The Rational Humanitarians 83
region. The wealth that accrues from trade became concentrated in the Hanseatic cities, in Antwerp, and later in London. Here, the material base for European expansion in the world was built up, and the capital that would finance the industrialization of Europe accumulated. Industrialization later spread from west to
east — in the direction opposite to that of the trade of old. Alfred Nobel, the first and foremost of the Nordic industrialists to operate on a multinational scale, made much of his fortune in Russia.
The enormous importance of east-west connections in European history throws the existence today of an iron curtain in the middle of Europe into stark relief. The iron curtain would seem to be a singular episode in our history. Today, Finland, because of its history, is the only country of the West that has a historically normal volume of east-west trade. (The Soviet Union, however, has a mainly energy to offer to its trading
partners — oil, nuclear power plants, natural gas — thereby putting east-west commerce out of balance.)
The parts of Europe that were untouched by commerce and industrialization retain many of their original values, for example, rural Ireland in Catholic Europe and isolated parts of Norway in Protestant Europe, and it is in these areas that we find a concentration of old-fashioned religious values. Changes in mentality are effected most easily in peripheral areas where commerce and industry flourish. Here, we find the most recent and superficial inroads into the old leading values of Europe and, at the same time, strong
commercial-industrials forces that either import values or create them, or both. Denmark and Sweden are such areas.
Norway has traditionally been the periphery of Denmark; Finland, of Sweden. Norway and Finland thus are the genuine peripheries in European cultural and commercial development. (Finland, of course, is also on the periphery of Russia.) The divide in Nordic history runs between Sweden-Finland on the one hand, and Denmark-Norway on the other. (The union of Norway and Sweden, which lasted from 1814 to 1905, is an anomaly in Nordic history.)
The periphery has its special charms. It retains old modes and reshapes them into near-novelties. For example, there is such a thing as the Finnish tango. The dance that originated in Argentina and swept across Europe before the First World War, and returned with an echo after the Second, thereafter to die out, has endured in the outskirts of Norden, where it has been adapted, given Finnish lyrics, and imbued
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