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This paper looks at how Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864Kjellén ( -1922 conceived of the relationship between nature and culture, between material and immaterial power as well as the role of soft power, geopolitical imaginary and competitive identity in off-setting potentially unfavourable geopolitical conditions for small and medium-sized states. It is argued that with regard to small states, Kjellén did not maintain a consistent separation between "soft" cultural resources of power and "hard" laws of nature. Rather, he placed the mutually constitutive tension between geography (nature) and politics (culture) at the centre of his politico-scientific analysis, arguing that active "biopolitics" could supplement geopolitics. In Kjellén's conception, cultural and natural resources are instruments of an otherwise integrated notion of power which challenges the contemporary separation between hard and soft power.

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Abstract:In this article, we study the relationship between the United States of America and Norden, first showing how images of the Nordic model were constructed and reproduced in the United States from the 1920s until the 1960s. We find both utopias and dystopias in these narratives. Second, the article argues that these American images, narratives, and stereotypes did not only fulfill a function in the American debate, but were also relayed back to Norden, and affected debate, nation-branding strategies, and self-understandings there. During the Cold War, furthermore, the Nordic welfare state image gained a new currency which reached well beyond national borders, far into transnational space.