How Did The Nordic-Baltic Countries Handle The First Wave of COVID-19?
How Did The Nordic-Baltic Countries Handle The First Wave of COVID-19?

Author(s): Iselin Engebretsen, Elina Lange-Ionatamishvili, Miranda Karin Michélsen Forsgren, Rakin Sayed
Subject(s): Civil Society, Government/Political systems, Security and defense, Comparative politics, Health and medicine and law
Published by: NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence
Keywords: Covid-19 pandemic; Nordic-Baltic countries and the pandemic; first wave of the pandemic; Sweden; Estonia; Finland; Denmark; Iceland; Norway; Latvia; Lithuania;
Summary/Abstract: What is this project? When the Covid-19 virus struck Europe in 2020 with the full force of a pandemic, eight countries allied in the Nordic-Baltic region immediately faced a challenge to their hard-won partnership. For three decades Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden had been building a common purpose. How would that friendship respond to the greatest health scare in a hundred years? This report aims to answer this question by looking at developments in the Nordic-Baltic Eight (NB8) through a Strategic Communications lens. Why a Strategic Communications lens? To understand fully the pandemic that gripped these eight partner states is to paint a picture that goes beyond the number of human lives lost or the rise in unemployment, fall in national economic growth, and assumption of state debt so punitive to their taxpayers. Any complete picture would also tell the story of how governments chose to speak to their electorates, and how civil society would respond to unprecedented measures imposed in peace time: curbing individual freedoms, it may be assumed, would elicit a consequent questioning of trust between government and governed.

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