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slightly less rapid development taking place in the neighboring Nordic countries. Throughout the area social and political forces peculiar to northern Europe aided the evolution. The relative geographic isolation of the Scandinavian Peninsula insulated it from most disruptions elsewhere on the continent, enhancing the coordinated, orderly, self-contained development.
Long associated with northern Europe, and derived perhaps as much from environmental factors such as climate as from cultural traits, has been the urge of the inhabitants toward gainful employment. The German sociologist Max Weber believed this urge to be rooted in organized religion. He found the dominant Protestant ethic especially congenial to the development of capitalism in the north. Yet in the same societies where competitive enterprise flourished, there evolved the world's most advanced social welfare systems.
As Western philosophers from the 18th to the 20th centuries evolved their formulas for human progress, predicating all on either competition (laissez-faire, free enterprise) or cooperation (rationalism, socialism), the north European societies were to prove uncommonly adaptable at reconciling the two. The all-pervasive Protestant work ethic may indeed have whetted the appetite for "pie on earth" as a mark of divine approbation, but it even more forcefully inculcated the essentially Lutheran doctrine of service. The social responsibility which 19th century travelers already found more finely honed in the Nordic area than elsewhere had other historic and environmental roots. The old aristocracy had been obliged to serve the state, and more often than not served it well, while the harsh physical environment early required cooperation from all for survival. There thus developed a relative respect for the constituted authority, more or less shared by the neighboring Teutonic societies and different from the relationship between the governing and the governed in Latin and Slavic countries. The acceptance of relatively enlightened measured authority fostered the order and disciplined that helped the northern countries exploit so successfully their relatively limited natural resources.
If the scarcity of good agricultural land, fossil fuels, and certain other minerals, as well as the harshness of the climate, initially impeded socioeconomic evolution, another natural resource—geographic remoteness—was ultimately to enable the area to catch up with and surpass Europe to the south. Removed from the principal continental invasion routes and, in the modern era, from the sealanes between Europe and America, the Swedes never suffered invasion and occupation from outside the Scandinavian area. The vast movements of peoples and civilizations elsewhere in Europe—notably the hegemony of the Romans, the Golden Horde, and the Ottoman Turks—caused barely a ripple in the Norwegian and Baltic Seas; the forces of the Counter-Reformation expanded themselves in Germany, and in the 20th century the Imperial German and Nazi juggernauts twice stopped at the Baltic. The Swedes, notably in the present century, exploited a protected period of peace to build a society which many regard as the world's most advanced.
Only twice in their known history did large numbers of Northmen seek to leave their severe habitat and make their fortunes in gentler lands. In the modern era, North America received about 2 million Scandinavian immigrants, the majority of them Swedes. About a thousand years earlier there was an exodus of another nature, which begin in 787 with a series of murderous raids along the east English coast. By the early 11th century, the Viking incursions were felt in lands covering a quarter of the globe, extending westward to Iceland, Greenland, and North America, southward to the Mediterranean, and eastward to Russia's Dnepr Valley. It was this "eastward passage" that was taken by the Swedish Vikings, called in the old Slavic Chronicles the Varangians or Rus.
After the Viking tide ebbed in the 12th century, Europe was spared further serious intrusions from the north until the rise of a somewhat more civilized Sweden to great power status in the 16th century. Its power was felt by the Russians and Poles in the 17th and 18th centuries when the Baltic Sea became a "Swedish Lake," and by all of Europe during the Thirty Years War (1618-48).
As Sweden's forces, battling with brilliant success, helped tear up Germany during that most devastating of European wars, a Swedish strategist was quoted as saying "...it is better that we tether our horses to our enemy's fence, than be to ours." Indeed the forces attempting to arrest and reverse the Protestant Reformations were stopped in Germany. Swedish home ground was spared the destruction that set German development back 200 years. The Reformation throughout the Nordic lands became universal, and no minority religious enclaves were left to disrupt the social order.
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