Carl Marklund

Listen to a podcast on how some of Sweden’s policymaking successes and failures since the Cold War have been perceived in Sweden itself as well as outside the region

Scandinavian “socialism” has been oddly absent from the final stages of the recent US election. It is possible to trace the arguments for and against ‘Scandinavian’ policies of different kinds in the American left and right from the 2016 election campaign until recently. However, the “socialism” that both the American right and left previously thought they saw in Scandinavia is no longer as unequivocal after the challenges of the coronavirus and the new fault lines of a meandering election campaign.

Since the interwar years, foreign observers have regularly portrayed the Nordic countries as well functioning states, successful in solving crises, with happy populations; in short as good societies. Why did this happen? Are the Nordic countries the way they are simply because they are in a relatively safe corner of the world? Because they have plenty of natural resources and small populations? Or are there more convincing cultural explanations, such as, their strong labour movements and trade unions? Listen to these two podcasts on the Nordic Model to find out. In October 2019, the editor of nordics.info Nicola Witcombe caught up with three researchers after an academic workshop on ‘Nordic Democracy: Challenges, Threats and Possibilities’ at the Institute of Contemporary History at Södertörn University in Sweden. All of the three researchers are involved in the project 'Nordic Model in the global circulation of ideas' and are ideally placed to help us find out more about the development of the Nordic Model - and whether it really should be called ‘a model’ in the first place.