Nationalism and Democracy in the Welfare State 1788976576, 9781788976572

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Nationalism and Democracy in the Welfare State

GLOBALIZATION AND WELFARE Series Editor: Giuliano Bonoli, Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration (IDHEAP), Switzerland and Jochen Clasen, University of Edinburgh, UK This important series is designed to make a significant contribution to the principles and practice of comparative social policy. It includes both theoretical and empirical work. International in scope, it addresses issues of current and future concern in both East and West, and in developed and developing countries. The main purpose of this series is to create a forum for the publication of high quality work to help understand the impact of globalization on the provision of social welfare. It offers state-of-the-art thinking and research on important areas such as privatization, employment, work, finance, gender and poverty. It includes some of the best theoretical and empirical work from both well-established researchers and the new generation of scholars. Titles in the series include: How Welfare States Shape the Democratic Public Policy Feedback, Participation, Voting and Attitudes Edited by Staffan Kumlin and Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen Race, Ethnicity and Welfare States An American Dilemma? Edited by Pauli Kettunen, Sonya Michel and Klaus Petersen The Social Legitimacy of Targeted Welfare Attitudes to Welfare Deservingness Edited by Wim van Oorschot, Femke Roosma, Bart Meuleman and Tim Resskens Globalizing Welfare An Evolving Asian-European Dialogue Edited by Stein Kuhnle, Per Selle and Sven E.O. Hort Welfare State Legitimacy in Times of Crisis and Austerity Between Continuity and Change Edited by Tijs Laenen, Bart Meuleman and Wim van Oorschot Nationalism and Democracy in the Welfare State Edited by Pauli Kettunen, Saara Pellander and Miika Tervonen

Nationalism and Democracy in the Welfare State Edited by

Pauli Kettunen Professor Emeritus of Political History, University of Helsinki, Finland

Saara Pellander Director, Migration Institute of Finland

Miika Tervonen Senior Research Fellow, Migration Institute of Finland

GLOBALIZATION AND WELFARE

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Pauli Kettunen, Saara Pellander and Miika Tervonen 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949002 This book is available electronically in the Sociology, Social Policy and Education subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781788976589

ISBN 978 1 78897 657 2 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78897 658 9 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents List of figuresvii List of tablesviii List of contributorsix Prefacexii 1

Introduction: rethinking nationalism and democracy in the welfare state Pauli Kettunen

PART I

DEMOCRATIC WELFARE NATIONALISM AND BEYOND

2

The end of ideology and Nordic democracy: Herbert Tingsten and the rhetoric of de-ideologization Jussi Kurunmäki

3

National interest as a limit to democracy: the rhetoric of Finnish and Swedish employers in the debates on ‘enterprise democracy’ during the 1960s and 1970s Ilkka Kärrylä

4

Democratic welfare nationalism and competitive community: changing ideals of social harmony in the regulation of capitalism Pauli Kettunen

PART II 5

1

19

47

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THE WELFARE STATE AND CROSS-BORDER MOBILITY OF CAPITAL

Offe’s paradox in the light of neoliberalism and its paradoxes: Schumpeterian workfare and Ricardian austerity Bob Jessop

v

104

vi

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Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

From democratic to market-driven regulation of employment: the Swedish and Finnish Social Democrats, the third way and emerging economic globalization, 1975−86 Sami Outinen

127

PART III THE WELFARE STATE AND CROSS-BORDER MOBILITY OF PEOPLE 7

Borders of welfare: mobility control and the Nordic welfare states 150 Miika Tervonen

8

Gender, emotions and vulnerability: mediated responses to deportations in the aftermath of the refugee reception crisis Saara Pellander

9

Filipino nurses as enablers of the future welfare state: the global commodity chains of producing racialized care labour for ageing Finland 184 Tiina Vaittinen, Margarita Sakilayan-Latvala and Päivi Vartiainen

10

Ambiguities of the welfare state and the paradoxes of immigration politics Thomas Faist

166

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Index239

Figures 3.1

Number of articles with the terms ‘ekonomisk demokrati’, ‘industriell demokrati’ and ‘företagsdemokrati’ in the Swedish database of digital newspapers 1910–2020

48

9.1

A typical production network in the Philippine nursing industry

192

9.2

The costs and payoffs of becoming a ‘globally competitive Filipino nurse’ (EUR)

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9.3

A typical trajectory of Filipino nurses’ export–import transition to the Finnish labour markets

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Tables 8.1

Quantities, perspectives and features of articles about deportation published in Helsingin Sanomat in 2015–19

174

8.2

Summary from analysis of case reporting that addressed the fate of those being deported

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10.1 Expansive and restrictive migration policy

213

10.2 Economically wanted and/or culturally welcome: types of migrant integration

225

viii

Contributors Thomas Faist (PhD, New School for Social Research) is Professor of Transnational, Migration and Development Sociology at Bielefeld University in Germany. He directs the Centre on Migration, Citizenship and Development (COMCAD). Faist has contributed to ongoing debates about citizenship, transnationality, migration and social policy in Europe and beyond. His book publications include The Transnationalized Social Question: Migration and the Politics of Social Inequalities in the Twenty-First Century (2019), Disentangling Migration and Climate Change (2016), Transnational Migration (2013), as well as Citizenship: Discourse, Theory and Transnational Prospects (2007), and Dual Citizenship in Europe (2007). Faist is a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. Bob Jessop is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. He is best known for his contributions to state theory, critical governance studies, critical political economy, cultural political economy, and the philosophy of social science. His most recent sole-authored book is Putting Civil Society in its Place (2020) and two recent co-edited volumes are Transnational Capital and Class Fractions (with Henk Overbeek, 2018) and The Pedagogy of Economic, Political and Social Crises (with Karim Knio, 2019). His work is available through ResearchGate.net and Academia.edu. Ilkka Kärrylä is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Nordic Studies, University of Helsinki. He is a historian specializing in intellectual and conceptual history, political ideologies, and economic thought and policy especially in the Nordic countries. He currently participates in the research project Neoliberalism in Nordics, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Sweden. Pauli Kettunen is Professor Emeritus of Political History at the University of Helsinki. He has written extensively on social movements, labour relations, welfare state, education politics, nationalism and globalization, and the conceptual history of politics. Edward Elgar has published two of his earlier edited books, Beyond Welfare State Models: Transnational Historical Perspectives on Social Policy (with Klaus Petersen, 2011) and Race, Ethnicity and Welfare States: An American Dilemma? (with Sonya Michel and Klaus Petersen, 2015). ix

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Jussi Kurunmäki, Dr. Soc. Sc., holds the titles of Docent in Political Science and Political History and works as an adjunct professor at the University of Eastern Finland. In his research, he has examined nineteenthand twentieth-century political ideas with a special focus on the conceptual histories of democracy and political ideologies. He is an editor of the books Käsitteet liikkeessä (Concepts in Motion) (2003), Die Zeit, Geschichte und Politik; Time, History and Politics: Zum achtzigsten Geburtstag von Reinhart Koselleck (2003), Rhetorics of Nordic Democracy (2010), Democracy in Modern Europe: A Conceptual History (2018), and the special issue on the political rhetoric of isms in Journal of Political Ideologies (2018). Kurunmäki is the chairperson of the network Concepta – International Research Seminars in Conceptual History and Political Thought and a member of the executive board of The History of Concepts Group (HCG). Sami Outinen, Dr. Soc. Sc., is a researcher of contemporary history, currently a visiting scholar in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki and a coordinator in the research project Finns in Russia 1917–1964 at the National Archives of Finland. His research interests include political ideologies, economic policy, Nordic labour market, global economic regulation, employment issues, migration, and the approaches of conceptual, comparative, and transnational history. Saara Pellander, Dr. Soc. Sc, is Director of the Migration Institute of Finland. She holds the title of Docent in Political History at the University of Helsinki. She specializes in bordering processes and policies that regulate transnational intimacies, questions of gender and mobility more broadly, and issues related to media representation of asylum seekers. She is currently involved in an Academy of Finland-funded project, “Deportation in a mediated society”. Margarita Sakilayan-Latvala is a senior lecturer on social welfare and services at Diaconia University of Applied Sciences in Finland. Her research interests are international migration and integration of migrants, focusing on understanding these themes using critical, feminist, and anti-racist perspectives. Miika Tervonen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Migration Institute of Finland, with the title of Docent in Nordic Studies at the University of Helsinki. He holds a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence. Tervonen’s research centres on issues of migration, minorities, nationalism and borders in the Nordic nation/welfare states.

Contributors

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Tiina Vaittinen is Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere University. She is a transdisciplinary political economist and care ethicist. In her work, she explores transnational connections, violence, and injustices on the level of care needs, with an aim to locate openings for a more just world order. Päivi Vartiainen, PhD in Education, MA in Social Sciences, works as a Head of Competence Area at Tampere University of Applied Sciences, School of Pedagogical Innovations and Culture. She has investigated the workplace as a learning space, acculturation and intercultural learning in social and health care work. In her dissertation (2019), she examined the paths of nurses recruited in the Philippines into the work organizations of Finnish social and health care.

Preface Democratic welfare nationalism has framed politics in many countries, including the Nordic countries, which many of the chapters in this book discuss. Nationalism, understood as justifications of a nation-based political order, was an integral element in the formation of the welfare state. The evolution of the welfare state, in turn, affected nationalism by reshaping national identities and the notions of nation state citizenship and democracy. In the context of globalization, democratic welfare nationalism has been challenged both by post-national and nationalist visions of the world. It is easy to recognize nationalism in protectionist, xenophobic and racist reactions against globalization. However, in many less apparent ways, nationalism is present in politics concerning the cross-border mobility of capital and people. Defining cross-border mobilities as problems of national competitiveness, national security, or national labour force requirements, nation state policies reproduce and reshape their own nationalistic framing. Those policies may weaken democratic welfare nationalism by eroding its democratic rather than nationalistic components. At the same time, it is important to recognize that in the emerging multi-level structures of global governance, nation states still play a fundamental role as the mediators of popular legitimacy. Nationalism and democracy, whether intertwined or in conflict, form a crucial issue for critical discussion on globalization and the welfare state. Herein lies the reason for writing this book. It was initiated and designed in the research project Nationalism and Democracy in the Welfare State at the University of Helsinki, funded by the Academy of Finland (no. 268275, 2013–17). When examining the controversial roles of nationalism and democracy in the formation and transformation of welfare state institutions and discourses, many chapters focus on the Nordic countries, especially Sweden and Finland. The book also includes studies that develop more general theoretical approaches to the welfare state and globalization. The nation state, national politics and nationalism are analyzed in relation to globalized and financialized capitalism and to the globalized social question appearing in divides and conflicts associated with migration. The book is divided into three parts. After the Introduction, Part I discusses the contested roles and interpretations of democracy in the making of the welfare state. Part II focuses on the reshaping of the welfare state through political responses to globalized and financialized capitalism, and Part III xii

Preface

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examines the ambiguities of migration policies in relation to the nationally framed welfare regimes. In a few chapters, the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on nationalism and democracy in the welfare state are shortly discussed as an important question for future research. As editors, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to the authors for their contributions and for their willingness to participate in the framing of the whole book. When editing and writing this book, we have received support and inspiration from many partners of international research collaboration. We are especially grateful to colleagues in the networks established by the Nordic centre of excellence in welfare research, NordWel (NordForsk, 2007–15), and to participants and partners of the research project Multilayered Borders of Global Security (Academy of Finland, 2016–19). One of the editors, Pauli Kettunen, had in 2019 the opportunity to focus on this book project in the inspiring milieu of the international research centre Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History, re:​work, at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In the finalization of the manuscript, the Migration Institute of Finland provided valuable assistance. Here, special thanks go to Tereza Brhelová, Heidi Latvala-White, and Gabriel Olegário for all their help. In turning the book proposal into a book, the support from excellent professional expertise in scholarly publishing has been decisive. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of Edward Elgar Publishing for their comments and to the editors of Globalization and Welfare series, Jane Lewis, Giuliano Bonoli and Jochen Clasen, for including the book in this recognized series. It has been a great pleasure to work with Emily Mew, Harry Fabian, Karen Jones, Kate Norman, and Brian North. Helsinki and Turku, September 2021 Pauli Kettunen Saara Pellander Miika Tervonen

1. Introduction: rethinking nationalism and democracy in the welfare state Pauli Kettunen The future of the welfare state in a world of globalized capitalism has been a topic of intense public and scholarly debate since the 1980s. The focus has been on the economic preconditions for and consequences of the welfare state, its economic sustainability and its compatibility with requirements of economic competitiveness. However, also the political legitimacy of the welfare state has emerged as a topical issue. The capacities of the welfare state to create social cohesion and to ensure the legitimacy of democracy may appear questionable, not least on account of challenges associated with immigration and anti‑immigration pushback, along with the so-called new social risks entailed by changing life courses, family structures and forms of employment (Chung et al. 2018; Laenen et al. 2020). Instead of the radical deregulation that many debaters proposed in the 1980s and 1990s, ‘rescuing the welfare state’ has become a popular cause, especially in the Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden (Edling et al. 2015, pp. 25–9; Kettunen 2015, pp. 170–2). Its rhetoric is employed for arguing for outright contradictory policies – by proponents of increased public spending on welfare and education alongside advocacy of austerity politics and for advocating more labour immigration at the same time as restrictive immigration policies. While views on the roles and meanings of the welfare state diverge, they most often share a taken-for-granted framing: debaters discuss the cross-border mobilities of money, people, information and viruses as national challenges. For this book, we aim to move beyond that framing by including the national frame itself as an integral part of the research theme. The nationally framed debates on the future of the welfare state imply a problem that is central to what this book examines: the contested roles of nationalism and democracy in the formation and transformation of welfare state institutions and ideologies.

1

2

Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

NATIONAL RESPONSES TO EXTERNAL CHALLENGES The concept of nationalism is a key to articulating our approach and the message of this book. In discussion of globalization as a national challenge, the term ‘nationalism’ has seen frequent use. As a rule, however, it is applied to only a few of the many possible ways of responding to the challenge of globalization, most notably in reference to those condemned as protectionism, xenophobia, separatism, expansionism or populism. The concept of nationalism almost never covers the responses debaters themselves propose and support, let alone the national construction of the challenge itself. Rhetoric referring to ‘nationalism’ is a tool for disapproval, but this tool is put to quite a limited range of uses: it does not cover all modes of committing to the agency of a specific nation or the very notion of a world order based on nations, nation states and national societies. Those who wish to improve ‘our’ national performance capacity, capabilities for reform, resilience, competitiveness and security do not count their arguments as nationalism. The usage of the concept of nationalism in political debates, and in much of the research on public policy and welfare states, has been strikingly immune to the influence of how scholars of nationalism and nationhood have used it for several decades now as an analytical concept (Kettunen 2018). While their theories vary, most of them recognize nationalism in any sense of nationhood and in the notion of a nation state-based order of the world (Calhoun 2007; Smith 1998). Nationalism, understood as ideational and practical modes of making and justifying a nation-based political order, was an integral element in the formation of the welfare state. The evolution of the welfare state, in turn, affected nationalism by reshaping national identities, solidarities and the notions of nation state citizenship and democracy; it helped ‘to nationalise the citizenry’, as Stein Rokkan put it (Rokkan 1999 [1966], p. 265; see also Béland & Lecours 2008; Ferrera 2006). The power of nationalism is manifested in its capability of casting nationhood as natural. We can find an explanation here for the gap between the scholarly and other uses of the notion. In the ‘age of nationalism’, beginning in the nineteenth century (Sluga 2013), a naturalizing and essentializing view of nationhood was adopted, and any ‘ism’ would appear too voluntaristic to be a precondition for the creation of a nation and a world order based on nations. It is reasonable to argue that the persistent limits of ‘nationalism’, outside specialist studies of nations and nationalism, indicate the power of nationalism as a taken-for-granted mode of thought and action. Thus, explaining the nationalism of our present world in terms of reactions against globalization would leave much of nationalism unrecognized and

Introduction

3

unexplained. It is also insufficient to argue, as Ulrich Beck (2004, pp. 155–6) does, that the unremitting power of nationalism reflects an incongruity between the old national modes of thought and a new global reality. Reinforced global interdependencies and intensified cross-border mobilities have created new preconditions for nationalism, with Europe being no exception. This is visible not only in protectionist and xenophobic reactions against globalization, or in the reinforced role of nation states amid the COVID-19 crisis, but also in how strivings for national economic competitiveness and national security have shaped political agendas and directed the agency of the state. The power of nationalism also appears in approaches adopted in welfare state research. Since the 1990s, comparing ‘welfare models’, ‘welfare regimes’ or ‘varieties of welfare capitalism’ has been a popular research orientation. These studies (most path-breakingly, Esping-Andersen 1990) take a distance from research focusing on single countries, but the models or regimes they construct and use for categorizing individual countries are ideal types of a national society. This kind of ‘comparativism’ (Strange 1997) is a type of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2002), in which a world order based on nation states and national societies is a given point of departure rather than problematized as a part of the research problem. It would not be justified to criticize comparisons of models for ignoring what happens outside nation states’ borders. As a rule, these scholars point out the importance of external preconditions for national developments, and the subject of comparison is often defined as national adaptations in international or global transformations (Esping-Andersen 1996; Steinmo 2010). It is justified, however, to criticize ‘the state adaptability scholarship’, as Saskia Sassen does, for a tendency to fall into ‘a reifying of the global as external and the national as internal’ (Sassen 2006, pp. 169, 228). Globalization gets conceptualized as transformations of an external environment. In their turn, the actors, nation states – among them the Nordic countries, discussed in many of the chapters in this book – appear as carriers of their own internal historical properties, achievements, resources and burdens that they defend, utilize or try to shed when adapting and otherwise responding to external challenges. The political and juridical establishment of a distinction between the internal and external played a crucial role in the development of territorial nation states and international relations (Walker 1993). It is important to take this distinction seriously – that is, to problematize the historicity of the internal– external divide instead of replicating it in one’s own theoretical and methodological approach. It is just as important to ask how the processes together called globalization reproduce the same divide as it is to see that globalization is taking place within nation state societies and through nation-centred modes of thought and action rather than in some external environment.

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Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

Transnational history has become a popular approach in historical research (Kettunen & Petersen 2011; Saunier 2013). Instead of defining it as studies focusing on a specific field of ‘transnational’ phenomena, we would be sensible to acknowledge the need for a transnational approach in research on national phenomena. In examining the nation state perspectives that dominate discussion of the welfare state’s future and of the competitive advantages of particular ‘models’, transnational history can function as ‘a history of present’, an expression Michel Foucault (1975, p. 35) sometimes used for his approach. The Foucauldian history of present is concerned, as Mitchell Dean (1994, p. 35) puts it, with discursive and non-discursive practices that are ‘taken-for-granted, assumed to be given, or natural within contemporary social existence’ but nevertheless exposed to a researcher’s critical gaze as they somehow come to be ‘questioned in the course of contemporary struggles’. We can find such modes of thought and action in a whole slew of nation state responses to globalization. National perspectives are taken for granted, as argued above, yet they are, at the same time, also called into question, by divergent ways of discussing and facing globalization.

DEMOCRATIC WELFARE NATIONALISM AND BEYOND The early 1990s assumptions of an already prevailing or emerging borderless world (Ohmae 1990) soon proved unsustainable. However, the existing and the future forms of global governance became a perennial topic of public and scholarly discussion. It is commonly pointed out that, in addition to nation states, there are various national, international and transnational players. Among these are transnational organizations aimed at regional integration, most notably the European Union; worldwide regulatory institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the Gs of varying numbers that encompass various sets of countries and leaders; cross-nationally networking cities; and transnational companies and investors. In the late 1990s, transnational movements arose to criticize global governance that relies on and facilitates the free reign of competitive markets, and the global consequences of the financial crisis of 2007–08 expanded the range of critics. In response to the critique, programmes for global ‘corporate social responsibility’ and ‘corporate citizenship’ were launched (discussed by Pauli Kettunen in Chapter 4 of this book). Views on the role of the nation state have diverged sharply, yet much critique of globalization has shared an account in which the nation state is the main locus of democracy in today’s world. One line of argumentation, developed in the 1990s in critical response to what Held et al. (1999) term ‘hyperglobalist’ views, highlights the importance of nation states as democratic mediators of

Introduction

5

popular legitimacy in the multi-level structure of global governance (Calhoun 2007; Hirst & Thompson 1995). Another line of argument, advanced by movements for alternative globalization, expresses aims of extending social and democratic forms of governance beyond the nation states, into a global democracy in which local, national and global aspects would be intertwined (e.g. Jacobs 2007). Taking a third tack, many debaters have cast their defence of the nation state against threats of globalization as a defence of democracy against globalized capitalism. A combination of democracy and nationalism characterizes many nation states that were shaped into welfare states. This combination coalesced in a notion of national society as a framework for political agency, solidarity and conflict – and even as an agent often identified with the state, as histories of the Nordic welfare states attest (Kettunen 2019). However, such a notion could also imply an idea of representing a universal trajectory of development and progress. From this point of view, the concept of ‘Nordic democracy’ is worth attention. Since the 1930s, it has referred to a shared Nordic element of national institutions and identities in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, but it has also carried an idea of democracy standing against the anti-democratic forces of the world. While the roles and meanings of ‘Nordic democracy’ have depended on political orientation, in the post‑Second World War decades of the Cold War’s inter-system confrontation it clearly implied a self-understanding wherein these nations are particularly consistent representatives of the universal progress of democracy. The promoters of the Nordic democracy often idealized a rational and pragmatic compromise-seeking and welfare-creating politics in a manner closely approaching that in the thesis of ‘the end of ideology’, as Jussi Kurunmäki argues in his study of the thought of Swedish liberal intellectual Herbert Tingsten (Chapter 2). Another Swedish intellectual, social democratic economist and social engineer Gunnar Myrdal, declared at the end of the Second World War: ‘By virtue of our history and our external conditions we [the Swedish] are especially called upon to be the advocates of [the] world’s interests’ (Appelqvist 1997, p. 185). This incorporated more than an ambition to offer a model of national reform. Since the 1930s, Myrdal had been active and influential in promoting the Swedish welfare state, not least by developing theoretical grounds for confidence in a self-reinforcing process of increased social equality, wider democracy and economic growth, to be achieved within a national society by means of science-based planning and compromises on the part of organized interests. In his post-war views on decolonization, development and ‘under-development’, he actively engaged in efforts to extend confidence in virtuous circles beyond nation states’ borders (see Kettunen’s discussion in Chapter 4). In Myrdal’s (1960) view, the Western democratic welfare state was ‘protectionist and nationalistic’. While nationalism would play a pro-

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Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

gressive role in the integration of the ‘under-developed’ countries into the world economy, in the rich portion of the world it had become an obstacle to progress. Regional integration processes launched in Western Europe did not solve the problem and failed to contribute to creation of the ‘Welfare World’ that Myrdal advocated. The vision of a welfare world represented a ‘concrete utopia’ (Bloch 1959) in political struggles, perhaps most notably in those associated with increased attention to the Third World and the problems plaguing development. However, while the welfare state dimension did gain strength in Western nation states in the 1960s and 1970s, this happened within an ideational framework we could call democratic welfare nationalism. This also imposed limits on ‘universalism’, a concept that scholars of comparative welfare studies often apply with regard to the Nordic welfare states. It confines consideration to the policies within a nation state in a manner indicative of methodological nationalism by the studies using it, and, even so, the meaning of universalism is far from unequivocal (Anttonen et al. 2012; Kildal & Kuhnle 2005). Nevertheless, when employed for the Nordic welfare states, this lofty term might encompass more than achieving individuals’ rights to high social security and the public provision of education, health and other care. The universalistic notion of social citizenship implies reducing social inequality by means of redistribution and through protecting and empowering the weaker parties in social relationships, especially in gender relations and working life. The making of the welfare state was arguably universalistic in the sense that the politics were oriented towards the establishment of equal citizenship as a normative standard that could be set in stark contrast to prevailing forms of inequality and subordination. True, it was a normative standard within a national society, yet it was also promoted as a transnational criterion of national social policies to be established by means of international collaboration, especially by the UN system, including the International Labour Organization (ILO). Extending equal citizenship beyond political institutions was an important ideological ingredient in the formation of the welfare state in the countries where reformist socialism had achieved a leading position in the defining of political agendas. The idea was employed effectively also in discussion of industrial and economic democracy, especially in the debate that waxed in the 1960s and waned in the 1980s. In critical analyses of the power of multinational companies, even visions of extending democracy beyond nation state borders emerged. However, in the course of the debate, such visions were overshadowed by the national framing of political conflicts. As Ilkka Kärrylä’s examination of the Swedish and Finnish discussion of economic and industrial democracy makes clear (in Chapter 3), the rival arguments pertaining to the roles and meanings of democracy in economic and working life gave way to

Introduction

7

controversy over how the national interest should be understood and proper ways of promoting it.

THE WELFARE STATE AND CROSS-BORDER MOBILITY OF CAPITAL Since the 1980s, the foundations for democratic welfare nationalism have been severely shaken by the transformations together referred to as globalization: universalization of capitalism as an economic system; ‘post-Fordist’ reorganization of production processes, coupled with neoliberal justification of markets and market-based relationships between the public and the private; and intensified cross-border mobilities of information, money and jobs. The modes of regulating capitalism changed in a way that implied new tensions arising between capitalism and the welfare state and also between capitalism and democracy, thereby restricting the capacities of a nation state. Bob Jessop (in Chapter 5) conceptualizes these changes by referring to the history of political economic thought as articulated in the context of globalized capitalism. He argues that a move from the ‘Keynesian Welfare National State’ has taken place, leading in two directions, which represent alternative modes or interlinked aspects of a neoliberal regime shift. The ‘Schumpeterian Workfare Post-National Regime’ is associated with the creation of a knowledge-based economy, while in the ‘Ricardian Workfare Post-National State’ an emphasis on austerity reshapes relations between economy and politics. In these post-national frames of the regulation of capitalism, nationalism and the national state still play an important role, which is clearly evidenced also, as Jessop stresses, in connection with the COVID-19 crisis. Applying Jessop’s conceptualization, Sami Outinen (in Chapter 6) analyses the Swedish and Finnish Social Democrats’ employment-related politics of the 1970s and 1980s. He identifies a tendentious shift from the Keynesian welfare state towards a Schumpeterian workfare state, along with an emergence of market-oriented ideas later labelled as a new Third Way. These changes did not mean the disappearance of nation state perspectives from politics. In a world of intensified and largely unfettered mobility of capital, competitiveness was assigned a role whereby it powerfully reproduced national perspectives – yet in a way that differed from that accompanying its earlier conception as a prerequisite for meeting public-policy objectives and as an outcome of good public policy. Competitiveness is far from a new objective, especially in the Nordic countries, which have been highly dependent on exports and exposed to the fluctuations and crises of the world economy (Katzenstein 1985). It was a vital ingredient in the making of the welfare state, playing an influential role in class compromises between labour and capital, and workers and farmers,

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Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

and in ideas of a virtuous circle connecting economic growth, social equality and widening democracy. However, the meaning of competitiveness in the world of unleashed and intensified mobility of capital took on quite a different appearance from how competitiveness used to be seen. At stake now was not merely the international competitiveness of ‘our’ enterprises in world markets but also ‘our’ national competitiveness before those who compare different national circumstances for their suitability as operating environments or ‘home bases’ (Porter 1990). Visions of a symmetry between labour and capital within a national society had been an effective utopian element in the Nordic model of change and reform, associated with ideas about the widening of democracy from politics to economy (Kärrylä 2019; Kettunen 2019). These visions have now lost their political power. Applying Albert O. Hirschman’s (1970) distinction of three ways actors can respond to changes in the milieu of their activities – through exit, voice and loyalty – we can say that the exit option held by globally mobile investors and firms furnished them with greatly increased power. The option of leaving an unsatisfactory milieu has become a powerful means of silently exerting an influential voice and defining preconditions for loyalty to the operating environment. National representatives of transnational business interests have achieved an influential dual role, in mediation through which global challenges enter national politics and in determining national responses. In the nation state that fosters a national competitive community, politics seems to assume two faces in relation to the economy. It reactively meets the requirements of what are seen as economic necessities, while it actively facilitates economic innovation and free entrepreneurship. In this we can see two sides of how the nation state acts as a competition state, a concept introduced in the early 1990s as a tool for analysing ‘the changing architecture of politics’ (Cerny 1990). Whilst the concept of the ‘competition state’ may be too vague for theorizing on the shifting regimes of the regulation of capitalism (Jessop 2004), it is useful for describing nation states’ responses to globalized capitalism and, especially, with reference to cross-border mobilities. Rather than a move from the welfare state to a competition state (Genschel & Seelkopf 2015), one may recognize a change in which welfare state institutions have been modified, in the sense of ‘institutional conversion’ (Mahoney & Thelen 2010), to serve competition-state functions. The concept thus far has been used mostly in critical accounts describing erosion of the welfare state. However, in Denmark, the political scientist Ove K. Pedersen has developed arguments in which the competition state is an inherent phase in the development of the welfare state and a precondition for its survival – an argument put forth in the 2010s that has already garnered positive responses among social democratic politicians (Dehlholm & Pedersen 2018; Pedersen 2011). Arguably, reforms taking the welfare state in the direc-

Introduction

9

tion of a competition state entail a reinforced national gaze. ‘Welfare’ does not in itself imply a distinction between us and others; ‘competitiveness’ does. The importance of comparisons in national politics is nothing new, yet promoting the competitiveness of a nation in global arenas implies new requirements of comparative reflexivity. ‘We’ within a given territory – local, regional or European but in the first place national – are supposed to make ourselves attractive and competitive in the eyes of those who compare environments from a transnational perspective in their decision-making regarding flows of money, investment and locations for production and jobs. This necessitates an ability to constantly assess one’s actions and capacities from the varying and changing positions of those actors who compare us with others. In addition to dichotomies between us and others, the distinction between the internal and external is reproduced. Globalization, perhaps most obviously the cross-border mobility of capital, is naturalized as necessities of the external environment, and the national society is commodified as a competitive community.

THE WELFARE STATE AND CROSS-BORDER MOBILITY OF PEOPLE In this world of increased cross-border mobilities of capital, information, people and risks to life, the changes to European welfare states have been wrought partly through regional integration but especially through national responses to cross-border mobilities. On the one hand, those responses are aimed at offering an attractive competitive operation environment for globally mobile companies, investors and people representing ‘international talent’. On the other hand, the nation states have developed policies for preventing the entry of unwanted people and for confronting migration-related challenges by defining them as security threats. The welfare state is assessed through the criteria of national competitiveness and security, and it is reshaped accordingly. The interconnection between migration control and the welfare state’s development is not a new phenomenon, as Miika Tervonen (Chapter 7) points out. In this respect, Nordic national and intra-Nordic-region histories alike demonstrate long continuities as well as changes of direction. Residence-based social inclusion implied an illegal status of ‘vagrant’, and labour market protectionism tended to overshadow international solidarity in socialist and trade union views on migration. Nevertheless, the expansion of welfare universalism coincided with regional Western European and – remarkably ambitious – Nordic regional efforts towards ‘debordering’, alongside the rise of international law contributing to a stronger legal position for non-citizens. The restrictive turn in migration control since the 1990s, in relation to the increased migration flow from countries of the so-called Global South to the

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Global North, was associated with and contributed to the weakening of welfare universalism. In policies and practices related to preventing the entry of unwanted people, deporting those not allowed to stay, the integration of those who are and encounters with those staying without a permit, the fundamental principles of the welfare state are reinterpreted. The criteria for family reunification reflect norms of the family as a unit of internal dependencies and of the breadwinner as an independent actor with a solid income who is at low risk of requiring social assistance (Pellander 2016). The limits of residence-based universalism have become more explicit, and the differential inclusion of various groups of non-citizens in the welfare state tends to reinforce the principles of hierarchy and conditionality in relation to social benefits (Careja et al. 2015; Eger et al. 2020; Könönen 2018). On the other hand, principles seen as intrinsic values of the Nordic welfare state have been employed as arguments for stricter immigration policies. Gender equality, including an image of the strong Nordic woman that is deeply rooted in national identities, has served as one such argument, as Saara Pellander elucidates (Chapter 8). Her analysis of Finnish mainstream media news on deportation cases in connection with the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ also demonstrates the gendering of views on who is a genuine refugee. Young male asylum‑seekers tend to face especially strong suspicion. In their case, it is especially obvious that migration is articulated as a security problem for ‘us’ rather than an issue for migrants. In the definition of global cross-border mobilities as security problems, the old distinction between internal and external security loses much of its relevance, as Didier Bigo (2007) has argued. However, while internal and external security are intertwined, the mixture between them is conceived of primarily as the security of the national ‘us’. It is defined against a backdrop of threat images in which the ultimate origin of the threats – faced outside and inside the borders of the national society, and in constant crossing of borders – is the external environment beyond ‘us’. In treating the mobilities of people and information as security problems, the distinctions between the internal and external and between us and others are a point of departure for restrictive bordering practices. Accounts of the changing forms of warfare, including those conceptualized as ‘hybrid warfare’, seem to be intermingled with the extension of metaphorical uses of ‘war’ (Huhtinen et al. 2019). Extending the concept of security from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ issues seems to have supported a tendency to extend the use of military terms in threat images, an example being ‘information war’. The metaphor of war is also seeing active use in the struggle against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. ‘War’ creates an image of an emergency, justifying restrictive measures and imposition of new borders and strengthening of existing ones.

Introduction

11

Old thought and speech modes are also vitalized in dehumanizing naturalization of societal phenomena and human activities. Two ways of depicting cross-border mobilities as if they were natural phenomena are visible in mainstream public speech in Europe, especially in small European countries, the Nordic countries among them. On the one hand, globalization is naturalized as unavoidable processes of the external environment. This notion is usually associated with the cross-border mobility of capital and most often appears in arguments for national policies that recognize the requirements of external economic necessities, particularly the mobility of capital. On the other hand, metaphors of natural threat or natural catastrophe are often utilized in discussion of the cross-border mobility of people. In connection with the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’, words such as ‘flood’ and ‘tsunami’ became popular in describing people’s attempts to reach Europe (Kotilainen & Laine 2021). A paradoxical combination of increasing and decreasing ‘our’ attractiveness becomes actualized in nation state-level responses to cross-border mobilities. The former response characterizes the domain of capital’s mobility while the latter one appears in the handling of migration; however, this dualism works within migration policies also. ‘Migration policy affects attractiveness of OECD countries to international talent’, as the OECD argues, with national policies being informed by comparative information based on the OECD Indicators of Talent Attractiveness (OECD 2019). National programmes are organized to increase attractiveness in certain respects (e.g. Business Finland 2019). In migration policy, the combination of what can be called competition-state and security-state policies is constructing divisions not only between ‘us’ and ‘them’ but also between distinct migrant groups, ‘international talent’ and asylum seekers representing the extreme ends of the spectrum. The need for migrant workers, not only ‘international talent’, to meet the demographic challenges of an ageing society is widely recognized, at least in principle, and opportunities to decrease labour costs by using lower-paid migrants have proved attractive for some employers. Arguments for immigration as a solution to national problems come up against political forces that, resorting to nativist and protectionist arguments, oppose any immigration and help shape political agendas and attitudes accordingly. In any case, migrant labour power is vital for the functioning of important sectors of Western economies and societies, including welfare state activities such as the provision of care. One can recognize global chains of labour power production, as Tiina Vaittinen, Margarita Sakilayan-Latvala and Päivi Vartiainen do in their case study on the recruitment of Filipino female workers to Finnish elderly care institutions (Chapter 9). The chain begins from the Philippine policies of exporting educated nurses and it ends in the recruitment of Filipino nurses as nurse assistants in Finnish eldercare homes. The import of labour power

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appears as a process of deskilling, in which the hierarchies of work organization tend to be ethnicized and racialized. Preventing and facilitating cross-border mobilities is one of the paradoxes and tensions identified by Thomas Faist (Chapter 10) in his analysis of national policies designed for coping with the transnationalized social question. Migration can be approached as primarily a question of class divisions. Market liberalization, and the functioning of the nation state as a competition state, reinforces class distinctions among migrants, while securitization, reshaping the welfare state, tends to culturalize those class distinctions and to construct racialized immigrants and their descendants as a threat to putative national homogeneity and the welfare state’s solidarity. The emergence of human rights, or ‘the rights revolution’, is part of the paradox. A tension appears between the extension of human rights to migrants who reside in welfare states and the efforts to control borders and cultural boundaries. As far as the nation state is constructing and treating social phenomena as security problems, it can be said to act as a security state.1 The security-state functions of the nation states should not be thought of as merely those of restrictive bordering practices, though. Problems defined as security threats, including violent extremism associated with Islamism and the rise of the far right, also tie in with welfare state policies of social integration,2 just as they used to, beginning with the nineteenth-century attempts to cope with class conflict. In responses to the challenges that cross-border mobilities pose to preventing social division and settling political conflicts, ‘resilience’ has become a most popular concept (Dunn Cavelty et al. 2015). It refers to the reform capacities a nation must have for coping with external shocks and pressures through adaptability, flexibility and innovativeness. The scope of 1 Accounts of the expanding welfare state from the 1970s occasionally employed ‘security state’ as a concept in referring to what the state did before the advent of the welfare state (Rescher 1972). At the same time, Marxist critics of the state in capitalism (especially what was called ‘late capitalism’) sometimes used this concept in their analysis of new forms of state repression (Oppenheimer & Canning 1978). In West German Marxist discussion, Joachim Hirsch (1980) developed a critique of ‘the German model’, arguing that the intertwined processes of all-embracing capitalism (Durchkapitalisierung) and the all-encompassing state (Durchstaatlichung) had transformed the state into a security state (Sicherheitsstaat). Hirsch later contributed to a discussion of the competition state, and he has recently updated his state theory with a harsh critique of the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as indicating a new security-state phase (Hirsch 2020). 2 An EU-level example of emphasis on integration as a solution to security problems is the ‘Joint statement by the EU home affairs ministers on the recent terrorist attacks in Europe’, of 13 November 2020. See www​.consilium​.europa​.eu/​en/​press/​ press​-releases/​2020/​11/​13/​joint​-statement​-by​-the​-eu​-home​-affairs​-ministers​-on​-the​ -recent​-terrorist​-attacks​-in​-europe/​.

Introduction

13

this concept has expanded to comprise the security-state, competition-state and welfare-state aspects of the nation state. In promoting resilience, welfare state institutions are made to serve security‑ and competition-state functions, where distinguishing between the internal and external serves as a point of departure.

CONCLUSION: THE LIMITS OF DEMOCRATIC WELFARE NATIONALISM Nationalism, understood as ideational and practical modes of making and justifying a nation‑based political order, was an integral component in the formation of the welfare state. The evolution of the welfare state, in turn, affected nationalism by reshaping national identities and the notions of nation state citizenship and democracy. Transformations labelled as globalization have created new preconditions for nationalism. It not only appears in protectionist and xenophobic reactions against cross-border mobilities but also in defining those mobilities as problems of competitiveness and security. The emphases on competitiveness and security tend to construct ‘us’ in a way that weakens the critical potential of democratic welfare nationalism to extend ‘us’ beyond national borders. Such potential of various sorts was embodied in the principle of universalism that gained a central role especially in the Nordic welfare states. In the formation of those welfare states, universalism was gradually established as a normative standard for the society. It was a nation state society, yet universalism could be extended further by critical political voices speaking out for democratic welfare policies beyond national borders that would be capable of effectively regulating the transnational economy. The changes to institutions and discourse by which the welfare state was modified for serving competition-state and security-state functions have arguably closed the horizons to such visions. A self-reinforcing circle exists. The sheer extent to which globalization is defined as a national challenge reinforces the position of competitiveness and security in political agenda-setting, and the role of competitiveness and security in framing the political agenda reinforces national perspectives on globalization. In politics framed by welfare-state, competition-state and security-state perspectives, ‘nationalism’ is a conceptual tool not for self-description but for condemning xenophobic and racist far-right nationalism. Those perspectives are seen as representing rational nation state policies and are generally not associated with nationalism. However, the non-reflexivity visible in persistent limits to how the concept gets used, at least outside specialist studies of nations and nationalism, points to the power of nationalism as a taken-for-granted mode of thought and action. Furthermore, taken-for-granted nationalism is arguably reinforced by the intertwining of democratic welfare nationalism with competitiveness-seeking and security‑seeking nationalism. It provides

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Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

a readymade framework for xenophobic nationalism that turns the us/other distinction into an exclusionary us-against-them divide, and the internal/external distinction is transformed into a motive for higher barriers at borders. While the emphasis on ‘us’ in the making of national competitive communities is integral to global capitalism, the same transformations may also either erode the solidarity based on common spatial ties or open new cross-national and cross-territorial perspectives for defining ‘us’. One could argue that a multi-circle non-divisive understanding of ‘us’ requires a transnational democratic dimension in the defining of problems and solutions. Even good answers to questions of national competitiveness and security fail to answer questions of democracy, citizenship, social equality and the ecological preconditions for life. Reinforced emphasis on the competition-state and security-state aspects of the nation state may make it even more difficult to formulate such questions in a manner that affords solid recognition that they are simultaneously local, national, European and global. The chapters that follow are organized to support our argument pertaining to the making and questioning of democratic welfare nationalism. In Part I of the book, ‘Democratic welfare nationalism and beyond’, the chapters discuss the contested roles and meanings of democracy in the formation of the so-called Nordic model of welfare. Democratic welfare nationalism provided a point of departure for visions extending democracy beyond nation state politics, whether in the framework of Cold War inter-system conflict (the chapter by Kurunmäki), associated with efforts to transcend the boundary between democracy and capitalism (the chapter by Kärrylä), or in connection with concerns about global development (the chapter by Kettunen). These visions were confronted by competitiveness- and security-oriented definitions of national interest that gained new power in national responses to increased cross-border mobility of capital and people. The chapters in Part II, ‘The welfare state and cross-border mobility of capital’, examine the ways in which national welfare states and their democratic dimensions are reshaped in the context of what Jessop in his chapter characterizes as post-national regulation regimes of globalized and financialized capitalism. In this context, politics was oriented to serve national adaptations in global economy and, as a variant of this orientation, ideas of a Third Way emerged (the chapter by Outinen). The chapters in Part III, ‘The welfare state and cross-border mobility of people’, analyse paradoxes and inherent tensions of national migration policies. Nation state policies handle migration as a problem of national security and integration (the chapters by Tervonen and Pellander) or as a solution to problems concerning national competitiveness and the sustainability of a national welfare state (the chapter by Vaittinen, Sakilayan-Latvala and Vartiainen), and they indicate the limits of nation state attempts to cope with the ‘transnationalized social question’ (the chapter by Faist). Those attempts

Introduction

15

prove to be paradoxical and contentious combinations of approaches that accentuate the importance of universal human rights while reproducing cultural justifications of social hierarchies, facilitating and preventing mobility, and aiming to reinforce competitiveness and security. Rescuing the welfare state has become a widely shared rhetorical motivation for divergent national policies. Yet, insofar as these policies define global mobilities as national challenges to tackle, they tend to erode the universalism developed within the framework of democratic welfare nationalism.

REFERENCES Anttonen, A., L. Häikiö and K. Stefansson (eds) (2012), Welfare State, Universalism and Diversity, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Appelqvist, Ö. (1997), ‘Gunnar Myrdal and the defeated ideals of a world new deal’, in P. Kettunen and H. Eskola (eds), Models, Modernity and the Myrdals, Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, pp. 177–90. Beck, U. (2004), Der kosmopolitische Blick oder: Krieg ist Frieden, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Béland, D. and A. Lecours (2008), Nationalism and Social Policy: The Politics of Territorial Solidarity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bigo, D. (2007), ‘Internal and external aspects of security’, Journal of European Security, 15 (4), 385–404. Bloch, E. (1959), Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Business Finland (2019), ‘Talent boost: recruit the international professional your company needs’, accessed 2 October 2020 at https://​www​.businessfinland​.fi/​en/​for​ -finnish​-customers/​services/​programs/​talent​-boost​-finland. Calhoun, C. (2007), Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream, London and New York: Routledge. Careja, R., P. Emmenegger and J. Kvist (2015), ‘An American dilemma in Europe? Welfare reform and immigration’, in P. Kettunen, S. Michel and K. Petersen (eds), Race, Ethnicity and Welfare States: An American Dilemma?, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Chung, H., P. Taylor-Gooby and B. Leruth (2018), ‘Political legitimacy and welfare state futures: introduction’, Social Policy & Administration, 52 (4), 835–46. Cerny, P. G. (1990), The Changing Architecture of Politics: Structure, Agency, and the Future of the State, London: SAGE Publications. Dean, M. (1994), Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Method and Historical Sociology, London and New York: Routledge. Dehlholm, M. and Ove K. Pedersen (2018), ‘Succes eller fiasko? Et komparativt blik på den danske konkurrencestat’, Dansk Sociologi, 29 (2), 51–75. Dunn Cavelty, M., M. Kaufmann and K. Søby Kristensen (2015), ‘Resilience and (in) security: practices, subjects, temporalities’, Security Dialogue, 46 (1), 3–14. Edling, N., J. H. Petersen and K. Petersen (2015), ‘Social policy language in Denmark and Sweden’, in D. Béland and K. Petersen (eds), Analysing Social Policy Concepts and Language: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 13–34. Eger, M. A., C. A. Larsen and J. Mewes (2020), ‘Welfare nationalism before and after the “migration crisis”’, in T. Laenen, B. Meuleman and W. van Oorschot (eds),

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Welfare State Legitimacy in Times of Crisis and Austerity: Between Continuity and Change, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 177–98. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990), The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Esping-Andersen, G. (ed.) (1996), Welfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economies, London: SAGE Publications. Ferrera, M. (2006), The Boundaries of Welfare: European Integration and the New Spatial Politics of Social Solidarity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1975), Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, Paris: Bibliothèque des histoires. Genschel, P. and L. Seelkopf (2015), ‘The competition state: the modern state in a global economy’, in S. Leibfried, E. Huber, M. Lange, J. D. Levy and J. D. Stephens (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Transformations of the State, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 237–52. Held, D., A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton (1999), Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hirsch, J. (1980), Der Sicherheitsstaat. Das ‘Modell Deutschland’, seine Krise und die neuen sozialen Bewegungen, Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Hirsch, J. (2020), ‘Sicherheitsstaat 4.0’, 26 May, accessed 2 October 2020 at http://​wp​ .links‑netz​.de/​?p​=​444. Hirschman, A. O. (1970), Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations, and States, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Hirst, P. and G. Thompson (1995), ‘Globalization and the future of the nation-state’, Economy and Society, 24 (3), 408–42. Huhtinen, A.-M., N. Kotilainen, S. Särmä and M. Streng (2019), ‘Information influence in hybrid environment: reflexive control as an analytical tool for understanding warfare in social media’, International Journal of Cyber Warfare and Terrorism, 9 (3), 1–20. Jacobs, D. (2007), Global Democracy: Political and Civil Rights for a New Era, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Jessop, B. (2004), ‘From the welfare state to the competition state’, in P. Bauer and H. Voelzkow (eds), Die Europäische Union – Marionette oder Regisseur? Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 335–59. Kärrylä, I. (2019), The contested relationship of democracy and the economy: debates on economic and industrial democracy in Finland and Sweden, 1960s–1990s, dissertation, University of Helsinki. Katzenstein, P. J. (1985), Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kettunen, P. (2015), ‘The language of social politics in Finland’, in D. Béland and K. Petersen (eds), Analysing Social Policy Concepts and Language: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 157–75. Kettunen, P. (2018), ‘The concept of nationalism in discussions on a European society’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 23 (3), 342–69. Kettunen, P. (2019), ‘The rise and fall of the Nordic utopia of an egalitarian wage work society’, in S. Hänninen, K.-M. Lehtelä and P. Saikkonen (eds), The Relational Nordic Welfare State: Between Utopia and Ideology, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 95–118. Kettunen, P. and K. Petersen (eds) (2011), Beyond Welfare State Models: Transnational Historical Perspectives on Social Policy, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

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Kildal, N. and S. Kuhnle (eds) (2005), Normative Foundations of the Welfare State: The Nordic Experience, London: Routledge. Könönen, J. (2018), ‘Differential inclusion of non-citizens in a universalistic welfare state’, Citizenship Studies, 22 (1), 53–69. Kotilainen, N. and J. Laine (eds) (2021), Muuttoliike murroksessa: metaforat, mielikuvat, merkitykset, Helsinki: Into. Laenen, T., B. Meuleman and W. van Oorschot (eds) (2020), Welfare State Legitimacy in Times of Crisis and Austerity: Between Continuity and Change, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Mahoney, J. and K. Thelen (2010), ‘A theory of gradual institutional change’, in J. Mahoney and K. Thelen (eds), Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–37. Myrdal, G. (1960), Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning in the Welfare State and Its International Implications, London: Duckworth. OECD (2019), ‘Migration policy affects attractiveness of OECD countries to international talent’, accessed 2 October 2020 at www​.oecd​.org/​newsroom/​migration​ -policy​-affects​-attractiveness​-of​-oecd​-countries​-to​-international​-talent​.htm. Ohmae, K. (1990), The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy, New York: Harper Business. Oppenheimer, M. and J. C. Canning (1978), ‘The national security state: repression within capitalism’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 23, 3–33. Pedersen, O. K. (2011), Konkurrencestaten, Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Pellander, S. (2016), Gatekeepers of the family: regulating family migration to Finland, dissertation, University of Helsinki, Publications of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Porter, M. E. (1990), The Competitive Advantage of Nations, New York: Free Press. Rescher, N. (1972), Welfare: The Social Issues in Philosophical Perspective, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Rokkan, S. (1999 [1966]), ‘Numerical democracy and corporate pluralism’, in P. Flora with S. Kuhnle and D. Urwin (eds), State Formation, Nation-building, and Mass Politics in Europe: The Theory of Stein Rokkan Based on His Collected Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 261–73. Sassen, S. (2006), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Saunier, P.-Y. (2013), Transnational History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sluga, G. (2013), Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Smith, A. D. (1998), Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism, London and New York: Routledge. Steinmo, S. (2010), The Evolution of Modern States: Sweden, Japan, and the United States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strange, S. (1997), ‘The future of global capitalism; or, will divergence persist forever?’, in C. Crouch and W. Streeck (eds), Political Economy of Modern Capitalism: Mapping Convergence and Diversity, London: SAGE Publications, pp. 182–92. Walker, R. B. J. (1993), Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wimmer, A. and N. Glick Schiller (2002), ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation‑state building, migration and the social sciences’, Global Networks, 2 (4), 301–34.

PART I

Democratic welfare nationalism and beyond

2. The end of ideology and Nordic democracy: Herbert Tingsten and the rhetoric of de-ideologization Jussi Kurunmäki INTRODUCTION In the closing chapter of his seminal Political Man (1959), Seymour Martin Lipset held that a basic premise of his book was that democracy was not about “a means through which different groups can attain their ends or seek the good society”, but “the good society itself in operation” (Lipset 1960, p. 403). What counted as a good society was indicated in the title of the chapter “The End of Ideology?”, borrowed from Edward Shils, who had used it in his well-known report from The Future of Freedom conference held in Milan under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in 1955 (Shils 1955). Both these famous US sociologists and advocates of the end of ideology thesis pointed to the Scandinavian countries as exemplary cases of a good society and de-ideologized political life (Shils 1955, p. 57; Lipset 1960, p. 415). They were also drawing on the Swedish political scientist and editor Herbert Tingsten, who became an internationally known apologist of the end of ideology thesis due to his 1955 article “Stability and vitality in Swedish democracy”, which was based on his lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science in October 1954 (see Petersson 2013, p. 130). In that article, Tingsten held that, in Sweden, the words socialism and liberalism were “tending to become mere honorifics, useful in connection with elections and political festivities” (Tingsten 1955, p. 145; see also Lipset 1960, p. 406). These men knew each other from the beginning of the 1950s. In 1952, when Tingsten raised the issue of the end of ideology as the editor of the Swedish liberal newspaper Dagens Nyheter, he referred to “a memorable discussion” with “some American social scientists” (Tingsten 1952a). Many years later, when recapitulating his view of the de-ideologized “happy democracy” (lycklig demokrati), he made an explicit reference to Lipset and Shils (Tingsten 1966a, p. 9). On the same occasion, he described the Scandinavian countries as 19

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“the upper class” among the ideologically relaxed countries, of which Sweden was the most typical one (pp. 11–13, 21).1 At the same time as the end of ideology thesis gained ground among Western intellectuals, the Scandinavian political culture was promoted under the labels “Nordic democracy” and “Scandinavian democracy”.2 The volumes Nordisk demokrati (1949), Scandinavia – Between East and West (1950) and Scandinavian Democracy: Development of Democratic Thought & Institutions in Denmark, Norway and Sweden (1958) presented the three Scandinavian countries as being based on a political culture in which democracy was unchallenged and where ideological conflicts had been smoothened through effective welfare policies (see Kurunmäki and Strang 2010, pp. 18–19). At first glance, these two ways of appreciating the political culture in the Nordic countries appear to be quite different from each other. “Nordic democracy” was employed to distinguish the Nordic political culture as a particular kind of democracy that was different from the communist East and the capitalist West (Koch and Ross 1949, p. xv; Steincke 1949, p. 458; Friis 1950a, p. x). The end of ideology thesis, in turn, should be seen as an attempt to demarcate the political influence of the communist East in the West (Bell 1988 [1960], p. 410; Brick 2013, p. 95; Kurunmäki and Marjanen 2018, pp. 268–9). However, as I aim to show, the ideal of a non-ideological political life and a certain “welfare statist” argument as the foundation of stable democracy were crucial for both strands of political branding. In this chapter, I will examine the similarities and differences between the notions of the end of ideology and Nordic democracy by taking the writings of Tingsten as the vantage point of the analysis. He was a prominent scholar, having studied parliamentary procedures and constitutional law as well as the crisis of democracy and the rise of totalitarian ideologies in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Second World War, he was perhaps the most important public intellectual in Sweden until the early sixties, not least due to his polemical role as the editor of the biggest newspaper in the country (see Petersson 2013). He was a vocal advocate of the Atlantic orientation of the Swedish foreign policy and critical of the idea of a Swedish third way position between the West and the East (Tingsten 1951; see also Johansson 1995, pp. 181–203; Nilsson 2011; Petersson 2013, pp. 251–3; Rainio-Niemi 2014, p. 46; Strand 2016, pp. 89–92), but he had also been involved in the promotion of the idea of a specific Nordic brand of democracy in the 1930s and during wartime (Kurunmäki

1 Other such countries included Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland in Europe, and the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the rest of the world. 2 In the Scandinavian languages, the notion was most often expressed as “Nordic democracy”, whereas “Scandinavian democracy” was more common in English.

The end of ideology and Nordic democracy

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2010, p. 48; Strang 2010, p. 97). My argument is that we should pay closer attention to Tingsten’s characterization of Nordic democracy and especially the nature of parliamentary life in Sweden, when examining the origins of his advocacy of the end of ideology thesis. As I will show, Tingsten’s view of the end of ideology can be traced back to his interpretation of the Swedish parliamentary culture, elaborated in the 1930s in connection to his accounts of Nordic democracy. In these works, he presented Swedish parliamentary culture as well-functioning, bureaucratic and essentially non-rhetorical in its nature. His view was based on the notion of an historical exceptionality of the Swedish-cum-Nordic democracy, which clearly lent it a nationalist tone. Consequently, while discussing the apparent similarities between the rhetoric of Nordic democracy and the end of ideology, in this study I will be dealing with the question of whether we can view the Cold War-era promotion of Nordic democracy as a variant of the end of ideology thesis or, rather, whether it is possible to see the end of ideology thesis as the idealized Nordic democracy come true.

THE END OF IDEOLOGY: ANTI-COMMUNISM AND WELFARE POLICIES The history of the concept of ideology suggests that it should be rather easy to find arguments in which the end of ideology would have been welcomed even before the thesis was pronounced in the late 1940s. The early history of “ideology”, a word coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796 for scholarly and educational purposes, shows that hardly anyone was in favour of ideology before it was adopted as an analytical concept in the social sciences from the late nineteenth century on, and before it became one of the means of discussing political ideas in the 1930s (Kurunmäki and Marjanen 2020). For instance, Napoleon, who first had supported the analytical attempt to create a way of categorising mental perception with the help of “ideology”, soon labelled “the ideologists” as advocates of political theories and eventually, revolutionary ideas (Kennedy 1979, pp. 353–4; Dierse 1982, pp. 140–46). Marx and Engels famously viewed ideology as false consciousness, reflecting the domination of capital in social relations (Dierese 1982, p. 154; Freeden 2011, p. 83; Leopold 2013, pp. 20–1; Stråth 2013, pp. 7–9).3 Furthermore, theories dealing with political modernization, such as rationalization (e.g. Max Weber) and the

3 It is in fact possible to maintain that Marx and Engels’ idea of ideology as false consciousness and the historically necessitated abolition of class structures implied an end state that, ironically enough, could be understood as the end of ideology (see also Brick 2013, 93; Strand 2016, 65–6).

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formation of political elites (e.g. Robert Michels), paved the way to a mindset which could be interpreted as speaking in favour of de-ideologization (Brick 2013, pp. 93–4). It is also obvious that works such as Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) with its critique of historicism and totalitarianism and its argument for “piecemeal social engineering” had an impact on the arguments that supported the end of ideology thesis (Popper 2003 [1945], p. xviii). Indeed, the most important background for the formulation of the end of ideology thesis was the emergence of the phenomenon that was conceptualized as totalitarianism in the 1920s (see Fuentes 2013; Stewart 2020, pp. 77–96). “Ideology” was often associated with all “isms” in the post-war context (e.g. Wasserman 1941; Gross 1948), and a critical view of “totalitarianism” cast a negative light on other ideological isms, in many accounts making them all potentially dangerous (e.g. Wootton 2009 [1942]; Arendt 1953, p. 315; Arendt 1973 [1958], p. 468). Despite different meanings given to the thesis, and despite different political motivations of its usage, the association of communism and totalitarianism was the leitmotif behind the promotion of the idea of the end of ideologies. It was based on the idea that after the fall of National Socialism and fascism, the only ideology left was Marxism and its implementation, communism (Kurunmäki and Marjanen 2018, pp. 267–9). Albert Camus has been referred to as the first intellectual to have used the explicit formulation “the end of ideologies” in the article “Ni victims, ni bourreaux” in the Combat newspaper in 1946 (Bell 1988 [1960], p. 411; Brick 2013, p. 94). Its English translation, “Neither victims nor executioners” was published in the American leftish magazine Politics in 1947. Camus argued against absolute utopias and urged the French socialists to reject Marxism. To him, it would mean that “they will exemplify the way our period marks the end of ideologies, that is, of absolute Utopias which destroy themselves, in History, by the price they ultimately exact. It will then be necessary to choose a most modest and less costly Utopia” (Camus 1947, p. 143). Camus’ text was an argument in a debate within the French Socialist Party, but it resonated well in a broader international intellectual context due to its repudiation of absolute utopias and due to its critique of communism (see also Judt 2010, pp. 210–21). The first meeting of the international anti-communist forum, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), held in Berlin in 1950 at the time of the outbreak of the Korean War and after Stalin had launched the international Movement for Peace (Judt 2010, pp. 221–2), was the formative moment for an international spreading of the end of ideology thesis (Scott-Smith 2002, p. 437).4

4 Behind the forming of the Congress for Cultural Freedom were such intellectuals as Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers and Jacques Maritain

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Arthur Koestler, one of the ex-communists whose presence gave label to the occasion, held in his keynote paper “The False Dilemma” that dichotomies such as “right” and “left”, as well as “socialism” and “capitalism” had become “virtually empty of meaning” (quoted in Brick 2013, p. 92; see also Strand 2016, p. 83). Although Koestler did not use the phrase “the end of ideology”, his statement became one of the key formulations of the thesis. Raymond Aron, for instance, opened his article “Nation and Ideologies” in 1955 by maintaining that “[w]e are becoming ever more aware that the political categories of the last century—Left and Right, liberal and socialist, traditionalist and revolutionary—have lost their relevance” (Aron 1955, p. 24). Here and in his famous The Opium of the Intellectuals (1957),5 in which the last chapter had the name “The End of the Ideological Age?”, he was concerned about the influence of the French Marxist intellectuals such as his earlier collaborators in the Les Temps modernes journal, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Aron 1955, pp. 26–7; Aron 1962 [1957], p. x; see also Rainio-Niemi 2014, p. 46; Strand 2016, pp. 114–15; Stewart 2020, pp. 104–5). Communism also figured in a certain way behind Shils’ article “The End of Ideology?”, his account of the meeting of the CCF in Milan in 1955. He wrote that “the conference had in part the atmosphere of a post-victory ball” and that “[t]here was a very widespread feeling that there was no longer any need to justify ourselves vis-à-vis the Communist critique of our society” (Shils 1955, p. 54). He also held that “almost every paper was in one way or another a critique of doctrinairism, of fanaticism, of ideological possession”, concluding that the papers presented in the event had in common something that “might be described as the end of ideological enthusiasm” (p. 53). Lipset, in turn, noted in his later account of the Milan conference that the debate grew warm only on those occasions when someone was saying something that could be understood as being favourable to the Soviet Union, the speaker thus serving as a “surrogate Communist” (Lipset 1960, p. 404). However, at least one famous congress participant felt that the atmosphere in the event was far too conforming. In his closing speech, Friedrich Hayek accused the delegates of preparing to bury freedom rather than to save it, because the distinction between the left and the right had been relativized too much (p. 404).

(Judt 2010, p. 222). As many scholars have noted, the link between the CCF and the CIA became commonly known in 1966. However, although the US support of the campaign has been taken as a sign of an ideological cultural Cold War (Stonor-Saunders 1999; cf. Scott-Smith and Krabbendam 2003), a geopolitically motivated anti-communist nature of the CCF rhetoric was so prominent both in the dealings of the CCF and in the texts dealing with the end of ideology that the CIA connection should not come as a surprise or add much to our understanding of the statements that discussed the end of ideology. 5 The French original L’Opium des intellectuels was published in 1955.

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Daniel Bell, whose The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960) is the best known document of the thesis, explained that his point was to call for the end of revolutionary rhetoric, stating that “[i]f the end of ideology has any meaning, it is to ask for the end of rhetoric, and rhetoricians, of ‘revolution’” (Bell 1988 [1960], p. 406). In his 1988 “Afterword”, he maintained that the thesis was a “part of the war of ideas that was taking place among intellectuals, especially in Europe, about the future of the Soviet Union and Stalinism”. Presenting an argument against a holistic and totalistic view of society based on Marxist sociology, he held that it was an attempt of a former socialist to demarcate the role of mass action and emotion in politics and moving toward a social democratic direction (pp. 410, 413–15, 423; see also Kurunmäki and Marjanen 2018, p. 269). Although this statement needs to be taken as a retrospective account of the campaign Bell had been a crucial part of, it nevertheless pointed at an important aspect of the end of ideology thesis. As the formulation “piecemeal engineering in a social democratic direction” (Bell 1988 [1960], p. 410) implies, there were the notion of a developing welfare state and the observation that both state-run and private policies had been used across the non-communist political field in the Western countries behind the thesis. It is important to note that besides the Cold War antagonism, the thesis was fuelled by a sociologically and economically motivated interpretation of the development of industrial societies (see Judt 2010, p. 362; Brick 2013, p. 97). In this light it is also understandable that Shils maintained that ideologies still played a crucial role in Asia, Africa and South America, and that he did not pay much attention to the situation in the communist countries. However, according to him, in the West several countries had already advanced to a situation in which ideologies played only a minor role. He held that in countries such as Great Britain, the United States, West Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, the distinction between socialism and laissez-faire had been replaced by “a matter-of-fact way which recognized no general principles and treated each emerging situation on its own merits”. Therefore, the idea that only one ideological side would have “a monopoly of the care of freedom and welfare” had lost its appeal (Shils 1955, pp. 53–4). Along the same lines, Aron noted that “Western ‘capitalist’ society today comprises a multitude of socialist institutions” (Aron 1962 [1957], p. 309). These ideas were increasingly captured in the concept of the welfare state at the time. As pointed out by Nils Edling, “the emerging new concept included both planning and social reforms, both extended administrative capacities and ideological commitment to popular welfare” (Edling 2019b, p. 318). Although the meaning and evaluation of the concept was contested, it is important to note that the welfare state was viewed as being a democratic “antithesis to Communist dictatorships” (p. 318). The emphasis placed on welfare policies

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and the idea of the mixed economy was to some extent based on the experience of wartime and the immediate post-war public sector policies, but they were also supported by contemporary social scientific ideas of social engineering and economic planning (Judt 2010, pp. 67–72).6 In this mode of thought, welfare policies were thought of as supporting political and civic freedom. In Lipset’s view, the bureaucratization of modern industrial society, whether capitalist or socialist, would mean the decline of arbitrary power rather than lead to a conformity that would reduce the scope of individual freedom. In so claiming, he took the Swedish and British cases as his examples and argued that individual political freedom was increasing in stable democracies. Although he admitted that some concerns over conformity were understandable, he nevertheless viewed “the shift away from ideology towards sociology” in a positive light (Lipset 1960, p. 415). Following Shils’ remark on the relevance of ideologies in the developing countries, Lipset held that ideology and passion were needed in the international effort to develop free political and economic institutions in the rest of the world (pp. 414–17). Lipset’s discussion on conformity and bureaucratization, together with the end of ideology, should also be viewed as an attempt to respond to an increasing critique in which the end of ideology thesis was deemed to be an inherently conservative idea. It was criticized by many left-wing intellectuals in the 1960s for being an argument in favour of technocracy, consensus and the status quo, something they viewed as being typical of modern liberalism (e.g. Rousseas and Farganis 1963, p. 347; for the debate, see Waxman 1968).7 It is noteworthy that unlike in Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis on the end of history in 1989 (Fukuyama 1989), liberalism was not usually mentioned as the core idea by the main advocates of the end of ideology thesis, even though Tingsten and Aron, for instance, were commonly regarded as “liberals”. It is possible that they felt that to single out one victorious ism would have jeopardized the whole idea, as isms were generally deemed to be harmful in the post-war context, but it is 6 The emphasis on a mixed economy and planning has often been associated with the notion of so-called convergence theory, which would also support the idea of the end of ideology. The theory was gaining ground after Stalin’s death and being based on the assumption that the Soviet economy and technological progress were increasingly similar to the Western ones, which would bring about possibilities for the relaxation of ideological tensions between the Soviet and the Western blocs (e.g. Brzezinski and Huntington 1964). 7 In fact, the first article bearing the name “the end of ideology” had presented the new situation in a dystopian light. H. Stuart Hughes, who became a renowned intellectual historian, published in 1951 the article “The end of political ideology” in which he feared “a temperamental conservatism and governmental intervention economic life” (Hughes 1951, p. 156; see also Scott-Smith 2002, p. 440; Brick 2013, p. 95; cf. Strand 2016, pp. 85–8).

