Nordic Societal Security

Convergence and Divergence

Sebastian Larsson, Mark Rhinard, Sebastian Larsson, Mark Rhinard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000168594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book compares and contrasts publicly espoused security concepts in the Nordic region, and explores the notion of societal security.

Outside observers often assume that Nordic countries take similar approaches to the security and safety of their citizens. This book challenges that assumption and traces the evolution of 'societal security', and its broadly equivalent concepts, in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. The notion of societal security is deconstructed and analysed in terms of its different meanings and implications for each country, through both country- and issue-focused studies. Each chapter traces the evolution of key security concepts and related practices, allowing for a comparison of similarities and differences between these four countries. Using discourses and practices as evidence, this is the first book to explore how different Nordic nations have conceptualised domestic security over time. The findings will be valuable to scholars from across the geographical and theoretical spectrum, while highlighting how Nordic security discourses and practices may deviate from traditional assumptions about Nordic values.

This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, Nordic politics and International Relations.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/Nordic-Societal-Security-Convergence-and-Divergence/Larsson-Rhinard/p/book/9780367492922, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part I
Introduction

1 Introduction

Comparing and conceptualising Nordic societal security

Sebastian Larsson and Mark Rhinard

Introduction

As in many regions of the world, Nordic conceptualisations of what ‘security’ means and how it should be practiced have transformed in recent decades. Traditional security strategies with a focus on geopolitics, concrete threat perceptions related to war, and territorial defence remain in place. But years of post-Cold War expansions of security thinking, conceptualisation, and practice have left an indelible and seemingly distinctive mark.

In the Nordic countries, as elsewhere in the Western world, security has come to be organised around a rather holistic conceptualisation of what constitutes a threat as well as the range of governmental responsibilities required to address them. In the Nordic region, we can observe a general shift in how discourses, practices, and technologies become related not to traditional defence or war-thinking, but to notions of ‘societal security’, ‘comprehensive security’, ‘resilience’, ‘risk’-, ‘crisis’-, or ‘emergency’ management, and ‘public safety and security’. These framings change what it means to provide security, presage a different kind of societal response, suggest different kinds of power hierarchies, and involve a wide range of actors from public to private and individual citizens. Nordic conceptions of security also wrest open a wider selection of threats to society, including terrorism and organised crime, infrastructure disruptions, IT breaches, disinformation campaigns, major accidents, environmental disasters, and even migration.

Similarly, the study of security has expanded considerably after the Cold War and into the 2000s, both in the field of International Relations and beyond. As much recent scholarship attests to (Burgess 2010), ‘new’ security studies feature a range of constructivist, reflexive, and interdisciplinary perspectives, and include empirical and theoretical studies of a range of issues. Extant and emerging agendas include processes of threat construction and securitisation, the expanding range of security-related discourses and practices, the interplay and mutual constitution of societal values and government action, security technologies and actor behaviours, and legitimate security governance – to name just a few. An increasing amount of critical security studies further explores the implications and effects of post-Cold War security practices with regard to civil liberties, fundamental rights, and democratic life (C.A.S.E. Collective 2006; Shepherd 2013).

The Nordic region is a prime area where these trends converge. As shown in this book, Nordic governments have displayed an apparent willingness to adopt expanded security concepts at the same time that academics have roamed across the (thin) line dividing research and practice. A central theme running through this book is the intermingling of research and practice in the Nordic region, amongst actors subscribing to evolving sets of historically shaped ideas – all in a process of co-constitution. These dynamics are not new, of course (as the global evolution of notions such as ‘soft power’ or ‘resilience’ in policy circles confirms), nor are they unique to the Nordic region (Vouri and Stritzel 2016). But Nordic countries do offer an uncannily rich and revealing set of cases in which to study how and to what extent concepts travel over time, across borders, and between the research and public spheres.

