In this podcast, researchers examine how the Nordic model is framed and used in and outside Norden. They present examples of how different aspects of the Nordic Model have been applied outside the Nordics, and how these attempts (and the global use of the term 'Nordic Model') has reflected back on the Nordic countries, defining in many ways how they see themselves. This podcast also illuminates a more general impulse to create understandable frameworks (like ‘models’) in order to fathom complex political and cultural patterns. Can policymakers elsewhere pick from a 'smorgasbord' of different social and economic policies that make up the 'Nordic Model', as one of the participants puts it? The three researchers are Carl Marklund, Byron Rom-Jensen and Andreas Mørkved Hellenes and are involved in the research project 'Nordic model(s) in the global circulation of ideas'. The presenter is editor of nordics.info, Nicola Witcombe. It is the second of two podcasts about the Nordic Model and was recorded at the Institute for Contemporary History at Södertörn University, Sweden in October 2019.
#nordicsinfo #ReNEWhub
In this podcast, researchers examine how the Nordic model is framed and used in and outside Norden. They present examples of how different aspects of the Nordic Model have been applied outside the Nordics, and how these attempts (and the global use of the term 'Nordic Model') has reflected back on the Nordic countries, defining in many ways how they see themselves. This podcast also illuminates a more general impulse to create understandable frameworks (like ‘models’) in order to fathom complex political and cultural patterns. Can policymakers elsewhere pick from a 'smorgasbord' of different social and economic policies that make up the 'Nordic Model', as one of the participants puts it? The three researchers are Carl Marklund, Byron Rom-Jensen and Andreas Mørkved Hellenes and are involved in the research project 'Nordic model(s) in the global circulation of ideas'. The presenter is editor of nordics.info, Nicola Witcombe. It is the second of two podcasts about the Nordic Model and was recorded at the Institute for Contemporary History at Södertörn University, Sweden in October 2019.
#nordicsinfo #ReNEWhub
Nicola Witcombe: Welcome to this nordics.info podcast. Nordics.info is a research dissemination website based at Aarhus university in Denmark and publishes material by researchers on many different aspects of the Nordic countries within the social sciences and humanities. Nordics.info is part of the university hub Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World, ReNEW. My name is Nicola Witcombe and I am the editor of the website. This podcast series is based on me catching up with specialists and experts at different university events and discussing particular topics of the day with them. This podcast is about The Nordic Model and is the first of two about the subject. It was recorded at the Institute for Contemporary History at Södertörn University in Sweden following an academic workshop on democracy in the Nordic countries in October 2019.
I'm pleased to be here at Södertörn University near Stockholm in Sweden with three academics to discuss the Nordic Model.Thank you for being here, would you like to introduce yourselves?
Andreas Mørkved Hellenes: Yes, thank you Nicola my name is Andreas Mørkved Hellenes. I'm a Norwegian living in Aarhus, Denmark where I work as a post-doc at the university.
Carl Marklund: My name is Carl Marklund, I am a Swedish person living in Sweden and i'm currently working at the Institute for Contemporary History here at Södertörn University where we are actually recording right now
Byron Rom-Jensen: and I'm Byron Rom-Jensen, an American living in Denmark for seven years and uh also a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University
Nicola Witcombe: Okay, thank you and in the first podcast we talked about how long the term the Nordic Model has been around we talked about how it can be deemed in a positive light and a negative light among other things and we're going to focus here on whether the application of the Nordic Model elsewhere outside the Nordics is possible or even desirable and we're going to look at some examples and have a wider discussion hopefully on the effect of modelising an aspect of a country or even the country itself, so um can we come up with some examples where it has been attempted to apply one or more of the Nordic Models or aspects of the Nordic Models elsewhere and how did it work out? Would you like to go first Byron?
Byron Rom-Jensen: Sure, well it's a difficult question because as we discussed in the previous podcast the Nordic Model itself is such a flexible term and it has such a diversity and also a vagueness of meaning so what it means to actually modelise what it means to actually try to adopt a Nordic Model depends. So, it can be about adopting a specific policy it can be about adopting specific institutions, it can even be adopting a specific approach, a type of approach. All depending on the standpoint of that adopter.
Nicola Witcombe: Could you tell us a little bit about your specific research that you've done on the Swedish model of labor market relations?
