Dualistic Colonial Experiences and the Ruins of Coloniality

Introduction

In 1930, Iceland celebrated the anniversary of the establishment of its Parliament at Þingvellir 1,000 years earlier. The aspirations for the festival were ambitious, especially considering that on the eve of the twentieth century, Iceland was populated by less than 100,000 people, and towns had only emerged a few decades earlier, as well as that a large number of people had emigrated to North America to escape the harsh conditions in Iceland. The planning of the festival itself started 4 years ahead of the event. An Austrian conductor was hired to set up Iceland’s first symphony to play at the festival, and demonstrations of Iceland’s leading industries and arts were prepared. Special importance was placed on inviting foreign dignitaries to the anniversary and, as the Icelandic media at the time vividly reflects, there was great anxiety over whether the festival would succeed in impressing these guests. The frequent reference to the festival as the “judgment day of Iceland” indicates the urgency of the matter, where the event was conceptualized almost as a test that the country had to pass in order to prove itself as a modernizing nation deserving of full independence (Rastrick 2013). To understand its importance, the festival has to be positioned within the emphasis of the era on showing the rest of the world that Iceland had a glorious past and that, while Iceland was currently poor, it had earlier contributed to “world culture.” In fact, some even claimed that this now impoverished country had in the past contributed to the foundations of European culture just like ancient Greece (Rastrick 2013; see Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson’s article “‘Icelandic Putridity’” in this issue of Scandinavian Studies). The festival thus constituted an attempt to assert Iceland’s position in relation to other nations—notably, what we would today refer to as the Global North—by reclaiming and making visible Iceland’s past glory as an indicator of Iceland’s prospects in the future. This rhetoric employed by the organizers was deeply embedded in modernization as a project, to show Iceland as a modernizing nation, which in fact also meant that the country needed to be disassociated from “non-modernity.”

I start with this story because it indicates the impossibility of understanding postcolonial positions of some countries without analytically recognizing what I see as “duality” in their engagements with colonialism. In the case of Iceland, the importance of the celebration to the general public and the painful anxieties and desires of the organizers are incomprehensible without the recognition that Iceland was under Danish rule at the time, eagerly seeking full independence. Simultaneously, Icelandic understandings of modernity and Iceland’s weak position as a modern nation at the time implicitly and explicitly refer to other colonized populations and accept the racist discourse of the time. Moreover, Icelandic people participated in settler-colonialism through their migration and settlement in the Americas (Brydon 2001; Eyford 2006; Bertram 2018; Eyrún Eyþórsdóttir and Kristín Loftsdóttir 2016). More broadly, my discussion seeks to emphasize the importance of analyzing the nuances of colonialism in attempts to understand the postcolonial present. Ann Laura Stoler (2008) importantly asks how we can detect the “ruins” of colonialism in our postcolonial present, but, with that concept, her intention is to move away from the more intangible “legacy” toward the various ways in which colonialism affects our present. Also, with Europe again and again being evoked as a point of reference (Bhambra 2011), we have to ask: What kind of European subject does our imperial and colonial past refer to and create, and how are different European subjects positioned within our postcolonial present? As I have claimed earlier, one important avenue for understanding the meaning of Europe is to analyze places that have been constructed as marginal or peripheral within Europe—places that have felt the need to “prove” their membership in the hierarchical community of Europeans. These are not only interesting as local examples in themselves, but they provide a lens to further understand how notions of Europe generate sets of meanings that are shared to some extent across and beyond the continent (see, for example, Kristín Loftsdóttir 2012). My discussion stresses, furthermore, the need to better position the Nordic countries in relation to other European countries that can be seen as holding a liminal position in some sense, even though they do not necessarily share Iceland’s duality in terms of coloniality.1 I refer to scholars focusing on Eastern and Southern Europe who demonstrate the value of comparing the “Nordic experience” to other irregular colonial experiences and then fleshing out what it means to be European and what falls outside that category.

My analysis uses Iceland as a lens to capture the importance of dualistic colonial positions in the present. Movements of people to and from Iceland bring into focus the continued salience of the past, ambiguous colonial positionings, and how the ruins of colonialism filter into the present through various discourses rooted in racism. To tease out the significance of this postcolonial past, I focus in particular on the visibility of Iceland’s dualistic positioning in current mobilities. As I show, Iceland’s colonial memory became particularly acute during the economic boom period of the early 2000s, when mobility was primarily conceived in terms of Icelandic businessmen going “out” and conquering the world. Iceland participated also in humanitarian and development assistance that sent Icelandic subjects into the Global South, which helped to position Iceland more strongly as an agent of modernity. With the disastrous economic collapse of 2008, the mobility of tourists to Iceland become important economically. Tourists came predominantly from the United States and the UK in response to an aggressive marketing campaign that depicted Iceland as exotic and off the beaten path. My discussion maps out these different discourses, and I chart how they engage with colonial memory and imaginaries and what they say about notions of “Europeanness.”

