Like most borders, the one between Germany and Denmark has been contended for a long time. It settled in 1920 following a plebiscite, and it's been the same since, although it had moved up and down a lot until then. Take Schleswig, a town of about 25 thousand people around 40 km south of the current border. It used to be the seat of a Duchy, which was part of the Kingdom of Denmark until 1864. Then Prussia took it. When a referendum was hold 56 years later, the city of Schleswig itself wasn't even involved, and only the northernmost part of the region voted to rejoin Denmark. Today, a Danish minority still lives here, it's protected by German Law and is represented in both the national and the state parliament by the South Schleswig Voters’ Association (SSW). How visible would the Danish minority be in a place like Schleswig was something I wondered before visiting the town in February. My general impression has been: not much.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that Scheleswig is missing cultural and historical links to Scandinavia and Denmark. After all, the modern town has evolved from an old Viking settlement, which was actually a fall-back settlement, established after the original one started to be the aim of repeated attacks. And the settlement that came before Schleswig was Hedeby (or Haithabu, feel free to pick the spelling you prefer!), an important trading centre in the Viking world, founded by the same guy who would end up giving his name to a famous wireless technology many centuries later.

Today, where Hedeby once was, lies a vast archeological site attached to a dedicated museum showcasing a large amount of finds - all more or less one thousand years old - including runestones, everyday items, old coins, swords and jewelry, as well as the remnants of a long boat. If you have visited the Jorvik Viking Centre in York you probably already know what to expect from the permanent exhibition, but I have to warn you: they don't have a human coprolite. The museum is also very keen on letting you know that the exhibition is made of just (a fraction of) around 5% of what was originally underground and has since been excavated and brought to the surface. Luckily, that 5% includes my personal favourite, that is: the oldest whole churchbell ever found north of the Alps.

I could not hear much Danish spoken around Schleswig. There was also none on street signs or information boards. Kiosks weren't selling Danish newspapers either. There was not even a local branch of the SSW in town. But if museum labels are meant to reveal something about the average visitor, then at least in this respect, German and Danish was the most common combination in almost all the places I have been to. More intriguing was the choice made by the Cathedral of Schleswig to print different versions of flyers for Danish and German speakers, with the former being asked to go around and spot the differences between protestant and catholic elements present in the church, and the latter being challenged to detect the animals in the building. In the meantime, only a few steps away, in what looks like an impressive win for interfaith dialogue, the last catholic king of Denmark and Norway is being commemorated with a huge Cenotaph inside a protestant cathedral in Germany.

Out in the freezing weather, not far from the cathedral, one thing that definitely spoke Danish to me was Holm Schleswig, an old fishing village built around a cemetery which seems to have been teleported there directly from the cutest areas of Ribe, Aarhus or Aalborg (but only after someone took care of hiding all the Dannebrogs). And there, down a narrow alley - provided one could dodge the ice falling from the roofs and maintain a minimum amount of grip on the slippery cobblestones - the view on the frozen Schlei wasn't bad at all.

From that spot, someone could have attempted to walk on the ice to reach the opposite side of the inlet. Not feeling brave enough, I boarded the local bus instead, which in around 40 minutes took me to Carlshöhe, a newly developed residential area near Eckerförde where Galerie Rieck is hidden. Here modern and contemporary Scandinavian (i.e. mostly Danish) art is on display (and on sale too), including paintings of Bornholm and Skagen next to more abstract takes of both Danish and German artists. I can’t claim I understand it, but I found Jens Christian Jensen’s compositions made of objects like springs or brushes stuck onto a panel quite intriging. Resting for lunch in a cafè near the gallery after the visit, I found out that I do like mustard after all, but only when it's mixed with honey.

I think it’s fair to say that Schleswig does not vibe like a border town. And yet, it seems to occupy a strange spot: far enough from the border not to show any obvious links to Denmark but also not distant enough to be able to hide entirely centuries of interactions and exchanges.
Stepping outside of the regional train that took me back to Hamburg, it amused me to discover that the official slogan of Schleswig-Holstein printed on the livery reads “the real North”. I wonder what a Dane on holiday would think of it.