This prompts the question: is there a Nordic way of thinking about and pursuing security, perhaps in line with the notion of ‘societal security’? For some outsiders, there appears to be vast similarities, rooted in seemingly common robust social welfare systems, supported by transnational conceptual learning, and manifested in Nordic cooperation and agreements like the Haga declarations (Dalgaard-Nielsen and Hamilton 2006; Hamilton 2005; Sandö and Bailes 2014; cf. NRF 2008). To be sure, there are clear connections. The welfare state, as we discuss below, underpins a particular perspective of society and portends a degree of shared values worth protecting. And the idea of ‘total defence’ giving way to ‘societal security’ – or some variant – echoes across multiple Nordic countries. Even the recent return to geopolitics in international security thinking can be found in Nordic governments’ calls to rethink societal security for a supposedly more militaristic threat environment. The chapters in this book clearly demonstrate family resemblances in how broad security concepts emerged, evolved, and transformed in the Nordics.

But this book points out that differences are as common as similarities, and methodologically speaking, understanding divergence provides important analytical purchase. Indeed, that motivation spurred the project behind this book. We take a critical perspective on the assumption of ‘Nordic convergence’, to investigate the extent to which differences rather than similarities characterise how a set of Nordic countries – Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland – speak of, frame, and act upon the security of their societies. The goal here is to add nuance to discussions of how Nordic countries address the question of security, and to consider the implications of similarities and differences. What makes this book broadly ‘critical’ is in its methods and approaches: it seeks to uncover evolving power constellations by examining who and what shape conceptual trends over time, while focusing on outcomes and implications in terms of the dominant discourses and practices of various Nordic ‘securities’.

We organise the book around the notion of ‘societal security’, a term proposed by some observers as a concept common to the Nordic region.¹ The concept of societal security has both academic and practical connotations, with the academic community divided between identity-based approaches associated with the Copenhagen School of security studies and those with a more ‘functionalist’ and objective view of security (Rhinard, this volume). It is the latter version of societal security that we take up in this book, not because we advocate for it, but rather because it is often promoted as a common ‘Nordic’ approach by practitioners (FNF 2014; Nordic Council 2005, 2019; Stoltenberg 2009) and some funding bodies (NordForsk 2013; Research Council of Norway 2008). As generally articulated, a societal security approach aims to protect the core values of a society from a wide range of intentional and unintentional threats. It envisions a host of public and private responses to such threats, and promotes steering models that span policy sectors and governance levels. The concept has been taken up by transboundary policy communities in the Nordic region and is sometimes accompanied by the idea of ‘Nordic values’ worth protecting. As such, it is an intensely political question and critical reflection on Nordic societies.

We investigate how widespread the notions of societal security are in the Nordic region, and moreover, whether such patterns reveal genuine conceptual kinship or just superficial window-dressing. We also want to understand the implications of Nordic convergence and divergence on this question, including for governance, democracy, and values. Using the concept of ‘societal security’ as a departure point allows us to explore divergences from this particular approach, and to relate concepts with conceptual affiliations, including comprehensive security, resilience, and risk management.

The authors in this volume are experts in their security-related fields and have spent several years jointly examining the discourses, practices, and implications of Nordic countries’ approaches to securing their citizens, under a common research framework.² The chapters take either a country-, thematic-, or comparative focus, examining in each case how security is conceptualised and practiced, and with what implications for Nordic societies. Our ontological approach is largely constructivist in orientation, concerned less with what security ‘is’ than with how certain approaches are ‘made possible’ as well as what they ‘do’. We are thus interpretivist in epistemological terms, allowing the empirical material to reveal patterns in unexpected ways.

Considerable conceptual overlaps are thereby revealed in the Nordic region related to the notion of societal security. Each country studied here has adopted some variant of the notion, and indeed there is evidence from each country that the precise term ‘societal security’ has been taken up by at least some corner of officialdom. However, the degree of institutionalisation differs dramatically, from a strong take-up in Sweden and Norway to a marginal adoption in Finland (in deference to the preferred notion of ‘comprehensive security’) to almost no formal adoption in Denmark. Whatever the concepts used, all have been shaped by socio-historical trajectories rooted to traditional defence postures. New security concepts are thus, as we will see, less revolutionary and more evolutionary. The key difference for each country lies in whether new holistic concepts linked to societal security replace, or co-exist with, traditional territorial defence notions such as total defence, particularly as political attention, more recently, turns towards a perceived ‘return of geopolitics’ in the global security environment (Mead 2014). Security concepts in the Nordic region, as shown convincingly by the chapters in this book, follow particular trajectories, each shaped inter alia by historical experience, pushed by field-spanning actors, reproduced or uprooted by institutional change, and reconfigured through narrative contestation. These various trajectories are unique to each country, of course, but all represent shifts in ways to conceptualise and act upon security, with consequences for politics, power, and cohesion in the Nordic region. The chapters in this book shed light on these questions, providing not only a ‘state of play’ regarding security thinking and practice but also tackling questions of how security has been produced, enacted, and performed in different Nordic countries.

