The Nordic Civil Sphere

Jeffrey C. Alexander, Anna Lund, Andrea Voyer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509538850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The civil sphere is a distinctively democratic field in modern societies, one that sustains universalizing cultural aspirations and organizational structures and that has tense and uncertain boundaries with other spheres of social life, like the economy, religion, family, and state. Unlike the latter, which are more particularistic and hierarchical in character, the civil sphere defines itself in terms of solidarity – the feeling of being connected with every other person in the collectivity. The utopian ideals of democratic solidarity shape every modern society, even if they are often compromised by the messy realities of social life. This volume uses the theory of the civil sphere to shed new light on Nordic societies, while at the same time drawing on the distinctive experiences of the Nordic nations to reflect on and advance the theory of the civil sphere. Nordic societies have long been admired for creating a distinctive form of social democracy, but this admirable achievement has not been well conceptualized theoretically. Most attempts to explain Nordic social democracy focus on material and organizational factors. This volume, by contrast, emphasizes the cultural foundations and characteristics of social democracy, demonstrating how civil sensibilities are necessary for the creation of an egalitarian and democratic state. Nordic civil spheres, however, are not only pro-civil but also white in color, European in ethnicity, secular in character and gender-equal in a subtly restrictive manner. Such primordialization of state civility is vividly on display in the sometime tense relationships that develop among natives and "foreigners" in Nordic countries, relationships that expose the primordial undersides of the social democratic codes and civil values that constitute the Nordic civil sphere. A major contribution to the theory of the civil sphere and to our understanding of the cultural and normative underpinnings of social and political life, this volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars of sociology and politics.

Part I
Social Democracy and the Civil Sphere

1
The Civil Sphere and the Welfare State
Henrik Enroth and Malin Henriksson

Introduction

In this chapter we approach civil sphere theory (CST) with an overarching interest in democracy. And with CST traveling to the Nordic countries, we approach democracy from the point of view of the specific form of political organization that has been dominant in these countries in the postwar period: the welfare state. This is not exactly uncharted territory. Existing theories of democracy and welfare state research are undeniably relevant for an informed understanding of our subject, but CST can draw our attention to things that have not yet been seen or properly focused on for the plain but compelling reason that our theories have not placed them in our field of vision. Theory, in the etymologically original sense of the Greek theoria, is an optical metaphor: to see or to make visible (Liddell and Scott 1889). Every theory enables a particular vision, letting us see certain things rather than others, in a certain manner rather than another.

One aspect of democracy that political scientists in general have yet to properly focus on is what Jeffrey Alexander has referred to as “the construction of a wider and more inclusive sphere of solidarity” (Alexander 2006: 193). Other factors aside, a sense of civil solidarity is an essential aspect of democratic life, CST suggests, and students of politics would do well to take a greater interest in how such senses of solidarity are constructed and reconstructed historically, or so we suggest. Taking this suggestion as our point of departure, we engage with CST in a manner that may best be described as dialectical and hermeneutic: neither bypassing it nor simply adopting it, but adapting it. In the context of the Nordic countries, we are obliged to ask partly new questions of the theory as well as of the empirical case that we shall consider by way of illustration: the past and present of the welfare state in Sweden.

Thus we do a double move. On the one hand, we use the Swedish case to highlight some of the questions facing CST as it travels beyond the American context in which it was conceived. On the other hand, we use the theory to make sense of our case, both drawing on and transcending previous research on the Swedish welfare state. This, we suggest, is a potential win-win. The Swedish case can be used to highlight theoretical issues, especially concerning the political aspects of the civil sphere, on which CST may be unnecessarily circumscribed by its American origins. At the same time, the theory can alert us to what remains as yet unacknowledged or inadequately understood in the evolution both of democracy in the formal sense and of the Swedish welfare state model, specifically as to the historically evolving senses of solidarity that have underpinned these institutions.