When I arrived in Oslo for my Erasmus internship in June 2015, I knew absolutely no one, it was my first time in a foreign country for an extended period of time and I could barely put together a sentence in English. I also happened to arrive on the week of the Oslo Pride.

So on a sunny Saturday morning I walked down to the assembly point in Grønlandsleiret to join the parade, only realising once I got there that things looked a bit different than I expected. Most people getting ready to take part in the tog were members of organised groups, companies and political parties, with everyone else watching on at the sides of the streets.

Not happy to give up, I looked around me and spotted a small but lively group of young people lining up on the street with a bunch of musical instrument. I knew already enough about Norwegian politics at the time to see that they were the local delegation of the Green Party. They seemed friendly enough to ask whether I could join them in the march, and they said yes. I have very good memories of that afternoon.

Incidentally, 2015 was a (local) election year in Norway, with elections in all municipalities and counties scheduled for September 14th. Two years earlier, the votes for the Norwegian Green Party had increased eightfold in the previous legislative elections and they had elected their very first MP to the national parliament since the party was founded in 1989. There was a lot of excitement around and the expectation was of further progress in many urban areas of the country, Oslo included. Their flagship proposal in that campaign was to get rid of as many cars as possible from the city centre and expand the bike infrastructure.

My Erasmus started the week after the Pride and it consisted of an internship in a (research) workplace rather than a student exchange at the university, so the chances of socialising with people of my age (in a country where socialising isn’t easy in the first place, especially when you have just arrived) weren’t great. On the other hand, the Green Party volunteers I met at the Pride were young and fun, held a weekly social gathering at the Café Tekehtopa in Sankt Olav Plass 2, and could certainly do with some help with the upcoming electoral campaign in Oslo. The combination of lots of free time to spare and fear of loneliness made me a very opportunistic volunteer for the rest of the summer.

The language barrier meant that I could only help with simple and practical tasks. And to be honest, aside my generic simpathy for the cause, I wasn't even motivated politically all that much. But I learned to make filter coffee, which I was bringing to the those canvassing on the streets. Eventually, I was rewarded with a red T-shirt with the logo and the word GRØNN.

On the evening of the election day, exactly 10 years ago, I was invited to the valgvake, the event in which members, candidates and supporters of a party (as well as journalists and TV commentators) follow the election night. And although I have no memory of it, I have dug up an old email saying that on that night - between 11 and 11.45pm - I was on shift at the door, to be sure no one was bringing alcohol inside the venue. It must have been hard given the overall mood.

Indeed, that night the Oslo Green Party made huge progress and obtained over 10% of the votes, becoming the third largest party in the city. It would have ended up governing the capital in a coalition with other progressive parties until 2023.

But even more importantly, the Greens won 4.2% of the national share of the votes, and that was the real news. In Norwegian politics, 4% represents the electoral threshold (sperregrense) that guarantees representation in the national parliament1. Replicating that result two years later at the parliamentary elections2 would have meant to gain another 6 or 7 representatives and be officially admitted to the group of (then) seven major political parties shaping national politics.

But as it turned out, things didn't proceed as fast. The Greens failed to clear the sperregrense in 2017, when they obtained 3.2% of the votes, and were left again with a single representative in the Stortinget. And they failed again in 2021, although they got closer than ever (3.94%) and elected two additional MPs.

My Erasmus internship and my time as Green volunteer had ended shortly after the night of the valgvake, when I headed back to Italy. Since then, I moved to Norway to study or work twice more, but somehow I had found other, less opportunistic ways to socialise than volunteering for a political party. I kept, however, following Norwegian politics as a spectator, waiting for the Norwegian Green Party to finally achieve what on that night of September back in 2015 seemed all but a done job.

Norway held its most recent parliamentary elections last monday3. The opinion polls looked terrible for the Green Party at the beginning of the summer, then things started to turn. In the weeks and days running up to the elections, their main campaign slogan became ‘Det er mulig’ (it’s possible), in attempt to motivate supporters and voters. The polling average on election day was a whopping 6.2%.

The final result isn’t quite impressive, but at least, 10 years later, the sperregrense spell is finally broken.

