The Pursuit of Governance

Nordic Dispatches on a New Middle Way

Fabrizio Tassinari

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781788214018, 9781788214001
• eBook ISBN: 9781788214032
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Although there is no overt ideological battle in the twenty-first century, citizens in every latitude register growing dissatisfaction with the results delivered by their governments. In the West they increasingly turn to populist forces to seek an easy respite to the frustration caused by the failures of democracy. Other models of governance, such as China's "autocratic capitalism", rest on technocratic command and control methods that are disdained in the West but whose global appeal is growing mostly due to their perceived ability to deliver. No matter how and where they are practised, these alternatives seem to offer only partial and unsatisfactory answers to increasingly complex questions of governance. In a world ravaged by pandemics and climate crises, migration flows and cyberwars, rigid rule-making imparted from above or populist over-simplifications brewing from below can only represent the extremes of a more sophisticated picture of governing processes.

In this book, Fabrizio Tassinari seeks to rediscover the methods, practices and limits of good governance. By taking inspiration from the Nordic region, where democratic governance has delivered some of its most impressive feats, he shows that populism and technocracy are not the causes of our political malaise; they represent skewed by-products of the most basic instincts in our body politic. They need not be suppressed but channelled and reconciled in our practices of governing.

1

From Singapore to Sacramento: a method of governance

These being the most influential 300 square-feet in the whole country, they look remarkably frugal. The lamps and ubiquitous candles form a choreography of asymmetric shadows on the pastel-coloured walls. If it were not for the copies of local and international dailies scattered on the mid-century teak desk, it would be hard to guess that this is the office of the editor-in-chief of the most important newspaper in the country.

I am about to be seated on one of two opposing dark-brown leather armchairs next to the desk, and I ask to have a glimpse of the majestic view from the corner office onto Copenhagen City Hall Square. Alas, I do not get to breathe any of the self-importance I had anticipated: the square has been transformed into a gigantic crater for the construction of a new subway line. It has been a frustratingly long project, marred with delays and minor accidents. Most Danes are fed up with the Italian contractors widely blamed for the blunders – even though afterwards they are immensely proud of the unmanned metroline they have delivered. “I really can’t say”, answers the soft-spoken secretary with a smile, when I ask when they will be finished.

Before serving at the helm of Politiken, Denmark’s leading daily, Bo Lidegaard had done most other things. A career diplomat, he was a top advisor of successive prime ministers and embodies the glorious technocratic tradition that sustains democratic institutions in Europe’s North. As a historian, he has chronicled the origins and development of the modern Danish state and the life of some of its most defining statesmen. His best-known book Countrymen recounted the story of the rescue of Danish Jews in 1943, and was a bestseller translated into several languages. His name does not appear on the ballot paper (though the surname does, as Lidegaard’s younger brother was Denmark’s foreign minister). Yet this diverse background makes him something of a polymath of Danish democracy.

Newspaper editors are legendary for their short attention-span and even shorter fuse. So precious is time in blue-chip journalism, that the Financial Times at one point offered one-to-one chats with the editors in end-of-year charity auctions at Christie’s. Here I did not have to bid in order to obtain a full 45-minute conversation starting with the origins of modern Scandinavian statehood in the nineteenth century. Cultivated, patrician, Lidegaard wears the uniform of Nordic intelligentsia: black blazer, white button-down shirt, no tie, and dark jeans, which are unmarked but betray the cut of some refined designer. He moves effortlessly across historical eras and academic disciplines with an overarching narrative of civic responsibility, where enlightened elites were instrumental to the creation of the modern welfare state.

I am here to talk about the specificities and lessons of what he calls the “most competitive social model on earth”.¹ When asked the secret of Nordic success, Lidegaard does not blink: “the cashier at Netto”, he explains, referring to a local discount supermarket chain, “has the same creed as the civil servant”. “Creed” is a loaded term but Lidegaard does not use it casually. It is a reflection of the almost religious reverence to the social contract in this part of the world.

