The Nordic Countries in Nordic and More Encompassing International Organizations

Abstract

The Nordic countries, with the partial exception of Iceland, are very active in both intergovernmental and international nongovernmental organizations. In addition, they tend to be members of the same international organizations, only a fraction of which are exclusively Nordic. All the Nordic countries cooperate mostly with Western Euro pean countries outside the Nordic region. In 1970, there were only four intergovern mental and forty-five international nongovernmental organizations with exclusively Nordic membership. Iceland was a full member of twenty-six of these INGOs. The growth rate of the Nordic organizational network is slow, but one must allow for the possibility that Nordic cooperation frequently takes an uninstitutionalized form which does not meet the strict criteria of the Yearbook of International Organizations from which the present data are collected.