2015年经济学人 北欧掌控欧洲 斯堪的纳维亚掀起狂潮

The Nordics in charge

A Scandinavian wave

How the Nordics get so many senior international positions

WHEN it comes to international jobs, Scandinavia does well.

Sweden, Denmark and Norway have only 20m people, yet their nationals often run global organisations.

Jens Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister, is taking over from a former Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as NATO's boss.

Thorbjorn Jagland, another former Norwegian prime minister, has just won a second term at the Council of Europe.

Now attention is on the current Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt,

who is a front-runner to succeed Belgium's Herman Van Rompuy as president of the European Council.

With the European Union's foreign-policy chief and the head of the Eurogroup of finance ministers,

this job should be filled at an EU summit on July 16th,

after the European Parliament confirms Luxembourg's Jean-Claude Juncker as European Commission president.

Ms Thorning-Schmidt has disavowed any interest, saying she hopes to lead the Social Democrats¹ to another election win next year.

But Mr Fogh Rasmussen played a similarly oblique² game in 2009, repeatedly denying any interest in NATO.

Afterwards he claimed that “being a candidate” and “canvassing” were separate.

Ms Thorning-Schmidt's real drawback is that Denmark is not in the euro.

But as a woman from the centre-left, she balances Mr Juncker.

She is also married to the son of Neil Kinnock, a former British Labour leader and European commissioner³.

Other politicians are less coy. Finland's former centre-right prime minister,

Jyrki Katainen, has stepped down to seek a big international job.

He is now interim⁴ economics commissioner (replacing another Finn, Olli Rehn),

and he might stay on or take the Eurogroup job.

Sweden's foreign minister (and another former prime minister),

Carl Bildt, is a possibility for the foreign-policy post, though some find him too abrasive⁵.

What gives the Nordics a head start? One answer is that they are unthreatening to big countries .

Another is that a history of parliamentary compromise gives them the ability to cross ideological⁶ divides.

It has been a long time since any Nordic country had a single-party majority government.

Mr Katainen's 2011-14 cabinet was a six-party patchwork⁷.

Yet there is a limit to how many Nordics the world can absorb.

No matter how perfect they are, not all will win prizes.

1 democrats   

n.民主主义者，民主人士( democrat的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The Democrats held a pep rally on Capitol Hill yesterday. 民主党昨天在国会山召开了竞选誓师大会。
• The democrats organize a filibuster in the senate. 民主党党员组织了阻挠议事。 来自《简明英汉词典》

2 oblique   

adj.斜的，倾斜的，无诚意的，不坦率的

参考例句：

• He made oblique references to her lack of experience.他拐弯抹角地说她缺乏经验。
• She gave an oblique look to one side.她向旁边斜看了一眼。

3 commissioner   

n.（政府厅、局、处等部门）专员，长官，委员

参考例句：

• The commissioner has issued a warrant for her arrest.专员发出了对她的逮捕令。
• He was tapped for police commissioner.他被任命为警务处长。

4 interim   

adj.暂时的，临时的；n.间歇，过渡期间

参考例句：

• The government is taking interim measures to help those in immediate need.政府正在采取临时措施帮助那些有立即需要的人。
• It may turn out to be an interim technology.这可能只是个过渡技术。

5 abrasive   

adj.使表面磨损的；粗糙的；恼人的

参考例句：

• His abrasive manner has won him an unenviable notoriety.他生硬粗暴的态度让他声名狼藉。
• She had abrasions to her wrists where the abrasive rope had scraped her.她的手腕有多出磨伤，那是被粗糙的绳子擦伤的。

6 ideological   

a.意识形态的

参考例句：

• He always tries to link his study with his ideological problems. 他总是把学习和自己的思想问题联系起来。
• He helped me enormously with advice on how to do ideological work. 他告诉我怎样做思想工作，对我有很大帮助。

7 patchwork   

n.混杂物；拼缝物

参考例句：

• That proposal is nothing else other than a patchwork.那个建议只是一个大杂烩而已。
• She patched new cloth to the old coat,so It'seemed mere patchwork. 她把新布初到那件旧上衣上，所以那件衣服看上去就象拼凑起来的东西。