Sustainable Modernity

The Nordic Model and Beyond

Nina Witoszek, Atle Midttun, Nina Witoszek, Atle Midttun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351765626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351765633, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

In the 21st century, Norway, Denmark and Sweden remain the icons of fair societies, with high economic productivity and quality of life. But they are also an enigma in a cultural-evolutionary sense: though by no means following the same socio-economic formula, they are all cases of a "non-hubristic", socially sustainable modernity that puzzles outside observers.

Using Nordic welfare states as its laboratory, Sustainable Modernity combines evolutionary and socio-cultural perspectives to illuminate the mainsprings of what the authors call the "well-being society". The main contention is that the Nordic uniqueness is not merely the outcome of one particular set of historical institutional or political arrangements, or sheer historical luck; rather, the high welfare creation inherent in the Nordic model has been predicated on a long and durable tradition of social cooperation, which has interacted with global competitive forces. Hence the socially sustainable Nordic modernity should be approached as an integrated and tightly orchestrated ecosystem based on a complex interplay of cooperative and competitive strategies within and across several domains: normative-cultural, socio-political and redistributive. The key question is: Can the Nordic countries uphold the balance of competition and cooperation and reproduce their resilience in the age of globalization, cultural collisions, the digital economy, the fragmentation of the work/life division, and often intrusive EU regulation?

With contributors providing insights from the humanities, the social sciences and evolutionary science, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, sociology, history, institutional economics, Nordic studies and human evolution studies.

1Sustainable modernity and the architecture of the “well-being society”

Interdisciplinary perspectives

Nina Witoszek and Atle Midttun

In 1914 Graham Wallas – the co-founder of the London School of Economics – published his influential Great Society: a study of the ways in which industrial revolution was transforming and distorting human relations. “If I try to make for myself a visual picture of the social system which I should desire for England and America,” Wallas wrote, “it would be a harmonious society like the one in Northern Europe.” In a rhapsodic exultation, he confided:

There comes before me a recollection of those Norwegian towns and villages where everyone, the shopkeepers and the artisans, the schoolmaster, the boy who drove the post-ponies, and the student daughter of the innkeeper who took round the potatoes, seemed to respect themselves, to be capable of Happiness as well as pleasure and excitement, because they were near the Mean in the employment of all their faculties. I can imagine such people learning to exploit power from their waterfalls, and the minerals in their mountains, without dividing themselves into dehumanized employers or officials, and equally dehumanized ‘hands’. But I recollect also that the very salt and savour of Norwegian life depends on the fact that poets, and artists and statesmen have worked in Norway with a devotion which was not directed by any formula of moderation.

(quoted by Dahrendorf 1997: 39–40).

Wallas’s pastoral vignette is arresting in a double sense. Though 21st-century Norway is the antithesis of the virtuous rural community he envisioned over a hundred years ago, some of its salient values – such as equality, reciprocity and basic humaneness – seem to live on. It is as if the spirit of the Norwegian harmonious, egalitarian village has been trapped, like a genie, in a capsule of time and guides the citizens of one of the richest and yet also most egalitarian democracies in the world.

But there is yet another dimension to Wallas’s fascination with an exemplary society in the North. It belongs to an intriguing tradition of the outsiders’ “romance” with Scandinavia, which has been a leitmotif of both early and late modernity. Already in the 19th century, romantic pilgrims – such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Maurycy Mochnacki – travelled to the North in search of a prototype of a free and egalitarian “nature tribe” (Witoszek 2013).¹ A century later, in the turbulent 1930s, with Marquis Childs’s publication of his bestseller Sweden: the Middle Way (1936), the world would be galvanized again by a vision of a caring state and a cooperative national community on the margins of Europe. And in 2013, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, international economists and policy-makers set out to crack the code of the surprisingly affluent and altruistic modern “Vikings” mark 2.0.²

How is it that the Northern passage from rags to riches has resulted in societies that have managed to restrain the growth of Wallas’s “dehumanized employers and […] equally dehumanized “hands”, and minimize the social distance between “shopkeepers, artisans and schoolmasters”? What have been the mechanisms – and who have been the actors – that have forged a seemingly non-hubristic Nordic modernity?

Three stages of Nordic modernization

One of the arguments of this book is that modern Nordic welfare societies owe their prosperity as much to their natural resources as to a cumulative build-up of cultural, value-charged, institutional and economic choices made at various stages of modernity,³ each with its own gains and hazards. The first stage – that of techno-economic modernity – boasted spectacular technological innovation, industrial revolution and unprecedented productivity. The second stage – that of socially sustainable modernity – introduced the ethos of social care and partnership into the techno-economic dynamic. The third stage – what we call “eco-modernity” (Midttun and Witoszek 2016) – has emerged to address mounting environmental and climate challenges.

