Introduction: neoliberalism and post‐welfare nordic states in transition (original) (raw)
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Neoliberalism and Post-Welfare Nordic States in Transition
This is a special issue of Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography, volume 97, issue 3, pages 209-274. INTRODUCTION: NEOLIBERALISM AND POST-WELFARE NORDIC STATES IN TRANSITION (pages 209–212), Guy Baeten, Lawrence D. Berg and Anders Lund Hansen ENCOUNTERING RACISM IN THE (POST-) WELFARE STATE: DANISH EXPERIENCES (pages 213–222), Kirsten Simonsen MAJORITY AND MINORITY NATIONALISM IN THE DANISH POST-WELFARE STATE (pages 223–232), Lasse Koefoed CHILDHOOD IN A NEOLIBERAL UTOPIA: PLANNING RHETORIC AND PARENTAL CONCEPTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY STOCKHOLM (pages 233–247), Sofia Cele RENEWING URBAN RENEWAL IN LANDSKRONA, SWEDEN: PURSUING DISPLACEMENT THROUGH HOUSING POLICIES (pages 249–261), Guy Baeten and Carina Listerborn COMMODIFYING DANISH HOUSING COMMONS (pages 263–274), Henrik Gutzon Larsen and Anders Lund Hansen
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.
This introductory chapter argues for the use of the concept of ‘welfare city’ to understand and explain the development of modern public services and welfare systems. Previous research has hitherto put too much emphasis on the welfare state and on the period after 1945. This book calls for a shift in perspective, from the national level, to the local level, as well as a focus on the decisive period 1850–1940. Urban areas and cites were of paramount importance for the establishment of public services and welfare systems. The analytical framework deployed in this book, therefore, places urban politics in front of national politics and shifts the chronological focus to an earlier period in time. This theme and its adjacent argument are explored through studies of the Nordic countries. The chapters contain various examples on welfare and public services that includes infrastructure and housing projects, but also health care, education, outdoor life and entertainment. Together, the contributing authors claims that it is necessary to analyse local politics in order to explain the discursive changes that paved the way for a wave of investments in public services and social welfare in the period.
Imagining the Neoliberal State: Assar Lindbeck and the Genealogy of Swedish Neoliberalism
2024
This doctoral thesis explores the history of the Swedish present by investigating the genealogy of Swedish neoliberalism through the authorship of economist Assar Lindbeck. The study commences with the influential 1993 Swedish governmental report “Nya villkor för ekonomi och politik” and extends back to Lindbeck’s early authorship in the 1950s. The study shows how Lindbeck’s influential authorship was inspired by and eclectically re-articulated ideas from central neoliberal actors such as Freidrich von Hayek, Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Ronald Coase. The concept of neoliberalism utilised in the thesis is based on a Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian interpretation, emphasising Hayek’s idea that markets act as the most effective information processor available to humans. Further, neoliberals use the private enterprise as a template for governing. This also applies to how individuals are encouraged to govern themselves as competing firms in the form of human capital. Third, neoliberalism should not be mixed up with laissez-faire; instead, it emphasises active statecraft in both the creation and protection of markets and entrepreneurial subjects, as well as moral systems, family structures, and so on that help perpetuate (entrepreneurial) conduct of conduct, which I, following Foucault, call (neoliberal) governmentality. The form of neoliberalism articulated by Lindbeck is a product of the unique Swedish context in which he operated. During the 1960s and 1970s, Lindbeck was profoundly influenced by debates against representatives of the New Left and neo-Malthusians, whose grievances he re-articulated and translated into a neoliberal framework. Eastern Bloc economists, whom Hayek influenced, also profoundly impacted Lindbeck’s authorship. Additionally, I have shown how Lindbeck problematised unemployment in a way that differs from the views of, for example, Chicago School neoliberals, reflecting a uniquely Swedish context. I have demonstrated that reshaping influential Swedish unions was part of a strategy to facilitate the production of entrepreneurial subjects and human capital. I argue that the accumulation of human capital should not be seen merely as the gaining of knowledge and education but is intimately linked to governing human behaviour. I have also demonstrated how the form of neoliberalism that Lindbeck consistently articulated and re-articulated – often in an eclectic manner and always intertwined and hybridised with other governing models – exhibited a growing scepticism towards elected politicians and democratic influence, instead advocating for exerting influence through consumer actions in the marketplace and increasing the political influence of business leaders and economists.
SASE Annual Meeting: Society of the Advancement of Socio-Economics, 2019
This paper traces the ascension of liberal economic ideas in the macroeconomic establishment in Denmark since the 1970s. Based on a systematic analysis of documents from the Danish government and the Economic Council from the 1970s to the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, this paper demonstrates that Denmark experienced a marked shift in paradigms during this period. Full employment Keynesianism dominated the 1970s and neoclassical liberalism became dominant from the late 1980s and early 1990s on. As such the Danish case fits the general understanding of the transition to neoliberalism. There are complicating factors though. The paper argues that the nature of this paradigm shift is more uneven and gradual than the literature traditionally suggests. Furthermore, the adoption of strict new monetary and fiscal policies took place in the early 1980s, before the intellectual tools of the new paradigm were dominant and developed. This suggests that it was not the intellectual dominance of liberal ideas that caused the initial adoption of neoliberal policies. It is argued instead that the central role of economic theory is rather in legitimating and justifying policy, and that the stability of economic strategy, despite changes in government, point towards a situation where neoclassical liberalism has taken the form of common sense in the policy elite. Remarkably this common sense even includes unions and labour parties. A fact that points toward a special form of neoliberal hegemony in Scandinavia that is more inclusive, technocratic and consensus-oriented, though no less orthodox, than in other countries.
The Nordic Economic, Social and Political Model Challenges in the 21st Century, 2021
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
Capital & Class, 2022
Drawing on a Gramscian Regulation Approach and Harvey's accumulation by dispossession thesis, this article discusses the structural and hegemonic mechanisms of the neoliberal transformation of Sweden's welfare sectors. Providing new longitudinal data on welfare retrenchment, corporate governance, wealth shares, and private economic power, the article further analyzes how the transformation of the Swedish postwar universal welfare model is related to class struggle and accumulation regime change in the Swedish economy. Following a decade-long countermobilization of Swedish capital and a severe economic crisis in the early 1990s, neoliberal economic common sense was cemented among social democratic policy elites that manifested itself in an institutionalized austerity polity, leading to a slow but steady dismantling of the Swedish welfare project. Roughly a fifth of employees in the three largest welfare sectors work in