Nordic Paths to Modernity

By Björn Wittrock

Within the growing attention to the diverse forms and trajectories of modern societies, the Nordic countries are now widely seen as a distinctive and instructive case. While discussions have centred on the ‘Nordic model’ of the welfare state and its record of adaptation to the changing global environment of the late twentieth century, this volume’s focus goes beyond these themes. The guiding principle here is that a long-term historical-sociological perspective is needed to make sense of the Nordic paths to modernity; of their significant but not complete convergence in patterns, which for some time were perceived as aspects of a model to be emulated in other settings; and of the specific features that still set the five countries in question (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland) apart from one another. The contributors explore transformative processes, above all the change from an absolutistmilitary state to a democratic one with its welfarist phase, as well as the crucial experiences that will have significant implications on future developments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Feb 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780857452702

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CHAPTER 1

Nordic Modernity: Origins, Trajectories, Perspectives

Bo Stråth

The Military and Absolutist Point of Departure

Nordic modernity is often understood in terms of enlightened and progressive welfare politics and social equality. There is a more or less implicit association with images of a Social Democratic model. The aim of this article is twofold: to discuss the historical preconditions and construction of that model of progressive politics, and to discuss its relevance today and its future prospects.

Concerning the first aim, there is nothing historically predetermined about a progressive development path. Nordic modernity should not be understood as teleology or as given by a natural state of egalitarian peasant communities. On the contrary, until the Napoleonic turmoil at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Denmark-Norway, to which Iceland belonged, and Sweden-Finland had a long history of military involvement in the European wars. Sweden was ruled by royal absolutism until 1809, Denmark until 1848. The series of military defeats in the eighteenth century changed the preconditions of the warlike disposition, but in Sweden the nobility continued to play an important political, cultural and economic role. The king based his power on a popular royalism built up not least in conflict with the nobility. King, gentry and people were involved in a triangular power struggle (kungamakt, herremakt, folkmakt, monarchical power, aristocratic power, people’s power) from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth century. In Finland many of these structures remained after 1809 when it was transferred to a grand duchy under the Russian tsar, but they were more complex due to the language issue and the cultural struggle between the svekomans and the Fennomans. In Denmark-Norway the king based his absolutist regime from 1660 on a strong popular support under elimination of the political role of the nobility. Iceland is the exceptional case in this warlike and absolutist history. As a sparsely populated (less than sixty thousand inhabitants around 1850) and remote island in the Atlantic, it never developed any military or feudal structures, and distance always ensured a certain degree of autonomy within the absolutist (until 1848/1849) Danish state.

Popular royalism was in particular based on the mobilization of politically strong freeholder peasants and urban middle classes. Here it must be noted that the North, until the end of the nineteenth century, was rural, and the degree of urbanization was less than in continental Europe. Political mobilization in the nineteenth century took a nationalistic turn. Nationalistic rhetoric frequently invoked a heroic military past. In Denmark nationalism was used against the growing power of Prussia during the decades after 1848. In Sweden the perceived threat was Russia, and nationalistic activism was linked to hopes of reconquering Finland. A third variation of the nationalistic theme was Scandinavianism, which tried to unify the threats of the Danes in the South and the Swedes in the East into one Denkfigur where a common Nordic past since the Viking Age was invoked. Scandinavianism as a dynastic and nationalistic programme failed in the end because few Danes were prepared to die for Sweden in the East, and the Swedes were not prepared to die for Denmark in the South. Norway developed a specific left-oriented nationalism in the framework of the union with Sweden. It claimed more autonomy and equality for Norway in the union and turned against the dangerous military activism associated with Swedish claims of national superiority and hopes for the reconquest of Finland. Again, Iceland is an exception. Nationalism there emerged also in the 1840s, but it only slowly developed into a political programme for independence, and a target for hostility was less identifiable. However, Finland also deviated from the Scandinavian pattern of centrifugal nationalisms and the vain attempts to overcome the lack of cohesion through Scandinavianism as an alternative nationalist ideology. After 1809, Finland searched for a position as a new nation that acknowledged a certain Swedish heritage even while adapting to the Russian presence. This search provided the framework for a language struggle that intensified throughout the nineteenth century, although it always remained subordinated to the shared struggle for national autonomy.

