We definitively consider ourselves a part of Europe.
There’s sometimes a tendency to use Europe = EU, at least in debates about EU, and mostly from pro-EU people, but it’s not all that widespread. We’ll sometimes talk about “the continent”, ie. the European mainland, including Denmark.
That’s right. In 1972 too. Our government will probably keep holding referendums until they get the answer they want.
Regarding the Scandinavia/Nordic question: It might be useful to know that these terms are defined differently in English than in Norwegian, and possibly/probably the other Nordic languages as well. In Norwegian:[ul][li]Skandinavia = Norway, Denmark and Sweden[/li][*]Norden (The Nordic Countries) = Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and a handful of small semiindependent islands[/ul]
I’ve just come back to this thread and it seems I might have been a bit hasty saying categorically that Denmark is not Scandinavian. I used to think it was, but a Danish girl I knew a few years back set me straight (after I’d made some offhand, stereotypical and possibly sexist comment about Scandinavian women )
Anyway, my dictionary gives two definitions for Scandinavia - the first (geographical) sense being “the peninsula occupied to Norway and Sweden”, and the second (cultural) sense “including Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and often Finland, Iceland and the Faeroe Islands”.
I think we’re taking this all too seriously. After all, in his follow-up post, the claimant that Scandinavia was separate from Europe went on to confess
We should offer this person our compassion rather than a critique of his peculiar views of geography.
Well, not as such, but probably when he was growing up and was taught history in school, his teaching followed a straight line from Ancient Greece to Rome to European countries such as Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Holy Roman Empire which included modern Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia, but not Norway or Sweden.
True, but as I said, I don’t imagine he thoght of it in strict historical terms, rather, in terms of basic history instruction. Poland and Russia seem more closely connected to the rest of Europe.
No, that’s clearly Asia. But Scandinavia is clearly either Europe or in its own category.
A British education prominently features the Vikings and the Normans - who hard to avoid from where we look at things.
Having reread the guy’s phrasing, I now suspect it’s actually a dig at the tourists who visit London, Paris and Rome and think they’re “done Europe”. But it’s a throroughly ineffective dig, as we’ve demonstrated
‘Brief burst of relevance’ describes many things in history - but the collapse of Viking dominance following Cnut’s death allowed something resembling a unified Anglo-Saxon nation to appear for the first time, and were it not for Viking raids, 1066 would have been very different.
When I was in Finland someone mentioned to me that he had a meeting with some Europeans. I took it as shorthand for continental Europeans. The same way I as a Canadian refer to USA’ers as Americans.
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