To capture diversity, we outlined an analytical framework that would allow authors, starting with the notion of societal security, to explore creatively how this concept – defined as such, or not – played out in the respective countries and sectors. First, we asked authors to characterise the dominant conceptual approach taken to the safety and security of societies in their respective country or policy area. Second, the authors were asked to trace the emergence of that approach, examining the social and transformational dynamics behind them. Third, the authors consider the implications of those approaches either in practical terms, in how security is done, or in normative terms, including what such concepts mean for power structures, societal values, and what new insecurities might emerge as a result.

This chapter unfolds as follows. The first two sections focus on ostensible similarities, one concerning the welfare state foundation for modern Nordic societies, and the second on the emergence of a supposedly region-wide approach to safety and security: societal security. The subsequent section considers potential lines of divergence, while the concluding section explains the organisation of the book and outlines the contributions.

Nordic security and the welfare state

One can hardly discuss common Nordic conceptions of security without first investigating the link between Nordic welfare apparatuses and Nordic security approaches. There is indeed much talk of a ‘Nordic Model’ in welfare and democracy studies focusing on, for instance, the region’s historical approach to public institutions and labour (Engelstad and Hagelund 2016), economic policy (Blomquist and Moene 2015), work organisation (Gustavsen 2011), education (Blossing et al. 2014), or even culture (Duelund 2003) and state media (Syvertsen et al. 2014). This broad range of scholarly attention undoubtedly points towards the existence of strong socio-political, cultural, and administrative similarities between the countries, but also suggests that these similarities have existed most tangibly in an area traditionally associated not with security and defence, but with the public provision of social welfare.

It would be safe to assume, however, that the region’s historical welfare model has conditioned its security discourses and practices to a large extent. How has this welfare model interplayed with, organised, and structured a potential Nordic approach to security? Relatedly, what are the links between the region’s modern reputation and international brand of ‘progressive’ politics (often constructed as ‘Nordic values’) and its current logic of framing and doing security? When associating traditional Nordic welfare commonalities with a potential shared security approach, at least three themes can be highlighted.

First, in some Nordic countries (most notably Sweden and Finland but also in Norway to some extent), the welfare system itself overlapped strongly with the logic of how to organise national defence during the Cold War. For example, the notion of ‘total defence’ – which existed varyingly in the region – was a political-bureaucratic ideal suggesting that virtually all aspects of societal planning and the peacetime provision of public services should be integrated into defence policy and aligned with the goals of war preparedness. Policies for public housing, healthcare, road construction, supply management, and so on all had a ‘war dimension’ and had to be designed not only for welfare purposes, but also with invasion scenarios in mind and with an eye towards how to best mobilise society and its citizens for defence purposes. As put by Lundin et al. (2010), in countries like Sweden, the logics of welfare and warfare became historically entangled and intertwined, and over time, seemingly inseparable. This has enabled a deeply rooted ‘defence-culture’ in certain Nordic countries, which, in turn, made it difficult for reformist bureaucrats and politicians to challenge and significantly alter total defence structures after the Cold War. In Sweden and Finland, for instance, the gradual transition from defence thinking to new and broadened security approaches was rather slow and fragmented (see also Larsson, and Hyvönen and Juntunen, respectively, this volume).

Second, and relatedly, similarities in security approaches may stem from shared traditions of comprehensive public administration structures. More specifically, the region’s history of strong social democratic parties has put public sector actors in generally strong positions vis-à-vis private companies. Security and defence was usually a rather state-owned operation during the Cold War, and thus tended to follow a top-down practical logic: from the government and parliament via civil and military agencies to regional county boards and local municipalities and companies. Much due to the peculiar intertwining of welfare and defence indicated earlier, the trust among citizens towards authorities and security agenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Nordic cases
• Part III Issues and processes
• Part IV Conclusions
• Index