Trust Us

Reproducing the Nation and the Scandinavian Nationalist Populist Parties

Anders Hellström

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781782389286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Europäische Politik

In Scandinavia, there is separation in the electorate between those who embrace diversity and those who wish for tighter bonds between people and nation. This book focuses on three nationalist populist parties in Scandinavia—the Sweden Democrats, the Progress Party in Norway, and the Danish People's Party. In order to affect domestic politics by addressing this conflict of diversity versus homogeneity, these parties must enter the national parliament while earning the nation's trust. Of the three, the Sweden Democrats have yet to earn the trust of the mainstream, leading to polarized and emotionally driven public debate that raises the question of national identity and what is understood as the common man.

CHAPTER 1

Towards a Multi-Dimensional Political Party Space

In a 1912 debate with Hjalmar Branting, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, the conservative scholar and national parliament member Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) argued for his vision of Swedish society as ‘the People’s Home’ (folkhemmet). Kjellén insisted that the political institutions should mirror the particularities of the national character and not divide the country (Berman 2006: 164; Berggren and Trägårdh 2009: 169; Hall 1998: 217). He welcomed the workers’ movement, but strongly resisted the class struggle that, in his view, only served to weaken the nation (Trägårdh 2002: 84). Instead, Kjellén hoped for a kind of ‘National Socialism’, based on corporatist principles – subordinating the class struggle to national cohesion and welfare (Stråth 2012: 28).¹

According to e.g. Lars Trägårdh (2002: 77) and Sheri Berman (2010: 162–167) the Social Democrats relied on a national narrative that portrayed Swedes as intrinsically freedom loving and pragmatically democratic. We shall return to the particular metaphor of the People’s Home throughout the book (see in particular chapter 3). What is noteworthy at this stage, however approximately one hundred years after the above-mentioned debate is that in popular memory today, the history has reversed itself. References made to the People’s Home are generally attributed to the Social Democratic dominance in Swedish politics after WWII and the art of social engineering of the Swedish society (Hellström and Wennerhag 2013; Persson and Arvidsson 2012: 181).

The Social Democratic parties dominated the social integration of the national state in Norway, as well (Sejersted 2011). The Social Democratic project, which seriously kicked off when the Social Democrats let go of their more radical Marxist aspirations (Berman 2006) – later in Norway than in Sweden – was fully realized when the parties seized governmental power and stayed in that position in the decades that followed the end of the Second World War: ‘During the 1930s to1960s Sweden and Norway became what has been called Social Democratic “one-party states”’ (Sejersted 2011: 5).

In Denmark, as well, the Social Democratic Party enjoyed governmental power in the post-war years, but has been less dominant compared to its Nordic counterparts (Persson and Arvidsson 2012). The early democratization phase, according to Persson and Arvidsson, much depended on the farmers’ movements and the strong ideological positioning of both Venstre and radikale Venstre (see also Fryklund and Peterson 1981). In Sweden and Norway the Social Democratic parties in the 1930s collaborated with the agrarian parties to realize their political visions. All in all, despite some obvious differences, the socio-political development of the three countries shares many similarities.

During the inter-war period, Nazi-style parties never came close to a parliamentary breakthrough in Scandinavia and the mainstream right was not influenced by fascism to the same extent as in many other European countries (Sejersted 2011: 76). Sweden, Norway and Denmark were characterized during the post-war period by high political stability, universal welfare states, similar party families and most parties being closely linked to distinct social groups (Demker and Svåsand 2005). Between the 1930s and the 1960s the party system remained essentially ‘frozen’ (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). These countries share many common socio-political attributes, thus a similar plot in which the national identity is being formed. The structural conditions are thus similar, even if they are not identical.

The Scandinavian Social Democratic parties from the 1930s onwards combined visions of modernity with ideas of economic growth and state interventions in the market economy – the Scandinavian model (Stråth 2012; Sejersted 2011).

The Scandinavian model of combining strong and active welfare states together with market economy reforms under Social Democratic governance constitutes the socio-political historical context in which the SD, the FrP and the DF operate and make their rhetorical claims. In terms of unequal income redistribution, Sweden has the lowest level of inequality in the world, while Denmark ranks fourth and Norway fifth (Kivisto and Wahlbeck 2013b: 11). The crucial issue is then how low levels of economic inequalities merge with an appraisal of diversity; not all the voters considers this to be a perfect match and this book focuses in particular on three parties who mobilize these voters.

After the Second World War the Scandinavian political systems were dominated by a five-party model and the building up of universal welfare systems by technocratic means.² In the 1973 national elections, however, both in Norway and in Denmark new political parties managed to gain enough voter support to gain access to the national parliament. The 1972 referendum on the European Communities (EC) in Norway and Denmark especially gave rise to new cleavage dimensions across party lines, corresponding to strong anti-statist sentiments (Hansen 2001; Neumann 2001).