The film revolves around the Icelandic fishing industry and the market of fishing quotas. The protagonist (Thordur) is the owner of a small company which catches and processes fish. His firm is struggling to remain economically viable in an industry landscape that is changing rapidly. His stubborness and reluctance to innovate (and eventually to sell the business to a bigger company) is at the centre of the main storyline, and ends up igniting all sort of conflicts and issues.

I personally liked this movie, and I was a bit surprised by the mediocre critical reception. But while I was skimming through some of the reviews, I quickly realised I wasn't adopting the same meter. What I enjoyed the most wasn't the plot, the characters, or the acting (although I think all of them were pretty good). It was, actually, its social and economic background: a snapshot of Iceland in 2002.

I am sure I will visit Iceland at some point, but I haven’t so far. And my current knowledge of it it’s scarce: it's not a place that ends up in the news very often. When it happened recently it was because of yet another volcanic eruption, and because the government announced it would organise a referendum on resuming the accession talks to join the European Union by 2027.

And so while I was watching this movie, I realised there was maybe something interesting to learn about the role of the fishing industry in Iceland, the fishing quotas and the reliance of this sector on foreign workers already in 2002.

The fishing industry

According to Statistics Iceland, around 3 700 people were employed in the ‘fishing and aquaculture’ sector in Iceland in 2024, that is, 1.7% of the total workforce1. To that, one should add those employed in the fish processing industry (3 200 people), taking the total to around 7 000, that is, around 3% of the working population2. Overall, the industry has shrinked by more than half since the mid nineties, when the whole sector employed around 16 000 people, and it had already become significantly smaller by the time the movie was shot and released in 2002, when it employed 11 700 people, or 7.5% of the the working population3.

Not surprisingly, the fishing industry has also receded in terms of share of the GDP: here it went form making up almost a seventh of the whole economy (14%) in the early 1990s, to around 10% in 2002 and 6% in 2024.

Fishing quotas

A system of fishing quota has been established in Iceland back in the 1980s to counteract overfishing. What it means is that the companies owning fishing vessels are only allowed to catch a certain amount of fish per year (sometimes divided by species, area, etc), established by the government. Possibly as a consquence of this, Icelandic fishing vessels have been catching less fish lately than they used to. The total catch in 2023 stood at around 1.3 million tonnes, down from a peak of 2.1 million in 2002 (there is a timeseries here).

In addition, since 1990 fishing quotas have been made transferrable, meaning they can be bought and sold4. Over time, the quotas’ system has created an increasingly concentrated industry, where fewer operators and companies own an increasingly larger share of the quotas, as even the official Icelandic government’s website reports:

The quota system has led to more concentrated vessel ownership and fishing quotas. Around 75% of the quotas now belong to 25 of the largest vessel operators and fishing companies in Iceland.

Source: government.is

It’s therefore not surprising that one of the most destabilising event in the movie is the attempt made by a bigger company to buy up Thordur’s smaller business.

Immigration

Another topic recurring many times in the film is immigration. The film seems to suggest that in 2002 the fishing industry in Iceland was strongly dependent on migrant workers to function properly. There is even a scene where the owner of a pub refers to this fact by saying that foreign citizens are taking up jobs that locals don’t want to do anymore. I also noticed that people of asian origin were by far the most represented immigrant group depicted in the film.

So let’s look at the big picture first. Migration is not a recent phenomenon in Iceland: looking at the net migration figures, the number of foreign citizens has been steadily increasing since the mid-1990s5, decreasing momentarily only in 2009 and 2010 - presumably as a consequence of the financial crash of 2008. Since then, there have been three peaks of new arrivals: one in 2006, one in 2017 and one in 2022. In 2024 more than 69 thousands foreign citizens were living in Iceland, making up 18.1% of the total population. When the movie came out in 2002 the percentage of foreign nationals was around 4%.

As for their country of origin, the composition has also changed slightly over the years. According to some data compiled by OECD available up to 2022, almost 80% of immigrants come from Europe or other nordic countries6 and around 10% from Asia. This proportion was a bit different in 2002, when the share of immigrants from Asia was almost 20% of the total, and a larger proportion was also coming from the other Nordic countries7.

