Chapter 2: Conceptual characteristics of Nordic added value

Before tracing the development of concepts articulating the relevance of Nordic co-operation, it is worth noting three features relating to the conceptual characteristics of Nordic added value:

These three conceptual characteristics and their relation to the concept of Nordic added value will be discussed in the following.

Nordic added value is an essentially contested concept and, like other such concepts, is accorded meaning by those who use and debate it. The meanings of essentially contested concepts are not given, settled, or agreed upon and they are highly context-dependent.

David Collier, Fernando Daniel Hidalgo, and Andra Olivia Maciuceanu, “Essentially Contested Concepts: Debates and Applications,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 3 (October 1, 2006): 211–46.

Indeed, the concept of Nordic added value has been described, with reference to the political scientist and philosopher Ernesto Laclau, as a “floating signifier” – an “open and evolving concept with multiple meanings” defined in the process of being used. From this point of view, the act of defining Nordic added value can, in turn, be perceived as an act of “expressing ideas and refining meanings that construct a Nordic region.”

Dang, “‘Nordic Added Value’: A Floating Signifier and a Mechanism for Nordic Higher Education Regionalism,” 156; This invokes the approach of another political scientist, the international relations scholar Iver B. Neumann, who has argued that regions are constantly being defined and redefined by actors seeking to situate themselves at the core of the region. See Iver B. Neumann, “A Region-Building Approach to Northern Europe,” Review of International Studies 20, no. 1 (January 1994): 53–74.

Nordic added value is a composite concept consisting of multiple other concepts. While composite concepts take on meanings of their own, they also relate to their constituent concepts, which have meanings of their own that might be equally contested and ambiguous.

Reinhart Koselleck, “The Temporalisation of Concepts,” trans. Klaus Sondermann, Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 1, no. 1 (1997): 16–24.

This is also the case when it comes to “Nordic” and “added value,” the constituent concepts of Nordic added value:

What constitutes “Norden” or “Nordic” is itself a question subject to constant negotiation, both from a contemporary point of view and historically.

Marja Jalava and Bo Stråth, “Scandinavia/Norden,” European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History 3 (2017): 36–56.

What constitutes the Nordic can be approached with reference to the term’s geographical, cultural, and political dimensions, none of which are subject to given understandings and all of which have been contested historically.

Johan Strang, Jani Marjanen, and Mary Hilson, “A Rhetorical Perspective on Nordicness: From Creating Unity to Exporting Models,” in Contesting Nordicness: From Scandinavianism to the Nordic Brand, eds. Johan Strang, Jani Marjanen, and Mary Hilson (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2021), 1–34; Byrkjeflot, Mordhorst, and Petersen, “The Making and Circulation of Nordic Models”; Jalava and Stråth, “Scandinavia/Norden”; Jani Marjanen, “Nordic Modernities: From Historical Region to Five Exceptions,” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 3, no. 1 (2015): 91–106.

While notions related to social progress, democratic values, cultural and linguistic affinity, and deep historical ties feature among the most common connotations of the term Nordic, they are by no means universally accepted.

Petersen, “Nordiske Værdier: Et Kritisk Reflekterende Essay”; Johan Strang and Jussi Kurunmäki, eds., Rhetorics of Nordic Democracy (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society / SKS, 2010); Strang, Marjanen, and Hilson, “A Rhetorical Perspective on Nordicness: From Creating Unity to Exporting Models.”

Indeed, it has been argued that the notion of the Nordic is attractive for political use exactly because disagreements exist about its exact definition even if there is, or is perceived to be, a general agreement about its overall frame of reference.

Jalava and Stråth, “Scandinavia/Norden,” 37.

“Added value” (mervärde) is itself a composite concept, and one with multiple meanings. As mentioned in the introduction, value-based concepts reflect the ambiguity of the notion of “value,” a word that, it has been noted, a banker would understand in a very different way than a bishop.

Tarschys, The Enigma of European Added Value, 4:9.

The concept of “added value” has been employed in relation to branding and marketing from the 1990s onwards, where some have used it to mark the difference between a brand and a product, making it a core requirement for any brand.

Leslie Chermatony, Fiona Harris, and Francesca Dall’Olmo Riley, “Added Value: Its Nature, Roles and Sustainability,” European Journal of Marketing 34 (February 1, 2000).