Authoritarian versus Democratic Options

There were also factors underpinning a more progressive and egalitarian development in the North, in particular the strength of the peasant freeholders and of the (numerically small) urban middle classes. The argument in this article is that these forces in the end broke through, but not until the 1930s in response to the Great Depression. Everywhere in Norden, red-green Social Democratic–Farmers’ Party reform coalitions emerged in attempts to cope with the economic crisis. Extreme political alternatives of both the right and left were marginalized. The Social Democrats were, with the exception of Iceland, the larger party in the coalitions. In that sense there is a Scandinavian Sonderweg but, again, there was nothing teleological in that breakthrough. In Iceland, a predominantly peasant society, these forces had, in a sense, always been stronger.

In the introduction to the revised (1981) edition of The Crisis of German Ideologies, George Mosse noted that while his book appeared to have left the impression among some readers that völkisch thought must inevitably lead to Nazism, this was not his intention. Not only were ‘moderate’, mainstream conservatives in pre-1933 Germany deeply infected with völkisch thoughts, but there also existed the non-authoritarian völkische socialism of Gustav Landauer which drew on the ideal of the Volk as a democratic community of equals (Mosse 1981). Eugene Lunn (1973) has suggested that Landauer’s völkische socialism could provide an antidote to the tendency among historians to teleologically link völkische romanticism with the triumph of Hitler’s version of völkische ideology. (For a discussion of the concept of völkisch in a comparative European perspective, see Hettling 2003.) The argument in this article is that the North fits well into this alternative scenario that Mosse drafted.

Mosse contended that socialists of all countries made efforts to combine völkisch and socialist thought, and speculated that if such a blend had been successful, National Socialism might not have triumphed so easily. Lars Trägårdh has taken up and developed this idea in a comparison of völkische ideologies in two ‘Germanic’ countries, Sweden and Germany, taking 1933 as the point of departure for the analysis. The same year as Germans voted their way to völkische Nazi dictatorship, a new coalition government headed by the Social Democrats came to power in Sweden. Founded by men inspired by Lassalle, Marx, Kautsky and other luminaries of the German socialist movement, the Swedish party was in many ways modelled on the German SPD. However, by the end of the 1920s the Swedish Social Democrats began to integrate völkische and socialist themes. They redefined their party from a workers’ class-based party to a people’s party, bent upon the idea of a folkhem, a home for the people. Class alliances replaced the class struggle as the dominant strategy for achieving the socialist dream of the classless society (Trägårdh 1999). The Swedish Social Democrats appropriated the political priority of interpretation of the folk concept after a protracted discursive struggle with the conservatives who had, at the turn of the century, used the concept to develop a strategy that one of the protagonists (Rudolf Kjellén, who later became known for his geopolitical theories) labelled ‘national socialism’, an ideological instrument designed to ward off the threats of class-struggle socialism. Rudolf Kjellén was uncompromising in his opposition to class-struggle socialism as the basis for political discourse. From his conservative perspective he argued for national socialism, portraying the country as a whole in which all of the people should be involved in society. The country was supposed to be a home for the whole population. The integrative idea of the ‘folkhemmet’, in which society was organized as a family, with the home as a metaphor, subordinated the class struggle to national welfare.

When Kjellén talked about the concept of folkhemmet, folk had a different connotation from Volk in Germany. Volk was a more holistic notion inspired by Herder’s philosophy and Romanticism. Folk connoted rather the empirically derived view of a union of all social classes. Both varieties of the concept connected visions of future potential to past achievements, but Volk had more utopian and folk more empirical connotations (for the German case, see Jansen