Transforming States: Continuity and Change in the Europeanisation of the Nordic Central Governments 1 Bengt Jacobsson SCORE/Stockholm School of Economics Bengt.Jacobsson@score.su.se Per Lægreid LOS-centre/University of Bergen per.lagreid@aorg.uib.no Ove K. Pedersen COS/University of Copenhagen OP@ifs.ku.dk Score Rapportserie 2001:4 ISBN 91-974176-0-2 ISSN 1404-5052 Introduction It has increasingly become common to think about the world as our world. Migration and media are two factors that have contributed to a change in people’s way of imagining themselves (Appadurai 1996). According to Robertson, we have witnessed a ”… compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole” (Robertson 1992, p 8). Robertson calls this globalisation, which is a concept that during the last decades has attracted social scientists and others to such an extent that one could ask if globalisation has become "... the cliché of our times" (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton 1999). 1 This paper is based on Jacobsson, B., Lægreid, P. and Pedersen, O.K. (eds), 2001, Europaveje. EU i de nordiske centralforvaltninger. Copenhagen: Jurist- og Økonomforbundets forlag. We want to thank Anders Esmark, Gry Larsen and Göran Sundström who has co-operated in the research that resulted in the book. The paper was presented at the Scancor Workshop “Transnational Regulation and the Transformation of States”, Stanford University, 22-23 June 2001.