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also likely that many of them thought that it did not fit well with the emphasis placed on the ideas of welfare policies and the mixed economy.

TINGSTEN ON IDEOLOGIES AND DEMOCRACY Tingsten’s engagement in the promotion of the end of ideology argument had a lot to do with his anti-communism and his critique of the socialist features of the Swedish Social Democratic party programme in the late 1940s. But it also had a theoretically grounded motivation. As a scholar, Tingsten is best known in Sweden for his critique of ideas (idékritik). Earlier research has traced its origins to his affiliation with the Swedish philosophical school known for its “value nihilism”, as well as to its application in his studies on the conservative ideas and the Swedish Social Democratic Party (Lundborg 1991; Skovdahl 1992; Sigurdson 2000; Strang 2010; Petersson 2013; cf. Tingsten 1939; 1967a [1941]; 1967b [1941]). As the argument goes, it was in these works that he first applied the principle, according to which the scholarly study of ideologies could not be about judging value statements, as they cannot be proven false or correct, but about fact statements included in ideological argumentation (Strang 2010, pp. 93–4; cf. Tingsten 1939, p. 7; Tingsten 1963 [1941], p. 21). According to Tingsten, it was possible to conduct a study of ideologies when the analysis would focus on the underlying presumptions on facts in ideological argumentation (such as, the political role of God, the theory of natural law, biological differences, and teleological conceptions of history), rather than values (Tingsten 1963 [1941], pp. 22–3). However, as Andrus Ers has pointed out, Tingsten’s oeuvre cannot be reduced to a theoretically consequent critical study of ideas. Rather, we should note that he referred to the past and the future in different ways depending on changed political circumstances and his political goals (Ers 2008, pp. 12–13). For instance, Tingsten gave different accounts of the relationship between nineteenth-century liberalism and socialism while defending the existing political order in Sweden during wartime (Tingsten 1940b, pp. 530–32) and when arguing in favour of the end of ideology during the Cold War (e.g. Tingsten 1966b, pp. 14–15). In the first instance, he saw socialism, liberalism and conservatism as being based on the shared legacy of the French Revolution; in the latter case, he saw socialism as having been based on Marxism and wanted to emphasise a recent decline of the Marxist thought in social democracy in order to support his idea of the post-war end of ideology. Furthermore, Tingsten’s adherence to the end of ideology cannot be understood without paying attention to his interest in the history and theories of democracy. He had written on the foundations of democracy, its enemies and the conditions of its survival as early as in 1933 in Demokratiens seger och kris (The Victory and Crisis of Democracy) as well as on the conditions of democ-

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racy after the war in Demokratiens problem (The Problem of Democracy) in 1945. As Johan Strang has pointed out, the question of the foundations of democracy was a difficult issue for a scholar who, in accordance with his value nihilistic principle, did not want to seek the justifications of democracy in natural law theories or in personal political valuations (Strang 2010, p. 92; cf. Tingsten 1933, pp. 21–32). In this sense, democracy was not different from ideologies: there was no scientific way of defining the valuation of democracy. In his way out of this problem, he nevertheless played democracy against ideologies. He held in Demokratiens problem that democracy appeared in political argumentation less as an ideology than as a critique of ideologies and traditions (Tingsten 1945, p. 90; see also Strang 2010, p. 93). To put it this way made it possible for him to claim that democracy was a “superideology” (överideologi) (Tingsten 1945, p. 57). In the 1965 English translation of the book, the point was made as follows: Belief in democracy is not a political persuasion comparable to conservatism, liberalism, or socialism. Democracy is a concept of the form of governance, the technique for political decision-making, not the content of these decisions and the way they affect the social structure. Democracy may be described as a sort of superideology in the sense that it is common to different persuasions. People believe in democracy and concurrently in either liberalism or socialism. (Tingsten 1965, p. 49)

The distance between here and the notion of the end of ideology was not great. A similar point was made by Lipset as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, when he held that democracy was not about the ends, but about the characteristics of the political community. For Tingsten, democracy meant a procedure which was appreciated by both the liberals and the socialists alike. It is noteworthy, though, that the communists were not included in the sphere of democracy in his account. Tingsten’s statement should also be understood as a way of denying contemporary communist attempts to define democracy by the content of the political decisions, something that also worried his Danish colleague Alf Ross in his Hvorfor Demokrati? (Why Democracy?) (Ross 1946; see also Strang 2010, pp. 100–101). In addition to the notion of democracy being a “superideology”, Tingsten needed yet another way of escaping the danger of value-essentialism and in keeping democracy different from ideologies. He employed the idea of the community of shared values (värdegemenskap), something he had elaborated already in his book on the victory and crisis of democracy in 1933 as well as in a wartime article on the relevance of the ideas of the 1789 French Revolution (Tingsten 1933, pp. 22, 60–61; Tingsten 1940b, p. 531; Tingsten 1945, p. 133). As such, the idea was not particularly original, since we can find it in one form or another in the idea of the rule of law as the shared rules of the game. For Tingsten, however, it served as a theoretical-cum-historical foundation

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of democracy. As we will see in a later section of this chapter, his argument leaned heavily on the notion of a democratic tradition in the Nordic countries.

TINGSTEN AND THE END OF IDEOLOGY When Tingsten raised the topic of de-ideologization as the editor-in-chief in Dagens Nyheter in 1952, he wrote about the prospects of democracy in a situation in which, as he put it, democracy was no longer threatened by dictatorship. The headlines of the three articles, “Democracy: a fulfilment or decay” (Tingsten 1952a), “The successful democracy” (Tingsten 1952b) and “A stable or vital democracy?” (Tingsten 1952c) indicate that his outspoken ambition was not only to praise the condition of democracy in a number of Western countries, but also that he was concerned about the democratic features of that condition. Although his description of successful democracies (lyckade demokratier8) had a general outlook, most of his characterizations dealt with Sweden. He claimed that Sweden stood out as a stable democracy even among other developed democracies.9 These three newspaper articles formed the core of his above-mentioned article in Political Quarterly in 1955, the title of which revealed that it was about Swedish democracy. According to Tingsten, the success of democracy had primarily been measured from the point of view of stability and security, which meant that “a successful democracy has been a regime possessing a community of values sufficiently strong not to be shaken by too great differences, not threatened by Nazism, fascism or communism” (Tingsten 1955, p. 140). Although he posed the question whether there was a risk that a successful democracy was about to lose its vitality, he did not hesitate to take sides between stability and vitality. As he put it, “we cannot wish for vitality at the expense of stability. We do not envy the fragile democracies of France and Italy, where a strong Catholic Church and a strong Communist Party lend lustre and heat to the debate” (p. 149). For him, conflicts regarding principled issues had become less common than before in successful democracies. For instance, he held that economic controversies dealt with technical solutions rather than matters of principle. Tingsten defined democracy “simply as a rule through a general

8 Tingsten used more often the expression “lyckade demokratier” than “lycklig demokrati”. However, the latter appeared in the title of his 1966 book. The former expression should be translated as “successful democracies”, while the latter can be translated both as “happy democracy” or “lucky democracy”. 9 Tingsten wrote: “The development that has taken place in Sweden over the last few decades is representative of a number of democracies, although it has probably reached longer here than elsewhere” (Tingsten, “Demokratin: fulländing eller förfall”, Dagens Nyheter, 27 July 1952).

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franchise under conditions of political liberty”, which would make it possible for “various interest groups and categories of the society to assert their demands within the framework of the state and would in this manner lead to social harmony”. He viewed this kind of democracy as “a welfare democracy” and also “a market of interests”. It was a society in which conflicts, passion and high-minded disputes were replaced by “a quietness” (pp. 140–42). His formulation of the situation, presented in brief at the beginning of this chapter, was the following: Liberalism in the old sense is dead, both among the Conservatives and in the Liberal Party; Social Democrat thinking has lost nearly all its traits of doctrinaire Marxism, and the label socialism on a specific proposal or a specific reform has hardly any other meaning than the fact that the proposal or reform in question is regarded as attractive. The actual words ‘socialism’ or ‘liberalism’ are tending to become mere honorifics, useful in connexion with elections and political festivities. Words such as ‘the proletariat’ and ‘class struggle’ are virtually used by the Communists alone—except possibly at the Mayday demonstrations. (p. 145)10

Tingsten wrote about ideological levelling, the point being that there was an unconscious compromise between competing political opinions which could contain conservative, liberal and social democratic elements. Importantly, moreover, he held that these elements were different from early twentieth-century liberalism and Marxist socialism (Tingsten 1952b; 1955, p. 147). A decreasing role of Marxism in Sweden had been the main conclusion in Tingsten’s extensive study of the development of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (Tingsten 1967a; 1967b[1941]). The idea, which many left-wing commentators regarded as incorrect and based on Tingsten’s own political preferences, had been spelt out in a short article in 1940 on the united and consensual nature of Swedish democracy, in which Tingsten also formulated the idea of socialism and liberalism being ideas that were closer to each other than before (Tingsten 1940a, pp. 257–62). He produced several catchy formulations, the purpose of which was to describe the consequences of de-ideologization. He argued that there had emerged a “movement from politics to administration, from principles to technique” (Tingsten 1955, p. 147), and that the state policies would “seem like a kind of applied statistics” in a situation in which general values were shared to a high degree, and that “instead of competing political opinions there would be competing bureaucracies” or that “a banner carrier aloft has been replaced by the attorney”. He also held that in parliamentary elections, a voter 10 Three years earlier, while writing in Swedish, Tingsten held that “the slogans conservatism, liberalism and socialism say infinitely less than before about how political problems were conceived” (Dagens Nyheter, 27 July 1952).

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reveals one’s support for a party “with the same kind of dull willingness as one states one’s age, profession and civil status” (p. 148). Although his rhetoric may appear cynical to us, he was serious about the claim that there was no better political regime than a non-ideological and technocratic system in a free and democratic country (Tingsten 1952b). Accordingly, a vitality based on passionate ideas could not be maintained in the atmosphere of compromises which characterized a successful democracy (Tingsten 1952c). Tingsten was not modest about the development of the Swedish democracy, to say the least. He claimed that Swedish democracy was “without doubt one of the most successful in the world” (Tingsten 1955, p. 142). He portrayed Sweden as a value community that had “almost total national and religious homogeneity”, and he held that Swedish constitutional politics had been characterized by peaceful progress towards wider political freedom and a larger popular share in the government than in most other countries (p. 146). In order to show that former controversial issues had become irrelevant in Sweden, he pointed out some of his pet political topics as something that had been solved without any significant controversy. For instance, he held that the question of the nationalization of private enterprises was no longer a real question, although he had only recently been involved in a big controversy about the issue with the Social Democrats. He also maintained that the question of the monarchy had lost its political relevance, although he was against the monarchy; and that the question of national defence was no longer an issue, although he was an engaged advocate of Sweden’s NATO membership (cf. pp. 142–5). Tingsten was more in tune with his contemporaries when claiming that welfare policies and taxation were more commonly agreed upon than before, but he was taking issues with the Social Democrats on the question of planned economy, and with the bourgeois parties on the question of a major reform of pension, which eventually contributed to his resignation from Dagens Nyheter in 1960. He wanted political life to be non-rhetorical and non-ideological, but he was perhaps the most rhetorically minded ideologist of his time in Sweden. Against this background it may not come as a surprise that Tingsten held some democracy-theoretical positions that went against existing parliamentary conventions. One of his favourite topics in the 1950s was to speak for a permanent government of “all democratic parties” (samregering), because, as he explained, it would give the opportunity for all the parties (save the Communists) to “air their wishes at the policy-deciding level” and because it “could be expected to restrict the zealous, but tactically poisoned and party-dependent debate and to stimulate a willingness to discuss fundamental questions which actually exist in various quarters” (Tingsten 1955, p. 149). Another of his favourites was to propose decisive referenda. According to him, “[p]olitical enlightenment would be enhanced and the feeling of being personally engaged would increase”. Moreover, he held that “a referendum on

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an important issue would lead to a more intensive debate between the citizens themselves and not only in the press and at the election meetings” (p. 149). He not only thought that an intensive debate without ideologies was possible, but also that ideologies made a debate impossible.

REDESCRIPTIONS OF HISTORY AND THE SWEDISH DEBATE ON THE END OF IDEOLOGY The end of ideology became a debated topic in Sweden in the 1960s. The publication of the first few volumes of Tingsten’s memoirs and his public debates with some leading Social Democratic politicians certainly contributed to it, but it was especially his book Från idéer till idyll: Den lyckliga demokratien (From Ideas to Idyll: The Happy Democracy) that triggered the interest in the topic (Tingsten 1966a). The book came out in a political climate that to some extent was different from the post-war sentiment. The Social Democrats had a strong hold on political power in Sweden, but political currents were towards a left-wing radicalization, like elsewhere in the West. When Tingsten maintained that “the harmonious democracy can, in the main, be regarded as the political form of the welfare state” (p. 60), understandably enough, his left-wing critics did not question the association between democracy and the welfare state, but they were concerned about Tingsten’s way of describing this kind of political community as non-ideological (e.g. Lewin 1967, pp. 504–22). It was felt to be too conformist a view which displayed no ambition for further reforms. The critics maintained that Tingsten was advocating a harmonious view common to liberalism and disregarding the relevance of socialism by associating it too strongly with Marxism (see also Hasselberg 2013, p. 107). Tingsten’s account was retrospective and summarising in style, spelling out the historical background of de-ideologization. To him, the idea that “democracy can live only if ideologies die” (Tingsten 1966a, p. 24) had been developed in the interwar context in democratic states. It is noteworthy that he described the interwar experience not only as a conflict between democracy and dictatorship, but also as antagonism between the West and the East (pp. 24–5). By framing the interwar experience in this way, he played down the relevance of Nazism and fascism as the background for de-ideologization. It is obvious that writing in the 1960s, he participated in the struggle over the meaning of democracy, in which his target was the Communists’ and the Socialists’ attempt to present themselves as representing true democracy. Tingsten stated that “a strain of falsity and fraud was an inevitable element of debates in harmonious democracies” (Tingsten 1966a, p. 32), and that “a certain split personality” appeared among politicians in a harmonious democracy. On “Sundays [they] dreamed about a perfect society, liberal or socialist, but during the week worked for small reforms and deals they

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regarded as possible to reach” (p. 33). According to him, the harmonious democracy was to “a certain degree labelled by an irrational conservatism” (p. 35). It is typical of Tingsten that when he ostensibly discussed the flipside of the de-ideologized democracy, “shadows in the idyll” as he put it (p. 60), he ended up in defending its characteristics. He claimed that those critical to the end of ideological conflicts were longing for “the bad old times” and that they were having “fantastic or utopian hopes” motivated by “the intellectual radical idealism” (p. 67). As indicated earlier, Tingsten held different views about the ideological concepts in the alleged era of de-ideologization and in the period before it. For him, ideological concepts had been important before the time of the de-ideologized democracies and deserved to be studied empirically. In the present circumstances, however, such a study would have been of minor importance. In this sense, he claimed, the present condition was rather like the era before ideologies, that is, before Hegel and Marx, a period he characterized as an earlier time of political administration (pp. 57–8). Although Marx was always a crucial watershed for Tingsten, he held still in 1940 that Western political ideas were built on the legacy of the ideas of the French Revolution, including liberalism, conservatism and even reformist socialism. These ideological positions were not inherently separate from each other. He even admitted that socialism had had a positive impact on the ways in which “old liberalism” had developed towards “social liberalism” (Tingsten 1940b, pp. 530–31). However, such an account did not serve well when the point was to make an argument in favour of the decline of Marxism in the socialist tradition. Tingsten’s debate with the historian Kurt Samuelsson is an illustrative example in this respect. Samuelsson had been working with Tingsten at the editorially liberal Dagens Nyheter but had taken the political route towards social democracy. In his 1966 volume Är ideologierna döda? (Are Ideologies Dead?) he argued not only that ideologies were based on the values of the Enlightenment tradition, but also that liberalism, socialism and conservatism were in a historical sense not as different from each other as Tingsten presented them. He agreed with Tingsten on the difference between communism and other major ideologies, but otherwise he saw the ideological isms as being sometimes combinable and even overlapping with each other. In his view these concepts could gain different meanings while being used, which made it possible for him to maintain that de-ideologization was not as dramatic as Tingsten had claimed. Furthermore, he held that even if Tingsten’s account characterized the post-war condition in the Western welfare states, it did not have to mean that a de-ideologized condition would prevail (Samuelsson 1966, pp. 83–4, 229–30; see also Carlsson 1966; Torstendahl 1967). Samuelsson’s point regarding the development of ideologies was thus not significantly dif-

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ferent from the one Tingsten had made during the war. However, in his reply to Samuelsson, Tingsten claimed that in his way of defining socialism, his former colleague had made it too easy for him to argue that there was no substantial change in the way socialism had been understood over time. In other words, Tingsten argued that Samuelsson ignored the heavy Marxist nature in early twentieth-century social democracy and thus ascribed “democratic socialism” a longer and steadier history than it had (Tingsten 1966b, pp. 14–15).

TINGSTEN ON “NORDIC DEMOCRACY” Tingsten’s view of the history of ideologies and democracy and his argument on the de-ideologized democracy were shaped by his view of the interwar geopolitical and ideological circumstances in Europe. As such, this was not different from many other intellectuals and politicians of his age (see e.g. Stewart 2020, pp. 77–103), but unlike most of his continental European colleagues, he felt able to draw on the success of democratic regimes in the Nordic countries. In the context of emerging dictatorships and other autocratic regimes in the mid-thirties, the Nordic Social Democratic parties had launched a campaign in which the allegedly long tradition of democracy in the Nordic countries was elevated as a bulwark against the totalitarian threat. This idea was built on the notion that drew on the idea of ancient liberty and the Viking-age democratic rule, elaborated in the early nineteenth century. Therefore, the notion of “Nordic democracy” also gained substantial support among non-socialist politicians, intellectuals and the press (Kurunmäki 2010; Kurunmäki and Herrmann 2018; Kurunmäki 2019). Tingsten participated in this promotion of Nordic democracy in the late 1930s and during the Second World War. However, the label “Nordic democracy” did not have any notable place in his rhetoric after the war, although he contributed to the two volumes on the topic with a chapter on the role of newspapers (Tingsten 1949; 1958). It seems that the post-war positioning of Nordic/Scandinavian democracy as a democratic sphere and different from Western democracy did not fit in his political ambitions. Yet, there is still good reason to make a link between Tingsten’s idea of the end of ideologies and the notion of Nordic democracy, because his articles on Nordic democracy (Tingsten 1938) and on popular government in Norden (Tingsten 1940c) presented many of the ideas that he employed afterwards in order to describe Swedish democracy as a non-ideological, successful and happy one.11 His main purpose in these articles was to defend the existing

11 Earlier research has noted Tingsten’s role in the promotion of Nordic democracy and linked it with his critique of ideas and the notion of democracy as an over-ideology

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democratic system against totalitarian ideas. He provided an interpretation of how the contemporary parliamentary democracy had grown from that allegedly democratic tradition. Not only had he written on the victory and crisis of democracy (Tingsten 1933) but he had also investigated parliamentary procedures in a comparative perspective (Tingsten 1931) and the relationship between interpellation and a normal parliamentary agenda (Tingsten 1935). In the latter work, he used the expression “bureaucratic parliamentarism” when describing Swedish constitutional life as being a stable one due to the standing parliamentary committees and the independent status of political administration (p. 75). This interpretation was further developed in his articles on Nordic democracy and popular government to an argument in favour of a political culture that was significantly non-rhetorical, calm and bureaucratic. According to him, parliaments in the Nordic countries had functioned less than in most other countries as “platforms for glorious rhetoric and dramatic deals”. Instead, their manner of working was characterized by “passionless impartiality”, which made it appropriate to speak about “working democracy” and “matter-of-fact decisions” (Tingsten 1938, pp. 41, 50). For Tingsten, the anti-partisan and anti-rhetorical ideal was an administrative ideal: “If one views the state as an administrative apparatus without any political regard, the Nordic countries seem to qualify well in any comparison” (Tingsten 1940c, p. 75). He even claimed that rhetorical parliamentary speeches were met with suspicion and irony, and eloquence was regarded as naïve and ridiculous. Not unlike Bell later in his account of the end of ideology, Tingsten associated rhetorical style with political extremism (Tingsten 1940c, pp. 78–9; see also Kurunmäki 2014, pp. 189–90). Without any reflection on ideologies or references to what came to be idékritik in these accounts of Swedish parliamentary politics,12 Tingsten provided arguments that we can find in his later rhetoric of the de-ideologized democracy. At least three thematic similarities between these earlier writings and his campaign for the end of ideology can be noted. First, Tingsten was arguing against totalitarian doctrines in both cases. What was different between the late 1930s and the Cold War era was that he did not regard fascism and Nazism as relevant threats in the latter period. Second, his main concern in (Kurunmäki and Strang 2010; Strang 2010), but it has not made the link between his early writings and the end of ideology thesis. When the link between Tingsten of the 1930s and the end of ideology has been made it has not been based on his own writings, but, instead, on his intellectual relationship with Gunnar and Alva Myrdal and their idea of “social engineering” (Hasselberg 2013). 12 Although he ostensibly wrote about Nordic parliaments, all his examples dealt with the Swedish parliamentary life.

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both cases was the defence of democracy, and there the idea of a community of shared values was of immense importance. A crucial precondition of such a value community was a gradual development of democratization, which was also one of the key notions in Lipset’s well-known account of the conditions of democratization (Lipset 1959; cf. Tingsten 1940b, pp. 530–31). Third, Tingsten idealized a non-rhetorical, matter-of-fact political culture both in his account of Nordic democracy and in his campaign for the end of ideology. As we have seen, this also included the idea that all political parties (save the Communists) should be involved in governing, an idea that was his post-war application of the idealized view of the interwar procedure of committee-based parliamentary procedure in the absence of strong governments. It is noteworthy that the political role of parliamentary opposition did not seem to bother him.

THE COLD WAR PROMOTION OF “NORDIC DEMOCRACY” AND THE END OF IDEOLOGY After the Second World War, the notion of Nordic/Scandinavian democracy was branded as an exemplary democracy in some scholarly anthologies directed at a broad audience. The purpose was to present this particular democracy as both different and better than what could be found in the communist East or the capitalist West. For instance, Hal Koch and Alf Ross, the Danish professors who edited the 1949 volume Nordisk demokrati, maintained that Nordic democracy was beyond the West–East division because it was different from other political cultures (Koch and Ross 1949, p. xiv). In the epilogue of the book “Between East and West”, K. K. Steincke, a Danish Social Democrat and minister in several interwar cabinets, maintained boldly that “[i]t is thus not Norden that should learn from East or West, but Russia and America who could learn from the Nordic democracies; the champions of peace, freedom and social policy in the midst of a chaos and delirious values” (Steincke 1949, p. 458). The middle way position was also evident in the book bearing the name Scandinavia: Between East and West (1950). The editor of the book, Henning Friis, the advisor to the Danish Ministry of Social Affairs, explained that the title of the book was “based on the conception that Scandinavian culture is a distinctive culture somewhere between that of free-enterprise democracy in the United States and that of the Communist dictatorship in Soviet Russia” (Friis 1950a, p. x). Despite the explicit attempts to position Scandinavia between East and West, and despite some critical comments on Western democracy (e.g. Steincke 1949, p. 456), it was obvious that the middle way position furthered here belonged to the Western hemisphere of the political map. Although the editors of Nordisk demokrati held that Nordic democracy could be found between New York and Moscow, they nevertheless maintained that this democracy

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belonged to the Western European culture which was under attack from the East (Koch and Ross 1949, p. xiv). It is also indicative that Scandinavia: Between East and West as well as the 1958 volume Scandinavian Democracy: Development of Democratic Thought & Institutions in Denmark, Norway and Sweden were published in cooperation with The American–Scandinavian Foundation. The editor of the latter volume, University of London Professor J. A. Lauwerys, was explicit about the whereabouts of Scandinavian democracy, as he stated that the book presented “an account of the special manner in which the democratic principles upon which Western society is founded operate in Scandinavian countries” (Lauwerys 1958, p. 7). Although these West-leaning middle-way formulations certainly fit well in a general picture of the end of ideology, they alone cannot be regarded as making a case in favour or against a considerable similarity between the promotion of Nordic democracy and the end of ideology. It should be kept in mind that the end of ideology debate dealt less with the relationship between East and West than with the relationship between “Eastern” political ideas and “Western” political ideas in the West. A closer look at how Nordic/ Scandinavian democracy was characterized is needed before it is possible to present an interpretation on the relationship between the rhetoric of the end of ideology and Nordic democracy. The post-war literature of Nordic or Scandinavian democracy did not contain any explicit statement on the end of ideology but it is remarkably easy to find formulations in the promotion of Nordic democracy that bore a considerable resemblance to the language aimed at advancing the idea of the end of ideology. Some obvious links between the two include a general view of democracy as a procedure, the idea of gradual democratization and non-rhetorical political culture, as well as the notion of a reduced left–right division. In assessing similarities, it is worth noting that many of Tingsten’s views were shared among his contemporaries in Sweden and that some of his associates were writing in the volumes discussed here. We should also consider that two of the three volumes on Nordic or Scandinavian democracy discussed here were published before Tingsten started his explicit campaign for the idea of de-ideologized political culture. The editors of the 1949 volume on Nordic democracy pointed out that the purpose of the book was not to present any “pure theory” of democracy because there was no place for such “orthodoxy” regarding the ways in which Nordic democracy should be understood (Koch and Ross 1949, p. xiv). What they had in mind was that it was not possible to define the right content of democratic decisions. A procedural conception of democracy had been at the core of Ross’ book Hvorfor demokrati? (Why Democracy?) in 1946. In his chapter in the 1949 volume on Nordic democracy, he held that democracy was not the same in the West and in the East. Arguing against “economic democ-

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racy”, he maintained that one could be a democrat without being a socialist, or a socialist without being a democrat. As a social democrat, one could be both (Ross 1949, pp. 192–4, 203). A procedural conception of democracy was advocated in the volume also by the Swedish philosopher Ingemar Hedenius, a close friend of Tingsten and an occasional participant in the CCF conferences (Hedenius 1949, p. 222; see also Petersson 2013, p. 134). Hedenius was the most important representative of the philosophical school known as value nihilism in post-war Sweden. Furthermore, the notion of historical anchorage of democracy and its rational and non-rhetorical character had a central place in the works of Nils Herlitz, Professor of Public Law and a Conservative MP. He was the main figure in the cultural and publicist activities organized by the Nordic Association in Sweden in the 1930s, having been elaborating the idea of an ancient Nordic tradition of freedom and democracy (e.g. Herlitz 1933). His volume Sweden: A Modern Democracy on Ancient Foundations was a statement on the political stability of Swedish democracy, directed to a US audience (Herlitz 1939). In that book, and in the 1949 volume on Nordic democracy, Herlitz put forward the idea of social solidarity and a non-debating matter-of-fact characteristic of the Swedish political culture. Like Tingsten, he based his view of the parliamentary political life in Sweden on the central role of parliamentary committees and on the ostensibly compromising nature of political conduct in the country (Herlitz 1949, pp. 45, 57; Herlitz 1939, p. 45; see also Kurunmäki 2019, p. 159). Interpretations we know from Tingsten were also present in the volume Scandinavia: Between East and West. Friis, the editor of the book, mentioned that his account “Scandinavian Democracy” was drawn from Tingsten’s 1940 article on popular rule in the Nordic countries as well as on the above discussed volume on Nordic democracy. He held that the Marxist ideology had given way to “a spirit of gradual reform” (Friis 1950b, p. 8), except for in Norway. Admitting that political discussion had been somewhat tense in Sweden after the war because of the Social Democrats’ programme in which the socialization of certain industries had a prominent place, he nevertheless concluded that the Swedish government had been “occupied chiefly with day-to-day policy and with broad social welfare reforms that have been passed by nearly unan-

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imous vote in parliament” (p. 16).13 Accordingly, he built an argument which could have come from an apologist of the end of ideology: The general picture in all three countries is the same: The Social Democratic parties have had to postpone the prosecution of their more far-reaching nationalization programs, resigning themselves to immediate necessities and to the expansion of their traditional social welfare policy. The other parties have accepted various kinds of government intervention that they formerly would have denounced. They are also supporting welfare measures that they would never have considered twenty years ago. The ideological dispute between free enterprise and socialism is still alive, but the antagonism has a tendency to disappear or change its character when the dispute is carried over from the ideological to the concrete level. (p. 17)

Much of the argumentation regarding both Scandinavian democracy and the end of ideology pivoted around the question of the political nature of the labour movement, and especially the Social Democratic parties, the point of departure being a relative weakness of the Communists in the Scandinavian countries. Friis maintained that in contrast to large parts of Western Europe where the working class was “almost a separate nation”, labour in Scandinavia had developed an active cooperative relationship with the other classes (p. 20). In the preface of the same volume, the President of the American–Scandinavian Foundation, Lithgow Osborne maintained that the political philosophy of the Scandinavian Social Democratic parties was “based on the doctrines of Karl Marx at least as much as is that of the Kremlin Communists”. He wanted to dramatise the Scandinavian exceptionality, but it is also possible to suggest that he wanted to “save” Marx from the sole ownership of the Communists. Nevertheless, his conclusion was basically the same as what we find in Friis’ account, as he wrote that “[i]t may be doubted whether any government controlled by parties of the Right in any Scandinavian country, even though it had a large parliamentary majority, would undo any of the so called socialistic measures now on the statute books” (Osborne 1950, p. vi). He described the ideological situation in Scandinavia in the same manner as what the end of ideology apologists would do just a couple of years later, when he concluded that there “will be no plunge into extremism in the course of which the rights of individuals are thrown overboard” because it was not “the Scandinavian way” (p. vi). Regardless of the similarities in the rhetoric discussed above, the most apparent “end of ideology-type” of view of Scandinavian democracy can 13 An important background factor for this solidarity, Friis held, was “the homogeneity of the countries with respect to race, nationality, language, religion and education” (1950b, p. 18). It is the very same notion we find when Tingsten was explaining the background for a de-ideologized “happy democracy”.

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be found in Jörgen Westerståhl’s contributions to the 1949 volume Nordisk demokrati and the 1958 volume Scandinavian Democracy. It is not surprising as such. Westerståhl was Tingsten’s former student and a family friend. He developed further many of the latter’s research interests and became a specialist in the study of political opinions and electoral behaviour. He emphasized the role of political leaders rather than citizens’ active political participation in the welfare state. His analysis of the political situation described a democracy for the people rather than a democracy by the people, a “service democracy”, as he coined it. The Swedish political scientist Olof Petersson has maintained that Westerståhl spelled out a Social Democratic view of the welfare state democracy (Petersson 2011, pp. 200–207; Petersson 2013, pp. 285–6). Westerståhl’s point in the book on Nordic democracy was that political parties had come closer to each other in Sweden. The Social Democrats were abandoning “the ideology of socialization” (socialiseringsidelogien) and the Liberals had “social liberalism” as their preference (Westerståhl 1949, pp. 98, 101). Quite like Tingsten, Westerståhl held that Swedish political parties, except for the Communists, were moving towards the middle; the right–left dichotomy and thus the difference between the Social Democrats and bourgeois parties was becoming less significant. As a conclusion, he argued that a common view of the ideological dispute between free markets and socialism tended to disappear when the political struggle was moved from an ideological level to a concrete one (pp. 102–4). In 1952, Westerståhl was one of the scholars invited to write a rejoinder to Tingsten’s above-mentioned three newspaper articles on the conditions of democracy. The title of his comment was tellingly “Democracy: form or content?” It spelt out his emphasis on the role of political elite and interest organizations in contemporary democracy when political parties aimed to catch marginal voters rather than appealing to ideological programmes. He held that “the power of party leadership has grown bigger and party confrontations have become de-ideologized”. According to him, this elite perspective could also explain “the calmness” (lugnet) of contemporary democracy in Sweden (Westerståhl 1952). Four years later, in presenting his elite theoretical view of democracy in the same newspaper, he maintained that the democratic debate was no longer of a principled character, but was of a technical character and that ideological contests had been replaced by parties appealing to all citizens. In accordance with his idea of service democracy, he held that an old-fashioned utopian view of solving societal problems had been replaced by a general demand for services. Tingsten was pleased with Westerståhl’s analysis and maintained that it lent support to his view, according to which “ideologies and programs had in the main withered” (quoted in Petersson 2011, p. 204).

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Westerståhl’s chapter in the 1958 volume on Scandinavian democracy pointed at the international recognition this democracy had gained thanks to the stability it had shown. He held that popular governments in Scandinavia had been free of any serious attacks from within and that it had been possible to provide social security without giving up democratic liberties (Westerståhl 1958, pp. 404–5). Like Tingsten in his articles in 1938 and 1940, he referred to the compromising character of Scandinavian politics and noted that political debates in Sweden were more realistic than elsewhere, that the social composition of the MPs was broader than elsewhere; and that the parliamentary work was done in committees and not in plenary debates (pp. 406–7). Noting the plenary debates, though, he held that the “debate in the chamber plays an insignificant part. Discussion is noted for detail and pertinence rather than for spirit and rhetoric” (p. 407). Furthermore, he maintained that “most of the Scandinavian parties started out by addressing themselves to certain homogenous and active ideological or interest groups within the electorate. Since then, the need to compete for marginal vote has increasingly come to replace loyalty to the aims of the party’s original ‘shock troops’” (p. 408). According to him, “the dividing lines between the various parties have in many instances actually disappeared” and the emphasis tended to shift “from the question of what should be done, to who should do it” (p. 409). Like Tingsten, Westerståhl was discussing the consequences of the kind of democracy that was well organized and effective, that is, democracy in which the work of the representative assemblies was “marked by pertinence and thoroughness” and in which “administration has reached a high level of competence and objectivity”. This meant, he explained, that “Scandinavian democracy [had] moved a long way from the individualistic ideas put forward with such enthusiasm by the early champions of popular government”. Did it mean, he asked, that “[a] certain rigidity and inflexibility seems to have settled over Scandinavian politics” or, rather, that this development was “part of a generalized trend within Western society, Scandinavia being merely ahead of its neighbours” (p. 410)?

CONCLUDING REMARKS Westerståhl’s question above is as much a conclusion as is the phrase “the end of ideology” with a question mark. It states two things that may serve as the starting point for my concluding remarks. First, there was a relatively widely shared assumption among Western intellectuals that political conduct was moving in a direction in which solving practical issues was far more common than formulating and following principled convictions. Second, the Scandinavian countries were regarded as front-runners in that development.

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We can find these two ideas behind the end of ideology thesis and the rhetoric of Nordic/Scandinavian democracy. They were both based on the idea that there was room for a variety of political opinions, as long as one was not challenging the idea of shared democratic values, including the primacy of procedural conception of democracy. It was possible to pick up the rhetoric of a welfare statist and non-ideological political culture for conservative purposes, for instance, in order to support an existing political constitution, and for social democratic ambitions to support thorough social reforms while keeping a distance from communism. Furthermore, although it is quite easy to find a self-conscious social democratic undertone in many accounts of the Nordic/Scandinavian particularity of democracy, it was still quite possible for a Liberal (e.g. Tingsten) or a Conservative (e.g. Herlitz) to contribute to this branding. In the first place, the approach was about promoting the political culture of the Scandinavian countries, which lent it a nationalist aspect within the countries in question, as there was a long tradition of using “Nordic/Scandinavian” and “Swedish” interchangeably without losing the national point. To the rest of the world, in turn, it ostensibly gave the impression of not being about national branding at all. Turning to the role of Herbert Tingsten, I have pointed out some intellectual and personal contacts between him and post-war Swedish promoters of Nordic democracy as well as some prominent international figures behind the end of ideology idea such as Shils and Lipset. However, my intention has not been to write about the political networks that formed an important context for the analysed brands political rhetoric; rather, my intention has been to show that the idea which Tingsten dressed in the language of de-ideologization was present in the publications that were branding Nordic/Scandinavian democracy. The fact that Tingsten did not have any prominent place in that branding is most likely because he felt that in the emerging Cold War context, the middle-way connotation that was postulated in the rhetoric of Nordic democracy did not suit his (geo)political purposes. Nevertheless, the pragmatic and de-ideologized content ascribed to that middle way was by and large the same as he had been advocating. Although anti-totalitarianism set the parameters both for the end of ideology thesis and the branding of Nordic democracy, and although these rhetorical approaches were based on a shared view of the importance of procedural democracy, I think it is possible to claim that what brought these two approaches together was the central place that was given to the notion of welfare policies. The concept of the welfare state was a contested one (Edling 2019a, p. 1) but it is nevertheless noteworthy how much the claim of the stability of a de-ideologized democracy was built on the notion of welfare policies both in the rhetoric of Nordic democracy and in the arguments supporting the end of ideology. As mentioned earlier, Tingsten maintained that harmonious

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democracy could be regarded as “the political form of the welfare state”. Moreover, the history of the notion of the welfare state and the promotion of Nordic democracy had been politically interlinked since the time of the campaign against totalitarian regimes in the 1930s (Kurunmäki and Strang 2010, pp. 10–11; Edling 2019a, pp. 5–6). It was not only important for Swedish and Nordic self-esteem regarding the promotion of Nordic/Scandinavian democracy, but it also provided credibility internationally. It also matched well with the argument that the de-ideologization had developed further in those political cultures in which democracy was historically anchored and where advanced welfare policies were in place. My interpretation thus lends support to those accounts of “the Cold War liberalism” in which both freedom and the welfare state have been pointed out as important characteristics of that liberalism (e.g. Müller 2008, pp. 55–7). This also means that, in my reading, the end of the ideology thesis cannot be reduced to a symptom of the CIA-directed “cultural Cold War” (cf. Stonor Saunders 1999; Scott-Smith and Krabbendam 2003). It has been held that the CCF never gained much foothold in Scandinavia because the preference among the Scandinavian activists was in a social democratic way of demarcating the influence of communism (Krabbendam and Scott-Smith 2003, p. 8). For instance, the CCF conferences in Stockholm (1952), Gothenburg (1955) and Copenhagen (1956) have been characterized as fiascos because of the lack of anti-communist enthusiasm and the prominence of participants who had “neutralist” sympathies (Philipsen 2003, pp. 241–4). Although we cannot reduce the purpose of the CCF merely to the rhetoric of de-ideologization, what this line of interpretation misses is the fact that the allegedly social democratic Scandinavian way of fighting communism was a crucial aspect of the end of ideology campaign, as we have learned also from Shils and Lipset. The “neutralist sympathies” notwithstanding, it is quite possible to suggest that the Cold War-era promotion of Scandinavian/ Nordic democracy should be understood as a variant of the end of ideology thesis dressed in the language of the locals without blending in the rhetoric that nevertheless had its ideological connotations. The key accounts of the end of ideology analysed in this study also lend support to my interpretation that the end of ideology was the idealized Nordic democracy come true.

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Petersson, O. (2011), Statsvetaren. Jörgen Westerståhl och demokratins århundrade, Stockholm: SNS Förlag. Petersson, O. (2013), Herbert Tingsten. Vetenskapsmannen, Stockholm: Atlantis. Philipsen, I. (2003), ‘Out of tune: the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Denmark, 1953–1960’ in G. Scott-Smith and H. Krabbendam (eds), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 237–53. Popper, K. (2003) [1945], The Open Society and Its Enemies. Volume One: The Spell of Plato, London and New York: Routledge. Rainio-Niemi, J. (2014), The Ideological Cold War: The Politics of Neutrality in Austria and Finland, New York and London: Routledge. Ross, A. (1946), Hvorfor Demokrati?, København: Munksgaard. Ross, A. (1949), ‘Hvad er demokrati?’, in H. Koch and A. Ross (eds), Nordisk demokrati, Oslo: Halvorsen & Larsen; Stockholm: Natur och Kultur; København: Westermann, pp. 191–206. Rousseas, S. W. and J. Farganis (1963), ‘American politics and the end of ideology’, The British Journal of Sociology, 14 (4), 347–62. Samuelsson, K. (1966), Är ideologierna döda?, Stockholm: Bokförlaget Aldus/ Bonniers. Scott-Smith, G. (2002), ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the end of ideology and the 1955 Milan Conference: “defining the parameters of discourse”’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37 (3), 437–55. Scott-Smith, G. and H. Krabbendam (eds) (2003), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960, London and New York: Routledge. Shils, E. (1955), ‘The end of ideology?’, Encounter, 5 (November), 52–8. Sigurdson, O. (2000), Den lyckliga filosofin – etik och politik hos Hägerström, Tingsten, makarna Myrdal och Hedenius, Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion. Skovdahl, B. (1992), Tingsten, totalitarismen och ideologierna, Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion. Steincke, K. K. (1949), ‘Mellem Øst og Vest’, in H. Koch and A. Ross (eds), Nordisk demokrati, Oslo: Halvorsen & Larsen; Stockholm: Natur och Kultur; København: Westermann, pp. 452–8. Stewart, I. (2020), Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stonor-Saunders, F. (1999), The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: The New Press. Strand, D. (2016), ‘No alternatives: the end of ideology in the 1950s and the post-political world of the 1990s’, doctoral thesis, Stockholm University. Strang, J. (2010), ‘Why Nordic democracy? The Scandinavian value nihilists and the crisis of democracy’, in J. Kurunmäki and J. Strang (eds), Rhetorics of Nordic Democracy, Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, pp. 83–113. Stråth, B. (2013), ‘Ideology and conceptual history’, in M. Freeden, L. T. Sargent and M. Stears (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–19. Tingsten, H. (1931), ‘Utredning rörande parlamentens arbetssätt i vissa främmande länder’, in Betänkande med förslag angående vissa ändringar i Riksdagens arbetsformer m.m., Stockholm: Statens offentliga utredningar, 1931: 26, pp. 170–94. Tingsten, H. (1933), Demokratiens seger och kris. Vår egen tids historia 1880–1930, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag.

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Tingsten, H. (1935), Utredning angående införande av ett dagordningsinstitut m.m., Stockholm: Statens offentliga utredningar 1935:21. Tingsten, H. (1938), ‘Nordisk demokrati’, Nordens kalender, 9, 41–50. Tingsten, H. (1939), De konservativa idéerna, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag. Tingsten, H. (1940a), ‘Svensk demokrati i samling’, Tiden, 32 (5), 257–62. Tingsten, H. (1940b), ‘1789–1940. En idéhistorisk återblick’, Tiden, 32, 525–37. Tingsten, H. (1940c), ‘Folkstyret i Norden’, in K. Perander (ed.), Nordisk gemenskap, Stockholm: Kooperativa förbundets bokförlag, pp. 50–83. Tingsten, H. (1945), Demokratiens problem, Stockholm: Norstedts. Tingsten, H. (1949), ‘Pressen’, in H. Koch and A. Ross (eds), Nordisk demokrati, Oslo: Halvorsen & Larsen; Stockholm: Natur och Kultur; København: Westermann, pp. 253–69. Tingsten, H. (1951), Tredje ståndpunkten – en orimlighet, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag. Tingsten, H. (1952a), ‘Demokratin: fulländing eller förfall’, Dagens Nyheter, 27 July. Tingsten, H. (1952b), ‘Den lyckade demokratin’, Dagens Nyheter, 29 July. Tingsten, H. (1952c), ‘En stabil och vital demokrati?’, Dagens Nyheter, 31 July. Tingsten, H. (1955), ‘Stability and vitality in Swedish democracy’, The Political Quarterly, 26 (2), 140–51. Tingsten, H. (1958), ‘The press’, in J. A. Lauwerys (ed.), Scandinavian Democracy: Development of Democratic Thought & Institutions in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Copenhagen: The Danish Institute, The Norwegian Office of Cultural Relations, The Swedish Institute, The American–Scandinavian Foundation, pp. 316–28. Tingsten, H. (1963 [1941]), Åsikter och motiv. Essayer i statsvetenskapliga, politiska och litterära ämnen, Stockholm: Aldus/Bonniers. Tingsten, H. (1965), The Problem of Democracy, Totowa, NJ: The Bedminster Press. Tingsten, H. (1966a), Från idéer till idyll: Den lyckliga demokratien, Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag. Tingsten, H. (1966b), Strid kring idyllen, Stockholm: Norstedts. Tingsten, H. (1967a [1941]), Den svenska socialdemokratins idéutveckling 1, Stockholm: Aldus/Bonnier. Tingsten, H. (1967b [1941]), Den svenska socialdemokratins idéutveckling 2, Stockholm: Aldus/Bonnier. Torstendahl, R. (1967), ‘Historikern inför ideologierna: problemställningar utifrån debatten om ideologiernas död’, Scandia, 33 (2), 217–49. Wasserman, L. (1941), Handbook of Political ‘Isms’, New York: Association Press. Waxman, C. I. (ed.) (1968), The End of Ideology Debate, New York: Funk and Wagnells. Westerståhl, J. (1949), ‘Det Svenska partiväsendet’, in H. Koch and A. Ross (eds), Nordisk demokrati, Oslo: Halvorsen & Larsen; Stockholm: Natur och Kultur; København: Westermann, pp. 88–104. Westerståhl, J. (1952), ‘Demokrati: form eller innehåll?’, Dagens Nyheter, 7 August. Westerståhl, J. (1958), ‘Some general observations on Scandinavian democracy’, in J. A. Lauwerys (ed.), Scandinavian Democracy: Development of Democratic Thought & Institutions in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Copenhagen: The Danish Institute, The Norwegian Office of Cultural Relations, The Swedish Institute, The American– Scandinavian Foundation, pp. 400–410. Wootton, B. (2009 [1942]), ‘A plague on all your isms’, The Political Quarterly, 80 (s1), S67–S75.

3. National interest as a limit to democracy: the rhetoric of Finnish and Swedish employers in the debates on ‘enterprise democracy’ during the 1960s and 1970s Ilkka Kärrylä INTRODUCTION The idea of applying democratic principles and practices to the ‘economic’ sphere and to working life has been a persistent theme in political thought and discourse, but since the 1980s it has been left rather marginal in most Western countries (Rothstein 2012). In the case of Sweden, this becomes evident, for example, when looking at party programmes and the Royal Library’s database of digitized newspapers (Figure 3.1). It seems perplexing that the economic life has fallen out from the potential scope of democracy, even though democracy has been the main principle of legitimizing political power since the end of the Second World War (Dunn 2005: 15; Müller 2011: 3–5).1 In the economic sphere, democracy does not have the same function. Political entities have power to regulate the economy, but more often the legitimacy of economic power is based on the principle of private ownership, the free market as the most efficient allocator of resources, and apolitical expertise governing the market. Today’s mainstream Western conception of society views democracy, at least implicitly, as belonging to the ‘political’ sphere and is silent about extending it elsewhere. Democracy is primarily a procedural concept denoting institutions such as universal suffrage and parliamentary representation, as well as rights such as freedom of speech, opinion and assembly. This concep1 The prevailing conception of democracy has been questioned, for example, by various autocratic regimes, but very few have discarded the term itself. This is exemplified in the use of notions like ‘people’s democracy’ during the Cold War and ‘illiberal democracy’ more recently.

47

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tion could be called ‘liberal’ or ‘capitalist’ democracy (Dryzek 1996; Dunn 2005; Teivainen 2002).

Source: http://​tidningar​.kb​.se/​.

Figure 3.1

Number of articles with the terms ‘ekonomisk demokrati’, ‘industriell demokrati’ and ‘företagsdemokrati’ in the Swedish database of digital newspapers 1910–2020

The fact that concepts like ‘economic democracy’ have nearly vanished from the political agenda testifies to the contested nature of democracy and the welfare state. We can see the contingent origins of our current conceptions by looking at a point in history when democracy was a more contested concept. In addition to democratic institutions, it is essential to analyse the language through which democracy has been defined. In this chapter, I examine how labour market organizations struggled over the meaning and value of the concept ‘enterprise democracy’2 in Finland and Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s – a period of heated debates on extending democracy to new spheres

2 I have chosen enterprise democracy as a translation for terms that do not have established equivalents in English. Finnish ‘yritysdemokratia’ and Swedish ‘företagsdemokrati’ meant democracy in all companies or corporations and were often distinguished from ‘industrial democracy’, which was criticized for only implying heavy industry. Enterprise democracy is sometimes used as a translation in literature (e.g. Logue 1991). My aim is to examine what enterprise democracy has meant historically. Therefore, I avoid defining the concept beforehand apart from the semantic truism that it means applying some type of democracy within enterprises and workplaces.

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of life like schools, prisons and local communities (Gilcher-Holtey 2018). The objective of democratizing the economy and working life also resurfaced transnationally, for example due to the rise of left-wing radicalism. This shows as a major peak in the use of the term enterprise democracy in Swedish newspapers. In the Finnish and Swedish debates on enterprise democracy, trade unions, employer organizations and political parties had different objectives and definitions regarding its meaning. Labour market organizations were the most important stakeholders in the issue and took part in shaping the meaning and practices of enterprise democracy. In this chapter, I focus on employer conceptions of the concept, which have strong continuities with today’s ideas. My main source material consists of public statements by employer confederations, Finnish STK (Suomen työnantajain keskusliitto) and Swedish SAF (Svenska arbetsgivareförening). In the debate at hand, published sources include more elaborate and explicit argumentation than archival material, as the former seek justification from a broader audience. In public rhetoric, the employers appear quite united internally, even though different branches of business did not make up a monolithic group. However, bringing out detailed contradictions on the employer side is not possible within this study. To analyse the struggle over enterprise democracy, I utilize a framework based on conceptual history and rhetorical analysis. I treat political concepts as contested and historically contingent. They are used as tools in political struggles, which shape their meanings and valuations as well as contribute to constituting reality (Koselleck 2011 [1972]; Skinner 2002: 145–50). I will therefore examine how different agents used and defined enterprise democracy, and how they legitimized their views. Following Quentin Skinner, I look at three aspects of conceptual struggles: criteria of application, range of reference and range of attitudes (Skinner 2002: 160–72). To better explain the different uses of concepts, their change and disappearance, I sketch out broader webs of beliefs of historical actors (Bevir 1999). These beliefs include, for example, different conceptions of society and working life as well as recurring forms of beliefs that fall into Albert O. Hirschman’s (1991) typology of reactionary argumentation. Lastly, I will pay attention to value hierarchies that could legitimize and delegitimize different conceptions of enterprise democracy (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 80–83). In this respect, the tension between the concepts of democracy and competitiveness as components of the national interest becomes noteworthy. Swedish historian Jenny Andersson (2006) has claimed that economic growth and competitiveness have been priorities in the Social Democratic ideology. Among Finnish scholars, the interpretation of economic necessities dictating the common interest and the scope of ‘politics’ is even more common (Alapuro 2010; Kettunen 2008: 88–9; Kosonen 1998: 121; Kyntäjä 1993: 260–65; Pekkarinen & Vartiainen 1993: 51–7).

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I begin the chapter by taking a brief look at how enterprise democracy became an important political question in the 1960s. In the following two sections, I will examine the struggle over the concrete meaning and practical applications of enterprise democracy in Finland and Sweden from the employer’s viewpoint. The next sections focus on the value hierarchies and background beliefs related to different versions of enterprise democracy, ultimately determining their desirability and viability. Finally, I will analyse the outcome of the conceptual struggle and assess which versions of enterprise democracy gained the upper hand by the end of the 1970s. This also provides insights into the prevalence of current liberal or capitalist conceptions of democracy.

THE ORIGINS OF ENTERPRISE DEMOCRACY Previous research has identified three ‘waves’ of debate on democratization of the economy and workplaces in Europe. The first of these took place immediately after the First World War, and mostly revolved around the concept of ‘industrial democracy’. Its contested meanings had roots in socialist and anarchist thought, which sought to democratize workplaces and labour market relations (Lundh 1987: 26; see also Lichtenstein & Harris 1993; Schiller 1988, 1991).3 Employers and right-wing parties had promoted their own ideas of democracy in working life since the 19th century. They were linked to social liberal and paternalistic ideas of worker welfare. Taking care of employees, for example by pension and healthcare plans, was believed to decrease strikes and increase efficiency. They also provided a counter-strategy against the potentially radical trade union movement. In the United States, some enterprises shared profits with their employees, but these practices were not widely adopted in the Nordic countries (Lundh 1987: 47–54; see also Harris 1993; Schiller 1991). In Finland, progressive corporate managers introduced terms like ‘industrial companionship’ and ‘industrial constitutionalism’, which usually referred to some kind of collective bargaining systems (Turunen 1987). In Sweden, a Social Democratic government appointed a committee on industrial democracy in 1920, but its proposal for consultative works councils in enterprises was left unrealized (Lundh 1987). For Swedish Social Democrats, extending political democracy and establishing social and economic democracy in order to create a fully democratic society were important objectives throughout the interwar era (Friberg 2012). In Finland, ‘economic’ and ‘industrial’ democracy became key political concepts a little later. The

3 Industrial democracy was apparently introduced by anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and used for example by the English Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb as well as many American trade unionists in the 19th century.

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political situation and labour market relations differed in many respects: the Finnish Social Democrats were relatively weak after the 1918 Civil War, and a system of collective bargaining was accepted by employers only in 1944. The extension of democracy from ‘political’ to other spheres did figure in the Finnish labour movement’s programmatic rhetoric. There were demands for workers councils, control of production, and the institutionalization of labour market relations, but they did not lead to anything concrete during the interwar period (Bruun, Kettunen & Turunen 1990; Kettunen 1986, 272–80). The second wave of debate throughout Western Europe came after the Second World War. Swedish Social Democrats demanded employee influence within companies in their 1944 platform and post-war programme, but its content was left quite vague.4 In 1946, labour market organizations reached an agreement on works councils, which were bodies of cooperative consultation in the fashion proposed by the committee of the 1920s (Schiller 1974: 65–71; Simonson 1988: 29–31). Similar bodies were also established in other European countries, such as Germany and Italy (Knudsen 1995: 31–50; Schiller 1991: 114–15; Streeck 1995: 313–16). The use of the concepts economic and industrial democracy also increased in Finland. There was debate on the planned economy, and works councils or ‘production committees’ were established in 1946 by legislation. Finnish employers insisted they should remain bodies of cooperative consultation that contributed to increasing the efficiency of industrial production (Bergholm 2005: 77–82; Kettunen 1994: 332–4; Mansner 1984; Soikkanen 1991: 483–9; Turunen 1990). In the 1950s, demands for democratization of workplaces weakened, and the role of existing works councils diminished in many countries (Streeck 1995: 317–18). In Sweden, the decade was characterized by collaboration between labour and capital, which was facilitated by steady economic growth (Östberg 2002; Sassoon 1996). In Finland, the situation was more conflictual, but demands for democratization were not voiced even during the general strike of 1956. In the 1960s, ideas of democratizing working life re-emerged around Europe. Worker protests against monotonous industrial work and lack of influence increased. Demands for democratization were strengthened by new transnational movements, such as the New Left, which challenged the old socialist parties. They criticized the bureaucracy and consumerism of Western societies as well as alienating practices of industrial production (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005 [1999]: 169–72; Eley 2002: 351–3; Östberg 2002; Sassoon 1996; Stråth 1998; Streeck 1995: 321–2; Streeck 2014: 12–18). In Sweden, the confederation of trade unions (LO) at first retained a moderate stance, as workplace democracy could potentially conflict with collective interest

4

Efterkrigsprogrammet: 10.

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representation and solidaristic wage policy (LO 1961; Simonson 1988: 34–8; Stråth 1998: 79–81). The debate on enterprise democracy, which had now replaced the term industrial democracy, was intensified by centre-right parties and employer organizations. In the mid-1960s, the Confederation of Swedish Employers (SAF) began to promote its own version of enterprise democracy.5 Employers and centre-right parties advocated enterprise democracy based on their traditional policy of cooperation in workplaces, aiming to increase work satisfaction and the sense of a common interest. This echoed older paternalistic and social liberal principles of management. In Sweden, some of the new ideas were brought into the renewed agreement on works councils in 1966, which stayed within the traditional bounds of cooperation. LO still favoured democracy at workplaces while calls for more substantial employee influence were increasing. In 1969, a growing number of parliamentary motions on enterprise democracy were given by different parties. LO took a more critical stance towards the works council agreement and began to prepare a report on enterprise democracy. After a major wildcat strike at the state-owned LKAB mine at the turn of 1970, enterprise democracy became a top theme in Swedish public debate. In the following year, a state committee on labour law (Arbetsrättskommittéen) was appointed to investigate enterprise democracy and codetermination (Pontusson 1992: 161–7; Stråth 1998: 81–91, 120–22; see also Schiller 1988; Simonson 1988). In Finland, there had been mild discussion on industrial or enterprise democracy since the early 1960s, but it mostly dealt with extending the mandate of production committees. A more intense debate began in 1966 when the Social Democrats gained a landslide victory in parliamentary elections, after seven years in opposition and severe internal contradictions. Due to the active stance of the Social Democrats, a state committee was appointed, and a legislation process initiated in 1967, four years before Sweden. The committee finished its work in March 1970 without very concrete proposals. Central labour market organizations had attempted an agreement along consultative lines in 1969, but it was buried due to trade union opposition. Negotiation continued within a second state committee, and finding a satisfactory solution took several years (Bergholm 2018; Kärrylä 2016; Mansner 1990).



5

Rhenman 1968 [1964]; SAF 1965.

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THE CRITERIA OF ENTERPRISE DEMOCRACY: THE POWER OF EMPLOYEES OR COOPERATIVE CONSULTATION? In the Finnish and Swedish debates on enterprise democracy, there was wide agreement over a fundamental criterion of democracy and enterprise democracy, namely the possibility of citizens to influence decisions concerning their own life. This principle was a key slogan of aspirations to democratize different walks of life, which was discussed in Western countries in the 1960s especially by the New Left. Belief in the growing demands of citizens and employees was central for social scientists who were developing ways of reforming working life. Worker protests in the 1960s were explained, for example, by the ‘hierarchy of needs’ introduced by sociologist Abraham Maslow: when basic material needs have been fulfilled, mental or spiritual needs become the most important. These include self-fulfilment and influence over one’s own life. One potential solution was found in Ralf Dahrendorf’s theory of managing social conflicts, which called for making conflicts explicit instead of suppressing them (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005 [1999]: 62–7, 169–72; Julkunen 1987: 37–42; Kärenlampi 1999: 9–15, 238–9; Kettunen 2008: 90; Mansner 1990: 431). Belief in the inevitability of linearly progressing democratization as a part of modernization was often also expressed by Finnish and Swedish social scientists. Finnish sociologist Seppo Randell, who was appointed Chairman of the State Committee on Enterprise Democracy, spoke about the theme in the business magazine Tehostaja (Effectivizer) in autumn 1968: ‘Even though I hardly believe in any “zeitgeists”, it’s impossible to deny the pursuit of democratization in many spheres of life.’6 According to Randell, youth activism in Finland and especially the Prague Spring earlier that same year signified that the movement was significant and could not be easily suppressed. Therefore, in due time, it was crucial to answer the demands for extended democracy. Employer ideas on enterprise democracy were influenced especially by the approaches of the human relations school of management, which were compatible with the democratization ideas of the time. They inspired the development of human resources (HR) management as a corporate function. In Finland, the 1970s marked the consolidation of HR in enterprises, for example with the aid of a vast amount of educational material published by the Finnish employer organization STK (Lilja 1987). The Finnish business magazine Yritystalous (Business Economy) even declared the 1970s ‘the decade of HR questions’.7

6 7

Tehostaja 8/1968: 45. Yritystalous 7/1970: 26.

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Like all management approaches, human relations aimed at increasing the efficiency of work organizations. As opposed to technical rationalization, which was believed to cause alienation and mental problems, HR emphasized the importance, even the psychological necessity, of influence and participation at the workplace. It was widely believed that contemporary workers demanded more autonomy, participation and responsibility, especially in matters concerning their everyday work (Kuokkanen 2015: 13–16; Schiller 1991: 111–12; Seeck 2008: 103–5, 151–3). Therefore, old authoritarian management styles were to be replaced with democratic ones. Drawing on a linear conception of history, many theorists and managers portrayed these old practices as antiquated in a democratizing society, where the only way to make organizations more efficient was by listening to the employees.8 In the 1960s, therefore, the belief of democratization being an intrinsic trait of a modernizing society was common and legitimized the democratization of working life (Bergholm 2014; Kärenlampi 1999: 50–51). Despite the widely shared belief in the inevitable democratization of societies, a disagreement over the criteria of enterprise democracy arose. It concerned the extent to which ordinary citizens or employees could take part in decision-making within companies: would they have actual power to make decisions or would they only be consulted beforehand? The question was essentially about the division of power in companies. Swedish historian Lars Ekdahl has described power over the economy as a latent issue in Swedish politics. The ‘Swedish model’ was based on a historical compromise between capital and labour, which approved private ownership and the employers’ right to manage and distribute work. When these principles have been questioned, such as in the planned economy debate after the Second World War, the employer side and bourgeois parties have reacted with a counter-campaign (Ekdahl 2002: 24–6; Sjöberg 2003: 212–15). To apply a distinction used in working-life studies, employers viewed enterprise democracy as a question of human resources management. It was considered a technical problem in achieving predetermined goals, and did not mean distribution of power or managing conflict as much as efficient management for the benefit of the company. The employee side’s viewpoint, in contrast, was ‘industrial relations’, which included questions of power relations and conflicting interests (Kettunen 2015: 107–9). Employers and employees in both Finland and Sweden leaned towards a similar classificatory scheme of enterprise democracy, based on international ‘models’ that gave a different amount of power to the employees. The same typology is used in most sociological and management-theoretical research E.g. Yritystalous 13/1969: 36; Yritystalous 13/1970: 29.

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on employee participation (Knudsen 1995: 8–10; Lundh 1987: 19–21). The most common terms delineating the meaning of enterprise democracy in this respect were (1) information and communication, (2) consultation or ‘co-influence’ (medinflytande/myötävaikuttaminen), (3) codetermination (medbestämmande/myötämäärääminen), and (4) employee self-governance.9 The second level after information referred to cooperative consultation, which took place, for example, in Finnish and Swedish production committees and works councils. Employee self-governance usually referred to the Yugoslavian model, where employees governed companies through workers’ councils and elected the board and managers amongst themselves.10 Codetermination was situated between these ideal types and meant that employees had a say in some decisions, for example through a German-style parity representation in governing bodies or by requiring an agreement before decision-making. However, in practical rhetoric, the distinction between codetermination and consultation was often unclear. A key feature of the debate was disagreement as to which of these models would represent ‘true’ or desirable enterprise democracy: employees demanded codetermination and even self-governance, whereas employers spoke about consultation and communication. The parties stuck to their rival definitions for several years. In Finland they came closer only after the second committee report was completed in 1974. In Sweden, the employer side opposed some features of the 1976 codetermination legislation but was ready to use it as a framework for future negotiations. In its definitions of enterprise democracy, the employer side focused on improving cooperation and communication in the workplace, which had been the dominant employer line of industrial democracy since the 19th century. Employers called these practices democratic but did not support employee claims for decision-making rights or control of managers. They thus put forward different criteria for enterprise democracy – and for democracy in general – than the employee side. It could also be interpreted that employers tried to portray the question as only concerning the range of reference of democracy: the essential criterion of employee influence or participation could also be fulfilled through consultation. The employer side was aware of the contested nature and different meanings of enterprise democracy. This is evident in the 1964 book Företagsdemokrati och företagsorganisation (Industrial Democracy and Industrial Management)



Koljonen 1966: 164–225; LO 1961: 110; SAF 1965: 50; Wiio 1970: 134–71. E.g. Pöppel 1968.

9

10

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by Swedish management theorist Eric Rhenman.11 The study was commissioned by SAF and became the most influential theoretical work defining employer position on enterprise democracy (Schiller 1988: 21–3). Rhenman’s starting point was the contested meaning of enterprise democracy, which the author wanted to clarify with a ‘common frame of reference’ based on modern organization theory. Rhenman argued that different meanings of the concept made discussion difficult. Even though everyone would agree on the basic principle of employee participation in management, people were ‘quite possibly considering very different practical steps and aiming at quite different goals’.12 The employer side’s position was clearly expressed. They argued that even though democratization of enterprises was desirable in principle, the meaning of enterprise democracy could not be analogous to political democracy. In 1965, SAF’s report Samarbetet i framtidens företag (Cooperation in the Enterprise of the Future) expressed reservations about combining democracy and working life, as politics and enterprises were very different environments: The concept of democracy has its natural area of use within analyses of the political life. In this context the term also gains its ideological content. When one talks about ‘industrial democracy’ and ‘enterprise democracy’ it means transferring the terminology to the circumstances of enterprises, which creates risks of misunderstanding and false analogies.13

Employer representatives often continued by arguing that if enterprise democracy was understood as different from political democracy, it had actually been realized to a large extent, for example through balancing the interests of employers and employees. This belief was expressed in SAF’s 1965 report: ‘Employees have significant influence in the company through their organizations and other routes.’14 Many employer representatives argued that in modern organizations power was already delegated and decentralized, which made claims of oligarchic decision-making misguided.15 This kind of argumentation is at the core of conceptual struggles, because it implies that the other party has defined a concept incorrectly, and even has a false picture of

11 Rhenman 1968 [1964]. I have used the English translation of Rhenman’s book, but checked correspondence with the original Swedish edition. Translation problems are highlighted by the fact that the English version consistently translates företagsdemokrati as ‘industrial democracy’. 12 Rhenman 1968 [1964]: 3–4. 13 SAF 1965: 15–16. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations from Swedish and Finnish are by the author. 14 SAF 1965: 15–16. 15 E.g. Enström 1965: 603–8.