Needless to say that each stage of modernization had its liabilities tied to a progressive depletion of human and environmental resources. But one could also say that each subsequent phase was a corrective to the preceding one: the social excesses of early industrialization were tempered by socially sustainable modernity, while the dawn of eco-modernity has started adding environmental amendments to the carbon age. This endless process of self-correction has been a testimony to modernity’s self-reflexivity; an attempt not to completely throw out the old “baby” of industrial and emancipatory modernity with the polluted bathwater, but to salvage some of the core achievements of human development.

As techno-economic modernizers at the periphery of Europe, the Nordics were relative latecomers, following the British first wave, and then the German and American second wave of industrialization. However, since the end of the 19th century, they were bold and precursory drivers of inclusive, socially sustainable modernity. This was due to a number of well known and well studied historical and political factors, such as the relative lack of feudal structures, a strong community of free peasants and fishermen, early literacy, and simultaneous modernization driven both by the grassroots and the elites (e.g. Østerud 1979; Seip 1997; Slagstad 1998; Sejersted 2011). This socio-cultural legacy was drawn upon by the labour movement, which, through confrontations and compromises with industry, co-created the welfare state.

But, as we argue in this volume, there are two, less explored drivers of the Nordic model in its current form. The first one is the shared Nordic humanism, which goes back to the 18th- and 19th-century founding tradition of a vibrant Christian Enlightenment, with its ideas of Samaritanism and social solidarity (see Chapter 3). The other derives from a cache of practical, local knowledge and “sustainability thinking”, which – in Norway, Sweden and Finland in particular – constituted an inbuilt reflex and unwritten codex of prudent action. This storehouse of wisdom was especially relevant in regions whose citizens struggled, for a long time, to eke out a livelihood in the harsh environment – particularly along the rugged North Sea coast, and in barren, sunlight-starved agricultural terrains. There, a community’s survival depended on an enduring tradition of social partnership and cooperation rather than unhinged competition. Long-term thinking, “ahead of a crisis”, predisposed the expedient resolution of social conflicts, as well as the ability to live with – and adapt to – unpredictable elemental forces (Witoszek 2011).

This was an early industrial North, as portrayed by Wallas. In the second half of the 20th century, the Nordics underwent a rapid techno-economic transformation to make a quantum leap into successful, modern welfare states: a position that they have held rather consistently, in spite of numerous obituaries announcing their demise. Judged by international comparative indexes, the 21st century has marked their renaissance. Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland now rank on a par with the top drivers of techno-industrial modernity, while also scoring highest as exemplars of socially sustainable modernity. In the past ten years, the United Nations has ranked them as the “world’s best countries to live in”, the best countries for mothers and – if we are to believe the latest assessment of the Norwegian via fortunata – also places with a surprisingly high coefficient of gross national happiness.⁴ This is a combination that few, if any, other countries can match.

It remains an open question whether the Nordics can equal their socio-economic success with a transition to eco-modernity. It is worth noting that, when the environmental sustainability agenda became a global programme, the Nordic countries were early pioneers, capitalizing on their “ecological” cultural memory and leading seminal initiatives advancing environmental concerns (see Chapter 11). In the 21st century, however, together with many other industrial nations, they have struggled to square the new climate objectives with economic growth. So far, they have certainly been impressive as modern myth makers. In Norway especially, the emergent, electrifying narrative of success – combined with prosperity and unspoiled beauty of nature – has been so potent, that even the country’s high, oil-lubricated ecological footprint has been eclipsed by upbeat “green stories”. One hears rhapsodies about Arne Naess’s Deep Ecology and the Brundtland Commission’s idea of sustainable development, not to mention the record number of peace missions and humanitarian initiatives in developing countries. As this volume will show, while the Norwegian economy has yet to live up to the country’s green mythology, other Nordic countries, Sweden in particular, aim at climate front-runnership. The discovery of green growth heralds a new synthesis, where socio-economic sustainability is no longer a question of austerity, but an opportunity for novel business models.

