The New World Order: Chapter 9
Sweden, Norway, and Denmark share closely related North Germanic languages and much of their history and culture. Add Finland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands and they become the Nordic countries. Together they represent one of the most prosperous, technologically advanced, and diplomatically coherent blocs in the world despite their small individual populations.
The 3rd India-Nordic Summit happened in Oslo on 18-19 May 2026, hosted by Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. All five Nordic Prime Ministers held a joint press briefing with Prime Minister Modi. The summit produced a joint statement and strategic roadmap covering green energy, blue economy, technology, Arctic cooperation, and global governance.
The Grand Transition
The India-Nordic Summit format began in 2018 in Stockholm as a soft cooperation dialogue. Clean energy, innovation, start-ups, people-to-people ties. It was essentially a think tank conversation between governments which are aspirational, non-binding and pleasant. The kind of summit that produces a joint communique nobody reads.
The first summit in 2018 and the second in 2022 in Copenhagen produced exactly that. Statements about sustainability, digital cooperation, shared values. Important but not historic.
Oslo 2026 is categorically different. Five heads of government used a soft cooperation forum to make coordinated geopolitical statements about the failure of the world order. That is not what think tank summits do. That is what alliance summits do.
The transition happened because the context changed. In 2018 the world order was uncomfortable but functional. In 2026 Hormuz is blocked, Ukraine is at war, supply chains are fractured, American unilateralism has reached a point where even NATO allies cannot stay silent, and India has just concluded the mother of all trade deals with the EU. The forum did not change. The world changed around it.
Unlike 2022 when summit was held through virtual video conference, PM Modi chose to attend in person this time. He flew to Oslo specifically to be in that room when the Nordic leaders needed a non-Western democratic anchor for their collective statement.
India gave the Nordic bloc the cover to transition from think tank to geopolitical forum. The Nordic bloc gave India the multilateral European endorsement it needed for everything being built across this five-nation tour.
World Politics
For decades Europe operated on the assumption that its security concerns, its values, its institutional preferences were automatically the world’s concerns. Ukraine is a European problem therefore it is the world’s problem. Press freedom in India is a European concern therefore India must answer for it. Minority rights as defined in Brussels are universal therefore India is judged by them. The Netherlands corridor ambush by journalist as mentioned in Chapter 5 was the last gasp of that assumption.
Oslo was Europe acknowledging, through five heads of state simultaneously, that the reverse is also true. Hormuz is a world problem. Supply chain fracture is a world problem. A failing rules-based order is a world problem. And to say that credibly they needed India in the room.
For a change they did not invite India to lecture it. They invited India to stand beside them as an equal voice on shared global concerns. That is the complete reversal of the posture that produced the minority rights ambush four days earlier in The Hague.
One Summit, Six Grievances
What no report noted is that the Nordic leaders did not speak in generalities. Each picked a specific global theme and together they formed one coordinated statement without naming the USA.
Norway’s Støre spoke about supply chain disruptions, energy market instability, wars in Europe and the Middle East, and the urgent need for a reformed rules-based order. That is Hormuz. That is Ukraine. That is the instability created by American unilateralism in the Gulf, named indirectly but unmistakably.
Denmark’s Frederiksen was the most direct of all. She said the old world order is changing rapidly and it is not going in the right direction. A sitting European head of state saying this publicly, at a summit with India, is the most candid acknowledgement in any speech we have read across this entire series that the Western-led order is failing.
Finland’s PM spoke about circular economy, digital cooperation, and the strategic partnership in digitalisation already established with India earlier in 2026. Finland is hosting the World Circular Economy Forum this autumn with India as a participant. The circular economy thread has now appeared at every stop of this tour, UAE, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and now Finland through the Nordic summit.
Iceland’s PM spoke about opening up not closing off, about harnessing hope not fear, about multilateral institutions needing reform not abandonment. That is a direct counter-narrative to the closing-off doctrine coming from Washington.
Sweden’s Kristersson returned to the same three keywords he used in Gothenburg two days earlier. These are innovation, scale, and long-term reliable relations. Reliable has now appeared in Modi’s Netherlands speech, in Sweden, and again here. It is not accidental repetition. It is a coordinated signal about what India offers that current arrangements do not.
Choice of Forum
Finland and Sweden are NATO members. Denmark hosts American military installations. Norway supplies energy to Europe under American security guarantees. Each of them carries a bilateral constraint that prevents direct public dissent.