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the social problems at stake. To supplement Hirschman’s typology of reactionary rhetoric, this argument could perhaps be named a ‘false diagnosis thesis’. The rhetoric of Finnish employers followed similar paths, and explicit references to Rhenman and SAF were often made. STK representative Osmo A. Wiio expressed a belief resembling Rhenman’s: employers and employees had a shared meaning for enterprise democracy but pursued different means and goals. Wiio quoted Norwegian management theorist Einar Thorsrud, who had defined enterprise democracy as ‘distributing the possibility of social influence to all participating in working life as opposed to concentrating influence to only a few people’.16 In Wiio’s view, this meant that employee self-governance, codetermination, consultation, and communication could all be considered forms of enterprise democracy. Its counter-concept was patriarchal, authoritarian leadership. Wiio argued that enterprise democracy should not be linked exclusively to one model, but the most appropriate models should be found in different companies.17 Thus he implied that the employers’ definition of enterprise democracy was more encompassing than the employee side’s. However, the potential scope of enterprise democracy was practically narrowed by defining consultation as the most appropriate model.18 In this version, the concepts of participation, cooperation and communication delineated the field of acceptable democratization, which was adapted to the objectives of enterprises. Although the term enterprise democracy was often used in a positive sense, especially in Finland, employer representatives were more comfortable with the term cooperation (yhteistoiminta/samarbete). In Sweden, the employer side had traditionally preferred this term over industrial or enterprise democracy (Lundh 1987: 479–81). This tendency continued in the 1960s. Eric Rhenman suggested that it was best to forget the ambiguous term enterprise democracy, which was ‘overloaded with time-worn emotions and evaluations’.19 The title of SAF’s report Samarbetet i framtidens företag (Cooperation in the Enterprise of the Future) reveals which term the employers favoured. In the report, the concepts of industrial and enterprise democracy were only used to describe previous debates. Actual practices at workplaces were called cooperation. SAF continued this line until the early 1970s and often abstained from using the concepts of industrial and enterprise democracy. Finnish employers, in contrast, used the concepts more explicitly but ascribed their own meaning to them. As enterprise democracy and codetermination became key terms Wiio 1967: 108. The same typology of enterprise democracy was used in many management guidebooks. See, for example, Saarikko & Voutilainen 1977: 18–20. 18 See also SAF 1965: 194. 19 Rhenman 1968 [1964]: 136. 16 17

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describing the aspired scope of democratization, Swedish employers also began to use them more frequently. This suggests that the labour movement at this point had a strong agenda-setting power, and the employer side had to modify its language. However, employers still tried to replace enterprise democracy with cooperation, and especially codetermination with the milder term ‘co-influence’, which was close to consultation. In the second half of the 1970s, cooperation again became the dominant term, as Bernt Schiller has noted (Schiller 1988: 12–13). It seems that SAF considered the word democracy threatening because of its layers of meaning that pointed to the distribution of power and control of leaders by their subjects. Employers rather portrayed economic activities as harmonious and apolitical, for which the term cooperation suited well. SAF’s uncomfortable relation with enterprise democracy became explicit in a statement by CEO Curt-Steffan Giesecke in 1971: Because conceptual confusion now becomes even more evident, it would be desirable that the term democracy was reserved for political democracy and that in the area of working life terms like cooperation and co-influence would be used. Both the development of political democracy and cooperation within companies would surely fare well after such conceptual distinctions.20

The policy of the Finnish employers regarding the criteria and terminology of enterprise democracy was similar to their Swedish counterparts, and SAF’s material was used as a source of definitions and arguments. A strong emphasis on cooperation is found in the 1974 book Yritysdemokratia: yhteistoimintaa yrityksessä (Enterprise Democracy: Cooperation within Enterprises) by STK’s Eero Voutilainen, who published widely on personnel management and cooperation. Voutilainen’s definition implies a desire to leave the concept of democracy in the background, probably for reasons shared with SAF. Instead of being a democratic reform, Voutilainen defined cooperation as a necessity in all corporate activity: As the most important trait of enterprise democracy is cooperation, the concept of cooperation has often been used instead of enterprise democracy. Because this concept clearly expresses what is fundamentally at stake, using it is rather recommendable. Enterprise democracy is cooperation between different parties within a business organization. Enterprise democracy does not exist without an enterprise, and no enterprise can survive without functioning cooperation.21

20 ‘Ett ökat medinflytande i företagen måste baseras på fortsatt snabb utveckling av produktiviteten’. Arbetsgivaren 10.9.1971: 7. 21 Voutilainen 1974: 3.

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ENTERPRISE DEMOCRACY’S RANGE OF REFERENCE: DEMOCRATIC MANAGEMENT AND INFLUENCE IN EVERYDAY WORK The potential range of reference of enterprise democracy was also contested, but was more open than the concept’s necessary criteria. Both employers and employees considered that enterprise democracy could be manifested in many different practices and organizational models as long as the criteria were fulfilled. Different emphases came up especially on the axes of direct/representative democracy and influence in everyday work/strategic management. These disagreements also drew on different classifications of democracy and their desirability. For example, the employer side’s argument that companies were not analogous to societies was used to justify the incompatibility of representative democracy as a model of decision-making. Instead of a universal model of representation, Swedish employers preferred local cooperation with employees, where companies themselves could determine the most suitable practices (Stråth 1998: 226–8). SAF stressed that the same model of cooperation could not be applied in every enterprise and emphasized adaptation to their specific needs (företagsanpassning). Employers often turned enterprise democracy into a question of management techniques and organization design rather than employee influence. In this line of thought, managers became the central actors of democratization. The concept ‘democratic leadership’ was often pitted against ‘authoritarian’ management styles, which were deemed outdated.22 Despite emphasizing direct relations between managers and employees, SAF was generally pleased with the existing works councils and stated that although they were less important than democratic management, in many companies they provided the most suitable model of cooperation.23 When the debate on enterprise democracy heated up in the late 1960s, SAF continued to oppose new regulations but spoke for experimentation in companies to find the most appropriate forms of cooperation. Employers emphasized employee influence in everyday work through new organizational forms like project groups. These normally gave employees power in operational matters – their own work methods and work environment – but did not intervene in the strategic power of managers (Julkunen 1987: 58–60). Especially the results of Norwegian experiments on ‘self-managed groups’ were positively commented on in public. The experiments seemed to confirm that shop floor influence, where groups of employees could determine how they organized their work Leinonen 1967: 14; Rhenman 1968 [1964]: 131; SAF 1965: 175–7. SAF 1965: 180–84.

22 23

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to reach production goals, was more efficient and created more satisfaction than representative models.24 The Norwegian example was so influential that in 1969 Swedish labour market parties agreed on voluntary experiments of self-managing groups and other new forms of cooperation (Schiller 1988: 49–51).25 Finnish employers were also keener to introduce direct influence in everyday work through self-managed workgroups and other new forms of work, and less keen to establish new representative bodies.26 The Norwegian experiments aroused great interest and similar interpretations of desirable organizational models.27 Like in Sweden, STK encouraged its member companies to initiate their own experiments of enterprise democracy, and in 1971 there were almost 500 experiments underway. In this way the definitions and practices promoted by the employer side were implemented before any official enactments. Voluntary experiments increased the consultation and information rights of the employees, and existing production committees were often turned into ‘cooperation committees’ with slightly extended mandates. Agreements between central labour market organizations also increased cooperation in rationalization and training issues in the early 1970s (Mansner 1990: 440–3). This may have been largely a strategy for rebutting the most radical demands on the employee side and the left, but it seems that it was, at least in part, based on spontaneous efforts to find more efficient organizational practices. Discussion on direct and representative forms of enterprise democracy was closely connected to the question of issues handled within enterprise democracy. In both Finland and Sweden, the employer side was clear on its aim to restrict these issues to job design, organization and other matters close to everyday work. This has been a common employer stance in past debates of working-life democratization (Knudsen 1995: 10–12). In Finland, the STK stated that they would not negotiate on employee participation in top management or on profit sharing. Instead, they welcomed procedures which improved the possibility of employee participation in security and work satisfaction issues.28 In Sweden, the SAF determined that in addition to planning and

24 E.g. ‘Självstyrande grupper kan öka produktivitet och arbetstillfredsställelse’, Arbetsgivaren 7.2.1969: 5; ‘Självstyrande grupper skapar ny mentalitet i företag’, Arbetsgivaren 18.4.1969: 4. 25 The experiments were reported in employer newspapers in order to show that employee influence was increasing. See e.g. Bendrik 1972: 7; ‘Projektgrupper ger medinflytande’, Arbetsgivaren 14.4.1972; Westermark 1972. 26 Pärnänen 1968: 286; Saarikko & Voutilainen 1977: 7. 27 Wiio 1970: 138–9, 188–9. 28 Meeting of STK’s Board of Directors, 28 April 1969, STK archive, ELKA; Mansner 1990: 435.

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organization of work in project groups, works councils could discuss issues like personnel policy, long-term planning and rationalization. However, it was always stressed that the councils were bodies of consultation and information.29 In Finnish state committee reports, profit sharing and employee representation in corporate governance were eventually left outside the discussion. The committees proposed an organizational model for enterprise democracy with two representative bodies: personnel councils and cooperation committees. The cooperation committees would have consisted of both employer and employee representatives and would have made decisions unanimously or by vote, with a veto right reserved for the employer side. The personnel council would have had only wage-earner representatives, but its role would have been consultative.30 Employers were against this model and continued to emphasize direct influence in everyday work. In Sweden, there was no serious discussion on councils consisting exclusively of wage-earner representatives. The most significant representative sites would have been the board of directors and the works council, where employers were also represented. Both employers and employees also emphasized the use of existing trade union organizations. Perhaps the greatest institutional difference between Sweden and Finland was that in Sweden employee representation in corporate governance was established by legislation in 1972. The reform gained wide support from Liberal and Centre parties as well as white-collar organizations, and the Social Democratic government was ready to legislate without a labour market agreement. After a trial period, trade unions gained the right to appoint two representatives to the boards of directors of companies with 25 or more employees (Schiller 1988: 67–87; Simonson 1988: 91–103). The attitude of SAF and its member companies was negative at first. SAF argued that proper results from the different company-level experiments should have been gathered before issuing new legislation.31 In the end, however, employers did not find employee minority representation harmful to private companies.32

THE VALUE OF ENTERPRISE DEMOCRACY: NATIONAL INTEREST AS A LIMIT TO DEMOCRACY Disagreement over the desirability of enterprise democracy and its relations to other values were central parts of the Finnish and Swedish debates (cf. Skinner 2002: 169–71). In this section, I will analyse what were the most potent con-

31 32 29 30

E.g. ‘SAF-skrift diskuterar samarbetet i företagen’, Arbetsgivaren 9/1971. Committee Report 1970: A3, 443–5; Committee Report 1974: 99, 28. ‘Forcerat samarbetsförslag’, Arbetsgivaren 11.8.1972: 2. ‘Nya styrelseledamöter’, Arbetsgivaren 15.12.1972: 2.

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cepts for legitimizing and criticizing enterprise democracy, and what kind of conceptual hierarchies can be discerned from employer rhetoric. I will also analyse what kind of conceptions of working life and society different versions of enterprise democracy entailed. Especially the construction of ‘political’ and ‘economic’ spheres of knowledge and action was a key aspect of these conceptualizations. The debate on enterprise democracy is an interesting example of struggles over concepts. It is worth noting that the employer side did not usually portray enterprise democracy as undesirable, even though especially in Sweden they avoided using it. Instead, the employee side’s definitions of the concept were heavily criticized. Employer statements show that they believed some reforms to be necessary in working life. Developing new forms of participation and cooperation was not only a reaction to the demands for democratization, but also stemmed from the internal need to make the organizations and practices of enterprises more efficient in the context of structural change and international competition (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005: 70–75; Julkunen 1987; Lilja 1977). This is visible in the emphasis of enterprise-level experiments. The Swedish employer newspaper Arbetsgivaren wrote that there was strong will to develop productivity and work satisfaction. If it could happen in forms that adapted cooperation to different enterprises, something ‘truly positive’ had been created.33 Even though democracy, equality and work satisfaction were important values in political debate, employer representatives did not begin their argumentation from them, but from a fundamental economic belief: the necessity of economic efficiency in a competitive and increasingly internationalized market economy. Due to the centrality of this belief, a major tension was formed between the concepts of democracy and efficiency. This dichotomy has been one of the recurring problems of working-life democratization (Dryzek 1996: 60–61; Julkunen 1987: 46). However, we can paint a more nuanced picture of the conceptual struggle by looking at other values and their hierarchies in employer thought and rhetoric. In his influential book, Eric Rhenman did not mention the extension of democracy as the goal of enterprise democracy. Instead, he specified two main objectives: (1) increasing productivity, (2) balancing different interests and decreasing conflict within the company. Rhenman’s conclusion was that most models did not fulfill these aims, and therefore he proposed a new approach based on business economy.34 SAF’s Cooperation Report took efficiency as its starting point, but acknowledged that there were also other perspectives, such

‘Klarsignal för experiment’, Arbetsgivaren 3.10.1969: 2. Rhenman 1968 [1964]: 133–4.

33 34

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as sociological and political viewpoints. However, the report argued that the demand for efficiency could not be overridden. It was ‘totally alien to reality’ to question efficiency or productivity as dominant demands for enterprises. This concerned especially the prevailing situation of Swedish companies: ‘Their possibilities of survival in the long run are highly dependent on their capability to hold off international competition.’35 On the employer side, employee influence was not an end in and for itself, as it conflicted with the employer’s freedom of action. Better goals were balance of interests and job satisfaction. However, the ‘all-encompassing demand for a company’ was improving its productivity.36 This constellation of values was also used in the Swedish works council agreement in 1966: the task of the councils was to promote productivity and work satisfaction.37 According to Albert O. Hirschman, one of the recurring strategies and tropes of reactionary rhetoric is to argue that a reform jeopardizes something valuable that already exists or is pursued in society (Hirschman 1991: 7–8). In employer rhetoric, a ‘jeopardy thesis’ was a common way to question the desirability of enterprise democracy. At least when defined and implemented in a wrong way, enterprise democracy was claimed to jeopardize not only efficiency but even more important values. These included the growth of welfare, which was portrayed as a common interest for companies, their employees and the entire society. Enterprises were portrayed as guardians of the national interest rather than as organizations pursuing their particular interests. Instead of maximizing profits, their objective was to secure their own continuity and employment.38 This belief was a cornerstone of employer rhetoric in both Sweden and Finland. It was often expressed in the debate on the social responsibility of companies, which was already being discussed in the 1960s.39 A logical derivative of this belief was that if efficiency was jeopardized, so too was the national interest. Päiviö Hetemäki, the CEO of Finnish STK, stressed that the welfare of the whole society was dependent on the efficient realization of corporate objectives. Therefore, it was crucial to find means of employee influence which would not disturb the development of the general welfare. Hetemäki argued that in reality economic activity left very little room for choices. Democratic decision-making thus inevitably jeopardized economic efficiency. ‘The national economy could not bear such a hindrance, which will be formed when corporate management is subjected to collective SAF 1965: 57. SAF 1965: 81–2, 86–7. 37 ‘Nya samarbetsavtal SAF–LO och SAF–TCO’, Arbetsgivaren 6.5.1966: 5. 38 Pärnänen 1969b: 22–3. 39 ‘Sagt på SAF-konferens i Karlstad om människan i arbetslivet’, Arbetsgivaren 16.5.1969. 35 36

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vote’, Hetemäki stated.40 STK representative Osmo A. Wiio argued in the same vein that there was no clear evidence that ‘ideal traits’ of democracy, such as equality and control over leaders, would help companies reach their goals. Instead, implementing democracy as an intrinsic value had for example in Yugoslavia apparently slowed down the operations of companies.41 This kind of argumentation was not a novelty in Finland. Historically, it has been more of a rule than an exception to legitimize different objectives and actions, such as rationalization of production by appealing to national interests and giving them a very economic nature (Kettunen 1994: 261–4; Kuokkanen 2015: 73–7). Some scholars have argued that the role of economic necessities as policy legitimation and as a means to depoliticize certain issues has been a fundamental characteristic of Finnish political culture, even more central than in other Nordic countries (Alapuro 2010: 534–6; Kettunen 2008: 88–9; Kosonen 1998: 121; Kyntäjä 1993: 260–65). In the rhetoric of Finnish employers, national interest, which often figured in the more tangible form of increasing welfare, was a more common legitimation concept than private ownership or economic freedom. Even though enterprise democracy challenged the principle of private ownership, it was defended only occasionally.42 It seems that the right of ownership was a rarely used legitimation strategy also in the Swedish debate. It is possible, however, that appealing to ownership was not considered necessary, as enterprise democracy challenged only part of the power based on ownership, not private ownership itself. Despite their critical tone, employers valued enterprise democracy positively, provided that it was adapted to the necessities of economic efficiency and competitiveness. This meant defining enterprise democracy as cooperation and consultation. Employers argued that efficiency was best guaranteed by competent management and a certain organizational hierarchy, complemented with flexible practices of cooperation. Taking the employees’ interests into account and improving their work satisfaction were considered productivity factors, especially in new management theories. Eric Rhenman even suggested a new definition of efficiency that would include work satisfaction. However, satisfaction increases were not desirable if they resulted in decreasing profitability.43 By contrast, enterprise democracy in the sense of employee participation in final decision-making – especially via representative models – was

42 43 40 41

Tehostaja 8/1968: 50–51. Wiio 1970: 179–80. E.g. Tehostaja 8/1968: 48. Rhenman 1968 [1964]: 127–8; SAF 1965: 97–107.

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portrayed as an inflexible and bureaucratic practice that threatened crucial components of national interest such as competitiveness and welfare.

DOMINANT BELIEFS: THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN ‘POLITICAL’ AND ‘ECONOMIC’ One of the key distinctions in employer rhetoric was the fundamental difference of political and economic issues and practices. The employers agreed that enterprises and workplaces should be democratized, but not in a way analogous to political democracy. They argued that political goals were always a matter of debate, but companies could not be organized on the basis of political ideologies. They had one primary goal, survival in competition by operating efficiently.44 This was strictly a matter of economic facts, not political choices. Facts and values, knowledge and ideology, were to be separated. SAF director Karl-Olof Faxén expressed this belief, which determined the appropriate limits of enterprise democracy, as follows: It is thus the surrounding world that sets the demand to constantly strive for increased profitability. An ideologically grounded development towards enterprise democracy does not interest customers. It cannot last in the long run if it does not fulfill other demands at the same time.45

Employer representatives often continued this line of thought by arguing that employees – or politicians – did not have the necessary knowledge on economic affairs. Therefore, decisions had to be left to managers and other experts. SAF newspaper Arbetsgivaren made this argument, albeit with a reservation, in its editorial: ‘A company cannot be managed through a collective vote – some must have the right to make decisions. This is still the task of experts, which of course need to have power, but should also have a small possibility to misuse this power.’46 Finnish STK official Heikki Pärnänen argued in a similar vein that the objective of economic efficiency and the means to achieve it were ‘not matters of vote but matters of expertise’.47 The possibility of participation at work was essentially dependent on expertise, and the operations had to some extent to be based on hierarchy in order to secure efficiency.48 Hierarchy was therefore legitimized by appealing to a common interest and to differences in competence, which has historically been a common strategy for many critics of

46 47 48 44 45

SAF 1965: 58–9, 66–7, 86–7. Faxén 1971: 4. ‘Makt och koncentration’, Arbetsgivaren 23.2.1968: 2. Pärnänen 1969a: 166; Pärnänen 1970a: 80. Pärnänen 1969a: 167.

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democracy (Dunn 2005: 46–52, 76–80; Held 1996: 105–10). Another way to argue for the apolitical nature of corporate activity and cooperation was insisting that they were strictly matters between the labour market parties not to be ‘politicized’ by state intervention, and certainly not by issuing legislation. This was repeated in numerous statements by the employer side in both Sweden and Finland.49 Sometimes employer representatives explicitly claimed that in overlooking economic facts, advocates of employee decision-making prioritized their group interests over a broader, even national interest. STK’s Heikki Pärnänen stated: ‘A company, while working as an instrument in society’s economic activity, may come into conflict with individual members or a group of their personnel, the objective of whom is especially to improve their own security and living standards’ (Pärnänen 1968: 284). Eric Rhenman’s stakeholder model had influenced Pärnänen, who also saw managers as the best people to mediate these conflicting interests. It is worth noting that the employers refrained from appealing to their group interests in public, which gave their arguments and expert position more credibility. Group interests may very well have been a significant motive for them, but this cannot be verified by rhetorical analysis. Employee representatives, in turn, often appealed to the security, self-determination and rights of the workers rather than to common interests. This may have made it easier to accuse them of advocating particular interests. To strengthen their argument that ultimately rested on the concept of national interest, employers argued that the conflict between labour and capital was mostly illusory. Instead, the common interest of both parties and the foundation of enterprise democracy were found in the continuity and success of the enterprise. Cooperation between employers and employees would help in perceiving this real state of affairs.50 Stig H. Hästö, Finnish CEO and later chairman of STK, argued that cooperation in the sense of consultation and communication helped perceive the interest of the company. This required setting aside all sources of conflict: While acting in this spirit, we will understand things better on every level, we will realize the inevitability of measures and changes. (…) Taking a step of this nature would require a harmonious, balanced view of society, not by any means a quarrelsome society.51

This kind of functional view of working life, which portrays it as completely void of harmful or unjust power relations and struggles, has been common to E.g. ‘Företagsnämnder behöver arbetsro’, Arbetsgivaren 20.10.1967: 2. E.g. Wiio 1970: 19–25. 51 TA 2.6.1977: 4. 49 50

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employers and business representatives in Finland and elsewhere (Kettunen 1994: 294–300; Kettunen 2001: 29–35; Knudsen 1995: 14–18). It also goes back to the different layers of meaning of the concepts of cooperation and enterprise democracy. Cooperation presupposes only one common interest – that of the company’s – which is objective and can be achieved with sufficient knowledge. Hierarchical decision-making is therefore conceived as natural and necessary, not coercive or authoritarian. The concept of cooperation seems to have been an attempt to conceptually isolate the employee side’s perspective, which emphasized the conflict and asymmetric power relation between capital and labour, from the economic life. Critical scholars have pointed out that also human relations theories of management mostly assumed the inherent functionality and common interests of work organizations instead of considering their potential structural conflicts. New models of employee participation appropriated some demands for autonomy and work satisfaction but did not redistribute strategic power to the employees or give them the power to control and supervise their managers, which had been core features of the leftist visions of working-life democratization (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005 [1999]; Julkunen 1987: 52–4; Kuokkanen 2015: 13–16, 26–9).

THE PRIMACY OF EFFICIENCY The employee side did not have strong means to question the primacy of national economic interest, which was anchored in concepts like efficiency and competitiveness. Trade union representatives in both Finland and Sweden acknowledged the necessity of economic efficiency in creating growth and welfare. They usually agreed that reforms had to improve efficiency and competitiveness.52 Employee representatives, especially in Finland, did not put much effort into promoting rivalling conceptions of national interest based on immaterial values such as democracy, equality and security. They could, however, claim that common interest was unreachable in the prevailing reality of conflicting class interests.53 A more common strategy was not to deny the primacy of efficiency but argue that the capitalist mode of production and rationalization were, in fact, less efficient than their socialist alternatives (Kettunen 1994: 277–83). However, when trade union representatives argued that enterprise democracy would increase economic efficiency, it was not always clear whether they were advocating altered power structures or consultation and cooperation. In the end, many employee representatives adopted the strategy of arguing that enterprise democracy would promote economic effi-

E.g. Palkkatyöläinen 23.4.1970: 1; Arbetsgivaren 3.10.1969: 4. Hautala 1970: 62–4; SAK 1969: 5–6.

52 53

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ciency in a capitalist society instead of prioritizing democracy over efficiency in their rhetorical hierarchy of values.54 When rhetorically combining democracy and efficiency, the employee side did not question the value hierarchies of the employers, which prioritized efficiency over democracy. This had also been a common strategy in other debates on labour market policy (Kettunen 1994: 397–8). Therefore, the agenda of the debate was defined, either consciously or unconsciously, as reconciling democracy with efficiency, not the other way around. This hierarchy was codified in the assignment of the first Finnish state committee investigating enterprise democracy. The committee had to ‘draw up suggestions which could be used to develop enterprise and workplace democracy without efficiency losses’.55 It stated in its final report that it was useful to examine if democracy could in some cases be prioritized over efficiency, but also confirmed the status of efficiency as an overarching value: ‘Regardless of their closer definition, within the market economy the goals of an enterprise must be adapted to the frame of profitable operations and retaining competitiveness.’56 However, the downsides of efficiency and growth became widely acknowledged in the 1960s and 1970s. These included not only decreasing work satisfaction but also environmental degradation. Besides material welfare, mental welfare was also taken as an objective, although it was usually left in the shadow of the necessity for efficiency. The prevalence of the critique of economic growth may explain why efficiency, or even rising living standards, were not clear-cut objectives in the rhetoric on the employer side, either. The Finnish management magazine Yritystalous (Business Economy) stated in 1970 that the ‘immaterial aspect of welfare’ could no longer be ignored in the debate on economic growth, but it might rather be a precondition to growth in the long term.57 In this kind of rhetoric, the hierarchy of values seems to twist into a circle, which suggests that ideas of ‘virtuous circles’ common in welfare state rhetoric were also common in Finland. The mutually reinforcing nature of efficiency and welfare gained familiar features of necessity (see also Wuokko 2016: 105–7). In his reply to trade union journalist Kimmo Kevätsalo, STK’s Heikki Pärnänen expressed a belief in the indispensable nature of efficiency as a step to the greater good: I fully agree with Kevätsalo on the fact that efficiency is not a meaningful objective for people in itself (…) personally, I enjoy summer holidays, free Saturdays, good

56 57 54 55

E.g. Koljonen 1966. KM 1970: A 3, preface. KM 1970: A 3, 104. ‘Hyvinvoinnista pahoinvointia?’ Yritystalous 2/1970.

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food, etc. much more than a stressful day of efficiency. Unfortunately, however, no one has yet invented a magic lantern to fulfill my wishes better than efficiency.58

FROM ENTERPRISE DEMOCRACY TO COOPERATION AND CODETERMINATION In both Sweden and Finland, the debate on enterprise democracy led to new legislation, albeit along different paths. In Sweden, the process began later, but there was the political will to realize the Labour Law Committee’s (Arbetsrättskommittéen) law proposal even if labour market parties disagreed. The Codetermination Act of 1976 (medbestämmandelagen (MBL)) became part of the ‘labour law offensive’ in Sweden, which included new legislation on shop stewards, the work environment, and employment protection. The Social Democratic Party of Sweden (SAP) and the LO were willing to improve the conditions of Swedish employees even at the expense of harmonious labour market relations. In Finland, by contrast, the governments did not want to push legislation without an agreement between labour market parties. Therefore, the negotiations on enterprise democracy remained in deadlock for several years. In Sweden, the employee side wanted to push through radical reforms, while employer representatives wanted to stay on a cooperative line. The MBL became a framework law that was to be supplemented through labour market agreements. It obliged employers to negotiate on significant changes affecting the employees. Employees gained the right to interpret laws and agreements in the case of a disagreement, and a right to make agreements on issues concerning the management of companies.59 Despite these reforms, the law did not really change power relations but extended the cooperation practice that works councils already represented (Johansson & Magnusson 2012: 170–75; Schiller 1988: 118–23, 130–33; Simonson 1988: 132–7). In the negotiations on the MBL’s implementation, the LO continued to call for more influence, but the Social Democrats’ loss in the parliamentary election in autumn and the formation of Sweden’s first bourgeois government in 44 years took away the ‘legislation threat’ from the employee side’s weaponry. Birger Simonson (1988: 151–7, 187–9) has interpreted that at this point the initiative in the codetermination question moved to the employer side. The negotiations were difficult, and it took until 1982 to reach a solution, named the ‘Development Agreement’ (utvecklingsavtal) (Johansson & Magnusson 2012: 177–9; Schiller 1988: 177–94; Simonson 1988: 157–80). The Agreement

Pärnänen 1970b: 128. Statens offentliga utredningar (SOU) 1975: 1. See also Stockholm 1975: 35–46; Lag 1976: 580, om medbestämmande i arbetslivet at https://​lagen​.nu/​1976:​580​#P11S1. 58 59

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marked a retreat from most of LO’s objectives. It emphasized competitiveness and cooperation, did not give codetermination an intrinsic value, and focused on technical development and rationalization rather than personnel issues (Schiller 1988: 194–202; Simonson 1988: 180–85). According to Bernt Schiller, the development agreement continued the same tradition of labour market cooperation as the 1946 agreement on works councils. Fundamental power relations did not change, but the agreement did not exclusively follow employer lines (Schiller 1988: 215–17). Jonas Pontusson has emphasized more the power of employers. The employee side did not gain any veto or self-determination rights in the MBL. Despite the influence on work design and organization, employees continued to have little power in strategic decisions, such as the internationalization of Swedish firms. The employer side was unwilling to negotiate on major issues if it was not forced to. In other words, the boundaries of class compromise determined the room to manoeuvre in enterprise democracy (Pontusson 1992: 183–5). In Finland, an agreement on enterprise democracy became possible when the central organization of Finnish trade unions, SAK, left aside demands for real employee decision-making. This was due to slow progress, employer resistance and the small role reserved for employee representation. Trade unions began to fear that representative bodies could be used to circumvent existing trade union institutions, such as shop stewards, who had strengthened their role during the 1970s (Kalela 1981: 402–3; Lappalainen 2003: 158–9; Mansner 1990: 446). Trade union and employer confederations reached an agreement on the outlines of enterprise democracy legislation at the same time as the Social Democrats, and Finnish business had reached a consensus on a new, more market-oriented economic policy to end economic stagnation (Bergholm 2012: 402–3; Outinen 2015: 85–90; Saari 2010: 469–71). Inspiration from Sweden is evident in the Finnish legislation (Lappalainen 2003: 160–61). Both were based on fitting enterprise democracy to the existing organizations rather than creating new systems of representation. The explicit objectives of the ‘Act on Cooperation within Undertakings’ from 1978 were cooperation and efficiency.60 The law required negotiations on issues that significantly affected the position of employees, such as layoffs and changes in work methods. They were to take place between the employer and individual workers or trade union representatives. In cases of disagreement, the employer retained the right to make the final decision. The only exceptions were certain

60 Säädös 725/1978. Laki yhteistoiminnasta yrityksissä at www​.finlex​.fi, alkuperäissäädökset; http://​www​.finlex​.fi/​fi/​laki/​alkup/​1978/​19780725​?search​%5Btype​%5 D​=​pika​&​search​%5Bpika​%5D​=​laki​%20yhteistoiminnasta​%20yrityksiss​%C3​%A4 (accessed 5 November 2020).

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social issues, such as employee meal and housing benefits.61 Like in Sweden, the Finnish law was not named the Enterprise Democracy Act, but it was based on the employer-favoured concept of cooperation, which implied a less conflictual image of working life. Extending the practice of negotiation between trade union and employer representatives at the workplace level thus became the primary model of enterprise democracy in both countries. Finnish employees used the Swedish Codetermination Act as a model to justify the organizational solution. In contrast, Swedish labour market parties do not seem to have taken very much inspiration from Finland during the debate, but they looked more closely at developments in Denmark, Norway and West Germany. Employers welcomed the reform as it did not require organizational changes, while trade unions were not entirely happy but considered it a first step towards enterprise democracy (Kärrylä 2016). However, since the economic crises and the rise of new economic thought and policy in the 1980s, concepts such as enterprise democracy have mostly vanished from political rhetoric. In Finland, the practice of ‘cooperative negotiations’ (yhteistoimintaneuvottelut (YT)), became notorious because it was mandatory before layoffs. The abbreviation ‘YT’ became something of a symbol of the era of economic recession and mass unemployment.

CONCLUSION The definitions of enterprise democracy by Finnish and Swedish employer organizations drew on similar conceptions of democracy and had many shared features. Employers advocated consultation and communication with employees, which were ideally realized through democratic management and forms of direct participation like project groups, focusing on issues close to individual employees, and the work process. To turn down the employee side’s demands of stronger codetermination, the employers used especially two of the three reactionary theses typified by Albert O. Hirschman. Representative democracy and control of corporate management were claimed to jeopardize the efficient operations of companies and to be futile in the pursuit of employee influence and work satisfaction. During the debate, employers in both countries favoured the terms cooperation and co-influence instead of enterprise democracy and codetermination, but in Sweden the reluctance to use the former terms was higher. In Finland, employers admitted more explicitly that ‘enterprise democracy’ was needed, but gave the concept a meaning that was close to the Swedish employers’ views on cooperation. The tendency to replace democracy with cooperation may have been a way to downplay questions of power Ibid.; see also Mansner 1990: 446–8.

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relations central to the concept of democracy and promote a harmonious and apolitical image of working life, where the success of companies was based on objective knowledge and was ultimately a common interest. The employee side in both Finland and Sweden saw the legislation of the 1970s as a first step towards enterprise democracy. However, with the benefit of hindsight it can be said that the Finnish Cooperation Act and the Swedish Development Agreement were instead first steps towards the hegemony of employer thought. After the 1980s, the rhetoric and practice of working-life reforms have continued to emphasize cooperation and employee participation, but the idea of redistributing power and the concept of enterprise democracy have been discarded altogether. Even the Swedish concept of codetermination, implying an equal relationship between employees and employers, has lost much of its meaning. Questions of power have been almost completely removed from the world of work after the concept of enterprise democracy vanished from the political agenda. Debates on enterprise democracy exemplify the gradual consolidation of a conception of working life as an essentially economic sphere of activity, which is – or at least should be – kept apart from the ‘political’. In areas defined as ‘economic’, power and decision-making are not based on democratic rights but on objective knowledge, expertise and merit. Social relations are conceptualized as functional and as aiming for the common good, not as asymmetric power relations and conflicts of interest. Beliefs in the latter are dismissed as false consciousness, which only obscures economic facts. Within this kind of web of beliefs, employees can participate in decisions on issues close to their work, but most decision-making is reserved for managers who possess the required competence. Economic efficiency and growth are treated as inescapable components of the national interest, which other values need to serve. Employer representatives in both Finland and Sweden used national economic interest as their primary legitimation concept, and it was dominant in comparison to other possible legitimation strategies. The economic conceptions of national interest also restricted the scope of democratic reforms by being taken as starting points for the work of state committees. National economic interest was in effect an overriding cultural norm that conditioned the whole debate. This is what previous research on Finnish political culture has suggested, and it also seems to apply to Sweden to a major extent, even though there was more space for legitimations based on democracy and equality. It seems, however, that the economic and material base of human welfare and national interest was practically impossible to question. This conception was rather strengthened in the debate. The necessity of efficiency was based on convincing evidence and shared beliefs, which gave it a lawlike quality. Representatives of the trade union movement sought to justify enterprise democracy by appealing to citizens’ and workers’ rights to

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democratic self-determination and security, but it was hard to prioritize these values over efficiency. Most employees adopted the strategy of arguing that their version of enterprise democracy would promote economic efficiency in a capitalist society. In order to legitimize their objectives, they had to prove that increasing democracy would not undermine the self-evident foundation of welfare and common interest. For decades, democracy has been conceived as the sole legitimate political system and as an important part of national identity in Finland and Sweden. However, depoliticization and the rhetoric of necessities reign when national interest is defined in terms of expanding the economy and welfare. This conception draws on managerialist thinking that emphasizes economic expertise over democracy and reproduces the division into political and economic spheres of society. Conceiving economy as a realm of objective knowledge illustrates a conceptual dilemma, which is still one of the greatest obstacles to democracy today. The dilemma is that the political sphere and the legitimate scope of democracy are limited by anything that is defined as objective as opposed to values and matters of opinion. However, both facts and values are based on beliefs, which are always potentially falsifiable. The distinction between facts and values is useful in assessing the rational warrant of different beliefs, but if facts are always determined outside democracy in different expert domains, a space for asymmetric power relations is opened. Therefore, we should reflect whether narrowing down the potential meaning and reference of democracy is a desirable course of development for a democratic society.

REFERENCES Primary Sources Arbetsgivaren 1964–78. Bendrik, S. (1972), ‘Personalen tar mer personligt ansvar sedan stängselfabriken införde premielön’, Arbetsgivaren 20 (17), 7. Bratt, C. (1972), ‘Allt mer samråd och medinflytande för allt fler’, Arbetsgivaren 20 (42), 4. Committee report (1970), A3. Enterprise democracy committee’s report. Helsinki. Committee report (1974), 99. Enterprise democracy application committee’s report. Helsinki. Demokrati i företagen (1971), Landsorganisation, Stockholm. Demokrati på arbetsplatsen. Förslag till ny lagstiftning om förhandlingsrätt och kollektivavtal (1975), Statens offentliga utredningar (SOU) 1975: 1. Stockholm. Enström, A. (1965), ‘Hur beslut kommer till i ett storföretag’, Tiden 57 (10), 603–8. Fackföreningsrörelsen och företagsdemokratin (1961), Landsorganisation, Stockholm. Faxén, K.-O. (1971), ‘Produktivitet och företagsdemokrati’, Arbetsgivaren 19 (15), 4. Hautala, A. (1970), ‘Yritysdemokratiakomitean mietintö SAK:n näkökulmasta’, in M. Parjanen (ed.), Yritysdemokratia – demokratian yritys, Helsinki: Kirjayhtymä.

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Koljonen, N. (1966), Työntekijä ja yritysdemokratia: sosialismi ja kapitalismi uudessa valossa. Helsinki: Tammi. Lag (1976: 580), om medbestämmande i arbetslivet. https://​lagen​.nu/​1976:​580​#P11S1. Leinonen, J. (1967), ‘Työpaikkademokratia ja yrityksen sisäiset suhteet’, Tehostaja 25 (5), 14–15. Misgeld, K. (ed.) (2001), Socialdemokratins program 1897 till 1990. Stockholm: Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek. Pärnänen, H. (1968), ‘Yritysdemokratia yrityksen teorian valossa’, Ekonomia 8/1968. Pärnänen, H. (1969a), ‘Yritysdemokratia’, Teollisuuslehti 48 (6–7). Pärnänen, H. (1969b), ‘Onko voiton maksimointi yrityksen päätavoite?’ Yritystalous 1 (13). Pärnänen, H. (1970a), ‘Yritysdemokratia – kenen osallistumista ja mihin?’ in M. Parjanen (ed.), Yritysdemokratia – demokratian yritys. Helsinki: Kirjayhtymä. Pärnänen, H. (1970b), ‘Heikki Pärnänen vastaa: STK:n yritysdemokratia-ajattelun arvostelua’, Teollisuuslehti 49 (4), 128–9. Pöppel, W. (1968), ‘Arbetarråd och självförvaltning i Jugoslavien’, Fackföreningsrörelsen 48 (11) 352–5. Rhenman, E. (1964), Företagsdemokrati och företagsorganisation. Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag. Rhenman, E. (1968), Industrial Democracy and Industrial Management. London: Tavistock. Säädös 725/1978. Laki yhteistoiminnasta yrityksissä. www​.finlex​.fi, alkuperäissäädökset; http://​www​.finlex​.fi/​fi/​laki/​alkup/​1978/​19780725​?search​%5Btype​%5D​=​pika​&​ search​%5Bpika​%5D​=​laki​%20yhteistoiminnasta​%20yrityksiss​%C3​%A4 (accessed 5 November 2020). Saarikko, A. and E. Voutilainen (1977), Johtaminen, yhteistoiminta ja yritysdemokratia. Helsinki: Weilin + Göös. Samarbetet i framtidens företag (1965), Svenska Arbetsgivareförening, Stockholm. Voutilainen, E. (1974), Yritysdemokratia: yhteistoimintaa yrityksessä. Helsinki: Tietomies. Westermark, G. (1969), ‘“Målstyrning i samverkan”: Plan för ökad medinflytande’, Arbetsgivaren 17 (19), 3. Wigforss, E. (1948), Ekonomisk demokrati. Stockholm: Natur och kultur. Wiio, O. A. (1967), ‘Yritysdemokratiasta’, Teollisuuslehti 46 (5), 106–11. Wiio, O. A. (1970), Yritysdemokratia ja muuttuva organisaatio. Helsinki: Weilin + Göös.

Secondary Sources Alapuro, R. (2010), ‘Ulkoinen ja sisäinen: Suomen poliittisen kulttuurin pitkä linja’, Yhteiskuntapolitiikka, 75 (5), 528–37. Andersson, J. (2006), Between Growth and Security: Swedish Social Democracy from a Strong Society to a Third Way, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bergholm, T. (2005), Sopimusyhteiskunnan synty I. Työehtosopimusten läpimurrosta yleislakkoon. Suomen Ammattiyhdistysten Keskusliitto 1944–1956, Helsinki: Otava. Bergholm, T. (2007), Sopimusyhteiskunnan synty II. Hajaannuksesta tulopolitiikkaan. SAK 1946–69, Helsinki: Otava. Bergholm, T. (2012), Kohti tasa-arvoa. Tulopolitiikan aika I. Suomen Ammattiliittojen Keskusjärjestö 1969–1977, Helsinki: Otava.

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Bergholm, T. (2014), ‘Tuotantokomiteoista yhteistoimintaan’, Työväentutkimus, 28–33. Bevir, M. (1999), The Logic of the History of Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boltanski, L. and È. Chiapello (2005), The New Spirit of Capitalism, London and New York: Verso. Bruun, N., P. Kettunen and I. Turunen (1990), ‘Industriell demokrati i norden: Introduktion till det finska delprojektet’, in D. Fleming (ed.), Industriell demokrati i norden, Lund: Arkiv, pp. 115–28. Dryzek, J. S. (1996), Democracy in Capitalist Times, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunn, J. (2005), Democracy: A History, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Ekdahl, L. (2002), ‘Svensk arbetarrörelse på den tredje vägen? Socialdemokratiska vägval under det “korta 1900-talet”’, in H. Blomqvist and L. Ekdahl (eds), Kommunismen hot och löfte: Arbetarrörelsen i skuggan av Sovjetunionen 1917–1991, Stockholm: Carlsson, pp. 201–29. Eley, G. (2002), Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friberg, A. (2012), Demokrati bortom politiken: En begreppshistorisk analys av demokratibegreppet inom Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti 1919–1939, Stockholm: Atlas. Gilcher-Holtey, I. (2018), ‘Political participation and democratization in the 1960s: the concept of participatory democracy and its repercussions’, in J. Kurunmäki, J. Nevers and H. te Velde (eds), Democracy in Modern Europe: A Conceptual History, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 257–80. Harris, H. J. (1993), ‘Industrial democracy and liberal capitalism, 1890–1925’, in N. Lichtenstein and H. J. Harris (eds), Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise, New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, pp. 43–66. Held, D. (1996), Models of Democracy, 2nd edition, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschman, A. O. (1991), The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Johansson, A. L. and L. Magnusson (2012), LO – 1900-talet och ett nytt millennium, Stockholm: Atlas. Julkunen, R. (1987), Työprosessi ja pitkät aallot: Työn uusien organisaatiomuotojen synty ja yleistyminen, Tampere: Vastapaino. Kalela, J. (1981), Taistojen taipaleelta: Paperityöläiset ja heidän liittonsa 1906–1981, Helsinki: Paperiliitto ry. Kärenlampi, P. (1999), Taistelu kouludemokratiasta: Kouludemokratian aalto Suomessa, Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura. Kärrylä, I. (2016), ‘Kansallinen etu demokratian rajoituksena: suomalaisten työnantajien retoriikka 1960- ja 1970-lukujen yritysdemokratiakeskustelussa’, Historiallinen aikakauskirja, 114 (4), 445–57. Kettunen, P. (1986), Poliittinen liike ja sosiaalinen kollektiivisuus: Tutkimus sosialidemokratiasta ja ammattiyhdistysliikkeestä Suomessa 1918–1930, Helsinki: Suomen historiallinen seura. Kettunen, P. (1994), Suojelu, suoritus, subjekti: Työsuojelu teollistuvan Suomen yhteiskunnallisissa ajattelu- ja toimintatavoissa, Helsinki: Suomen historiallinen seura.

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Kettunen, P. (2001), Kansallinen työ: Suomalaisen suorituskyvyn vaalimisesta, Helsinki: Yliopistopaino. Kettunen, P. (2008), Globalisaatio ja kansallinen me: Kansallisen katseen historiallinen kritiikki, Tampere: Vastapaino. Kettunen, P. (2015), Historia petollisena liittolaisena: Näkökulmia työväen, työelämän ja hyvinvointivaltion historiaan, Helsinki: Työväen historian ja perinteen tutkimuksen seura. Knudsen, H. (1995), Employee Participation in Europe, London: Sage. Koselleck, R. (2011 [1972]), ‘Introduction and Preface to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’, in Contributions to the History of Concepts, 6 (1), 7–37. Kosonen, P. (1998), Pohjoismaiset mallit murroksessa, Tampere: Vastapaino. Kuokkanen, A. (2015), Johtamisen ihmissuhdekoulukunta Suomessa: Työntekijäkeskeiset johtamisopit suomalaisen työelämän muutoksessa, Helsinki: Työterveyslaitos. Kyntäjä, T. (1993), Tulopolitiikka Suomessa: Tulopoliittinen diskurssi ja instituutiot 1960-luvulta 1990-luvun kynnykselle, Helsinki: Gaudeamus. Lappalainen, H. (2003), ‘Yritysdemokratiasta YT-lakiin: Yritysdemokratiakeskustelu Suomessa 1970-luvulla’, Työelämän tutkimus, 1 (2), 158–61. Lichtenstein, N. and H. J. Harris (eds) (1993), Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise, New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Lilja, K. (1977), Työntekijöiden osallistuminen hallintoon teollisuusyrityksissä: Tutkimus työnantajapuolen toiminnan kehityksestä, Helsinki: Helsingin kauppakorkeakoulu. Lilja, K. (1987), ‘Henkilöstöhallinnon ammattikäytännön kehityspiirteitä Suomessa’, Hallinnon tutkimus, 16 (3), 185–94. Logue, J. (1991), ‘Democratic theory and atheoretical democracy: reflections on building democratic enterprises in the American economy’, in M. D. Hancock, J. Logue and B. Schiller (eds), Managing Modern Capitalism: Industrial Renewal and Workplace Democracy in the United States and Western Europe, New York: Praeger, pp. 313–36. Lundh, C. (1987), Den svenska debatten om industriell demokrati 1919–1924, Lund: Studentlitteratur. Mansner, M. (1990), Suomalaista yhteiskuntaa rakentamassa: Suomen Työnantajain Keskusliitto 1956–1982, Helsinki: Teollisuuden kustannus. Müller, J-W. (2011), Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth Century Europe, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Östberg, K. (2002), 1968 – när allting var i rörelse, Stockholm: Prisma. Outinen, S. (2015), Sosiaalidemokraattien tie talouden ohjailusta markkinareaktioiden ennakointiin: Työllisyys sosiaalidemokraattien politiikassa Suomessa 1975–1998, Helsinki: Into. Pekkarinen, J. and J. Vartiainen (1993), Suomen talouspolitiikan pitkä linja, Helsinki: WSOY. Perelman, C. and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, Notre Dame, IN and London: University of Notre Dame Press. Pontusson, J. (1992), The Limits of Social Democracy: Investment Politics in Sweden, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rothstein, B. (2012), ‘Ekonomisk demokrati? Reflexioner kring en borttappad diskussion’, in B. Rothstein (ed.), Tillsammans: En fungerande ekonomisk demokrati, Stockholm: SNS, pp. 9–46.

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Saari, J. (2010), ‘Suomalainen konsensus – Korpilammen konferenssi (-77) käännekohtana’, Yhteiskuntapolitiikka, 75 (5), 469–85. Sassoon, D. (1996), One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, London: Fontana Press. Schiller, B. (1974), LO, paragraf 32 och företagsdemokratin, Stockholm: Prisma/LO. Schiller, B. (1988), “Det förödande 70-talet”: SAF och medbestämmandet 1965–1982, Stockholm: Arbetsmiljöfonden. Schiller, B. (1991), ‘Workplace democracy: the dual roots of worker participation’, in M. D. Hancock, J. Logue and B. Schiller (eds), Managing Modern Capitalism: Industrial Renewal and Workplace Democracy in the United States and Western Europe, New York: Praeger, pp. 109–18. Seeck, H. (2008), Johtamisopit Suomessa: Taylorismista innovaatioteorioihin, Helsinki: Gaudeamus. Simonson, B. (1988), Arbetarmakt och näringspolitik: LO och inflytandefrågorna 1961–1982, Stockholm: Arbetsmiljöfonden. Sjöberg, S. (2003), Löntagarfondsfrågan: En hegemonisk vändpunkt. En marxistisk analys, Uppsala: Universitetstryckeriet. Skinner, Q. (2002), Visions of Politics I: Regarding Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soikkanen, H. (1991), Kohti kansanvaltaa 3: SDP 1944–1952, Helsinki: Suomen Sosialidemokraattinen puolue. Stråth, B. (1998), Mellan två fonder: LO och den svenska modellen, Stockholm: Atlas. Streeck, W. (1995), ‘Works councils in Western Europe: from consultation to participation’, in J. Rogers and W. Streeck (eds), Works Councils: Consultation, Representation, and Cooperation in Industrial Relations, Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 313–48. Streeck, W. (2014), Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London and New York: Verso. Teivainen, T. (2002), Enter Economism, Exit Politics: Experts, Economic Policy and the Damage to Democracy, London and New York: Zed Books. Turunen, I. (1987), ‘Ammattiyhdistysutopia’, in R. Alapuro, I. Liikanen, K. Smeds and H. Stenius (eds), Kansa liikkeessä, Helsinki: Kirjayhtymä, pp. 194–212. Turunen, I. (1990), ‘Arbete, produktion och demokrati: De finländska produktionskommittéernas historia’, in D. Fleming (ed.), Industriell demokrati i norden, Lund: Arkiv, pp. 191–222.

4. Democratic welfare nationalism and competitive community: changing ideals of social harmony in the regulation of capitalism Pauli Kettunen At a time of increased asymmetries between labour and capital in globalized capitalism, the warm symmetrical expressions ‘social partners’ and ‘social dialogue’ were widely adopted, especially in the language of the European Union. Moreover, during a period when the spatial ties of capital loosened, humble community-oriented concepts such as ‘corporate citizenship’ became popular in the rhetoric of ‘corporate social responsibility’. This chapter discusses these paradoxes from a historical perspective. Social practices cannot simply be reduced to language and concepts; however, it is important to recognize the power of conceptualizations in defining the political agenda and agency. By examining the meanings and contexts of ‘social partners’ and ‘corporate citizens’, the chapter highlights the changing relationships between the public and the private, and the mandatory and the voluntary, in the social regulation of capitalism. These developments are associated with the changing roles of territorial entities, including nation states and the European Union, in a world of increased cross-border mobility for money, information, jobs and people. I will argue that harmony-and-symmetry-laden concepts reflect new emphases on a competitive community in the framework of globalized capitalism. In order to provide a historical interpretation of ‘social partners’ and ‘corporate citizens’, I examine the terms in relation to the particular pattern of social reform that was – with national variations – shared by the Nordic countries, that is, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. I draw attention to two aspects of what can be characterized as the democratic nationalism of the Nordic model of welfare: the ideal of parity between workers and employers and confidence in virtuous circles between different interests and objectives within national society. After a brief account of the emergence of these modes of thought and action, I focus on the Swedish Social Democratic economist and social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, reading his theoretical endeavours as self-critical reflections on the formation of the Nordic model. In the late 78

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1950s, in his notion of a ‘created harmony’, Myrdal generalized from Swedish experiences and future expectations while also criticising the nationalism of the welfare state, instead envisioning a ‘Welfare World’. I then move on to the present visions of harmony and symmetry appearing in the usages of ‘social partners’ and ‘corporate citizens’. Comparing these visions with the older Nordic ones, I discuss the changes in the Nordic model as a particular case of those transnational transformations in which ‘social partners’ and ‘corporate citizens’ serve as conceptual tools. When examining ‘social partners’, the focus is the European Union, and the data mainly consist of documents resulting from and dealing with the European ‘social dialogue’. In turn, the analysis of ‘corporate citizenship’ focuses on international arenas advocating this idea, including the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and the International Labour Organization, utilising the documents they have produced.

IDEOLOGY OF PARITY AND VIRTUOUS CIRCLES A point of departure for European labour law in the 19th and 20th centuries was the recognition that the symmetry between the parties of an employment relationship, worker and employer, was merely formal. The worker was the weaker party to the contract and was, consequently, in need of protection. This could be provided by legislation or collective agreements between workers’ associations and employers. Such agreements were advocated, in particular, by the social liberals of the late 19th century as the main solution to the so-called labour question. They argued that at the collective level, a more than formal kind of symmetry could be established. ‘The ideology of parity’ (Bruun 1979, pp. 157–61) was strengthened in Western European countries during the post-Second World War decades until the 1970s, and the practices of collective negotiations and agreements expanded. In the Marxian tradition of critical theory, the symmetrical appearance of labour market relationships is seen as an ideological disguise hiding the basic asymmetry between capital and labour. At the individual level, the relationship between worker and capitalist appears as a free market relationship, yet it is essentially – as Karl Marx concluded – a relationship of subordination and exploitation. This basic asymmetry is not removed by collective associations and agreements, as important as they may be for protecting workers and increasing their class consciousness. Parity at a collective level is still a mere formal appearance that conceals the fundamentally different compositions of the two labour market parties. One of the most significant contributions in this critique of ideology is the analysis of the ‘two logics of collective action’ presented by Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal (1980), who focus on the essential differences beyond the symmetrical outlook of trade unions and

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employer organizations concerning the actors they represent as well as their modes of creating and articulating collective interests. However, in the Nordic traditions of industrial relations, the symmetry between labour market parties seems to have meant something more than simply a juridical form of regulating labour market conflicts or an ideological disguise of the basic asymmetry of capital and labour. Arguably, the symmetry of collective labour market agreements became a criterion for an immanent critique of society, that is, the mode of critique in which society is criticized by means of its own apparent normative standards.1 In the Nordic countries, the ideology of parity was modified by influential trade unions associated with reformist socialist movements. As early as the 1930s, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, in this order, were among the most highly unionized societies in the world, and ‘labour market parties’ was adopted as an expression that reflected and reinforced the idea of a symmetric collective-level relationship between workers and employers. Labour market parties reciprocally recognized the particular and legitimate nature of their interests and committed themselves to taking into account the general interest through their mutual compromises. This mode of thought was manifested in a reinforced system of collective agreements in Denmark, Sweden and Norway in the 1930s, based not only on earlier traditions of collective organization and agreement but also on experiences of large-scale industrial conflicts. Any simple distinction between conflict and cooperation would be inadequate for describing this change. The increased power of trade unions was based on their conflict potential, and they became oriented to using it for extending the field of symmetric relations between ‘labour market parties’. This did not only mean that trade unions achieved a legitimate role in industrial relations. An equally fundamental change was that capitalists and somewhat later even the state and municipalities in their role as employers were defined and organized as a ‘party’ with (no more than) particular interests. Thus, the horizon was opened to a continuous widening of the agenda, in which employers would be obliged to admit the particularism of their interests, that is, the widening of symmetrical party relations. In the Nordics, in Sweden the most successfully and in Finland the least successfully, the Social Democratic movement was able to establish the parity of labour market parties as a normative standard of ‘society’ itself, which could then be turned against the prevailing asymmetries. Trade unions were seen as agents of democracy in two senses, both as a part of the Nordic tradition of voluntary associations and as a labour market party.

1 On immanent critique in Marx’s critique of political economy, see Lohmann (1986).

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These two aspects were interlinked by the idea of collective action as a means of levelling asymmetrical social relations (Kettunen 2012). The notion of democracy associated with the parity of labour market parties was extended in two directions. On the one hand, in the Nordic countries, the notion of industrial democracy was associated with the local and workplace-level practices of the system of collective agreements, including shop stewards, rather than with separate institutions of employee participation (Fleming 1990; Knudsen 1995). In debates on working-life reform, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, one can recognize a politically effective utopian idea according to which the collective-level parity between the labour market parties must be extended and woven into individual employment relationships, a vision of a kind of social citizenship within wage-work relationships (see Winner 1995, pp. 78–82). On the other hand, Social Democratic trade union leaders, in particular, conceived the representation of organized interests in economic and social policies as an essential part of their visions of economic democracy (Kärrylä 2019). However, in addition to widening democracy and preventing destructive conflicts, compromises between divergent particular interests were also seen to serve the universal interest in other ways. In the lessons drawn from the Great Depression of the 1930s, new ideas of cumulative economic success reshaped the notion of national economy. A virtuous circle would connect the interests of worker-consumers and farmer-producers as well as those of workers and employers, yet it entailed, in political discourse, something more than merely organized economic interests promoting each other. It was also a virtuous circle between equality, efficiency and solidarity, which, in a sense, can be seen as being based on three different ideological strains of Nordic modernization processes: the idealized heritage of the free peasant, the spirit of capitalism and the utopia of socialism. The correct definition of political objectives and the means of combining and achieving them remained contested issues. However, confidence in the possibility of virtuous circles provided a widely shared framework for political conflicts and compromises in a process that, retrospectively, can be seen as the making of the welfare state. This was not a uniquely Nordic mode of thought and action. During the Second World War, interlinkages between social equality, economic growth and democracy had become a more or less explicit part of the so-called post-war planning in Western countries. At the international level, it was manifested in the Declaration of Philadelphia of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1944, which came to form part of the organization’s constitution. Among the main principles of the Declaration were collective bargaining and the participation of workers’ and employers’ representatives in social and economic policies, conceived as a part of democracy. Full employment was a primary

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objective that would direct national and international measures in social and economic policies, which were to be controlled and coordinated by the ILO.2 Commentators within and outside the Nordic region nevertheless often perceived the post-war development in Scandinavia, especially in Sweden, as exceptional in the sense that it was seen to represent uniquely consistent steps along this universally applicable road to progress. To be sure, in the Cold War world, more than one candidate for a universally applicable road emerged. Nonetheless, the notion of ‘the middle way’, as associated with Sweden and sometimes with the whole Norden, implied a particular claim of universality. It was expressed, for example, by maintaining that ‘freedom and welfare’ were principles of the established cooperation in social policy between the Nordic countries (Nelson 1953; Salvesen 1956). The vision of a created harmony, developed by Gunnar Myrdal, reflected this kind of Nordic self-understanding and a critical elaboration of Nordic, notably Swedish, experiences and expectations.

CREATED HARMONY In 1960, based on his lectures at Yale, Gunnar Myrdal published the book Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning and Its International Implications. He identified two problems of the welfare state: detailed bureaucratic control and nationalism. In his proposed solutions, key expressions included ‘created harmony’ and ‘a more enlightened citizenry’. Myrdal distinguished between three phases in the planning of the welfare state. Prehistory consisted of uncoordinated public interventions to attempt to solve the problems caused by ‘the quasi-liberal state of mass-poverty, much social rigidity, and gross inequality of opportunity’. Then, attempts at the coordination of these interventions were initiated and expanded. This meant increasing direct state intervention. However, this was solely a transitional period which would result in the third phase of planning: In this transitional phase of the development towards the more perfect democratic Welfare State, while coordination and planning are becoming gradually more thorough, under the pressure of the continually growing volume of intervention, both by the state and by collective authorities and power groups beneath the state level, it often happens that people confuse planning with direct and detailed state regulations. The opposite, however, is true; there is still such a large volume of intervention because the measures are not ideally coordinated and planned. 2 Declaration concerning the aims and purposes of the International Labour Organization (Declaration of Philadelphia), https://​www​.ilo​.org/​dyn/​normlex/​en/​f​?p​=​ 1000:​62:​0:​:​NO:​62:​P62​_LIST​_ENTRIE​_ID:​2453907:​NO​#declaration (accessed May 2019).

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Thus, the perfection of planning in its third phase would mean an actual decrease in state intervention: The assumption is a continued strengthening of provincial and municipal selfgovernment, and a balanced growth of the infra-structure of effective interest organizations. This would, in its turn, presume an intensified citizens’ participation and control, exerted in both these fields. (Myrdal 1960, pp. 67–8)

That there was no natural harmony or equilibrium of private interests was clear to Myrdal. Moreover, it was neither through collective compromises per se that the common good was to be achieved, nor was the ‘created harmony’ an outcome of a Great Plan. The inseparable connection of planning and education was essential for Myrdal. This was the process of enlightenment. Planning as practising the knowledge and values of the common good presumed that all relevant interests were institutionally articulated and nobody, especially not the economically powerful, had any right to claim universality for their particular interests. Furthermore, ‘created harmony’ would not only be realized within a national framework but also on a global scale. Myrdal was critically aware that ‘the democratic Welfare State in the rich countries of the Western world is protectionist and nationalistic’ (p. 162, italics original). He argued that ‘economic balance in the world, and at the same time national stability and progress in all countries, should be secured by inter-governmental planning and concerted action, directed towards a coordination of national policies in the common interest’ (pp. 213). Beyond the Welfare State was overtly linked with Cold War confrontations and conflicts related to decolonization. Myrdal aimed to assure his American audience that the welfare state and economic planning, correctly conceived, would not lead to a Soviet-type system. His vision of a ‘Welfare World’, in turn, was associated with contemporary expectations regarding the growing significance of Third World voices. Thus, he recognized different roles for nationalism in different parts of the world. While nationalism had become an obstacle to progress in the Western welfare states, it could play a progressive role in the development of ‘underdeveloped countries’ and in their integration into the world economy. ‘Created harmony’ referred to the dynamics of reform rather than a future state of affairs. It implied two basic assumptions in Myrdal’s theoretical thought. The first was the idea that social reality consists of self-reinforcing processes, or, in Myrdal’s terms, ‘circular cumulative causation’ between economic, social, political and cultural factors (Myrdal 1957; Berger 2008). According to Myrdal, these self-reinforcing processes tended to be vicious circles, and the task of politics was to turn them into virtuous ones. The crea-

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tion of harmony was thus a process of positive ‘circular cumulative causation’ in which planning had become an integral part of the virtuous circle based on the recognition of divergent interests. The second basic assumption of Myrdal’s theoretical thought was the idea of the immanent critique of society. Any social scientific study should begin from an empirical identification of existing valuations in the society under scrutiny and a choice of some of them as value premises for reform-oriented critical research. In a rational choice of value premises, those valuations existing in a society should be chosen that correspond to the progress of enlightenment (Kettunen 1997; Strang 2007). Myrdal’s critique of the state-centredness and nationalism of Western welfare states also encompassed the Scandinavian countries. However, he seems to have thought that the characteristics of a created harmony had already achieved, especially in Sweden, the status of society’s own normative standards, and thus they provided the criteria for its self-criticism. He mentioned the ‘people’s home’ as an ideal that had been formulated in Sweden but indicated the future forms of popular self-government in all Western welfare states (Myrdal 1960, p. 177). Myrdal arguably universalized something that had been, in Nordic debates, idealized as the unique features of ‘Nordic democracy’. This concept had gained popularity in political conclusions drawn from the Great Depression and the threat of fascism in the 1930s (Kurunmäki & Strang 2010). While contrasting parliamentary democracy to dictatorships, it also referred to practices beneath the state-level. The sub-state ingredients of Nordic democracy included local self-government, popular movements with a strong ethos of education, and collective agreements between organized labour market interests. In his vision of planning through the self-regulation of enlightened citizenry, Myrdal obviously elaborated on these experiences. In expanding ‘the Welfare State’ into ‘a Welfare World’, he put his confidence in ‘the international idealism of all people’, which he was convinced was ‘a reality’ (Myrdal 1960, p. 214). Here, too, he seems to have universalized such aspects of the Swedish and Nordic self-understanding that he could see as normative standards of society itself, including small-state moral superiority. The sub-state ingredients of Nordic democracy contributed to what can be characterized as the societalization of the state (Kettunen 2011, pp. 24–5). Interest organizations came to play a strong role in political processes, and municipalities developed into the main providers of public services. However, while the legitimacy of the state was reinforced and high taxes were approved

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as a form of social solidarity, the societalization of the state never resulted in the decrease in direct state interventions that Myrdal had envisioned.3 Nonetheless, decreasing direct state interventions and removing protectionist borders did emerge as influential ideas in discussions on globalization and transnational integration after the 1970s. However, applying the phrases of the two 1974 Nobel Prize winners in economics, Friedrich Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal, we can say that these ideas were connected with a confidence in Hayek’s ‘spontaneous order’ rather than Myrdal’s ‘created harmony’. Visions of harmony thus appeared in the form of neoliberalist assumptions on the self-regulating market. However, as part of globalization rhetoric, images of harmony are also constructed by arguments pointing to community. Territorial ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983) – local, regional, European, yet still, in particular, national – are reproduced in efforts to provide competitive operational environments for globally mobile economic actors. In the making of a competitive ‘us’, institutional and discursive changes have thus emerged, including those indicated by the new usages of ‘social partners’.

