Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (74 page)

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.
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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 Ådalen 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,
Ådalen 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 Saltsjöbaden 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.
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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 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.
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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.