Self-limiting modernity

In a panoramic take on Western modernity’s central theme, Daniel Bell has pointed to the relevance of the word beyond: imagining a limitless world that was beyond nature, beyond culture, beyond humanity and God (Bell 1991: 353). The beyondness of modernity has been expressed in mobilizing stories and images, such as the powerful American frontier mythology, the British “civilizing mission” towards “savage species”, German ideas of Übermensch and Lebensraum and the French Jacobin project of inventing a brave new world from scratch – without false gods and idols. In the Nordic countries, modernity’s hubristic temptations seem to have been largely kept in check. As our volume will show, the Nordics are interesting examples of “self-limiting modernity”: one, which has kept measure with regard to economic, social and ecological excesses. They have evolved gradually, through a refolution (a mixture of reform and revolution) rather than revolutionary change, and their most meaningful, world-changing texts, habits and routines show the workings of a pragmatic and cooperative ethos. This, we argue, is also the basis of the relative resilience of the Nordic model; the fact that its architects have managed to balance political and economic innovation with norms and values that have boosted community, identity, conciliatory ways of resolving conflicts and non-coercive strategies for monitoring human behaviour. In Chapters 3–7, we show how non-hubristic Nordic modernity has been supported by a set of strong behavioural and normative patterns. Here the capitalist homo economicus – a rational, profit-seeking protagonist – has been counterbalanced by strong educational ideals stressing public-mindedness and social cooperation. Interestingly, these ideals have tended to be oriented towards what is achievable, rather than wishful thinking. The overarching goal of the homo nordicus has never been to build an ideal society; rather, since the beginning of the 20th century, the Nordics have got on with the task of building what Peter Corning has called a “fair society”, based on equality, equity and reciprocity (Corning 2011).

Evolutionary and socio-cultural underpinnings of the Nordic model

The strong tradition of teamwork which underlines the Nordic model has been the subject of numerous studies that focus on specific institutions, politics and industrial relations, (e.g. Sejersted 2011; Wahl, A. 2011, Dølvik et al. 2014; Engelstad 2015; Törnquist and Harriss 2016). We contend that these arrangements reflect deeper societal and behavioural principles that lie at the core of social and evolutionary theory. As Chapter 2 will show, by exploring the Nordic model through the combined evolutionary and socio-cultural lens, we are able to uncover novel facets of both the mainsprings and inner workings of Nordic sustainable modernity.

Our broad, inter-disciplinary approach has been inspired by a dialogue with evolutionary science and its findings on the role of multi-level selection and collaboration in human evolution. As opposed to the often crude and simplified Darwinism, “the third wave” of evolutionary biology has gathered evidence to the effect that collaborative behaviour may carry equal, if not stronger, weight than competition in forging resilience and adaptability in human evolution. Wilson and Wilson (2007), in their theory of multi-level selection, have shown how prosociality provides behavioural underpinnings for a doctrine of the competitive advantage of collaboration. There is evidence to the effect that, while unselfish individuals might be vulnerable to exploiters and free-riders within their own group, groups of individuals that behave prosocially will robustly outcompete groups handicapped by selfish exploitation and free-riding. The shortest rendition of this idea has been the legendary dictum: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary” (Wilson and Wilson 2007: 346). Translated onto the societal level, multiple-level selection theory implies that competitive advantage in the international economy can be fostered by collaborative behaviour at national and sub-national levels. But it also implies that the efficacy of domestic collaborative behaviour is critically dependent on external competition.

The evolutionary work on the efficacy of small prosocial groups chimes with the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom’s studies of the mechanisms of governance for sustainable resource management. Ostrom explored communities that successfully managed to overcome the tragedy of the commons by a fair distribution of the pool of natural resources (Ostrom 1990). She singled out eight design principles of such efficacious management, including clearly defined boundaries and strong identity, collective decision-making, effective monitoring of group behaviour, graduated sanctions and swift and fair conflict resolution (Ostrom 1990; see also Chapter 2). While Wilson illuminated the basic evolutionary mechanisms of successful prosociality, Ostrom codified the governance conditions necessary to put this mechanism into practice in human societies. In a joint article, Wilson, Ostrom and Cox (Wilson et al. 2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Sustainable modernity and the architecture of the “well-being society”: Interdisciplinary perspectives
• 2 Cooperation, competition and multi-level selection: A new paradigm for understanding the Nordic model
• 3 Nordic humanism as a driver of the welfare society
• 4 Individualism and collectivism in Nordic schools: A comparative approach
• 5 Scaling up solidarity from the national to the global: Sweden as welfare state and moral superpower
• 6 Scandinavian feminism and gender partnership
• 7 A welfare “regime of goodness”?: Self-interest, reciprocity, and the moral sustainability of the Nordic model
• 8 Challenges to the Nordic work model in the age of globalized digitalization
• 9 Between individualism and communitarianism: The Nordic way of doing politics
• 10 Civilising global capitalism: Aligning CSR and the welfare state
• 11 Eco-modernity Nordic style: The challenge of aligning ecological and socio-economic sustainability
• Afterword: Lessons from the Nordic model: the US perspective
• Index