Applying a theory to a new case is theory development, and theory development is interpretation and translation (Kivisto and Sciortino 2018: 241). In this, as in all instances of interpretation and translation, words matter a good deal. We start, therefore, with terms and concepts, the following two sections being devoted to theoretical groundwork. The first section unpacks some of the theoretical implications of the concept of the civil sphere, considered from the point of view of the Swedish case. In the second section we discuss briefly the relationship between democracy and the civil sphere, and the role of the state in CST. The third and fourth sections then trace in broad outline how these relationships have unfolded – and changed – historically in the Swedish case. The fifth and concluding section brings this heavily abridged story of the civil sphere and the democratic welfare state in Sweden up to date, and considers some of the challenges involved in conceptualizing the civil sphere for the purpose of cross-national theorizing.

Conceptualizing the Civil Sphere

We should begin with the question of what “civil” implies in “the civil sphere.” This is not, we should clarify, a question about the content of the symbolic codes of which the civil sphere is taken to consist. While that is surely a key issue to consider as CST travels – what are the relevant differences and similarities between the symbolic codes that structure the civil sphere in different contexts? – this is also an issue on which there has already been a good deal of commentary and response occasioned by The Civil Sphere (Alexander 2007; Kivisto and Sciortino 2015). Our interest is in the theoretical determination of the civil sphere, and in its relations to its others, as it were, more than in the empirical content with which this category can be filled in different contexts. As we bring CST to bear on the Swedish case, what are the theoretical implications of this designation?

There seem to be two main implications of “civil” in CST, which we would do well to distinguish and unpack in this context, if only because they do not obviously go together in the Swedish case in quite the same way as in the American context. For the sake of simplicity, we can identify these as “autonomy” and “solidarity,” respectively. “Civil” in the first sense implies the autonomy of the civil sphere in relation to “what might be called ‘noncivil’ spheres,” such as “state, economy, religion, family, and community” (Alexander 2006: 7). Civil society in this sense “can thus be thought of as an independent sphere,” Alexander remarks at the outset of The Civil Sphere, immediately qualifying that “the civil sphere is not separated and ideal; it must exist in the real world,” where “its contradictions become apparent” (Alexander 2006: 6). The independence of the civil sphere is analytical, Alexander points out, and he notes that there may be a good deal of boundary crossing going on empirically between the civil sphere and its others.

This use of “civil” draws on the European tradition of civil society theorizing, a tradition which in its modern form extends back to the Scottish Enlightenment and to thinkers such as Adam Ferguson, and to subsequent influential readers of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as G. W. F. Hegel (Cohen and Arato 1992; Dickey 1987; Keane 1988; Taylor 1990; cf. Enroth 2004: 26–30). In the context of CST, this sense of “civil” is the more conventional one, but it is essential to the theory as presented in The Civil Sphere. It is through the kind of boundary work on which this tradition turns that the autonomy of the civil sphere can be established analytically vis-à-vis other spheres, the latter being designated as non-civil in consequence.

A challenge from a comparative point of view, and most certainly a challenge presented by the Swedish case, is how the stipulated autonomy of the civil sphere can be conceptualized without foreclosing empirical inquiry into “the real world” where actual civil spheres exist. If we conceive of the autonomy of the civil sphere analytically, allowing for boundary crossing empirically between the civil sphere and its others, then we must still at least assume the self-identity of and a relevant distinction between the spheres whose boundaries are being crossed. But in the Swedish case, we suggest, the relationship between the state and the civil sphere has evolved historically in such a way that even this minimal assumption seems less than safe. What seems safe to say is that conceptualizing the Swedish state as categorically “non-civil” does not accurately convey the historically mutable relationship between the state and the civil sphere in this context, as we hope the following will make clear.

A second sense of “civil” is more original and seemingly more demanding, namely civil as tending toward “solidarity and universalism” (Alexander 2006: 203). In the sense noted above, something is either civil or non-civil; in the sense noted here, the most likely opposite of civil is uncivil, or anti-civil, which is the term used in The Civil Sphere to introduce the counter-codes of civil motives, relations, and institutions (Alexander 2006: 57–9). In contrast with the first sense of the term, “civil” in this latter sense seems at the same time to be a matter of degree. In this sense, actors, their motives and their relationships, and the institutions in which they act and interact may be considered more or less civil; the civil sphere as a sphere of solidarity may be “wider and more inclusive,” or narrower and less inclusive.