Except EU parliament, Nordic nations have no forum. United Nations is defunct. Nobody bothers about what is spoken there. Nordic nations have little choice of any multilateral forum. but five nations together with the world’s largest democracy standing in Oslo is a different calculation entirely.
India’s strategic autonomy doctrine, its refusal to join any bloc, its simultaneous partnerships with Russia, UAE, Europe and America, gave the Nordic bloc the platform to voice a collective concern they could not voice in Brussels or Washington.
India did not organise this as a protest. It organised it as a partnership summit. The Nordic leaders used the partnership platform to say what the partnership implied. They emphasized that reliable, trust-based, democratic alternatives to the current order are not just desirable but urgently necessary.
Modi emphasized democracy, rule of law, multilateralism, no compromise no double standards on terrorism. Each phrase was directed at a specific failure of the current order without naming who failed. Together all parties in Nordic Summit made it clear that this World Order was unacceptable.
Samband
The most memorable moment of the summit was not a policy announcement. It was a single emotional word. A word that makes all members present bonded to each other. It was not linguistics. It was the force behind the transition this forum made.
PM Modi had used the Hindi word Sambandh repeatedly through his speech. It means connection, relationship, a bond. The Icelandic Prime Minister stopped mid-speech and acknowledged it as a purely Icelandic word. Samband in Icelandic means exactly the same thing. Connection. Relations. A bond.
Two civilisations at opposite ends of Eurasia, separated by geography, history, and scale, sharing the same root word for what holds people together. The Icelandic PM said people need more Samband today.
The Sambandh moment sealed the a newly discovered alliance emotionally. The Icelandic PM was saying that we are the same kind of people. We use the same word for what matters most. We belong in the same conversation.
Europe spent seventy years telling the world its problems were universal. In Oslo it finally admitted that the world’s problems are its problems too. That too in the presence of a Prime Minister of a country they loved to call ‘third world.’ Suddenly they were One World. This is a New World Order.
Modi’s Division of Labour
Modi named each Nordic country’s specific contribution in his speech. Iceland’s geothermal energy and fisheries. Norway’s blue economy and Arctic expertise. Sweden’s advanced manufacturing and defence. Finland’s telecom and digital technology. Denmark’s maritime expertise.
This is not diplomatic courtesy. It is a public announcement of the division of labour in the green technology and Arctic architecture being built. Each country has a role. Each role is named. The architecture is described without being described as an architecture.
Trade between India and Nordic nations has grown fourfold in ten years. Nordic investment in India has grown 200 percent in the past decade. The TEPA agreement with Norway, Iceland and EFTA partners has been operational since October 2025. The India-EU FTA brings Denmark, Finland and Sweden into the same trade framework. Every Nordic nation now has a formal trade agreement with India simultaneously for the first time in history.
The New World Order
If there is any doubt lingering, this is the extract from the speech of Danish PM Mette Frederiksen:
“There is this idea growing right now that the middle powers in the world should act together. We cannot say that India is a middle power. You are one of the biggest powers. It’s not very easy to say that the Nordic countries are a middle power because we are too small to be a middle power. But when we are united, the Nordic countries, then we are a middle power. And working together with one of the greatest powers on these very clear ideas and values, I think we can bring stability, prosperity, and unity into a world that is changing rapidly and unfortunately not in the right direction.”
Notice three points. one by one.
First she started to place India in the middle power category and then stopped herself and corrected it publicly on camera. That self-correction is more significant than a prepared statement as it shows an honest moment of reflection. Remember she was on a State visit to India, a few years back.
Second she described the Nordic countries as a middle power only when united. Five small nations acknowledging they need collective weight to matter is itself a statement about the failure of existing multilateral institutions to give them adequate voice. And it confirms the transition, analysed above.
Third the phrase “working together with one of the greatest powers on these very clear ideas and values” is Europe formally acknowledging India’s great power status in a multilateral setting. Not emerging power. Not rising power. One of the greatest powers. That is a tectonic shift and acknowledgment that we must stop our silly lecturing though NGOs and activist/journalists. Though one can only wonder when that will happen.
From the summit floor, the public focus shifted to an incident that became next chapter. An incident created by a moral judging of a young activist posing as journalist. An activist who knew absolutely nothing about India. But more about that in Chapter 10.