The 1970s was a watershed for Europe and for social democracy. Economic crises, regime changes in Southern Europe, and rising neoliberalism posed challenges and offered opportunities that shaped the end of the 20th century.
In a witness seminar organized by the Institute of Contemporary History, Södertörn University, and the Centre for Nordic Studies, University of Helsinki, four social democrats shed light on the period and on the interactions of Northern and Southern Europe.
Participants included: Pierre Schori (former international secretary of the Swedish Social Democratic Party), Valdo Spini (former vice-secretary of the Italian Socialist Party), Ulf Sundqvist (former chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Finland), and Jaime Gama (founding member of the Portuguese Socialist Party).
The concept of the Nordic model played an important role in the ideological and political rejuvenation of the Northern and Southern European political left from the 1970s to the 1990s.
In a witness seminar organized by the Centre for Nordic Studies at Helsinki University, the Institute for Contemporary History at Södertörn University and the Department of History and Classical Studies at Aarhus University, key political actors for the development of European social democracy and Northern and Southern processes of European integration discuss the fortunes of the Nordic model from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Participants included: Allan Larsson (former Minister for Finance of Sweden), Mogens Lykketoft (former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, leader of the Social Democrats) and Joaquín Almunia (former Minister of Public Administration of Spain and leader of PSOE). The witness seminar is funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS).
Since the 2010s, it has become common to view the European project as troubled by crisis. As the EU historical narrative is selective, the problems that we perceive today in the EU seem to be exceptional and unusually dangerous, not the least from the perspective of Europe’s peripheries. In order to assess the current challenges and future prospects of the European project, we need to understand better the complexities of European integration in Southern and Northern Europe in the recent past.
By bringing together three relevant political actors, deeply involved in these historical events – Esko Aho (Finland), Mats Hellström (Sweden) and Juan Antonio Yáñez-Barnuevo (Spain) – this witness seminar provides important insights into the negotiations concerning EC/EU integration as well as the similarities and differences between the Northern and Southern European experiences.
The ‘open society’ has become a watchword of liberal democracy and the market system in the modern globalized world. Openness stands for individual opportunity and collective reason, as well as bottom-up empowerment and top-down transparency. It has become a cherished value, despite its vagueness and the connotation of vulnerability that surrounds it. Scandinavia has long considered itself a model of openness, citing traditions of freedom of information and inclusive policy making. This collection of essays traces the conceptual origins, development, and diverse challenges of openness in the Nordic countries and Austria. It examines some of the many paradoxes that openness encounters and the tensions it arouses when it addresses such divergent ends as democratic deliberation and market transactions, freedom of speech and sensitive information, compliant decision making and political and administrative transparency, and consensual procedures and the toleration of dissent.
Europeiska unionens medlemsstater är inte längre självstyrande. De är, på flera sätt, beroende av varandra och därför också beroende av samarbete. Någon gemensam syn på hur samarbetet ska fortskrida finns dock knappast. En federal utveckling förefaller inte sannolik, i varje fall inte inom överskådlig tid. Det är exempelvis svårt att tänka sig ett paneuropeiskt välfärdssystem. Det är heller inte troligt att länderna kan uppnå politisk enighet om hur man ska hantera utmaningarna på ekonomi- och miljöområdet. I det läget erbjuder det konflikttoleranta perspektivet (Conflicts Law Perspective) en tredje väg. I ett europeiskt integrationsperspektiv utgör det en medelväg, när såväl försvaret av nationalstaten som federala ambitioner är orealistiska. I praktiken handlar det om att förverkliga mottot ”förenade i mångfald”, det som har kommit att känneteckna EU-projektet på senare tid. Med det som utgångspunkt diskuterar författaren – själv upphovsman till det konflikttoleranta perspektivet – aktuella utmaningar för EU som exempelvis skuldkrisen och kärnkraftssäkerhet. Jämförelser görs också med teorier om europeisk integration som härstammar från Karl Polanyi, Jürgen Habermas och Carl Schmitt.