In the first part of the article, I position the discussion within an analysis of the afterlife of colonialism in the Nordic countries and briefly compare Iceland with other European countries in the East and the South. The discussion then moves on to an analysis of data from several projects focusing on racialization in Iceland in which I have stressed that racism does not only revolve around migration and cross-cultural encounters, but is also embedded in everyday life and identity (see, for example, Kristín Loftsdóttir 2014; 2019).2 Racism is not only an important ruin of colonialism: it can also be seen as constitutive of modernity itself, as stressed by decolonial scholars (Mignolo 2011), meaning that we have to analyze modernity and racism as interlinked. As part of my earlier projects on racial identity and nationalism in Iceland, I have interviewed people working in overseas international development (from different NGOs and official international development agencies of the nation-state) and in the financial sector of Iceland. My perspectives are also shaped by interviews in relation to these projects, with people who have migrated to Iceland from Lithuania, Latvia, and a number of African countries.3

Colonialism at the Margins

For more than 10 years now, postcolonial scholarship on the Nordic countries has been particularly vibrant. Jointly, these works have affirmed that the Nordic countries constitute a part of Europe’s colonial past and postcolonial present. This revision of dominant understandings of Nordic history thus challenges the sense of the Nordic countries as “unallied and neutral” (Fur 2013, 18), and the understanding that Nordic colonial actors—when acknowledged at all—were “gentler and more humane colonizers” (Naum and Nordin 2013, 10). It is clear that the colonial engagements differed in terms of how extensive they were and in terms of key actors, but the everyday lives of people not only in the Nordic countries but all over Europe during the early modern period were in one way or another touched by colonialization (Horning 2013, 297). The engagement with colonialization took various forms and was not limited to state actors (see, for example, Edvik 2014). No less importantly, within the Nordic countries themselves, Indigenous people have been subjected to racism, brutality, and exclusion. Gunlög Fur’s (2013) overview of the various ways in which the Sámi in Sweden have been positioned and repositioned in scholarly and official discourses to make claims that they are not colonized people reveals widespread attempts to hold on to Sweden’s place as “outside” colonial history (see also Lindmark 2013). The Nordic countries, in particular Sweden and Denmark, have had a strong colonial presence in the Arctic in general (Bravo and Sörlin 2002; Jensen 2012), both through colonization and modernization that deeply affected Indigenous people in Greenland and Sápmi and through explorations of the Arctic that understood this enterprise through discourses of white, upper-class masculinity (Bravo and Sörlin 2002, 21). As detailed work on different historical and cultural production in the Nordic countries has demonstrated, coloniality was embedded in people’s everyday lives and aspirations (see, for example, Rastas 2014; Kristín Loftsdóttir 2010).

Another strand crucial to the ongoing positioning of the Nordic countries within the framework of colonialism is the notion that revisiting this past needs to be done because it has ramifications for current discourses on multicultural Nordic society (Fur 2013). This emphasis reflects a long-standing postcolonial understanding that imperialism and colonialism were not only crucial in shaping and remaking life for those in the colonies, but also crucial in creating “European” and “Europe” as meaningful categories (see Dirks 1992; McClintock 1995). Contemporary discussions of gender equality in the Nordic countries have emphasized the need for a postcolonial perspective (Keskinen et al. 2009; Lundström 2014), where current discourses about “equality” have to be seen in conjunction with colonizing and racializing discourses (Palmberg 2009; Vuorela 2009; Tuori 2009). A collection edited by myself and Lars Jensen (Kristín Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012) highlighted the analytical usefulness of the idea of Nordic exceptionalism as running through ideas about the Nordic countries’ assumed non-involvement with colonialism. Discourses of Nordic exceptionalism animate the idea that the Nordic countries lacked racism in the past and thus that racism is not really part of the Nordic countries’ present (Kristín Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012; Rastas 2012; 2014; Kristín Loftsdóttir 2013). Discourses of racialized Others intersect with implied notions of whiteness, where the power of whiteness rests in its ability to normalize certain bodies (see discussions in Hartigan 1997).