This highlights an essential aspect of the civil sphere: solidarity is relative, not only in the sense that actually existing democratic societies tend to fall short of their own ideals of solidarity, but also and no less in the sense that such ideals can never be conclusively declared universal or particular, tout court. “Universal” and “particular” are relative, not absolute, terms. To be sure, the point of CST is “to understand civil society as the arena not of solidarity narrowly defined in a communitarian and particularistic way but in universalistic terms,” the latter exemplified in context by “the we-ness of a national, regional, or international community” (Alexander 2006: 43). But as the items on this list clearly illustrate, what looks like universalism from one point of view or at one point in time may look like particularism from another point of view or at another point in time (cf. Enroth 2015). To take a timely example, the “independent norms of universalism” on which the Swedish welfare state famously rests may easily look like “particularistic primordialities” at the borders of the welfare state, where young asylum seekers are presently faced with relocations, deportations, and medical age assessments (Alexander 2007: 650–1; cf. Hinely 2015; Nielsen 2016; Schall 2016). True to the aspirational spirit of CST, and to emphasize these intricacies, we opt for “universalizing” in lieu of “universalism” in the following.

Democracy, the Civil Sphere, and the State

This brings us to the relationship between democracy and the civil sphere. The basic suggestion about this relationship in The Civil Sphere is that the former depends on the latter: “democracy depends on the existence of solidary bonds that extend beyond political arrangements,” bonds in the light of which such arrangements can be assessed as more or less civil (Alexander 2006: 38). “The more democratic the society,” Alexander points out, “the more widely extended is the liberating discourse of [the] civil sphere, and the more restricted is the scope of the anticivil discourse that justifies repression” (Alexander 2006: 115). A democratic society, then, is one in which there is a wider and more inclusive sense of solidarity, where solidarity “becomes palpable, an almost visible force” (Alexander 2006: 107). Granting the relativity of solidarity, this raises at least two questions, one, we believe, beside the point, the other very much to the point.

The first question concerns just how wide or inclusive our sense of solidarity needs to be in order for our political arrangements and our way of life to qualify as democratic. The Athenian polis in the era of democracy was internally democratic, yet infamously narrow in the sense of solidarity on the basis of which inclusion in the demos was granted to free men but denied to women, slaves, and metics (Cartledge 1993; Ober 1998). This is very much a political science kind of question, classifying and measuring democracy being a favored approach to the subject. But this question in a vital sense misses the point. If we wish to understand the relationship between the civil sphere and democracy, the key point, and the challenge, as we see it, is to describe and explain how such wider senses of solidarity evolve out of narrower versions, and how broader senses of civil solidarity eventually gain hold in a democratic political order. The point should not be to arbitrarily decide, whether in quantitative or qualitative terms, when and where we may and may not refer to the order at hand as “democratic.”

What we need to focus on, in other words, is the dynamic through which a “feeling of connectedness” becomes culturally and institutionally entrenched, the emergence and institutionalization of a sense of solidarity “that transcends particular commitments, narrow loyalties, and sectional interests” (Alexander 2006: 43). As Alexander points out, getting this right is largely a matter of navigating between varieties of social-scientific explanation tending to the cynicism of unbridled selfinterest or the determinism of social stratification, on the one hand, and those given to utopian visions of social evolution or the tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Notes on the Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Civil Spheres, Pro-Civil States, and Their Contradictions
• Part I Social Democracy and the Civil Sphere
• Part II The Struggle for Recognition: Performing Civility
• Part III Civil and Uncivil Immigrant Identities
• Part IV Nativism and Extremism in the Pro-Civil State
• Commentary: The Civil State in the Nordic Region and Beyond
• Conclusion: Developing Civil Sphere Theory the Nordic Way
• Index
• End User License Agreement