I don’t know much about Scandinavia to make a good comparison with America but if differences do exist, they ought to as well as between Scandinavian countries. I guess Scandinavia and actually anywhere else seem interchangeable to outsiders and vice versa. To start off, Scandinavia’s best characterised by a series of peninsulas and a few archipelagos. Finland borders Russia and Estonia, Sweden’s in the centre, Iceland and Norway are adjacent to the British Isles and Denmark sits on top of Germany.
America by contrast encompasses a lot of land in North America. (Though similar things can be said of Brazil in South America.) Iceland and the Faroes are rather isolated for a long time whilst Norway, Sweden and Finland are home to the Sami people, a long-standing ethnic minority. America, like Russia, China, India and Brazil, encompasses a wide variety of climates given their territory size. Sweden technically has a larger population than Denmark.
But it’s got similar geographical and climate problems like Norway, Finland, Iceland and Russia to a lesser degree in that only a few areas are habitable enough to sustain a substantial population. (There’s a reason why Russia’s more densely populated to the West and South.) Thus leaving out Denmark as the most densely populated both due to smaller size and greater habitability.
Lastly but not the least (and most amusing), Sweden’s home to IKEA and H&M. Denmark’s got Lego, Finland’s got Nokia and Norway and Iceland don’t seem to have any at least on this scale to my knowledge. America’s got a lot more brands, thus logically more globally known brands too. (As in YouTube, WordPress, Typepad, Blogspot, Kelloggs, Hershey, National Geographic and Disney.)
That’s what I know of.
fynm 