and made no attempt to exert leadership in regard to UN matters. Norway's indifference toward the UN in the 1940s stands in marked contrast to the country's later reputation as a faithful supporter of the world organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the modern state and the European states system limned the inside of a state different from its outside. Inside the state, peace and progress could be furthered by means of disciplinary power, while outside the state, anarchy reigned. Academic disciplines such as political theory, International Relations and International History treat this divide as foundational, and so the knowledge they produce contributes to its reproduction. The article traces the emergence of the divide where Norway and Denmark are concerned through a reading of the concept of 'realm' (rike), and asks when Norway evolved a foreign policy (as distinct from a non-discriminating foreign/domestic one). There are two extant views. A legal view starts from sovereignty and fixes the date at 1905, whereas a nationalistic view popular with historians treats it as originary to the political entity of Norway, which means that it may be dated back some thousand years or so. Treating discriminating institutions such as foreign ministries as preconditions for the existence of a permanent divide between inside and outside, the article suggests the end of the eighteenth century. One may speculate that the firming of the divide is related to the rise of nationalism, in which case it is not surprising that the two phenomena fade concurrently. Since Nordic cooperation stood out as a special phenomenon in international relations because of the particular way in which it handled the domestic/foreign divide, Nordic cooperation will lose its role as special in the degree to which the domestic/foreign divide becomes less foundational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]