When I hear this, I am reminded of Karl Popper, the Austrian-British philosopher who was said to disdain of the likes of Lidegaard. Plato called them “philosopher kings” and Popper thought they were imbued with a dangerous messianism that entitles them to try out highly questionable experiments of “social engineering” – an accusation often leveled at the intrusive government institutions in Northern Europe. In this case, even in egalitarian Scandinavia, it is increasingly questionable that a supermarket cashier, whose shifts are being shortened because of automation and whose suburban supermarket is visited time and again by desperate, and often foreign, shoplifters, shares the worldview concocted by civil servants sipping coffee in dimly-lit, pastel-coloured ministerial rooms, almost identical to Lidegaard’s office.

Precisely because of this contrast, it is important to pin down what this “creed” is all about. In what follows I shall set out a method of governance rooted in social constructivism and show how even Marquis Childs’ original “middle way” was unwittingly rooted in it. I shall then tease out the conceptual spectrum along which different governance experiences have positioned themselves. I conclude by showing how the Nordic example has pragmatically shifted and moved across this continuum by comparing the cases of the Danish and Swedish government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic since March 2020.

Seizing the middle way

Marquis Childs did not know it, but he was a constructivist. When categorizing Sweden as the “middle way”, he must have instinctively felt that “anarchy”, as international relations scholar Alexander Wendt wrote in his seminal study of social constructivism, “is what states make of it”.² Constructivism, in this respect, is not a theory as such, but a theory of knowledge,³ shaded according to how social reality displays itself. There is probably not even one single constructivist methodology; it is rather the practice of uncovering how social facts unfold. Had Sweden in fact veered towards “democratic socialism”, as Americans erroneously label it today, Childs would have probably picked another subtitle or another case. The key methodological insight of the middle way is that it is the exact opposite of finding a new label, a new category; it is about positioning and indeed constructing a social reality.

This goes to the heart of social science epistemology. The debate within it has perennially swung between exclusive acceptance or total rejection of social phenomena as “brute facts”.⁴ Rationalists claim that social facts are irrefutable: objectivity, positivism and determinism are their defining traits. Interpretative approaches instead argue that facts as such do not exist; power originates from ideas and consequently the creation of knowledge is an eminently subjective affair. Much like in Childs’ intuition, constructivism rejects this dialectic framing. The very same phenomenon can be examined from different perspectives and can produce different interpretations.

It is not by chance that international relations scholar Emmanuel Adler speaks about constructivism as “seizing the middle ground”. Different interpretations can be placed along a continuum, each possessing their own validity and coherence. Attempting to combine idealism and realism, then, would be tantamount to mixing water and oil. Constructivism “is not anti-liberal or anti-realist by ideological conviction; neither is it pessimistic or optimistic by design”.⁵ What it does is to “dot the margin” of the analysis, says Norwegian political scientist Iver Neumann.⁶ And much like in the study of cooperatives in Sweden in the 1930s, this margin is dotted by scrutinizing social facts according to how they display themselves. Childs observed reality first, then deliberated. He starts out by saying that the world is ravaged by ideology and then observed social facts much like one would observe a natural phenomenon. He does not draw conclusions before observing how reality unfolds.

A corollary to this argument is that no deliberation is possible for facts that have yet to take place. This explains why Stephen Walt, for one, defines constructivism as “agnostic” and “better at describing the past than anticipating the future”.⁷ At the same time, the construction of social reality is a continuous process of learning. It allows the establishment of a connection between the origin of social facts, their unfolding and their possible future developments, what is also known as cognitive evolution. Cognitive evolution, according to Adler, means that “at any point in time and place of historical process, institutional or social facts may be socially constructed by collective understandings of the physical and the social world that are subject to authoritative (political) selection processes and thus to evolutionary change”.⁸ Based on a reading of the reality in the past and the present, observation is equipped to indicate possible scenarios for the future.

In this reading, that young, intrepid American journalist travelling across Scandinavia in the middle of the Great Depression was a constructivist ante litteram. He did not take sides between socialism and capitalism; it might be more appropriate to say that while acknowledging their existence, he literally sidelined them, placed them on the opposite extremes of a continuum of analysis, a container in which contrasting approaches and different ideologies are placed. The synthesis that he created does not aim at subsuming or mediating between the extremes; nor does it adhere a priori to any of them; rather, it aimed to comprise them, to “dot the margins”.

