Postwar

influence that attracted near-universal appreciation.

Doctrinal differences over the ostensible goals of the state might noisily oppose Left and Right, Christian Democrats and Communists, Socialists and Conservatives, but almost everyone had something to gain from the opportunities the state afforded them for income and influence. Faith in the state—as planner, coordinator, facilitator, arbiter, provider, caretaker and guardian—was widespread and crossed almost all political divides.[142] The welfare state was avowedly social, but it was far from socialist. In that sense welfare capitalism, as it unfolded in Western Europe, was truly post-ideological.

Nevertheless, within the general post-war European consensus there was a distinctive vision, that of the Social Democrats. Social Democracy had always been a hybrid; indeed, this was just what was held against it by enemies to the Right and Left alike. A practice in lifelong search of its theory, Social Democracy was the outcome of an insight vouchsafed to a generation of European socialists early in the twentieth century: that radical social revolution in the heartlands of modern Europe—as prophesied and planned by the socialist visionaries of the nineteenth century—lay in the past, not the future. As a solution to the injustice and inefficiency of industrial capitalism, the nineteenth-century paradigm of violent urban upheaval was not only undesirable and unlikely to meet its goals; it was also redundant. Genuine improvements in the condition of all classes could be obtained in incremental and peaceful ways.

It did not follow from this that the fundamental nineteenth-century socialist tenets were discarded. The overwhelming majority of mid-twentieth-century European Social Democrats, even if they kept their distance from Marx and his avowed heirs, maintained as an article of faith that capitalism was inherently dysfunctional and that socialism was both morally and economically superior. Where they differed from Communists was in their unwillingness to commit to the inevitability of capitalism’s imminent demise or to the wisdom of hastening that demise by their own political actions. Their task, as they had come to understand it in the course of decades of Depression, division and dictatorship, was to use the resources of the state to eliminate the social pathologies attendant on capitalist forms of production and the unrestricted workings of a market economy: to build not economic utopias but good societies.

The politics of social democracy were not always seductive to impatient young people, as later events were to show. But they were intuitively appealing to men and women who had lived through the terrible decades since 1914, and in certain parts of Western Europe social democracy by the mid-Sixties was no longer so much a politics as a way of life. Nowhere was this more evident than in Scandinavia. Between 1945 and 1964 the Danish Social Democratic Party’s share of the vote in national elections rose from 33 percent to 42 percent; in the same years the Norwegian Labour Party won between 43 and 48 percent; as for the Swedish Social Democrats, their share of the post-war vote never fell below 45 percent. In the elections of 1968 it even exceeded 50 percent.

What was remarkable about these voting figures was not the numbers themselves—the Austrian Socialist Party did almost as well on occasion and in the British general elections of 1951 Clement Attlee’s Labour Party had won 48.8 percent of the vote (though the Conservatives, with a smaller overall vote, got more parliamentary seats). It was their consistency. Year in, year out, Scandinavian Social Democratic parties secured over two-fifths of their countries’ votes, and the result was decades of unbroken control of government, occasionally at the head of a coalition of small and compliant junior partners but usually alone. Between 1945 and 1968, eight out of ten Danish governments were led by Social Democrats; in the same years there were five Norwegian governments, three of them Social Democratic, and four Swedish governments, all Social Democratic. There was consistency in personnel, too: Norway’s Einar Gerhardsen led two Social Democratic governments for a total of fourteen years; in Sweden, Tage Erlander ruled both his party and his country for twenty-three years, from 1946-1969.[143]

Scandinavian societies inherited certain advantages. Small and socially homogenous, with no overseas colonies or imperial ambitions, they had been constitutional states for many years. The Danish constitution of 1849 had introduced limited parliamentary government but extensive press and religious freedom. The Swedish (and at the time Norwegian) constitution of 1809 established modern political institutions, including proportional representation and the exemplary system of the ombudsman—the latter adopted throughout Scandinavia in later years—and provided the stable framework within which the party political system could develop. It would remain in force until 1975.