Byron Rom-Jensen: Sure well, it's interesting because it's a Swedish model of labor market relations in the 1960s but it also represents in some many ways a Nordic Model. It has many of the same features in the 1960s, organised labor powerful organised labor movement, organised employers representing as a specific well not a union, but as a specific organisation as a specific negotiating partner functioning within a system where there was a minimal amount of interference from the state. While at the same time, there's an attempt by government to steer the economy through various labor market programs. And that policy actually starts to sound very attractive to the Kennedy administration. They're in a situation where they're looking to both control various strikes, various work stoppages while also at the same time trying to cut down on unemployment at the time in Sweden, below 2%, which looks very good for the US, which is at 6%. So they end up bringing in several Swedish delegations to speak about this Swedish Model. They're not really referring to a Swedish Model at that point, but they're referring to 'a Swedish way' and that actually causes some jealousy amongst the other Scandinavian nations. They're saying: "well see, we have the same program here, why aren't you looking at Norway? Why is it always Sweden?" But it doesn't necessarily go so well because nobody can really agree what the point is. The Kennedy administration, they want to become a watchdog for labor market stoppages. The unions in the United States, they want to have more power, more say in terms of determining policy. Business is generally just uninterested in this whole system. So, you get a lot of talk and you get a lot of attentive form to copy a type of communication but the actual copying of the institutions of this approach, this method as we talked about last time, that never comes to fruition and that's actually one of the more successful examples.
*laughter*
Nicola Witcombe: Are there any examples from other countries in the world where aspects of the Nordic Model have been used elsewhere?
Carl Marklund: Yes, there are, but I would say that it's often in the kind of more vague presentational sense, when we have political debates where the notion of the model is being used but when it comes to actual policies usually one talks about the policy. You know like the ombudsman as Byron has researched, for example and there is another concept that might actually describe this, 'norm entrepreneurship', so that the Nordic countries have been relatively successful in formulating programs and scripts for reform norms on the global agenda, so to speak, when it comes to for example the Norwegian campaign against landmines and things like that and ideas about gender policy and ideas about environmental sustainability and so forth. The Nordic countries have been relatively successful in marketing themselves as good marketers of themselves. It's a very interesting kind of dual language thing here. I think also that um that doesn't mean necessarily that very much actual policies have been translated but they have served as inspiration and that's something that's quite clear and we can observe that rather well. At the same time, the Nordic countries in that sense actually present a smurgos board, if you will of various policy solutions and various policy entrepreneurs can pick and choose and take elements of this and implement here and there.
Byron Rom-Jensen: And I guess there's also an element about where are we actually looking? My research has focused very much on the United States as a nation state and that's sort of one to one they take from Sweden and they implement in Washington DC But, we'll maybe find more successful examples, if we look at other levels of government. I'm just thinking my own home state, New Jersey, which implemented a Finnish baby basket type system and labeled under the idea of a Nordic Model of child care. So, it's also what level are you actually looking at.
Nicola Witcombe: What exactly is a baby basket? The idea that new mothers would receive a bassinet filled with all sorts of goods that they would need and New Jersey sort of changed that a little bit from a universal system to a specifically means-based system but it was much more successful because it was a modest policy, a smaller policy, in a specific state context but at the same time marketed under that idea of a Nordic Model.
Carl Marklund: Ideas about for example pension systems in California state level during the early 1960s, when California was relatively progressive at that point in time and so forth.
Nicola Witcombe: Okay, so this discussion about different aspects of the Nordic Model/Models, does this have an impact on the Nordic countries themselves, does it reflect back to the Nordic countries and how they see themselves? How they implement policy, and so on and so forth? Would anyone like to answer that?
Andreas Mørkved Hellenes:: Yeah, I think it's interesting simply to look at the model concept itself and and how it first came into use in the Nordic countries regarding the Swedish case, as Byron just said. Representatives of the other Nordic countries were were provoked by the fact that Americans in the 1960s seemed to always go for the Swedish solutions instead of the own and in fact, the model concept itself first appeared in a Swedish guise, so to speak, as the Swedish model, or more precisely the 'models' as it was a concept that spread in French political debate in the late 1960s to begin with and which Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden, actually reacted strongly against, precisely because in his view, the model concept seemed to represent something fixed and not the sort of flexible dynamic method that we talked about earlier. However, through the 1970s and in particular as the elections in Sweden in 1976 came closer, conservative Swedish politicians used the Swedish model in their attacks on Palmer's government claiming that Palmer introducing radical policies was breaking with what foreigners found so inspiring in Sweden, the Swedish model. Only then did the social democrats appropriate the concept and made it one of their key slogans and I think it's safe to say that since the, it's been closely associated with social democracy in Sweden
Nicola Witcombe: Isn't it so that recently, they've even sought to copyright the Swedish model, perhaps or?
