Reinterpreting the Historicity of the Nordic Model

2012

The strong state is conventionally regarded as a major characteristic of the Nordic model of social regulation. Guaranteeing social rights, promoting gender-equality, or patronising people, the strong state is also a central figure in the discussion on the current challenges to the Nordic-type societal pattern. Some debaters, seeking for effective responses to the challenges of globalised economic competition, cross-national migration, or aging population, have put their hopes on actors and modes of action they find opposite or alternative to the strong state: market competition, civil society, or local community.

West European Politics, 2015

European Journal of Political Research, 2006

The origins of the Nordic social policy model(s) need to be viewed broadly and historically from its late nineteenth-century initiation to the immediate postwar period (1940s to the early 1960s), when a social democratic model began to consolidate. In reference to the alternate social policy traditions of British poor relief and German occupational insurance, this article analyzes the sociopolitical contexts that finally prevented Scandinavian states from developing similarly, instead enabling development of universalistic social policy. The historical narratives are arranged with respect to four analytical aspects: policy development; the configuration of state institutions; the strength of liberal, conservative and leftist power blocs; and intra-Nordic divergence in all these respects. Such an approach integrates state-centred and power-resources-focused analyses of Nordic welfare.

Scandinavian Economic History Review, 2023

This article deals with the recent developments of labour history in and about the Nordic countries. We identify patterns, problems and possibilities in these recent developments in the fieldroughly within the last two decades. Our main source of analysis is the research presented and exchanged in the Nordic labour history journals, the Nordic Labour History Network, the labour history associations, the archives and libraries. We relate current trends to developments in European and Global labour history. We claim that the revival and expansion of Nordic labour history must also be understood through its exchange with labour history outside the Nordic sphere and with other disciplines and research fields. The expansion of the field occurred through increased attention and sensitivity to the specificities of various forms of labour, the lived lives of those who work, the places in which work takes place, the various ways in which workers form collective practices and structures, and how they understand themselves in relation to as well as within and outside the parties and institutions that organise and claim to represent workers and labour interests.

2009

2021

Reinhart Koselleck has taught us that one of the main characteristics of modern political concepts is their being “temporalised”. They were shaped as a means of governing the tension between “the space experience and the horizon of expectation” that was constitutive of the modern notions of history and politics. The concepts became “instruments for the direction of historical movement” (Koselleck 1979, 344), which was often conceptualized as development or progress. From our current historical perspectives, the making of the welfare state easily appears as an important phase and stream of “historical movement” in the Nordic countries. However, it was quite late that the concept of the welfare state played any significant part in the direction of this movement (Beland & Petersen ed. 2014; Edling ed. 2019).

Nordic Welfare Research, 2024

Every instantiation of decommodifying welfare capitalism relies on a global hinterland, an exterior space for which commodification still remains the rule and whose function is to service the national interior of a social democratic polity. Taking Norway as its case study, this article deploys the notion of a protective "cupola," following Žižek and Wacquant's concept of the "centaur state," as productive ways of thinking about how late-modern social democracy relies upon dualization and structural bifurcation. While extracting resources, low-cost labor, cheap goods, and financial profits from the global hinterland, the welfare-capitalist state privileges its national citizenry. Despite significant neoliberal transformation, it continues to protect the populace from the vagaries of the market, but at the expense of the world beyond its bounds. Social democracy, then, hinges on the preservation of difference, failing to offer a truly globe-encompassing, universal response to the commodifying effects of market capitalism. Welfare capitalism tends to mean welfare for insiders, (liberal) capitalism for the rest.

How is it possible to maintain social protection for weaker groups when the demand for services of middle – and high-income groups increases in tan- dem with their earnings without hampering the general economic growth? This is the main challenge Scandinavian welfare states have faced during the last three decades. Increased internationalization and technological advances, especially in information technology, have given some popula- tion groups greater income opportunities, whilst other groups find it still more difficult to keep track. Scandinavian welfare state reforms have tried to address this underlying societal pressure towards greater inequality. New activation strategies have been at the heart of these reforms in the preceding twelve years and they have changed the blueprint of the Scandinavian wel- fare model. Numerous changes to individual policy programmes and their interconnectedness have changed the content of social citizenship towards a greater emphasis on rights to participate and on obligations to contribute. Less emphasis is now given to the de-commodification potential of the wel- fare state and more to the (re)commodification of labour.

1999