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 Democrats to another election win next year. But Mr Fogh Rasmussen played a similarly oblique 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 commissioner.

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 interim 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 abrasive.

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 ideological 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 patchwork. Yet there is a limit to how many Nordics the world can absorb. No matter how perfect they are, not all will win prizes.