Economic nationalism and maritime policy in Norway

Abstract

While celebrating recent efforts to redefine ‘economic nationalism’ by placing nationalism and national identity — rather than the state or illiberal economic policies — at its core, this article takes issue with the tendency to provide an unnecessarily narrow specification of a new research agenda on economic nationalism. More specifically, it argues that the agenda should concern not merely how national identities and nationalism influence economic policies and processes, but also how the latter can influence the former. An argument is also made for this twoway relationship to be conceived in constitutive terms, and a study of the efforts to develop a maritime policy in Norway in the mid-1990s is presented to show the usefulness of this reformulated research agenda on economic nationalism.