According to Marie Demker and Lars Svåsand, who compare the political development in Sweden and in Norway, Norway has never really recovered:

The dividing line around the EC shredded the Norwegian parties in a profound and painful way, this rupture has remained in Norwegian politics and the political system has not been able to overcome it. … Also in Sweden the referendum on membership in 1994 led to convulsions in the party system. … This rupture could be handled within the frame for the established party system. (2005: 34; cf. Fryklund 2008: 299)

Today, all across Europe new political parties are challenging the established party hierarchies, politicizing new issues such as immigration and law and order that do not neatly correspond to the socio-economic cleavages between welfare and capital. It is thus not only the question of membership in the European Union that creates new challenges for established patterns of political competition; in more economically successful member states such as Finland new political parties can also mobilize voters around other political issues (such as immigration and gender) to gain electoral fortunes. Antonis Ellinas (2010: 26) makes, in this regard, references to ‘the socio-cultural shift’ in contemporary European politics. ‘New’ political parties gain an influence in European politics by means of politicizing so-called socio-cultural issues to challenge traditional party structures (see e.g. Bornschier 2012).

In the competitive space for voting support, then, Herbert Kitschelt and Anthony McGann (1997: 15) convincingly argue that the political space of electoral competition should be seen as two-dimensional, including both the socio-economic cleavage structure (welfare versus capital) and the socio-cultural (libertarian versus authoritarian values) cleavage structure. Their argument is basically that ‘the new right’ has established a niche in post-industrial societies, combining authoritarian views on issues such as gender, the environment and immigration with a market-friendly view on the economy. What has been referred to as a ‘new politics’ (Taggart 1996) thus operates along this particular axis, with e.g. the Green parties and the PRR parties, typically, representing the opposite poles (see e.g. Ignazi 1992).

In this chapter I will first briefly reiterate the development of the political systems in the three countries towards a (more) multi-dimensional political space. Second, I will focus on the historical legacies and chronological development of the three parties put under scrutiny in this book. Third, I will, in brief, discuss both demand-side and supply-side explanations given to explain the varying electoral fortunes of the parties in domestic politics. This chapter thus deals with the first discursive layer for national identity construction in the Scandinavian countries.

The Historical Context

At the end of the nineteenth century the Scandinavian states shared experiences of and suffered from a massive emigration to the United States. Processes of urbanization, political and religious demands against dissidents and a difficult financial and demographic situation for the natives triggered many people to move in search of a better future. By around 1900 it had been estimated that approximately one-fifth of the total Swedish population had emigrated to the United States in the late decades of the nineteenth century (Persson and Arvidsson 2012: 184).

In 1913 a governmental report on emigration (led by Gustav Sundbärg) was conducted in Sweden. The overall conclusion was that emigration must be halted through the improvement of social conditions (ibid.; Hall 1998). During this time, ideas of eugenics were popular and widely shared. In the founding of the international institute for eugenics in 1922 in Uppsala, Sweden, the contrasting ideals of scientific progress and cultural purity were politically sanctioned and ingrained in the social integration of national cohesion in the Swedish society (Hagerman 2006). After decades of free immigration to and between the Nordic states, immigration was sharply limited and, eventually, the problem of emigration was rephrased as a problem of immigration. In 1927 a new law on immigration was passed in the Swedish parliament, which made a restrictive policy on immigration permanent (Persson and Arvidsson 2011: 193–197). In particular, the immigration of Jews from Germany and, in general, immigrants from the Eastern parts of Europe were to be halted.

In 1905 Norway became independent from Sweden after a stunning victory for independence in a public referendum: 368,208 in favour, 184 against (Elgenius 2011: 117). Before the union with Sweden, during which Norway had a separate constitution, Norway had been governed under Danish rule since 1814 after the Napoleonic wars. It is perhaps not surprising, as Gabriella Elgenius (ibid.: 118) suggests: ‘The freedom-rhetoric of the 17 May (the national day in Norway, my addition) celebration was from the beginning positioned against the neighbouring countries.’

In the early twentieth century the struggle for national independence in Norway was inherently linked to progressive democratic forces (Sejersted 2011: 10), while in Sweden there was no such break in historical continuity (ibid.: 11): ‘One could say that Norway was democratized before it was industrialized, while the opposite was the case in Sweden.’ In the shared desire for economic modernization, the formation of democratic nation-states is deeply entangled with ideas of economic progress.

Despite these tendencies towards an increased acceptance of ideas of racial biology and an outright fear of immigrants from the eastern parts of Europe, no outright extreme party (communist, Nazi- or fascist) had a parliamentary breakthrough in the Scandinavian countries. In the 1930s the previously internationally reputable centre of eugenics and its founder Herman Lundborg gained less and less political recognition (Hagerman 2006: 382–383). Also the national socialist party gained very limited success, even if ideas of racial biology reverberated in mainstream society and among the mainstream parties – for instance all the parliamentary parties in Sweden approved the inception of the racial biological institute. However, if in the early 1920s e.g. the Social Democratic Party was divided on these issues, the mainstream parties clearly turned away from anti-Semitism and racial biology only a decade later (ibid.: 384–387; Norocel 2013: 140).³