But Scandinavia was historically poor—a region of forests, farms, fisheries and a handful of primary industries, most of them in Sweden. Labour relations in Sweden and Norway especially were chronically troubled by conflict—the strike rate in both countries was among the highest in the world during the first decades of the twentieth century. During the Depression of the 1930s unemployment in the region was chronic. In 1932-33 one third of the Swedish labour force was out of work; in Norway and Denmark 40 percent of the adult workforce had no jobs—figures comparable to the worst years of joblessness in Britain, Weimar Germany or the industrial states of the US. In Sweden the crisis led to violent confrontations, notably at Adalen in 1931 where a strike at a paper- mill was suppressed by the army (memorably recalled by Swedish director Bo Widerberg in a 1969 film, Adalen 31).

If Scandinavia—and Sweden in particular—did not follow the path of other economically depressed societies on the European margin between the wars, much of the credit belongs to the Social Democrats. After World War One the Scandinavian socialist parties largely abandoned the radical dogma and revolutionary ambitions they had shared with the German and other Socialist movements of the Second International; and in the course of the 1930s they moved towards a historic compromise between capital and labour. At Saltsjobaden in 1938, representatives of Swedish employers and labour signed a Pact that was to form the basis of the country’s future social relations—a foretaste of the neo-corporatist social partnerships formed in Germany and Austria after 1945, but which were virtually unknown before the war, except under Fascist auspices. [144]

Scandinavian Social Democrats were open to such compromises because they had no illusions about the putative ‘proletarian’ constituency on whom other socialist parties relied for their core support. Had they depended upon urban working-class votes alone, or even working-class votes allied to middle-class reformers, the Socialist parties of Scandinavia would forever have remained in the minority. Their political prospects rested upon extending their appeal to the overwhelmingly rural populations of the region. And thus, unlike almost every other socialist or social-democratic party of Europe, Scandinavian social democrats were not scarred by the instinctive antipathy to the countryside that characterized much of the European Left, from Marx’s remarks about the ‘idiocy of rural life’ to Lenin’s distaste for ‘kulaks’.

The embittered and destitute peasants of inter-war central and southern Europe formed a ready constituency for Nazis, Fascists or single-issue Agrarian populists. But the equally troubled farmers, loggers, crofters and fisherman of Europe’s far north turned in growing numbers to the Social Democrats, who actively supported agrarian cooperatives—especially important in Denmark, where commercial farming was widespread and efficient, but very small-scale—and thereby blurred the longstanding socialist distinctions between private production and collectivist goals, ‘backward’ country and ‘modern’ town that were so electorally disastrous in other countries.

This alliance of labour and farming—facilitated by the unusual independence of Scandinavian peasants, conjoined in fervently Protestant communities unconstrained by traditional rural subservience to priest or landlord—was to form the long-term platform on which Europe’s most successful social democracies were built. ‘Red-green’ coalitions (at first between Agrarian and Social Democratic parties, later within the latter alone) were unthinkable everywhere else; in Scandinavia they became the norm. The Social Democratic parties were the vehicle through which traditional rural society and industrial labour together entered the urban age: in that sense Social Democracy in Scandinavia was not just one politics among many, it was the very form of modernity itself.

The Scandinavian welfare states that evolved after 1945 had their origins, then, in the two social pacts of the 1930s: between employees and employers, and between labour and farming. The social services and other public provisions that came to characterize the Scandinavian ‘model’ reflected these origins, emphasizing universality and equality—universal social rights, equalized incomes, flat-rate benefits paid from steeply progressive taxation. They thus stood in marked contrast to the typical continental European version in which the state transferred or returned income to families and individuals, enabling them to pay in cash for what were, in essence, subsidized private services (insurance and medicine in particular). But except for education, which was already universal and comprehensive before 1914, the Scandinavian system of welfare was not conceived and