Having established that coloniality and thus racism are intrinsic parts of the history and nation-making of the Nordic countries, we can move toward two interconnected issues. The first concerns the positionality of the different Nordic countries and the second involves racism in the Nordic countries. We have to recognize the Nordic countries’ diverse histories and, while acknowledging the fluidity of the national boundaries today, avoid the risk of conflating the experience of varying individuals and groups into one blurred experience. The historical boundaries between the Nordic countries have certainly been blurred and shifting. Intersectionality reminds us of the importance of recognizing the multiple positions that people hold, and nationality has become one such dimension. The issue is not necessarily that people happily identify with the nation, but that critical discussions about the nation and what it means are also important in making the nation a tangible “object.” In addition, the nation-state constitutes a frame that provides people with access to certain services and rights. Stating that we have to recognize differently positioned Nordic subjects and the colonial history of some is not to imply that they share equal experience with other colonized parts of the world. It would be a serious distortion of reality to equate Iceland’s position under Denmark with European colonialism as executed in Africa, with its extensive brutality and dehumanization, for example. To me, the technical question of whether Iceland was a colony is not as interesting as trying to understand the consequences of Danish rule becoming highly problematic in the nineteenth century when Icelandic people started to feel the need to assert that they were not colonial subjects. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Icelandic people started seeing themselves as constituting a nation that should have independence, and experiencing themselves as inferior in some sense to other Danish subjects (see Kristján Jóhann Jónsson 2014). To acknowledge this is not to dismiss Iceland’s varied engagements in the colonial projects (image making, settler-colonialism) as mentioned earlier. Although it still seems salient today, such as in metaphors that imagine the Nordic countries as a family where some siblings are older or more mature than others, the power dynamics between the different Nordic countries are usually not directly addressed in scholarship and popular discourses. Such imagery is currently quite potent in Iceland in the conceptualization of the nation’s relationship to Denmark (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2015). This is similar to the situation of Finnish subjects, who often feel marginalized in the context of the Nordic countries (Vuorela 2009). This shows how the experience of Nordic subjects is shaped by both interlinked histories and different positionings. Thus, as Ulla Vuorela (2009) has pointed out, Finland’s position as a Northern European country can still be coupled with a sense of marginalization within the Nordic countries. Vuorela’s observations resemble Eduardo Restrepo and Arturo Escobar’s (2005) call for giving increased attention to where “knowledge” is produced and their idea that geopolitical imbalances are made more visible in the production of knowledge that is seen as universal and all-encompassing. Thus, even though it is crucial that postcolonial analysis in the Nordic countries moves beyond a simplistic national context, the power relationships between these historically constructed categories and the subjects that are associated with them must also be recognized in order to understand differently positioned and shifting subjectivities. It is simultaneously important to more broadly contextualize the sense of being located on the margins or periphery of a particular historically constituted category or area.

The other issue is racism in the Nordic countries. More broadly, scholars have, for some time, disputed the dominance of American theories of race. Probably one of the most famous objections was raised in a paper by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant (1999), which critically addresses how US historical experiences have become the universal theorizing of racism, as particularism universalized. Similar concerns have been raised in relation to racialization in Europe, especially regarding how notions of whiteness have taken shape differently in Europe, the United States (Ponzanesi and Blaagaard 2011; Garner 2010; Kristín Loftsdóttir 2014), and Latin America (Wade 2012). For example, Peter Wade (2012) demonstrates how the United States, rather than other Latin American countries, is always the point of reference when discussing racism in Brazil (35). Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1999) discussion was highly criticized, and the authors were accused of refuting the existence of race altogether in the European context (see, for example, Parvulescu 2016). Putting aside the particularities of their argument, in a similar way to many decolonial scholars (Grosfoguel 2011; Restrepo and Escobar 2005), Bourdieu and Waquant generally question how Anglo-American theorizing of American realities has become a universal theory that is then supplemented by case studies conducted in other parts of the world.

I believe that the extensive theorizing of race conducted in the context of North America should not be considered useless in other contexts, but rather it should, just like other theories, be positioned as arising within a particular social and historical reality. I find this important because theorizing race in a Nordic context needs to take into account historically constituted subjectivities. If we have established that racism was a part of the Nordic countries’ histories and is part of current realities (I emphasize this because the call for more nuanced meanings of race and racism is often interpreted as meaning that there is no racism), the next step must involve an effort to understand the particularities and nuances in the way that racism has been, and remains, part of the Nordic countries. This is done not to gather different “areas” or case examples from the Nordic region to juxtapose with “universal” theories of race, but rather to push the theorization of race forward. To do that, it is important to question what is “universal” or “global” and how this interplays with the local articulation of particular histories. Also, while it is productive to understand racism as interlinked with the creation and maintenance of certain national boundaries—underscoring the nation-state’s continued significance in the present—racism still does not constitute a “national phenomenon” in the sense that it is contained within the borders of the nation (Nowicka 2017). Race is a global historical idea, circulating and being transplanted to diverse national contexts and other social imaginaries, while constantly mutating and adapting to new realities.