SOCIAL PARTNERS AND LABOUR MARKET PARTIES In the mid-1980s, ‘social dialogue’ between ‘social partners’, that is, trade unions and employer organizations, was introduced in the procedures of European integration (Barbier 2013, p. 50). Its status was confirmed in the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties of the European Union as well as in the constitutional Lisbon Treaty. However, the translations of the Lisbon Treaty into Danish, Finnish and Swedish, the languages of the three Nordic EU members, make reference to ‘labour market parties’ rather than ‘social partners’.4 The vocabulary implies that a particular Nordic feature in the regulation of labour has been the stress on the labour market and divergent interests rather than communitarian ideas. The Nordic pattern of the welfare state and industrial relations did not rest on a denial of the fact that labour is a commodity. Arguably, it was not even oriented to abolishing this state of affairs. The policies Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1985; 1990) influentially termed ‘decommodification’ were rather aimed at empowering the sellers of labour power so as to level the asymmetries that stemmed from the ‘fictitious’ character of labour as a commodity (Polanyi 3 In his critical historical, partly autobiographical, account of Swedish social democratic politics in 1982, the main message of the old Gunnar Myrdal was a critique of what he considered ‘large-scale’ bureaucratic solutions (storskalighet) in different policy areas in recent decades (Myrdal 1982, pp. 23–36). 4 Danish: arbejdmarkedsparter; Swedish: arbetsmarknadsparterna; Finnish: työmarkkinaosapuolet.

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2001 [1944]), that is, from its being inseparably connected with its seller’s life. Social policies liberated people’s life courses from the necessity of selling labour power under any conditions and thus aimed to make labour more like a real commodity (Kettunen 2012). Social security, public social services and industrial relations were shaped by reforms that significantly promoted the functioning of the labour market. The Nordic model of social reform implied the making of modern society, in which waged and salaried work is the overwhelming social form of work and institutions are based on the normalcy of this form of employment, including the work of women outside the home. The notion of social citizenship not only concerned the relationship between the state and the individual but it also meant that the individual was empowered as a party in social relationships. ‘Social partners’ has a different origin. The term Sozialpartnerschaft seems to have emerged in Austria after the Second World War and referred to common efforts to facilitate national economic and political recovery and overcome previous cleavages. Its major features can be found in Social Catholicism, which took shape in the late 19th century (Hyman 2001, pp. 38–65). In the post-Second World War decades, especially in Austria and West Germany, the notion of ‘social partnership’ had the potential to combine the traditions of Social Catholicism and Social Democracy. The Social Democratic ‘dualism of labour and capital’ (Brüggemann 1994, p. 254) could be interpreted within the framework of the Catholic organicist idea of a community in which every member fulfils his or her own function for the common good. This idea implies a norm which reduces societal relationships to a personal relationship – a crucial aspect of the Catholic understanding of the principle of subsidiarity in the ‘social dimension’ of the EU (van Kersbergen 1995, pp. 187–97; van Kersbergen & Verbeek 2004, pp. 142–62). Adopting ‘social partners’ within the EU vocabulary detached the concept from its particular historical contexts and generalized its ideological content. Social dialogue is a mode of action all EU member states are supposed to share.5 In connection with this usage, another concept frequently appears that is also detached from its original post-Second World War context, namely ‘social market economy’. Stemming from so-called ordoliberalism, the concept was adopted by the German Christian Democrats at the end of 1940s and, later, by other European conservative parties as a tool for opposing any kind of socialism, including the Social Democratic combinations of economic plan-

5 See, especially, Commission of the European Communities. The European social dialogue, a force for innovation and change. Proposal for a Council Decision establishing a Tripartite Social Summit for Growth and Employment. COM (2002) 341 final, Brussels 26.6.2002.

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ning and social policies (Ptak 2004, pp. 201ff.; Slobodian 2018, pp. 74, 190, 266). As part of the EU vocabulary, ‘social market economy’ was turned into an all-encompassing concept for the European mode of relating the economic and the social, a crucial part of which is ‘social dialogue’.6 In the EU reports on industrial relations, ‘social partners’ is routinely used as the concept for any trade unions and employer organization. At the turn of millennium, the ILO also adopted ‘social dialogue’ as part of its vocabulary as a friendly and flexible companion to its old key concept of ‘tripartism’ (Baccaro & Mele 2012).7 The discursive power of ‘social partners’ and ‘social dialogue’ stems not only from the anchorage of these concepts in one of the long traditions of European social thought, but also from their resonance with recent and current tendencies in social political agenda setting. They are concepts in a discourse in which collective labour market negotiations and agreements are discussed from the perspective of their compatibility with European or national competitiveness. The concepts are means to defend collective regulation by attempting to prove its benefits to competitiveness and modify it to further promote this end. For those from the Nordic countries, it has been easy to support EU competitiveness strategies that recognize the need for social protection and the role of workers’ and employers’ organizations. It has been less easy for them to notice the changes in agenda setting caused by the new meanings of competitiveness. Similarly, it has been difficult to notice that the notion of symmetry in ‘social partners’ and ‘social dialogue’ differs from the ideal of symmetry that had been influential in the development of Nordic industrial relations. In the Nordic vernacular vocabularies, ‘social partners’ has not substituted for ‘labour market parties’, yet the equivalence between the terms seems to be taken for granted.

SOCIAL PARTNERS IN SOFT GOVERNANCE In the 1990s, several opinions and declarations were issued as a result of EU-level social dialogue, with a common stance being the easiest to achieve on, inter alia, training and education. However, anyone expecting that the European single labour market would be regulated by an EU-level system of collective agreements proper was soon to be disappointed. In only a small number of cases did social dialogue result in an agreement implemented in the 6 See, especially, European Commission. A new start for Social Dialogue. 05/03/2015. https://​ec​.europa​.eu/​social/​main​.jsp​?langId​=​en​&​catId​=​521​&​eventsId​=​ 1028​&​furtherEvents​=​yes (accessed May 2019). 7 As part of the Governance and Tripartism Department of the ILO, the Social Dialogue and Tripartism Unit was founded in the early 2010s.

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binding form of a Council Directive (the first one in 1996, on parental leave). The most obvious institutional limits to social dialogue derived from the fact that in social policies EU-level arrangements play a merely complementary role in relation to national practices. For the coordination of national social policies, the particular EU ‘social dimension’ is less important than the institutional preconditions stemming from single market norms. However, new modes of including social policies in the EU-level political agenda were introduced in connection with the Lisbon Strategy in 2000 that was aimed to make the EU, by 2010, ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’.8 A procedure called the Open Method of Coordination was to provide non-binding frameworks for national policies in areas within member-state competence (Zeitlin et al. 2005). In the process of establishing those general frameworks, a consultative role was assigned to the social partners. Moreover, a principle of non-binding framework agreements was adopted. In such agreements (the first one in 2002, on telework), the EU-level social partners committed themselves to urging their national member organizations to implement the agreements in nationally appropriate ways (Larsen & Andersen 2006). The Lisbon Strategy period ended with the financial crisis. The failure to achieve the objectives of competitiveness and a European-level social model was recognized in the next ten-year strategy, launched in 2010, Europe 2020: A European Strategy for Smart, Sustainable, and Inclusive Growth. Now ‘social model’ appeared in the plural form. Moreover, ‘structural reforms’ were ‘essential for a strong and sustainable recovery and for preserving the sustainability of our social models’.9 In addition, a new tool of macroeconomic coordination, the so-called European Semester, was launched.10 It was arguably designed to orient the EU to defining the imperatives of globalized financial markets and turning them into guidelines for national policies. The autonomy of social-policy coordination was reduced, as it was more tightly integrated with economic policies. Divergent claims have been made as to whether this meant the socialization of economic policies or the economization of social policies (Dawson 2018; Zeitlin & Vanhercke 2018). However, this dualism already appeared in the phrase ‘social protection as a productive 8 Lisbon European Council 23-24.03.2000: Conclusions of the Presidency, https://​ www​.europarl​.europa​.eu/​summits/​lis1​_en​.htm (accessed October 2019). 9 Europe 2020: A European Strategy for Smart, Sustainable, and Inclusive Growth http://​www​.efesme​.org/​europe​-2020​-a​-strategy​-for​-smart​-sustainable​-and​-inclusive​ -growth (accessed October 2019). 10 European Council/The Council of European Union. European Semester. https://​ www​.consilium​.europa​.eu/​en/​policies/​european​-semester/​ (accessed October 2019).

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factor’, introduced in the late 1990s – with support from the Nordic defenders of the welfare state – and adopted in the Lisbon Strategy. While it was an argument for the economic importance of social policy, it also implied a demand to reform social policy to allow it to serve as a productive factor and as ‘social investments’ (Beck et al. 2001; Magnusson et al. 2008; Kettunen 2012, p. 36). The prospects of EU-level social dialogue became weaker during the Lisbon Strategy period. In 2015, the Commission arranged a high-level conference on ‘A new start for Social Dialogue’. The message was a reminder that ‘social dialogue at all levels is a prerequisite for the functioning of Europe’s social market economy and crucial to promote both competitiveness and fairness’.11 Reading EU documents on social dialogue,12 one can make three observations. Firstly, while ‘social partners’ originally explicitly referred to a particular communitarian attitude to the relationships between workers and employers,13 in the EU vocabulary they appear as a natural element of any (at least any European) society. Secondly, little mention is usually made of the diverging compositions of various social partners. Instead, the increased global asymmetries between capital and labour disappear behind the symmetrical figures of social partners and social dialogue. Thirdly, as far as hints about conflicting interests appear, conflicts are presented as disturbances rather than structural aspects of social relationships. The common good is described as the improvement of economic and social ‘quality’ rather than as a result of compromises between divergent interests. Social dialogue is ‘a force for innovation and change’, ‘a key to better governance’, and ‘a force for economic and social modernization’.14 Not only is the EU-level social policy a field of ‘soft governance’ in relation to national social policies; the EU conceptualization of the social also contributes to confidence in voluntary agency and soft governance in the social regulation of capitalism. ‘Social partners’ and ‘social dialogue’ indicate such confidence. Social partners are characterized as actors of civil society, and social dialogue is presented as a way of creating a European civil society

11 European Commission. A new start for Social Dialogue, 05/03/2015, https://​ec​ .europa​.eu/​social/​main​.jsp​?langId​=​en​&​catId​=​521​&​eventsId​=​1028​&​furtherEvents​=​yes (accessed June 2019). 12 Especially, Industrial Relations in Europe reports that the European Commission has published every second year since 2000. 13 In critical social research, one may still find this usage of Sozialpartnerschaft. See e.g. Seelinger (2012). 14 Quotations from Communication from the Commission. The European social dialogue, a force for innovation and change /* COM/2002/0341 final */, https://​eur​-lex​ .europa​.eu/​legal​-content/​EN/​TXT/​?uri​=​celex:​52002DC0341 (accessed June 2019).

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(Kettunen 2018, pp. 358–60).15 Since ‘civil society’ in this usage denotes the sphere of citizens’ voluntary association, business enterprises, associated in employer organizations, thus qualify as citizens, notably in the sense of being members of civil society. However, more explicit ways of applying the concept of citizen to firms also appear, notably the concept of ‘corporate citizenship’.

CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP AND VOLUNTARISM Personified collective actors are far from recent novelties. In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes described the state, the ‘commonwealth’, as ‘an artificial man’. In later sociology, a living (human) organism came to be an influential metaphor for society. Moreover, in a more direct way, the 19th-century conceptual innovation of the ‘juridical person’ provided the preconditions for the ‘corporate citizen’. The political philosophy of natural law, dealing with societies of human beings – even if an artificial person might unite them – failed to provide the means for conceptualising the phenomena of the new commercial society. As the Swedish labour-law researcher Håkan Hydén notes, ‘legal positivism, by breaking with natural law thinking, opened up for legal constructions’. A juridical person, which referred to an association of several natural persons, especially a company, was one such revolutionary construction, making ‘the expansion of large-scale industrial society possible’ (Hydén 2002, pp. 161–4). In the late 19th-century United States, ‘corporate citizenship’ was even introduced as a legal construction, utilized, for example, for defining whether a railway company had its corporate domicile in Alabama or Tennessee (McCinney 1892). The concept nevertheless provoked opposition. It was, as a critic of monopolies wrote, ‘a legal fiction’ that intolerably increased the power of trusts and monopolies (Benjamin 1907, pp. 263–6). In management discourse, ‘corporate citizenship’ gained popularity in the late 1990s. In their value manifestos, large businesses promised to be ‘good corporate citizens’. Moreover, corporate citizenship was rapidly adopted even in academic contexts. For instance, The Journal of Corporate Citizenship was first published in 2001, and research institutes, government units, consultancies and think tanks were founded during the first years of the 21st century in, 15 The idea of employer organizations as a part of civil society is also included in the Lisbon Treaty. According to article I-32, ‘The Economic and Social Committee shall consist of representatives of organizations of employers, of the employed, and of other parties representative of civil society, notably in socioeconomic, civic, professional and cultural areas.’ In the ILO, employers’ and workers’ organizations have defended tripartism against ideas of involving ‘other civil society organizations’ in the ILO structure (Baccaro & Mele 2012, p. 208).

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for example, the United States, Britain and Australia (Matten & Crane 2003; Pies & Koslowski 2011). As the manifesto of an established field of research, the Handbook of Research on Global Corporate Citizenship was published in 2008. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the time of the global economic crisis, ‘corporate citizenship’ seems to have lost some of its popularity in global business language, yet it certainly did not disappear. The introduction of ‘corporate citizenship’ was a response to the critique of neoliberalist globalization.16 A major impulse for the wider adoption of this concept was the foundation of the United Nations Global Compact in 2000. General Secretary Kofi Annan initiated this programme at the World Economic Forum in Davos 1999. He urged business leaders to respond to the increased criticism of the globalized market economy by joining ‘a global compact of shared values and principles, which will give a human face to the global market’. According to Annan, the failure to do this would result in the global economy remaining ‘vulnerable to backlash from all the “isms” of our post-Cold War world: protectionism; populism; nationalism; ethnic chauvinism; fanaticism; and terrorism’.17 ‘Corporate citizenship’ was adopted as a key concept of the UN Global Compact, ‘the world’s largest corporate citizenship initiative’, although ‘corporate sustainability’ later emerged as an alternative. In 2019, about 10 000 companies located in more than 160 countries had committed themselves to ten principles that ‘enjoy universal consensus’ in the areas of human rights, core labour standards, environmental norms and anti-corruption. The primary proof of commitment is an annual report that each member company should submit.18 The World Economic Forum has been a leading arena for advocating corporate citizenship. A landmark in the triumph of this concept was the joint statement on ‘Global Corporate Citizenship – The Leadership Challenge for CEOs and Boards’ by the CEOs of 34 large multinational corporations at the World Economic Forum 2002 in New York.19 Intergovernmental organizations have played a vigilant role in adopting and diffusing such novel concepts as ‘corpo16 For example, on the role of NGOs in the emergence of the schemes of corporate social responsibility in Germany, see Berthoin Antal et al. (2007); Rieth (2009, pp. 111–13). 17 ‘Secretary-General proposes global compact on human rights, labour, environment, in address to World Economic Forum in Davos’, Press release SG/SM 6881, 1.2.1999, https://​www​.un​.org/​press/​en/​1999/​19990201​.sgsm6881​.html (accessed May 2019). 18 United Nations Global Compact, https://​www​.unglobalcompact​.org/​(accessed October 2019). 19 World Economic Forum 2002. Global Corporate Citizenship – The Leadership Challenge for CEOs and Boards, http://​www​.weforum​.org/​pdf/​GCCI/​GCC​_CE Ostatement.pdf (accessed May 2019).

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rate citizenship’. For instance, the ILO has been a major actor in the UN Global Compact. In the first years of the Global Compart, the ILO implemented ‘The Management Promotion and Corporate Citizenship Programme’, which, mostly by means of research and knowledge production, helped ‘build the supportive systems and the managerial competencies that enable enterprises to be productive, competitive and viable and at the same time meet the increasing social expectations on business’.20 Corporate citizenship belongs to the field of issues in which intergovernmental organizations such as the ILO and OECD primarily produce comparative knowledge and, thus, promote ‘benchmarking’ and the diffusion of ‘best practices’ instead of aiming at legally binding conventions. Voluntarism does not, however, imply hostility towards the official norms set by legislation or collective agreements. ‘Human and labour rights’ were mentioned in several parts of the declaration of CEOs at the World Economic Forum 2002. Moreover, the ten principles of the UN Global Compact on human rights, core labour standards, environmental norms and anti-corruption are all based on international conventions. Furthermore, the programme emphasizes that its members are committed to ‘voluntarism as a complement of regulation’.21 The ILO has, for example, developed ideas for involving the encouragement of corporate social responsibility (CSR) – and, thus, a social dimension – in international trade and investment agreements, in which the World Trade Organization (WTO) opposes the inclusion of binding social norms (Peels et al. 2016). Varying forms of trade union participation have also been associated with the CSR schemes. For example, transnational companies have made international framework agreements with international trade union federations. These agreements may express general principles in their CSR programmes, including the right of unionization and sometimes even a role for national and local trade unions in implementing and monitoring the programmes (Croucher & Cotton 2009, pp. 57–68). Manifestos on corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship encompass both the internal social relationships of firms and their relationships with the host communities. In this sense they are reminiscent of the welfare capitalism or company paternalism that, particularly in the early 20th 20 International Labour Organization. The Management Promotion and Corporate Citizenship Programme, http://​www​.ilo​.org/​dyn/​empent/​ (accessed March 2005); Kari Tapiola, ‘UN Global Compact and other ILO instruments’, OECD Roundtable on Global Instruments for Corporate Responsibility, OECD Headquarters, Paris, 19 June 2001, http://​www​.oecd​.org/​industry/​inv/​mne/​2348714​.pdf (accessed May 2019). 21 The Importance of Voluntarism, https://​www​.unglobalcompact​.org/​docs/​about​ _the​_gc/​Voluntarism​_Importance​.pdf (accessed May 2019).

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century, was characteristic of many large industrial enterprises. However, the role of spatial ties has profoundly changed. Today, territorial communities, most notably national ones, are being reproduced and reshaped as part of the globalized economic competition between different business environments (Rosamond 2002; Sassen 2006; Kettunen 2011), and the onus is on making community membership more preferable to companies than exit or remaining unengaged.

CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP AND THE EXIT OPTION Albert O. Hirschman (1970) distinguished three ways actors can respond to changes in the milieu of their activities. Exit means leaving an unsatisfactory milieu, while voice refers to attempts to exert influence on the operational environment and loyalty to commitment to its modes of functioning. Applying this distinction in a world of increased cross-border mobility of capital, it is apparent that, for transnational companies and investors, the exit option has become a powerful silent means of exerting an influential voice and defining the preconditions of loyalty. A market relationship has developed between business companies and the suppliers of business environments. One aspect of this change is a reversal of the positions of public and private. National and local public authorities are behaving as market actors as they attempt to produce and market attractive business environments to companies and investors, emphasising, for example, their high levels of ‘human capital’ and ‘social capital’. Private companies, in turn, are active in creating self-regulating norms and sanctions, for instance in the form of various certificates in social and environmental issues as an alternative to legal constraints. ‘Corporate citizenship’ is an expression for this reversal. At the same time it indicates that not only the providers of business environments but also businesses themselves must take into account the requirements for the popular legitimacy of their policies. For companies this means, most obviously, a sensitivity to consumer attitudes, and a good branding tool is an award in a Best Corporate Citizen Competition, which, for example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Chinese Committee of Corporate Citizenship arrange annually.22 The exit option is one side of the Janus face, while the other side is ‘corporate citizenship’. Correspondingly, we can distinguish between two sides in

22 The Citizens Awards. U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, https://​ www​.uschamberfoundation​.org/​citizens​-awards​-1 (accessed June 2019); Chinese Association of Social Workers, Committee of Corporate Citizenship, http://​ www​ .chinacccc​.org/​en/​(accessed June 2019); Darigan & Post (2009).

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the conventional politics dealing with globalization as a national challenge and reshaping the nation state as a ‘competition state’ (Cerny 1990; Streeck 1998; Palan et al. 1999). On the one hand, politics is shaped as the reactive fulfilling of economic necessities, which are associated with the exit option of companies and investors. On the other hand, politics is aimed at the active creation of an innovative context for competitive companies. Thus, varying national forms of ‘Public Private Partnership’ have emerged in projects for creating and exploiting competitive business environments that engage with national and local public authorities, universities and other institutes of research, education and training, large and small enterprises, and various kinds of voluntary organizations. At the same time as voluntarism connects ‘corporate citizenship’ with the notion of a civil society distinct from the state, the concept also implies the idea of membership in a community in which many different actors – called ‘stakeholders’ – must be taken into account and where the private and the public are inseparably intertwined. According to the declaration on Global Corporate Citizenship at the 2002 World Economic Forum, the first category of stakeholders comprises ‘investors, customers and employees’, while the second is a mixed collection of ‘other stakeholders’, such as ‘business partners, industry associations, local communities, trade unions, non-governmental organizations, research and academic institutions, the media and government bodies – from local municipalities to regional, state and national governments and international bodies such as those in the United Nations system’. The wide range of stakeholders in the rhetoric of corporate citizenship bears some resemblance to Myrdal’s emphasis on the recognition of all relevant interests. However, it also indicates that business interests have gained the new power of being recognized as general rather than particular interests. In the making of the Nordic model, an important principle was that the interests of businesses as employers were no more than a category of particular interests. This was to be ensured through collective and public regulation of labour relations, bolstering the ability of the weaker party (workers) to articulate their interests and constraining the stronger party (employers) from presenting their interests as universal. In the 1980s, the direction changed in a way that can be characterized by means of a distinction between ‘industrial relations’ and ‘human resource management’. Until the 1970s, the agenda of working-life reform was dominated by the struggle over the extent to which management questions should be drawn into the sphere of collective interest representation and conflict regulation, that is, into industrial relations. Then, the terms of the debate changed, and the perspective of human resource management became the dominant position in defining the agenda of working-life problems (Dulebohn et al. 1995, pp. 29–38; Looise & van Riemsdijk 2001). From a defensive position,

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trade unions developed arguments for proving that the institutions of industrial relations usefully contributed to social stability, economic predictability, more committed employees, more innovative management, and knowledge-based competitiveness. By contrast, the transnational rhetoric of national business interest organizations sends the message that they represent the universal interest of the ‘economy’ in relation to the particular and biased interests of trade unions and public authorities. In many European countries, for example in all Nordic countries, separate employer organizations have been abolished. Instead, the representation of enterprises as employers has become just one function of the business interest organizations that represent the interest of the ‘economy’ in relation to many different ‘stakeholders’, competitiveness appearing as the core of this universalized interest. On the other hand, for ‘global corporate citizens’, national business interest organizations are but one category of ‘stakeholders’. Thus, what kinds of motives can tie a transnational company to a national business or employer interest organization? This is as fundamental a question as the problems of trade union membership. One plausible motive is the logic of buying interest representation services. We may assume that the need for and availability and quality of such services are among the variables considered by transnational corporations when assessing potential business environments. Effective national business interest organizations adopt an influential dual role in which they both translate the imperatives of global competition into national challenges and are active in the shaping of national responses. In the competition to sell business environments for competitive economic performance, nation states, in turn, may highlight their effective systems of collective conflict regulation, risk sharing and consensus making as competitive advantages in their ‘country brands’.23 In the Nordic countries, this appears to be an important aspect of how encounters between transnational economic actors and national institutions are moulding the nation state as a competition state and national society as a competitive community.

23 In Finland, a commission for developing the country brand of Finland was appointed in 2008 by Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb and published in a report in 2010. It was chaired by Jorma Ollila, the president of the boards of Shell and Nokia, who has on several occasions – also when active as the CEO of Nokia in 1992–2006 – expressed his views on the economic benefits of the ‘Nordic model’. For a scholarly example of this kind of argumentation, see Andersen et al. (2007).

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CONCLUSION: COMPETITIVE COMMUNITY The need to cope with transnational economic, political and cultural interdependencies was a major impetus in the development of national welfare states and industrial relations systems. The Nordic experiences provided a background for the ‘created harmony’ Gunnar Myrdal envisioned in the late 1950s. According to his critical account, national responses to transnational interdependencies should be complemented and coordinated with international policies. In a world of increased cross-border mobility of capital, information, jobs and people, the problematic implications of the nationalism of Western welfare states are more evident than they were at the time of Myrdal’s observations. Nevertheless, the national welfare state is hardly expanding into a Myrdalian welfare world. By contrast, it is being modified to serve the competition-state and security-state functions of nation states that aim to provide attractive operational environments for globally mobile economic actors and respond to global inequalities by preventing the entry of unwanted people. Since the 1980s, the premises of the Nordic vision of symmetry between labour market parties have been weakened by a variety of developments: the increasingly multinational and transnational character of companies in the global economy; the restructuring of corporate practices and production chains by networking, subcontracting and outsourcing; transformations in the public sector in the spirit of New Public Management, including the blurring of boundaries between public and private, obligatory and voluntary, and official and unofficial; the increase in so-called ‘atypical’ employment relationships; and the growing fluidity of the boundary between wage work and entrepreneurship. It thus became more difficult to identify, organize, unite and centralize the different labour market parties within national society. Moreover, through the ethos of entrepreneurship, the idea of the worker as the weaker party of the employment relationship tended to be marginalized while, on the other hand, the asymmetry between capital and labour increased due to the dramatic growth in the mobility of financial capital. However, in the Nordic traditions, some favourable preconditions existed for a re-orientation. For instance, competitiveness was an integral part of the post-Second World War ideology of virtuous circles. Thus, it was easy for trade unions to accept, at least in their programmes, a value-added competition strategy based on innovation, training and participation as an alternative to the cost-based strategies of social dumping and low-wage competition. Much of the ideological power of knowledge, education and innovation in the Nordic countries stemmed from the promise that competitiveness and its preconditions in the global economy can – or even must – be seen from a wider perspective than that of neoliberalist deregulation. Consequently, the concepts of ‘social

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capital’ and ‘social investment’ gained popularity in the 1990s, while they also opened up new possibilities to revitalize ideas of a virtuous circle between social cohesion and economic success. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden have stubbornly held their top positions in international statistics of unionization. Thus, change has occurred within a period of remarkable institutional continuity, through ‘institutional conversion’ (Mahoney & Thelen 2010, pp. 1–37), in which the old welfare state institutions have been modified to serve the new functions of the competition-state. Concerning the guidelines of the political process, this change can be described by means of the distinction between compromise and consensus suggested by the Dutch historian Frank Ankersmit (2002, pp. 193–213). Compromise is based on mutual recognition of the particular instead of the universal nature of the interests in question, and the political process does not aim to remove this state of affairs. Consensus, in turn, presupposes a commitment to a predefined common interest, and in the political process only those aspects of the particular interests of the participants are recognized which contain elements of that common interest. Conflicts may emerge over the content of the common interest or the correct ways of representing it, and such conflicts, based on the consensus ideal, may be hard to regulate, as they easily involve accusations of betrayal. In nation state societies, consensus and compromise often co-exist, yet the relationship between these principles varies and changes. The Nordic pattern of social regulation institutionalized compromises between different particular interests, and they were legitimized by a confidence in virtuous circles. The recognition of and compromises between divergent interests were also at the core of Myrdal’s ‘created harmony’. However, creating competitive communities in a system of globalized capitalism reinforces consensus and weakens compromise. ‘Social partners’ and ‘corporate citizens’ indicate this change. The institutionalized status of ‘social partners’ and ‘social dialogue’ in the EU – and, later, also in the ILO – reflects attempts to engage businesses in a strategy aimed at promoting competitiveness based on knowledge, innovation, relatively high social norms, and trade union participation. ‘Corporate citizenship’, in turn, emerged as a management concept for responding to the critique of neoliberalist globalization. It thus enjoys a weaker institutional status, and, moreover, may be a double-edged sword, as the concept of citizenship still tends to be associated with rights and duties and equality and inclusion among human beings. Consequently, critics of corporate policies might turn ‘corporate citi-

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zenship’ against the very idea of the self-regulated responsibility of non-human persons that it was introduced to support (Rowe 2005, pp. 130–31).24 Nonetheless, ‘social partners’ and ‘corporate citizens’ are both conceptual tools for connecting the state, capitalism and civil society, most notably in the context of how nation states or the European Union are shaped as competitive territorial communities.25 Here, the newly emerged notion of civil society as the sphere of voluntary associations and social movements meets the Hegelian bürgerliche Gesellschaft, which refers to the sphere of (economic) needs and necessities. This Janus-faced notion of civil society appears to be furnished, in the rhetoric of ‘social partners’ and ‘corporate citizens’, with a strong emphasis on the common good, that is, on the orientation of action Hegel associated with the state. One may find here a competition-state variety of the ‘integral state’, which, as Antonio Gramsci (1971) argued, includes the complex of state machinery and the modes of organising economic interests in ‘civil society’ – the complex within and through which hegemony is established. The Gramscian concept of hegemony applies to a specific type of power that is evident in the discussion on corporate citizens, social partners and social dialogue. It is the power of defining the questions that are viewed as relevant, legitimate and also taken for granted. Struggles between rival answers tend to conceal the power of formulating the question. Thus, controversies over the answers to ‘how to make Europe (or a country) competitive in the globalized economy’ seem to reinforce the self-evident role of competitiveness in political agenda setting. The changes are nevertheless paradoxical and controversial. They are paradoxical because the competition state, while fulfilling the imperatives of ‘our’ competitiveness, seems to point to the notion of a warm community, based on personified ties, rather than to the notion of a cool society that consists of structures and interests and has been characteristic of Nordic-type welfare states. The changes are, however, also inherently controversial. While the emphasis on ‘us’ in the making of competitive territorial (most notably national) communities is an integral part of globalized economic competition, the very same transformations may also either erode solidarity based on common spatial ties,

24 A few researchers advocating ‘corporate citizenship’ have elaborated this concept in a way that includes human beings in their roles associated with the political agency of a company, as employees and customers (Crane et al. 2008). In this direction, new perspectives may be found on the old but recently marginalized discussion on ‘corporate democracy’ or ‘industrial democracy’. However, there are good grounds for agreeing with Colin Crouch (2009, p. 55), who finds ‘corporate citizenship’ a ‘deeply problematic’ idea. 25 Of course, there are many other topical issues concerning the relationships between the state, capitalism and civil society. See Adloff et al. (2016).

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evoke xenophobic reactions and practices of bordering, or help to create new cross-national and cross-territorial perspectives for defining ‘us’.

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PART II

The welfare state and cross-border mobility of capital

5. Offe’s paradox in the light of neoliberalism and its paradoxes: Schumpeterian workfare and Ricardian austerity Bob Jessop This chapter builds on my earlier work on the restructuring and strategic reorientation of welfare regimes in advanced capitalist social formations in the post-war period. But it updates and revises it in five main ways. First, it grounds the earlier analysis in the contradictions of the capital relation, some of which can be displaced and deferred within given spatio-temporal horizons but nonetheless provide generic mechanisms that recurrently destabilize capital accumulation and social reproduction and generate crises. Second, it considers two main exit routes from Atlantic Fordism in the heartlands of capitalism and suggests two different forms of welfare regime that are compatible with these exit routes. These are the knowledge-based economy and finance-led accumulation, each of which has a corresponding ideal-typical welfare regime. Third, it suggests that, whereas the form of welfare regime associated with the knowledge-based economy may pursue conjunctural austerity policies and even a contingent politics of intermittent austerity, finance-led accumulation is associated with the emergence of an enduring austerity state. Fourth, it addresses the crisis-tendencies of financialized neoliberalism and its capacities for renewal in response to the North Atlantic and Eurozone financial crises and related crisis forms. And, fifth, it assesses these remarks in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic and its implications for austerity.

PUTTING OFFE’S PARADOX IN ITS PLACE This chapter first revisits what I have elsewhere described as “Offe’s Paradox”, namely, that, “while capitalism cannot coexist with, neither can it exist without, the welfare state” (Offe 1984, p. 153, italics in original). Claus Offe proposed this paradox during the crisis of Atlantic Fordism in the 1970s and its reflection and refraction in what he termed Keynesian welfare states. Some might dismiss his statement as a simple rhetorical flourish without 104

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theoretical meaning or empirical application. But Offe grounded his argument in an account of the logic of capitalism and also noted some of its practical implications. Moreover, his paradox was not just a perceptive observation by a disinterested social scientist but one that was directly experienced and expressed by capitalist interests, political parties, reformist trade unions, think tanks, and official bodies. Indeed, his analysis is generally compelling and still repays careful reading. Thus, if there are problems with Offe’s paradox, they do not lie in its rhetorical form. For, like much theorizing about the crisis of the welfare state in the 1970s and early 1980s, his observations were shaped by current economic and political horizons. Offe developed his analysis for the specificities of Keynesian welfare states in a particular phase of capitalist development in the Global North. As such, his analysis did not address the inherent contradictions and crisis-tendencies of capital accumulation on a world scale and their problematic co-existence, especially over a full business cycle let alone a long Kondratieff wave, with efforts to secure daily, lifetime, and intergenerational social reproduction. For example, Offe neglected semi-peripheral or peripheral economies in Fordist circuits and the more general role of political capitalism (on which, see below). Since then, as the Atlantic Fordist system has continued to decline, world market integration has deepened, the centre of economic gravity has moved, and neoliberal financialization has survived a major crisis, we can better understand the strengths and weaknesses of Offe’s analysis. Two other limitations are, first, that Offe did not consider that welfare states in some societies depend on the articulation of varieties of capitalism (as well as pre- and non-capitalist relations of production) within the world market. And, second, relatedly, he focused on capitalist democracies rather than exceptional regimes based on authoritarian rule without competitive party systems and entrenched legal, economic and social rights. In previous work, I have suggested that Offe’s paradox could be deparadoxified in three ways (see Jessop 2002a, 2005, 2013). First, it can be put in its place temporally by exploring the interaction of secular and cyclical trends in social reproduction so that the paradox is no longer fixed in form and intensity but varies conjuncturally. To abuse an extended metaphor, which overpersonalizes features that are grounded in structural relations, the ‘unhappy marriage’ of capitalism and the welfare state is not permanent but involves serial monogamy. It passes through a fraught experimental period of cohabitation until a mutually satisfying modus vivendi and even state of limerence are reached and then difficulties emerge as incompatibilities are discovered and, despite counselling and attempts at reconciliation, the relation gradually deteriorates, even becoming one of pathological co-dependence, until new horizons open for capitalism and, as a result, the welfare state is, if not abandoned, left to play a secondary role in a new relationship.

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Second, putting it in its place structurally, while each relatively stable variety of capitalism discovers its own way of coping with this paradox for a time, each way leads sooner or later to crisis, and this then prompts a search for new solutions. Third, in this context, different varieties of capitalism are linked with different welfare regimes, with some couplings proving more compatible than others and hence more prone to the paradox. Conversely, as an addendum, the paradox could also be explored in terms of possible institutional complementarities among varieties of capitalism and their respective welfare regimes, whereby some social reproduction regimes may compensate for the deficits of others, each offering something to a global welfare mix in a global division of reproductive labour (on variegated capitalism, see Jessop 2015).

CAPITALISM AND ITS CONTRADICTIONS Offe’s paradox is not rooted in the alleged efficiency of unfettered markets but in the capitalist labour process, which treats labour-power as if it were a commodity. It is actually a “special kind of commodity” (Marx) or a “fictitious commodity” (Polanyi) that cannot be reproduced solely through the market mechanism. Its reproduction depends on non- or de-commodified forms of daily, life-course, and intergenerational support for its reproduction. In addition, capitalism is marked by structural contradictions and strategic dilemmas that cannot be permanently managed or resolved. For example, the wage (including social wage) is a source of demand and a cost of production; money functions as a ‘national’ currency circulating within a monetary bloc and subject to state control and as an international money exchangeable against other monies in currency markets; productive capital is a more or less concrete stock of time- and place-specific assets undergoing valorization and abstract value in motion (notably as realized profits available for re-investment); and knowledge circulates as part of the intellectual commons and can also become the object of intellectual property rights (Jessop 2002a). This makes stable growth inherently improbable and, insofar as there are periods and zones of relative stability, this depends on displacing or deferring problems into the future or elsewhere. Different varieties of capitalism handle these contradictions and their associated dilemmas in different ways (for a longer list of contradictions and how they are reflected in variegated capitalism, see Jessop 2013). This in turn implies that the forms of Offe’s paradox will depend on how a given variety of capitalism has managed these contradictions and tensions.

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OFFE’S PARADOX AND THE KEYNESIAN WELFARE NATIONAL STATE I now relate these points to Offe’s paradox in the period of the Keynesian Welfare National State (KWNS). The specificity of this type of welfare regime can be explicated in terms of the articulation of four aspects of state involvement in reproducing the capital relation. These aspects are: (1) the state’s distinctive role in securing the conditions for the profitability of private capital; (2) its distinctive role in securing the reproduction of the labour force on a daily basis, over the life-course, and intergenerationally (which is also the domain of biopolitics, Foucault 2008); (3) the primary scale on which these policies are determined even if they are delivered at other scales; and (4) the primary governance mechanism (e.g. hierarchical command, networks, or solidarity) used to compensate for market failures. I first applied these four criteria to the KWNS regimes that emerged in North Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand during the 1950s to 1970s and that were closely linked with the post-war Atlantic Fordist growth dynamic, which was based on mass production and mass consumption within national economies or, at least, within the more extensive circuits of Atlantic Fordism (Jessop 1993, 2002a). These were also the regimes explored in Offe’s Contradictions of the Welfare State (1984). While far from identical, these regimes had enough in common to provide a benchmark for assessing changes in welfare regimes in the intervening decades. The Fordist welfare regime can be described as a Keynesian welfare national state. First, in its economic moment, the KWNS was distinctively Keynesian insofar as it aimed to secure full employment in a relatively closed national economy and did so mainly through demand-side management and national infrastructural provision. Second, in contributing to the reproduction of the labour force, KWNS social policy had a distinctive welfare orientation insofar as it (a) instituted economic and social rights for all citizens so that they could share in growing prosperity (and contribute to high levels of demand) even if they were not employed in the high-wage, high-growth Fordist economic sectors; and (b) promoted forms of collective consumption favourable to the Fordist growth dynamic. Third, the KWNS was national insofar as these economic and social policies were pursued within the historically specific (and socially constructed) matrix of a national economy, a national state, and a society seen as comprising national citizens. Within this matrix it was the national territorial state that was mainly responsible for developing and guiding Keynesian welfare policies. Local and regional states acted more as relays for policies framed at the national level; and the leading international regimes established after the Second World War served mainly to restore

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stability to national economies and national states. And, fourth, the KWNS was statist insofar as state institutions (on different levels) were the chief supplement and corrective to market forces in a “mixed economy” concerned with economic growth and social integration. This example establishes that capitalism (at least in its Atlantic Fordist form) coexisted with the welfare state (in the form of the KWNS) for an extended period. This did not preclude the demise or weakening of firms or sectors that could not compete in the new Fordist–KWNS setting. Eventually, however, the Fordist accumulation regime and its KWNS mode of regulation became mutually contradictory. This development was aggravated as economies became more open and governments lost control over the conditions for full employment and welfare expansion. All examples faced similar pressures from internal crisis-tendencies and external developments and their symptoms reflected national and local specificities. The first signs of economic crisis emerged in the mid-1970s and the crisis worsened in the 1980s. The structured coherence of national economy–national state–national society was weakened by changes linked to internationalization, the rise of multi-tiered global city networks, the formation of triad economies (such as European Economic Space), and the re-emergence of regional and local economies. The unity of the nation state was also weakened by the (admittedly uneven) growth of multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies and of divided political loyalties (with the resurgence of regionalism and nationalism as well as the rise of European identities, diasporic networks, cosmopolitan patriotism, etc.). Other crisis-tendencies were also intensified. There were fisco-financial crises, representational crises (reflected in disaffection with mainstream political parties and the state), rationality crises as post-war modes of state intervention became ineffective, legitimacy crises, and a growing organic crisis of the wider society. All this prompted some forces to search for new economic and social bases for capital accumulation rather than try to muddle through or seek to restore the status quo ante and revive the Fordist mode of growth and KWNS.

ALTERNATIVE ROUTES TOWARDS POST-FORDISM In this context, many economic imaginaries were proposed but two became dominant, if not hegemonic, in the former economic spaces where Atlantic Fordism prevailed. These imaginaries were the knowledge-based economy (KBE) and the “more market, less state” approach of neoliberalization. The former reflects a profit-producing (or productive) concept of capital, the latter a money concept of capital (cf. van der Pijl 1998). The KBE was more prominent initially in export-oriented economies that had social democratic or neo-corporatist welfare regimes. Conversely, neoliberal regime shifts were more prominent in societies that previously had more liberal market econo-

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mies with internationally oriented finance sectors and liberal welfare regimes. The KBE imaginary was openly articulated in declared strategies and strongly promoted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Neoliberal regime shifts implicitly favoured finance-led rather than export-led growth and produced growing inequalities of wealth and income – but these outcomes were not openly advocated in the public domain and emerged more through stealth. Identifying these alternatives does not imply a radical rupture from Fordism to post-Fordism or that these two forms could not co-exist in a variegated world market. I now discuss the welfare regimes that correspond ideal-typically to the KBE and the finance-dominated economy that is emerging in the neoliberal regime shifts. Schumpeterian Workfare Post-national Regimes As the capital relation developed in ways that undermined the national economy as an object of state management, the underlying contradictions of the capital relation re-emerged. It was no longer possible to treat the wage (and social wage) primarily as a source of demand and money could no longer be treated as a national money controlled by a national state. In the 1990s, based on theoretical reasoning, emerging narratives, and empirical observation, I suggested that a new type of welfare regime was emerging. I termed this, by analogy with the KWNS, the Schumpeterian Workfare Post-national Regime (SWPR). I interpreted this as the latest attempt to solve Offe’s paradox and predicted that, like the KWNS, it would be consolidated for a while but then, also like the KWNS, prove permanent. The SWPR corresponded to the emergence of knowledge-based economies – or, at least, the rhetorical promotion of the KBE as a hegemonic economic imaginary (Jessop 2002a, 2007, 2013). This imaginary presents the production, management, distribution, and use of knowledge as a key driver of economic growth, wealth generation, and job creation across the private, public, and “third” sectors. In a true KBE, knowledge is allegedly applied reflexively to the production of knowledge and most sectors tend to become more knowledge-intensive. While it tends to favour productive over money capital, it has sometimes been inflected in a neoliberal manner that highlights the role of market forces as the driving force behind innovation. Because the valorization of knowledge as a fictitious commodity depends on diverse extra-economic supports, there are limits to its commodification and this indicates that an effective fix depends on embedding the KBE in a multi-scalar knowledge society (Jessop 2007; cf. Polanyi 1957 [1944] on market economy and market society). The SWPR can be presented along the same lines as the KWNS. First, it is Schumpeterian insofar as it tries to promote permanent innovation and

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flexibility in relatively open economies by intervening on the supply-side and to strengthen their overall competitiveness. The emblematic economist here is Schumpeter, the theorist of innovation, entrepreneurship, and competition, rather than Keynes, the theorist of money, employment, and national demand (Keynes 1936; Schumpeter 1939). Second, as a workfare regime, the SWPR subordinates social policy to the demands of labour market flexibility and employability as well as to the socially constructed imperatives of global competition. This includes putting downward pressure on the social wage qua cost of international production but, given the economic and political limits to welfare cuts, it also aims to re-functionalize the inherited welfare state to serve economic interests. The state also tries to create subjects to serve as partners in the innovative, knowledge-driven, entrepreneurial, flexible economy and its accompanying self-reliant, autonomous, empowered workfare regime. Third, the SWPR is “post-national” insofar as national territories have become less important as economic, political, and cultural “power containers”. This is reflected in a transfer of economic and social policy-making functions upwards, downwards, and sideways. Globally, this is seen in the growing concern of diverse international agencies (such as the IMF, World Bank, OECD, and ILO) and intergovernmental forums (such as the G7 and G20) with shaping current social as well as economic policy agendas. The European Union (EU) acts as a relay for these agenda-shaping efforts within its borders and also promotes its own agenda for other countries, whether near neighbours or further afield. In both cases, the EU operates in a post-national context. The EU level is also seeking to impose more numerous and tighter restrictions on national economic and social governance, especially through the norms of the Single Market, the economic policy and performance criteria of the Eurozone, and the fiscal and budgetary union that is emerging in the wake of the Eurozone crisis. Needless to say, these efforts are not always successful. What is emerging in this context is a series of multi-level government and/or multi-spatial meta-governance regimes oriented to issues of the inter-scalar re-articulation of the economic and political – with the EU just one among many such emerging regimes. At the same time there are tendencies to devolve some economic and social policy-making to the regional, urban, and local levels on the grounds that policies intended to influence the micro-economic supply-side and social regeneration are best designed close to their sites of implementation. This may also involve cross-border cooperation among regional, urban, or local spaces. Paradoxically, this often leads to an enhanced role for national states in controlling the interscalar transfer of these powers – suggesting a shift from sovereignty to a primus inter pares role in intergovernmental relations. Fourth, the SWPR relies increasingly on governance to compensate for market failures and inadequacies. One aspect is the increased importance of

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private–public networks to state activities on all levels – from local partnerships to supranational neo-corporatist arrangements. The shift from government towards governance means that traditional forms of intervention are less important now in economic and social policy. This does not mean that law and money have disappeared, of course; instead, active economic and social steering now tends to run more through soft regulation and reflexive law, additionality and private–public partnerships, organizational intelligence and information-sharing, and so on. A key role is also played by metagovernance both in normal times and in response to major shocks and crises. The “Third Way” is an interesting variant on the SWPR and may even provide a bridge to Ricardian workfare post-national states (see below). Its advocates sought to move beyond the KWNS by instituting more decentralized, more flexible, and more resilient economic and political arrangements based on network governance, active labour market policies, and a social investment state (classically, Giddens 1998). Its timing is interesting: its political take-off emerged as a search for flanking and supporting measures to compensate for the increasingly evident limitations to the rollback of the KWNS and the rollout of a laissez-faire, free market approach where a neoliberal regime shift had occurred – most notably in the USA (under President Clinton) and the United Kingdom (under Prime Minister Blair) – and, as such, it served to maintain the forward momentum of neoliberal restructuring. It was nonetheless most significant for crises in social democratic regimes that were undergoing neoliberal regime shifts or neoliberal policy adjustments and involved a search for a via media between (1) earlier forms of social democracy (national plans, tripartite corporatism, Keynesian welfarism), to which, it is alleged, there can be no return; and (2) the emerging economic, political, and social strategy of a newly resurgent capitalist class, especially in its currently hegemonic neoliberal form with its Ricardian tendencies. As with all ideal-types, there are no pure cases; the Nordic social democracies and Rhenish capitalism provide some representative examples. This is especially clear for the Schumpeterian dimension. For, where the KBE is the dominant strategy, there are strong material incentives to maintain public expenditure that supports enhanced competitiveness based on a flexible, high-skilled economy. An exception arises where financial innovation is primary; this produces strong ideological pressures to reduce public expenditure as an unproductive deduction from the profit-generating private sector and to reduce the social wage as a cost of international production. With hindsight, I overestimated how far the SWPR would develop in all post-Fordist economies. This was because I underestimated the survival power of neoliberal regime shifts and the long-term effects of neoliberal policy adjustments as they cumulate over time, bringing profound but unanticipated shifts in accumulation regimes and welfare systems. The latter occurred in

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the German case, for example, so that it became more neoliberal through the cumulative effect of policy shifts. Thus, I now consider whether there is an organic form of welfare regime associated with neoliberal regime shifts. Ricardian Workfare Post-national States Another dominant economic imaginary, which first won traction in the 1970s, was the “more market, less state” strategy advocated by the neoliberal thought collective. Neoliberalism is a political project that is justified on philosophical grounds and seeks to extend competitive market forces, consolidate a market-friendly constitution, and promote individual freedom. The specific content and overall weight of these three desiderata vary as do their supporters’ motives. Four main variants of neoliberalization emerged from the 1970s onwards (their ideological prehistory is another story) and converged in the 1990s to produce the first global highpoint of neoliberalism. There are various hybrid forms and even, occasionally, transitions between the main forms. The four main forms are: (1) neoliberal system transformation in the wake of the decomposition of the Soviet Bloc and Yugoslavia; (2) principled neoliberal regime shifts, which aimed to roll back the post-war institutionalized class compromises and forms of welfare regime linked to the circuits of Atlantic Fordism and to tilt the balance of forces in economic and social policy towards capital;1 (3) neoliberal structural adjustment policies imposed primarily from outside on semi-peripheral economies by transnational economic institutions and organizations backed by leading capitalist powers and their local partners among domestic political and economic elites in response to the crises of import-substitution industrialization, export-led growth, and state socialism;2 and (4) pragmatic and potentially reversible neoliberal policy adjustments, which aimed to support rather than overthrow or undermine post-war settlements (for more details, see Jessop 2002b, 2012, 2015). In each case, but in different ways and with different effects, neoliberalization one-sidedly privileges the exchange-value aspect (profit for the sake of profit, regardless of negative externalities) of capitalist relations over the substantive material and symbolic use-value aspect (reflecting material interdependencies in space-time and the balance of externalities). Partly because there are varieties of neoliberalism and forms of neoliberalization, neoliberalization shows a remarkable

1 Well-known cases are Thatcherism and Reaganism, but similar shifts occurred in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Iceland and Cyprus. 2 Policy adjustments can cumulate despite the fluctuating fortunes of the parties more favourably inclined towards them and, almost by stealth, lead to neoliberal regimes.

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collective capacity for renewal in the face of shocks (Mirowski 2013; Peck 2010). Whereas social formations that emphasized KBE strategies were more likely to involve neoliberal policy adjustments, social formations where the balance of forces favoured neoliberal regime shifts tended towards finance-led and even finance-dominated accumulation. While often identified with right-wing parties, neoliberal regime shifts have also been initiated, maintained or supported by centre-left parties, often under a “Third Way” label. At its core are six economic policies: (1) liberalization (more competition); (2) deregulation (fewer state and “hard law” controls over capital); (3) privatization to sell off the public sector, often at below market value, facilitating accumulation through dispossession (especially the politically licensed plundering of public assets and the intellectual commons); (4) market proxies in the residual public sector to promote quasi-commodification; (5) internationalization (reducing the frictions of national “power containers” and analogous borders, generalizing competition through world market integration, promoting best practice, and, coincidentally, promoting a race to the bottom); and (6) shifts in the tax burden from direct to indirect taxation to boost consumer choice, from mobile transnational capital to less mobile small and medium enterprises, subaltern classes, and citizens, and an increase in post-tax profits of firms and financial institutions (Jessop 2002b). These features are also common to structural adjustment programmes. Whereas the KBE and SWPR are associated with productive capital, finance-led accumulation is associated with the money concept of capital. Unsurprisingly, the neoliberal privileging of the exchange-value aspect of capital’s contradictions helps to free money capital as the most abstract expression of the capital relation from extra-economic and spatio-temporal constraints, increases the emphasis on speed, acceleration, and turnover time, and enhances capitalʼs capacity to escape the control of states and other institutional orders that are territorially differentiated and fragmented. This disembedding from the frictions of national power containers benefits transnational capital, intensifies the influence of the logic of capital on a global scale (which may also benefit more competitive national capitals), and promotes a treadmill search for superprofits. Above all, compared to the largely intermediary role of finance in Atlantic Fordism and a more productivist, post-Fordist knowledge-based economy, the deregulation of finance increases the significance of the financial sector relative to the non-financial sector. It tends to privilege hypermobile financial capital at the expense of capitals that are embedded in broader sets of social relations and/or that must be valorized in particular times and places. Hypermobile capital also controls the most liquid, abstract, and generalized capitalist resource (money and capitalist credit) and has become the most integrated fraction of capital and, as such, is more easily disembedded from

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social constraints than other forms of capital and enjoys more opportunities for moving up, down, and across scales, re-articulating time horizons, and commodifying and securitizing the future. This reinforces its competitiveness and boosts its ability to displace and defer problems onto other economic actors and interests, other systems, and the natural world, thereby increasing its “indifference” to its operating environment. Yet, as Marx foresaw, world market integration also generalizes the contradictions and dilemmas of a relatively unfettered (or disembedded) capitalism (Marx 1967 [1883], p. 227). These macro- and meso-level changes are accompanied by the financialization of everyday life. Treatment of the wage primarily as a cost of (global) production rather than as a source of (domestic) demand leads to re-commodification of social welfare in housing, pensions, higher education, health insurance, and so on. Further, growing flexibility of wage labour (especially increasing precarization) and cuts in the residual social wage leads workers to rely on credit (and usury) to maintain their standard of living and provide for daily, life-course, and intergenerational reproduction. This increases inequalities of income and wealth, limiting the impact of the wage as a source of demand (see Dore 2008; Krippner 2005; Rasmus 2010). This is reinforced through the diversion of revenues and wealth by companies and high net-worth households to tax havens to escape state regulation, evade income, wealth and inheritance taxes, and to facilitate speculation in financial markets (Goda and Lysandrou 2014; Rasmus 2015; Zucman 2013).3 Likewise, while individuals are subject to monitoring that far exceeds traditional census-taking norms, the activities of corporations, financial institutions, escape regulatory control via commercial confidentiality and opaque offshoring arrangements. World market integration also affects state capacities to raise taxation, incur debt and manage budget(s). The Ricardian Workfare Post-national States (RWPS) system involves consistent implementation of the six core features of the neoliberal policy set (see above). David Ricardo, the emblematic economist in this workfare regime, was a theorist of international trade whose work has been interpreted, rightly or wrongly, to imply that each economy in the international division of labour should focus on exploiting its cheapest, most abundant factor of production (Ricardo 1817).4 And Ricardian economic and social policies today aim to reduce the price of labour-power, to seek out on a global scale the most abun3 Zucman (2013) shows that tax havens hold 8% of households’ financial wealth, three-quarters of which are unrecorded; and that the stock of unrecorded assets is double the recorded net debt of the rich world. Goda and Lysandrou (2014) indicate how high net worth individuals drive the demand for asset-based derivatives. 4 In fact, the assumptions in Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage assumed that each national economy produces complete goods (no global commodity chains),

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dant and cheapest sources of raw materials, and to reduce the cost of capital – all in order to increase the revenues accruing to capital. The Ricardian form of workfare involves general fisco-financial restraint, putting downward pressure on most areas of expenditure, especially discretionary ones (Ferrera 2008; Pierson 2001; Seymour 2014). This pattern can occur in normal forms of politics, in states of economic emergency or, even, in lasting states of exception. It can be triggered by an obvious crisis, one that is deliberately exaggerated, or one “manufactured” for political ends. Indeed, in neoliberal regimes, whatever the state of the economy, it is always deemed the right time to reduce public expenditure (except for corporate welfare) through a well-crafted (and crafty) politics of austerity. In this context, the ideal-typical RWPS places more emphasis than the SWPR on putting downward pressure on wages and the social wage and, because this is attempted in the context of increasing competition in the world market, it involves action at the supranational and transnational scale, as well as nationally, regionally and locally. Far more than in the SWPR, it also involves an attack on the legal, economic and social rights of labour (with the last labelled, pejoratively, “entitlements”) to enhance the flexibility of the labour market and reduce the costs of the residual and increasingly threadbare welfare state. At the same time, this regime extends the rights of capital, their entrenchment in new international treaties and agreements, and the transfer of adjudication and arbitration on capital’s rights and prerogatives to private tribunals or other arrangements beyond the purview of national states. It also puts localities, cities and regions, as well as national territorial states, in competition with each other to provide the most favourable investment environment possible for potentially mobile capital. In ideal-typical terms, then, a consolidated RWPS is linked to an enduring austerity state. This approach to austerity differs radically from the kind of conjunctural austerity policies that characterize the KWNS and occur in cases of pragmatic neoliberal policy adjustment, when it is associated with targeted cuts in specific areas. An enduring austerity state also goes beyond the enduring politics of austerity promoted in response to a “chronic” fisco-financial crisis, real or manufactured, or a more general economic crisis. This state form results from a major institutional reorganization of the relations between the economic and political in capitalist formations – either as a possibly unintended product of the politics of austerity or a deliberate strategy to subordinate the polity more directly and durably to the “imperatives” of the world market as construed in neoliberal discourse with its one-sided emphasis on the logic of exchange-value. And, given the political, ideological, hegemonic and organic

there is no capital mobility, no labour migration, and that there is full employment of labour and other resources.

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crises that have developed in the context of the financial, economic, and fisco-financial crises, they can also be an authoritarian response to growing popular unrest (including right-wing extremism) about the technocratic and plutocratic nature of crisis responses. Considered in scalar terms, the RWPS is a transnational project promoted by the USA and, in a subordinate role, the UK and associated with a transnational neoliberal class. While it operates on many scales, the imperial dimension cannot be ignored – especially when neoliberalism is associated with structural adjustment policies and externally imposed austerity and neoliberal policies (think Greece). So, either imperial or post-national would be good descriptions to contrast the austerity state with the KWNS but, on a global scale, imperialist is preferable to post-national where initiatives are externally mediated. Many aspects of the RWPS involve pushing the costs of reproduction onto civil society, households and individuals. This might justify the term regime. But, insofar as they are associated with the rise of an authoritarian state that pursues permanent austerity, the importance of this shadow of hierarchy might justify the use of the state – especially as this serves to highlight the contrast with the SWPR. The Enduring Austerity State The enduring austerity state involves far more than quantitative cuts in spending because it is also intended to have qualitative, transformative effects. It is pursued as a means to consolidate and extend the power of capital, especially interest-bearing capital, and to subsume ever wider areas of social life under the logic of differential accumulation. This approach is a key feature of the RWPS as it emerges. It seeks to tip the institutional matrix and balance of forces in favour of capital rather than adjust policies to safeguard existing economic and political arrangements. The politics of austerity can be read as a long-term strategic offensive to rearticulate (1) the social power of money as capital and of capital as property and (2) the political power of the state. This second feature justifies referring again to the statal dimension of governance. For even where there is greater involvement of civil society modes of governance, these operate in the shadow of an authoritarian state. In addition, the politics of permanent austerity is not just a response to economic crisis but also to political and ideological crises and, indeed, an organic crisis of the capitalist social order (Seymour 2014, p. 4; cf. Bruff 2013; Gramsci 1971). This is used to justify a state of economic emergency that is presented initially as a “temporary” response to immediate or chronic problems but then acquires more permanent form through cumulative and mutually reinforcing institutional change, routinization of exceptional measures, and habituation (e.g. on the left, Bruff 2013; Oberndorfer 2015; Solty 2013; from

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the right, Stockman 2013; and, from the centre, Crouch 2004; Streeck 2013). Most of these commentators note that the scope for material concessions to subaltern groups has shrunk and, faced with growing resentment and sometimes open resistance, capitalist states are also becoming less open and democratic and increasingly coercive (in addition to the sources cited above, see Duménil and Lévy 2011; Harvey 2005; Lapavitsas 2011). Some also note that the apparent strengthening of the state also weakens it (e.g. Bruff 2013, citing Poulantzas 1978). Seymour (2014) explains this well. He argues that austerity involves something much broader and more complex than spending cuts – thanks to its role in restructuring, recalibrating and reorienting state expenditure. Indeed, for him, austerity is the dominant political articulation of the global economic crisis in Europe and North America. This strategy has seven aspects: (1) rebalance the economy from wage-led to finance-led growth; (2) redistribute income from wage-earners to capital; (3) promote “precarity” in all areas of life as a disciplinary mechanism and means to reinforce the financialization of everyday life; (4) recompose social classes, with increasing inequality in income and wealth and greater stratification within classes; (5) facilitate the penetration of the state by corporations; (6) accelerate the turn from a KWNS based on shared citizenship rights to a workfare regime that relies on coercion, casual sadism and, especially in the US, penality; and (7) promote the values of hierarchy and competitiveness (Seymour 2014, pp. 2–4). In many respects, these aspects were already inscribed in the politics of neoliberal regime shifts (see above) but, for Seymour, they have been much reinforced following the 2007–09 financial and economic crisis. This can be explained in part by the fact that the painful measures already taken to consolidate budgets in the 1990s and early 2000s were wiped out when the financial bubble burst and governments took on more debt to bail out banks and/or engineer stimulus packages in response to the North Atlantic Financial Crisis (NAFC) and Eurozone crisis (Hudson 2012; Rasmus 2010). In addition, the decision to bail out and recapitalize interest-bearing capital, has further distorted the growth dynamic of neoliberal finance-dominated accumulation. We should also note that the austerity state pursues a politics aimed at disorganizing subaltern classes and reorganizing the capitalist power bloc around interest-bearing capital (in neoliberal regimes) and export-based profit-producing capital (in economies where neoliberal policy adjustments prevailed).

BEYOND THE ELECTIVE AFFINITY OF CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY The historical tension between capitalism and liberal democracy has become more complicated thanks to four major changes in the logic and organization

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of contemporary capitalism. These comprise (1) the transition from national markets to world market; (2) the transition from rational to political capitalism; (3) the relativization of the national scale of economic and political organization and its implications for government and governance; and (4) a move from classical and social liberalism to neoliberalism. The World Market The growing integration of the world market and continuing survival of a pluralistic world of states has led to a growing spatio-temporal dissociation between the economic and political spheres that previously underpinned the elective affinity between capitalism and democracy. While the world market is tendentially unified and integrated through profit-oriented, market-mediated competition based on trade, financial flows and (capitalist) commodity production, the world political order is still characterized by a “motley diversity” of states that may be “hostile brothers”, or deadly enemies, and that vary in size, capacities, and ability to shape the operation of the world market and defend their respective capitals and/or other capitals operating in their respective economic spaces. One aspect of this is the growing disjunction between the economic and social power of money capital and the political power of the state. The scope for capital mobility and the competition to attract capital undermine three key conditions of a tax state: its monopolies of taxation and coercion and, hence, the general and compulsory nature of taxation. The taken-for-grantedness of national space as the site for taxation as competition to attract or retain potentially mobile capital leads to a proliferation of state-sponsored exceptions and exemptions from taxation and as corporations and high net-worth households act to avoid or evade tax (Cameron 2008). More generally, as world market integration proceeds, it becomes harder to control the international, transnational and supranational economic and extra-economic aspects of differential accumulation. State managers therefore give more weight in their fisco-financial calculations to the impact of international currency regimes, internationally transferable property rights, and the international political order compared with their control over the national money, domestic property rights and the domestic political situation. This can generate legitimacy crises and/or create a democratic deficit as competitiveness is prioritized over other public concerns. Moreover, temporally, as economic interactions accelerate in real time, especially in financial relations, it becomes harder to control them through democratic means. This is reflected in the resort to technocratic and other forms of unelected, non-accountable executive powers linked to international regimes and obscure parallel power networks; and in reliance on “fast policy” as states seek to compress their own decision-making cycles (Peck and Theodore 2015; Rosa 2013).

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From Rational Capitalism to Political Capitalism The relationship between capitalism and democracy assumes profit-oriented, market-mediated capitalism – a kind that Weber described as rational capitalism. He also identified three forms of political capitalism, in which market forces have a secondary role. These are predatory profit from political activities, including from financing of wars, revolutions or party leaders; profits from continuous business activity based on force or a monopoly granted by political authority; and profit from unusual transactions with political bodies (Weber 1961, pp. 222–3, 244–7; 1968, pp. 160–6; see also Swedberg 1998). Neoliberalism did not emerge from the spontaneous operation of free market forces (cf. Polanyi 1957, on liberalism). It was created through a long politico-ideological war of position, the use of economic power and relentless lobbying, targeted legislation to promote the neoliberal economic policy set, and judicial decisions (Jones 2012; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). This is also associated with accumulation through politically licensed plundering of public assets and the intellectual commons and the de-criminalization of financial fraud (see Black 2005, 2015). Furthermore, when this produces financial crises, we see bailouts and financial subsidies that reflect “unusual deals with political bodies” (legislative, executive and judicial) mediated through neoliberalizing states at local, national, regional, continental and global scales (Duménil and Lévy 2004; Harvey 2003; Hudson 2015; Prins 2014). Where accumulation depends on the primacy of one or more political forms of capitalism rather than formally rational calculation and social relations, it becomes harder to maintain more than a façade of democracy. This was already evident in the early phases of capitalist development, based on mercantilism, primitive accumulation and colonialism, and is becoming evident again after the golden years of post-war embedded liberalism. From National States to Post-national Governance One effect of regionalization, internationalization and globalization is that the national scale lost the primacy it enjoyed as a site of decision-making in the post-war period – an era when national economies were managed by national states in the interests of national capital and/or national populations (especially citizens of the national territorial state). The rescaling of state functions (see above) reinforced the democratic deficit because supranational apparatuses and tasks are less subject to liberal democratic control, if not deliberately placed beyond such control. This was also accompanied by a shift from government to governance with greater priority going to “stakeholders” than to individual citizens; the influence of mass parties and unions in policy-making and policy delivery was also reduced as politics became more technocratic (Jessop 2002a,

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2015). This removes significant areas of policy-making and regulation from state control and limits efforts to govern capital flows, investment decisions, product quality and so on (for a brief statement, representative of many others, see Corporate Europe Observatory 2016). From Classical and Social Liberalism to Neoliberalism The elective affinity between capitalism and democracy worked, insofar as it existed, for classical liberalism and social liberalism. Classical liberalism promoted free markets and the constitutional state based on the rule of law against feudal, absolutist and mercantilist restrictions. Social liberalism refers especially to the post-war economic, political and social order of advanced capitalism from 1945 to the 1970. This was the heyday of the KWNS, based on an institutionalized compromise between organized labour and big capital as mediated through the state and based on economic and social as well as legal citizenship rights (Marshall 1950; see above). Neoliberalism or, for Anglo-Foucauldian scholars such as Peter Miller and Nik Rose, “advanced liberalism”, breaks with classical as well as social liberalism. It dismantles the collective social rights and entitlements extended and defended by the post-war state and does so in the name of freedom and the bonds between individuals and communities (Miller and Rose 2008). Advanced liberalism has a pro-market bias, regarding citizens as entrepreneurial citizen-consumers committed to flexibility, adaptability and autonomy, and involves a fundamental challenge to the affinity between rational capitalism and liberal democracy by undermining the institutional separation of the economic and political spheres that was foundational to classical liberalism and its modification in the social liberalism of the Keynesian national welfare state that depended on separating and limiting economic and political conflicts within their respective logics. In their place, advanced liberalism extends the logic of market forces and competition into civil society and prizes entrepreneurship and resilience as qualities of the hard-working, self-reliant individual as it rolls back entitlements. This is linked to the rise on different scales of “competition states”. These not only promote economic competitiveness narrowly conceived but also seek to subordinate many areas previously seen as “extra-economic” to the currently alleged imperatives of capital accumulation (Jessop 2002a, pp. 95–139). This has the effect of weakening the institutional separation between the market economy and the state apparatus; facilitates the emergence of extra-territorial and virtual economic and political spaces; witnesses the growing importance of corporations as legal entities with special privileges and capacities that enable them to negotiate with, and even sue, territorial states for infringing their property rights, freedom of speech, profit expecta-

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tions, and so on, thereby limiting state territorial and temporal sovereignty; and the centre–periphery relations among states such that, while almost all states may be formally equal in terms of mutual recognition and membership of the United Nations and similar bodies, some states are substantively more powerful than others – notably the USA. These changes have major implications for public finance, tax sovereignty, and the governance of national and international tax regimes.