However, it has been argued that added value in this understanding is a multidimensional construct with both a functional and emotional dimension, and that the term suffers from a vagueness that poses questions of its usefulness within the marketing sector as well.

Chermatony, Harris, and Dall’Olmo Riley, 54 ff.

Added value entered the field of policy amidst a broader “value-turn” in governance that gathered pace by the mid-1990s and was spurred on by the so-called New Public Management reform movement that sought to apply management principles from the private sphere to the public sector.

Tarschys, The Enigma of European Added Value, 4:35 ff.; Jan-Erik Lane, New Public Management: An Introduction (Routledge, 2002).

“Value added” (sometimes referred to as “surplus value”) – a close conceptual relative of added value that has also occasionally been used in the language of Nordic co-operation – is an economic term denoting the difference between a product’s production costs and its market price which, among other things, came to hold a central place in Marxist economic thinking.

Tarschys, The Enigma of European Added Value, 4:9.

For reasons that will be discussed below, the term nordisk nytta is often used as the preferred Scandinavian-language equivalent to Nordic added value, even if nordisk mervärde is a more obvious equivalent. It therefore makes sense to regard the concept “nytta” as one of the composites making up the Nordic added value concept, but one that offers a different set of connotations. “Nytta” is customarily translated as “benefit,” “usefulness,” or “utility.” The term utility in particular is strongly associated with the ethical theory of utilitarianism. In the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s (1748-1832) classic definition, utility refers to the “property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness.”

John Broome, “Utility,” Economics & Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1991): 1.

Therefore, Bentham and other classic utilitarians argued that the actions of individuals and governments ought to be prioritised according to the degree to which they maximise utility.

Julia Driver, “The History of Utilitarianism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, eds. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Winter 2022 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2009).

As the term has since been used in economic theory, its meaning has changed slightly, so that it now usually refers to the benefit, advantage, etc. that is produced, rather than the property that facilitates such production.

Broome, “Utility,” 1–2.

In that formulation, the utilitarian roots and understanding of nytta are certainly worth keeping in mind when assessing how nordisk nytta is used and understood today – since it puts the stress on (measurable) outcomes when determining what it is worth (or right) doing.

Nordic added value can also be regarded as a concept having what the German conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck has called an “internal temporal structure” that is “multilayered” and “complex.”

Cited from Helge Jordheim, “Introduction: Multiple Times and the Work of Synchronization,” History and Theory 53, no. 4 (2014): 504; see also Koselleck, “The Temporalisation of Concepts.”

Simply put, this means that the use of concepts such as Nordic added value in the present is entangled with historical experience (how the concept has been used in the past) as well as the future expectations it helps to formulate. A consequence of this is that the past meanings and usages of a concept might potentially affect its current usage and understandings in complex and often unacknowledged ways. In the case of Nordic added value, it is notable that once the concept entered the lingo of Nordic co-operation, it was retroactively equated with the concept of nordisk nytta as it had been used since the early-to-mid 1990s. Consequently, the meanings attached to nordisk nytta some decades earlier offered a layer of meaning which actors in Nordic co-operation could draw upon when interpreting and operationalising the meanings of Nordic added value as well. The following chapter therefore begins with an analysis of the conceptualisation of nordisk nytta in the 1990s.

In this chapter, it has been highlighted that Nordic added value is a contested concept, comprising both various other concepts and different temporal layers. Understanding these associated features is crucial for comprehending the historical evolution and the contemporary usage of Nordic added value in a nuanced manner. As the remainder of the report investigates the historical origins and development of the concept of Nordic added value as well as its contemporary operationalisation within official Nordic co-operation, this chapter has highlighted that the concept of Nordic added value has acquired and continues to acquire meanings based on who uses and debates it. Additionally, it has been argued that language and translations constitute an important analytical perspective when seeking to understand the operationalisation of the principle of Nordic added value in the multilingual framework of Nordic co-operation. Furthermore, the meanings that Nordic added value has acquired do not emerge out of nowhere but are influenced by the multiple other terms contained within the concept with their unique histories, contexts, and associated meanings, as well as the various temporal layers that have been ingrained in the concept in its present form through its uses in the past.