Carl, Byron and Andreas: Actually the Nordic Model, yeah
Carl Marklund: The Swedish social democratic party did that and it was also accepted, it should be probably qualified a bit because it means like you're only allowed to be the only users, when you use it for for example educational outreach efforts and for advertisements and political advertisements and so forth and this is of course a reflection of the centrality of this concept in Swedish domestic political debate. I would argue that it's a concept, precisely as Andreas said, that has a transnational origin, transnational history but has now become, shall we say, even more in focus domestically than internationally, I would argue and this is a clear reflection of that. At the same time of course that claiming the Nordic Model on the part of the Swedish social democrats is in its turn a reflection of the fact that the previous Swedish conservative or center-right government used the term 'The Nordic Way', when they presented a joint platform of 'why are the Nordic countries achieving success in socio-economical indexes' and so forth at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Then, they didn't want to use the concept of the Nordic Model because it was already, precisely as Andreas indicated in a sense, coded with the social democrats. Now the conservatives had 'The Nordic Way' instead N: So they had to claim a different headline? C: Yeah, they had already claimed yes . They had already claimed a different headline but then that also meant that the social democrats saw an opportunity then to really even more closely tie the concept of the Nordic Model to themselves and there was also this kind of rather big research group operating out of Oslo, which was trying to kind of find ways of identifying 'what is the Nordic Model today?' and 'how can it be adapted to facing the challenges of globalisation?' and a more competitive world market.
Nicola Witcombe: There's also been some interesting ping pong in terms of diplomacy over the years one example, with respect to Denmark, was that Trish Reagan on Fox News likened Denmark to Venezuela and pointed to the fact that students are funded through universities, so they would never finish university and that the state rather sort of stifled entrepreneurialism and productive working life and so on and there was a bit of a response in Denmark for that, I don't know whether you want to say a bit more about that Byron or?
Byron Rom-Jensen: Sure i mean, i guess it's clear that there's the transnational aspect of the Nordic model that has been very much incorporated in within domestic politics but the rest of the world still matters, in terms of where do the ideological battlegrounds still exist, they're domestic but they're also foreign and uh yeah Trish Reagans on Fox News' declaration of the socialist Denmark was met with outrage and was met with both official responses, official Twitter responses trying to demonstrate that Denmark actually had higher rates of work than the United States, 'we're still better than you' but at the same time, I mean there was also some agreement. The Danish newspaper Berlingske, which generally has a more conservative point of view basically said: "Yeah this is correct, the Danish Model reduces incentives and thus needs to be reformed, so it created a platform for discussing what is the future of a Danish model.
Carl Marklund: It's interesting because from a comparative perspective, there might be some sort of evidence pointing in that direction, but at the same time, I think it's very much based upon a US. conservative misreading of the Nordic concept of .. [lifelong learning], which actually is a part of the Nordic educational model, if you will allow me to use that concept to do some modalising here and I think that this is something which maybe does not appear particularly provocative or or strange or somehow linked to any political battlegrounds in an internal Nordic context, but when taken into an international arena it all of a sudden can get wings and fly in a different direction. I also wanted to mention that this phenomenon of ping pong that backwards and forwards as you mentioned, is something, which has occurred also with regard to Sweden, for example, in 2009 when the Obama government were looking at ways in which to reform the banking system and also saving the auto industry in the US after the financial crisis. They brought in the former Swedish minister of finance to do a congressional hearing on how Sweden had solved its crisis or at least sought to solve its crisis in the early 1990s and this was then picked up in Fox News again with the following tagline "We got to defeat this recession but do we want to turn the US into Sweden?" you know the idea of 'socialist Sweden', you wouldn't want to go socialist on the US, while in fact these measures were being implemented by a strict conservative government in Sweden, so some of things are lost in translation here, if you will.