As put by Kitschelt and McGann (1997: 123): ‘Rural smallholders stayed away from the extreme Right and could be co-opted into an alternative coalition that also included the labour movement and elements of the industrial bourgeoisie.’ Rather than a fascist or communist orientation of the modernist project, another political movement had a breakthrough: the Social Democratic movement. Accordingly, the Social Democratic movement had to attract voters from the cadre of the petit-bourgeoisie to create alliances so as to achieve governmental power (Linderborg 2002). In the consolidation of the democratic nation-states the worker movements in these countries mobilized supporters to, step by step, translate these demands into party political preferences. In the Nordic states it is obvious that National Socialism failed to gain significant ground. According to Sheri Berman (2006: 6), the ideology of Social Democracy was the most successful ideology of the twentieth century: ‘Its principles and policies undergirded the most prosperous and harmonious period in European history by reconciling things that had hitherto seemed incompatible – a well-functioning capitalist system, democracy, and social stability.’

In 1920 Sweden had its first Social Democratic prime minister, Hjalmar Branting. In Norway the first Social Democratic government, which lasted for only two weeks, was set up in 1928. In Denmark the first Social Democratic government, led by Thorvald Stauning, began its first period in office in 1924. The parliamentary turbulence was much evident in the Scandinavian states during the 1920s. From the 1930s and on, interrupted by the Nazi occupation (Denmark and Norway) and a coalition government in Sweden during the Second World War, the Social Democratic parties were dominant, not to say hegemonic, in the political conciliation of the emergent democratic states. But it is important to remember that the Social Democrats always had to co-operate with other political parties to maintain their governmental position.

In the decades that followed the Second World War, national politics was remarkably stable and constituted by coalition building and compromise making between the various societal interests. This was also a time of economic progress and democratic reforms to level the cleavages in the society. The immigration issue was, during this period, not salient and the demographic composition of the population was comparatively homogenous. The five-party model – three mainstream right parties (one liberal, one conservative, one agrarian), one Social Democratic and one revolutionary socialist – remained intact for a long period of time (Demker and Svåsand 2005).

Immigration after the Second World War

Since the second half of the nineteenth century, immigration to Sweden has been substantial. In 2011 the Swedish immigrant population consisted of approximately 15 per cent foreign-born individuals and another 4 per cent with both parents born abroad. In Norway approximately 13 per cent of the total population was either foreign born or had two immigrant parents. In Denmark, finally, a little more than 10 per cent of the total population was either foreign born or had immigrant parents. As we can see, Sweden has a larger immigration population compared to its neighbours. In total, the immigrant population in Sweden is almost twice the size as in Denmark and Norway.

Already in 1968 with the formation of Invandraverket, Sweden was institutionally prepared to deal with the integration issue some twenty years before Denmark and Norway (Brochmann and Hagelund 2012). On a ‘kindness continuum’, according to Grete Brochmann and Anniken Hagelund (ibid.; see also Lithman 2013: 255), Sweden is at one extreme liberal pole with an ensuing support for generous integration policies with Denmark on the opposite side (much more restrictive path) and with Norway somewhere in between. There is a fear in Norway that the country is drifting towards the Danish position and thus e.g. exaggerating the cleavage between the universal decency of the natives and the cheating behaviour of the immigrants (Lithman 2013: 257). All three counties belong to the upper strata – more liberal than authoritarian when it comes to attitudes to immigration and immigrants (see further Lithman 2013). The difference in terms of density has, however, a negative correlation with public attitudes, with Sweden having the most immigration-friendly population. As put by Yngve Lithman (2013: 252): ‘If there is a relationship between “immigrant density” and attitudes to immigrants, it is a positive one.’

None of the Scandinavian states are thus entirely homogenous, but the demographic challenges have provoked different political reactions. One of the reasons for this difference relates to the varying electoral fortunes and influence of the three nationalist populist parties put under scrutiny in this study. According to Brochmann and Hagelund, Scandinavia constitutes a social laboratory for how ethnic diversity is handled by previously more homogenous nation-states that nowadays have expanded welfare states and a more heterogeneous demographic structure.

In the 1950s and 1960s immigration to, in particular, Sweden pursued a policy to neutralize labour shortage in the industrial sector (Borevi 2013: 147). In the following decades, with increased need for assistance to the world refugee situation, Sweden, in particular, was among the industrial countries with the highest per capita intake of refugees. Recapitulating the integration diachronically, the adaption of immigrants and their descendants, in economic terms, in particular, was positive during the first decades after the Second World War, but has decreased gradually since the 1970s. This weakening integration has been much debated in the Scandinavian states.

It is my contention that in order for us to understand the electoral fortunes of ‘new’ parties, we need to acknowledge the historical socio-political context in which they operate, the first tier of the layered discursive structure. It is obvious that this entails, more in Sweden than in Norway and Denmark, recognition of the Social Democratic dominance in post–world war politics. Actually, no new party made it into the parliament. Not until 1973. This is also when this story begins.

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