What Nordic Council is and how it works

What the treaty covers, and what it leaves out

The Treaty of Co-operation was signed at Helsinki on 23 March 1962 and entered into force on 1 July 1962. Article 1 lists the fields it reaches: legal, cultural, social and economic matters, transport and communications, and environmental protection, which a later amendment added. Defence and foreign policy are not on the list, and leaving them off was the condition of having a treaty at all. Denmark, Iceland and Norway had signed the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949. Sweden stayed out of alliances, and Finland had signed a treaty of friendship and mutual assistance with the Soviet Union on 6 April 1948. Both of those positions have since been abandoned from the same direction: Finland acceded to NATO on 4 April 2023 and Sweden on 7 March 2024, and both records carry the date.

Seven agreements have amended the text, signed on 13 February 1971, 11 March 1974, 15 June 1983, 6 May 1985, 21 August 1991, 18 March 1993 and 29 September 1995, the last of them in force from 2 January 1996. The agreement of 1971 wrote the Nordic Council into the treaty and set the Nordic Council of Ministers beside it. The first is the parliamentary half of the arrangement and the second the governmental one.

The seats, and what a vote in them produces

Article 47 gives the Council 87 elected members. The Danish parliament appoints sixteen, the Finnish eighteen, the Icelandic seven, and the Norwegian and the Swedish twenty each; the parliaments of the Faroe Islands and of Greenland and the Legislative Assembly of Åland appoint two each. Governments may send representatives as well, and Article 49 says in one line that those representatives do not vote.

Article 45 sets out what a vote produces. The Council may adopt recommendations, make other representations, or state its views to one or more of the governments or to the Council of Ministers. Nothing there turns any of it into law inside a member. Admission costs no transferred competence and no ratified accession, which is what separates this treaty from an accession treaty to the European Union, and it is also the outer limit of what the group can do.

The three autonomous areas were seated before the treaty named them. The amending agreement of 15 June 1983 states in its own preamble that it was made to give the Faroe Islands and Åland a greater measure of representation and to give Greenland the same measure. Article 48 now builds the Danish delegation from the Danish members together with the Faroese and the Greenlandic ones, and the Finnish delegation from the Finnish members together with Åland's.

The border that came down first

Free movement here is older than the treaty and older than its European counterpart. A protocol for passport-free travel between Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden was signed on 14 July 1952, five days before the Olympic Games opened in Helsinki. An agreement of 1954 dropped the three-month limit on staying and the requirement for residence and work permits, which is the common labour market Article 14 later obliged the parties to preserve. The decision to lift passport control at the internal borders for every traveller rather than for Nordic citizens alone was taken in 1957 and implemented from 1958. Iceland came in in 1965 and the Faroe Islands in 1966. Article 28 records the result as a single passport-control area and asks the parties to keep it.

That area then had to survive the European one. Denmark joined the European Communities on 1 January 1973, Finland and Sweden joined the Union on 1 January 1995, and Norwegian referendums in September 1972 and November 1994 declined membership. The three inside the Union carried a commitment to preserving the Nordic passport-free area into their applications to Schengen, and Iceland and Norway were brought in by cooperation agreements of their own rather than left on the far side of a new external border. Both records date that association to 18 May 1999, and the rules were applied across all five from 25 March 2001. Greenland and the Faroe Islands stayed outside it. Greenland had left the Communities on 1 February 1985, twelve years after entering them with Denmark.

Five languages, and a convention about using them

The treaty was drawn up in Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, each text equally authentic. Finnish belongs to a different language family from the other four, and Icelandic, which shares a family with Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, is not readily intelligible to the people who speak them. The Nordic Language Convention, done at Svaneke on 17 June 1981 and in force from 1 March 1987, answers that with a right rather than an aspiration: a national of one party may use any of those languages before the authorities of another, in courts, schools, tax offices and health services, without being charged for interpretation.

Kroner, and the convention that named them

Denmark and Sweden agreed a coin convention in 1873 and Norway acceded in 1875, fixing new crowns against gold at par with one another and making the coins of each legal tender in all three. The arrangement did not outlast the First World War. The name did. The Danish and Norwegian krone, the Swedish krona and the Icelandic króna all descend from that convention, and the Faroese króna is issued at parity with the Danish one. Finland and Åland carry the euro on their records instead, and Greenland carries the Danish krone.

Where the edges are argued

Scandinavia and Norden are different words doing different work. In its ordinary sense Scandinavia names Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the three crowns joined at Kalmar; Norden, which is what the parties call themselves, takes in Finland, Iceland and the three autonomous areas as well. A page that files Finland as Scandinavian and a page that does not are using two definitions rather than disagreeing about a fact, and this catalogue settles neither.

The membership divides the same way twice over. The parties to the treaty are five states. The assemblies that elect members to the Council are those five parliaments and three more, and this page is built on the wider reading, which is why it holds 8 countries and why three of them are neither sovereign nor seated at the United Nations. The flags record the same split: seven of them carry the off-centre cross that the Danish flag fixed, and Greenland's, adopted on 21 June 1985, carries a disc instead, with the record showing the Danish flag in use there until that date.