The Nordic countries, furthermore, draw from and are shaped by various institutional frameworks that are themselves racialized and not limited to the North. Institutional racism is, as defined by Fox, Moraşanu, and Szilassy, not necessarily explicit but “implicitly embedded and reproduced in exclusionary institutional practices, routines, and cultures that both draw on and reproduce a logic of racialized difference” (2012, 684). Many of these institutional systems are produced through regulatory frameworks that are not national but are often shaped by international bodies or corporations. The Nordic countries have, for example, adopted the Schengen Agreement (EU) on immigration, where the outer borders of Europe are fortified. The Nordic countries thus take part in reproducing institutional racism of the past that is re-animated by the regulation’s distinction between desirable migrants (within the Schengen area) and less desirable (outside the area). The regulation does not explicitly prevent non-white subjects from entering Europe, but still makes it extremely difficult for those from areas previously colonized by Europe to enter the area (Fox, Moraşanu, and Szilassy 2012; Garner 2007). As phrased by Fox, Moraşanu, and Szilassy, this “approach does not explicitly invoke racial categories because it does not have to: by favouring migrants from the EU, the UK is implicitly favouring white migrants” (2012, 684).

Other Positionalities

Prior to looking more closely at how Iceland’s dualistic colonial position is important for current ruins of colonialism, I take two examples to explore how a Nordic analysis of racism and coloniality can benefit from insights from other geopolitical positions that have, in one way or another, struggled to assert their “Europeanness”: Eastern and Southern Europe. Scholars have, for some time, pointed out how Eastern European countries have a long history of being perceived as non-European, and are often objectified by orientalist discourse from other European countries with greater geopolitical power (Buchowski 2006). For some scholars, postcolonial theorizing on colonialism revolves too much around “exploitative colonizing relations between first world and third world countries” (see Bilaniuk 2016). Seeing Eastern European countries as Europe’s “internal Others,” Benedikts Kalnačs argues that the decolonial approach’s stronger acknowledgment of the “specificity of each particular historical experience” (2016, 19) can make it more adept as a theoretical framework to analyze the situation of Eastern European countries. Working through these specific historical experiences, Laada Bilaniuk’s (2016) discussions of African presence in Ukraine points out how aspirations toward “Europeanness” formulate an important part of the identity of Ukrainians, especially as they understand themselves in a global context. Bilaniuk stresses that Ukraine can be viewed as postcolonial due to its status under the Russian empire when Ukrainian culture and language were constantly presented as inferior and Ukrainian labor and land was exploited. Bilaniuk’s analysis does not dismiss the significance of racism against African subjects in Ukraine, but stresses how assertions in the “West” of Eastern European racism often become a part of discourses on the “moral superiority of the West” (2016, 357). The issue is not, as Bilaniuk stresses, that there is no racism in Ukraine, but that we need a nuanced perspective to understand what it means and how it interacts with national identity-building in a globalized world of hierarchal positioning of Europeans. Bilaniuk’s analysis highlights how racism against Black subjects exists alongside the sense that the presence of Black Ukrainian subjects positions Ukraine more strongly as a globalized country, and thus as working against the stereotype of Ukraine as provincial and backward (2016, 360). Thus, blackness becomes valued positively in specific contexts but is simultaneously negatively associated with backwardness and exoticism (Bilaniuk 2016, 355).