This article analyzes Swedish political scientist and conservative politician Rudolf Kjellén’s advocacy in favour of a Swedish "Baltic program" directed at the Baltic Sea region and Russia in the decades preceding the First World War. These Baltic ambitions as well as their legacy in the interwar period are studied as a series of exercises in "para-diplomacy" on three different levels: 1) as a geopolitical reconstruction of a Baltic-Nordic "space of expectation;" 2) as a kind of Baltic-Nordic regionalism based upon early notions of "soft power;" and 3) as an inspiration to the geopolitical outlook of the Swedish military elite, business circles and trade policy-makers in the time period from the First World War up to the Second World War. This "region-work in the margins" contributed to modernizing Swedish conservative elites’ geopolitical outlook into an ostensibly less aggressive vision of Swedish international influence through cultural, economic, and technological prowess.
This dissertation aims to problematize the historical concept of “social engineering”.
As North-South conflict appeared to overshadow Cold War tensions in the early 1970s, minor powers as well as non-aligned states across the world faced new challenges. The oil crisis, the rise of environmentalism, and the calls for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) propelled a wide-ranging debate within the Nordic countries regarding their complex position vis-a-vis international development and global environment. In Sweden, these debates reflect the emergence of (inter)national knowledge production about economic inequalities, ecological imbalances, and sustainable development. While these debates can be followed in both media and public debate, they also resulted in a specific body of governmental reports, research projects, and future long-term planning for the 1980s. By analysing a series of such studies from Sweden, this article problematizes the fusing of ecology and economy, the grand strategy of small states, and the local intellectual history of global solidarity during a key moment in the global Cold War. It is argued that the NIEO agenda/ideology played a significant but understudied role in shaping the debate on the balance between development and environment as well as the idea of Sweden's 'double loyalties' as a solidaristic small state and as a competitive advanced economy.
This article analyses the background, activities and reception of the Swedish power investigation (1985–1990). It argues that the power investigation had to navigate between two distinct expectations: on the one hand, the investigation was to expose private power in the interest of equality and justice; on the other hand, it was to improve the exercise of public power in the interest of democracy and efficiency. Because of this two-fold objective, the power investigation was criticised for having neither disclosed private power openly enough, nor pointed out possible ways of adequately rejuvenating welfare state policies clearly. However, the article concludes that one may also assess the power investigation insofar as it served to reconceptualise the socio-political language of welfare state politics in general, as a result of the power inherent in the right to investigate power.
This chapter analyzes how competing notions of conditionality – primarily tensions between efficiency and solidarity – have played out in debates and discourses on development aid since the 1960s in one Scandinavian country and a small, yet highly profiled donor – Sweden. Repeated and shifting demands for accountability and transparency serve as a probe into the complex, competing, and often fluctuating aims, goals, and motives of international development aid. The chapter argues that current debates on “the end of aid” are informed by a historical and unresolved tension between “unconditional solidarity” on the one hand and “conditional efficiency” on the other: Demands for openness elucidate competing aims of aid, indicating a paradox in the transparency paradigm in contemporary development aid discourse, whereby efficient aid – as manifested in economic growth – eventually leads to the end of aid while its alleged inefficiency – as evidenced in social inequality – ensures its continued legitimacy.
The concept of soft power, as introduced by Joseph S. Nye in the early 1990s has become popular in academia and media since the end of the Cold War. It addresses the influence of attraction through culture, policies, and values—as in “getting others to want what you want” and as distinct from hard power through coercion by means of economic strength and/or military force. As such, the concept reflects the growing significance of immaterial factors for exercising power under conditions of globalization, financialization, and mediatization, when physical control of territory, trade, and transport is increasingly supplanted by the significance of controlling digital infrastructures, ideational languages, and norm systems, allowing nonstate actors more influence, diffusing the power of the state and affecting coupled human–environment systems in diverse ways. While soft power has sometimes been reduced to imply an idealist outlook on global affairs, its main contribution lies in nuancing the concept of power in international relations, illustrating the significance of the whole spectrum of power, ranging from coercive hard power to attractive soft power. As such, it’s usage in human geography and other social sciences also requires attention to the complexity of the concept as introduced by Nye to avoid the risk of reproducing the binary separation between nature and humanity, material and immaterial factors implied by the dichotomy between hard and soft forms of power.
