Saqqummersitaq

Five and a half years after its first appearance as a printed book in 2014, the transdisciplinary anthology The Postcolonial North Atlantic: Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, edited by Professor Lill-Ann Körber (Aarhus Universitet) and Associate Professor Ebbe Volquardsen (Ilisimatusarfik), came out in an open-access second edition today. Stored on the document server of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the book can from now on be downloaded free of charge by anyone.

Whereas a new preface, written by the editors, has been added, the articles in the volume have not been changed or amended since the first edition, and thus reflect the state of the art of the first half of the 2010s. Yet, the texts remain relevant and topical in that they provide fundamental insight into negotiations of the postcolonial status of the North Atlantic nations, and into manifestations of their interconnected, often competing, histories in literature, language, politics, art, fashion, and public discourse. They invite to comparative investigations into the region’s past and present as seen from its diverse and distinct viewpoints, and to explorations of this part of the Nordic region from a joint critical postcolonial perspective.

It is the editors’ hope that The Postcolonial North Atlantic will find many curious new readers and re-readers among students, scholars, and the broader public; and we look forward to continued discussions and North Atlantic journeys.

In this article we combine two traditions within political science: regional party research and selfgovernment research. The reason behind this rationale is to show that mobilization of the electorate is solely in the hands of regional parties in the three autonomous islands under investigation: the Faroe Islands, Greenland and the Åland Islands. We use most similar systems design as an approach to look at how the different party systems have evolved over time. The degree of entrenched self-rule has been different over time but is now on a similar level. The background variables that have been held constant in this context are the population size and the degree of a distinct culture and language, which emanates from a homogenous population on the islands. A distinct party system can evolve exclusively around a national parliament and an entrenched regional assembly. In our study regional parties are members of both. Self-government has a severe impact on the birth of regional parties, and their incumbents serve in the first instance as agents for the regional government in national parliaments. In this study we have chosen to look at the impact of entrenched self-government on regional parties and regional party systems. Self-government facilitates birth of new parties, and when the devolved government is well consolidated it gives fuel to the emergence of a distinct full-scale party system.