Similarly, Southern Europe has persistently been theorized as exotic and pre-modern, and seen as unable to change or modernize. De Cesari’s discussion on the Mediterranean reminds us how the area has consistently been defined in opposition to European modernity (De Cesari 2017, 26). Here again, we see discourses that focus on “Europeanness” and subjects who are not necessarily seen as “non-European” but more as failed European subjects or subjects who are unable to become fully European. This was particularly evident in the context of the economic crisis starting in 2008 in the reference to Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain as PIGS. The image raised by the acronym is one of undignified greedy national subjects, unable to control themselves (see Tsoukala 2013; Bickes, Otten, and Weymann 2014). Greece was in particular presented in this way by European media; the country was portrayed as the source of the economic crisis, and its population as beggars and outcasts (Bickes, Otten, and Weymann 2014, 119). As claimed by Chalániová, this meant that the Greeks are “definitely not treated as ‘one of us,’ but ‘belittled,’ ‘ridiculed,’ ‘humiliated’” (2014, 45). Frois’s (2012) discussion of Portugal contextualizes this further by pointing out the widespread sentiment in Portugal and beyond of Portugal as having “trailed behind” other European countries. The idea of modernization becomes particularly salient as a way of regaining a stronger status as a European country. While Frois points out that, while the strong affection for modernization in its rather traditional technocentric notion is shared with other peripheral parts of the world (2012, 91), the Portuguese example indicates the strong need of Europeans of certain nationalities to assert their “Europeanness.”

What we see here are discourses of modernity that rank European nation-states into hierarchies, where some nations are seen as better and some as worse; some are failed while others are successful. For some Nordic countries, the experience of being under what at a particular point of time is seen as “foreign” rule would be relevant and would intersect with the experience of other European nations that at different points in history have been seen as failed or not fully European in some sense. The transnational racialized discourses are based, furthermore, on a shared history of racism, while at the same time engaging with various local histories where these hierarchies have been made relevant in different ways.

Mobility and Iceland’s Dual Positioning

The discussion now turns toward Iceland to exemplify how this dualistic colonial experience becomes important in various ways in the present and how racism is intrinsic to the experience. Iceland had been under Danish rule for centuries when the struggle for independence began in the mid-nineteenth century. The struggle continued in the twentieth century by peaceful means using diplomatic debates between Icelanders and their Danish rulers. Denmark itself was changing from a colonial empire that stretched across the world to a nation-state that imagined itself as homogenous and isolated from the outside world. I will not go into the details of the disputes between Denmark and Iceland here, but will merely stress that the Icelanders’ emphasis on showing their country as a sovereign part of Europe indicates their sense of marginality within Europe (see Kristín Loftsdóttir 2012). The Parliamentary festival referred to at the beginning of the article is just one example of this discourse, especially the stress placed on showing the foreign guests that Iceland was a nation fast moving into “modernity.” One member of the festival’s organizing committee said, when expressing how important it was to present Iceland positively to the foreign guests:

Hljóta listir landsmanna að vera eitt af því, sem mönnum kemur fyrst til hugar. Vitanlega megnum vid ekki ad gera gesti okkar agndofa med því, sem vid getum sýnt þeim, en vid getum þó sannfært þá um, að hjer býr þjóð, er má teljast þroskavænleg a menningarbrautinni. (quoted in Rastrick 2013, 252)

(The art of our countrymen must be among the things that first spring to mind. Of course, we are not capable of astounding our guests with what we can show them, but at least we can convince them that here lives a nation that can be considered as demonstrating potential on the road to cultural maturity.)

Similarly, the anonymous author of an article in one Icelandic journal proclaimed:

Erlendir men sjá nú, að hjer er að fara fram mikil nýsköpun á öllum sviðum og það sannar menningarmátt þjóðarinnar. Af þessu leiðir það, að það verður ekki lengur litið til Íslands sem villimannaeyju norður í höfum. Þjóðin verður talin með í för þjóðanna fram til hærri menningar og sigilds þroska. (“Alþingishátíðin 930–1930” 1929–1930)

(Foreign men will see now that a great deal of innovation is taking place here in all aspects, and this proves the nation’s ability for culture. The consequence will be that Iceland will no longer be seen as a savage island in the north ocean. The nation will be perceived as being en route to higher culture and continuous development.)

A key aspect here is that Icelandic social discourses on modernity and national identity in the past were shaped by Iceland’s position under Danish rule simultaneously as they were fashioned by Iceland’s engagements with wider racist and colonial narratives. Ideas of “higher culture” and the country’s development were thus, in Iceland as in the rest of Europe, deeply racialized. As decolonial scholars have emphasized, such claims toward modernity have to be read alongside discussions of uncivilized “Others” and how Icelandic subjects differed from them. As I have shown elsewhere, such discussions were clearly demonstrated in the Colonial Exhibition in Copenhagen in 1905, where Icelandic subjects were to be exhibited alongside other Danish colonial subjects (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2012), but also in a variety of other discourses such as those presented in textbooks that positively addressed European colonialization of the world as “our” colonialization (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2010). While this was usually done by indirect means, such as by celebrating explorations and European culture, in a few cases, the books also remind the reader that it was the Icelanders who originally “found” America, rather than Columbus (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2010, 90–1). In the past, Iceland’s postcolonial position was thus largely shaped by its attempts to position itself alongside more firmly established colonizing European nations. Such attempts were still in no way only limited to Iceland. Elisabeth Oxfeldt’s discussion of eighteenth-century orientalism in Norway and Denmark points out that they positioned themselves “not against their colonial other but rather in relation to central European nations” (2005, 13).

