Reluctance towards European integration in the Nordic countries is doubtlessly more connected to ideas on democracy than elsewhere. This goes not only for the (empirical) practicability of democracy but also for the (normative) desirability of democracy in the EU. After the Second World War, when the process of contemporary European integration was approaching, and the concept of democracy at the same time was heavily contested in public debates and among academics, two conceptions of democracy were struggling: On one hand, democracy was recognized as a European value developing in the form of ‘tripartition of power' from the Age of the Enlightenment and spreading from the European centre to the Nordic periphery, as it were. On the other hand, democracy was reconsidered as a universal value in the form of ‘dialogue' (or deliberation) as a reaction to the Nazi compromising of democracy in the 1930s and reborn after the Second World War as genuine democracy. However, a third narrative developed in which democracy was seen as having its roots in the Nordic countries dating back to the Viking Age or earlier. In the period from the 1940s to the 1980s, a number of Nordic anthologies contained articles on this idea of a "Nordic democracy". The paper maps the conceptual history of "Nordic democracy" and illustrates the ways in which the different narratives interfere with the idea of European integration in the Nordic countries.