This study shows that Scandinavian object shift and so-called A-scrambling in the continental Germanic languages are the same, and aims at providing an account of the variation that we find with respect to this phenomenon by combining certain aspects of the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory. More specifically, it is claimed that representations created by a simplified version of the computational system of human language CHL are evaluated in an optimality theoretic fashion by taking recourse to a very small set of output constraints.