The key issue for this paper is, however, how the ruins of colonialism—here embodied in the dualistic position of Icelanders as both colonized and participants in colonial narratives and practices—present themselves in the present. The three cases of mobility that I will mention here exemplify how this past continues to shape the present, which says something about the salience of coloniality in the present. These examples also reflect how mobility is involved in generating the category of the “nation” and the sense of belonging within it, while constantly in an interplay with the notion of belonging with “White” Europeans. In addition, a more nuanced understanding of the colonial past reveals the anxieties tied to Iceland’s placement within the hierarchies of nations. The Icelandic economic boom in the early 2000s clearly shows how nationalistic elements are often intensified through mobility and processes of globalization. Iceland’s past position under Danish rule became increasingly significant during this time, and Danes were in a sense re-animated as the “enemies” of Icelandic businessmen (and thus of the nation) who went out into the world to invest. When a report published by the Danish bank Danske Bank in 2006 questioned, for example, the sustainability of the economic boom in Iceland, comparing it with “emerging economies” in the South, this was strongly perceived in Iceland as the product of jealously and as an attempt to sabotage the Icelandic economic miracle. The CEO of one investment bank echoed the discussion in Iceland at that time when writing about this comparison in an opinion piece in one of Iceland’s business journals: “Er þetta nokkuð sprottið af öfund? Ljótt ef satt væri” (Jafet S. Ólafsson 2006) [Is this the result of jealousy? Ugly, if that is the reason]. In relation to this historical phase, one of my interviewees used the analogy of two brothers and explained to me that “we [Icelanders] are really the little brother or the little one who started acting up and pretended to be more than the big brother and they [the Danes] do not appreciate it” (personal communication 2013). It is interesting that, in spite of Iceland becoming much more globalized in the sense of regulatory and institutionalized frameworks, the mobility of the Icelandic population was primarily conceived in terms of Icelandic businessmen going “out” and conquering the world, as was reflected in that the business “adventure” was often referred to in uncritical and strongly colonial terms (see discussion in Kristín Loftsdóttir 2015). It can be seen as an attempt by the political leaders at the time at “imagining a new Iceland into being,” as phrased by Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson (2014, 16). This emphasis of political leaders on a “new Iceland” also captured the imagination of other people living in Iceland. The term “business Viking” was often used after 2000 to describe the men who were at the forefront of Iceland’s economic boom. The term reflects the masculinity of this imagination and its association with an imagined glorified Viking past. It was as if Iceland had finally achieved a belated involvement in the colonialization of the world (see also Kristín Loftsdóttir 2015). However, it also has an indirect association with “White” bodies and thus White masculinity (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2015).

Mobility was also, however, intensified through extensive labor migration to Iceland. As Iceland became part of the wider European labor market in 2001, and with acceptance of new countries into the European Union, Iceland’s lowest-paying jobs were increasingly filled by people from Eastern European countries, such as Poland and Lithuania. During the boom years, these individuals were frequently discussed in a racialized way (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2016; Wojtyńska, Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir, and Helga Ólafs 2011), echoing the wider European discourses outlined above, of Eastern Europe as Europe’s “Other” (Kalnačs 2016). It is important to read these discourses concurrently, as they took place at the same time while not necessarily in the same space; on the one hand, glorifying Icelandic subjects who go “out” into the world and show other nations Iceland’s ability to act within a fast-moving, modern financialized world—and, on the other hand, negatively addressing people from Eastern Europe as criminals and racialized subjects who almost deserve to be economically exploited.4 In Iceland, there was no previous history of prejudice against people from Poland and Lithuania, but with the collision of certain nationalities with lower class positions, the globally available repertoire of racism against Eastern “Europeanness” seems to have been useful to justify the treatment of this new population (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2017). We thus have distinctive discourses, passing each other with differently positioned subjects. Icelanders sought to assert their hyper-compatibility with the Anglo-European world while making use of racialized depictions of Eastern Europeans who came to work in Iceland in the country’s lowest-paying jobs—even while their emphasis on asserting their “Europeanness” collided with aspirations that are evident also among many people from Eastern European countries.