LIMITS TO THE HYPOTHESIS Offe’s thesis suggests that “while capitalism cannot coexist with, neither can it exist without, the welfare state” (1984, p. 153, italics in original). I have argued that the thesis can be deparadoxified by taking account of its historical context and the different forms of welfare and capitalism. This is further illustrated by the impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic and how it has transformed the role of the SWPR and RWPS regarding its biopolitical implications and shock to the capitalist order. Some theorists argue that pandemics are an integral result of the development of global capitalism and the short-sighted attempts by capitalist states and businesses to occupy and “master” nature (Dale 2020; Wallace 2017). “The growing ease with which viruses jump from animals to humans is conditioned by expansion of corporate agri-systems, encroachment of humans on habitats, and the commodification of wildlife – all integral to current growth economies” (Pazaitis et al. 2020, p. 214). Pandemics have been anticipated in the last two decades and their arrival should have been prepared for. But austerity has weakened public health systems, especially where neoliberal regimes and structural adjustment programmes have been established. This is reflected in the pandemic response in the two types of post-Fordist welfare regime and their hybrid forms. The pandemic shows the limits of the neoliberal rollback of the state and the importance of reinvigorated state action to deal with the health, economic and social implications of the new coronavirus. It has led to a massive increase in hard and soft law to restrict international, national and local travel and to impose physical and social distancing, including short-term lockdowns; an enormous expansion of government fiat expenditure and quantitative easing to compensate for the collapse of the market economy that matches or exceeds that created in response to the NAFC, supporting the unemployed, businesses, financial institutions, local authorities, and so on; state support for rapid vaccine research and purchasing vaccines; and the reassertion of nationalism within a post-national framework. In addition, in Ricardian workfare states, public spending has benefitted financial institutions and big businesses more than industrial capital and workers. It has also led to reflections on the role of a one-off wealth tax to pay the costs of Covid-19 expenditure and shown the

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limits of privatization in the health sector as inefficiencies become evident – especially in the USA and also in the UK. The effects of the pandemic are especially clear in the uneven impact of the virus in terms of incidence and lethality among deprived classes, strata, and locales, due in part to the growing polarization of income and wealth and the lack of investment in infrastructure (sanitation, fresh water, good housing, etc.) (Sotiris 2020). In certain regards, the United Kingdom is a better illustration of these effects than the Trump administration. The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts a public sector net borrowing this fiscal year of 19 per cent of GDP, the biggest deficit since 1944 (2020: 5). The Bank of England’s quantitative easing programme is currently equivalent to around 30 per cent of GDP this year and next, compared to 9 per cent during the 2007–08 Global Financial Crisis (Refinitiv Datastream, data as at 1 December 2020). The Trump administration cannot be considered a typical RWPS because of its retreat from global leadership and its focus on denying the impact of Covid-19 at the federal level. It also has a historically weak health care system and a large population excluded from health insurance, which makes the impact of the pandemic worse. The Biden administration has been hindered in preparing a Covid-19 action plan by Trump’s denial of his electoral defeat. All this suggests that Covid-19 has put limits on neoliberal lasting austerity in the United Kingdom and the USA that will need to be recuperated when the pandemic is over. New Zealand is a neoliberal exception in this regard because of its remoteness and island status and Australia because of its state-level restrictions on travel. In the ideal-typical Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime, there are also poor health consequences in Europe, reflecting the impact of austerity and weak health systems as well as relatively dense population movements. The countries least affected are Finland, Norway and Iceland, with Germany also performing well because of its test–trace–isolate capacities. The costs of dealing with the crisis have also undermined their austerity regimes. In East Asia, China, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam have remarkably low incidence and death rates per capita, thanks to strong state capacities, previous experience with coronavirus outbreaks (SARS, MERS, bird flu), and compliant populations. In general, the pandemic nature of coronavirus makes general observations hard to draw beyond the obvious neoliberal regimes.

CONCLUSIONS Neoliberal regimes have largely succeeded: witness stagnant real wages, cuts in welfare, increasing personal debt to invest in housing, pensions, education, and health or, indeed, maintain a previous standard of living, and growing concentration of income and assets at the top of their respective populations, and

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a growing share of income and wealth in the hands of the top decile (especially the top percentile) of their respective populations. Whereas the short-lived phase of apparently permanent prosperity (Lutz 1989) of the Fordist period was based on the dynamic of profit-producing capital and wage-led growth, neoliberal regimes are dominated by different forms of financial capital and involve largely debt-fuelled expansion (Jessop 2002a; Stockhammer 2015). The illusory permanent prosperity that occurred under the latter regimes (sometimes termed the Great Moderation) was actually based on unsustainable private debt facilitated by financial innovation, liberalization, deregulation and decriminalization, and the expansion of ever more fantastic forms of fictitious credit, fictitious capital and fictitious profits. In an increasingly integrated world economy, this also affects the dynamic of other varieties of capitalism because of the weight of the USA and other finance-dominated regimes and the contagion effects of their crises. Since the NAFC, the neoliberal project may have lost some of its hegemonic appeal among elites, the “squeezed middle”, and subaltern social forces. Yet it remains dominant because of the entrenched structural position, built up over 30 or more years, of a neoliberal power bloc. The NAFC and its specific, overdetermined expression in the Eurozone have not produced an effective challenge to neoliberalism or, despite popular resentment and fragmented resistance, undermined the power of interest-bearing capital to damage the rest of the economy and wider society. Thus, having begun with Offe’s paradox, we might conclude with another, this time concerning neoliberalism. For, whereas (1) neoliberalism is a political project that aims to extend the logic of exchange-value within the profit-oriented, market-mediated economy and to extend market forces and economic calculation into spheres of social life where they were absent before (primacy of the economic); and (2) pursuit of this project depends on integrating neoliberalism not only into accumulation strategies but also into state projects and hegemonic visions, which require both struggle for hegemony and control over the state apparatus (primacy of the political). This paradox is reflected in important institutional features and social practices that can be interpreted in terms of the primacy of the political – notably distinctive forms of political capitalism and the reorganization of state power on post-democratic, authoritarian statist lines to defend finance-dominated accumulation and the broader neoliberal project. This is even truer of finance-dominated accumulation, which benefits from different forms of political capitalism as well as from a more general neoliberal environment. As such its leading forces have a strong interest (as does transnational profit-producing capital) in weakening liberal bourgeois democracy in favour of an authoritarian statist “post-democracy” that can reinforce financialization, manage financial crises, and channel or defeat economic and political resistance.

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Jessop, B. (2007), ‘Knowledge as a fictitious commodity: insights and limits of a Polanyian analysis’, in A. Buğra and K. Ağartan (eds), Reading Karl Polanyi for the 21st Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 115–34. Jessop, B. (2012), ‘Neo-liberalism’, in G. Ritzer (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, Vol. 3, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1513–21. Jessop, B. (2013), ‘Revisiting the regulation approach: critical reflections on the contradictions, dilemmas, fixes, and crisis dynamics of growth regimes’, Capital & Class, 37 (1), 5–24. Jessop, B. (2015), ‘Comparative capitalisms and/or variegated capitalism’, in I. Bruff, M. Ebenau and C. May (eds), New Directions in Critical Comparative Capitalisms Research, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 65–82. Jones, D. S. (2012), Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Keynes, J. M. (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan. Krippner, G. R. (2005), ‘The financialization of the American economy’, Socio-Economic Review, 3 (2), 173–208. Lapavitsas, C. (2011), ‘Theorizing financialization’, Work, Employment, and Society, 25 (4), 611–26. Lutz, B. (1989), Der kurze Traum immerwährender Prosperität, Frankfurt: Campus. Marshall, T. H. (1950), Citizenship and Social Class, London and New York: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. (1967 [1883]), Capital, Volume 1, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Miller, P. and Rose, N. (2008), Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life, Cambridge: Polity. Mirowski, P. (2013), Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso. Mirowski, P. and D. Plehwe (eds) (2009), The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oberndorfer, L. (2015), ‘From new constitutionalism to authoritarian constitutionalism’, in J. Jäger and E. Springler (eds), Asymmetric Crisis in Europe and Possible Futures, London: Routledge, pp. 184–205. Offe, C. (1984), Contradictions of the Welfare State, London: Hutchinson. Office for Budget Responsibility (2020), Economic and Fiscal Outlook, November 2020, London: Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Pazaitis, A., V. Kostakis, G. Kallis and K. Troullaki (2020), ‘Should we look for a hero to save us from the coronavirus? The commons as an alternative trajectory for social change’, TripleC, 18 (2), 613–21. Peck, J. (2010), Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, New York: Oxford University Press. Peck, J. and Theodore, N. (2015), Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism, Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press. Pierson, P. (2001), ‘Coping with permanent austerity: welfare state restructuring in affluent democracies’, in P. Pierson (ed.), The New Politics of the Welfare State, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 410–56. Polanyi, K. (1957 [1944]), The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston, MA: Beacon. Poulantzas, N. (1978), State, Power, Socialism, London: NLB. Prins, N. (2014), All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power, New York: Nation.

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6. From democratic to market-driven regulation of employment: the Swedish and Finnish Social Democrats, the third way and emerging economic globalization, 1975−86 Sami Outinen INTRODUCTION The economic globalization emerging since the 1970s has co-existed with the recurrent crises of Keynesian post-Second World War full-employment policies in the developed countries (see Jessop, Chapter 5 in this book). This context clearly affected the wage-work-oriented and export‑dependent Nordic welfare states, where influential Social Democrats urged the maintenance or achievement of full employment (Outinen 2015; 2017). In this chapter, I analyse the major employment-related concepts and policies of Sweden’s and Finland’s Social Democrats’ in 1975–86, when both Nordic welfare states and business-friendly regulation of the economy were defined as preconditions for competitiveness. A close reading of archival material from the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Sweden (SAP) and the Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP) enables historical deconstruction of these phenomena. The chapter examines conceptual connections of the ‘third way’-type policies of the Finnish Social Democrats in the late 1970s and the Swedish Social Democrats of the early 1980s (Outinen 2015; Stephens 1996) with the better-known third-way programmes. Key actors of the latter, including New Labour in Britain, the Clinton presidency in the USA and die Neue Mitte (the third way of the Social Democratic Party of Germany) in Germany, positioned themselves between traditional social democracy and neoliberalism in the 1990s (Whyman 2003, pp. 1–5). This meant abandoning socialist goals and concentrating on efforts to solve the efficiency problems of the market 127

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economy within the realm of capitalism (Giddens 1998, pp. 43–4; Schmidtke 2002). The hybridization of social democracy and neoliberalism started becoming more probable in the 1970s in the wake of rising transnational support for Milton Friedman’s monetarist economic theory (Mirowski 2009; Van Horn & Mirowski 2009). Monetarism relies on a stable money supply as a guarantor of the equation linking production, employment and prices. This is meant to ensure steady economic growth and low inflation at least in the longer term. Neoliberals had managed to form a global elite network especially through the Mont Pèlerin Society and the Chicago school of economics by the 1980s. They had intentionally constructed a recognizable set of corporation- and capital-friendly doctrines mobilized against collectivism, socialism, welfare states and classical liberalism. This entailed relying on market competition in respect of almost every societal question. From this standpoint, the role of state and international institutions was to guarantee the existence of a stable market society, the free flow of capital across national borders and market discipline through flexible exchange rates (Mirowski 2009; Plehwe 2009; Van Horn & Mirowski 2009). Neoliberalism challenged post-Second World War welfare states’ Keynesian foundations. In a broad sense, the latter had meant state intervention in the economy, regulation of financial markets and favouring of low interest rates for channelling scarce national capital into productive investments both in Sweden and in Finland from the post-war years until the mid-1970s. Also, in Sweden, unlike in Finland, applying Keynesianism had, from the 1930s onward, involved practising counter-cyclical fiscal policy (Pekkarinen & Vartiainen 1993, pp. 42–4, 51–6, 182−6). From this point of view, it is useful to examine how Bob Jessop’s four distinct strategies for transition from employment- and demand-centred Keynesian national welfare states to innovation- and competition-driven Schumpeterian post-national workfare regimes were used by Social Democrats in Sweden and Finland. These strategies, which may be interlinked, are neoliberalism, neocorporatism, neostatism and neocommunitarianism. In this context, the first of these utilizes financialization, liberalization and market-friendly promotion of innovations to generate finance-led growth. Neocorporatism, in turn, refers to interest groups’ and states’ common impact ex ante in promoting a knowledge-based productivist economy. In neostatism, the emphasis is on the state’s role in pursuing reorganization, re-education, technological development, core industries’ efficiency and profitability. Finally, a neocommunitarian strategy favours a decentralized third sector and local, community-based innovation measures. (Jessop & Sum 2006, pp. 106–13; see also Chapter 5 in this book)

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The discussion in this chapter does not extend to ecological aspects of the third-way policies and other issues related to values connected with a liberal identity (Giddens 1998, pp. 43–4). This is partly because the sources indicate that the economy (in a broad sense) remained the centre of Social Democratic employment-related concepts and policies in relation to gender equality and migration factors in both Sweden and Finland during the time examined. Likewise, delving into the relationship of the third way in Britain, Germany or the USA in the 1990s to the economic policies of James Callaghan, Helmut Schmidt and Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s (Allen 1989; Stedman Jones 2012, pp. 241–54) would require more comprehensive analysis than could be provided here. The interwoven nature of the dilemmata of the crisis of social democracy (Lavelle 2008) and unemployment in the Nordic countries since the 1970s has been attributed to the strong influence of trade unions on Sweden’s economic policy (Vartiainen 2001), the combination of a monetarist international monetary system with a post-industrial economy in Sweden and Denmark (Iversen 2001) and the increasing attractiveness of neoliberalism among Social Democrats (Ryner 2002). However, these factors do not themselves explain the (dis)continuities in the ways in which the leading decision-makers within the SDP and the SAP justified their employment-related policies, and made historical interpretations and international comparisons as a crucial aspect of their policies. For analysis of national policies that takes these elements into account, one must apply a historical method that combines conceptual history and a transnational approach. This also makes it possible to overcome the methodological nationalism that has often appeared in comparative research into the transformations of advanced capitalist countries since the 1970s (see Kettunen & Petersen 2011 and Chapter 1 in this book). Such an approach enables historicizing how the Nordic Social Democrats sketched their own employment-related scopes of action in relation to major ideologies such as socialism, neoliberalism and Keynesianism (see Freeden 2017, pp. 122–30) and affords revisiting the conventional definitions of these -isms (see Koselleck & Richter 2011, p. 31). For this chapter, the major sources drawn upon are the protocols of the SAP and the SDP, which describe the parties’ strategic decision-making and also encompass public statements and discussion that were able to serve several functions, from action blueprints to rhetorical weapons (cf. Palonen 1997). The source material makes it possible to analyse changes in concepts and the public use of various employment-related notions by the Nordic Social Democrats (see Freeden 2017, p. 121) and to bridge any gaps between analysis

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of discourses/concepts and of praxis/action/institutions (cf. Kettunen 2006b, pp. 33–4).1 The analysis reveals that the Swedish and Finnish Social Democrats took a great leap towards capitalist territory and anti-inflationist economic policy at the expense of full employment by the mid-1980s. Demonstrating this means disproving the earlier interpretations wherein the SAP maintained its fundamental goals and ideological positioning between the state and the market (Hinnfors 2006) without abandoning a full-employment policy (Lindvall 2004) in the 1980s. In the late twentieth century, the Nordic Social Democrats formed the vanguard of social democratic third-way policies. They moved from Keynesian regulation of the national economy towards neoliberal, neocorporatist and neostatist economic regulation before the Cold War drew to a close. This adaptation to a competition-state paradigm (see Chapter 1) took place after the Nordic Social Democrats demonstrated failure to maintain full employment and transform the global economic infrastructure into a full-employment regime through democratic economic regulation.

‘JOBS FOR ALL’ AND ‘BAD SILLANPÄÄ’ (1975–78) The Social Democrats of Sweden and of Finland differed substantially in the employment-related policies they followed immediately after the first oil crisis, in the mid-1970s. In Finland, the SDP supported the decisions of the coalition government (of the SDP and the centre parties) to strengthen fiscal policy in response to deterioration of the current balance of payments in 1975. The SDP’s key decision-makers understood that the government’s policy would lead to a modest rise in the number of the unemployed. Only a few SDP decision-makers would not have given up the immediate goal of full employment by increasing public debt and the number of public-sector jobs in a Keynesian manner (Outinen 2015, pp. 43–6; 2017, pp. 392–4). This represented continuity with the cyclical policy of the SDP, which had followed neoclassical economic theory by concentrating on the need to keep the state budget in balance across economic cycles (Kettunen 2008; Puoskari 1979; 1980). Instead, party leader Prime Minister Olof Palme stressed at the 1975 SAP Party Conference that the low unemployment rate in Sweden was an international exception. He insisted that the SAP would also not tolerate permanent

1 All direct quotations from primary sources have been translated from Swedish or Finnish into English as accurately as possible.

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mass unemployment in the future.2 The SAP and the central organization of Swedish trade unions, the Landsorganisationen (LO), had set a common goal of raising Sweden’s world record-level employment rate from 75 to 80 per cent by the end of the 1970s. This was marketed to a wider audience under the slogan ‘Jobs for All’.3 The SDP verified its alternative conception of employment by deciding to transform its practical short-term policy at a meeting of the party’s directorate held at a spa of the Miina Sillanpää Foundation in early 1977. Party leader Kalevi Sorsa called the idea of the meeting ‘Bad Sillanpää’, a moniker making reference to the congress held in 1959 by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in the spa town of Bad Godesberg. In its Bad Godesberg programme, the SPD disconnected itself in principle from Marxism (Outinen 2017, pp. 394–5; Sassoon 1997, pp. 249–51). The SDP’s ‘Bad Sillanpää’ strategy included decreasing corporation tax, increasing productivity, improving the export sector’s cost-competitiveness and practising strict financial and monetary policy. This was meant to stabilize the economy and concentrate on anti-inflation policy by keeping wage rises moderate and reducing income tax. The strategy formed the core of the resuscitation policy employed by the new Left–Centre coalition government headed by Sorsa from summer 1977 (Outinen 2017, pp. 394–5; Puoskari 1992, p. 9). Taking a contrary stance, SAP economic expert Kjell-Olof Feldt argued in 1978 that stagnation in conjunction with growing unemployment does not create inflation as long as one avoids excessive profits and instability of costs and prices.4 While the SAP’s economic and other governmental policies after the first oil crisis implied historical continuity with counter-cyclical demand management (Blyth 2002, pp. 105–10), the SDP preferred policies combining anti-inflationism and the new company-friendly resuscitation approach. An anti-inflationist stance and strict economic policy is not necessarily neoliberal. For the SDP, it meant continuity with tying wage increases to growth in productivity in the stability-oriented nationwide collective income-policy agreements between the government, labour market parties and agricultural producers from the late 1960s (Bergholm 2007, pp. 382–442; Rainio-Niemi

2 ‘Protokoll. Första delen’, from 1975 SAP Party Conference records, published in 1977 by Tiden-Barnängen AB (‘Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetarpartis 26e kongress 27 september–5 oktober 1975’), or ‘SAP 1975/1’, pp. 103–4. 3 ‘Protokoll. Tredje delen’, from 1975 SAP Party Conference records, published in 1977 by Tiden-Barnängen AB (‘Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetarpartis 26e kongress 27 september–5 oktober 1975’), or ‘SAP 1975/3’, pp. 959–67. 4 ‘Protokoll. Första delen’, from the records of the 1978 SAP Party Conference, published in 1979 by Tiden-Barnängen AB (‘Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetarepartis 27:e kongress 1978’), p. 334.

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2008, pp. 232–6). For the SAP, the main instrument of Sweden’s post-war employment policy had been the so-called Rehn–Meidner model, initially proposed by LO economists Gösta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner in the late 1940s. It meant initially taming the overheated economy and inflation by means of restrictive fiscal policy and a moderate wage policy (Sihto 1994, pp. 34–7). However, the SAP began to feel the pressure of a deteriorating global economy and the anti‑inflation economic policies of several industrialized countries in 1975. This, jointly with the counter-cyclical economic policy, had led to increasing state indebtedness in Sweden and a negative current balance of payments.5 Combating these problems constituted a key element of SAP economic policy from 1977 onwards. Then, in 1978, Palme announced his readiness for austerity measures, ‘tight and hard’ economic policy and lower living standards for workers.6 This meant that, even though the SAP had initially prioritized employment over inflation while the SDP tried to fight unemployment by decreasing inflation in the mid-1970s, SAP economic policy grew closer to the SDP’s Bad Sillanpää strategy in the late 1970s. This came to pass only after the SAP entered the opposition for the first time in 40 years upon losing the 1976 parliamentary election. The last time the SAP had preferred other economic goals over full employment was in 1920, when Hjalmar Branting’s minority government applied deflationary economic policy to balance the state budget despite unemployment problems and an economic downturn (Bergström 1992, pp. 136–7).

DEMOCRATIC ECONOMIC REGULATION The SDP’s Declaration of Domestic Policy, issued in 1975, underscored that the party favoured ‘democratic economic planning’, including ‘the effective regulation of capital movements’ (Outinen 2017, p. 393). This was not far from the state of affairs that already prevailed in Finland at the time, with prices, the movement of capital, interest rates and rents being under state control. The policy objective was supported by rapid expansion of the Finnish welfare state and by export sector-led economic growth from the late 1960s onwards (Kalela 2005; Kettunen 2006b; 2006c). The SAP’s commitment in 1975 to full employment entailed similarly programmatic subscription to long-term planning of the economy (planmässig hushållning). This represented a counterweight to multinational companies and 5 From the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s Executive Board (partistyrelse) minutes, held by the Swedish Labour Movement’s Archives and Library (ARBARK), Stockholm, or ‘PS’, for 26 May 1975, pp. 1–3; SAP 1975/1, pp. 450–61. 6 PS, for 7 January 1977, p. 24; SAP Party Directorate (verkställande utskott) minutes, from ARBARK, or ‘VU’, for 4 January 1978, pp. 3–5.

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concentration of private power.7 Among the components of the post‑Second World War policy for full employment in Sweden had been expansion of the welfare state, large-scale public investment funds, a solidarity-oriented wage policy (with equal pay for equal work to promote restructuring and export-sector competitiveness via relatively high wages, which imposed on companies the need to maximize their productivity) and regional development policy (Erixon 2003; Esping-Andersen 1985, pp. 231−3). The ideas behind both the SDP’s and the SAP’s planning were influenced by 1920s Austro-Marxism, which favoured the economy’s democratic rational regulation by the state and worker organizations, to optimize societal production costs (Friberg 2012, p. 200; Hannikainen 2003; Isaksson 2000, p. 202; Kettunen 2008, pp. 105–8). This was compatible with the identity of democratic socialism, which remained the core concept of the SAP and the SDP programme alike in the mid-1970s.8 From an economic and industrial-democracy point of view, it is noteworthy that the LO proposed the establishment of wage-earner funds in Sweden in 1976. Their plan was to urge the country’s 50–100 biggest companies to channel 20 per cent of their profits to the funds, which were to be controlled by the wage-earners as a collective (Pontusson 1992, pp. 186–93). One of the core principles here was to create a tool preventing jobs from flowing out of Sweden through decisions of multinational companies. It would have meant the wage-earners themselves owning the majority of Sweden’s big businesses for the time being.9 In the end, the SAP–LO joint Wage-Earner Fund Group abandoned the original proposition by 1977 so as not to hinder private capital formation. The intention was to encourage employment-generating investments and savings in the existing capitalist market economy.10 In 1980, Palme admitted that the SAP had lowered its ambitions in abandoning the aim of achieving socialism through this reform. This was because the initiative faced strong business SAP 1975/1, pp. 95−154. SAP 1975/1, pp. 95, 103; SDP Programme of Industrial Policy 1975 (publisher: Pohtiva – poliittisten ohjelmien tietovaranto), accessed 19 December 2017 at www​.fsd​ .uta​.fi/​pohtiva/​ohjelmalistat/​SDP/​473, or ‘SDP:n teollisuuspoliittinen ohjelma 1975’; SDP Declaration of Domestic Policy 1975 (‘SDP:n sisäpoliittinen julkilausuma 1975’), from Pöytäkirja SDP:n XXX puoluekokouksesta 1975 (the protocol of the 1975 SDP Party Conference). 9 ‘Protokoll. Del 2. Tiden 1976’, from Landsorganisationen i Sverige, LO conference protocol for 1976 (‘19e ordinarie kongress 12–19 juni 1976’), Stockholm: Folkets Hus, pp. 689−97, 733. 10 VU, for 7 October 1977, pp. 1–5; PS, for 18 November 1977 and for 30 June 1978 (see also Ekdahl 2005, pp. 286–90; Nycander 2017, p. 360; Viktorov 2006, pp. 157–95). 7 8

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opposition in Sweden. The SAP then started promoting regional wage-earner funds instead, in line with the moderate wage policy declared as part of its crisis policy in 1981.11 The SAP government managed to attach these wage-earner funds to the state pension system temporarily, for the years 1983–90 (Pontusson 1992, pp. 187–98). Prime Minister Palme stated that, had the idea been abandoned, the bourgeois opposition would have presented new demands as a condition for their future cooperation. This was because the opposition were trying to move the society in a conservative and neoliberal direction.12 The SDP similarly anchored its arguments for establishment of wage-earner funds in a positive impact on productive investments. In 1981, the party expressed a preference for only company-level ‘cooperation funds’, in consequence of Swedish employers’ heavy resistance to wage-earner funds. The SDP managed to establish voluntary company-level personal funds with performance-related pay only in the Left–Right coalition government in 1990 (Outinen 2015, pp. 107, 189, 217–24). The fading of ambitious proposals for wage-earner funds into temporary and voluntary arrangements and components of a moderate wage policy shows the Nordic Social Democrats’ declining power to maintain, let alone increase, democratic economic regulation aimed at strengthening employment. This happened even though Sweden’s and Finland’s Social Democrats still opposed neoliberalism, capitalism and radical right-wing thought as a rhetorical tool in the public battle for voter acceptance in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.13 The perceived ambivalence points to the increased power and resistance displayed by Nordic businesses at that time.

11 VU, for 3 December 1980, pp. 4–8, and for 17 December 1980; PS, for 19 December 1980, pp. 1–22, and for 23 January 1981 (see also Viktorov 2006, pp. 195–6). 12 VU, for 21 September 1983, p. 5 (see also Viktorov 2006, p. 199). 13 From the records of the 1978 SDP Party Conference (‘Pöytäkirja SDP:n XXXI puoluekokouksesta Espoossa 1978’), published in 1979 by Sosialidemokraattinen puoluetoimikunta; records of the 1981 SDP Party Conference (‘Pöytäkirja SDP:n XXXII puoluekokouksesta Porissa 1981’), published in 1982 by Kansan Voima Oy:n Kirjapaino; SAP Election Manifesto 1979 (‘Valmanifest. Socialdemokraterna, partistyrelsen, den 8 augusti 1979’), accessed 3 November 2017 at http://​snd​.gu​.se/​sv/​ vivill/​party/​s/​manifesto/​1979; Records of the 1981 SAP Party Conference, protocols A–B (‘SAP Kongress 1981. Protokoll A−B’l), published in 1981 by Sjuhäradsbygdens Tryckeri AB, or ‘SAP 1981/1’, pp. B21−2, B77−81.

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THE STABLE CURRENCY POLICY AND CRISIS PROGRAMME (1979–86) The SDP was the prime minister’s party in the Centre–Left coalition governments during the economic upturn in Finland in 1979–86. In those years, an aim of guaranteeing the export sector’s competitiveness by trimming the costs for companies and the public sector was followed in the conceptions of the SDP via disengagement from the spiral of inflation–devaluation (Outinen 2015, pp. 90−97, 130−34; 2017, p. 396). This involved an attempt to practise stable currency policy by means of flexible interest rates, which was accepted as the cornerstone of Finland’s economic policy in 1986 (Hulkko & Pöysä 1998, pp. 164–71; Kuusterä & Tarkka 2012, pp. 531–4). Sweden, meanwhile, had begun to defend the stability of its currency, the krona, and started to stem the outflow of capital from the country by maintaining high interest rates in the early 1970s. This happened after the collapse of the post-Second World War Bretton Woods currency system. It had meant gold-tied fixed exchange rates between national currencies. (Esping-Andersen 1985, p. 234). In 1978, the SAP’s Economic Policy Group noticed that more flexible exchange rates had led to intensified speculation in financial markets.14 For the Nordic Social Democrats, stable currency policy came at the cost of accepting higher interest rates in a neoliberally influenced post‑Bretton Woods era, as compared to Keynesian low interest rate-focused regulation, which had encouraged employment-bolstering productive investments (Stephens 1996, pp. 39–40, 49). Stable currency policy was accompanied by a social democratic innovation policy that in Finland was aimed at strengthening the economy and increasing employment in an era of industrial restructuring from the late 1970s. Consequently, the SDP declared in 1979 that Finland’s research and development (R&D) expenditure should be raised to ‘the Nordic level’ (Outinen 2017, p. 396). Research and technological investments were covered by the SAP’s economic and industrial policy with the aim of generating economic growth and improving the competitiveness of Swedish businesses.15 This tied the traditional virtues of competitiveness, education and rationalism (Friberg 2012, pp. 113–16; Hakoniemi 2017; Lindensjö 1992; Outinen 2017, p. 393) to a new social democratic programmatic goal.

VU, attachment set (A) 22, for 21 September 1978. VU A 6, from 17 January 1977; PS, for 12 September 1977, pp. 4–12; PS, for 1 March 1979, pp. 3–6; VU A (‘Krisprogrammet’) for 16–17 June 1981, pp. 59, 156; VU A 110, for 28 May 1979. 14 15

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In 1980, Palme drew the SAP Executive Board’s attention to the Japanese state’s investment in research and technological development. For Palme, this meant the ideological acceptance of a ‘mixed economy’ in the manner of the SPD in Germany, diverging from the ‘more dogmatic’ Labour in Britain. On the other hand, Sven Hulterström reminded his Executive Board colleagues that West Germany and Japan were market economies with relatively high unemployment.16 This was the time when anti-inflation measures became the main policy tool for the SAP. The decision was motivated by a negative current balance of payments, predictions of high inflation and sluggish industrial investment. One clear result was that the SAP in practise abandoned its full employment policy, which was introduced in the aftermath of the Great Depression. This is because unemployment was still a problem in Sweden (notwithstanding a relatively low unemployment rate).17 Furthermore, Feldt and his group of economists (Föreningen Socialdemokratiska Ekonomer) concluded in 1980 that the growing workforce should be employed by the private service sector, because of the financial deficit in the public sector.18 The group pushed for transforming the SAP’s traditional economic policy by taking right-wing critics seriously. This meant recognizing expansion of the public sector as one cause of the public budget deficit and high inflation (Andersson 2006, pp. 108–11). However, austerity policy had become a part of SAP economic policy argumentation before the group was established in 1979. In this spirit, the programme for the 1980s group (with Feldt and Ingvar Carlsson from the party’s Parliamentary Group, Rune Molin as a trade union representative and Leni Björklund from the municipal sector19) developed a strategy in which its ‘Crisis Program’ was based on opposing deficits (in the state budget and current balance of payment) as well as high inflation. This was meant to generate production whereby employment would rise.20 At the SAP Party Conference in 1981, Carlsson stressed that the labour movement’s traditional understanding of the fight against inflation and high employment as opposite phenomena no longer held up. The Crisis Program was accepted irrespective of warnings (from the influential Stockholm delegate Anita Gradin)

1980. 18 19 20 16 17

PS, for 28 March 1980, pp. 17–21. PS, for 7 January 1980, pp. 2–3; PS, for 10 January 1980; PS A 1, for 10 January PS, for 24 October 1980, p. 22. VU, for 7 November 1980, p. 7; VU, for 21 November 1980, p. 3. PS, for 16–17 June 1981, pp. 5–7.

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that, while Finland’s state budget had the current balance of payments and inflation under control, there was a ‘high’ (5%) unemployment rate.21 The SAP won the next parliamentary elections and formed a government in 1982. Newly appointed Finance Minister Feldt stressed that the Swedish government’s economic policy would be based on the Crisis Program. Given that the economic situation in Sweden had worsened still further in the preceding year, this necessitated ‘rather radical measures’ to promote industrial growth and, because of intense currency speculation, strong devaluation of the krona. Feldt stated that this devaluation was a component of structural policy, not cyclical policy, and ‘in the short run it must be accepted that unemployment increases’.22 The SAP employment policy was in line with the SDP’s Bad Sillanpää policy in preferring low inflation and industrial competitiveness over full employment for the first few years of the 1980s. Reverse reasoning with regard to the relationship between inflation and employment strengthened, thanks to the simultaneous existence of increased unemployment and inflation (i.e. stagflation). This indicates that neoliberalism had indeed touched the Nordic Social Democrats. They distanced themselves from further expanding the welfare state, despite the employment situation weakening relative to that of the mid-1970s. Leading Social Democrats in Sweden and Finland adopted this conceptualization even though some of them would have preferred a more public sector-driven employment policy and were suspicious of some new research-oriented innovation policy. Thus, the findings of this chapter do not support Johannes Lindvall’s (2004, pp.  67‒106) conclusion that the SAPʼs‚‘active exchange rate policyʼ would not have meant an acceptance of rising unemployment in the 1980s. They did accept it, although it did not happen publicly.

THE NEW INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER AND EUROPEAN KEYNESIANISM International solidarity that includes seeking practical solutions to address international injustices has been strongly built into the social democratic ideological tradition (Sassoon 1997, pp. 29, 31, 167, 185, 338−44). Palme tried to combine stable economic growth and full employment with the fundaments of the United Nations New International Economic Order (NIEO) initiative (Vivekanadan 2016, pp. 15–32). The UN’s General Assembly had accepted that resolution on 1 May 1974. According to NIEO principles, every state has

SAP 1981/1, pp. B13−83 (see also Bergström 1988, pp. 47−8). PS, for 15 October 1982, pp. 4–9.

21 22

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sovereign power to choose its economic and social system and to exert effective control over its economic resources and activities.23 The SAP stressed the NIEO’s role as a platform to promote equal distribution, humane standards of living and global planning while also helping transform economic power structures in the post‑oil crisis world of the mid-1970s.24 In 1978, the party connected the NIEO process with the will ‘to promote an international economic policy that prioritizes full employment and at the same time fights against inflation’.25 Ultimately, the NIEO initiative was buried, however, by the proponents of the ‘magic of the market’ (Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl) at the North–South Summit, held in Mexico in October 1981 (Bair 2009, p. 355; Doyle 1983; Toye & Toye 2004). The NIEO initiative was meant to be an alternative to the austerity-driven stabilization programmes that were prerequisites for International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans (Agarwala 1983, pp. 4–5). Through the IMF, the impact of neoliberalism was felt also in Finland. In June 1975, Prime Minister Sorsa committed to the IMF’s standby loan to Finland. This necessitated stabilizing the currency exchange rate, following strict economic policies and balancing the deficits of public expenditure and the current balance of payments. The agreement was valid until 31 December 1976, though Finland did not end up raising the loan (Heikkinen & Tiihonen 2010, pp. 141–2; Keränen 2010, pp. 254–9; Kuusterä & Tarkka 2012, pp. 412–14). Still, Prime Minister Sorsa recommended European coordination of neo-Keynesian economic policy to European Social Democrat leaders in spring 1983. In fact, the SAP representatives had been actively promoting similar goals within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) at the time.26 However, Sorsa’s proposition was nullified in Paris on account of the French socialists’ political U-turn (Blåfield & Vuoristo 1985, p. 183; Outinen 2015, pp. 147–8; 2017, p. 401). That is, the French socialist government failed to implement a reflationary and counter-cyclical economic policy successfully. This would have involved increasing corporate taxation and nationalizing private banks and other companies. However, factors such as capital flight led newly elected Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy and his government to concentrate on market-friendly politics such as anti-inflationist economic policy, competitiveness of the export sector, deregulation of both 23 Resolution adopted by the General Assembly 3201 (S-VI), ‘Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order’, United Nations General Assembly, 1.5.1975, accessed 7 March 2012 at www​.un‑documents​.net/​s6r3201​.htm (see also Bair 2009, p. 347). 24 SAP 1975/1, pp. 118–19. 25 PS A 5, for 13 April 1978, p. 49. 26 PS, for 25 May 1983, p. 5.

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price controls and capital markets, and sales of the stock of state companies (Browne & Akbar 2001, pp. 63–4; Lordon 2001, pp. 111­–20). The example of the French case was cited by the SAP government when it implemented its devaluation of the Swedish krona. Telephoning Sorsa on 7 October 1982, during a meeting of the SDP Party Directorate, Carlsson explained the measure in terms of – in a dissatisfied Sorsa’s account – ‘avoiding the French way’.27 For the SAP, this meant trying to find a new way to oppose strengthened business and bourgeoisie forces (Lindvall 2004, p. 74), yet the new orientation implied the questioning of democratic economic regulation and counter-cyclical economic policy at the same time. Nordic Social Democrats would have favoured European or global decisions to practise Keynesian full-employment policy and restrain the power of global capital. After this did not materialize, not least because of the strong role of neoliberalism in international organizations, the Bad Sillanpää and the crisis-policy strategies remained compatible with global capitalism. Maintaining an employment strategy oriented towards export-sector competitiveness in such a situation required committing to a market-friendly economic policy.

CAPITAL-MARKET LIBERALIZATION The Nordic Social Democrats detected the existence of a ‘grey’ monetary market in the early 1980s. Both in Finland and in Sweden, they feared that this was a threat to domestic productive investments and, thereby, employment.28 These unofficial financial markets outside the regulated monetary system were born once the financial institutions of the Soviet bloc had begun to channel their money from the USA to Europe in the 1950s and US-based multinational companies were joining ‘Eurodollar markets’ from the 1960s (Kuisma 2004, p. 227). In this environment, the opening of daily credit markets beyond the Bank of Finland’s (central bank) credit rationing in 1975 and the licence for private banks to intermediate short-term foreign loans in 1980 further increased the power of capital markets vis-à-vis state economic policy in Finland (Kuisma 2004, p. 373; Kuusterä & Tarkka 2012, pp. 419–20, 468–71, 518; Pekkarinen & Vartiainen 1993, pp. 381–2). In Sweden, the SAP government started to deregulate financial markets by abolishing the liquidity ratio requirements for banks in 1983 (Bieler 2000, 27 SDP Party Directorate (puoluetoimikunta) minutes, from the Labour Archives, Helsinki, or ‘PT’, for 7 October 1982, p. 8. 28 Records of the 1981 SAP Party Conference, protocols C–D (‘SAP Kongress 1981. Protokoll C−D’), published in 1981 by Sjuhäradsbygdens Tryckeri AB, pp. C9−55, 64−77 (for Finland, see Outinen 2015, pp. 165–6).

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pp. 41–2). Responding to criticism of the weak control of the grey-capital market, Finance Minister Feldt told the SAP Executive Board in December 1983 that Sweden’s government could not strengthen capital control while financial institutions were always finding a way to circumvent restrictions.29 At roughly the same time, in a meeting of the SDP Party Directorate, Trade and Industry Minister Seppo Lindblom expressed a belief that grey-capital markets led to investment decisions, though this view did face criticism among the members of the Party Directorate (Outinen 2015, pp. 165–6). The Nordic synchronization of discussion in this regard is partly explained by a preceded increase in activity by Finnish companies buying shares in Swedish companies.30 In Sweden, the Social Democrats’ government approved removal of the lending ceiling for banks in November 1985 (Bieler 2000, pp. 41–2). In Finland, the main decision to liberalize capital markets was the Bank of Finland’s choice to eliminate the regulation of interest rates, in August 1986. The immediate reason for the latter decision was to avoid devaluation of the Finnish markka. Large commercial banks promised to transfer capital back to Finland after this decision (Hulkko & Pöysä 1998, pp. 151–81; Kuisma 2004, pp. 369–70; Kuusterä & Tarkka 2012, p. 521), as agreed upon in a private meeting of the Governor of the Bank of Finland Rolf Kullberg, Prime Minister Sorsa and Finance Minister Esko Ollila (of the Centre Party) in the summer of 1986. Sorsa labelled this a necessary measure and stated that Social Democrats should adapt to its consequences. The SDP’s decision-makers and economics experts understood that this would bring higher interest rates during economic downturns, a more moderate labour-market policy, unwelcome surprises at times, company-friendly budgetary policy and a need to give the impression that the budgetary measures supported financial stability (Outinen 2017, p. 399). In Sweden, as well, the central bank was responsible for practical decisions in the course of the process. Finance Minister Feldt wrote in his memoirs that the bank persuaded him to deregulate financial markets and he again urged Prime Minister Palme to accept the reform, with a ‘War of the Roses’ resulting between the (Social Democrat) government and (Social Democrat-led) trade unions (Ryner 2002, pp. 149–50). In 1986, LO Chair Stig Malm questioned the validity of the existing combination of deregulation, big profits and the increasing power of market forces, which together provided an opportunity for capital to escape from Sweden in the event of its flight being profitable.

PS, for 16 December 1983, pp. 20–24. PT, for 15 December 1983; PT, for 19 January 1984, pp. 17–22.

29 30

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Feldt responded that this had had a positive effect because interest rates had decreased.31 By the mid-1980s, the Nordic Social Democrats had adapted to capital markets’ liberalization, which substantially reduced their ability to engage in democratic economic regulation. Stricter control of capital markets (to avoid reduction in productive investments and, thereby, in employment) remained a secondary pillar of the Social Democrats’ argumentation in those years. This meant committing to the idea that one must take the market’s reactions into account before making important economic and employment policy decisions. The SAP’s Crisis Group had accepted a positive role in addressing market signals related to productive investments and the ‘market economy’ in 1981,32 and the SDP’s Party Platform Committee acknowledged the role of ‘markets’ as a part of its idea of ‘market socialism’ in 1984 (Outinen 2017, p. 397). However, embracing capitalism as a consequence of capital-market liberalization represented a totally new stage in the history of the SAP and the SDP.

THE NORDIC SOCIAL DEMOCRATS’ THIRD-WAY POLICIES The Swedish Social Democrats had declared themselves to be the representatives of a third way between capitalism and Communism during the Cold War (Kettunen 2006a, p. 57). This was preceded by an interpretation, published in 1936 by American journalist Marquis W. Childs, wherein Sweden represented ‘The Middle Way […] where “laissez faire has continued to exist” […] and “supply and demand have not been wholly invalidated by the spread of monopoly”’ (Marklund 2009, p. 268, citing Childs 1936, p. 161). This was followed by the concept of the so‑called Swedish model as the carrier of ‘social equality’ and ‘a radical form of social and political egalitarianism’ (Marklund 2009, pp. 277–8). Meidner, in turn, who had worked to develop wage-earner funds, left a testament to the LO in 1979 by sketching a ‘third way’ between capitalism and a planned economy (Ekdahl 2001, pp. 12–13). Recalling this in 1980, he stated that increased influence of employee funds would have represented ‘the model for a third, hitherto untried, democratic socialist way’ between monopoly/ state capitalism and centralized/bureaucratic socialization (Meidner 1980, pp. 366–7).

VU, for 25 April 1986, pp. 8–16. PS A (‘Krisprogrammet’), for 16–17 June 1981, pp. 38–41 (see also Bergström 1988, p. 44). 31 32

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The implementation of the SAP Crisis Program by the Social Democrat government from 1982 onward was later labelled a new ‘Third Road’ policy between Keynesianism and the neoliberal austerity policy (Stephens 1996, pp. 43–4). However, the Crisis Group did not talk about third-way politics, instead criticizing capitalism, neoliberalism and neoconservatism.33 In a discussion at the SAP Party Conference in 1981, the Stockholm delegate Bosse Ringholm did describe the Crisis Program as ‘a kind of third way’, notably situated between a ‘capitalist market economy and centralized state economy’,34 but this interpretation still represented continuity from the Cold War constellation in the manner of Meidner’s more radical and future-oriented proposition. The SAP Executive Board stated in its proposition to the 1984 Party Conference that the Crisis Program and the government’s economic policy had represented ‘a third way economic policy’ by combining ‘working’ (i.e. endorsing growth in order to create new jobs) and ‘saving’ (i.e. strict economic policy) in order to raise Sweden from crisis. This characterization of a third way became the SAP’s marketing concept before the parliamentary elections of 1985,35 and Feldt spoke out for this idea in his book Den tredje vägen (The Third Way) in 1985. The implementation of the SAP’s above presented crisis policy since 1982 was presented as a third-way policy only afterwards. The SAP meant its programme to be an alternative to neoliberalism. The party was no longer striving for a middle path between socialism and capitalism but sought a way to combine the fortunes of national economic policy and Swedish welfare with globalizing capitalism. Relocating the third way between neoliberalism and Keynesianism could also be interpreted as a conceptual return from the egalitarian-oriented ‘Swedish model’ of the 1960s and 1970s to the ‘Middle Way’ of the 1930s as presented by Childs (see Marklund 2009). The SAP adopted its new ‘third way’ in the 1980s – that is, clearly before the birth of the similarly capitalism-friendly social democratic third-way policies in Britain, the USA and Germany in the 1990s. Furthermore, the Bad Sillanpää policy of the SDP in the late 1970s in many ways resembled the premises of the SAP’s third-way policy of the 1980s (cf. Outinen 2015; 2017). In this spirit, the Joint Committee of the Nordic Social Democratic Labour Movement (SAMAK) tried to combine the goals of low inflation and low unemployment programmatically, aimed at deeper Nordic business cooperation with the aim of surviving in global competition and turned ‘the Nordic PS A (‘Krisprogrammet’), for 16–17 June 1981, pp. 41–2. SAP 1981/1, p. B15. 35 VU A, for 10 May 1984, p. 2; SAP Election Manifesto 1985 (‘Valmanifest antaget av socialdemokratiska partistyrelsen den 9 augusti 1985’), accessed 3 November 2017 at http://​snd​.gu​.se/​sv/​vivill/​party/​s/​manifesto/​1985. 33 34

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model’ from attack to defence in the 1980s (Lundberg 2006). All in all, both the Swedish and the Finnish Social Democratic party had adapted to financialized capitalism by 1986 – that is, before the deepening of European integration and the end of the Cold War.

CONCLUSIONS The Swedish Social Democratic Party’s goals from the mid-1970s of raising the employment rate and guaranteeing jobs for all were supplanted in the early 1980s by the primacy of anti-inflationist policy over permanent full employment in the manner of monetarist economic theory. This was compatible with the Bad Sillanpää strategy of the Finnish Social Democratic Party in the second half of the 1970s. It is reasonable to argue that the fundamental goal behind the SAP’s employment‑related policies changed in the first half of the 1980s (cf. Hinnfors 2006; Lindvall 2004). This is indicative of the rising power of global financial institutions and transnational neoliberal economic regulation vis-à-vis national welfare states (Jessop 2016). Analysis also reveals that Sweden’s and Finland’s Social Democrats internalized certain aspects of neoliberal thought not only by adopting monetarist employment conceptions but also, especially, by accepting capital markets’ liberalization by the mid-1980s. Therefore, while describing the Social Democratic rhetoric correctly, Hinnfors (2006) underestimated the content of third-way Social Democrat activity in Sweden in the 1980s, by linking it to the continuation of Social Democratic reformism in the middle ground between the state and the market. In those years, the Nordic Social Democrats also criticized capitalism and free-market ideology in the traditional manner. However, giving capital markets and ‘the market economy’ a positive role as the reflector of market signals instead of stressing democratic economic planning involved a decisive shift in their politics and conceptions. It meant a move from Keynesian regulation of the economy and democratic socialism towards neoliberal economic regulation. This shift took place only after Swedish and Finnish Social Democrats alike had struggled in vain to transform global economic infrastructure into a Keynesian full-employment regime through democratic economic regulation. Furthermore, embracing capitalism by elevating the state as the guarantor of neoliberal regulation also clearly differed from the Finnish Social Democrats traditional support for neoclassical economics. By applying Jessop‘s transition strategies from Keynesian national welfare states to Schumpeterian post-national workfare regimes (Jessop & Sum 2006, pp. 106–13; Jessop in Chapter 5 in this book), one observes that Sweden’s and Finland’s Social Democrats practised neoliberal economic regulation strategy,

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neocoporatist innovativeness strategy and neostatist public research and development investment strategy from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The deregulation of financial markets entailed shifting the basis of the Nordic Social Democrats’ employment-related policies from steering the capitalist economy and towards seeking market acceptance of their policies. The taming of inflation and public-sector expenditure was seen as crucial for keeping interest rates low and markets stable. This, again, particularly when coupled with R&D investments, was viewed as a necessary measure for generating investments, promoting employment and avoiding balance-of-payments problems. These developments, completed before the Cold War ended and European integration deepened, could not guarantee the return of full employment either in Finland or in Sweden by the mid-1980s, however, notwithstanding revival of economic growth (Lindvall 2004, pp. 10, 108; Outinen 2017, p. 398). As for the rhetoric behind third-way positions, the SAP replaced its representation of itself as between capitalism and communism by repositioning itself as standing for a third way between democratic and neoliberal economic regulation, with facets of both at the same time. Even if the ‘third way’ concept itself became attached to the SAP’s new strategy a couple of years later than previously accepted, both the SAP and the SDP had adapted to financialized capitalism by the mid‑1980s and articulated this in some manner. While the Swedish and Finnish Social Democrats alike had retrospectively followed the German SPD in the late 1970s in their commitment to a ‘mixed economy’, they adopted new third-way-type policies clearly before the third-way Social Democrat programmes of Britain, Germany and the USA did so in the 1990s.

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Jessop, B. and N.-L. Sum (2006), Beyond the Regulation Approach: Putting Capitalist Economies in Their Place, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Kalela, J. (2005), ‘Hyvinvointivaltion rakentaminen’, in V. Pernaa and M.K. Niemi (eds), Suomalaisen yhteiskunnan poliittinen historia, Helsinki: Edita, pp. 205–24. Keränen, S. (2010), Ehdollinen demokratia. Urho Kekkonen ja työmarkkinapolitiikka, Turku: University of Turku. Kettunen, P. (2006a), ‘Kirkuvan harmaa vuosikymmen’, Työväentutkimus, 4–11. Kettunen, P. (2006b), ‘The power of international comparison: a perspective on the making and challenging of the Nordic welfare state’, in N.F. Christiansen, N. Edling, P. Haave and K. Petersen (eds), The Nordic Model of Welfare: A Historical Reappraisal, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, pp. 31–65. Kettunen, P. (2006c), ‘The tension between the social and the economic: a historical perspective on a welfare state’, in J. Ojala and J. Jalava (eds), The Road to Prosperity: An Economic History of Finland, Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, pp. 285–313. Kettunen, P. (2008), Globalisaatio ja kansallinen me. Kansallisen katseen historiallinen kritiikki, Tampere: Vastapaino. Kettunen, P. and K. Petersen (2011), ‘Introduction: rethinking welfare state models’, in P. Kettunen and K. Petersen (eds), Beyond Welfare State Models: Transnational Historical Perspectives on Social Policy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 1–15. Koselleck, R. and M. Richter (2011), ‘Introduction and prefaces to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 6 (1), 1–37. Kuisma, M. (2004), Kahlittu raha, kansallinen kapitalismi. Kansallis-Osake-Pankki 1940–1995, Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Kuusterä, A. and J. Tarkka (2012), Suomen Pankki 200 vuotta II. Parlamentin pankki, Helsinki: Otava. Lavelle, A. (2008), The Death of Social Democracy: Political Consequences in the 21st Century, Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Lindensjö, B. (1992), ‘From liberal common school to state primary school: a main line in social democratic education policy’, in K. Misgeld, K. Molin and K. Åmark (eds), Creating Social Democracy: A Century of the Social Democratic Labour Party in Sweden, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 307–37. Lindvall, J. (2004), The Politics of Purpose: Swedish Macroeconomic Policy after the Golden Age, Gothenburg: Gothenburg University. Lordon, F. (2001), ‘The logic and limits of désinflation compétitive’, in A. Glyn (ed.), Social Democracy in Neo-Liberal Times: The Left and Economic Policy Since 1980, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 110–37. Lundberg, U. (2006), ‘A leap in the dark: from a large actor to a large area approach – the joint committee of the Nordic social democratic labour movement and the crisis of the Nordic model’, in N.F. Christiansen, N. Edling, P. Haave and K. Petersen (eds), The Nordic Model of Welfare: A Historical Reappraisal, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, pp. 269–97. Marklund, C. (2009), ‘The social laboratory, the middle way and the Swedish model: three frames for the image of Sweden’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 34 (3), 264–85. Meidner, R. (1980), ‘Our concept of the third way: some remarks on the socio-political tenets of the Swedish labour movement’, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 1 (3), 343−69.

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Mirowski, P. (2009), ‘Postface: defining neoliberalism’, in P. Mirowski and D. Plehwe (eds), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 417–55. Nycander, S. (2017), Makten över arbetsmarknaden. Ett perspektiv på Sveriges 1900-tal, Stockholm: SNS Förlag. Outinen, S. (2015), Sosiaalidemokraattien tie kansantalouden ohjailusta markkinareaktioiden ennakointiin. Työllisyys sosiaalidemokraattien politiikassa Suomessa 1975–1998, Helsinki: Into Kustannus. Outinen, S. (2017), ‘From steering capitalism to seeking market acceptance: social democrats and employment in Finland 1975–1998’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 42 (4), 389−413. Palonen, K. (1997), Kootut retoriikat. Esimerkkejä politiikan luennasta, Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Pekkarinen, J. and J. Vartiainen (1993), Suomen talouspolitiikan pitkä linja, Helsinki: WSOY. Plehwe, D. (2009), ‘Introduction’, in P. Mirowski and D. Plehwe (eds), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 1–44. Pontusson, J. (1992), The Limits of Social Democracy: Investment Politics in Sweden, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Puoskari, P. (1979), Tehokkaan kysynnän teoria SDP:n suhdannepoliittisessa ajattelussa 1930-luvulta 1960-luvun alkuun, Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Puoskari, P. (1980), ‘SDP:n talouspoliittinen ajattelu historiallisena ongelmana. Ideologian ja talouspolitiikan kehityksen suhteista SDP:​ssä’, Sosialistinen Politiikka, 9 (2), 6–16. Puoskari, P. (1992), Talouspolitiikan funktiot ja instituutiot. Teorian rekonstruktio ja elvytyksen talouspoliittinen anatomia, Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Rainio-Niemi, J. (2008), Small State Cultures of Consensus: State Traditions and Consensus-Seeking in the Neo-Corporatist and Neutrality Policies in Post-1945 Austria and Finland, Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Ryner, J.M. (2002), Capitalist Restructuring, Globalization and the Third Way: Lessons from the Swedish Model, London and New York: Routledge. Sassoon, D. (1997), One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, London: Fontana Press. Schmidtke, O. (2002), ‘Introduction: transforming the social democratic left – the challenges to third way politics in the age of globalization’, in O. Schmidtke (ed.), The Third Way Transformation of Social Democracy: Normative Claims and Policy Initiatives in the 21st Century, Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 3–27. Sihto, M. (1994): Aktiivinen työvoimapolitiikka. Kehitys Rehnin-Meidnerin mallista OECD:n strategiaksi, Tampere: Tampere University Press. Stedman Jones, D. (2012), Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stephens, J.D. (1996), ‘The Scandinavian welfare states: achievements, crisis, and prospects’, in G. Esping-Andersen (ed.), Welfare States in Transition, London: SAGE Publications, pp. 32–65. Toye, J. and R. Toye (2004), The U.N. and Global Political Economy: Trade, Finance, and Development, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Van Horn, R. and P. Mirowski (2009), ‘The rise of the Chicago school of economics and the birth of neoliberalism’, in P. Mirowski and D. Plehwe (eds), The Road from

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Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 139–78. Vartiainen, J. (2001), ‘Understanding Swedish social democracy: victims of success?’, in A. Glyn (ed.), Social Democracy in Neo-Liberal Times: The Left and Economic Policy Since 1980, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–52. Viktorov, I. (2006), Fordismens kris och löntagarfonder i Sverige, Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Vivekanadan, B. (2016), Global Visions of Olof Palme, Bruno Kreisky and Willy Brandt: International Peace and Security, Co-operation and Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Whyman, P. (2003), Sweden and the ‘Third Way’: A Macroeconomic Evaluation, Aldershot: Ashgate.

PART III

The welfare state and cross-border mobility of people

7. Borders of welfare: mobility control and the Nordic welfare states Miika Tervonen INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the long-term relationship between mobility control and welfare development in the Nordic countries, focusing particularly on a shift from regional ‘debordering’ to global ‘rebordering’ in the post-war era. In a restrictive turn in migration control since the 1990s, each Nordic country has moved consistently towards stricter and more selective policies, with such manifestations as limitations on citizenship and family reunification rights, soaring numbers of deportations and detentions of migrants, and the intermittent return of border control within the region (e.g. Brochmann & Hagelund 2011, pp. 13–24; Pellander 2016). A simultaneous increase in international mobility and the tightening of migration policies have produced a growing phenomenon of diverse non-citizens in each Nordic country, who have overstayed their residence permit, lack one altogether, or are in an otherwise precarious legal and social position. Migrants such as non-EU students with a lapsed visa, irregular EU migrants or rejected asylum-seekers exist in a kind of societal grey zone, partly or wholly outside the service systems of the welfare state. This poses a dilemma for the Nordic welfare states, which have a long tradition of combining strict regulation of entry and residence with relatively generous welfare arrangements for recognized residents (Brochmann & Hagelund 2011; Djuve et al. 2015, pp. 9–10). Proliferation of processes of ‘everyday bordering’ exerted on non-citizens has produced a deepening contradiction between a universalistic residence-based welfare system and the migrants’ de facto lack of access to welfare and social rights (e.g. Könönen 2018; Lindström 2015). These developments have usually been conceptualized as something fundamentally new in the Nordic countries, without grounding in historical developments. More generally, the development of Nordic migration control regimes has, by and large, been studied separately from the Nordic welfare state’s 150

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development, and vice versa. In this chapter, I aim to link the two, following scholars who have pointed to an intimate, historically rooted connection between the forms of migration control and state-bound welfare provision. The Nordic welfare states have been described as ‘Janus-faced’ by several researchers (e.g. Kettunen et al. 2015), as they simultaneously rely on and produce both processes of social inclusion and exclusion. The history of mobility control is situated in many ways at the heart of this ‘split’ in their nature, attesting to the contradictions and unintended consequences arising from the efforts to include ‘citizens’ and exclude ‘aliens’. Such contradictions are apparent in, for example, the struggles over who can be deported, and who not; in the prominence of racialized ‘others’ in the development of modern Nordic migration control regimes; and in the production of illegal statuses – from ‘vagrants’ to ‘paperless’ migrants – as a by-product of residency-based social inclusion. Persistent tensions have similarly been reflected in such manifestations as the shifting agendas of the Nordic social democratic parties and trade unions, as they have vacillated since the late nineteenth century between impulses towards labour market protectionism, international solidarity, welfare nationalism, human rights promotion and xenophobic nativism (e.g. Leitzinger 2008a, pp. 388–95; Välimäki 2019, p. 105). In fact, one of the earliest concrete incentives for international working-class collaboration was the attempt to oppose recruitment of foreign workers as strike-breakers (Kettunen 2021; Prothero 2018). Longstanding contradictions have been further complicated by specific post-war developments, which I examine in this chapter, among them efforts towards first Nordic and then European-level ‘debordering’ (c.1940s–2000s), the strengthening of the legal position of non-citizen residents and the rise of international law (1950s–2000s) and the ‘hyperpoliticization’ and ‘rebordering’ of migration directed from countries of the so‑called Global South to the Global North (late 1980s onward). Finally, I probe the contradictions and ambivalences within what could be called ‘post-universalist’ Nordic welfare states. Examining these developments, I argue, firstly, that the restrictive turn in migration control since the 1990s has been a fundamental part of a long-term shift from expansion of welfare universalism to a growing hierarchization and fragmentation of social rights (cf. Könönen 2018, pp. 53–6). At the same time, I follow Vanessa Barker (2013; 2017) in arguing that it is ultimately less the ‘crisis’ of the welfare state than the nationally defined logic of the welfare state itself that upholds and drives the present-day repressive control of migrants.

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CONNECTING MOBILITY CONTROL AND THE WELFARE STATE The analytical starting point of the chapter is based on John Torpey’s (1998) assertion of an elemental connection between ‘monopolization of the legitimate means of movement’ and the emergence of welfare states, or modern state systems more generally. Torpey and other scholars have pointed to a long-term dynamic relationship between forms of welfare and mobility control, in which the two appear complementary, or even co‑constitutive. In its analysis of the entanglement between welfare and mobility control in the case of the Nordic countries, this chapter connects with three overlapping strands of research in particular. The first of these is formed by work of historians and social scientists who have pointed to an essential historical link between the establishing of social rights and welfare provision in various European polities, on the one hand, and tightening control over membership and residence, on the other. In fact, a connection between poverty relief and control of entry was already evident in early modern towns, which often acted as ‘mini welfare states’, controlling entry to their territory and municipal poverty relief systems through often surprisingly ‘modern’ registries and other identity control systems (e.g. Fauser 2017, pp. 606–8; Lucassen 2012, p. 220). Despite such precedents, the consolidation of territorial nation states meant a fundamental turning point in the history both of welfare measures and of mobility control. From the late nineteenth century onwards, increasingly sophisticated and restrictive systems of border and immigration control and naturalization laws have been employed by state actors in order to enforce a deepening division between ‘citizens’ and ‘aliens’ (e.g. Reinecke 2009). Torpey (1998, p. 240) argues that the modern states’ ‘expropriation of the legitimate means of movement’ was, in fact, a key element in constituting the very ‘state-ness’ of nation states, as they depend on being able to ‘embrace’ their populations administratively and to distinguish them from others. The second relevant body of literature has pointed to the logics of bordering and exclusion intrinsic to advanced welfare states themselves. On the most fundamental level, this can refer to ‘welfare nationalists’ striving to limit the use of resources of the state for (paying) ‘members’, as defined by exclusive citizenship regimes (e.g. Brochmann & Hagelund 2011, pp. 14–15). In a related manner, Erica Righard (2010) has referred to a ‘welfare mobility dilemma’, resulting from a collision between increasingly mobile and transnational everyday realities and an expected relative immobility in national social policies. Barker (2017) has meanwhile analysed processes in which a welfare state’s benevolent or ameliorative goals lead also, in themselves, to coercive

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means, resulting in what she calls benevolent violence. Further, Barker has examined forms of ‘penal nationalism’, aimed at assurances of national security, and forms of social security, for citizens alone. Thirdly, critical scholarship focusing on migration control has produced a reconceptualization of borders and migration management that is relevant also in understanding the history of Nordic welfare states and their borders. Through looking at borders as an everyday phenomenon, this strand of research has approached them as something that is increasingly ‘everywhere’ (Lyon 2005). Rather than static lines at the outer edges of states, then, borders appear from this perspective as active processes, ‘bordering’ that reaches into day-to-day life, shaping social relations and migrant subjectivities. Critical migration research has further rejected the simple dichotomy between societal inclusion and exclusion, pointing rather to processes of differential inclusion of migrants within a complex system of administrative regulation (e.g. Könönen 2018, p. 54; Mezzadra & Neilson 2013, pp. 159–64). Literature on everyday bordering has similarly highlighted the complex societal consequences of border control processes that extend deep into the social space of the welfare states, pointing to the increasing stratification of social rights and entitlements for non-citizens (e.g. De Genova 2002; Fauser 2017; Tervonen et al. 2018).

