The Confederation of Nordic Associations had invited the pair to discuss Wetterberg’s ideas at a meeting of its presidium in the Danish parliament in Copenhagen in Tuesday.

Wetterberg reiterated the vision of a federal state, which has generated so much debate throughout the Region since he first proposed it in an opinion piece published in Dagens Nyheter at the time of the annual Session of the Nordic Council in Stockholm last October.

According to Wetterberg, a federal state would give the Nordic country a strong international position of power because it would make it the 10th largest economy in the world, just ahead of Canada and Spain and just behind Brazil and Russia.

“A place at the G20 table would make the Nordic Region far more influential than our five separate small nation states are today,” the author pointed out.

He also stressed that a federal Nordic Region would have far greater power inside the EU and easier access to key positions in, for example, the EU Commission.

Wetterberg, who calls his own idea as a “realistic utopia”, explained that Switzerland could serve as a model for far closer Nordic partnerships on foreign, defence and security policy, research, the labour market and legislation.

Asgrímsson said that he thought it was highly positive that Wetterberg’s ideas have generated renewed debate about Nordic co-operation and underlined that he saw membership of NATO, the EU and the Eurozone as the first tests of Nordic political will to work more closely together.

The Secretary General was very open to the possibility of further work being done on Nordic conventions, e.g. on tax and intellectual property.

“Those would be difficult but also realistic extensions to the Nordic agreements that already exists, like the Helsinki Treaty and the Language Convention,” he added.

Wetterberg hopes that the members of the inter-parliamentary Nordic Council will submit proposals for a preliminary feasibility study for a federal state before the next Session in Iceland this November..

Wetterberg’s article (in Swedish) in Dagens Nyheter

Registration

If you wish to attend the seminar, please register to Henrik Killander at email: heki@norden.org