Rudolf Kjellén ses idag vanligen som den hårdföra geopolitikens upphovsman. Men ett närmare studium av hans analys av förhållandet mellan natur och kultur och mellan materiella och immateriella maktresurser visar att han också ansåg att en aktiv ”biopolitik” kunde påverka geopolitikens lagar till små och medelstora staters fördel. När det kom till frågan om Sveriges ställning i världen upprätthöll Kjellén t.ex. inte den åtskillnad mellan ”mjuka” kulturella resurser och ”hårda” naturlagar som vanligen anses som typisk för geopolitiken. Snarare pendlade han mellan vad vi idag skulle se som konstruktivistiska respektive realistiska impulser i studiet av internationella relationer.
Här undersöks Sverigebilden i USA mot bakgrund av den senaste tidens debatt om hur Sverige beskrivs utomlands. Den svenskamerikanska relationen är viktig för Sverige – kulturellt, ekonomiskt och politiskt. Den är högaktuell givet den säkerhetspolitiska oron och Sveriges NATO-ansökan. USA är också en viktig hållplats för den globala spridningen av föreställningar om Sverige världen över, vilket blivit tydligt i dagens alltmer polariserade medielandskap. Rapporten syftar inte till att återge en fullständig bild av ”hela” den amerikanska Sverigebilden utan fokuserar på sådana händelser och tillfällen där uppmärksamheten kring Sverige och svenska förhållanden dels förstärkts kvantitativt och dels förändrats kvalitativt.
Globalization, stagflation and economic uncertainty challenged the Swedish welfare model during the 1980s, driving renegotiations of state-market relations domestically as well as re-conceptualizations of Sweden’s place in the world internationally. This article addresses how a key media event – the 1638–1988 New Sweden 350th Anniversary of the New Sweden Colony in North America (New Sweden ’88) – reflects these shifts. Drawing upon materials from the National Committee for New Sweden ’88 and various public-private Swedish-American foundations and initiatives as well as Swedish and US media reception, this article argues that the performance of this media event signaled a shift in state-market relations in Swedish public diplomacy as well as a renegotiation of Swedish self-identity in the late 1980s. The New Sweden ’88 project reflected the more polarized self-perceptions beginning to proliferate in Sweden at the end of the 1980s – self-perceptions which would set the transformations of the early 1990s into a sense of inevitability, which in its turn matched calls for far-ranging reforms of the Swedish welfare model which followed during the globalized 1990s.
This article revisits the debates on Sweden’s possible contribution to the international developmental debates as an exemplary neutral, a developmental model, and an aid donor. While these debates exemplify diplomatic elements and activities, understood metaphorically as the art of negotiating conflicting interests, they also fed into, and informed Swedish positions vis-à-vis the emerging Global South, diplomatic outreach, and foreign policy initiatives on the part of successive Swedish Governments from the 1950s to the 1970s. As such, these positions have only rarely directly impacted upon actual Swedish policy behaviour. But they have over time aggregated into a widely shared and oft-cited understanding of Sweden as “the darling of the Third World”. This article seeks to trace the origins, motives, and main themes of this moral diplomacy – directed inwards as well as outwards.
This paper analyses the contemporary deployment of the Nordic welfare state model as a centrepiece of Nordic competitive identity and strategic communication on the global market of ideas. First, it looks at the interrelated phenomena of global competition, competitive identity and region branding. Second, it studies the interplay between Nordic transnational public diplomacy and national public diplomacy of individual Nordic countries, in particular Sweden, on the one hand and international media outlets’ reporting on the Nordic countries on the other. In analysing this cross-fertilizing genre, the paper identifies how the welfare state is being repackaged for export along with a set of “progressive values” which are coded as specifically “Nordic.” The paper discusses (1) the interaction between outer images and inner visions; (2) the place and significance of the Nordic model, progressive values and the welfare state in today’s Nordic branding; and (3) the possible function of outward competitive identity as a kind of “compensatory imagination” directed inward as well as outward.
This paper looks at how Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) conceived of the relationship between nature and culture, between material and immaterial power as well as the role of soft power, geopolitical imaginary and competitive identity in off-setting potentially unfavourable geopolitical conditions for small and medium-sized states. It is argued that with regard to small states, Kjellén did not maintain a consistent separation between “soft” cultural resources of power and “hard” laws of nature. Rather, he placed the mutually constitutive tension between geography (nature) and politics (culture) at the centre of his politico-scientific analysis, arguing that active “biopolitics” could supplement geopolitics. In Kjellén’s conception, cultural and natural resources are instruments of an otherwise integrated notion of power which challenges the contemporary separation between hard and soft power.