DEMARCATING CITIZENS AND ALIENS In Nordic history, interconnection among nation-building, social protection and tightening migration control appears clear. The nation-building efforts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced in each country a deepening legal, institutional and documentary borderline between ‘citizens’ and ‘aliens’. The first citizenship Acts in Norway (1888), Sweden (1894), Denmark (1898) and Finland (1919) were thus enacted more or less in lockstep with immigration and deportation laws, passed by the Grand Duchy of Finland (1862, 1888) and later independent Finland (1919, 1924, 1930), Denmark (1875), Sweden (1914) and Norway (1888, 1902, 1915). As elsewhere in Europe, the outbreak of the First World War caused a restrictive and security-oriented turn in Nordic immigration regulation. While the Danish law of 1875 and Norwegian law of 1901 were primarily instruments for evicting people considered burdensome to municipal poverty relief, immigration laws passed in Sweden in 1914 (and quickly emulated in other Scandinavian countries) placed a new emphasis on the surveillance and control of aliens. The latter came to be increasingly viewed as potential spies (which, of course, they in some cases were), political agitators or racially inferior undesirables. The aim of hindering immigration of racialized others such as the Jews and the Roma played a prominent role in the development of the enhanced border control, as illustrated by the immigration ban on ‘foreign

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Gypsies’ upheld in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries until the 1950s (Hammar 1964; Tervonen 2015). At the same time, laws targeting specific unwanted groups, such as the immigration ban that was in force in Denmark until 1952, also highlight the sometimes tenuous nature of the categorizations used, along with the overlap between social and racial stereotyping inherited from older anti-Ziganist and vagrancy laws. The latter ban thus forbade settling in the country to ‘Foreign Gypsies, musicians, showmen exhibiting animals and other things, performers of feats of strength and dexterity and similar persons … in so far as they want to earn a livelihood by the trades of vagrancy’. Overall, however, the immigration laws passed in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries meant increasingly precise codification of the relationship between non-citizens and the Nordic states. The gradual development of social protection measures within the nationalizing Nordic states was matched by a growing institutional, legislative and technological capacity to restrict non-citizens’ access to these services. In a parallel with other European countries, control of entry and systematic passport and visa control, control of work and residence permits, obligatory registration with the police and regular statistical reports were adopted and wielded by new central immigration offices such as the Finnish Passitoimisto (1919–49) (Leitzinger 2008b).1 Centralization of an aliens policy also entailed a shift of authority from the local to the national level, alongside a parallel shift of focus from internal mobility – with a long history of criminalizing the combination of poverty and mobility as ‘vagrancy’ – to overseeing cross-border mobility. Besides the centralizing states, the labour unions became interested in immigration early on. As they gained political influence in the interwar era, the unions gave their support to stricter regulation of foreign workers through decrees making work permits obligatory for them. These were subsequently introduced in Sweden, Norway and Finland in 1926–27 (Boguslav 2012, pp. 24, 29; International Migration Institute 2015; Kuosma 1991, pp. 86–7). After tens of thousands of East Karelians, Ingrians and Russians fled to Finland after the Russian Revolution, the refugees were viewed with suspicion by the political left. Attitudes were hardened by clashes during an industrial strike in Kemi in 1926, in which Eastern Karelian refugees were recruited as strike-breakers. Stricter work permit regulation arrived in the same year. The increasing hostility expressed by the labour unions and right-wing parties alike quite possibly contributed to the subsequent long-term drop in the number of

1 The institutional successors of the Passitoimisto have been the Ulkomaalaistoimisto (1949–84), Ulko­maalaiskeskus (1984–95), Ulkomaalaisvirasto (1995–2007) and Maahanmuuttovirasto 2007–present.

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foreign citizens, which fell from approximately 30,000 in 1928 to 21,158 in 1938 (Leitzinger 2008a, p. 94; 2008b, pp. 386–94). While the decline was caused mainly by the onslaught of the Great Depression, the numbers continued to fall even after economic recovery, pointing to the effects of a more hostile environment as well as to the increasingly tense international situation. The restrictive immigration processes and institutions constructed during and immediately after the First World War were never fully dismantled, even though there was a partial easing of visa controls between the wars (Kjeldstadli 2011, p. 10). These structures formed a foundational layer in the development of modern Nordic migration control regimes, and they highlighted the racialized boundary-drawing ingrained in the building of ethno-nationally defined ‘folkhemmet’.

POST-WAR DEBORDERING AND ITS DISCONTENTS If the First World War was a watershed in the international development of more restrictive aliens laws, then the Second World War and its aftermath again fundamentally altered the development of the Nordic mobility control regimes. This was particularly true in Sweden, which became a place of refuge for about 180,000 refugees and displaced people, in particular from Finland, Norway, Estonia, Denmark and Germany (Reinecke 2009, p. 2). During the war, this group was exempted from work permission requirements in order to alleviate a labour shortage in conditions of simultaneous industrial expansion and extensive military conscription. While providing an important economic input, the use of this additional labour force also formed a model for subsequent reliance on foreign manpower. After the war, Swedish industries boomed, and the country began a swift laying out of bilateral and then multilateral agreements to expedite labour recruitment from Europe and beyond. The rapid and sustained economic growth in Western and Northern European countries set the stage for broader ideas about free movement of persons. In a reversal of the pre‑war development, border controls began to be conceived of as an unnecessary hindrance to economic development. In the half-century following the end of the Second World War, they became objects of highly successful regional ‘debordering’ programmes, first on a Nordic and later a European level. Sweden acted as a forerunner and a model particularly in opening its borders to citizens of other Nordic countries (Svanberg & Tydén 1992, p. 328; Tervonen 2015, p. 133). The removal of restrictions on mobility between the Nordic countries was among the main efforts of Nordic cooperation in the decade after the war. A string of agreements and conventions between 1943 and 1957 abolished the requirements for a visa, work permit and passport, while also guaranteeing social security for those moving from one Nordic

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country to another. Passport checks between Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland were abolished in 1952, and two years later, citizens were allowed to reside and work in these countries without residence or work permits. With some later additions, this created a region of free mobility that remains unique to this day in terms of the depth of freedom of movement and social rights that it allows the citizens of its member countries. In the three decades following 1954, these rights were exercised by more than one million Nordic citizens, most of whom were Finns moving to Sweden (e.g. Snellman 2019). The intra‑region mobility has undoubtedly contributed significantly to economic growth and low unemployment levels in the Nordic countries (Wendt 1981, p. 221). A subsequent continent-wide debordering process began in 1958 with the Treaty of Rome – signed in the same year as the member countries of the Nordic Passport Union finally abolished all checks at the borders between them. The Benelux countries declared their intention of free movement of labour, goods, capital and services. Although disagreements among EEC member states as to the practical realizing of these goals subsequently led to a long impasse, the European debordering progressed steadily from the early 1980s onward, leading to the Schengen Agreement in 1985. Sweden, Finland and Denmark joined the agreement in 1996 and became full members in 2001, while Norway and Iceland joined in 1999, becoming associate members. Border checkpoints and passport checks were removed from the Danish–German border, as they had been from the intra-Nordic borders in 1958. What appears striking with the post-war Nordic drive for dismantling obstacles to mobility is the seemingly apolitical nature of migration as an issue. Contrasting against both preceding and later eras, critical debate on immigration in, for example, Sweden was generally absent in the first decades after the war (see Svanberg & Tydén 1992, p. 328). Nordic migration in particular appeared to be a matter of mere economic rationalization – with ideas of close cultural or even racial proximity between the Nordic countries undoubtedly also playing a role. Beneath the surface, however, the combination of free mobility and nationally bound welfare also produced frictions. The Nordic Social Security Convention (1955) necessitated efforts to harmonize social security within the region. Moreover, many authorities worried that this would enable the movement of ‘non-desirable elements’ too, such as criminals, vagrants and alcoholics. For example, the entry of Finnish ‘a-socials’, alcoholics, recidivists and car thieves was noted by Swedish and Danish authorities in the 1950s–1980s. Additionally, there was an ethnic or racial element in the concern over unwanted mobility. Specifically, some Swedish authorities expressed their interest in preventing Finnish Roma from entering the country, or at least decreasing the number doing so, and several municipalities adopted

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the practice of regularly sending Roma families back to Finland (Montesino 2002, pp. 100, 178; Tervonen 2015, pp. 135–7). The Swedish concern over Finnish criminals entering the country led to that country taking an active role in setting up cooperation of the various Nordic police forces, including exchange of information. Accordingly, the 1959 Nordic agreement on police cooperation was expanded and formalized in 1968 (Sjöblom 2001). As with the later European free mobility zone, the Nordic Passport Union thus already exposed some tensions between multilateral debordering and the national- and local‑level urge to maintain control over mobility. Moreover, when perceptions of cultural difference later came to be coupled with economic troubles, immigration became a subject of recurring high-profile political interventions. Amid the economic downturn of the early 1970s, public attention focused on migrants from outside Europe thus produced what Brochmann and Hagelund (2011) have called the emergence of migration as a social policy problem in Scandinavian countries. Selective ‘migration stops’ were put in place in Sweden (1972), Denmark (1973) and Norway (1975), with the aim of restricting labour migration to low-wage sectors, particularly from poor non-Western countries (Brochmann & Hagelund 2011, p. 16). Worries over a possible new, ethnically visible underclass that the welfare state would not be able to absorb were tied in with a resurgence in labour market protectionism. In Sweden, the labour unions exercised a de facto veto to approval of recruitment of labour from abroad. In the post-war conditions of nearly full employment, they had generally agreed to the admission of skilled foreign workers. From the 1960s on, however, the unions grew increasingly critical of what they saw as labour dumping, at a time in which the large-scale arrival of women in the workplace increased the supply of labour. The tension between growing international mobility and welfare nationalism was further exacerbated by the subsequent European debordering. While the major inter-region hindrances to the mobility of people, goods and capital have been eliminated, globalization and South–North migration have become immensely politicized issues (cf. Brochmann & Hagelund 2011; Välimäki 2019). Politicization particularly of humanitarian immigration has placed rising pressure on multilateral agreements that can be seen as undercutting national sovereignty and restricting the authorities’ possibilities for controlling mobility, whether Nordic or European in their scope. Before 2015, this pressure was visible in, for example, the Danish attempts to stop the movement of third-country humanitarian migrants between Nordic and other European countries. In 2011, the Danish police reportedly demanded passports from all ‘foreign‑looking’ travellers on the Øresund train. This ethnic profiling was employed to stop humanitarian migrants with pending cases arriving from Sweden. In the same year, the Danish authorities attempted

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to implement border controls in the form of sampling-based customs checks which sought to circumvent Schengen and Nordic agreements. Denmark’s proposed measures for enhancing border controls were only abandoned after a heated German and European reaction, with previous Nordic protests largely having been ignored by the Danish government (Munkøe 2012, pp. 18–19; Tervonen 2015). Four years later, the Swedish–Danish ‘Greater Copenhagen’ initiative was undercut by a decision to restore systematic border controls for Øresund – this time imposed from the Swedish side of the border (Yndigegn 2011).

REBORDERING AND LEGAL HIERARCHIZATION In November 2015, the Swedish government made a highly publicized decision to reintroduce identity checks at its borders. The police started monitoring all modes of transport arriving from continental Europe, stopping anyone without valid travel documents. The decision was made after more than 150,000 refugees had arrived in Sweden during what was dubbed the refugee crisis of 2015 and in the aftermath of November’s gruesome terror attacks in Paris. As before, Sweden led a wider shift in Nordic migration politics. This closing of borders was quickly followed by Denmark resuming border controls on its southern border with Germany. These rapid changes were widely interpreted at the time as a ‘political U-turn’, or a symbolic ‘slamming shut’ of a Nordic ‘open-door policy towards refugees’.2 However, from a longer-term perspective, the reintroduction of border checks – along with a flurry of moves such as building of border fences along the Norwegian–Russian border and 2016’s introduction of Danish laws on seizing assets from refugees entering the country – were merely the latest development in a wider restrictive turn extending much further back than the panicked decisions of autumn 2015. The politicization of immigration in the Nordic countries since the 1990s has been part of a global shift, in which immigration from the countries of the Global South has become a central site of political contestation and realignments in the countries of the Global North. Connected to this, there has been a proliferation of border controls, following larger European and global patterns. Three developments seem particularly evident in this regard. The most prominent has been a rise of what could be described as ‘hard borders 2.0’, with physical state borders transformed by technologization, mil-

2 E.g. ‘Sweden slams shut its open-door policy towards refugees’, from David Crouch, for The Guardian, 24 Nov. 2015, accessed 28 May 2019 at www​.theguardian​ .com/​world/​2015/​nov/​24/​sweden​-asylum​-seekers​-refugees​-policy​-reversal.

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itarization and pouring in of resources. Border walls in Europe have multiplied from two in 1990 to 15 in 2015, with walls and fences stretching over a length of 1000 kilometres (Benedicto & Brunet 2018). Meanwhile, ‘smart’ forms of border surveillance utilize vast databanks such as the second-generation Schengen Information System (SIS II) to either slow down or expedite the movement of border-crossers in accordance with the estimated level of ‘risk’ posed. Secondly, there has been a sustained European effort to push the control of borders outwards, with forms of ‘remote control’ developing. ‘Upstreaming’ of restrictive control via visa requirements has been supplemented with carrier sanctions imposed on flight and ferry companies, and with deals created with neighbouring and migrant-sending countries such as Turkey, Eritrea and Libya with the aim of stopping would-be migrants from reaching European borders. The actual boundaries of Europe – and, along with them, the Nordic countries – have thus been pushed far outside their physical territory. A third bordering development has been formed by intensified efforts of internal control over migrants. The combination of growing numbers of international migrants and the increasingly tough migration and residency policies has produced non-citizen populations living in a precarious legal position. However, regional freedom of movement and commitment to international law and agreements that protect the rights of migrants mean that authorities are often unable to directly turn back or deport migrants such as rejected asylum-seekers or unregistered EU migrants. It has been estimated that just 40 per cent of migrants who have been given an order to leave the EU actually leave (Andrijasevic 2010). The focus of migration control has consequently shifted from external borderlines to the regulation of access to permanent residence, and social and economic rights (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013). An ever more varied collection of migrants with ‘in‑between’ statuses face a multitude of boundaries and gatekeepers in their everyday dealings with health-care centres, schools, workplaces, banks and other entities. All three of these developments have been clearly visible in the Nordic countries. At the outer boundaries, Norwegian and Finnish eastern borders with Russia manifest effects of both the technologization of EU borders and the deals to co-opt third countries into preventing would-be asylum-seekers from reaching the border. Within Nordic states’ borders, the migration control regimes have converged with European policies of massive-scale detention and deportation, apprehending and removing migrants in growing numbers. A new pervasiveness of mobility control within the Nordic societies has given rise to complex societal consequences. Their immigration law entails legal hierarchies and differential inclusion, producing conditional subjects divided into categories with unequal access to housing and labour markets, education, health care and welfare services. The rights of the non-citizens are affected by their nationality, grounds for a right of residence, employment

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status, marital status, student status and also wealth (determining the possibilities for family reunification). Furthermore, municipalities differ in the levels of access offered to health services and emergency shelters for undocumented migrants and non-registered EU citizens (Könönen 2018). On the other side of the threshold, there has been the involvement of an expanding set of authorities, civil servants, doctors, non-governmental organization (NGO) workers, landlords/landowners and many others in gatekeeping roles vis-à-vis non-citizen residents. Public and private actors alike have, in effect, been charged with upholding the internal boundaries of the nation/welfare state by enforcing policies aimed at removing ‘incentives’ for unwanted would-be migrants. The police thus have initiated targeted campaigns such as the Swedish REVA3 in 2013 to detain undocumented migrants within their borders, leading to recurring use of ethnic profiling as a tool of migration control (Keskinen et al. 2018; Sager 2018). Actors such as the Finnish traffic police are also involved in immigration raids. Social workers, teachers and doctors are expected to withhold non-essential services from those without residence permits and to refer them to the immigration authorities. As the burden of controlling the social rights of migrants filters down to ground-level actors, moral and institutional grey zones emerge, with, for instance, physicians who are unwilling to deny treatment to undocumented migrants or social workers struggling with contradictory guidelines on homeless EU migrants during cold Nordic winters (Tervonen et al. 2018). The tightening of migration control has taken place in parallel with expression of broader tendencies towards the restructuring of Nordic welfare policies. Often, this has meant moving from universal welfare services and programmes towards more selective, means-tested ones. Economic stratification, austerity measures and normative stress on the importance of work have paved the way to growing tolerance of social, economic and also juridical hierarchies within the Nordic countries, as exemplified by workfare reforms designed to coerce ‘high-risk’ groups into gainful labour. A drive towards reduced state regulation, outsourcing and greater marketization of public-sector activities has created a ‘mixed economy of welfare’, involving the private and volunteer sectors in basic social, health and education services (Lindström 2015, pp. 19–21). These developments have been both mirrored in and driven further by changes in immigration policy, from differentiation of the rights of various migrant groups to the NGOization and projectization of their welfare provision. The latter is evident, for instance, in relation to undocumented migrants and

3

An acronym for ‘Rättssäkert och effektivt verkställighetsarbete’.

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street-working EU migrants in the Nordic countries, many of whom identify as ethnic Roma. As political unwillingness and institutional difficulties hinder extending normal welfare provision to cover this quasi‑permanent unwanted group, urban municipalities such as Oslo, Malmö, and Helsinki opt instead to fund NGOs and private actors to provide rudimentary services and emergency shelters (e.g. Lindström 2015; Persdotter 2019; Tervonen & Enache 2017). Meanwhile, there have been efforts (e.g. in Denmark and Finland) to reduce the level of support for asylum-seekers and to demarcate between the benefits received by this group and those for unemployed citizens. At a more extreme level of legal differentiation, Denmark’s ‘ghetto laws’ of 2018 explicitly set a harsher punitive regime in place for 25 residential areas officially designated as ‘ghettos’. These are areas that have a high proportion of residents with a migrant background. Residents of these areas are subject to double sentences for crimes and to eviction of families whose children commit a crime. In a sign of returning protectionist and nativist attitudes to immigration among the Nordic centre left, this legislation was enthusiastically supported by the Danish Social Democratic Party, which has also sought to introduce laws specifically reducing the number of so-called non-Western immigrants coming to Denmark – in the name of defending a universal welfare model. These examples point to entanglements among the restructuring of welfare policies, differentiation of rights and the increasingly restrictive Nordic mobility control regimes. In 2020, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic brought further pressure with regard to both the Schengen rules and the Nordic Passport Union. Three of the five Nordic states (Norway, Denmark and Finland) closed their internal borders in response to COVID-19. The border restrictions have targeted surprising countries: for example, Finland closed its borders with Sweden and Norway for the first time in nearly 70 years (Heinikoski 2020, p. 7). A time of crisis has thus once again highlighted the borders as fundamental physical nation state structures. In the era of climate change and new pandemics, borders seem, if anything, to be expanding their roles in structuring and differentiating the Nordic welfare regimes.

CONCLUSION: AMBIVALENCES OF THE POST-UNIVERSALIST WELFARE STATE In this chapter, I have sought to analyse the relationship between mobility control and the welfare state in the Nordic countries. This relationship is complex and multi-layered, and over time it has produced a multiplicity of shifting policies, discourses and conceptualizations. However, strong continuities and recurring tensions are also evident. On the one hand, there is an essential historical relationship between the constructing of national systems of social protection, from the late 1800s

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onward, and the increasingly sharp boundaries separating citizens and ‘aliens’. The First World War served as a major turning point in the latter respect, with accelerating development of laws and practices excluding non-citizens. Interwar forms of welfare nationalism included protectionist attitudes and policies towards foreign labour, alongside racializing elements apparent in the targeted restrictions imposed on groups such as Jews and Roma. The bounded logic of the nationally defined welfare state seems in itself to have produced restrictive laws and practices related to immigrants, particularly when those migrants have been conceived as an economic and/or cultural threat. The development of Nordic and then European free mobility zones can be seen as a major exception to this, as both created forms of social belonging not requiring national citizenship in the country of residence. However, both the Schengen area and the European Passport Union also highlight the growing tension between multilateral and national welfare/migration regimes, with precarious in-between groups such as homeless EU migrants. From a long‑term perspective, recent developments such as the closing of Swedish borders in 2015 can thus be interpreted as maintaining the nationally defined welfare state, rather than as a sign of its crisis, as Barker (2013; 2017) has argued. On the other hand, the restrictive turn in migration control since the 1990s has coincided with a broad restructuring of the welfare policies of the Nordic countries. The hierarchization of rights of non-citizens in Nordic countries, from exchange students and labour migrant labourers to rejected asylum-seekers, has taken place in a context of wider legal differentiation and welfare retrenchment, cuts in social expenditure and emphasis on workfare schemes. The increasingly coercive migration control can thus be seen as both following from and contributing to a more fragmented social rights regime. Critical Nordic migration studies literature points to many complexities in the encounters between diverse non-citizens and the various gatekeepers of today’s mixed economy of welfare. I argue that these complexities are part of a wider ambivalence that has developed within what could be called post-universalist Nordic welfare states. They are ‘post-universalist’ in the sense that the hierarchically differentiated position of diverse non-citizens has become ingrained in the law, politics and policy practice. Present-day Nordic welfare/migration regimes can, therefore, be seen as pointing to a paradox, in which the alleged defence of national welfare structures through restriction of non-members’ access fragments and ultimately undermines universalistic welfare as a model.

REFERENCES Andrijasevic, R. (2010), ‘From exception to excess: detention and deportations across the Mediterranean space’, in N. De Genova and N. Peutz (eds), The Deportation

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Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 147–65. Barker, V. (2013), ‘Nordic Exceptionalism revisited: explaining the paradox of a Janus-faced penal regime’, Theoretical Criminology, 17 (1), 5–25. Barker, V. (2017), ‘Nordic vagabonds: the Roma and the logic of benevolent violence in the Swedish welfare state’, European Journal of Criminology, 14 (1), 120–39. Benedicto, A. R. and P. Brunet (2018), Building Walls: Fear and Securitization in the European Union, Barcelona: Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau, accessed 3 May 2019 at www​.tni​.org/​files/​publication​-downloads/​building​_walls​_​-​_full​_report​_​ -​_english​.pdf. Boguslav, J. (2012), Svensk invandringspolitik under 500 år: 1512–2012, Lund: Studentlitteratur. Brochmann, G. and A. Hagelund (2011), ‘Migrants in the Scandinavian welfare state: the emergence of a social policy problem’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 1 (1), 13–24. De Genova, N. (2002), ‘Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31 (4), 419–47. Djuve, A. B., J. H. Friberg, G. Tyldum and H. Zhang (2015), When Poverty Meets Affluence: Migrants from Romania on the Streets of the Scandinavian Capitals, Oslo: FAFO. Fauser, M. (2017), ‘The emergence of urban border spaces in Europe’, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 34 (5), 1–18. Hammar, T. (1964), Sverige åt svenskarn: invandringspolitik, utlänningskontroll och asylrätt 1900–1932, Stockholm: Caslon Press. Heinikoski, S. (2020), ‘COVID-19 bends the rules on border controls: yet another crisis undermining the Schengen acquis?’, FIIA Briefing Paper 281, Helsinki: Finnish Institute of International Affairs, accessed 21 December 2020 at www​.fiia​.fi/​ wp‑content/​uploads/​2020/​04/​bp281​_covid​-19​-and​-schengen​-acquis​.pdf.. International Migration Institute (2015), DEGIM POLICY, accessed 28 May 2019 at www​.imi​-n​.org/​data/​demig​-data/​demig​-policy​-1/​download​-the​-data/​demig​-policy​ -data​-downloads. Keskinen, S., A. A. Alemanji, M. Himanen, A. Kivijärvi, U. Osazee, N. Pöyhölä and V. Rousku (2018), Pysäytetyt – etninen profilointi Suomessa, SSKH Reports and Discussion Papers 2/2018, University of Helsinki. Kettunen, P. (2022), ‘Internationalism in socialist conceptualizations of politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries’, in P. Ihalainen and A. Holmila (eds), Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined: A European History of Concepts Beyond Nation States, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, chapter 4. Kettunen, P, S. Michel and K. Petersen (eds) (2015), Race, Ethnicity and Welfare States: An American Dilemma?, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Kjeldstadli, K. (2011), ‘Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland’, in K. J. Bade, P. C. Emmer, L. Lucassen and J. Oltmer (eds), The Encyclopedia of European Migration and Minorities: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 5–12. Könönen, J. (2018), ‘Differential inclusion of non-citizens in a universalistic welfare state’, Citizenship Studies, 22 (1), 53–69. Kuosma, T. (1991), Uusi Ulkomaalaislaki, Helsinki: Lakimiesliiton kustannus. Leitzinger, A. (2008a), Ulkomaalaiset Suomessa 1812–1972, Helsinki: East–West Books.

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Leitzinger, A. (2008b), Ulkomaalaispolitiikka Suomessa 1812–1972, Helsinki: East– West Books. Lindström, T. (2015), ‘They don’t fit in: homeless EU migrants, new social risks and the mixed economy of welfare in Sweden’, Lund University. Lucassen, L. (2012), ‘Cities, states and migration control in Western Europe: comparing then and now’, in B. de Munck and A. Winter (eds), Gated Communities? Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 217–44. Lyon, D. (2005), ‘The border is everywhere: ID cards, surveillance and the other’, in E. Zureik and M. Salter (eds), Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, Security, Identity, Cullompton: Willan Publishing, pp. 66–82. Mezzadra, S. and B. Neilson (2013), Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Montesino, N. (2002), Zigenarfrågan. Intervention och romantik, Lund University. Munkøe, M. (2012), ‘The 2011 debacle over Danish border control: a mismatch of domestic and European games’, EU Diplomacy Paper 1/2012, Bruges: College of Europe. Pellander, S. (2016), Gatekeepers of the Family: Regulating Family Migration to Finland, Publications of the Faculty of Social Sciences 20, Helsinki: Unigrafia. Persdotter, M. (2019), Free To Move Along: On the Urbanisation of Cross-Border Mobility Controls – a Case of Roma ‘EU Migrants’ in Malmö, Sweden, Roskilde University; Malmö University: Holmbergs. Prothero, I. (2018), ‘The IWMA and industrial conflict in England and France’, in F. Bensimon, Q. Deluermoz and J. Moisand (eds), “Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth”: The First International in a Global Perspective, Leiden: Brill. Reinecke, C. (2009), ‘Governing aliens in times of upheaval: immigration control and modern state practice in early twentieth-century Britain, compared with Prussia’, International Review of Social History, 54 (1), 39–65. Righard, E. (2010), The Welfare Mobility Dilemma: Transnational Strategies and National Structuring at Crossroads, Lund University. Sager, M. (2018), ‘Struggles around representation and in/visibility in everyday migrant irregularity in Sweden’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 8 (3), 175–82. Sjöblom, J. (2001), ‘“Fri rörlighet för alla utom polisen”. Nordiskt kriminalpolissamarbete 1952–1968 med särskild hänsyn till samarbetsfrågorna mellan Finland och Sverige’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Helsinki. Snellman, H. (2019), ‘Tiedon ja taidon kierto: maastamuuttajien Suomi ja Ruotsi’, in J. Koponen and S. Saaritsa (eds), Nälkämaasta hyvinvointivaltioksi. Suomi kehityksen kiinniottajana, Tallinn: Gaudeamus, pp. 185–98. Svanberg, I. and M. Tydén (1992), Tusen år av invandring: en svensk kulturhistoria, Stockholm: Gidlunds. Tervonen, M. (2015), ‘The Nordic Passport Union and its discontents: unintended consequences of free movement’, in J. Strang (ed.), Nordic Cooperation: A European Region in Transition, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 131–46. Tervonen, M. and A. Enache (2017), ‘Coping with everyday bordering: Roma migrants and gatekeepers in Helsinki’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (7), 1114–31. Tervonen, M., S. Pellander and N. Yuval-Davis (2018), ‘Everyday bordering in the Nordic countries’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 8 (3), 139–42. Torpey, J. (1998) ‘Coming and going: on the state monopolization of legitimate “means of movement”’, Sociological Theory, 16 (3), 239–59.

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Välimäki, M. (2019), Politiikkaa kansainvälisten, kansallisten ja ideologisten reunaehtojen puitteissa: Suomalaiset puolueet ja maahanmuutto 1973–2015, University of Turku. Wendt, F. (1981), Cooperation in the Nordic Countries: Achievements and Obstacles, Stockholm: Nordic Council. Yndigegn, C. (2011), ‘Between debordering and rebordering Europe: cross-border cooperation in the Øresund region or the Danish–Swedish border region’, Eurasian Border Review, 2 (1), 47–59.

8. Gender, emotions and vulnerability: mediated responses to deportations in the aftermath of the refugee reception crisis Saara Pellander All of the Nordic countries have restricted their immigration policies, especially in the aftermath of the so-called refugee crisis of 2015. While these countries differ in the numbers and demographics of the asylum-seekers and refugees both living and arriving there, the countries’ policy responses are based on similar perceptions. Debate on asylum-seekers and their deportation has been informed by certain understandings of gender equality, as well as by certain perceptions of migrant men and women, in relation to (gendered) vulnerability and suffering. Looking at the case of Finland, this chapter explores how political and public responses to asylum-seekers arriving in larger numbers in 2015 are informed by and tied to gendered understandings of otherness. As we know from previous research (see, for example, Fekete 2006; Norocel 2013; Towns et al. 2014), the Scandinavian far right employs gender equality as an argument for stricter immigration regulations. This is bound up also with debate articulating connections and oppositions between multiculturalism and Nordic understandings of gender (Keskinen 2017; Langvasbråten 2008; Razack 2004; Tuori 2007). The literature on these phenomena provides a starting point for this chapter’s examination of how gender started to become an increasingly relevant category in public debate about immigration not merely as a tool of the far right. How did mediated and political responses to the growing numbers of asylum-seekers articulate gender and gender equality in their argumentation? How did the fact that most asylum-seekers arriving in 2015 were young men become relevant in debates over immigration? And how did gender feature in the discussion and political decisions on deportations? Analysis reveals both that the notion of the universalism of the Nordic welfare state serves the project of employing normative values related to gender equality as a tool for excluding the most vulnerable and that notions of deservingness and under166

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standings of what makes a ‘real’ refugee are tied to stereotypical notions of female vulnerability versus male capability. The chapter centres on an analysis of media material, which plays a vital role in shaping public opinion (McCombs 2014). Trying to forcibly remove those who are not allowed on the nation’s territory is a way of enacting national sovereignty. Therefore, when it comes to controlling the movement of people, this can be regarded as the most nationalistic of acts. In fact, migration scholars like to point out that, irrespective of the transnational turn in migration scholarship and casting a critical eye on methodological nationalism remaining within the national frame, ultimately it still is the nation state that presides overregulation of entry and settlement within its borders. In Nordic welfare states such as Finland, we find a clash in this regard – between a state that sees itself as respecting human rights and defending them in international arenas and one that, at the same time, deports people into dangerous conditions. Many media consumers are confronted by this disparity when they read news articles: items about the unjust treatment of asylum-seekers do not match their perception of a fair and benevolent welfare state. I find that news reports on deportation offer a valuable case study because this way of regulating the movement of people is something that tends to be kept out of the public eye and that, when brought to wider attention, challenges perceptions of the national self. The ensuing debate is interwoven with understandings of gender. The Nordic countries are known for scoring high in international comparisons of gender equality. International discourses frame the Nordic gender model as a success story (Esping-Andersson 1990; Melby & Carlsson Wetterberg 2009). If anything, gender equality has become so prominently articulated that it has turned into somewhat of a national narrative. Gender equality, then, is something that the Nordic countries take as a source of pride, and it has directly served the construction of the success story of the Nordic welfare state. That story, however, ignores the problematic normative assumptions behind the model. Feminist, post-colonial and anti-racist scholarship in particular has questioned the oft-repeated mantra that the Nordic countries are champions of resolving gender-equality issues. Feminist scholarship has pointed out, first of all, that a narrative wherein gender equality has already been achieved hides the fact that many forms of gender discrimination remain. Care work both in and outside the home is done mostly by women, and other household chores and family leave are still mainly the province of women. Furthermore, even though women’s participation in the working world is far greater in the Nordic countries than in many other OECD countries, the Nordic labour markets are among the most segregated in the world (Lahelma & Öhrn 2003, p. 51; Peltonen 1998, pp. 66–72; Saari et al. 2019). In addition, in times of neoliberal politics aimed at dismantling the Nordic welfare state, the cuts in public spending that austerity politics have introduced affect women more than men

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(Kantola & Lombardo 2017; Karamessini & Rubery 2013). At the same time, there are also unresolved issues of discrimination against men. Further criticism of the narrative in which gender equality is a pillar of national identity-building in the Nordic countries comes from anti-racist scholars especially. They argue that gender equality has become a trait with nationalist aspects (Martinsson et al. 2016): several groups who do not fit that nationalist image get excluded. Immigration scholarship has shown that gender is an organizing principle in the structuring of mobilities. For instance, Katie E. Oliviero argues that ‘the connection between terrorism, immigration, national vulnerability, and racial and gendered difference in the public imaginary’ intensified especially since 9/11 and that, ‘consequently, more attention is needed to the ways that contemporary immigration policies unevenly tie narratives of gender and ethnic difference to understandings of national emergency and foreign threat’ (2013, p. 5). To answer that call, I present an overview of the ways in which asylum-seekers have been addressed in Finnish public and political debate post-2015. I begin by laying bare the gendered ways in which mobility, vulnerability and threat have unfolded in the Finnish context. That discussion is followed by a more empirically oriented examination, anchoring the analysis in newspaper reporting on deportation. This case study deepens our understanding of the gendered readings of the years since what most researchers call the refugee reception crisis and illustrates precisely how news about deportability and inclusion is tied to understandings of gender.

BACKGROUND Debate on immigration and the (Nordic) welfare state tends to centre on topics such as inclusion and integration. Little scholarship has considered deportation in its own right, let alone as a gendered phenomenon. For the US setting, the work of Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo reveals that most people deported from that country are working-class Latino men, a phenomenon expressing what they refer to as a ‘gendered racial removal program’ (2013, p. 274). Alongside this, there are a few pieces of international literature on deportation (e.g. De Genova et al. 2010; Ellis & Stam 2018; Gravelle et al. 2012; Khosravi 2017; Nyers 2003). With regard to Finland specifically, only a handful of scholars have published work on deportation-related topics (Könönen & Vuolajärvi 2016; Korhonen & Siitonen 2018), although the number of ongoing research projects is growing. Deportation is an element of border control in Finland and other countries alike, and it is not a new phenomenon for either. Finland’s long history of deportation includes deporting the Roma ever since the seventeenth century,

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when Finland was part of Sweden. In the twentieth and the early twenty-first century, the deportation of foreign citizens from Finland has gone rather unnoticed within the public sphere. Public awareness about the distress and hardship of those who are forcibly removed became more prominent only after 2015. With this era, the number of deportations of foreign nationals had started rising noticeably, and public criticism started mounting against the immigration system and the workings of the Finnish Immigration Service. Several public actors have recently criticized Finland’s deportation policies and practices. In addition to several NGOs and various public protests and demonstrations, criticism has come from several priests with the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church, who condemned deportation to such countries as Afghanistan and Iraq, also participating in anti-deportation protests. An editorial in the Church newspaper Kirkko ja me compared the recent deportations from Finland to the country’s deportation of Jewish refugees to Germany, appealing to Finnish historical consciousness to condemn ongoing deportations too, not only those of the past (Heinimäki 2019). My case study of deportation news is based on an analysis of news items in Finland’s only nationwide daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. While the media landscape of Finland is, of course, broader than this, Helsingin Sanomat has an exceptionally strong role in shaping public debate. With regard to public mediated discussion in Finland, this venue represents the discourse of discourses, its role being to select public debates and reinterpret and reorganize them. Some of the voices published in its pages come from politicians, some from experts, and sometimes the medium has a voice of its own. Often, these perspectives are mixed or overlapping. I chose to analyse topics that appeared in Helsingin Sanomat. Most of the time, such publishing reflects a certain issue having sparked so much public national or international debate that Helsingin Sanomat felt the need to follow it more closely. Hence, this material reflects not only a newspaper writing about topics that they assumed would attract most readers’ interest (and with that revenue) or that they deemed most newsworthy but also attention to topics that were important enough and evolving over a long enough time that Helsingin Sanomat followed them via several articles. To situate the case study of deportation, I start with an overview of the ways in which gender coupled with migration is publicly debated in general and offer examples of the ways in which politicians from the far right in particular have discussed asylum-seekers before the Finnish public. While the newspaper reports were, naturally, designed for a more balanced depiction than the partly openly racist comments I present just below, it is vital to keep in mind that the reporting on deportations took place within a political landscape where it had become rather commonplace to openly express racist stereotypes. As several scholars have pointed out, news reporting about immigration is influenced

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by racist discourses and has, for example, started to portray the arrival of asylum-seekers through a language of natural disaster and catastrophe – referring to such phenomena as floods and tsunamis (see e.g. Kotilainen & Laine 2021).

MALE ASYLUM-SEEKERS: GENDER EQUALITY USED AS A TOOL FOR EXCLUSION During the refugee reception crisis in and after 2015, much of the public debate about refugees focused on the fact that many of them were young men. Central arguments – brought to the fore in particular by anti-immigration advocates and the far right but also debated publicly in other settings – presented these men as undeserving because their youth indicated that they should be fighting as soldiers in their home country. In addition to being framed as cowards who, instead of seeking refuge, should be at home protecting the women and children, they were depicted as potential threats on several levels. The threatening migrant man is a very common trope that is familiar from various national contexts. Women are construed as the ‘real’ refugees and victims, while men are presented as perpetrators of ills (see e.g. Horsti & Pellander 2014; Johnson 2018; Malkki 1996; Razack 2004; Roggeband & Verloo 2007; Ticktin 2011). While migrant women tend to be discussed in a context of victimhood and suppression, there are several stereotypical notions of migrant men. All of these frame them as threatening (Allsopp 2017; Charsley & Wray 2015; Olivius 2016). First is the notion of migrant men as circumventors of immigration regulations. In this frame, men are more likely to try to fool the immigration authorities. In relation to the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, the fact that many of these men were carrying smartphones and wearing up-to-date Western-style clothing led to them seeming especially suspicious (see also Kotilainen & Pellander 2017). They were perceived as undeserving, for they did not fit in with the image of the ragged, poor refugee that we are so familiar with from the ways in which refugeeness has traditionally been represented in the media (Chouliaraki 2017; Chouliaraki & Stolic 2017; Johnson 2018). In Finland’s public debate, these men were called ‘iPhone men’ by several politicians, referring to the fact that, as carriers of iPhones, they are not really in need of protection. Right-wing populist Finns Party politician Riikka Slunga-Poutsalo called them living-standard surfers who, for her, do not look like refugees. The centre-right National Coalition Party’s Wille Rydman argued that the men who use this ‘sea-taxi service’ are not really suffering, because they are healthy young men. To cite evidence for this, the Finns Party’s Teuvo Hakkarainen pointed out the hairdos and shoes of the refugees, which struck him as a sign of undeservingness. Interestingly, a connection was drawn between economic

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hardship and seeking asylum, assuming that people who are fleeing need to be poor in order to be truly deserving of a refugee status. The fact that the people who arrived in 2015, mainly from Iraq and Syria, were fleeing not poverty but war and conflict did not impinge much on negative perceptions of them. The arrival of refugees was debated as mainly an economic issue, and the fact that accommodating them in Finland would cost money was one very central argument in political discussion of the topic. It is worth noting that at the time of the refugee reception crisis, the Finnish government had one rather right-wing party in its government coalition, the Finns Party. This party had a very strong anti‑immigration agenda long before the number of people seeking asylum rose in 2015. They were able to use the momentum of attention to the growing number of refugees as a push to their anti-immigration agenda. Men receive more negative residence-permit decisions than women (per Finnish Immigration Service figures; see also Leinonen & Pellander 2014), which seems to mirror an international trend. One reason is that men are suspected more readily of abusing immigration regulations. The notion of ‘bogus’ asylum-seekers trying to fool the Finnish immigration system was very gendered in nature also simply because the majority of those arriving were male. Alongside the notion of migrant men as misusers and circumventors of immigration law, another strong image of the migrant man that we find in the media and political debate is that of the potential terrorist. Especially Muslim young men are seen as potential terrorists and hence as a threat to national security (Adamson 2006; Esses et al. 2013; Rettberg & Gajjala 2016; Watson 2007). In Finnish debate, this image is evoked particularly in conversations about unaccompanied children. The situation and vulnerability of unaccompanied children has been exploited in political debate both in arguing for stricter immigration policies and to back up calls for policies that would facilitate immigration for minors and their families (see Horsti & Pellander 2014). Muslim men also appear as patriarchal oppressors of their wives and family. According to this threat-image, Muslim men pose a threat to their own families and by introducing patriarchal family forms to the entire society that they are entering (Razack 2004). As I have shown elsewhere (Horsti & Pellander 2014; Pellander 2015), these notions of patriarchal migrants invading Finnish society have been quite prominent in Finnish parliamentary debates about migration issues. They have been used in particular to restrict rights to family reunification, the regulation of which has become very strict. This has a particularly strong effect on women and children, as it often tends to be the men who leave their country, in hopes of being able to bring their wives and children later through family reunification. Thus, recent restrictions to family-reunification possibilities, which have been implemented in almost all European countries,

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have made it increasingly difficult for those family members to enter Europe legally. The boundaries of the nation state, belonging and citizenship are intrinsically interwoven with public debate on (alleged) violence by migrant men (see Keskinen 2009; 2017). The far-right movements that are gaining more and more power in several countries in Europe are, on the one hand, using gender equality and women’s rights as a tool in nationalist opinion-building – those who are moving into the country represent less equality and do not understand gender equality; therefore, they are unfit to become part of the (gender-equal) society in which they are now living. In Sweden, gender equality is a mantra that most parties would not openly rally against, and it is more institutionalized than in many other countries. In Finland too, the gender-equality discourse is an integral part of national identity, with the image of the strong Finnish woman having formed part of a national narrative in this regard (Holli et al. 2005; Marakowitz 1996). While the far right thus cites gender equality in its arguments for stricter immigration policies, presenting asylum-seekers as a threat to what is portrayed as ‘gender equality already achieved’, this is only part of the picture. Simultaneously with proclaiming themselves to be proponents and protectors of gender equality, the right-wing parties do the exact opposite when it comes to domestic politics – namely, introduce political measures that weaken gender equality (Kantola & Lombardo 2017). This is, of course, not unique to Finland, or even to the Nordic countries – seeing ‘our’ women as in need of protection from brown men while at the same time weakening women’s rights in the state’s answers to questions such as abortion rights is very common, and international media have prominently featured these phenomena with regard to Poland, Spain, Ireland, Brazil, the USA and many other national contexts. What makes the Nordic countries different is that, in their statistics and national self-perceptions, they stand as countries that have been at the forefront of gender equality. As mentioned earlier, it is part of the national identity and self-understanding for most Nordic countries. Therefore, arguments that frame immigration as a threat to this self‑understanding can become particularly powerful. There is another notion at play, connected to the idea addressed above that migrants are unfit for a Nordic welfare state when it comes to gender equality: it is very common to portray foreign men as a threat to white women and girls. The trope of foreign men as rapists crystallizes this. It is an additional well-known way of negatively presenting migrants and is utilized commonly in connection with refugees (Bernhardsson & Bogren 2012; Dagistanli & Grewal 2012; Keskinen 2018). Near the beginning of 2019, several sexual crimes committed by asylum-seekers that had young girls as victims were prominently discussed in the media. The reaction was quite different from the

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way in which sexual crimes are usually discussed in Finland’s public sphere. Again, the notion of the foreign men as a threat was activated in public debate, in a markedly different manner from what is seen when the perpetrator has not recently moved to Finland or does not have brown skin (Keskinen 2018). After these cases came to public attention, politicians held emergency meetings and proposed changes to the law. There were no similar debates and no emergency measures taken when, only a short time later, a case of devastating, large-scale sexual assault against several children became public. This time, the perpetrators were Finnish.

DEPORTATION NEWS: A CASE STUDY ON VULNERABILITY, GENDER AND EMOTIONS I will now look at the connections of key issues associated with the mass arrival of asylum-seekers in 2015 by examining the ways in which deportations have been portrayed in Helsingin Sanomat (HS) – specifically, how vulnerability, gender and emotions intertwine in these portrayals (Table 8.1). I identified these analytical concepts after a first reading of the material, so they represent both points of departure and results of my analysis, use of the concepts in the methodology (Slaby et al. 2019). The accounts of deportation cases presented in Finland’s most influential daily newspaper come from between 2015 and 2019, the years after the refugee reception crisis, or, as Suvi Keskinen (2018) puts it, the crisis of white hegemony. Again, I was interested in the topics that were reported about more than once, topics that rose to the level of ‘cases’ that the media followed over several days or that were deemed so newsworthy that they were reported about multiple times. By the number of articles, the case that was written about most was the planned deportation of a mother and her three-year-old child, who would have been separated from the father and the couple’s baby. The fate of this family came to public attention in June 2016, with 12 articles written on the topic in all. In that month, Finland decided to introduce stricter regulations on family reunification, so the case of this family raised special interest at a time when families’ reunion was subject to political debate. The second-highest number of articles on a topic was six, addressing themes such as sexual assaults by asylum-seekers on New Year’s Eve 2015/16 in Cologne, deportation flights to Kabul (and protests against those deportations, in 2017) and a speech made in early 2016 by Finnish President Sauli Niinistö about the difficulties of honouring human rights conventions under current conditions. In all, for the 20 distinct topics that the newspaper picked up on more than once, I found 68 news items published in 2015–19 (with the search terms ‘deportation’ and ‘refusal of entry’). Most articles covered the fate of the people being deported, seven cases in total (with 41 articles). There were

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Table 8.1

Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

Quantities, perspectives and features of articles about deportation published in Helsingin Sanomat in 2015–19

The fate of those who are

Cases followed

Number of

(min. 2 articles)

articles

7

41

deported

Major foci Vulnerability of both men and women but with the latter strongly dominating the frames

Immigration policies

6

21

Nationalist perspective, Finland vs.

Law and order

5

17

Fear, notions of refugee men as

the rest of Europe perpetrators and xenophobic/racist remarks Protests

3

17

Public compassion and young females who attempted to stop planes

six cases connected with immigration policies/legislation (accounting for 21 articles), five cases related to law and order/crimes (17 articles) and three cases related to discussing protests for/against deportations (also 17 articles). One case (involving protesting of deportation flights to Kabul) is counted twice, as it fits both the category of the fate of those who are deported and the one covering deportation protests. Articles on the fate of those who are being deported clearly constituted the majority of the newspaper reporting (Table 8.2). Some of them were about individuals and their pleas, while others dealt with bigger groups. In addition to the above-mentioned case of the mother and baby being separated, HS published several articles about a Chinese grandfather who was deported from Finland and, furthermore, on the EU deal with Turkey and its effects on refugees on the island of Lesbos (in March 2016). Also, HS ran a series of articles dealing with deportations to Iraq from Finland (in 2016–19), a story about a 106-year-old woman who was facing deportation in Sweden, and the USA with its policy that entailed separating children under detention from their parents. The articles that discussed immigration policies either dealt with Finland or provided examples from Denmark, the USA and Sweden. In the articles about law and order, two cases dealt with sexual offences by asylum-seekers (in Cologne, or Germany generally, and Finland), and one each addressed Denmark’s plans to put foreign criminals on an island, the Stockholm terror attack in 2017, and a biker gang from Russia. The texts about activism were about a female staff member of the Green party who stood up aboard a flight before takeoff to stop a deportation, stories about several protesters against

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Gender, emotions and vulnerability

Table 8.2

Summary from analysis of case reporting that addressed the fate of those being deported

Theme

Dates

Emotions

Gender

The Chinese grandfather

5.3.2015; 6.3.2015;

Shame

A male carer, counter to

1.4.2015; 2.4.2015;

Sorrow (tears)

gendered assumptions of

27.6.2015

Sadness

female care

The deal with Turkey

21.3.2016; 22.3.2016;

Total exhaustion

Many images of men

and the situation on

24.3.2016

(after reaching shore),

and their despair,

babies not even crying

including a father in

anymore, inability to

tears, but also images of

smile properly and tears

women and children

Lesbos

of relief Deportation of

5.6.2016, three items;

Separation of the mother

the mother and

6.6.2016; 7.6.2016, five

from her baby

three‑year‑old

pieces; 11.6.2016, two

The 106-year-old in

5.9.2017; 4.10.2017

Compassion

Vulnerability of an old

The deportation flight

4.4.2017, four items;

Outrage

Pregnant woman and

to Kabul

5.4.2017; 4.7.2017

Worry

small children as

Pity

particularly vulnerable,

items; 25.10.2016 Sweden

woman

while the majority of deportees are men Deportations to Iraq

11.12.2016; 22.12.2016; 16.1.2017; 21.2.2017;

Feelings of fear

Mainly reports about Iraqi men

30.3.2017; 14.11.2019 Separating children from

22.6.2018; 28.6.2018

their parents in the USA

deportation flights to Kabul, and news items about the Right to Live demonstration in 2017 and various cultural institutions’ support for it. Vulnerability and Age The case material that HS published in 2015–19 resonates with previous findings on the influence of gender, age and care relations on public compassion. We find two cases involving age and the elderly: the one about the Chinese grandfather and the one about the 106-year-old woman facing deportation in Sweden. In that of the grandfather, the deciding factor for not granting a residence permit was that the authorities did not believe that he would actually come to work as part of his daughter’s family and considered the motive behind his application to be family ties. This is consistent with findings by

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Leinonen and Pellander (2014) about family ties to Finland being seen as the ‘real’ reason for entering the country and rendering other claims less credible. The reporting on the grandfather was crafted around emotions. First and foremost was sorrow – the accompanying photograph shows his daughter in tears, and a son-in-law states that this is a sad experience: ‘This is a sad experience. I have caused this whole ordeal. I cannot but apologize to grandpa.ʼ Another feeling that the article deals with is a sense of shame as highlighted by the grandfather, who says: ‘The situation feels a bit shameful and unfair. I feel like a criminal, even though I have not done anything badʼ (HS 5.3.2015). Scholarship on public compassion shows that it tends to be a combination of age, race, religion and gender that makes certain people appear more worthy of compassion than others. When two elderly white Christian grandmothers received public compassion and attention from the media in 2010, they were presented as needing the care of their children and grandchildren. What these cases share with that of the Chinese grandfather as well as the cases of an Egyptian and a Russian grandmother I have written about elsewhere (Horsti & Pellander 2014) is that the Christian Democrats party commented on them and called for a change in legislation that would make it possible for elderly family members to live with their children in Finland. The clear difference is that the two grandmothers were themselves in need of care, while the grandfather had planned to take care of his grandchild, acting as a caregiver. In contrast to the cases of the two grandmothers, he was presented as capable and in good shape, his reason for coming to Finland being that his presence would be beneficial to Finnish society and his family. Women and Children In addition to elderly people, the deportation of females and children caught public attention. One of these cases is that of an Iraqi family who, as so many other families in Finland and elsewhere have, faced separation. The father and the family’s small baby were granted protection and allowed to stay in Finland, while the mother and the older child were forced to leave the country. The fate of this family gained more public attention than any other single case in this entire timespan. One reason this case captured public attention is that it reached the public during a month when Finland was deciding on stricter family-reunification policies. The case was cited as an example to show that the policies were rather inhumane as things stood, and that the situation would only get worse if stricter policies were implemented. Yet I would argue that it was the element of a mother being separated from her baby that made the case so extremely attractive to the media and served appeals to public support and statements from elsewhere.

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177

The lawyer of the family, Jari Vuorijoki, states that the situation of the family is inhumane. ‘It is unreasonable, that a mother of small children is sent to Iraq and separated from her baby. The best interest of the child has not been considered at allʼ, Vuorijoki states. ‘And even if the immigration office states otherwise, of course the family is in danger in Iraq, if the father has been threatened, and he is in danger.ʼ This resembles the logic with large protests against a deportation flight to Kabul in 2017: rumour had it that there would be children under the age of majority and also a pregnant woman on the flight to Kabul. After several politicians and public figures had expressed harsh public criticism of their deportation, the family were indeed picked up from their homes/schools, but their deportation was ultimately interrupted, as the police had made a mistake. Before this, though, the thought of a pregnant woman and small children on a deportation flight was unbearable to many, and the situation sparked enough public criticism that the media wrote extensively about it. As Finland’s minister of the interior pointed out in a later interview, there is nothing exceptional about deporting children or pregnant women, and being under a certain age or pregnant does not automatically lead to residence permits in Finland. Still, the vulnerability of the pregnant female body and the young child caught public attention at a time when deportations were being written about more prolifically. Male Vulnerability Several of the cases that I identified in the news reports on deportation are related to activism against deportations. Only a few years earlier, a lengthy hunger strike by two young men from Afghanistan was largely ignored by the media (Pellander & Horsti 2018). Despite the fact that their protest lasted more than 100 days and took place right outside Finland’s parliament, the media did not report about the case at all until relatively late, and what coverage there was focused not on the men’s political claims and demands or the situation in Afghanistan but on medicalization of the protest and the hunger strike. Furthermore, public support for the men was rather thin on the ground. Things changed rather dramatically by the years I examined. In 2015–19, we have three cases covering protested against deportations: the Green League staff member who stood up to stop a deportation flight; several people protesting against deportation flights to Kabul; and the Right to Live demonstration, along with support for the protest from various cultural institutions. Several scholars have pointed out that the lived experiences of migrant men are often invisible in both media and academic treatment of displacement (Allsopp 2017; Griffiths 2015; Rajaram 2002). With the ‘women and children first’ rhetoric, it is women and children who carry signs of vulnerability. In

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a special issue of Men and Masculinities titled ‘The Invisible (Migrant) Man’, the editors point out how little we actually know, in contrast, about the vulnerabilities that migrant men experience (Charsley & Wray 2015). When migrant men feature mostly as figures circumventing immigration law, a danger to their own family members or a danger to the society they are moving to, there is little space for discourses of vulnerability and suffering. This seemed to change somewhat in reporting on the circumstances in 2015. One factor was that young men themselves brought their situation and distress to the fore – as was the case in the Right to Live protest, in which most of the protestors were male asylum-seekers. Furthermore, with the majority of the people who arrived in 2015 being men, deportation became rather gendered. Helsingin Sanomat followed four young men to Iraq to see what their situation was like after they were deported from Finland. In the resulting article published on 11 December 2016, we find emotional accounts of fear by all four men. Yet, even though the article takes the perspective of these men and reports on their worries and fears, it at the same time questions the credibility of their accounts, leaving it up to interpretation by the reader if the accounts of these men can be trusted or not. In the article ‘Finland deported Hamid, Zaid, Naward and Murtadha, and now they are afraid and hidingʼ, HS reports: ‘Al-Saeedi is obviously desperate. He speaks about his situation consistently. Proving it with documents and photographs. It is still impossible to make sure, if he is in such great danger as he believes. That will become apparent only, if he gets caught.ʼ The paper clearly describes the worry and fear that these men are experiencing, while at the same time casting doubt over the credibility of their concerns: ‘Murtadha Samlan says, that he does not know, where his wife and children are. The last call was in the summer when he was still in Finland. Then he said to have heard that the family had been threatened and one of his boys kidnapped. True or not? Justifiable fear or not?ʼ (HS 11.12.2016). Also, reports on the situation of young men in refugee camps on Lesbos in March 2016 show male suffering, such as the image of a crying father who is immensely relieved at not having lost his son on the journey, with the subtext: ‘An Afghan father cries because he thought that his son had disappeared during landfall. His son and wife were found.ʼ Female suffering and the well-known rhetoric of vulnerable women and children still evokes more sympathy in appeals for public and political support in certain cases, such as protesting against the pregnant woman’s deportation or addressing the deportation of the woman and her daughter and their separation from the other members of the nuclear family. Yet, it seems that the aftermath of the refugee reception crisis shows – albeit to a lesser extent and as the case of the men in Iraq shows, also with a shadow of a doubt – media accounts of male suffering as well.

Gender, emotions and vulnerability

179

CONCLUSIONS The time around 2015 and since then has been referred to as rather exceptional in terms of the numbers of asylum-seekers arriving in Europe. While the number of people who made it to Finland is comparably low, Finland still partook in public discourses about asylum-seekers that were similar to those in other Nordic and European countries at the time. The notions that appeared in Finland of ‘dangerous young men’ who should be fighting and defending their homeland instead of fleeing, depictions of refugees as ‘too well off’ as indicated by their styles of clothing or other material assets and the familiar notions of refugees as sexual perpetrators are familiar from other national contexts. While the ways in which male asylum-seekers were met in public discourse were not really new, what changed was the public’s perception of deportation. Both the media and the general public had been rather uninterested in deportations previously, despite the fact that they had been taking place for centuries. Locking people up at prison-like detention centres as if they had committed some crime and the fate of refugees on their way to Europe who get stuck in terrible conditions at transit centres are things that most states would not be proud of, so these have remained out of the public eye. It was the arrival of a larger flow of refugees and public critique of the Finnish immigration administration that caused heightened interest in topics related to deportation and the forced removal of foreigners. An important factor in this was the activism of asylum-seekers themselves, which gained public momentum in an unprecedented manner. When it comes to emotions, the analysis shows that of the texts that actually look at the effects of deportations on the people who are being deported, half of the articles address not the emotions of the deportees themselves but the emotions that the arrival of asylum-seekers and their (potential) deportation evokes in the surrounding society. While the pieces on deportations to Iraq present the feelings of fear that the men experience, the Chinese grandfather is portrayed as ashamed and his son-in-law as sad, and the refugees who arrive in Lesbos are shown to be in shock and in tears (whether relieved or horrified), what seems to be at the centre of public attention is the ways in which the arrival of refugees affects Finnish society and how politicians, activists or the general public respond to the suffering and despair of others. As for gender itself, one thing we find is a set of gendered tropes related to deservingness, public empathy and pity that are very similar to those presented in media coverage of earlier cases and discussed in previous research into the topic. The suffering of (pregnant) women and children was especially prominent in this news. Noteworthy and new, however, is that the media images and debates surrounding 2015 and beyond articulate, in addition, male suffering

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and male vulnerability – bodily as well as emotional – both in images and in written reportage. The reports about male suffering break with the common pattern of representing male immigrants as a threat to public safety and as undermining Nordic gender equality. We can conclude that, while the material from 2015 and in its aftermath stuck mostly to familiar gendered notions of threat and pity, new and more multifaceted ways of discussing the consequences of a tightening European border regime are visible too.

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9. Filipino nurses as enablers of the future welfare state: the global commodity chains of producing racialized care labour for ageing Finland Tiina Vaittinen, Margarita Sakilayan-Latvala and Päivi Vartiainen INTRODUCTION The imagery of the high-resolution advert is collated by merging separate photographs in one. They capture young health care professionals working in clinical hospital spaces. In one image, a slightly darker skinned male, a Filipino perhaps, looks at the camera with a stethoscope loosely hanging around his shoulders. A doctor perhaps. Below, another picture: an older man sitting in the wheelchair. A blonde nurse stands behind him and listens, together with the patient, as a young Asian female doctor explains some papers to both. In the third image, a fit, grey-haired Asian man lies in bed. A female nurse, Asian as well, sits by the bed, keeping him company. A thin monitor placed in front of them hints that the room is in a clinical, high-tech environment.

This vignette describes a recruitment advert, aimed at young Filipino registered nurses. A Filipino recruitment company had created the ad on behalf of a Finnish company in 2013, seeking to recruit nurses for Finnish eldercare. Whilst the advert’s imagery represented health professionals in a hospital environment, the textual content revealed the nature of the job. It said:

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FINLAND, NURSING ASSISTANT • Registered nurse • Male/Female, 22–25 years old • Work experience: 1–5 years in a hospital, elderly care or as private nurse • Good English skills (at least IELTS with overall band score of 7) Please send your resume to xxx.yyy@​xxx​.ph For many young un- or under-employed registered nurses in the Philippines, the advert looked tempting: a promise of a better future. Yet, the advert was also misleading in crucial ways. Namely, although aimed at university-educated registered nurses with excellent English skills, the advertisement failed to be explicit in that the job in question was about basic eldercare in Finnish-speaking eldercare homes. In spite of the imagery of the advert, the nursing assistant positions advertised are about the lowest category of institutional care work in Finland, formed to support the basic care work of nurses in care homes for the elderly and the disabled. There are no formal qualifications, nor is a license required. It is not a job where one holds a stethoscope, or utilizes clinical skills. Nursing assistants bathe their elderly clients. They provide incontinence care; assist in toileting; clean rooms; organize laundry; serve meals; feed those who can no longer consume food without help (TE-palvelut 2013). All these tasks are vital for good care. Yet, they are not the primary tasks of university-educated registered nurses, whom the recruitment company seek to recruit. Furthermore, the advert did not reveal that getting the job requires the applicants to pass an intensive, several month-long Finnish language course in the Philippines, which then might – or might not – lead to their deployment in Finland (Sakilayan-Latvala 2015; Vaittinen 2017; Vartiainen 2019). All this would have been impossible to know without knowledge of the policies and practices shaping the recruitment routes to Finland. In this chapter, we elaborate those routes, policies, and practices, with empirical detail. Understanding these processes is important, not only for the young nurses in the Philippines, who still today may come across similar adverts, but also to the policy-makers in Finland, who in the post-COVID world are, yet again, calling for increased labour migration for the sustenance of the welfare state (Luukka 2021; Pirilä 2021). The chapter contributes to this book by examining the position of migrants not only as the targets of restrictive immigration policies, but also as enablers of the future welfare state: as carers of ageing citizens and future

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workforce. Thereby, the chapter illuminates how the national project of the Finnish welfare state subtly relies on the extraction of resources from poorer, racialized states, when seeking to ensure the welfare of its citizenry (cf. Keskinen et al. 2009). Finally, the chapter calls for the Finnish state to take responsibility in treating these enablers of welfare and their home countries ethically, instead of allowing the present, racialized practices of deskilling to continue in the recruitment processes. Simultaneously, our analysis contributes to scholarship on post- or neocolonial education (e.g. Crossley and Tikly 2006), with a specific reference to nursing (Masselink and Lee 2010; Ortiga 2014). We provide an analysis of how education and health systems of source and destination countries entangle transnationally in processes of migration. These policy fields are still easily understood through the frames of the national welfare state only. Yet, in the age of global capitalism, their thorough understanding requires a frame that is global and transnational. Due to the ageing demographics of post-industrial countries, nursing has turned into a growing export industry in the Philippines (e.g. Lorenzo et al. 2007) and many other countries in the so-called Global South (e.g. Walton-Roberts 2015; 2021). In these countries, nurses are educated not only, or even mainly, for the domestic health system. Instead, they are trained to become ‘globally competitive’ professionals, ready to serve health systems across the world. Research shows however that, in many countries, foreign qualifications are generally less valued, particularly for racialized immigrants coming from outside the so-called ‘West’. This has been referred to as deskilling (Cuban 2013), and devaluation of immigrants’ human capital (Salmonsson & Mella 2013). The deskilling is prevalent in health care professions, also in the Nordic welfare states, where more menial basic care has become a ‘migrant’s job’, with white ‘natives’ responsible for the clinical, higher skilled work. Such ethnic segmentation in nursing professions goes beyond labour migration and recruitment, as migrants in general are perceived as particularly suitable for care work (Dahle & Seeberg 2013; Wrede et al. 2020). In Finland, the same trend exists, and is “fed by a perception that migrant workers are an answer to the problems of the Finnish welfare state, that is, the care deficit caused by ageing population and worsening dependency ratio” (Näre 2013, p. 72). In international nurse recruitment, Finland is of course a small player globally, and it continues to be also a source country, with Finnish nurses migrating to countries such as Sweden, Norway, and the UK (Juuti 2020). Furthermore, there are also other migrant nurses than Filipinos in Finland. Nurses have been recruited from within the EU, from Bulgaria, Estonia, and Spain. As elaborated later in this chapter, for these recruits, the routes to the Finnish professional qualifications have been smoother than for the Filipinos, due to their EU citizenship and, in the case of Estonians, because of linguistic, geographical, and cultural proximity (Vartiainen 2019, p. 67).

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Furthermore, individual nurses migrate to Finland from various countries every year, also from outside the EU: for other reasons than work – or for work, but without the involvement of the recruitment business. Some arguments in this chapter apply also to these other non-EU nurses working in Finland (see also Nieminen 2011). However, we focus on the case of Filipinos (see also Cleland Silva 2016; Vaittinen 2017; Vartiainen 2019; Näre & Cleland Silva 2020), because this is the only non-EU source country where Finnish recruitment companies operate, and which the companies often market as a solution to the Finnish care and labour deficits. Examining the production networks of the ‘globally competitive Filipino nurse’ in the Philippines, we first describe the ‘manufacturing’ of Filipino nurses as export commodities. We then trace, through detailed empirical analysis, how the value of the nurse’s human capital decreases when being transformed from a highly skilled, exportable health professional in the source country into an importable nursing assistant at the receiving end. We show how commodified skills are accumulated in the nurses’ bodies as human capital, in order to make them globally employable. We then demonstrate how this human capital is system(at)ically devalued, as the nurses move to Finland, through the racialized space(s) of the transnational labour markets. It must be underlined that, although the recruitment practices are often justified with reference to the ageing nation, Finland, as a state, has no active role in the recruitment. Quite the opposite. As we have shown elsewhere (Vartiainen et al. 2016, p. 44; Vaittinen 2017, pp. 113–15), the Finnish state has left the recruitment practices largely unregulated. It does not register or otherwise supervise the recruitment companies, with the responsible ministries sometimes oblivious of the Finland-bound recruitment operations taking place in the Philippines. In this chapter, we want to underline that the state would be morally responsible to ensure that the recruitment practices are ethical. From the perspective of global ethics, however, the present devaluation of the nurses’ professional skills in the recruitment practices is highly unethical. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it is estimated that, by 2030, there is a need to create 40 million new social and health care jobs globally, and that at least 18 million health and social care workers need to be deployed in low- and middle-income (LMIC) countries (World Health Organization 2016, p. 12). In our case study, a global pool of health professionals from an LMIC country (the Philippines) is utilized to secure lower skilled care labour for a rich welfare state (Finland), without helping the source country to ensure adequate social and health care resources for its population. This grossly undermines the WHO global strategy on human resources for health (World Health Organization 2016, p. 12). The deskilling also devalues the investments that individual nurses have made in higher education. In what follows, we provide empirical detail on the scale of these investments and how

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they become devalued. In conclusion, we list the policy actions the state should take to make the processes more ethical. As for methodology, the chapter draws on data collected for four separate but partially overlapping research projects conducted in Finland (2011–14) and in the Philippines (February–March 2012, June 2014, and November 2014).1 This chapter has emerged from our sporadic collaboration and discussions during our research and its aftermath. Altogether, our data consists of 22 interviews with Filipino nurses in Finland; 25 interviews with Filipino nurses in the Philippines; 21 interviews with stakeholders, officials or other key informants in Finland; and 18 interviews with state officials or other stakeholders in the Philippines. In addition, the analysis is informed by policy documents, media sources, email correspondence with stakeholders, and ethnographic observations. Analytically, we have utilized these data to construct the typical educational and migrant trajectories (cf. Vaittinen 2014) of Finland-bound Filipino nurses, as they move through the nursing schools in the Philippines, via the recruitment paths, to enter the Finnish labour markets. While some of the recruitment practices may have changed since the end of our respective projects, the Finnish jurisdictional and policy environment in which the recruitment takes place has not. Hence, our conclusions on the need for a better state governance of these processes are still valid. Indeed, with COVID-19 reinvigorating the calls for international nurse recruitment in Finland, the recommendations are as topical as ever.

