Scandinavian Politics: new Danish party

To all on the Scandinavian Politics mailing list,

Here are three notices - about developments in Danish party politics, news of an interesting-sounding research network, and a report of a recent research workshop.


1. A NEW PARTY has been launched in Denmark. Flemming Juul Christiansen of the University of Aarhus has kindly contributed this report.

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A new centre party, New Alliance (nyalliance.dk) was formed on Monday by Danish MP Naser Khader, who broke with the Social Liberal Party. Khader was designated as party leader. With him at his press conference were his two co-founders, MEPs Anders Samuelsen and Gitte Seeberg, who used to be a Social Liberal and a Conservative, respectively.

The break came after disagreement between Khader and the party leader, Marianne Jelved, over the strategy and policies of the Social Liberals. Khader became an MP in 2001. He soon showed his skills with the press but rose to fame during the "cartoon crisis" last year. Born in Syria, he sided with the views of the government on freedom of speech. He founded the organisation Democratic Muslims, which stressed the integration of immigrants into democracy and liberal values. Polls showed that he was very popular with the public. Other parts of the Social Liberal Party advocated less critical stances. In addition, Khader has argued in favour of co-operation with the Liberal-Conservative government instead of strict opposition.

Samuelsen is also known for liberal points of view. Seeberg has been critical of the government's co-operation with the Danish People's Party. A number of leading businessmen support the new party.

New Alliance states that it seeks to build compromises across the blocs in Danish politics. It wants to limit the influence of the Danish People's Party. It favours tax reform. It is pro-European. Finally, it favours strict immigration policies - stricter than those that applied before the present government constellation was formed in 2001, but less strict than the current ones.

Now the party needs around 20,000 signatures to get on the ballot. During its first day, the party apparently attracted over 1,000 members.

The Social Liberals have avoided party splits since the beginning of the 1960s (the Peace Policy Party failed to win representation in 1964). New Alliance may shake up the Danish party system, which has been static since the 2001 election. It may take voters from the present government and the Social Liberals.
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2. I've been contacted by Joachim Koops from the Department of Political Science, University of Kiel, Germany. He's alerted me to a newly formed research grouping, NETWORK NORTHERN EUROPE, based at Kiel. An English version of their website (www.politik.uni-kiel.de/nne/) is promised soon. This certainly looks like a very interesting development.


3. Lee Miles of Liverpool University has sent me the following report of a WORKSHOP that was held in April, which our Scandinavian Politics Specialist Groups helped to fund.

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EMINENT ACADEMICS AND POLICY-MAKERS DEBATE FUSION IN LIVERPOOL

On April 26th the FUSE-EUROPA programme, based in the Europe in the World Centre (EWC) at the University of Liverpool, hosted a prestigious international workshop that brought together prominent academics from eight countries, as well as policy-makers representing Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the UK and the European Parliament, to examine comparatively the complex relationship between the EU and the Nordic countries. This workshop was highly distinctive in that it provided a useful opportunity not only for the researchers working on fusion approaches to introduce new thinking and fresh concepts on fusion to a broader audience, but also to enable policy-makers to respond directly and inform about their ongoing research. The workshop fostered independent assessments of the utility of the fusion approaches for explaining the priorities and behaviour of Nordic policy-makers and how such policy-makers value their country's relationship with the European Union. The workshop attracted an audience of over 30 for each session.

In the first session, Professor Lee Miles (Jean Monnet Professor, EWC Director and leader of the FUSE-EUROPA research programme) delivered a paper discussing the functional utility of fusion approaches to the study of Nordic policy-making, which was followed by two interventions by Professor Clive Archer (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Magnus Lindh (Karlstad University, Sweden). The paper by Lee Miles was warmly received and a vibrant debate that lasted for over an hour ensued. The second and third sessions then provided opportunities to relate fusion concepts to the particular policy-making attitudes in the respective Nordic countries. Dr Teija Tiilikainen (Helsinki University) gave a highly stimulating talk on the successful integration of Finnish policy-makers into the workings of the EU. This was followed by a co-written paper by Professor Lee Miles (author of Fusing in Europe? Sweden in the European Union), Professor Rutger Lindahl and Dr Daniel Naurin (both Göteborg University, Sweden) that examined the Swedish case, arguing that Swedish policy-makers are in fact 'selective supranationalists', and not as commonly presented, 'ardent intergovernmentalists'.

Attention then turned to Norway and Iceland and participants explored whether fusion approaches could have relevance in evaluating policy-makers' behaviour in non-EU states. In a session chaired by Stewart Arnold (advisor to Diana Wallis MEP), Professor Baldur Thorhallsson (University of Iceland), who is widely acknowledged as Iceland's leading expert on Iceland-EU relations, reviewed the priorities and participation of Icelandic policy-makers in the European Economic Area. This was accompanied by a paper by Professor Jarle Trondal (Agder University College, Norway), who argued that Norwegian policy-making now represented a form of 'differentiated fusion'. The final session also included a review of the day's proceedings, and the process of national adaptation using fusion, by Dr Andreas Maurer, an award-winning academic from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin and co-editor of Fifteen into One?, one of the leading academic works using fusion approaches. The proceedings and papers of this highly successful workshop will form the basis of a new edited volume, to be published in 2008.
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Best,

Nick Aylott.
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Dr Nicholas Aylott, senior lecturer (docent) in political science
School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University College
SE-141 89 Huddinge, Sweden
www.sh.se/samhallsvetenskaper