Icelandic mobility into the wider world and the symbolic assertions of Iceland’s greatness were, however, not only in relation to economic expansion, but part of a wider neoliberalization of various sectors of Icelandic society (Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson 2014). The economic boom years also boosted Icelandic confidence in the international arena in other ways, where Iceland, after having very marginally participated in international collaboration, considerably increased its engagements in international development projects. An important change was the establishment of Iceland’s first peacekeeping unit, the ICRU (Icelandic Crisis Response Unit), which was defined as part of the country’s development assistance policy. These links between the economic expansion and a greater international presence in terms of development and peacekeeping were recognized by some of those interviewed; one woman even referred to the strong emphasis on peacekeeping during these years as part of the “economic boom-years-nonsense” (personal communication 2014). Icelandic participation in humanitarian and development assistance that sent Icelandic subjects into the Global South was, however, early on conceived by Icelandic subjects as a way of positioning the nation more strongly as an agent of modernity. Nevertheless, international development was only officially established as a project of the Icelandic state in 1971, and received very limited funding from the Icelandic government. It was, however, widely celebrated as a source of national pride and seen as signifying that Iceland was ready to take on the responsibility of a European nation-state in a global community of nations (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2011). This can be exemplified by a 1964 quote from the newspaper Morgunblaðið where such a claim is made in relation to “underdeveloped countries” (as phrased in the article): “Við Íslendingar erum þess vel megnugir að senda hóp ungra, seŕþjálfaðra manna til að taka þátt í því víðtæka og göfuga starfi að kenna og hjálpa vanmáttugum að hjálpa seŕ sjálfir” (“Íslenzkt æskufólk leggi eitthvað af mörkum” 1964) [We Icelanders are very capable of sending a group of young, specially trained men to take part in the widespread and noble task of teaching and helping the disadvantaged to help themselves]. An analysis of discourses on international development in Icelandic newspapers in the 1970s reveals the salience of the binary division into developed White people and impoverished Black people (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2011), thus ideologically strengthening the sense of Iceland as a White “Western” or developed country.

During the economic boom years, the Icelandic state saw it as beneficial to its goals of gaining stronger international recognition to considerably increase its contribution to international development work. “Iceland’s Policy on Development Cooperation 2005–2009,” issued in 2005, states that with its participation in international development, the country achieves its “political and moral obligation as a responsible member of the international community” (Ministry for Foreign Affairs 2005, 12). This reflects what Kapoor (2005) has stressed, that discourses of international development often reflect European identities rather than the lives and aspirations of the “target” populations. The Nordic countries in general have longer traditions of peacekeeping than Iceland does, and this has generally provided them with prestige and power within the international community (Stamnes 2007, 449). In addition to this, the Nordic countries have often been seen as particularly suited to the task due to the perception that the Nordic countries lack a colonial history (Jakobsen 2006, 382). The ICRU was also a part of Iceland’s contribution to NATO, and as such engaged in NATO operations in Afghanistan (Helga Björnsdóttir 2011). When Iceland applied for a seat in the UN Security Council for the period 2009–2010 (unsuccessfully), one of the points emphasized was that, as a former colony, Iceland should assist other former colonies, reminding Icelanders that “we” were a colony ourselves (see discussion in Kristín Loftsdóttir 2014, 465) and thus better able to assist other countries that had been colonized. Such claims completely ignore the history of colonialism in Africa and beyond as one of brutality and racism, and thus as strikingly different from the experience of the Icelandic population, which gained independence through peaceful means and had been under foreign rule for centuries before claiming independence. The increased emphasis on international development and the establishment of peacekeeping at that time must be contextualized within the period of yearning for international recognition during the boom years, with Iceland establishing itself even more firmly within the legacy of other Nordic countries in international development and peacekeeping.

