Finding a place in the world

Abstract

The economic crash in Iceland created a sense of social and political collapse that extended far beyond the economic realm. Calls for a “New Iceland” were invoked, where the Icelandic political arena would be “cleaned” and reimagined in drastic ways. In this article, I explore how ideas circulating in the wider European region about how Icelanders dealt exceptionally well with the crisis not only failed to reflect the lived effects of the collapse but also echoed long-standing nationalist ideals of Icelanders’ imagined reality of themselves. I show how nation branding in Iceland after 2010 added to the conception that Iceland dealt with the crisis in an exceptional way, and I critically ask why Iceland received such a positive depiction in the international media.

Routine failure in Macedonia: a critique of the Global Financial Crisis from the periphery

“…On a geopolitical level, the trope of crisis can enable marginal subjects to contest larger projects such as Europeanization (Rogozen‐Soltar 2020). In the case of Greece, reading the GFC as a ‘threat to national sovereignty and local autonomy’ (Argenti & Knight 2015: 782) allowed citizens to forge forms of solidarity and co‐operation (Rakopoulos 2014), sometimes in relation to right‐wing nationalism (Theodossopoulos 2013) – a phenomenon observed across Europe (see Loftsdóttir 2018 for Iceland; Kalb 2009 for Poland).…”