THE PHILIPPINE NURSING INDUSTRY The Philippines is known as one of the world’s central labour reserves. Ten per cent of the population of 100 million presently lives abroad (Commission on Filipinos Overseas n.d.), and around half a million new contracts are registered by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA n.d.) annually. The working age population’s desire and necessity to migrate for work is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, however, but heavily shaped by the country’s (post)colonial history. In nursing, the US Empire during the colonial era gradually shaped the Philippines into an “empire of care” (Choy

1 (1) Vaittinen’s (2017) PhD thesis on the entanglements of Filipino nurse migration with ageing Finland (also Vaittinen 2014; 2015); (2) Sakilayan-Latvala’s (2015) second MA Thesis on the narratives of potential nurse recruits in the Philippines and recruited Filipino nurses in Finland; (3) Vartiainen’s (2019) PhD thesis on intercultural learning and mutual acculturation processes of multicultural health care work communities; and (4) Vartiainen’s work for TRANS-SPACE, a project examining the emergence of transnational educational spaces in social and health care work (Vartiainen-Ora 2018; Vartiainen et al. 2016).

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2003). Later on, Ferdinand Marcos’ aggressive labour exportation policies, particularly his 1974 Labour Code, left the country with a state machinery specifically designed for the governance of labour emigration (Guevarra 2010). While Marcos’ labour exportation policies were designed as a temporary solution to domestic unemployment and external debts, the emigration of the working-age population has, over the decades, turned into a sine qua non of the Philippine economy. The economy relies on domestic consumption driven by remittances, which annually make approximately 10 per cent of GDP. In 2020, the remittances added up to over 29.9 billion US dollars (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas n.d.). With high external sovereign debt, and domestic unemployment soaring, the country remains heavily dependent on labour emigration. For an individual migrant, the present economic realities combined with a “culture of migration” (Choy 2003, p. 4) often mean a necessity to leave for a better future. Migration offers a stepping stone to a decent salary, and often also for better working conditions. The main selling point for nursing education for instance has always been the promise imbued in a nursing degree: the possibility of being deployed overseas, at relatively good pay, even when the migration process involves deskilling. For instance, at the time that our data were collected, a registered nurse working in a hospital in the Philippines earned about 150–250 euros per month (Interview, Nurse Tessa, February 25, 2012, MS-L). As a comparison, the basic salary of a nursing assistant in Finland was 1,100 euros (net). Given its population’s willingness to migrate, the government of the Philippines no longer needs to explicitly export labour. Rather, the policy is to facilitate the emigration of those who wish to leave (e.g. Guevarra 2010). However, even though the government would not acknowledge the export of nurses, the national policies would still recognize the duty of the Philippines to respond to the global ‘demand’ of health personnel. This has, over the years, had repercussions for the Philippine educational system as a whole (Ortiga 2014). The Philippine nurse reserve is highly responsive and vulnerable to the fluctuations of transnational labour markets in human resources for health. Thus, while it has been estimated that half of all newly licenced nurses in the Philippines emigrated between 1998 and 2008 (Schultz & Rijks 2014), and that, by early 2000s, 85 per cent of nurses educated in the Philippines at all times worked overseas (Lorenzo et al. 2007), there are temporary ebbs and flows in the annual figures. Such fluctuations are produced by the actual variations in the global demand for nurses, as well as by the predictions of and responses to that demand in the source country. For instance, the Philippine nursing boom that showed in our data (collected in 2011–14) began in the early 2000s as a response to an anticipated increase in the global demand, caused by the ageing demographics in wealthy destination countries. Many participants in our research projects started their nursing studies because of this

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boom: at the time that they were to go to college, nursing seemed like the most cost-effective bet for overseas work, which is why their families asked them to take up nursing. For very few participants, if any, nursing was a vocation: rather, it was a ticket to overseas salaries. In our interviews (conducted for four separate research projects by three different researchers), the narrative of the increased global demand ‘especially in America’ was a recurrent factor, often expressed in almost literally the same words. This implies that, in addition to describing the actual state of the global nursing markets in the early 2000s, the interlocutors also reiterated a narrative that circulated in the Philippines at the time: a narrative of global nurse demand, ‘especially in America’. Yet, our interlocutors ended up in Finland. In the early 2000s, there were also actual signs of growth in the ‘global demand’. Two major Western destination countries, the USA and UK, relaxed their immigration controls for nurses. Consequently, in the Philippines the number of nursing programmes in colleges proliferated quickly, from 170 in 1999 to 470 in 2005. Similarly, within a few years’ time-span, the enrolments to bachelor’s programmes in registered nursing grew from 50,000 new enrolments in 2001 to over 400,000 in 2005 (Lorenzo et al. 2007). Since 2008, however, the circumstances have changed with the global recession. Many of our informants had only just passed their professional licensure exams, some having overseas contracts set for emigration when the economic crisis suddenly closed the gates to many destination countries, changing their plans drastically (see also Vaittinen 2014, pp. 197–8). The Philippine government responded by closing down nursing programmes, particularly those of poor quality. In 2013, for instance, 281 colleges out of 491 were forced to close their nursing courses due to consistently poor performance in the Nursing Licensure Examinations (Cueto 2013). Nevertheless, the early 2000s’ nursing boom and its sudden end had created a situation where the domestic supply of nurses gravely exceeded demand, with over 250,000 registered nurses in the Philippines unemployed or working outside the health care sector (Interview, Prof. F.M. Lorenzo, November 14, 2014, PV). Consequently, throughout the 2010 decade, there was a docile reserve of unemployed young nurses in the Philippines, available for the global labour markets to utilize. Judged by the actions of the Philippine nation state, and its governance of education and health system policies, the situation had been caused by failed estimates on the ‘global demand’ of nurses on the one hand, and by mismanaged educational policies, on the other. In the latter, the privatized and commodified higher education system played a big role, also as a beneficiary of the transnational recruitment processes.

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THE PRODUCTION OF THE FILIPINO NURSE AS A GLOBALLY COMPETITIVE COMMODITY The ethical questions of international nurse recruitment are often discussed in terms of interstate ethics, where one state allegedly produces nurses for the benefit of another state. In the transnational Philippine nursing industry, this perspective is too narrow. Whilst the state always has some role in the structures and funding of education, the narrow interstate perspective obscures the fact that higher education is often paid for by students and their families. The question is thus not simply about states in the so called Global South, or the majority world, producing skilled labour for the utilization of the states in the richer North. Rather, it is about individual families in the South, producing labour for the utilization of different private for-profit actors in the source and destination countries, as well as public sector employers in the destination states.2 A focus on state–state relations of production thus simplifies the production process of exportable labour, which involves a wide variety of actors making profit from the education, skills, mobility, and labour of the migrant. To produce commodities, investments are necessary. When the commodity is skilled labour, the investors are often the labourers themselves, investing time, money and work into learning sellable skills. Like ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ (Foucault 2008, p. 226), the labourers of global capitalism accumulate skills and personal characteristics – human capital – in their very own embodiment, so as to capitalize upon themselves when selling their labour in the markets. These neoliberal relations of production are not simply about the exchange of money for work, but a process of entrepreneurship where accumulating value in one’s very own being is the purpose of education. It involves risks, since the education commodified within the self may or may not pay off. In the postcolonial context of the Philippines, such risk-taking is perceived as a route to a better life (e.g. Guevarra 2010). The migrant is ‘an investor […], an entrepreneur of himself [sic] who incurs expenses by investing to obtain some kind of improvement’ (Foucault 2008, p. 230). In the production of the ‘globally competitive Filipino nurse’, the investors are, primarily, the nurses themselves, and their families paying for their education. Estimating the size of these investments becomes possible when the production of the exportable/

2 Here, it is worth noting that the Filipino nurse recruitment to Finland is largely operated by private for-profit care providers, who sell care services to the Finnish public sector, while making profit from tax-funded eldercare. As shown in Vaittinen (2017), for these companies, the transnational nurse recruitment is a complex method of capital accumulation, supported by deskilling and labour docility.

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importable nurse is analysed in terms of commodity chains, or production networks, which in turn can be traced by following the educational trajectories of the migrant-nurses-to-be. This reveals how, in the commodified networks of education, the accumulation of human capital by/in the nurse is a profitable business for a variety of actors, who can capitalize on the nurses’ risk-taking far before the nurses themselves. Analysing the political economies of the global nursing care chains, Nicola Yeates (2009) applies the global commodity chain theory and its production networks approach to the study of global nursing labour. In this approach, “global commodity chains are analysed across three dimensions – inputs/ outputs, territoriality and governance” (Yeates 2009, p. 44). When looking at the production of exportable labour by means of commodified education, particularly the structure of inputs/outputs is relevant: The structure of inputs/outputs refers to the various processing stages (“nodes”) involved in the production of a finished commodity. Each “node” represents a specific production process […] linked together in a sequence (chain) in which each stage adds value to its predecessor. (p. 44, emphasis added)

Figure 9.1

A typical production network in the Philippine nursing industry

Figure 9.1 applies this perspective to enumerate a typical network of producing a Filipino nurse to the global markets, from college (i.e. excluding prior education and upbringing) to the nurse’s deployment overseas. Two points in particular are to be noted. First, in the commodity chain where ‘Filipino

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nurses’ are manufactured, the ‘production nodes’ consist of a wide variety of actors. The nursing colleges are central nodes, while the other actors have specialized roles in making the nurse employable in the global market. The loan providers and the family in turn, continue to feed finances into the operation of the entire chain. Secondly, each of these ‘nodes’ not only adds value to the thus produced export commodity – the ‘globally competitive Filipino nurse’ – but also extracts profit from the embodied process where the nurses accumulate human capital within their mobile selves. Thus, when moving from one ‘production node’ to another, the nurses themselves, while gaining skills that are capitalizable on the global labour markets, also make further financial investments. The other actors in the chain make profit from the investments, while the nurses will often be able to capitalize on the skills only at the end of the production process, i.e. once they are ‘final products’ working overseas. Many nursing colleges in the Philippines are private market actors, making profit from the business of producing nurses for international demand. This also explains the rapid increase in the number of nursing colleges in the early 2000s, when universities set up new nursing programmes in order to participate in the expanding global market. The colleges profit from the tuition fees that families pay with loans or savings, or by the sponsorship of a relative working overseas. The same applies to the review centres (where nurses prepare for their licensure exams), to the potential fees of the recruitment businesses, to the interests paid to loan providers, to the fees paid to government agencies (e.g. document authentication, certifications), and to a whole network of NGOs that exist to provide Pre-departure Orientation Seminars (PDOS), which are compulsory for Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) prior to the emigration. To elaborate, gaining the university degree in registered nursing is only the beginning of the process of becoming a ‘Filipino nurse’. In order to work overseas, the nurse must meet a long list of other requirements, too. One is the Philippine Nursing Licensure Examination, administered by the Professional Regulatory Commission (PRC). Depending on the destination country, the nurses must also pass other training and examinations, both professional and language-related. This is where hospitals, recruitment firms and licensure examination review centres come in, having their own specific niches in the nursing migration business. A licensure examination review centre, for instance, not only offers support when the nurses revise for their licensure exams, but many cater also to the international licensure examinations (i.e. NCLEX and CGFNS) as well as language examinations (TOEFL, IELTS) required for international deployment. All the actors, while promising ‘immediate hiring’ and reproducing the discourse of ‘global demand’, continue to propagate the idea that becoming a nurse is the direct pathway for a (better) life overseas (see Guevarra 2010).

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THE INVESTMENTS The nursing degree in the Philippines is a four-year programme, and there are major differences in the tuition fees between public and private colleges and universities. The price of tuition depends on the institution’s locality (provincial, city, national capital region), ranking, public reputation, as well as performance in licensure examinations. For example, a private university could charge up to 12,000 euros for the tuition per year, while a public university charges approximately 800 euros (see Edukasyon.ph n.d.). These figures still exclude living and other school-related expenses. Although scholarships and grants are available, especially in state-funded universities, nursing education remains a demanding financial investment for the whole (extended) family. Figure 9.2 presents the costs and payoffs of becoming a ‘globally competitive Filipino nurse’. Not everyone is recruited to work overseas, however. To get recruited from amongst the over two hundred thousand un- or under-employed registered nurses is a tough competition. Lavina, for instance, migrated to Finland with a student visa in 2011, to do a two and a half year degree in Finnish practical nursing. By then, she had invested 60,000 pesos (approximately 1,200 euros) in her education, study materials, and living costs for each academic year of her four-year college degree, adding up to 240,000 PHP (4,800 euros) in total. Lavina had chosen the university together with her mother, in a search for ‘one of the best producers of nurses’. A brother working overseas used to remit money for the tuition fees and living costs. After taking her licensure exams, Lavina had taken a course on intravenous (IV) therapy. The course took only three days to complete, but cost her 3,000 pesos (60 euros). This corresponds to almost a week’s salary for a newly graduated nurse – but then, Lavina never had a paid job in the Philippines. After getting her licensure, she had volunteered at two public hospitals – three months at the first and a little less at the second. In many respects, she had been lucky to volunteer for free; until 2011, private hospitals used to charge newly graduated registered nurses for the opportunity to volunteer.3 Many paid, since getting the work experience was – and still is – pivotal for accumulating experience, i.e. human capital, which is a requirement for overseas deployment. In order to move to Finland, Lavina recalled that the family took a loan of 500,000 pesos (approximately 10,000 euros) from a cooperative, to cover the living expenses for the two and a half years’ full-time education. The interest was high, however, adding 300,000 pesos (6,000 euros) to the loan over five 3 This is not characteristic of the Philippine nursing industry only (see e.g. Walton-Roberts 2015, p. 377).

Filipino nurses as enablers of the future welfare state

Figure 9.2

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The costs and payoffs of becoming a ‘globally competitive Filipino nurse’ (EUR)

years. This, of course, was but another investment in becoming a ‘globally competitive nurse’, while making oneself profitable to some ‘node’ in the production network, in this case the cooperative. At the time when Lavina moved to Finland to study, the Finnish degree training was free of charge also for non-EU students. Nevertheless, altogether her investments, until being employed as a practical nurse in Finland, added up to over one million pesos (approx. 21,800 euros), plus the costs of pre-college education that we have not discussed. Lavina received her first ever pay cheque in Finland, when working as a cleaner during her first summer break from her school, in an eldercare

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home where she had interned earlier (for free) as part of her vocational training. During the second year of the diploma programme, she also managed to secure shifts as a care worker, and after graduation she worked as a practical nurse full time (Interview, Nurse Lavina, September 28, 2012, TV). Lavina’s story exemplifies not only the investments the nurses and their families make in the commodified education in the source country, but also the long wait until the investments start to pay off. This is but one example, and more research is required for a thorough examination of the money flows and stakeholders involved. It is notable, however, that the chain of investments begins with the commodified higher education in the source country, which does not eventually pay off even upon arrival at the destination country.

THE NURSES’ TRANSITION FROM EXPORT TO IMPORT COMMODITIES The global demand for nurses continues to play a significant role in the Philippine nursing education policy and practice. The colleges have adjusted their curricula according to the needs of foreign employers, also in the previous curriculum reform in 2015–18 (Ortiga 2014; Interview, Professional Regulation Commission of the Philippines Board of Nursing, November 12, 2014, PV). The universities advertise their degree programmes as meeting the basic requirements of popular destinations such as Canada, Saudi Arabia and the USA. Often, the training to qualify overseas begins the moment the nurses start their studies: the examples given by the lecturers tend to apply to the destination countries rather than the Philippines, and clinical instructors often have overseas work experience (Interview, Nurse Elena, November 28, 2011, MS-L). The transition from an exportable nurse produced in the Philippines to the (de)skilled professional importable elsewhere does not happen automatically, however. Here, the transnational recruiters, who under the Philippine law are required to collaborate with a domestic agency accredited by the POEA, play a pivotal role. Whereas the nursing colleges operate as central ‘production nodes’ in the making of the Filipino nurse exportable, the recruitment business is central in turning the nurse importable. Through different assessment practices they ‘filter’ the ‘ideal migrant’ for the employers’ purposes, while simultaneously constructing the migrant’s embodied skills as employable (cf. Findlay et al. 2013). Hence, operating as ‘migration mediators’ (Sporton 2013), the recruiters provide a space of transition: the dash in the process of export–import. In this space, the nurses’ skills and human capital start to be evaluated anew, in relation to the immigration policies and labour market requirements of the countries of destination. The typical path of a Filipino nurse to Finland takes place through Finnish recruitment agencies who, operating with local partner agencies in the

Filipino nurses as enablers of the future welfare state

Figure 9.3

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A typical trajectory of Filipino nurses’ export–import transition to the Finnish labour markets

Philippines, import nursing assistants for the needs of Finnish eldercare providers (Figure 9.3). Here, the state of Finland is not actively involved, and also the clients of the recruitment companies in Finland are often not public actors, but international companies that make profit from tax-money by selling care services to the Finnish municipalities (see Vaittinen 2017; Vartiainen 2019). At the time of our research, the recruitment process – the transition from exportable to importable skills – typically took about a year, sometimes more. The process began with up to one thousand aspiring applicants responding to an advert like the one described at the beginning of the chapter. Of these, only 20–50 nurses were chosen for the pre-deployment language training. After meeting the qualifications set by the recruiters, the nurses were assessed for their competencies and aptitude for learning the Finnish language. The latter is crucial, as Finnish is a difficult language to learn, and a certain level of proficiency is required for health care professions. This is how one interviewee described the process: After the orientation we had our initial exam. Out of 1,000 orientees just 600 took the exam. Then they got 200 who passed the initial exam. Then we proceeded to the initial interview. After passing the initial interview with our teachers and the owner of the agency they chose one hundred from that two hundred who passed the initial interview who will proceed to the second interview with doctor X. Then after the second interview we had again the final exam. (…) They really wanted to see our dedication and hard work … (Interview, Nurse 05, November 4, 2014, PV, emphasis added)

Once selected, the nurses attended an intensive, several month-long language course. At the end of the course, their Finnish language skills were

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re-evaluated, and those who met the level required were selected for deployment. Assisted by the recruiters, the selected nurses then applied for visas to the Finland/Schengen area, while complying with other requirements for their future deployment, as mandated by both the Philippine and Finnish governments. For instance, the PDOS is mandatory for getting an exit visa to leave the Philippines as a recruited overseas worker. The processing of documents does not necessarily take long (2–3 months). However, as the final deployment is dependent on the labour demands of the recruiters’ clients, we followed cases where the nurses had to wait over half a year more before their actual deployment. Some were not even employed as nursing assistants but care home cleaners, with the possibility of advancing to nursing assistants at a later date. It is notable that this whole transition process from export to import ‘commodity’ usually requires the nurses’ full attention. Some of our research participants had resigned from their full-time jobs (often not in nursing), to ensure they would eventually be one of the selected few. The nurses do not pay for the language course and the recruitment process, but their investment in the transition comes in the form of time: the newly graduated, licenced registered nurses spend from one to two years learning the Finnish language, while making themselves potentially employable as nursing assistants in Finnish eldercare. In the following section, we elaborate the complex EU and nationally specific structures that lead to the devaluation of Filipino registered nurses’ globally competitive education in Finland.

NURSING ASSISTANTS TO IMPORT – WHY NOT REGISTERED NURSES? Finland’s history of nurse immigration is very short (Weber & Frenzel 2014), and Europe in general is not a traditional destination for Filipino workforce, excluding Ireland and the United Kingdom (Battistella & Asis 2014; Schultz & Rijks 2014). However, the ageing demographics in Europe, as well as the tightening of markets in other Western destinations, have led the Philippines to show growing interest in the EU. Simultaneously, European nurse recruiters have started to operate internationally. Finland, as was elaborated in the introduction, does not have state-led recruitment programmes, but a small number of Finnish private recruitment companies have been active in the Philippines since 2008. In Finland, there are presently three groups of Filipino nurses: (1) those who have migrated due to family reasons such as marriage, and have found their own routes of qualification to the professional labour markets; (2) the internationally recruited nurses who migrate with a worker’s visa, and whose migration and employment processes are assisted by the recruitment businesses; (3) nurses, such as Lavina, who have entered the country with a student visa, and

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the national labour markets through a Finnish degree programme. The status of these three groups in the Finnish labour markets varies, as their access to Finnish professional qualifications vary. Lacking the assistance of the recruitment companies, those coming due to family reasons, or as students, need to make their own way in achieving a Finnish working life. These routes are heterogeneous, often requiring further education, i.e. taking additional modules or entire degrees at a Finnish educational institution (Vartiainen 2019). As nurses qualified outside the EU, salaried apprenticeship-based qualification routes are not always an option for Filipinos – sometimes not even in practical nursing, and never in registered nursing. The Bologna Process aims at ensuring that academic degree and quality assurance standards are comparable and easily transferable across the EU (Baumann & Blythe 2008). The European Qualifications Framework (EQF) makes the educational credentials comparable, and non-EU countries utilize this tool as well when revamping their educational systems to mirror the Bologna Process. Also, the goal of the Philippines is to ensure that educational standards will in the future correspond to the EQF (Ortiga 2014). As of yet, however, they do not, meaning that the Philippine nursing education is deemed to be of lower quality. In Finland, for instance, other source countries of nurse recruitment over recent years have included Bulgaria, Estonia and Spain (Mustonen 2012; Raunio 2013). Thanks to the Bologna Process, Bulgarian, Estonian and Spanish nurses can enter the Finnish labour markets as registered nurses in line with the EQF. Simultaneously, as further elaborated below, non-EU citizens cannot, by law, enter the Finnish labour market as registered nurses (Council Directive 2005/36/EC; Laki ammattipätevyyden tunnustamisesta 1384/2015; Interview, K. Virtanen, May 6, 2014, TV), which is one of the reasons why Filipino nurses are recruited to Finland as nursing assistants. Another reason is that the private for-profit care homes that are the main clients of the Finnish recruiters have less demand for registered nurses than nursing assistants and practical nurses (Vaittinen 2017; Vartiainen 2019). Finnish nursing is hierarchically divided into two licenced professions, registered and practical nursing. The former requires a bachelor’s degree from a University of Applied Sciences, whereas the latter requires a degree from a secondary level (vocational) school. Both the professions are licenced under the supervision of the National Supervisory Authority for Welfare and Health (Valvira), which maintains the Central Register of Healthcare Professionals (Terhikki). The nursing assistant in turn is a recently formed low-paid vocational category for the care of the elderly and the disabled, as described in the introduction, and it is not a licenced health profession. Yet, when imported to Finland as eldercare workforce, Filipino registered nurses are systematically deskilled as nursing assistants.

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Unlike many destination countries (e.g. the USA, Canada), Finland has no licensure examination for nurses. Instead, for non-EU citizens, there are two possible paths to having professional qualifications in nursing recognized (Interview, K. Virtanen, May 6, 2014, January 23, 2015, TV; Email, January 23, 2015, PV). First, they may apply to a bachelor’s programme in nursing at a Finnish University of Applied Sciences, to complete the full degree. After passing the entrance exam, the educational institution may, at its own discretion, recognize parts of the previous studies and/or work experience gained abroad. Here, the college assesses which particular credits and work experience are comparable to the Finnish degree. In this path, the foreign qualifications are recognized as part of a Finnish nursing degree programme, and the licence to practise is received only after finishing the entire programme. This power handed over to autonomous educational institutions has led to heterogeneous practices in the recognition of qualifications (Nieminen 2011). The second route to licensure in Finland begins with submitting an application directly to the National Supervisory Authority, Valvira, which requests the assessment of comparability from a University of Applied Sciences accredited for this purpose. Based on the statement, Valvira decides which parts of the former degree and work experience can be recognized, and which additional modules the applicant needs to take. Upon completion of the additional studies, Valvira can issue a licence to practise. Unlike for EU citizens going through the EQF, the degree of a non-EU nurse must be comparable to the Finnish equivalent one to one (Laki ammattipätevyyden tunnustamisesta 1384/2015). Nursing degrees being nationally specific, this is a sheer impossibility: in practice, for non-EU nurses, some additional studies or (unpaid) periods of apprenticeship are always required (Interview, K. Virtanen, May 6, 2014, TV). The non-EU nurses are, in other words, in many ways in an unequal position compared to their European peers. Paradoxically, the law focuses on the citizenship of the applicant, rather than the origin of the qualifications (i.e. Filipino nurses with Spanish qualifications would be treated differently from their Spanish classmates). Simultaneously, qualifications from outside the EU are considered lower than the standards set in the EQF, by default. Thus, non-EU nurses are discriminated against in terms of both their non-EU citizenship and their non-EU skills. To further complicate the situation, when the ‘globally competitive Filipino nurse’ migrates to Finland for work, two separate legislative regimes intersect in the migrant trajectory: one that governs qualifications and the entry to the professional nursing labour markets, and another that governs immigration. At this intersection emerges a racialized structure, where deskilling is unavoidable (cf. Könönen 2018). First, gaining the licensure as a professional registered nurse requires additional studies in Finland, that is, one has to enter Finnish territory in order to complete the qualification process. To do so, one needs a visa to the Schengen area, and

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to get a worker’s visa, one needs a job. According to the Finnish Alien’s Act, the worker’s visa is profession-specific, that is, a person employed as a nursing assistant enters the country as a nursing assistant, a practical nurse as a practical nurse and so on, being entitled to work only in the profession(s) enumerated in the visa. Simultaneously, as elaborated above, it remains impossible to enter the country as a registered nurse – to get in to the country, the nurses cannot but accept the deskilling of their qualifications. It is here that the recruitment companies come in, capable of providing entry to both the country and to the national labour markets, albeit in a considerably lower professional category than the migrants’ professional skills: as nursing assistants. Entering as nursing assistants, the recruits are often provided an apprentice-based route to become practical nurses. Unlike in registered nursing, apprenticeship-based qualification routes are available in practical nursing, meaning that it is possible to gain the qualifications whilst working in a paid job. When importing Filipino registered nurses as nursing assistants to Finland, the Finnish recruitment businesses utilize such ambiguities in the law. In practice, the Filipinos also often do practical nurses’ work before gaining the official qualifications. Namely, it is possible to be employed in practical nurses’ tasks without the licence – one is just then not eligible to use the professional title and, consequently, can be paid less. At the time that the last one of our four research projects finished in 2019, there were two Finnish recruitment agencies exporting/importing nurses to Finland. The first started in 2008, and had recruited approximately 300 nurses by 2019, mostly as practical nurses (Vartiainen 2019). Another agency started in 2012. They had recruited 150 nurses at the time when our data collection finished (2014), but new batches of nurses have been deployed since at regular intervals. Based on recent news (Pirilä 2021), both the agencies are still active, and new actors are entering the field. At present, in both companies, nurses start their work as nursing assistants, with a possibility to qualify as practical nurses through the combination of salaried apprenticeship and theoretical studies online. They gain qualifications as professional practical nurses after approximately two years of working and studying at the same time (Vartiainen et al. 2018). A central element in all recruiters’ services is the pre-migration language training provided in the Philippines, and the question of language skills does require some further attention.

THE POWER OF LANGUAGE SKILLS Language skills form a challenge in international nurse recruitment, even when all parties speak ‘the same’ language (Buchan 2006), as Filipinos in the UK. Language is also identified as the strongest barrier of adaptation for migrants in Finnish health care professions. In Vartiainen’s interviews with employers

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or co-workers, for instance, the professional nursing skills of Filipino nurse recruits were rarely suspected as being inadequate. However, the poor level of Finnish language skills was often considered as a hindrance in taking full responsibility for professional tasks (Vartiainen 2019). Having a direct impact on patient safety, the lack of language skills is seen as an acceptable reason for non-EU nurses to start working as nursing assistants or practical nurses. The determination of adequate language skills is not an objective practice, however, but imbued with racialized hierarchies. Virtanen (2011), for instance, has shown that, in the Finnish media discussions of Filipino nurses’ language skills, the foreign nurse is represented as individually responsible for the duty to learn. She argues that the foreign nurses’ language skills are represented dichotomously, as either existing or non-existing. This can be problematic, to the extent that language in health care professions is not merely an “instrument of communication in a semantic sense, but [also] a symbol of the right kind of competence” (Dahle & Seeberg 2013, p. 83). Consequently, if speaking broken language corresponds to not speaking the language corresponds to professional incompetence, the discussion on language skills risks reproducing racialized hierarchies within the profession (Dahle & Seeberg 2013; see also Olakivi 2013). Many of our Filipino informants did point to language as the main obstacle to excelling in their work in Finland. While finding the process of deskilling into practical nurses or nursing assistants humiliating – a clear signal that the hard-earned human capital is not appreciated – they acknowledged that, in the day-to-day work, their language skills remained inadequate for a long time. For some, this led to conflicts in the workplace when their lack of language skills made working difficult, and colleagues with better language skills had to take over their tasks. Others faced complaints from the relatives of their elderly clients, due to their allegedly inadequate language skills. Yet, many also regarded the language training provided to them in Finland as inadequate, feeling they were left alone with the duty to learn the language, especially when simultaneously having to invest time in (re)learning the skills required for Finnish practical nurses’ qualifications. Paradoxically, thus, the lack of language skills in the working environment hindered the nurses from demonstrating their skills effectively, which in turn made professional deskilling justifiable. Simultaneously, the teaching of professional skills that the nurses already possessed took time from effective language training and learning. In other words, gaining ‘adequate’ language skills was slowed down by the structural necessity to (re)learn one’s profession. Such situations are easily reproduced in the institutionally discriminating structures, where migrants’ skills are a priori suspected, rather than appreciated (Näre 2013).

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TOWARDS THE REVALUATION OF THE ‘FILIPINO NURSE’ IN THE EXPORT–IMPORT PROCESS In this chapter, we have shown how the ‘Filipino nurse’ is first produced as exportable in the commodified higher education system in the Philippines, then transformed importable to the Finnish welfare state in the recruitment processes, and finally deskilled as a non-EU nurse when entering Finland. It is clear that, in the export–import process, Filipino family investments in the commodified education – while eventually profitable financially – lose some of their value in terms of human capital. In Finland, Filipino registered nurses are not considered as ‘globally competitive’ professionals; their education is not transferable even to the vocational degree required for licenced practical nursing. Nevertheless, being recruited to Finland under these terms remains economically viable. At the time of our research, many of the 250,000 registered nurses un- or under-employed in the Philippines did not have even this option. In the Philippine nursing industry, the competition to get recruited remains tough, allowing recruitment companies to train nurses for reserve, without commitments to hire. Natalia, for instance, describes her migration process in terms of an endless struggle, with a long wait, a difficult language to learn and a lack of transparency in the recruitment procedures. Yet, the struggle itself made her all the more determined to learn the language and migrate to Finland, for any job. Unfortunately, even after receiving her Schengen visa, and having processed all the required documents, she ended up on the recruitment firm’s ‘reserve list’. Relying on the information given by the recruitment firm, she was left with no choice but to wait. After three years since the beginning of the recruitment process (see Figure 9.3), the company informed her that they had decided not to deploy her. Natalia describes her position: I told them that if you had, if you had told me, if you had told us that we have nothing to hope for, to wait for, then we could, we could have stopped hoping. They gave us false hopes; they let us believe, to the extent that nothing happened in our lives because of what they did. (Interview, Nurse Natalia, March 3, 2012, MS-L)

Natalia’s story exemplifies the power relations imbued in the transnational recruitment business: however much one invests in one’s skills, they turn capitalizable only after someone somewhere perceives them as worth ‘purchasing’. This worth, as we have shown, is often not determined in relation to the actual skills, as the global racialized hierarchies between ‘the west’ and ‘the rest’ materialize throughout the export–import process. In the Philippines, where the nursing industry is driven by an overproduction of nurses and business interests, risk-taking in professional life is common if not necessary.

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The brain and care drain of nurses from one country to another is not only about nation states trading in human resources for health. The chains of capital accumulation in nurse migration are much more complex. Yet, it is still the responsibility of states, at both ends of the migrant trajectory, to govern these processes, so the practices are ethical for the nurses as well as the health systems concerned. The transnational nursing industry can perhaps never be entirely ethical, since it is about a business where the commodities traded are human workforce in precarious global labour markets. Yet, many of the problems are structural – and structures can be changed for the better (see Siyam et al. 2013; World Health Organization 2016). First, there is a need for the receiving state – in this case Finland – to take responsibility, and monitor the practices of recruitment and training, to ensure that the competencies of the nurses are fully recognized. There is also a need for equally accessible bridging programmes and language training, for nurses from outside the EU to get their qualifications recognized in the appropriate educational level. Furthermore, there are significant differences in the implementation of the EU Directive concerning the recognition of non-EU qualifications. For instance, the Philippines–Germany bilateral agreement ‘Triple Win’, signed in 2013, specifies that Filipino registered nurses deployed to Germany may get their degrees recognized after one year’s employment as nursing assistants (Weber & Frenzel 2014). Simultaneously, for Filipino nurses deployed in Finland it takes up to one and a half years to qualify as practical nurses, after which they may choose to continue to study further, to eventually qualify as registered nurses. The EU harmonization of educational policies should avoid such differential treatment of third-country health care professionals within the common labour market, as it further reproduces racialized hierarchies in Europe. Finally, although we have mainly focused on the perspectives of migrant nurses, it is imperative to also consider the harms that the transnational nursing industry brings to the public health systems of the source country, and to the segments of the population that cannot, or will not, migrate for a ‘better life’ in ‘the West’. Whether we like it or not, the welfare state is always a national project that seeks to keep certain, nationally defined, populations alive. This has often meant ‘living off’ other, racialized populations (Foucault 2004; Kelly 2015; Vaittinen 2017, p. 164; see also Keskinen et al. 2009). One could argue, as M.G.E. Kelly (2015) has done, that utilization of ‘third world’ nurse reserves as a solution to ‘first world’ care deficits is one instance of what he calls ‘parasitism’ of richer nations. Such criticism must be taken seriously in the Finnish welfare state now, when migration is portrayed as a solution to the labour and care deficits of the ageing nation. These questions are no longer

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about domestic politics alone. In the era of global capitalism, purely national dilemmas do not exist, not even in a welfare state, if they ever did.4

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4 A previous version of this chapter has been published in a limited number of printed copies of two PhD dissertations. For electronic versions of the same, see Vaittinen 2017; Vartiainen 2019.

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Findlay, A., D. McCollum, S. Shubin, E. Absite and Z. Krisjane (2013), ‘The role of recruitment agencies in imagining and producing the “good” migrant’, Social & Cultural Geography, 14 (2), 145–67. Foucault, M. (2004), Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, translated by David Macey, London and New York: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Guevarra, A.R. (2010), Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers, London: Rutgers University Press. Juuti, M. (2020), ‘Sairaanhoitajien maastamuutto kasvussa ennen koronaa – muuttaneiden vuosittaiset määrät silti melko pieniä’, Tieto & Trendit, Tilastokeskus, accessed 31 March 2021 at https://​www​.tilastokeskus​.fi/​tietotrendit/​artikkelit/​2020/​ sairaanhoitajien​-maastamuutto​-kasvussa​-ennen​-koronaa​-muuttaneiden​-vuosittaiset​ -maarat​-silti​-melko​-pienia/​. Kelly, M.G.E. (2015), Biopolitical Imperialism, Alresford: Zero Books. Keskinen, S., S. Tuori, S. Irni and D. Mulinari (eds) (2009), Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region, London and New York: Routledge. Könönen, J., 2018. ‘Border struggles within the state: administrative bordering or non-citizens in Finland’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 8 (3), 143–50. Laki ammattipätevyyden tunnustamisesta (1384/2015), accessed 17 March 2021 at https://​finlex​.fi/​fi/​laki/​ajantasa/​2015/​20151384. Lorenzo, F.M.E., J. Galvez-Tan, K. Icamina and L. Javier (2007), ‘Nurse migration from a source country perspective: Philippine country case study’, Health Services Research, 42 (3), 1406–18. Luukka, T. (2021), ‘Keskustan Annika Saarikko haluaa Suomeen 10 000 työperäistä maahanmuuttajaa lisää vuosittain’, 13 March, accessed 18 March 2021 at https://​ www​.hs​.fi/​politiikka/​art​-2000007857958​.html. Masselink, L.E. and S.-Y.D. Lee (2010), ‘Nurses, Inc.: expansion and commercialization of nursing education in the Philippines’, Social Science & Medicine, 71 (1), 166–72.  Mustonen, A.M. (2012),  ‘Hoidetaan suomeksi ‒ Ammatillinen suomen kielen taito hoitoalalla’.  Kieli, koulutus ja yhteiskunta: Kielikoulutuspolitiikan verkoston verkkolehti, accessed 17 March 2021 at  https://​www​.kieliverkosto​.fi/​fi/​journals/​kieli​ -koulutus​-ja​-yhteiskunta​-marraskuu​-2012/​hoidetaan​-suomeksi​-2012​-ammatillinen​ -suomen​-kielen​-taito​-hoitoalalla. Näre, L. (2013), ‘Ideal workers and suspects: employers’ politics of recognition and the migrant division of care labour in Finland’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 3 (2), 72–81. Näre, L. and T. Cleland-Silva (2020), ‘The global bases of inequality regimes: the case of international nurse recruitment’, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, e-print, available at https://​doi​.org/​10​.1108/​EDI​-02​-2020​-0039. Nieminen S. (2011), ‘Kuulumisen politiikkaa: Maahanmuuttajasairaanhoitajat, ammattikuntaan sisäänpääsy ja toimijuuden ehdot’, PhD dissertation, University of Tampere, http://​urn​.fi/​urn:​isbn:​978​-951​-44​-8458​-2. Olakivi, A. (2013), ‘“In case you can speak Finnish, there is no problem”: reconstructing problematic identity-positions in migrant care workers’ organisational discourse’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 3 (2), 91–9.

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Ortiga Y.Y. (2014), ‘Professional problems: the burden of producing the “global” Filipino nurse’, Social Science & Medicine, 115, 64–71. Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (n.d.), Overseas Employment Statistics: Deployed Overseas Filipino Workers – By Type of Hiring 2006–2018 (1st SEM), accessed 18 March 2021 at https://​www​.poea​.gov​.ph/​ofwstat/​compendium/​ deployment​%202006​-2018S1​.pdf. Pirilä, M. (2021), ‘Hoitajapula pahenee Suomessa ja filippiiniläishoitajia palkataan taas apuun – rekrytoinneissa eettisiä ongelmia’, 5 January, accessed 18 March at https://​yle​.fi/​uutiset/​3​-11723255​?fbclid​=​I​wAR1dnsqPu​iiffHjG0e9​DgchkBOL0J​ Itn3g7SJTN​SpMXEJQrto​iYbr2nYKvM. Raunio, P. (2013), ‘Työhön Suomeen? Tutkimus työperusteiseen maahanmuuttoon liittyvistä koulutusprosesseista’, PhD dissertation, University of Tampere, accessed 18 March 2021 at http://​urn​.fi/​URN:​ISBN:​978​-951​-44​-9209​-9. Sakilayan-Latvala, M. (2015), ‘“To leave in order to live?” Filipino nurses and their narratives of migration to Finland’, MA thesis, University of Helsinki. Salmonsson, L. and O. Mella (2013), ‘Cultural demands on skilled immigrants, a devaluation of human capital: the case of immigrant physicians in Sweden’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 3 (1), 3–9. Schultz, C. and B. Rijks (2014), ‘Mobility of health professionals to, from and within the European Union’, IOM Migration Research Series No. 48, Geneva: International Organization for Migration. Siyam, A., P. Zurn, O.C. Rø, G. Gedik, K. Ronquillo, C.J. Co, C. Vaillancourt-Laflamme, J. dela Rosa, G. Perfilieva and M.R. Dal Poz (2013), ‘Monitoring the implementation of the WHO Global Code of Practice on the international recruitment of health personnel’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 91, 816–23. Sporton, D. (2013), ‘“They control my life”: the role of local recruitment agencies in East European migration to the UK’, Population, Space & Place, 19, 443–8. TE-palvelut (2013), Hoiva-avustaja. Tukea arjen hyvinvointiin, Ministry of Employment and the Economy, accessed 17 March 2021 at http://​www​.te​-palvelut​ .fi/​te/​fi/​pdf/​esitteet/​hoiva​_avustaja​_esite​.pdf. Vaittinen, T. (2014), ‘Reading care chains as migrant trajectories: a theoretical framework for the understanding of structural change’, Women’s Studies International Journal, 47, 191–202. Vaittinen, T. (2015), ‘The power of the vulnerable body: a new political understanding of care’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17 (1), 100–118. Vaittinen, T. (2017), ‘The global biopolitical economy of needs: transnational entanglements between ageing Finland and the global nurse reserve of the Philippines’, PhD dissertation, University of Tampere, accessed 18 March 2021 at http://​urn​.fi/​URN:​ ISBN:​978​-952​-03​-0505​-5. Vartiainen, P. (2019), ’Filippiiniläisten sairaanhoitajien polut Suomeen: Tutkimus oppimisesta ja työyhteisöintegraatiosta kansainvälisen rekrytoinnin kontekstissa’, PhD dissertation, Tampere University, accessed 18 March 2021 at http://​urn​.fi/​URN:​ ISBN:​978​-952​-03​-0937​-4. Vartiainen, P., M. Koskela and P. Pitkänen (2018), Sairaanhoitajia Filippiineiltä, Näkökulmia kestävään kansainväliseen rekrytointiin, Tampere: Tampere University Press. Vartiainen, P., P. Pitkänen, M. Asis, P. Raunio and M. Koskela (2016), ‘International recruitment of Filipino nurses to Finland – expectations and realities’, Journal of Population and Social Studies, 24 (1), 30–46.

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10. Ambiguities of the welfare state and the paradoxes of immigration politics Thomas Faist INTRODUCTION The social question is back. Yet today’s social question is not primarily between labour and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. The contemporary social question is located at the interstices between the Global South and the Global North and the politico-economic centres and peripheries. It finds its expression in movements of people seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states in transnational social spaces; because of the cross-border diffusion of norms such as social rights as human rights (Faist 2009); and because there are implications of migration for social inequalities within national states. In earlier periods, class differences dominated political conflicts, and while class has always been criss-crossed by manifold heterogeneities, not least of all cultural ones around ethnicity, religion and language; it is these latter heterogeneities that have sharpened over the past decades. Cross-border migration and its consequences have been important sites for these debates and conflicts. The transnationalized social question concerns social inequalities between and within immigration, emigration, and transit countries and the contentious politics around them. Within national states, the struggles around inequalities and claims for equality involve the entanglement of both socio-economic and cultural issues. In Western Europe, cultural heterogeneities have been increasingly at the centre of public debate on migration and integration. We have seen an increasing political salience of heterogeneities such as ethnicity, religion, nationalism and gender in the politics of migrant incorporation (e.g. Phillimore et al. 2017). The politicized heterogeneities involved have been changing over time, as expressed in the changing semantics around immigrants. This politics of culture has figured in the debates and conflicts around the importance of heterogeneities in two ways. First, cultural heterogeneities now209

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adays seem to occupy a more prominent place than class in debates on immigrant integration – class understood in the Weberian sense as market-based positions in social stratification which determine socio-economic and political opportunities through material resources (Weber 1968 [1922], pp. 302–7, 927–31). Nonetheless, class and culture as the axes around which the politics of integration revolve may not be mutually exclusive modes (Faist 2019). Debates on the cultural backwardness of migrants concern only selected segments of migrants and are often class-specific. Market liberalization has led to a stronger divide between high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants. This means that not all migrants are perceived in the same way. It is above all low-skilled migrants whose fit for cultural integration has been cast in doubt by anti-immigrant voices. Second, while claims to acknowledging cultural diversity or even cultural rights can be interpreted as part of the individual ‘rights revolution’ (Sunstein 1993), with an extension to group rights, it is counteracted by politics striving for cultural homogeneity on the national level, expressed by the politics of anti-immigrant populism, exercised by mainstream political parties and right-wing populism. Populism in particular tends to divide and thus simplify the political sphere into two distinct camps (Laclau 2005), championing the ‘people’ over the ‘political elite’. These tendencies conceive of migrants as a threat to physical, ontological and social security – that is, they are objects of a process of securitization. The overall question posed here is how to account for the ambiguous role of the welfare state which, on the one hand, provides citizens and partly non-citizens with social rights and, on the other hand, is associated with exclusionist tendencies vis-à-vis non-members. This question can be approached by asking how conflicts around the heterogeneities of class and culture have shaped the politics around admission and integration of migrants in European welfare states. The claim put forward is that the two tensions between market liberalization and de-commodification, and between multiculturalism and securitization, constitute the core of the transnationalized social question in immigration states, and are driving the politics of inequalities and thus integration in those states. In this branch of politics, class and culture are somewhat intertwined in that class co-structures how culture arises as a field of contention in post-migration processes, without fully determining the politics of culture which has its own dynamics. In order to support these propositions, this analysis outlines the master processes driving the politics around the social question. The master processes are market liberalization as market fundamentalism, as opposed to de-commodification, and cultural pluralism based on the rights revolution against securitization. Economic divisions refer to market liberalization and the de-commodification of labour as part of the welfare paradox: economic openness towards capital transfer is in tension with political closure towards migrants. It is the competition state versus the welfare

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state. In the cultural realm, the contention relates to a clash between cultural rights based on the rights revolution and the myth of national-cultural homogeneity. It finds expression in the liberal paradox: the extension of human rights to migrants who reside in welfare states versus the efforts to control borders and cultural boundaries. Threat perceptions often lead to a securitization of migration, a juxtaposition of the multicultural state and the national state. The role played by individual rights, interestingly enough, is ambiguous: the rights revolution drives market liberalization and at the same time often serves as a counter-movement against securitization. While the framework of analysis is meant to apply – with great variations across countries – to West European immigration states, the empirical reference for most of the analysis is the German case. In other words, the analysis focuses on commonalities across Western Europe, despite the fact that there are important differences to be accounted for (e.g. Hampshire 2013). The first part of this chapter describes the four master processes which make for more open immigration policies (market liberalization and cultural pluralism) and those favouring more restrictive policies (de-commodification and securitization). The second part delves deeper into the acrimony between market liberalization (viewing migrants as human capital) and de-commodification (the ability to make a living independent of market participation) in welfare states. It also includes a section which describes the counter-movement against market liberalization, pushing migrant social rights as human rights. The third part discusses in greater detail the acrimonious relationship between migration as a threat (securitization) and cultural pluralism based on (multi) cultural rights. Again, this part concludes with a section on struggles for equality based on the rights revolution. The fourth part deals with the implications of inclusion and exclusion concerning migrants for their integration into national states. The outlook then concludes with reflections on the increasing significance of politics in the realms of culture and status without implying the disappearance of class-based politics.

THE FOUR MASTER PROCESSES OF MIGRATION POLITICS Since the mid-20th century, the relative waning of class politics has not meant a decline in political contention. Rather, there appears to have been a rise in political conflict between groups defined on the basis of status. This development is also reflected in the case of cross-border migration and its consequences: the politicized heterogeneities involved have been changing over time, as expressed in the changing semantics around immigrants. In Germany, immigrants went from ‘worker’ in the 1960s to ‘nationality’ (in its double meaning as a legal aspect of citizenship but also culture: Turks,

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Italians, etc.) in the 1980s, and further to ‘religion’ (Islam) from the late 1990s onwards. Nonetheless, it is important to consider the intersectional component of class and culture: for immigrants from certain countries of origin (North Africa, Turkey) there is an overlap of socio-economic disadvantage with religion (Islam), although not all immigrants from the Middle East fall into the category of low-skilled or disadvantaged. The main element is simplification: migration is constituted as an overarching issue, not only as a potential enrichment of immigration countries with respect to demography and filling gaps in the labour market but also related to the ‘illth’ (Ruskin 1921 [1860]) – as opposed to the wealth – of capitalism, for example in unemployment, housing scarcities, but also threats to non-material goods, such as (national) identity, whose homogeneity is perceived to be endangered by increasing cultural heterogeneities in the wake of immigration. This means that migration is elevated to constitute a meta-issue (Faist 1994). We can distinguish the general social processes in the economic and cultural realms (Table 10.1).1 Market liberalization and the rights revolution tend to favour more open immigration policies and de-commodification in welfare states more inclusive integration policies, whereas social protection in the form of welfare state rights and policies leans towards more restrictive immigration policies and the securitization of culture also supports more restrictive immigration and integration policies. Here, the focus is on integration policies: market liberalization and securitization are linked to countervailing processes through the concept of rights. In the economic realm, it is above all social rights which act as a corrective to excessive commodification of labour, providing for redistribution and regulation. The idea of rights is also present in the cultural realm, providing for recognition: cultural rights, as demanded by concepts such as multiculturalism, are meant to provide recognition to groups hitherto excluded from public life, especially but not only in the political arena. Multicultural rights and corresponding policies constitute an important part of any analysis of how welfare states deal with cross-border migration: it assumes that cultural recognition and representation are a foundation for fair participation in other fields of social life, such as education, employment and politics – and hence inclusion into welfare states. In the economic realm, a tension exists between market liberalization via a flexible workforce on the one hand, versus (de‑)commodification via social rights on the other hand. In essence, this means the juxtaposition of migrants as human capital versus migrants as bearers of social rights. Market liberalization – which sees migrants mainly as human capital – has led to a stronger divide between high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants with respect to

1

For a related but different kind of typology, see Hampshire 2013: chapter 1.

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Table 10.1 Migration Policy

213

Expansive and restrictive migration policy Expansive & tolerant

Restrictive

Paradoxes

Welfare paradox

Market liberalization: migrants as

(De‑)Commodification: citizens and

human capital

migrants as bearers of social rights;

Competition state

protected labour markets Welfare state

Liberal paradox

Rights revolution: human rights and

Common culture & securitization:

cultural rights for migrants

citizens sharing a way of life & norms;

Rule of law

migrants as risk and threat National state

ease of admission: over the past few decades, immigration regulations for high-skilled migrants have been eased, whereas those for low-skilled migrants have been tightened (Beine et al. 2016). In terms of the state, we could say that it is the competition state of market liberalism versus the (national) welfare state which is predicated on social rights for its members. Social rights are nowadays often conceived of as human rights. For example, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) sees labour and social rights as human rights (Kott and Droux 2013). These rights serve to favour de-commodification (income independent from labour) but above all mean that labour markets are regulated and immigrant workers tend to have access to (certain) social rights (Faist 2014). This development has been part of the rights revolution. While there is a trade-off between market liberalization and social rights in that the former pushes for an optimal number of workers at lower rights and the latter for a high degree of social rights and thus fewer workers (Ruhs 2013), the two also go together to a certain degree. For example, anti-discrimination policies help to mobilize what economists have called human capital of individuals belonging to groups, such as women and racialized minorities. The issue raised by cross-border migration is that social rights as human and citizen rights limit profit-seeking capital and are applicable not just to citizens but also to non-citizen residents. The latter are often able to access some or many social rights (Sainsbury 2006). In short, there is a welfare paradox: individual rights are compatible with market liberalization in that they strengthen the autonomy of the individual worker with respect to discrimination. Yet market liberalization also challenges social and human rights, for example, when migrants work in substandard conditions, such as 3D jobs: dirty, dangerous, difficult jobs, and precarious positions (Standing 2011: chapter 4). These dynamics of economic development and migration have been spurred by changes in the economic sphere overall. The key economic shift since the 1970s has been the subjection of all forms of production to criteria of rationality

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and profitability, through the attack on national regulatory mechanisms such as quotas, tariffs, labour practices, national ownership rules and the opening to global competition in investment and trade. A national “competition state” has emerged (Cerny 1997). This tendency, which intensifies capital accumulation, is sometimes called neoliberalism, whose outcome has been policies and ideological tenets aimed at reducing state expenditures and state regulation more generally, and decreasing overall market regulation (e.g. by privatization of various economic sectors). A common feature with respect to cross-border traffic has been the demand for docile and sometimes cheaper migrant labour, combined with the construction not only of a category of high-skilled immigrants but also of a subordinate status for migrant workers to ensure that they take jobs rejected by nationals of the destination countries (Castles 2010). For those industries not relocating abroad this in turn has increased the demand for labour migration. Services, construction and agriculture fall into this category (Bauder 2006). These developments are not short-term tendencies but longer-term trends dating to the 1970s, since the ‘golden years’ of the Keynesian welfare state are over and rates of high economic growth have largely subsided in the Global North (cf. Wallerstein et al. 2013). As to the cultural realm, what is important is the tension between an expansion of rights including cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, on the one hand, and the politics of national unity, combined with democratic politics, on the other hand. In terms of the state, we could say that it is the rule of law versus the national state which constitutes contradictions or antinomies. More generally, this tension has been called the liberal paradox (Hollifield 2004): on the one hand, liberal democracies seek to restrict the large-scale entry of forced migrants because of, among other reasons, security concerns and issues around cultural conflicts, such as perceived threats to a homogenous understanding of national identity. On the other hand, states have entered obligations to honour human rights conventions, such as the 1951 (Geneva) Refugee Convention and accompanying stipulations such as the New York Protocol (1969) but also fundamental rights to be extended even to non-citizen populations on their territory. In contrast to the first realm, this is not about social but cultural rights: in other words, migrants are perceived either as a beacon of diversity in a multicultural perspective, sometimes even with the potential to revitalize ageing and culturally homogeneous societies, or as a threat in the frames of securitization. The general process of securitization refers, first, to issues of external and internal security (borders) and, second, to the welfare state. One of the results of closure towards the outside world and exclusion of non-members is thus called ‘welfare chauvinism’. The perception of “migration as a threat” (Lucassen 2005) is often based on the assumption that ethno-national homogeneity indeed exists and needs to be protected. One of the most important contemporary expressions of such culturalization and racialization in Europe

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has been right-wing xenophobic populism. Anti-immigration feelings among the dominant population’s electorates have been fostered and exploited by parties mobilizing tensions related to growing inequalities not only in material wealth but also power between ‘the elites’ and ‘the people’. Overall, populism is related not only to migration but also to the loss of state legitimacy and, economically, nationalist protectionist trade and currency policies (Kriesi et al. 2006). The two sets of processes, namely market liberalization and securitization, are intricately interrelated. While the former provides for class-based distinctions, the latter, in its various guises, works to exclude certain categories based on control of borders, and to culturalize certain class segments in the case of migration – who are then perceived as a threat to resources and identities. Often, though not exclusively, it has been the lower-class segments among immigrants which have been culturalized since the 1970s (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013); for example, it is claimed that they do not integrate and are still culturally backward (e.g. on sexuality and Islam, see Mepschen et al. 2010). In a nutshell, market liberalization serves as a basis for class distinctions, or at least reinforces them, while securitization plays upon class distinctions in the effort to culturalize them. Over the past few decades, the grounds for legitimation of inequalities have shifted. It is not outright racism which takes ascriptive traits as a point of departure – though that process continues – but also the alleged cultural dispositions of immigrants or the lack thereof. An important trope is that migrants are not liberal, that is, they allegedly do not master the tenets of modernity (Triadafilopoulos et al. 2011). There is a relationship between market liberalization and exclusivist attitudes towards religious minorities. Studies suggest that intensified market liberalization has accompanied a foregrounding of individual responsibility and a focus on individuals’ resources such as human capital. It can be shown empirically that levels of market-liberal adoption of policies correlate with the way citizens draw symbolic boundaries along the lines of ethno-religious otherness and moral deservingness. In other words, members of states that implemented more rigorous market liberal policies over the last two decades tend to draw more fixed boundaries between themselves and those who are not welcome. Data from the European Values Study (EVS) indicates a strengthening of animosity towards ethno-religious others, Muslims in particular. For example, citizens increasingly do not want Muslims as their neighbours (see Mijs et al. 2016, in comparative perspective on Eastern and Western European countries). Overall, the data from two waves of EVS in 1990 and 2010 suggest that the introduction and implementation of market liberal policies leads to more narrow definitions of membership vis-à-vis certain groups, namely those not welcome on socio-cultural grounds. It is through market liberal policies and, ultimately, cultural-populist politics of migration that boundaries are

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reinforced and established along ethnicity and religion as, for example, in the case of Turks and Muslims; while they have blurred, for instance, in the case of Spaniards and Italians in Germany over the past 50 years (Fincke 2009). The four interlocking general processes provide for a political dynamic which is driving the politics of integration. A rights-based perspective constantly pushes norms of equality to the forefront with respect to inequalities arising from commodification and social protection, but also political participation and non-recognition; hence the perpetual politicization of perceived inequalities in immigration contexts. The perspective matters: whereas norms of equality derived from human rights are mainly mustered by those supporting the cause of migrants, those who fear migrants as competitors and unwelcome intruders seek to uphold citizenship rights exclusively for the dominant national group. In this context, it is the national welfare state which plays an inherently ambiguous role. On the one hand, it is a corrective to market liberalization – and sometimes, perhaps, in opposition to it – by enabling citizens and (permanent) resident migrants through provision of a modicum of social rights. On the other hand, it is an institution which is exclusive vis-à-vis migrants from a national point of view: only full members have all (social) rights. Furthermore, migration restrictions and limitations on rights for migrants are sometimes legitimized with the idea that meaningful redistribution and regulation of social provisions can only occur in a nationally bounded unit and not across the whole world (cf. Walzer 1983: 65). The welfare state thus embodies the national state principle, ensuring equalities among citizens in bounded political communities but also upholding fundamental inequalities between citizens and non-citizens, especially those abroad, and, to a certain extent, also non-citizens in the territory of the national welfare state. Since the general processes refer to both exclusionary and inclusionary societal processes, for both migrants and non-migrants in immigration countries, it is necessary to detail the mechanisms and practices associated with the tensions around the four master processes.

MARKET LIBERALIZATION VERSUS DECOMMODIFICATION How Market Liberalization Undermines Social Rights Market liberalization signals a transformation in the ways welfare states have engaged in the commodification and de-commodification of migrant labour. There has been a transition from ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie 1982) with a still-expanding welfare state in the 1960s and 1970s, which enabled economic openness with domestic social rights for citizens, to a more market-liberal way

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of regulating, in the 1980s and after, which included mixes of cutbacks but also expansion (e.g. Borchert 1995). In general, during the post-Second World War climax of the European welfare state up until the early 1970s, a pro-inclusion social policy stance prevailed in most European regimes. Yet such an active social policy depended on strong social closure towards the outside world in the sphere of labour. Far from being open economically, the national labour markets were highly protected from outside competition. In this situation, continental welfare states in Europe granted social rights to migrant workers primarily to make sure they would not underbid native workers. Germany represented a typical case in that the labour unions assented to guest-worker recruitment once it was clear that they did not formally underbid native workers (Dohse 1977). Labour immigration reached a peak in the 1960s, followed by processes of family reunification thereafter. Asylum seekers started to arrive in higher numbers from the late 1970s onwards, reaching a peak first in 1992 as part of the successor wars around Yugoslavia, and again in 2015 in the midst of wars in the Middle East. Many of the legal or legalized migrants could achieve denizen status – having most of the social rights citizens enjoyed, depending on the country and legal category of entry. It was not only legal citizenship but family (re)unification, residence (human rights), and regular employment (social rights) that constituted the basis of social citizenship for denizens in Germany and countries such as the Netherlands, France and the UK (Dörr and Faist 1997). Market liberalization in the context of the welfare paradox of open economies and closed welfare states, has implied a move towards market-oriented citizenship through the master mechanism of efficiency-oriented individualization. During the heydays of the welfare state the tension could be managed by both maintaining relatively open economies for goods and recruiting workers. Following the idea of embedded liberalism, it could be argued that more regulated commodification of labour and de-commodification in terms of increasing social rights were something of a precondition for open economies. Vice versa, the gradual deregulation of selected rules could signal a declining willingness to accept open economic borders, based on the perception that costs are borne by workers in the Global North. Prioritizing economic efficiency as a basis for citizenship indicates a changing understanding of membership. This hunch is also borne out by a focus of states on labour market activation policies in combination with education policies. We see an increasing emphasis on human capital when admitting migrants. Increasingly, OECD countries have implemented selection schemes based on the amount of human capital provided by potential migrants. The schemes range from a points-based system as practised, for example, in Canada until recently, which admits migrants based on criteria such as academic degree, language skills, and age, to more employer-based schemes which demand

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from the applicant a job offer from a company before admission. Human capital selection systems have spread in European immigration laws. These rules favour young and highly skilled immigrants (Boucher and Cerna 2014). In Germany, the introduction of such schemes in the wake of the in-migration law (Zuwanderungsgesetz, 2004) has indicated a partial shift of emphasis to (high‑) skilled labour migration, where economically desirable newcomers, as in the guest-worker programme and other countries’ colonial labour schemes of the 1950s and 1960s, are no longer supposed to be dominantly situated in the lowest socio-economic strata of societies. Germany introduced the Green Card Initiative (2000), to be followed by EU rules implemented into national law, such as the so-called Blue Card (2009), another way of privileged hiring and admission of the category called highly skilled (cf. Hanganu and Heß 2016). Looking at immigration policies in comparative perspective, it is noticeable that the admission regulations for the highly skilled have been simplified, whereas those for the low-skilled have become more cumbersome (Beine et al. 2016). Overall, the diversity of legal statuses, of ‘outsider’ status in particular, has increased, creating an ever more differentiated hierarchy of ‘civic stratification’ among migrants (Morris 2002). Human capital selection means that migrants are chosen along individual characteristics, such as educational and occupational qualifications and language skills, and not along group characteristics which do not correspond to liberal criteria, such as race, ethnicity or religion. It is intended that these individual characteristics privilege highly skilled migrants. The admission schemes are based on the premise of specific skills as a prerequisite for admission and, implicitly, successful social integration. In sum, migrants have come to be evaluated almost exclusively as bearers of human capital. The latter is even seen as a proxy for the success of cultural integration. It is by connecting class and culture in this way that national states have reinvented themselves as competition states. Despite its global and cosmopolitan appearance and the focus on individual heterogeneities such as qualifications and education, market liberalization in OECD welfare states displays economically nationalist tendencies. The main inequality-producing mechanism is class-based ranking of diverse migrant categories, especially through hierarchization, not only through legal means but also discursively. The most obvious and rather crude one is the semantic dichotomy between mobiles and migrants (Faist 2013): officially, intra-EU migrants are considered mobiles and, unofficially, so also are persons from other high-status countries such as the USA and Japan. The mobiles are considered beneficial for economic efficiency and include categories such as international students, posted managers, successful entrepreneurs, elite athletes, top scientists and world-class artists. The often neglected irony is that mobiles are also the ones more likely to be mobile across borders again: mobility breeds

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mobility, immobility breeds immobility (Faist 2000: chapter 3). Premises such as docility and social proximity abound: the highly skilled are not only those who are regarded as economically the most efficient but are also those thought to comply with the immigration country’s laws and traditions, and who are thus considered as prospective members. By contrast, regular labour migrants, that is, those hailing from outside the EU or from some of the new accession countries, such as Romania or Bulgaria, are often considered as part of a social problem and in need of assisted social integration. They include, for example, low-skilled labour migrants, and the majority of refugees and asylum seekers. The social constitution of low-skilled and high-skilled workers is part of ongoing struggles around classifications. Such categorizations are key elements by which social positions and relations between actors are (re) produced, and categorizations are part of symbolic struggles (Bourdieu 1998). We may surmise that the importance of this way of handling class contributes to reproducing social inequalities, that is, slotting individuals in destination states according to their social position in the country of origin. In general, there is evidence that selected, positively evaluated, migrant groups, are not seen to need integration efforts, while negatively evaluated migrant groups are perceived to be in need of assimilation (Montreuil and Bourhis 2001). The reproduction of class-based inequalities does not happen only through market-liberal immigration and citizenship policies but also through regular policies and institutions of the welfare state applying to all residents. Take the case of schooling: disparities between second-generation migrant and native youths have remained considerable. This is true particularly in the Bismarckian welfare regimes of Continental Europe with their educational systems based on early tracking and the limited participation of these migrants in early education childcare (Borgna 2016). One striking example is comparative test results (e.g. Programme for International Student Assessment) which clearly suggest that the school system matters, not only specific immigrant integration policies. Otherwise, it would be hard to account for the persistent findings that the same ethnic group fares better or worse in one European country than in another (Crul and Mollenkopf 2012). There have been tendencies reinforcing market liberalization by way of Europeanization. Market liberalization in the EU has been in tune with individualization and individual rights. A prime example is the push towards anti-discrimination policies from the EU level downward (except the UK). The rationale for this move has been a thickening of (labour) market integration. As a consequence, the supranational regulation of migration moved to the area of free movement, away from justice and home affairs (Ette 2017). The new social project in Europe favours a citizenship model that privileges individuals as bearers of human capital and draws a close link between work, economic productivity and social justice (Soysal 2012). This means that the individual

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in the market sphere enjoys the imaginary social contract with a national state only if he or she contributes to the polity. In most liberal democratic states, the argument draws on the costs of migrants for social welfare expenditures. Immigration is wanted and welcome if it is not a burden to the social welfare system and contributes instead to productivity and economic growth. Human capital selection schemes and citizenship are intricately related. The new mobile cosmopolitans, mainly highly skilled, young urban populations, are recognized as a distinct type of migrant: ‘Eurostars’, for example, are young persons who are mobile within the EU (Favell 2008). Their migration intentions are often temporary or even circular, as opposed to migrants who establish long-term or permanent links to their destination countries. Acquisition of the citizenship of the immigration country has become legally less important for internationally mobile, highly skilled migrants – including those from third countries – who do not plan to stay in the destination country for an extended period. Yet for migrants from poorer countries, acquiring the citizenship of richer countries remains important, for example, in order to compensate for other lacking resources. A main benefit of the immigration country’s citizenship, and implicitly dual citizenship, is the ability to travel with fewer restrictions, such as the need for a visa. There is a claim that opposition to migration is sometimes based on the negative effects immigration allegedly has on the welfare state in the EU in general and Germany in particular. While there are indications that such effects have occurred on the micro-economic level (cf. Wickham 2019), there is little evidence about such claims on a macro-economic scale. In 2004, the EU admitted ten new countries, and wages in these countries were generally well below the levels in the existing member countries. Citizens of these newly admitted countries were subsequently free to take jobs anywhere in the EU, and many did so. The real wage effects have been small, and the gains from open borders are large (Kennan 2017). With respect to more recent inflows of refugees, the situation is similar. More than two million refugees made their way to Europe between 2014 and 2015, with over one million arriving in Germany alone. Estimates suggest that migrants have not displaced native workers but have struggled to find gainful employment (Gehrsitz and Ungerer 2017). Countries that experience a larger influx see neither more nor less support for the main anti-immigrant party than countries that experience small migrant inflows. However, another correlation holds steadfast: concerns about free movement are greatest in countries that combine flexibilized labour markets with a relatively non-contributory welfare state, such as the UK (Ruhs 2015).

