The Nordic Economic, Social and Political Model

Challenges in the 21st Century

Anu Koivunen, Jari Ojala, Janne Holmén, Anu Koivunen, Jari Ojala, Janne Holmén

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429640278
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Economics
• Sous-sujet: Econometrics

The Nordic Model is the 20th-century Scandinavian recipe for combining stable democracies, individual freedom, economic growth and comprehensive systems for social security. But what happens when Sweden and Finland – two countries topping global indexes for competitiveness, productivity, growth, quality of life, prosperity, and equality – start doubting themselves and their future? Is the Nordic Model at a crossroads?

Historically, consensus, continuity, social cohesion, and broad social trust have been hailed as key components for the success and for the self-images of Sweden and Finland. In the contemporary, however, political debates in both countries are increasingly focused on risks, threats, and worry. Social disintegration, political polarization, geopolitical anxieties, and threat of terrorism are often dominant themes. This book focuses on what appears to be a paradox: countries with low income differences, high faith in social institutions, and relatively high cultural homogeneity becoming fixated on the fear of polarization, disintegration, and diminished social trust. Unpacking the presentist discourse of "worry" and a sense of interregnum at the face of geopolitical tensions, digitalization, and globalization, as well as challenges to democracy, the chapters take steps back in time and explore the current conjecture through the eyes of historians and social scientists, addressing key aspects of and challenges to both the contemporary and future Nordic Model. In addition, the functioning and efficacy of the participatory democracy and current protocols of decision-making are debated.

This work is essential reading for students and scholars of the welfare state, social reforms, and populism, as well as Nordic and Scandinavian studies.

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

1 Always in crisis, always a solution?

The Nordic model as a political and scholarly concept

Anu Koivunen, Jari Ojala and Janne Holmén

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026690-1

While campaigning for the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders invoked the Nordic countries as a model for future politics. In a debate, he declared, ‘I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.’¹ Hailing the Nordic countries, especially Denmark, as an example of ‘democratic socialism’,² Sanders’s vision engendered a heated debate, with political opponents critiquing the implied political agenda, the prime minister of Denmark protesting the idea of Denmark as a socialist country, and journalists and pundits presenting corrective views of the economic and social policies of the Nordic countries.³ The critiques notwithstanding, the notion of the Nordic model has continued to circulate in US political imaginary, invoked by both left and centre Democratic politicians. For example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic representative from New York, promotes her Green New Deal agenda with references to Nordic countries: ‘My policies most closely resemble what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden.’⁴ In the polarised US political debate of the 21st century, the Nordic countries serve as an imaginary horizon for both a new kind of socialism and a reformed capitalism in the age of accelerated climate change.

However, the idea of the Nordic model as fuel for political imagination and a trope for global comparison and competition is an old one. The Nordic countries – especially Sweden and Denmark – have been invoked by Nordic and foreign actors as a social and economic model for the rest of the world in times of crisis dating back to the Great Depression of the 1930s.⁵ In particular, the interplay between the Nordic Social Democrats and the forces on the left and the centre of the US political spectrum has been a driving force behind establishing the idea that there is a Nordic recipe for how to alleviate the ills of capitalism while avoiding the pitfalls of socialism.⁶ In the Nordic countries, this discourse about a third way has been adopted by both right- and left-wing governments, and the Nordic model has come to serve as a tool in the global competition and regional and national branding of the 21st century. Both policymakers and economists have rebranded the Nordic model as a benchmark for constant renewal and for ‘embracing globalization by sharing risks’.⁷ At the World Economic Forum in Davos, 2011, ‘the Nordic way’ was touted as a recipe for ‘the new reality’ – that is, the world in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the Eurocrisis.⁸ A report, released by a think tank and endorsed by the five Nordic governments, paraded the virtues of countries that top global indexes for competitiveness, productivity, growth, quality of life, prosperity and equality. Rejecting the notion of the Nordic countries as a compromise between capitalism and socialism, it defined the Nordic model as a ‘combination of extreme individualism and a strong state that has shaped the fertile ground for an efficient market economy’. The report highlighted social cohesion and broad social trust as key for the Nordic way, enabling resilience through constant renewal.⁹ In 2013, The Economist termed the Nordic countries ‘the next supermodel’ for ‘reinventing their model of capitalism’ and ‘a blueprint’ for politicians from both the right and the left of ‘how to reform the public sector, making the state more efficient and responsive’.¹⁰