Nicola Witcombe: Yeah. So we've discussed different models and different aspects of models. We've also discussed, how it can be a problem to generalise about a group of countries that are actually quite different, but on the other hand, surely there's also merit in looking and discussing about the Nordic Model and that's what I'd like to talk about now, I mean why is it important to discuss societal models in this way?
Carl Marklund: Well I think first and foremost, this is a political form of communication. That there are political party strategists, there are policy professionals across the world who simply are looking at what are they doing in other countries, and why shouldn't they? I mean it's one of the tenets of the OECD, for example. We are involved in a learning process, when we're studying what they're doing in different countries and then of course, when packaging this, not for export because it sounds very much like superimposing oneself, there is an exchange of ideas between different countries, with regard to how to solve social and economic problems. There are mechanisms of benchmarking to see which kind of policies are actually successful and which ones are not. So this is like a political learning process and then in that context, it makes sense to try to somehow conceptualise, what are the policies that were being used and then in that sense, the model appears as a helpful tool. Well, we have undertaken this with regard to the pension system, or the tax system, or something like that, well that's an incredibly complex thing to do, now we're going to talk with somebody else about how that is done and then of course we present a model of how it was done, a simplification, if you will. And this is part of global policy communication and diffusion as Byron has been studying, for example. Another aspect of this is of course that is when societies are struggling with challenges and you can see that certain countries are doing better than others, it becomes natural that other countries are studying those that seem to be somewhat more successful and this is one of the reasons why, for example Western European politics have been copied in Eastern Europe for example regardless of their eventual merit, they were simply better off at a particular point in time.
Nicola Witcombe: Yeah, okay well, are there any concluding remarks about modalisation?
Carl Marklund: Yeah well one aspect that I would like to bring to the table is something that has preoccupied us very much as researchers. We have all of us been involved with these questions about what is the role of the model or the models rather in political debate, and precisely as Andreas just said, these have been political concepts the Swedish model and the Nordic Model have been used in political struggles and so therefore they are meaningful and are attempts at mobilising political change on the basis of these concepts. That aspect I think is very important. Another aspect is also that you have at least in the Swedish case, which I know better than the other Nordics, there is a certain sense of seeing Swedish pioneering spirit or being ahead and pushing various policy agendas and serving as an example to others as a policy goal in itself to be a pioneer, to be a leader and this is not something, which belongs solely to the social democratic, or shall we call it progressive sides of Swedish political landscape. I mean, the conservative party regularly talks about Sweden as being the pioneering country and so forth. B: Because, I guess that's also what's so
Byron Rom-Jensen: interesting about when you discuss a Nordic model, it creates a specific benchmark by which you can just establish what is the original? Who is the original? We were just at this seminar about Nordic democracy and establishing what exactly does it mean to have Nordic democracy from sharing these different ideas, and where does that where was that originally established and what is the future right now. You can see, for example, politicians in Iceland using a Nordic Model to say well we're part of this larger, this larger institution, but at the same time, we were first to be democratic, we were the first to have parliamentary consensus so, when we discuss the Nordic Model, or when anyone discusses it, tries to reduce these societies into models, it also creates a dialogue about well, exactly what elements we should be comparing.
Andreas Mørkved Hellenes:: Yeah, and you just add that we've talked a lot about the model part of the Nordic Model, but not that much about the Nordic part of it and it's something I find interesting as well and I think that maybe, and perhaps we'll get back to this in the future fellow researchers, but there's also something about how the sort of epithet or the adjective 'Nordic' in itself is sort of ascribed some of the model qualities, precisely as Byron touched upon, when he talked about the import of what was the name of the baskets?
Byron Rom-Jensen: Oh the bassinets, the child baskets
Andreas Mørkved Hellenes: Yeah Precisely, simply by referring to them as 'Nordic' that meant something particular.
Nicola Witcombe: Okay, and we'll leave it there. You've been listening to a podcast on the Nordic Model. We were examining how the Nordic Model is framed and used in and outside Norden and can help us to not only understand various societies better, but also illuminate a more general impulse to create understandable frameworks, in order to fathom complex political and cultural patterns.
I'd like to thank my three guests today, Andreas, Byron and Carl, our funders, The Independent Research Fund Denmark and NordForsk and thanks also go to our very own research university hub, Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World (ReNEW). Please do listen to future podcasts and if you would like to know more, take a look at the website: nordics.info