Postwar

implemented all at once. It came about incrementally. Health care in particular lagged behind: in Denmark, universal health coverage was achieved only in 1971, twenty-three years after Aneurin Bevan’s National Health Service was inaugurated across the North Sea in the United Kingdom.

Moreover, what looked from the outside like a single Nordic system was in reality quite varied by country. Denmark was the least ‘Scandinavian’. Not only was it critically dependent upon an overseas market for farm produce (dairy and pork products especially) and thus more sensitive to policies and political developments elsewhere in Europe; but its skilled work force was much more divided by traditional craft-based loyalties and organisations. In this respect it resembled Britain more than, say, Norway; indeed, Denmark’s Social Democrats were constrained on more than one occasion in the Sixties to emulate British governments and seek to impose price and wage controls on an unstable labour market. By British standards the policy was a success; but by more demanding Scandinavian measures, Danish social relations and Denmark’s economic performance were always somewhat troubled.

Norway was the smallest and most homogenous of all the Nordic societies (save Iceland). It had also suffered most from the war. Moreover, even before oil was discovered off the coast, Norway’s situation was distinctive. A front-line state in the Cold War and therefore committed to much greater defense outlays than tiny Denmark or neutral Sweden, it was also the most elongated of the northern countries, its tiny population of less than four million people strung along a 1,752 kilometre coastline, the longest in Europe. Many of the farther-flung towns and villages were and are utterly dependent on fishing for their livelihood. Social Democratic or not, the government of Oslo was bound to apply the resources of the state to social and communal objectives: subsidies flowing from centre to periphery (for transport, communications, education and the supply of professionals and services, notably to the third of the country lying north of the Arctic Circle) were the lifeblood of the Norwegian nation state.

Sweden, too, was distinctive—though its peculiarities came over time to be thought of as the Scandinavian norm. With a population almost the size of Norway and Denmark combined (greater Stockholm alone was home to the equivalent of 45 percent of Norway’s inhabitants), Sweden was by far the richest and most industrialized of the Scandinavian societies. By 1973 its output of iron ore was comparable to that of France, Britain and West Germany put together and was almost half that of the USA. In paper production, wood pulp and shipping it was a world leader. Where Norwegian social democracy consisted for many years in marshalling, rationing and distributing scarce resources in a poor society, Sweden was by the 1960s already one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Social democracy there was about allocating and equalizing wealth and services for the common good.

Throughout Scandinavia, but in Sweden especially, the private ownership and exploitation of the means of production were never put into question. Unlike the British Labour movement, whose core doctrine and program ever since 1918 rested on an ineradicable faith in the virtues of state ownership, Swedish Social Democrats were content to leave capital and initiative in private hands. The example of the UK’s British Motor Corporation, a helpless guinea pig for government experiments in centralized resource allocation, was never followed in Sweden. Volvo, Saab and other private businesses were left free to flourish or fail.

Indeed, industrial capital in ‘socialist’ Sweden was concentrated into fewer private hands than anywhere else in western Europe. The government never interfered either with private wealth accumulation or with the marketplace for goods and capital. Even in Norway, after fifteen years of Social Democratic government, the directly state-owned or state-run sector of the economy was actually smaller than that of Christian Democratic West Germany. But in both countries, as in Denmark and Finland, what the state did do was ruthlessly and progressively tax and redistribute private profits for public ends.

To many foreign observers and most Scandinavians the results appeared to speak for themselves. By 1970 Sweden (along with Finland) was one of the world’s four leading economies, measured by purchasing power per head of the population (the other two were the USA and Switzerland). Scandinavians lived longer, healthier lives than most other people in the world (something that would have amazed the isolated, impoverished Nordic peasantry of three generations before). The provision of educational, welfare, medical, insurance, retirement and leisure services and facilities was unequalled (not least in the US and indeed Switzerland), as were the economic and physical security in which the citizens of Nordic Europe pursued their contented lives. By the mid-1960s, Europe’s ‘frozen north’ had acquired near-mythic status: the Scandinavian Social Democratic model might not be replicated readily elsewhere, but it was universally admired and widely envied.