This choice presents an inescapable ethical dilemma for any observer. In this age of social media echo chambers, we tend to overlook that the role of the analyst is to observe and report what political, social and economic actors do. Yet, one might as well acknowledge upfront that no observation is a politically neutral act. While analysts and reporters should not take sides, they ought to take responsibility for the awkward position they are in. Much like in today’s heated environment of “fake news” and “mainstream media”, it is of the essence that analysts possess the moral clarity of acknowledging the difference between analysis and advocacy and of any involuntary and yet inevitable bias therein.⁹

What Childs did was to report on what Swedish social, economic and political actors were doing. In fact, an analysis swinging perpetually along a continuum between socialism and capitalism would have been toothless and perhaps pointless, if it did not draw any operative conclusions about how to take our understanding of reality forward. And in this, Childs was unquestionably sympathetic to the Scandinavian model. Put another way: there will be competing discourses about governance and democracy. Within those, there will always be some dominant or hegemonic ones, “nodal points” as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe call them.¹⁰ Moral clarity is essentially about doing due diligence: acknowledging one’s limitations and biases and then settling somewhere for the purpose of delivering workable outcomes.

Once we have uncovered and defused the ideological land-mines on which social analysis can fall, we can more safely look at how reality unfolds. Here “cognitive evolution” takes a very practical meaning: we learn from experience, real existing instances in which good governance not only took place but can serve an explanatory purpose for the future. Much like Childs, the method of this analysis will be to witness virtuous practices that can serve as case studies to answer broader questions about the future “when the investigator has little control over events”.¹¹

By picking a case study that was unique and critical, Childs was unwittingly picking a signpost, something at once extreme and constitutive of the bigger story he wanted to tell about an uncertain future. I shall do much the same in this book. I rely on a number of critical, and seemingly disparate, in-depth, single case studies. On that basis, I articulate how actors operate, the way they talk and act social reality into existence, their “speech acts”.¹² By unearthing the constructivist inspiration and biases of the original “middle way”, I shall thus chart a path for virtuous and less virtuous practices in the contemporary governance landscape.

Thus swung the pendulum

“The expansion of the right of the individual to behave or misbehave as he pleases has come at the expense of orderly society” once argued Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister and patriarch: “In the East, the main object is to have a well-ordered state and not in a natural state of contention and anarchy”. He continues: “First you must have order in society … Then the schools, when you have violence in schools, you are not going to have education, so you’ve got to put that right. Then you have to educate rigorously and train a whole generation of skilled, intelligent, knowledgeable people who can be productive”.¹³

Singapore is arguably the world’s most sophisticated technocracy, and these are the kind of statements that have earned Lee a rock-star reputation ever since he stepped down as Singapore’s prime minister in 1990. He has been compared to other great statesmen; former US president Richard Nixon once claimed that had Lee lived in Britain, he would have reached “the world stature of a Churchill, a Disraeli, or a Gladstone”. While he ruled his people with an iron fist more akin to that of some authoritarian regimes, it is hard to not sympathize with some of his concerns about democracy.

The crux of the matter, familiar at one point or another to any Western leader, is how you can accumulate the authority necessary to push through painful reforms without losing popularity and, eventually, the legitimacy to do so. Here culture plays a role, if it is true that Asian culture emphasizes “the values of patron-client communitarianism, personalism, deference to authority, dominant political parties, and strong interventionist states”.¹⁴ As a result of this, the complex thrust-and-parry characterizing the art of governing is moderated by an intricate web of clientelistic relations and a myriad of intermediate bureaucratic, business and nongovernmental bodies, which are tasked with filtering through decisions and helping to execute them.

Lamenting the historical failure of social democracy, the British historian Tony Judt wrote that: “for most people, most of the time, the legitimacy and credibility of a political system rests not on the liberal practices or democratic forms but upon order and predictability … above all, we want to be safe”.¹⁵ Seen in this light, this is exactly what East Asian governance practices have prioritized. On a continuum ranging from liberty to security, they placed their bets squarely at the security end.

As extensively discussed by political theorists,¹⁶ this choice is favoured by the fact that Asian-style governance is based on paternalism and hierarchy; traditions and religions defer status and authority to pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the pioneers
• 1. From Singapore to Sacramento: a method of governance
• 2. It takes an island: the sources of governance
• 3. The crystal curtain: a culture of governance
• 4. Hail to the mandarins: the scaffolding of governance
• 5. The good disorder: the limits to governance
• 6. A transnational world: the practice of governance
• Conclusion: the new middle way
• Notes
• References
• Index