Iceland’s geopolitical position of power at the time—or at least its perceived position of power—was about to change, however. The disastrous economic collapse of 2008 made the country technically bankrupt, with three of its main banks failing almost overnight. Tourism intensified greatly after 2010 after a massive campaign by the Icelandic state and interested commercial parties to boost Iceland’s economy and enhance the country’s reputation (Gunnar Þ. Jóhannesson and Huijbens, 2010). Tourism mobilities to Iceland indicate yet another way for Iceland’s colonial past to intersect with the present. New tourism mobilities to post-crash Iceland were strongly boosted by the exoticization of Iceland through two routes: an organized branding campaign called “Inspired by Iceland,” which was initiated in 2010 by the Icelandic government and commercial actors, and the extensive international media coverage of Iceland after the crash. Both played on images of peculiarity and tropes of exceptionalism (Kristín Lofts-dóttir 2018). Tourism was not new in Iceland but had previously been emphasized marginally by the Icelandic government (see Gunnar Þ. Jóhannesson and Huijbens 2010). The campaign success can be seen in the sharp increase of tourists over the span of a few years, from an estimated 502,000 in 2008 to 1.3 million in 2015 and then 1.8 million in 2016 (Ferðamálastofa 2016; 2017) mainly from the United States and the UK (Oddný Þóra Óladóttir 2015). In spite of tourism’s economic significance in rescuing Iceland from the crisis, it has been controversial, with concerns regarding environmental degradation due to the high number of tourists and the lack of infrastructure to accommodate them (Schaller 2016) but also more general concerns with what this rapid intensification of tourism as an industry means for Icelandic society (Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir and Kristín Loftsdóttir 2016).

If we go further back to the past, Iceland was, from the nineteenth century onward, a part of the tourist mobilities of the time, with affluent scholars and explorers from upper-class European elites being especially interested in Iceland’s wilderness and nature. Written narratives produced by these authors are mostly focused on nature and the landscape, but they also refer to Iceland’s inhabitants, usually as “pre-modern” (see Oslund 2011). This is in line with Iceland being regularly perceived in Denmark at the time as the guardian of old Nordic culture (Karlsson 1995).

The exoticization of Iceland in the post-crash campaigns rested thus in some sense on familiar tropes of the “authenticity” of nature and people, where a pristine natural and unspoiled environment could be explored by tourists (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2016). Images from the webpage “Inspired by Iceland” clearly reflect this with an emphasis on panoramic images and landscapes empty of people. This recalls older colonial and masculine images of the explorer in native lands (Driver 2001). The Icelandic government tried, furthermore, to actively associate Iceland with the Arctic after the crash, which also enhanced the image of Iceland as a distant and exotic location (Kristín Loftsdóttir, Katla Kjartansdóttir, and Lund 2017). These exotic images intersected with tropes of exceptionalism that emphasized Iceland as having miraculously “recovered” from the crisis due to the intrinsic character of the populations, which were perceived as a persistently homogenous group living in the Far North (Kristín Loftsdóttir, forthcoming). Iceland’s liminal position can be seen as making these images more potent and possible. It can, furthermore, be stressed that this exoticization is rendered more secure in Iceland due to its implicit position as a “White” country. In a sense, the images of the tourism industry in Iceland stand in a playful relationship with the notion that Iceland exists, as other Nordic countries, outside of colonialism, and thus colonial imaginaries and racialization become innocent and safe (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2016).

Concluding Observations

Through an analysis of mobility in Iceland, it is evident again and again how Iceland’s postcoloniality continues to be important, interplaying with Iceland’s dual position within the past colonial world. Iceland’s dual position was embedded in Iceland’s varied position within colonialism; the people of Iceland participated in racist image-making and settler colonialism while simultaneously feeling subjected as individuals. As we see, mobility has long been an important force in shaping Iceland, while mobility itself was conceived differently in accordance with the imagination of Iceland’s global position within the world of nations. In the early twenty-first century, the perception of mobility was primarily centered around Icelanders going “out” and conquering other countries through business at the same time as Iceland sought a disposable workforce. More recently, tourism has become important economically in Iceland in order to reconstruct the country both symbolically and economically after the crash. This effort was based on a branding exercise that relied heavily on Iceland’s historical imagination as not “fully” European. As I have tried to stress, the issues discussed here are not limited to Iceland. Other European countries experiencing themselves and being perceived by others as marginal in some sense share similar anxieties about belonging to Europe and also needing to assert their compatibility with Europe. Recognizing how this colonial history shapes national discourses is therefore useful to broadening our understanding of how racism is expressed and how it intersects with notions of national identity in the world. Analyzing in detail how such discourses are based on historical ambiguity in terms of full membership in the category “European” can help to illustrate in more depth how racism persists in the present, as it reveals not only racism of the countries in question but more widely the racism entangled with historically formed concepts such as the concept of Europe.

Analyzing what Stoler has labeled the “ruins” of colonialism in places that have been seen as marginal or peripheral within Europe is thus one way of understanding the meaning of Europe in a much broader sense. Acknowledging that different European subjects are differently positioned, where some constantly feel the need to assert or prove their “Europeanness,” hints at the importance of investigating these countries’ engagement with colonialism in order to understand the ways in which the ruins of colonialism manifest themselves in the present and how racism is experienced and executed.