In these framings, the Nordic model appears to have two sides. On the one hand, it is a set of crisis narratives; the model is perpetually called into question and seen as facing daunting challenges. Furthermore, its economic foundation is threatened by globalisation, an ageing population and the digital revolution. On the other hand, the Nordic model is invoked as a recipe for dealing with these future challenges.¹¹ Both as a set of policies and as self-branding, the Nordic model has had an institutional footing in official parliamentary and governmental cooperation since the 1950s. While the political relevance of Nordic cooperation waned after the Cold War and European integration, the actors involved in the many layers of transnational cooperation – parliaments, governments, academia and civil society – continue to invest in Nordicness.¹²

This book joins in this tradition by asking whether the 21st-century Scandinavian recipe for combining stable democracies, individual freedom, economic growth and comprehensive systems for social security is at a crossroads in the current conjuncture of the global digital economy, geopolitical tensions and changes in political culture, as well as challenges to democracy. The chapters were written in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the Eurocrisis and amid a sense of accelerating global unrest (war in Syria, the Russian annexation of Ukrainian Crimea in 2014, the continuing war in Eastern Ukraine), threats of European disintegration (Brexit, European Union member states breaching the rule of law) and the intensifying political polarisation and disruption of party structures in many countries, but before the COVID-19 pandemic. In this framework, this book asks how the Nordic economic, social and political model is currently challenged as both an idea and a practice. The underlying question, following German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck’s invocation of Antonio Gramsci, is whether we are living in an age of interregnum, an era between systemic changes. In other words, we examine whether we are in ‘a period of tremendous insecurity in which the accustomed chains of cause and effect are no longer in force, and unexpected, dangerous and grotesquely abnormal events may occur at any moment’.¹³ For Streeck and many other commentators of a ‘democratic decline’ in the 21st century, the present reads as a period of dramatic, foundational changes in the global economy and political systems.¹⁴ According to Streeck, interregnum is characterised by a sense of inability to predict the future as ‘disparate lines of development run unreconciled, parallel to one another, resulting in unstable configurations of many kinds, and chains of surprising events take the place of predictable structures’.¹⁵ This book asks how this age affects the Nordic model as a trope of political imagination and a vocabulary for futurity.

This book analyses the Nordic model as an empirical, policy-based phenomenon and as a political idea and a trope for the imagination through the lenses of social scientists and historians. While exploring contemporary economic, social and political challenges, the emphasis is, however, on historicising the presentist narratives of crisis and tracing longer and diverse developments.

The emergence of the Nordic model

Although fluid as a geographical referent, Norden, as the Nordic region is called in Scandinavian, primarily refers to the five nation-states of Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden, as well as the autonomous territories of the Faroe Islands, Greenland and the Åland islands. However, the Nordic identity has an appeal outside of this traditional core. For example, Estonian youths are more likely to identify as Nordic than as Baltic, and voices emphasising the Nordic identity of Scotland, as well as tangible Nordic-Scottish political cooperation, have been increasing in the last decade.¹⁶ Although the Nordic countries are often regarded as fairly homogeneous from the outside, from within, the notion of a single economic and social model can be called into question. Is there one model? Are there many models, but is the Swedish model the most well known? What is Nordic about the model? What does it entail? And are these national models simple, unique and – moreover – only associated with positive connotations?¹⁷

Nevertheless, the concept of the Nordic model circulates and has political currency internationally, as well as in the Nordic countries, where it operates as a signifier and vehicle for various political goals, a to...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Always in crisis, always a solution? The Nordic model as a political and scholarly concept
• 2 Three driving forces: structural challenges for Nordic democracies in the 2010s
• 3 Lost land of bliss: imagined temporalities of the Nordic welfare state
• 4 More or less equality? facts, debates, and policies related to the Nordic model
• 5 Liquid neutrality: paradoxes of democracy in Finnish and Swedish NATO discussions?
• 6 The decline of Nordic social democracy
• 7 Conservatives at the crossroads: cooperating or resisting extremism and populism?
• 8 Nordic populists as hegemony challengers
• 9 Cultural policy and cultural diversity
• 10 Managing moods: media, politicians, and anxiety over public debate
• 11 Persistent paradoxes, turbulent times: gender equality policies in the Nordics in the 2010s
• 12 Adapting the Nordic welfare state model to the challenges of automation
• 13 Education 4.0. Nordic long-term planning and educational policies in the fourth industrial revolution
• Index