Anyone familiar with Nordic culture, from Ibsen and Munch through Ingmar Bergman, will recognise another side of Scandinavian life: its self-interrogating, incipiently melancholic quality—popularly understood in these years as a propensity to depression, alcoholism and high suicide rates. In the 1960s and at times since, it pleased conservative critics of Scandinavian politics to blame these shortcomings on the moral paralysis induced by too much economic security and centralised direction. And then there was the concurrent propensity of Scandinavians to take off their clothes in public (and on film) and—so it was widely rumoured—make love with perfect strangers: further evidence, to some observers, of the psychic damage wrought by an over-mighty state that provides everything and forbids nothing.[145]

If this was the worst that could be said against the Scandinavian ‘model’ then the Social Democrats of Sweden and elsewhere could be forgiven for laughing (or, as it were, complaining) all the way to the bank. But the critics had a point: there was indeed a darker side to the all-embracing state. Early-twentieth-century confidence in the capacity of the state to make a better society had taken many forms: Scandinavian Social Democracy—like the Fabian reformism of Britain’s welfare state—was born of a widespread fascination with social engineering of all kinds. And just a little beyond the use of the state to adjust incomes, expenditures, employment and information there lurked the temptation to tinker with individuals themselves.

Eugenics—the ‘science’ of racial improvement—was more than an Edwardian-era fad, like vegetarianism or rambling (though it often appealed to the same constituencies). Taken up by thinkers of all political shades, it dovetailed especially well with the ambitions of well-meaning social reformers. If one’s social goal was to improve the human condition wholesale, why pass up the opportunities afforded by modern science to add retail amelioration along the way? Why should the prevention or abolition of imperfections in the human condition not extend to the prevention (or abolition) of imperfect human beings? In the early decades of the twentieth century the appeal of scientifically manipulated social or genetic planning was widespread and thoroughly respectable; it was only thanks to the Nazis, whose ‘hygienic’ ambitions began with ersatz anthropometrics and ended in the gas chamber, that it was comprehensively discredited in post-war Europe. Or so it was widely supposed.

But, as it emerged many years later, Scandinavian authorities at least had not abandoned an interest in the theory—and practice—of ‘racial hygiene’. Between 1934 and 1976 sterilization programmes were pursued in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, in each case under the auspices and with the knowledge of Social Democratic governments. In these years some 6,000 Danes, 40,000 Norwegians and 60,000 Swedes (90 percent of them women) were sterilized for ‘hygienic’ purposes: ‘to improve the population’. The intellectual driving force behind these programmes—the Institute of Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden—had been set up in 1921, at the peak of the fashion for the subject. It was not dismantled until fifty-five years later.

What, if anything, this sad story tells us about Social Democracy is unclear—distinctly unsocialist and undemocratic societies and governments have done more and worse. The legitimacy of the state in post-war Scandinavia, the authority and initiative accorded it by a mostly unquestioning citizenry, left government free to act in what it took to be the common interest with remarkably little oversight. It does not seem ever to have occurred to an ombudsman to investigate abuse of those who stood outside the rights-bearing community of tax-paying citizens. The line separating progressive taxation and paternity-leave from forcible interference in the reproductive capacities of ‘defective’ citizens seems not to have been altogether clear to some post-war governments in Social Democratic Scandinavia. If nothing else this suggests that the moral lessons of World War Two were not as clear as was once supposed—precisely (and not perhaps coincidentally) in countries like Sweden whose collective conscience was widely presumed clear.

Outside of Scandinavia, the closest approximation to the Social Democratic ideal was achieved in another small, neutral country on the edge of Western Europe: Austria. Indeed, the superficial similarities were such that observers took to referring to the ‘Austro-Scandinavian model’. In Austria as in Sweden or Norway, an overwhelmingly rural, historically poor country had been transformed, as we have seen, into a prosperous, stable, politically tranquil oasis of state-furnished well-being. In Austria, too, a de facto pact had