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How Social Rights as Human Rights Advance Claims-making Increasing liberalization of access to citizenship in general and rights for resident migrants in particular is part of a shift from ethnic to civic nationalism. Also, almost half of all states around the world now tolerate some form of dual citizenship. It is apparent that the rights revolution (Ignatieff 2007) underway since the 1960s has found its way into legislation regulating access to citizenship as full membership and access of non-citizen residents to social, civil and political rights as partial membership, yet still mostly excluding irregular migrants. The rights revolution has also added to social rights claims-making as part of de-commodification of migrant labour. This revolution can be discerned very clearly in the USA in the wake of the civil rights movement, and in Europe somewhat later in the process of Europeanization in general, and EU anti-discrimination legislation from the top down to individual member states in particular. Both in the USA and in Europe, since the 1960s and 1970s, courts have pushed for the individual rights of legally resident non-citizens. In past decades, migrants’ political mobilization and advocacy on behalf of migrants have increasingly relied on discourses of human rights and political equality more generally. This has also been true for the processes of de-commodification, such as the mobilization among undocumented migrants with an irregular residence and/or work status (Bassel 2014). For example, irregular migrants have insisted, while mobilizing across Europe, that they have contributed to the national economy of their country of work and residence (Chimienti 2011). To trace the mechanisms guiding mobilization of migrants against perceived inequalities it is necessary to look at the resources of migrants and the responses of the dominant groups. There are three main mechanisms furthering claims of socio-economic equality for immigrants: redistribution, catching up and inclusion. First, positive rights often demand redistribution through taxes. Intervention in schooling, such as the provision of comprehensive schools or day-long instruction, requires additional resources. These universal policies are most often blind to ethnicity or skin colour. Comprehensive high schools, in particular, are favourable to more disadvantaged children from immigrant families (e.g. Stanat and Christensen 2006). The second general mechanism advancing overall equality is catching up. Again, in this case we need to consider not only official public policies, such as affirmative action, but also trust networks, such as professional ties and cliques. On the policy level, anti-discrimination rules explicitly take heterogeneities such as gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation as a point of departure. The basic idea is that there has been a historical injustice based on exclusion along such heterogeneities which calls for remedial action, and that there is empirical evidence that (institutional) discrimination along the lines of

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such heterogeneities is still prevalent. The idea of catching up, when promoted in a diluted form such as the EU directive dealing with anti-discrimination (Academy of European Law 2012), is not fiercely contested in public debates. It is implemented into national law and often upheld by the respective courts. Even so, a caveat needs to be added. There is wide latitude in implementing this EU directive and corresponding national legislation, and questions revolve around whether such legal instruments advance the goal of anti-discrimination effectively. In addition to public policies, trust networks are decisive for less-represented categories in catching up with established and dominant ones. Third, there is the general mechanism of inclusion which enables migrants to acquire and seize upon social and political rights. A prime example is the liberalization of citizenship acquisition, such as the reduction of the required waiting period or toleration of dual citizenship. Yet even migrants not fully included may strive to overcome what they consider injustices. For example, labour migrants in Germany engaged in a series of wildcat strikes in 1973 in order to improve their working conditions (Miller 1982). We also find political claims-making among undocumented migrants (e.g. Nicholls and Uitermark 2016). It is in this way that migrants are active claims-makers pushing for social rights. Overall, the role of individual rights is ambiguous in that market liberalization is furthered but so are the manifold claims against its negative effects. Individual rights undergird the activation policy in the fields of employment and education (Roche and van Berkel 1997). In doing so they are compatible with the push for a stronger consideration of human capital in selecting, admitting and integrating migrants. But, ideally, human rights in the form of social rights also guard and protect against the negative consequences of the commodification of labour, and legitimize mobilization against the violation of social rights. The context in which the importance of human rights plays out has changed over the past decades. European integration has meant a thickening of (labour) market integration, contributing to the activation of labour. The latter has been connected to a transformation of the Keynesian welfare state since the 1980s (Seeleib-Kaiser 2008). In general, instead of de-commodification through social rights as a trend most visible in the 1960s and 1970s, there has been a greater emphasis on creating human capital through activating employment policies and – in Continental Europe – casting education as part of social policies. In contrast, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, education has for a long time been conceived of as an integral part of the welfare state. In this respect, there has been a sort of Continental European convergence with Anglo-Saxon commodification patterns. So far, the analysis has focused on migrants as wanted or unwanted from an economic point of view. It has become clear that migrants have not, however, remained apolitical Homo oeconomicus by way of abstaining from political

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claims; hence the need to look at how both migrants and established groups have, when viewing immigration from an endogenous point of view, gradually moved beyond a primary focus on economic aspects to include politico-cultural ones as well. We know that, in general, the supremacy of the economic aspects of established–outsider conflicts is most pronounced where the balance of power between the contenders is most uneven, that is, tilted strongly in favour of the established group (Elias 1994 [1965]: xxxi). At the core, tensions and conflicts are always balance-of-power struggles: dominant groups feel threatened by moves against their monopolized power resources, against their group charisma, and against their group norms (Elias 1994 [1965]: xxxvii).

SECURITIZATION VERSUS THE RIGHTS REVOLUTION How Securitization Pushes Perceptions of Migration as a Threat While market liberalization runs the risk of consolidating or even augmenting social inequalities through uneven outcomes with respect to financial, human and social capital and thus directly refers to integration as placement, securitization of culture mainly concerns aspects of recognition and identification. Not only are recognition and identification of migrants at stake but also those of the established groups. Securitization is a discursive move to construct an intersubjective understanding that holds something as an existential threat and calls for exceptional measures beyond the routines and norms of everyday politics (Buzan et al. 1998). Securitization refers to the overall process of turning a policy issue such as drug trafficking, international migration or integration of migrants into a security issue. The term concerns a perception of a threat to the ability of a nationally bounded polity to maintain and reproduce itself. Threats perceived in the context of immigration may be physical and material – such as job competition with migrants – but also identity-based, such as the fear of ‘over-foreignization’ by cultures perceived to be distant and incompatible. What is driving the contention around cultural heterogeneity, and places it at the forefront of the politics of immigration, is the antinomy of difference in multiculturalism, on the one hand, and of similarity or even sameness in securitization, on the other. Historically, national states have used immigration as a tool in fostering a particular national identity (Zolberg 2006), and integration policies and debates have served to answer the question ‘who are we?’ This part of migration politics is mainly based on ascriptive heterogeneities, both self-ascriptive by immigrants themselves and ascribed by others, such as the immigration society. Securitization issues comprise very different phenomena ranging from international terrorism or ethno-national strife to environmental degradation, food and energy scarcities, drug trafficking, population growth,

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illegal migration, and organized crime to ‘disintegration’ or ‘non-integration’ of immigrants. It is thus not surprising that the post-Cold War period has seen efforts to view international migration not only as an important regional and geo-strategic dynamic with potentially crucial effects upon states and their security but also as a threat to the very fabric of national societies, namely national identity. Consider the increasing securitization of citizenship (Macklin 2014), such as extending protection to dual citizens, and public concerns about the compatibility of Muslim immigrants with liberal values post-9/11 (Foner and Simon 2015). One of the results is the emergence of conceptions and stereotypes of migrant groups conforming to or violating values – seeing certain groups, for example, as criminal, promiscuous or lazy (Staerklé 2009). Norms of reciprocity and solidarity in welfare states essentially depend upon who is included in the collective we. It is often cast as a matter of redistribution although the welfare state is largely paid for by the middle class, which is at the same time its main beneficiary (Wilensky 1974). Therefore, it matters very much who is counted to be among the welfare collective. And there is evidence that the non-material identity threat is especially resonant with disenchanted middle-class voters (e.g. Geiges et al. 2015) and with cultural conservatives who have not necessarily been among the losers of economic globalization (Bergmann et al. 2017). There is a strong link between membership and a sense of belonging and access to rights, a link exploited by right-wing and extremist parties to win over culturally conservative voters. For example, immigrants – including refugees – are perceived as competitors by those who express a voting preference for right-wing parties (Dolmas and Huffman 2004). This probably also applies to those who expressed a preference for the German ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ (AfD). Increasing securitization of migration and, above all, the emergence of populist politics has resulted in a cultural politics of homogenizing groups as ethnic or national groups, both migrants and so-called natives. This is the necessary condition for migration to serve as a meta-issue, which links all sorts of socio-economic and political ills to immigration, for example, unemployment, housing shortages and terrorism, to cross-border movement. Populism’s meta-issue promotion is mainly aimed at eroding the trust of citizens in the political elite and renewing a sense of national homogeneity. It is also closely connected to the rights revolution in that populism is partly a response to the transformation of the welfare state which is not exclusively serving the dominant group of citizens anymore but also immigrants. Empirically, we find increasing welfare chauvinism and xenophobia across Europe (Rydgren 2008). This kind of populist politics is the ideal vehicle for immigration as a meta-issue because populism constitutes an anti-system and anti-elite movement with a plebiscitarian bent (Mény and Surel 2002). Populism means

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Table 10.2

Economically wanted and/or culturally welcome: types of migrant integration

Wanted (economic demand) Welcome (cultural recognition)

Yes Integration (1)

Yes

(e.g. high skilled, ‘modernʼ labour migrants)

No

No Tolerance (4) (e.g. ‘deservingʼ asylum seekers)

Discrimination (2)

Exclusion (3)

(e.g. ‘backwardʼ labour

(e.g. ‘undeservingʼ irregular

migrants)

migrants & asylum seekers)

a re-nationalization of the welfare state, and the constitution of national belonging and homogeneity as a non-divisible good. Populism brings together the dimensions of class and culture. It not only promises to reduce or even terminate immigration but also to restore the welfare state to the deserving citizens. It is part of a comprehensive movement aiming to re-nationalize welfare stateness. In other words, its appeal is also based on the idea that national homogeneity is a public good which would be diluted by ethnic and cultural pluralism. By contrast, in such discourses, notions of plurality and multiculturalism are portrayed as typical elite phenomena (Hilson 2008). In sum, the principal origin of contention and conflicts is the perception that the other is not part of the community of solidarity upon which national welfare states are built. To shed light on the consequences of the politics around cultural diversity and homogeneity, it is helpful to look at the desirability of certain immigrant groups for economic purposes (wanted) and their acceptance as socio-cultural actors (welcome). In other words, the economic field is oriented along criteria of desirability for market processes, whereas the cultural field divides along criteria of belonging. In this way we arrive at Table 10.2 which gives four options: integration, discrimination, exclusion and tolerance. Among the wanted, there is the distinction between one category which is economically welcome and the other which is not. Both categories enjoy more or less full social protection in the respective welfare states. Those who are wanted and welcome around Europe and North America currently fall into the category of integration (1), that is, the expectation by the majority society is that people in this category adapt to the immigration country without any problems. Among them are currently the so-called high skilled. Viewed in historical perspective, some of the guestworker groups who arrived in Germany in the 1960s and early 1970s can be viewed as integrated with respect to acculturation, placement, interaction and identification, such as those who hailed from Spain or Greece (Woellert et al. 2009).

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Those often called labour migrants are ‘wanted but not welcome’ (Zolberg 1987). They are exposed to discrimination in the cultural realm (2). Interestingly, in this category, low status with respect to social class and cultural discrimination sometimes go together, as in the case of many of the descendants of those classified as the children of former guestworkers of Muslim background in Germany (Hunn 2005). They are those whose labour at some time was in demand but whose fit for full membership has been in doubt. Many of the issues around culture are projected upon people and groups in this category. This analysis focuses on this second type by suggesting three mechanisms through which culturalist securitization (re)produces inequalities between established groups and outsiders: symbolic exclusion and discursive ranking. The mechanism of symbolic exclusion works primarily through the specific mechanism of cultural ascription. It pertains, for example, to the question of whether Islam is a part of the contemporary German cultural scape. Former Federal President Christian Wulff initiated a debate in 2010 when he claimed: “But Islam nowadays also belongs to Germany” (Aber der Islam gehört inzwischen auch zu Deutschland). Critics immediately conceded the point but emphasized that “we” are steeped in the Christian-Jewish tradition. Then prime minister of Hessia, Volker Bouffier, claimed that Christendom and Islam are fundamentally incompatible as long as there is no liberalized, European Islam (Langenohl and Rauer 2012). In public debates in Germany we can also discern a second mechanism, the discursive ranking of cultures by way of distinguishing various categories of migrants and mobiles. As pointed out above, there is a clear distinction around the desirability of multiculturalism for distinct groups: in Germany, practices such as speaking the country of origin language at home are sometimes considered a first step towards exclusion and segregation (Göktürk et al. 2007: 303). This may result in the symbolic devaluation of a (potential) resource such as the country of origin language. In essence, this devaluation is legitimized through reference to socio-cultural backwardness and the danger of segregation. In this perspective, cultural pluralism or multiculturalism simply is another word for an undesirable ‘parallel society’. By contrast, for the high skilled, moving into or out of Germany, aliens or citizens, such practices are discussed without any culturalist ranking but as a prerequisite for increasing economic competitiveness of the national economy and as a jump start for persons who experience upwardly mobile patterns (see the documents in Göktürk et al. 2007). There is also the category of those who are neither wanted economically nor welcome culturally; this category is exclusion (3). Among these we find the irregular migrants who do not have legally sanctioned access to the institutions of the civil and the welfare state, and where access, such as emergency hospital treatment, carries the risk of expulsion.

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The last category is usually not wanted for economic reasons but is nonetheless sometimes welcome. The case is thus one of toleration (4). An example of a group in this category would be asylum seekers whose claims are seen as legitimate – refugees from war-torn regions such as Syria and Iraq in some European countries in 2015. The case has not been as clear-cut for asylum seekers originating in other regions, such as Afghanistan. The latter’s chances to be recognized as legitimate refugees have been much lower (BAMF 2016) despite the fact that Afghanistan, during the 2010s, has ranked among the four least peaceful countries on the globe, along with countries such as Iraq, Syria and Somalia – according to the Global Peace Index, by far the best measure we have available to compare violence (see also Monsutti and Balci 2014).2 Struggling for Equalities through Multiculturalism Multiculturalism can be seen as a set of policies to which securitization responded but also as a set of policies which partly counteracts securitization. Multiculturalism, which developed as a consequence of policies originally directed at racialized minorities and national minorities (see e.g. Kymlicka 1995 on Canada), is based on the idea that cultural rights give immigrant minorities a chance to compete on equal terms, assuming that cultural rights are a visible sign of group recognition. Multiculturalism is relevant in any discussion of welfare state and immigration because its agenda assumes that cultural recognition is a necessary element of minorities’ successful socio-economic and political participation and representation in fields such as education, employment and politics. Populist responses to multiculturalism include, among other things, allegations that rights to religious self-organization and representation in the public sphere would ultimately end up with Islam soon dominating the European scene. One of its latest expressions has been the PEGIDA movement in Germany: ‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident’. Nonetheless, multicultural demands also counteract populist rhetoric by inducing governments to negotiate and, perhaps even more to the point, disciplining Islamic organizations so that they fit into the religious registrar of nationally specific arrangements between religious communities and state institutions; as happened in France, Sweden and Germany (see also O’Brien 2016). Multiculturalism addresses, in principle, the second mechanism of migrant integration, namely discrimination (see Table 10.2). Given this background, inequalities and equalities need to be seen in tandem. Multicultural claims-making and corresponding public policies have been part of the rights revolution, although they sometimes date back much earlier. To take an

2

See http://​www​.peaceworldwide​.org/​.

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example, the special rights afforded to national minorities such as Danes and Sorbs in Germany, or Germans in Denmark (Schneckener 2004) are a case in point. In Europe in general and in Germany in particular, one of the most contested fields and a prime arena of multiculturalism with respect to migration in Europe has been religion. It has been in this field that claims-making by migrant associations and the responses by the dominant groups have been most visible and contentious. Religion constitutes a suitable field for understanding the struggle for equal rights. The rights revolution has come to include issues of cultural recognition, including rights for groups and thus their appreciation with respect to cultural differences. There is what one could call a multicultural puzzle: despite the public perception of a backlash and retreat from immigrant multiculturalism, multicultural policies, by and large, have not receded in Europe across the board but have persisted and, in many cases, have continued to expand (Banting and Kymlicka 2012; Bloemraad 2011). Across Europe, there is a sharp divide between the expansion of multicultural policies in the legal realm, on the one hand, and a much less widespread acceptance of such policies in public opinion (Hafez 2014), on the other. This is also true with respect to Germany which is characterized by multicultural rights in the field of religion: the Catholic and the Protestant Church as well as the Jewish Community enjoy extensive collective rights, whereas the debate on the inclusion of Islam is ongoing. While the rhetorical criticism of multiculturalism is ever mounting, fexisting multicultural policies have not been significantly reversed. The multicultural counter-movement to securitization is in some sense an equality-producing de-hierarchization. It aims at equalizing the position of collective actors in the religious order. In Germany, for example, large religious communities, such as the Catholic and the Protestant Church, have historically been party to the agreement between state and Church (Konkordat). Those religious denominations who are acknowledged public players are either religious communities or even corporations of public law. This characteristic applies to Christian churches and the Jewish community. All of them have far-reaching rights in the socio-cultural sphere, akin to unions and employer associations in the field of employment regulation. The latter regulate the setting of wages and working conditions through sector-wide labour contracts relatively autonomously. Religious associations recognized as corporations of public law are entitled to privileges, such as the collection of taxes by the state from registered believers, representation on the boards of public mass media and the extension of religious instruction in public schools. To deal with the integration of another major religion, Islam, two options are available. The first is to try to include Islam the same way other major religious communities have been inserted into the German corporatist system. The second is to abolish all existing privileges; as exemplified by the Swedish case. In Sweden, the

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Lutheran Church lost its privilege as a Church representing the state, whereas newcomer associations have been elevated to the status of other communities (for an overview, see Koenig 2007). Mobilization around religion, religious freedom and representation in public life is a prominent current example of efforts at de-hierarchization on the part of certain immigrant groups. In Germany, Islamic organizations have vigorously pushed for inclusion into the corporatist structure, with varying success: some are recognized as religious communities and are allowed, for example, to offer religious instruction in public schools; others are not (DIK 2011). Not only in the religious field is de-hierarchization as a social mechanism certainly very much connected to claims-making of immigrants. Two classic examples are unionization (Goeke 2014) and the setting up of political organizations to achieve political empowerment (Pojmann 2008). While religious differences and social distance matter in most countries, the institutional channels for dealing with such heterogeneities differ. For example, the corporatist German system sets high hurdles for access of Muslim organizations in public policy, whereas the British system does not require such an elaborate institutional inclusion process. There is no doubt that the speed of integration of (migrant) religious communities has been much faster in the Anglo-Saxon world where the formal-institutional separation of Church and state provides for quicker accommodation than in corporatist continental systems. Yet, note that even in countries with relatively high hurdles to overcome, such as Germany, there has been a slow and gradual transition from Staatskirchenrecht (state–church law) to Religionsverfassungsrecht (constitutional law on religion) (Krech 2011). This tendency signals a gradual retreat from tight legal state–church linkages. It also indicates a gradual transition of Muslim organizations into the landscape of social service providers (Hunger 2002). This mechanism countervailing securitization, namely de-hierarchization, leads directly to the ambivalent results of mechanisms producing equalities and inequalities. In essence, de-hierarchization usually has been paralleled by essentialization of religious difference and identity politics, a homogenizing re-categorization of heterogeneities (Hewstone and Swart 2011). Re-categorizing, over the past two decades in Europe, has meant seeing certain migrant groups as solid religious wholes. The Deutsche Islamkonferenz (DIK) is a convenient lens through which one may analyse de-hierarchization and re-categorization. The DIK aims to integrate Muslim religious organizations. Obviously, the inclusion of Muslim organizations refers not only to the legal– political inclusion of Islamic groups and organizations into the corporatist system, which has been an ongoing concern for state and religious associations and established Churches alike. Through the DIK, religion is co-constituted as the main axis of immigrant integration politics and policy. The DIK can be

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considered as a sort of boot camp to train representatives of Islamic organizations to be part of Germany’s corporatist political system. It serves as way to not only confirm that ‘Islam belongs to Germany’ (see above) but to suggest that its organizational tenets should be compatible with German conditions, at least from the perspective of the federal and state government (Tezcan 2012). The focus on Islam in the context of a specific corporatist mode of religious institutionalization denotes an entire population of persons, namely those who (allegedly) are Muslims (on other European cases, see Laurence 2006). As a result, in public debates, the individuals in question are not Muslims who have a religious identity in addition to their class, gender or ethnic identity. Rather, their entire collective identity seems to be defined by religious belonging. This tendency is also visible in the case of some Muslim organizations who claim to speak for all Muslims and espouse an authoritarian and a nationalist world view. It is thus well worth studying the actual effects of specific interfaces such as the DIK. There seems to be an interesting confluence of equality-producing re-categorization of religious communities, on the one hand, and a further essentialization of religious identities, on the other. The question is whether members of the category in question withdraw their commitment from other boundaries, for example those defined along class or national lines, as they focus increasingly on allegiance to the boundary defined in religious terms (on heterogeneities intersecting with religion, such as gender, see Joly and Wadia 2017; Korteweg and Yurdakul 2014). Instead of recognizing certain heterogeneities, such as religion, as constitutive of representing particular groups in public life, re-categorization in conjunction with de-hierarchization aims to get rid of ascriptive heterogeneities as a basis for exclusion. In essence, it is an effort to make sure that heterogeneities such as religious belonging or practice should not matter for life chances. Efforts at de-hierarchization are sometimes pushed forward by the dominant groups. A crucial example is the use of term ‘Persons with a Migration Background’ (PMB) in Germany, which aims to replace the term ‘foreigners’. PMBs are defined by the German Federal Statistical Office as persons who have immigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949; foreign citizens born in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG); and all German citizens born in the FRG with at least one parent who either immigrated to the FRG after 1949 or was born in Germany as a foreign citizen. PMB is a composite category, not one that respondents can self-identify with. As a close empirical analysis of parliamentary debates on education between the years 2006 and 2013 indicates, however, the speakers tended to construct PMB as a “homogenized social category” which conflated language, class and belonging (Elrick and Schwartzman 2015: 1539). In short, there are definite limits to efforts to re-categorize. This is not only so because the very social construction of subordinate categories of migrants is often imposed by the dominant groups through

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political debates. There are also incentives to organize along group-specific boundaries in order to reap the benefits of collective representation. In this way, group boundaries are created and reinforced, albeit in different ways. What can also be observed is a trend towards a depoliticized interpretation of heterogeneities in European public spheres. Multicultural group rights, in particular, have been contentious and have been criticized as divisive (Barry 2001). What we have seen is a displacement of multicultural language for a semantic of diversity. It is worth noting that diversity management is not rights-based but takes the resources of migrants, such as language and intercultural skills, to help organizations either to compete more successfully in markets as private institutions or serve their clients as public institutions. Diversity, at least in the private sector, mobilizes the private resources of minority individuals and looks for their most efficient allocation for profit- and rent-seeking. It is easily compatible with the human capital approach though it is broader in scope and is not limited to employment-related skills. It is somewhat different in the public sector, where organizations – in the domain of policing but also in the education and health sectors – seek more adequate ways of provisioning services to a clientele which is ever more diverse with respect to aspects such as migration channel, legal status, language and religion. Nonetheless, what we find is a seminal shift from a rights-based to a resource-based approach in dealing with cultural difference (Faist 2010). This means that there are aspects of cultural heterogeneity around immigration which are not subject to politicization. It is of interest that these zones of de-politicization are to be found on the level of organizations. Diversity management has the potential to contribute to both market liberalization and to de-commodification. This is so because it is quite compatible with market liberal approaches which look to use resources of employees more efficiently; in this case intercultural skills. This observation applies to the private sector. At the same time, diversity management may improve de-commodification in that public institutions such as hospitals and schools deploy these resources to strengthen the usage of rights and improve upon social services. This means that diversity management squarely fits into the antinomies of the welfare paradox by simultaneously pushing ahead the efficient use of human capital and by strengthening social services – depending on whether we look at the public or the private sector. With respect to the multiculturalism and homogenizing securitization, the situation is quite different. Diversity management is clearly incompatible with perceiving migration and associated heterogeneities as a threat. It does not contradict multiculturalism which operates as an instrument of national social cohesion but focuses on a specific scale, the organizational. Nonetheless, diversity management can operate without a strong focus on social rights. In short, diversity management is ambiguous in that it works on both sides of the welfare paradox, market lib-

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eralization and de-commodification. Looking at the liberal paradox, it seems that it is compatible with multiculturalism but does not require a strong rights foundation.

CONCLUSION: THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF CLASS AND THE INCREASING SIGNIFICANCE OF CULTURE What are the implications of the welfare and the liberal paradox for political coalitions on migration issues? In general, the logics of the competition state and the rule of law favour a tolerant immigration policy towards (forced) migrants. It should be noted, however, that explicit political coalitions between the two camps are almost absent. Although there are compatibilities – for example, identity politics favoured under the welfare state and a politics of resilience in the competition state – they are otherwise too far removed from each other ideologically. To start with, there is usually a right–left divide. In contrast to this setup, the functional logics of both the welfare state and the national state favour more restrictive immigration policies. From a welfare state view, it is social rights and social protection of residents that reign supreme; from the national state perspective it is the principle of cultural homogeneity. Again, despite similar policy orientations towards immigration, political coalitions are unlikely between the welfare state and the national state perspectives. All of this suggests that there are not only strange bedfellows but also close to impossible coalitions. As regards the implications of immigration politicies, market liberalization, de-commodification, securitization, and multiculturalism in light of the rights revolution have been identified as master processes which provide the main pillars of the dynamics of the politics of (in)equalities. In sum, market liberalization and partly de-commodification serve as a basis for class distinctions among migrants, or at least reinforce them, while securitization plays upon class distinctions in the effort to culturalize them, and constructs certain immigrant culture(s) as a threat to homogeneity and welfare state solidarity. Over the past few decades, the grounds for the legitimization of inequalities have shifted. Ascriptive traits have been complemented by the alleged cultural dispositions of immigrants and the conviction that immigrants as individuals are responsible for their own fate. Such categorizations start by distinguishing legitimate refugees from non-legitimate forced migrants. Another important trope is the alleged illiberal predispositions of migrants and their unadaptability to modernity (cf. Triadafilopoulos et al. 2011). Bringing together market liberalization and culturalized securitization, the current results could be read as Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic reloaded (Weber 1980 [1904, 1920]): politics and policies seem to reward specific types of migrants and refugees,

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exclude the low- and non-performers in the market, and reward those who espouse liberal attitudes. In brief, it is a process of categorizing migrants into useful or dispensable. Migration is a crucial lens through which to explore today’s transnationalized social question. While mobilization along axes such as class continues, a seminal shift towards cultural heterogeneities and mobilization has occurred. This has not simply led to a displacement of class by status and cultural politics. After all, class politics is also built along cultural boundaries, such as working-class culture, or bourgeois culture. Nonetheless, the heterogeneities that are politicized in the contemporary period have somewhat shifted: cultural heterogeneities now stand at the forefront of debate and contention. Given the finding of this analysis is that class inequalities are inextricably linked to those around culture, one should not speak of the declining significance of class but rather of the increasing significance of culture and status politics. The future of this dynamic arrangement is highly uncertain. What can be observed is a trend towards both a de-politicized and a politicized development of heterogeneities around class and culture in European public spheres. As to multicultural group rights in particular, these have been contentious and criticized as divisive. What we have seen is a displacement of multicultural language for a semantic of diversity or even super-diversity in market-liberal thinking and a semantic of threat in nationalist-populist rhetoric. Given this background, it is possible that market liberalization has also contributed to the decline of a rights-based approach and the rise of a resource-based approach. With specific regard to culture, we have seen a shift in policies from group rights to individual resources which can be tapped for enterprises, especially in the private sector. While a de-politicization of cultural heterogeneities through diversity management may help to achieve partial equalities in organizations, multicultural policies are strongly linked to national projects. After all, such policies are meant to foster national integration and the social integration of immigrants as minorities into national life. Nonetheless, not only social rights but also cultural rights have been increasingly cast by international organizations as human rights which have a global reach but have to be implemented by national states to become effective. From all we know these policies are likely to remain the chief target of securitizing and xenophobic efforts. While the rhetorical criticism of multiculturalism is ever mounting, existing multicultural policies are not reversed to the same extent. Quite to the contrary: the political struggle is ongoing.

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Index Biden, Joe 122 Bigo, Didier 10 Bologna process 199 bordering 10, 12, 98, 150, 153, 159 debordering 9, 150–2, 155–8 everyday bordering 150, 153 rebordering 150–1, 158 Bouffier, Volker 226 branding 20, 41, 93 country brands 95 Branting, Hjalmar 132 Brazil 172 Bretton Woods currency system 135 Britain see United Kingdom (UK) Bulgaria 186, 199, 219

accumulation 104–5, 108, 111, 113, 116–20, 123, 191–2, 204, 214 differential 116, 118 finance-dominated 104, 113, 117, 123 primitive 119 Act on Cooperation within Undertakings (Finland) 70 active labour market policies 111 Africa 24, 212 ageing 11, 185–7, 188 n1, 189, 198, 204, 214 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) 224 America 19, 24, 35, 50 n3, 83, 141, 107, 117, 190, 225 North 107, 117, 225 Amsterdam Treaty 85 anarchist 50 Andersson, Jenny 49 Ankersmit, Frank 97 Annan, Kofi 91 Aron, Raymond 23–5 Asia 24, 122, 184, asylum-seekers 11, 150, 159, 161–2, 166–74, 178–9 austerity 1, 7, 104, 115–17, 121–2, 132, 136, 138, 142, 160, 167 state 115–17 Australia 20, 90, 107, 112, 122 authoritarian 54, 57, 59, 67, 105, 116, 123, 230

Callaghan, James 129 Camus, Albert 22 Canada 201n1, 112n1, 196, 200, 217, 227 capital 7–9, 11, 14, 21, 51, 54, 66–7, 78–80, 89, 93, 96, 104–9, 113–21, 123, 128, 132–3, 135, 138–41, 143, 156–7, 186–7, 191–4, 202–3, 209–10, 212–5, 217–20, 222–3, 231 accumulation 104–5, 108, 120, 191n2, 204, 214 financial 96, 113, 123 human 93, 186–7, 191–4, 196, 202–3, 211–13, 215, 217–19, 222, 231 productive 106, 113 relation 104, 107, 109, 113 social 93, 96, 223 capitalism 1, 3, 5, 7–8, 12n1, 14, 23, 78, 81–9, 92, 97–8, 104–6, 108, 111, 114, 117–21, 123, 128, 134, 139, 141–4, 186, 191, 205, 212 and democracy 7, 117–20 financialized 14, 143–4

Bad Godesberg 131 bailout 119 Barker, Vanessa 151–3, 162 Beck, Ulrich 3 Bell, Daniel 24, 34 benchmarking 92 and best practices 92 Benelux countries 156 Best Corporate Citizen Competition 93 239

240

Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

from rational to political 118 globalized 1, 5, 7–8, 78, 97 Rhenish 111 variegated 106 varieties of 105–6, 123 welfare 3, 92 capitalist 20, 24–5, 35, 48, 50, 67–8, 73, 79–80, 104–6, 111–13, 115–19, 121, 129–30, 133, 142, 144 contradictions 104–5, 109, 113–14, mode of production 67 care 6, 11, 24, 50, 167, 175–6, 184–8, 190, 191n2, 192, 195–9, 201–2, 204 elderly 11, 184–5, 191 n2, 195, 197–9 health 122, 159, 184, 186–8, 190, 197, 201–2, 204 Carlsson, Ingvar 32, 136, 139, 167 Carter, Jimmy 129 Catholic church 28 Social Catholicism 86 central banks 139–40 Bank of England 122 Bank of Finland 139–40 Riksbank (Sweden) 140 centre-periphery relations 121 chauvinism 91, 214, 224 Chicago school of economics 128 Childs, Marquis W. 141–2 China 122, 174–6, 179 Chinese Committee of Corporate Citizenship 93 citizenship 2, 4, 6, 13–14, 79, 81, 86, 90–4, 97, 117, 120, 150, 152–53, 162, 172, 186, 200, 216–7, 219–22, 224 European 186 rights 117, 120, 216 social 6, 81, 86, 217 see also corporate citizenship citizenry 186 city 108, 194, networking cities 4 civil society 89, 90, 94, 98, 116, 120 Civil War (Finland) 127 class 7, 12, 20, 21n3, 29, 38, 54, 67, 70, 79, 111–13, 116–17, 122, 151, 168, 209–12, 215, 218–19, 224–6, 229–30, 232–3

division 12 compromise 70, 112 Clinton, Bill 111, 127 codetermination 52, 55, 57–8, 69–72 Codetermination Act (Sweden) 69, 71 Cold War 5, 14, 21, 23n4, 24, 26, 34–5, 41–2, 47n1, 82–3, 91, 130, 141–44, 224 inter-system conflict 14 the end of 143, post- 91, 224 collective bargaining 50–51, 81 Cologne 173 colonial labour schemes 218 colonialism 119 commodification 109, 121, 212, 216–17, 222 quasi-commodification 113 re-commodification 114 see also decommodification Communism 20, 22–4, 27–32, 35, 38–9, 41–2, 141, 144 anti-communism 21–2, 23n 4, 26, 42 community 8–9, 27, 28, 30–31, 35, 78, 85–6, 93, 94, 95, 98, 128, 225, 228 competitive 8–9, 78, 95 European 86 n5 imagined 85 local 49, 94 national 14, territorial 92, 98 company 4, 6, 9, 48 n1, 51, 54–67, 69, 71–2, 90–6, 97 n24, 131, 134, 140, 184–85, 203, 218 multinational 4, 6, 96, 132–3, 139 see also transnational comparative research 129 comparativism 3 competition state 8–9, 11–14, 93, 95–8, 120, 130, 210, 213–4, 218, 232 competitiveness 1–3, 7–9, 13–15, 49, 64–5, 67–8, 70, 87–9, 93, 95–8, 110–11, 114, 117–18, 120, 127, 131, 133, 135, 137–9, 226 knowledge-based 95 conceptual history 49, 129 conditionality 10 Congress for Cultural Freedom 19, 22

Index

consensus 25, 70, 91, 95, 97 and compromise 97 Conservatism 25 n7, 26–7, 29 n10, 32, 41, 86, 134, 224 consumerism 51 consumer 51, 93, 113, 120, 167 citizen-consumer 120 consumption 107, 189 consultation 51, 53, 55, 57–8, 60–61, 64, 66–7, 71 cooperation 36, 52, 55–62, 64, 66–7, 69–72, 80, 82, 110, 134, 142, 155, 157 cooperative negotiations 71 coordination 82–3, 88, 138 Copenhagen 42, 158 core labour standards see labour rights corporate citizenship 4, 78–9, 90–94, 97 global 90–91, 94 corporate social responsibility (CSR) 92 corporatism 111, 229–30, neocorporatism 108, 111, 130, 128 COVID-19 3, 7, 12 n1, 104, 121–2, 161, 188 SARS-CoV-2 10 crisis 3, 4, 7, 10–11, 20, 26–7, 34, 71, 88, 91, 104–6, 108–12, 115–19, 122–3, 127, 129–31, 134–9, 141–2, 151, 158, 161–2, 166, 168, 170–1, 173, 178, 190 economic 71, 91, 108, 115–17, 190 Eurozone 104, 110, 117, 123 fisco-financial 108, 115–16, 118 financial 4, 88, 104, 108, 116, 119, 122–3 ideological 6, 20, 22–4, 26, 29–30, 32–3, 38–40, 42, 56, 65, 79–81, 86, 96, 111–12, 115–16, 130, 136–7, 214, 232 North Atlantic Financial Crisis (NAFC) of legitimacy 108, 118 of Social Democracy 129 organic 108, 115–16 political 115–16 refugee 10, 11, 158, 166, 170 see also 117, 121, 123 cross-border mobility 7, 9, 11, 14, 78, 93, 96, 154 of capital 9, 11, 14, 93, 96

241

of people 11, 14 culturalization 214 currency 106, 118, 135, 137–8, 215 international currency regimes 118 exchange rates 128, 135 policy 135 Cyprus 112 n1 Dahrendorf, Ralf 53 Danes (minority) 228 Dean, Mitchell 4 Declaration of Philadelphia 81, 82 n2 decommodification 85, 210–13, 216–17, 221–2, 231–2 decriminalization 123 de-ideologization 19, 22, 28–9, 31–2, 41–2 democracy 1–8, 13–14, 19–21, 26–42, 47–73, 80–81, 84, 86, 97 n24, 118–20, 123, 127 capitalist 105 corporate 97 n24 economic 6, 48, 50, 81 enterprise 48–50, 52–73 global 5 industrial 6, 48 n2, 50–52, 55–6, 81, 97 n24 national 14 liberal 117, 120 representative 59, 71 democratic 4–8, 13–15, 20, 24, 26, 28–31, 33–4, 36, 38–42, 47–50, 54–5, 58–9, 61–3, 71–3, 78, 80–3, 85 n3, 86, 108, 111, 117–19, 123, 127, 129–35, 137, 139, 141–4, 151, 161, 214, 220 parties 30, 33, 38, 151 welfare nationalism 5–7, 13–5, 82–3 democratization 35–6, 50–51, 53–4, 56–60, 62, 67 de-politicization 73, 231, 233 Denmark 1, 5, 8, 20, 36, 71, 78, 80, 96, 129, 153–8, 161, 174, 228 deportation 10, 150, 153, 159, 166–9, 173–9 Deutsche Islamkonferenz (DIK) 229 devaluation 135, 137, 139–40, 186–7, 198, 226 Development Agreement (Sweden) 70, 72

242

Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

disabled 185, 199 doctrinairism 23 Eastern Karelian 154 ecological 14, 129, 209 economic policy 70, 110, 119, 129–32, 135–9, 142 Edling, Nils 24 Ekdahl, Lars 54 education 1, 6, 21, 38 n13, 83–4, 87, 94, 96, 114, 122, 135, 159, 160, 186–7, 189–92, 194–6, 198–200, 203, 212, 217–19, 222, 227, 230, 231 higher 114, 187, 190–191, 196, 203 efficiency 50–51, 54, 62–5, 67–70, 72–3, 81, 106, 127–8, 217–18 egalitarianism 141 eldercare see care emotions 57, 166, 173, 175–6, 179 employees’ organizations, see trade union employers’ organizations 87 employment 1, 63, 69, 79, 81, 86, 96, 107–8, 110, 115 n4, 127–32, 133, 135–9, 141, 143–4, 159, 188, 198, 204, 212, 217, 220, 222, 227–8 policy 130, 132, 136–7, 139, 141 relationship 79, 81, 96 enlightenment 30, 32, 83, 84 entrepreneurship 96, 110, 120, 191 Ers, Andrus 26 Esping-Andersen, Gøsta 3, 85 Estonia 155, 186, 199 ethnic 91, 108, 156–7, 160–161, 168, 186, 209, 219, 221, 224–5, 230 multi 108 ethnicized 12 Europe 3, 6, 11, 20 n1, 24, 33, 38, 50–51, 89 n12, 98, 107, 117, 120, 122, 139, 153, 155, 157, 158–9, 172, 174, 179, 198, 204, 211, 214, 217–22, 224–5, 228–9 North Western 107 Western 6, 38, 51, 209, 211 European Economic Community (EEC) 156 European semester 88

European Union (EU) 4, 12 n1, 78–9, 85–7, 88 n10, 89, 97–8, 110, 150, 159–62, 174, 186–7, 195, 198–200, 204, 218–22 European Values Study (EVS) 215 Eurozone 104, 110, 117, 123 expansionism 2 extremism 12, 34, 38, 116, 224 right-wing 116 Fabians 50 n3 Faist, Thomas 12, 14, 209, 213 family reunification 10, 150, 160, 171, 173, 217 fanaticism 23, 91 Fascism 22, 28, 31, 34, 84 Faxén, Karl-Olof 65 Feldt, Kjell-Olof 131, 136–7, 140–142 financialization 105, 114, 117, 123, 128 of everyday life 114, 117 Finland 1, 5, 11, 48, 50–55, 57, 60–61, 63–4, 66–73, 78, 80, 95, 96, 122, 127–32, 134–5, 137–40, 143–4, 153–7, 161, 166–74, 176–9, 185–90, 191 n2, 194–204 flexibility 12, 110, 114–15, 120 Fordism 104, 107–9, 112–13 Atlantic 107–8, 112–13 post- 108–9 Fordist mode of growth 108 Fordist welfare regime 107, 121 Foucault, Michel 4 France 28, 217, 227 Friis, Henning 35, 37–8 Fukuyama, Francis 2 gender 6, 10, 129, 166–9, 172–3, 175–6, 179–80, 209, 221, 230 equality 10, 129, 166–8, 172, 180 relations 6 Geneva Convention on refugees 214 German Federal Statistical Office 230 Germany 24, 51, 71, 86, 91 n16, 122, 127, 129, 131, 136, 142, 144, 155, 158, 169, 174, 204, 211, 216–18, 220, 222, 225–30 West Germany 24, 71, 86, 136 Giesecke, Curt-Steffan 58 global commodity chains 114 n4, 192

Index

Global North 10, 105, 151, 158, 209, 214, 217 Global South 9, 151, 158, 186, 191, 209 globalization 2–5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 85, 91, 93, 97, 119, 127, 157, 224 economic 127, 224 governance 4–5, 27, 61, 87, 89, 107, 110–111, 116, 118–19, 188–90, 192 from government to governance 111 global 4, 5 post-national 119 soft 87, 89 self- 55, 57 Gramsci, Antonio 98 Great Britain see United Kingdom (UK) Great Depression 81, 84, 136, 155 Greece 116, 226 Gs 4 G7 110 G20 110 Hakkarainen, Teuvo 170 harmony 29, 31–2, 41, 58, 66, 69, 72, 78–9, 82–5, 96, 156, 204 created 79, 82, 85, 96–7 natural 83 social 29 Hästö, Stig H. 66 Hayek, Friedrich 23, 85 health 6, 114, 121–2, 159, 160, 184, 186–7, 188 n1, 189–90, 197, 199, 201–2, 204, 231 insurance 114, 122 public health systems 204 sector 122, 231 Hedenius, Ingemar 37 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 32, 98 Herlitz, Nils 37, 41 Hetemäki, Päiviö 63–4 heterogeneity 223, 231 Hinnfors, Jonas 143 Hirschman, Albert O. 8, 49, 57, 63, 71, 93 historicism 22 history of present 4 Hobbes, Thomas 90 holistic 24 homogeneity 12, 30, 38 n13, 210–12, 214, 224–5, 232

243

cultural 210–211, 232 national 12, 214, 224–5 household 114, 116, 118, 167 Hulterström, Sven 136 human relations school 53–4, 67 human resource management 53–4, 94 human rights 12, 15, 91–2, 151, 167, 173, 209, 211, 213–14, 216–17, 221–2, 233 Hydén, Håkan 90 hyperglobalist 4 Iceland 1, 5, 78, 96, 112 n1, 122, 156 ideology 19–22, 23 n4, 24–7, 31, 33–4, 36–9, 41–2, 79–80, 96, 143 critique of 79 end of 19–22, 23 n4, 24–7, 31, 34, 36, 38, 41–2 of virtuous circles 79, 96 immanent critique 80, 84 immigration 1, 10–11, 152–61, 166, 168–72, 174, 177–9, 185, 190, 196, 198, 200, 209–13, 216–20, 223–5, 227, 231–2 labour 1, 217 policies 1, 10, 166, 168, 171–2, 174, 185, 196, 211–12, 218, 232 see also migration imperial 116 imperialist 116 income policy 131 industrial conflict 80, see also strike industrial democracy 6, 48 n2, 50–52, 55–6, 81, 97 industrial relations 54, 80–88, 89 n12, 94–5 inequality 6, 82, 96, 109, 114, 117, 209–10, 215–9, 221, 223, 226–7, 229, 232–3 of opportunity 82 of income and wealth 117 inflation 128, 131–2, 135, 137–8, 142, 144 anti- 130–132, 136, 138, 143 infrastructure 122, 130, 143 Ingrians 154 innovation 8, 86 n5, 89–90, 96–7, 109–11, 123, 128, 135–7 financial 111, 123 policy 135, 137

244

Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

institutional conversion 8, 96 integration 4, 6, 9–10, 12, 14, 83, 85, 105, 108, 113–14, 118, 143–4, 168, 209–12, 216, 218–9, 222–3, 225, 227–30, 233 European 85, 143–4, 222 of migrants 210, 223 regional 4, 6, 9 social 12, 108, 218–9, 233 integral state see Gramsci, Antonio interdependence 3, 95–6, 112 intergovernmental 91–2, 110 internationalization 70, 108, 113, 119 International Labour Organization (ILO) 6, 79–82, 87, 90 n15, 91–2, 97, 110, 213 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 4, 110, 138 international monetary system 129 international nurse recruitment 186, 188, 191, 201 international talent 9, 11 Iraq 169, 171, 174–9, 227 Ireland 112 n1, 172, 198 Islam 212, 226–30 Islamism 12 Italy 28, 51, 212, 216 Japan 136, 218 Jessop, Bob 7, 14, 128, 143 Jews 153, 162 Jewish community 228 Kabul 173–5, 177 Kärrylä, Ilkka 6, 14 Keskinen, Suvi 173 Kettunen, Pauli 4, 14 Kevätsalo, Kimmo 68 Keynes, John Maynard 110 Keynesianism 128–9, 137, 142 European 137 Keynesian counter-cyclical fiscal policy 128 neo-Keynesian economic policy 138 Keynesian welfare state 7, 104–5, 214, 222 Keynesian welfarism 111

Keynesian Welfare National State (KWNS) 7, 107–9, 111, 115–17, 120, 143 knowledge-based economy (KBE) 7, 88, 104, 108–9, 111, 113 Koch, Hal 35 Koestler, Arthur 23 Kohl, Helmut 138 Kurunmäki, Jussi 5, 14 labour as a (fictitious) commodity 85 labour law 52, 69, 79 labour market parties 60, 66, 69, 71, 79, 80–81, 85, 87, 96, 131 symmetry/asymmetry of 80, 96 labour movement 38, 51, 58, 132 n5, 136, 142 labour rights 91–2 laissez faire 24, 111, 141 Lauwerys, J. A. 36 Leinonen, Johanna 176 liberal paradox 211, 213–14, 232 liberalism 19, 25–7, 29, 31–2, 39, 42, 86, 118–20, 128, 213, 216, 217 classical 120, 128 social 32, 39, 118, 120 see also neoliberalism liberalization 12, 113, 123, 128, 139, 141, 143, 210–13, 215–19, 221–3, 231–3 market 12, 210–213, 215–19, 222–3, 231–3 capital market 139, 141 life-course 106–7, 114 Lindblom, Seppo 140 Lindvall, Johannes 137 Lipset, Seymour Martin 19, 23, 25, 27, 35, 41–2 Lisbon Strategy 88–9 Lisbon Treaty 85 low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) 187 Malm, Stig 140 Marcos, Ferdinand 189 Marx, Karl 21, 32, 38, 79, 114 Marxian tradition of critical theory 79 Marxism 22, 26, 29, 31–2, 131, 133 Austro-Marxism 133

Index

Maslow, Abraham 53 Mauroy, Pierre 138 media 10, 94, 111, 167, 169–73, 176–9, 188, 202 mainstream 10 Meidner, Rudolf 132 mercantilism 119 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 23 Mexico 138 Middle East 212, 217 Middle Way 35, 41, 82, 141–2 migration 9–12, 14, 115 n4, 129, 150–1, 153–60, 162, 167, 169, 171, 185–6, 188 n1, 189, 193, 196, 198, 201, 203–4, 209–16, 218–20, 223–4, 228, 230–3 control 9, 150–151, 153, 155, 159–60, 162 control regime150–151, 155, 159 policy 11, 213 see also immigration Miina Sillanpää Foundation 131 Miller, Peter 120 mobility control 150–152, 155, 159, 161 models 3, 4, 54–5, 57, 59–60, 62, 64, 67, 88 see also Nordic model; social model; welfare models modernization 21, 53, 81, 89 political 21 monetarism 128 Mont Pèlerin Society 128 movements 4, 5, 51, 80, 84, 98, 122, 132, 172, 209 new transnational 51 popular 84 see also labour movement multiculturalism 166, 210, 212, 214, 223, 225–8, 231–3 municipalities 80, 84, 94, 156, 160–161, 197 local self-government 84 Myrdal, Gunnar 5–6, 78–9, 82–5, 94–7 national interest 7, 14, 49, 61, 63–7, 72–3 National Socialism 22 national state 7, 107–10, 115, 119, 209, 211, 213–14, 216, 218, 220, 223, 232–37

245

see also nation state; Keynesian Welfare National State (KWNS); Ricardian Workfare Post-National State (RWPS) nationalism 1–7, 13–15, 78–9, 82–4, 91, 96, 108, 121, 129, 151, 153, 157, 162, 167, 209, 221 competitiveness-seeking 13 democratic 78 protectionist 3, 5, 11, 13, 83, 85, 161–2, 215 racist far-right 13 security-seeking 13 welfare 4, 6, 7, 13–5, 107, 151–2, 157, 162 xenophobic 14 nation state 2–9, 11–14, 78, 93, 95–8, 108, 152, 161, 167, 172, 190, 204 border 6 see also citizenship natural law 26–7, 90 naturalization 11, 152 neocommunitarianism 128 neoconservatism 142 neoliberalization 108, 112 neoliberalism 104, 112, 116, 118–20, 123, 127–9, 134, 137–9, 142, 214 neoliberal regime shifts 108–9, 111–13, 117 networking 4, 96 Netherlands 20 n1, 217 Neue Mitte 127 New International Economic Order (NIEO) 137–8 New Labour 127 New Left 53 New Public Management (NPM) 96 New Zealand 20 n1, 107, 112 n1, 122 New York Protocol 214 news 10, 167–9, 173, 175, 177, 201 newspaper 19–20, 22, 28, 33, 39, 47–9, 60 n25, 62, 65, 168–9, 173–4 Niinistö, Sauli 173 Nordic 1, 3, 5–11, 13–14, 20–21, 28, 33–7, 39, 41–2, 50, 64, 78–82, 84–7, 94–8, 111, 127, 129–30, 134–5, 137, 139–44, 150–62, 166–68, 172, 179–80, 186 businesses 134, 142

246

Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

countries 1, 3, 7, 11, 20, 28, 33–4, 37, 50, 64, 78, 80–82, 87, 95–6, 129, 150, 152, 155–6, 158–62, 166–8, 172 democracy 5, 20–21, 33–7, 39–42, 84 model 8, 14, 78–9, 86, 94, 95 n23 Social Democrats 129–30, 134–5, 137, 139, 141, 143–4 strong Nordic woman 10 welfare state 5–6, 10, 13, 127, 150–151, 153, 162, 166–7, 172, 186 North Atlantic Financial Crisis (NAFC) 117, 121, 123 Norway 1, 5, 20, 36–7, 71, 78, 80, 96, 122, 153–7, 161, 186 Offe, Claus 79, 104–5 Offe’s Paradox 104–7, 109, 123 Office for Budget Responsibility (UK) 122 Ollila, Esko 140 Open Method of Coordination 88 ordoliberalism 86 Øresund 157–8 organicist idea of community 86 organism 90 Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 11, 92, 109–10, 138, 167, 217–8 organization theory 56 Outinen, Sami 7, 14 outsourcing 96, 160 Palme, Olof 130, 132–4, 136–7, 140 Paris 138, 158 parity 55, 78–81 the ideology of 79–80 parliamentary 20–21, 29–30, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 47, 52, 69, 84, 132, 136–37, 142, 171, 230 elections 29, 52, 69, 132, 137, 142 representation 47 Pärnänen, Heikki 65–6, 68 participation 39, 54–7, 60, 62, 64–5, 67, 71–2, 81, 83, 92, 96–7, 167, 211–12, 216, 219, 227 employee 55–6, 60, 64, 67, 72, 81

political 39, 216, 227 parties 6, 22, 26, 28–30, 33, 35, 38–40, 47, 49–52, 54–6, 58, 60–61, 66, 69–71, 79–81, 85–7, 90 n15, 94, 96, 105, 108, 112 n2, 113, 119, 127, 129–32, 133 n8, 134–43, 154, 161, 170–72, 174, 176, 201, 210, 215, 220, 224, 228 centre-left 113 centre-right 52 right-wing 50, 113, 154, 171–2, 224 socialist 51 paternalism 92 Pedersen, Ove K. 8 PEGIDA movement 227 pension 50, 114, 122 reform 30 system 134 Pellander, Saara 10, 14, 176 Petersson, Olof 39 Philippines 185–91, 193–4, 196–9, 201, 203–4 Filipino nurse migration 184–204. planning 5, 24–5, 60–61, 81–4, 132–3, 138, 143 economic 25, 82–3, 132, 143 post-war 81 Myrdal’s three phases of 82 Poland 172 political culture 20, 34–7, 41–2, 64, 72 political rhetoric 41, 71 politicization 157–8, 216, 231 hyper 151 see also de-politicization Pontusson, Jonas 70 Popper, Karl 22 populism 2, 91, 210, 215, 224–5 post-colonial and anti-racist scholarship 167 post-war 5, 22, 25–6, 31–3, 35–7, 41, 51, 81–2, 104, 107–8, 112, 119–20, 128, 132, 150–151, 155–7 poverty 82, 152–54, 171 precarity 117 precarization 114 private ownership 47, 54, 64 privatization 113, 122, 214 production committees see works councils property rights 106, 118, 120

Index

protectionism 2–3, 5, 9, 11, 13, 83, 85, 91, 151, 157, 161–62, 215 Protestant Church 228 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 50 n3 Public Private Partnership 94 public sector 25, 96, 113, 122, 135–7, 191, 231 racialization 214 of care work 186 radicalism 49 left-wing 49 Randell, Seppo 53 rationalization 21, 54, 60–61, 64, 67, 70, 156 reactionary argumentation 49 refugee 10, 11, 154–5, 158, 166–74,178–9, 214, 219–20, 224, 227, 232–3 crisis 10, 11, 158, 166, 170 Reagan, Ronald 138 Reaganism 112 n1 reformism 6, 32, 105, 143 reformist Socialist movement 80 regulation 1, 7–8, 14, 59, 78, 82, 85, 87, 89, 92, 94–5, 97, 108, 111, 114, 120, 127–8, 130, 132–5, 139–41, 143–4, 150, 153–4, 159–60, 166, 170–171, 173, 196, 212–14, 216, 218–19, 228 democratic economic 130, 132, 134, 139, 141, 143 deregulation 1, 96, 113, 123, 138, 140, 144, 217 of capitalism 7–8, 78, 89 of capital movements 132 of conflicts 94 of employment 127 of financial markets 128 Rehn, Gösta 132 Rehn-Meidner model 132 reproduction 104–7, 114, 116, 219 of labour power 107 of capital relation 107 social 104–6 resilience 2, 12–13, 120, 232 revolution 12, 24, 26–7, 32, 119, 154, 210–13, 221, 223–4, 228, 232 French 26–7, 32 revolutionary 21, 23–4, 90,

247

rights 12, 210–213, 221, 223–4, 228, 232 Rhenman, Eric 56–7, 62, 64, 66 Ricardian Workfare Post-National State (RWPS) 7, 111–12, 114–16, 121–2 Ricardo, David 114 risks 1, 9–10, 28, 56, 95, 159, 191, 202, 223, 227 new social 1 Rokkan, Stein 2 Roma 153, 156–7, 161–2, 168 Romania 219 Rose, Nikolas 120 Ross, Alf 27 Russia 35, 158–9, 174 Russian revolution 154 Russians 154, 176, Rydman, Wille 170 Samuelsson, Kurt 32–3 Sartre, Jean-Paul 23 Sassen, Saskia 3 Scandinavia 19–20, 35–8, 40, 42, 82 Scandinavian countries 19–20, 24, 36, 38, 40–41, 84, 153–4, 157 Schengen Agreement 156, 158, 161–2, 198, 200, Schengen Information System 159 Schiller, Bernt 58, 70 Schmidt, Helmut 129 Schumpeter, Joseph A. 110 Schumpeterian Workfare Post-National Regime (SWPR) 7, 109–11, 113, 115–6, 121–2 Second World War 5, 20, 33, 35, 47, 51, 54, 81, 86, 107, 155, 217 post- 5, 79, 86, 96, 127–8, 133, 135, 217 securitization 12, 210–215, 223–4, 226–9, 231–2 security 2–3, 6, 9–15, 28, 40, 60, 66–7, 73, 86, 153, 155–6, 171, 210, 214, 223–4 external and internal 10, 214 national 3, 14, 153, 171 security state 11–12, 12 n1, 13–14, 96 self-determination 66, 70, 73 self-governance 55, 57 self-government 84

248

Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

self-regulation 84 separatism 2 Seymour, Richard 19, 117 Shils, Edward 19, 23–5, 41–2 Simonson, Birger 69 Skinner, Quentin 49, 61 skills 185, 187, 191, 193, 197, 200–203, 217–8, 231 deskilling 12, 186–7, 189, 191, 200–202 Slunga-Poutsalo, Riikka 170 social 1, 4–6, 8–10, 12, 14–5, 19, 21–2, 24–5, 27, 29, 32–3, 35, 37–8, 40, 50, 53, 57, 63, 71–2, 78, 81–8, 91 n16, 92–4, 96–8, 104–23, 138, 141, 150–157, 159–62, 187, 188 n1, 209–23, 225–6, 229–33 assistance 10 benefits 10 cohesion 1, 88, 96, 231 dimension 86, 88, dumping 96 (in)equality 5–6, 8, 14, 81, 141, 209, 219, 223 integration 12, 108, 218–19, 233 reproduction 104–6 rights 105, 107, 115, 120, 150–153, 156, 160, 162, 209–13, 216–17, 221–2, 232–3 rigidity 82 security 6, 40, 86, 153, 155–6, 210 services 86, 231 stability 94 Social Democracy 5, 7–8, 24, 26, 29–31, 32–3, 35, 37–9, 41–2, 49–52, 61, 69–70, 78, 80–81, 86, 108, 111, 127–30, 134–35, 137–44, 151, 161, Joint Committee of the Nordic Social Democratic Labour Movement (SAMAK) 33, 129–30, 134–5, 137, 139, 141–44, 151 Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP) 7, 51, 127–35, 137, 139–44 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 127, 131, 136, 144

Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Sweden (SAP) 7, 26, 29, 37, 67, 50–51, 70, 127–44 social dialogue 78–9, 85–9, 97–8 social investment 89, 96, 111 social liberal 32, 39, 50, 52, 79, 118, 120 social market economy 86–7, 89 social model 88 social policy 6, 35, 81–2, 86–9, 107, 110–112, 114, 152, 157, 217, 222 social protection 87–8, 153–4, 161, 212, 216, 225, 232 social partners 78–9, 85, 86–9, 97–8 Sozialpartnerschaft 86, 89 n13 socialism 6, 19, 22–4, 26–7, 29, 31–3, 38–9, 81, 86, 112, 128–9, 133, 141–3 democratic 33, 133, 143 market 141 societalization of the state 84–5 solidaristic wage policy 52 Sorbs (minority) 228 Sorsa, Kalevi 131, 138–40 sovereignty 110, 121, 157, 167 Soviet Union 23–4, 35 Soviet Bloc 25 n6, 112, 139 Soviet-type system 83 Spain 172, 186, 199, 226 spontaneous order 85 stakeholders 49, 94–5, 119, 188, 196 state 1–15, 24, 29–31, 34, 39, 41–2, 48, 52–3, 61, 66, 68, 72, 79–86, 88–90, 93–8, 104–23, 128, 130, 132–4, 136–7, 139, 141–3, 150–152, 157–8, 160–162, 166–8, 172, 185–91, 197, 203–5, 210–217, 219–20, 222, 224–5, 227–30, 232 state intervention 66, 82–3, 85, 108, 128 see also competition state; national state; nation state; security state; welfare state statist 20, 108, 123 neostatism 130, 144 Strang, Johan 27 strike 50–52, 154, 222 hunger 177 wildcat 50, 222 strike-breakers 151–4

Index

249

see also industrial conflict structural adjustment 112–13, 116, 121 subcontracting 96 suffrage 47 Suomen Työnantajain Keskusliitto (STK) 49, 53, 57–8, 60, 63–6, 68 sustainability 1, 14, 88, 91 Svenska Arbetsgivareförening (SAF) 49, 52, 56–62, 65 Sweden 1, 5, 19–21, 26, 28–31, 36–7, 39–40, 47–8, 50–52, 55, 57, 60–63, 66–7, 69–73, 78, 80, 82, 84, 96, 127–37, 139–44, 153–8, 161, 169, 172, 174–5, 186, 227, 229 Syria 171, 227

transnational 4, 6, 8–9, 13–14, 49, 51, 79, 85, 92–3, 95–6, 112–13, 115–16, 118, 123, 128–9, 143, 152, 167, 186–7, 188 n1, 189–91, 196, 203–4, 209 companies 4, 8–9, 92–3, 95 history 4 investors 4, 8–9, 93–4 transnationalized social question 14, 209–10, 233 Treaty of Rome 156 tripartism 87, 90 n15 see also corporatism Trump, Donald 122 Trump Administration 122 Turks (minority) 211, 216

Taiwan 122 taxation 30, 113–14, 118, 138 corporation tax 131 income tax 131 indirect taxation 113 inheritance taxes 114 international tax regimes 121 terrorism 91, 168, 223, 224 Tervonen, Miika 9, 14 Thailand 122 Thatcher, Margaret 138 Thatcherism 112 n1 Third Way 7, 14, 20, 111, 113, 127, 129, 141–2, 144 Third World 6, 83, 204 Thorsrud, Einar 57 Tingsten, Herbert 19–21, 25–41 Torpey, John 152 totalitarianism 22 Tracy, Antoine Destutt de 21 trade union 9, 49–52, 61, 67–8, 70–72, 79–81, 85, 87, 92, 94–7, 105, 129, 131, 140, 151 LO (Swedish Trade Union Confederation) 51–2, 69–70, 131–3, 140–141 movement 50, 72 representatives 67, 70, 136 SAK (Central Organization of Finnish Trade Unions) 70 unionization 92, 96, 229 traditionalist 23

underdeveloped countries 83 United Kingdom (UK) 20 n1, 24, 90, 111, 116, 122, 127, 129, 136, 142, 144, 186, 190, 201, 217, 219–20 United Nations (UN) 6, 79, 91, 94, 121, 137, 138 n23 Global Compact 91–2 UN system 6 United States of America (USA) 20 n1, 111, 116–17, 122–3, 127, 129, 139, 142, 144, 172, 174–5, 188, 190, 196, 200, 218, 221 universalism 6, 9–10, 13, 15, 151, 166 U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation 93 utopia 6, 22, 81 vagrancy 9, 151, 154, 156 values 10, 26–9, 32, 35, 41, 61–3, 65, 67–8, 72–3, 83, 91, 117, 129, 166, 215, 224 shared 27, 35, 91 Vietnam 122 voluntarism 90, 92, 94 voluntary associations 80, 98 Voutilainen, Eero 58 vulnerability 166–8, 171, 173–5, 177–8, 180 male 177, 180 Vuorijoki, Jari 177

250

Nationalism and democracy in the welfare state

wage 52, 96, 106, 109–10, 114–15, 131–4, 220, 228 policy 52, 132–4 social wage 106, 109–11, 114–5 wage work 96 see also solidaristic wage policy wage-earner funds 133–4, 141 employee funds 141 warfare 10 hybrid 10 Webb, Beatrice 50 n3 Webb, Sidney 50 n3 Weber, Max 21, 119, 204, 233 welfare chauvinism 214, 224 welfare mobility dilemma 152 welfare models 3, 161 welfare paradox 210, 213, 217, 231, 232 welfare regimes 3, 104–9, 161, 219 Welfare World 6, 79, 83–4, 96 Westerståhl, Jörgen 39–40 Wiesenthal, Helmut 79 Wiio, Osmo A. 57, 64 works councils 51–2, 55, 60, 62–3

workfare 7, 104, 109–12, 114–5, 117, 121–2, 128, 143, 160, 162 regime 110, 114, 117, 128, 143 state 7, 121 working life 6, 47, 49–51, 53–4, 56–8, 62, 66, 71–2, 199 World Bank 4, 110 World Economic Forum 79, 91–2, 94 world economy 6, 7, 83, 123 World Health Organization (WHO) 187, 204 world market 8, 105, 109, 113–15, 118 integration 105, 113–14, 118 world order 2–3 World Trade Organization (WTO) 4, 92 trade and investment agreements 92 Wulff, Christian 226 xenophobia 2, 224 Yale 82 YT, see cooperative negotiations Yugoslavia 64, 112, 217