As for the reliance of the fishing industry on the labour of foreing citizens, one can compare the share of foreign citizens employed overall with the proportion of those working specifically in this sector. It turns out, migrants were already overrepresented in this sector in 2002, and they continue to be so today. In 2002, there were a total of 156 070 people in employment (of which 6 360 were foreign citizens), and 11 700 of them worked in the fishing industry (of which 1 450 were foreign nationals)8. This means that while the share of foreign nationals in the workforce as a whole was 4%, they represented more than 12% (i.e. three times as much!) of the people working in the fishing industry. This overrepresentation is smaller today but hasn’t gone away, despite the fishing industry having shrunk in size and the overall foreign workforce having grown to be 24% of the total. In fact, around 38% of all workers employed in the fishing industry in 2023 were foreign citizens (in the manufacturing sector the proportion is almost at 50%)9. So if anything, the reliance of this sector on the work of foreign citizens is more significant today (at leasy in relative term) than it was when the movie was released 23 years ago.

One final interesting aspect of Iceland’s job market is the fact that it has one of the largest share of over-qualified foreign nationals in employment among EU and EEA countries. Data compiled by Eurostat show that more than half of both EU and non-EU citizens working in Iceland are overqualified for their job. In the case of EU citizens, this represents a larger over-qualification rate than that of any EU country.

• Dag Solstad, whose existence I discovered on the day he died (15th of March).

Articles

• An article about boycotts in the Nordic countries against american companies and products. (ilpost.it)

• An article about the Norwegian ski jumping team admitting to cheating in the World Championship. (reuters.com)

• Estonia by Neil Taylor.

  I visited Tallinn in December and I loved it. Probably the Baltic country that has the strongest Scandinavian vibes. On my last day I went to a small bookshop in the city centre and picked up this book from their (small) english language section.

Podcasts

• An episode of The News Agents in which Lewis Goodall interviews Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Prime Minister of Denmark between 2011 and 2015. (Spotify link)

Recipes

• I made Fastlavensboller (based on this recipe).

Pictures

• This nice Instagram album showing Queen Sonja of Norway visiting a Munch exhibition in Rome. It’s the first time in 20 years that a Munch is held in Rome.

Articles

• A nice piece about Nordhavn, defined “the 5-minute neighborhood of Copenaghen” by the Guardian. (guardian.com)

• An article about the government crisis in Norway. As a result, the Labour party now leads a tiny minority government. (ilpost.it)

• Another article about Greenland, its relationship with Denmark, the United States and the Trump family (freitag.de)

• Why Nordic companies are so successful? (The Economist)

• PhD students and postdoc researchers will be asked to enrol in some Norwegian language course as part of their studies and work. There seems to have been a bit of an outcry about this, I am not sure it’s justified. (nature.com)

• The Löwensköld ring by Selma Lagerlöf. I heard about it in Comodino. The author won the Literature Nobel Prize in 1909 and was the first woman to do so. The book is written in a simple, almost child-friendly way. It feels like it’s set in a magical world, but it’s actually Sweden.

• Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse. He won the Literature Nobel Prize in 2023, and in terms of style is very much at the other end of the spectrum. The book itself is not very long, but in about 150 pages there is barely any punctuation.

Movies

• Pioneer by Erik Skjoldbjærg. I watched this after learning about commercial offshore diving in Norway between the 60s and the 80s. Thanks God today we have robots to do this stuff.

• Togo by Ericson Core1 . Incidentally, the only semi-decent first screening of a movie aired on the italian TV during the Christmas holiday.

Data

• I have randomly bumbed into this Instagram story by chlamidiamagazine, showing a number of Nordic countries at the top of a ranking of confirmed cases of Chlamydia in Europe in 2022. ECDC numbers tell the same story. Will not speculate on why.

  

Podcasts

• Listened to an episode of Behind the Money (produced by the Financial Times) with Richard Milne titled Why Northvolt failed to become Europe's battery champion. Northvolt is swedish. It doesn’t look good for the production of batteries for EVs in Europe.

Articles

• The political diatribe in Sweden around Herik Landerholm, an advisor to the Prime Minister (ilpost.it).

  N.B. He has resigned on January 27th.

• The strategic imporance of Greenland due to the presence of many rare materials on the island (freitag.de).

Pictures

• A picture taken at Mette Frederiksen’s house during a meal with the Prime Ministers of Norway, Sweden and Finland (reddit.com).