At some indeterminate point in the fairly recent past, citizens and leaders of most liberal democracies probably looked forward to a condition to be realized in the imaginable future that we can, for the sake of a convenient label, call Universal Scandinavia. The basic features ought to be obvious: employment and decent housing for all, lots of leisure time and paid holidays, universal healthcare generous maternity provision, inclusion for people with disabilities, free education and universal childcare, freedom to form a relationship and maybe a family with the person of your choice (straight or gay), a woman’s right to choose, tolerance of everyone regardless of faith or race, political freedom and democratic elections under fair conditions, concern for the natural environment and so on. A vision of prosperity for all, even if some degree of inequality might be tolerated to provide incentives and so forth. This wasn’t particularly an ideal limited to the left (in fact parts of the left would have rejected it for something more robustly socialist) but could have been embraced, in its rough outlines, by everyone from the centre-left to people on the centre right such as, for example, Simone Veil.
Some parts of this radiant future even got built, to varying degrees, across parts of Europe other than Scandinavia, in places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand. A realistic utopia, in fact.
But
Today, alas, that happy crowded floor
Looks very different: many are in tears:
Some have retired to bed and locked the door;
And some swing madly from the chandeliers;
Some have passed out entirely in the rears;
Some have been sick in corners; the sobering few
Are trying hard to think of something new.1
Nobody currently thinks our future looks like Universal Scandinavia – and even in places where social democratic parties are in power, such as the UK – nobody thinks that they will advance even the tiniest step towards it. Rather, the likelihood is that even they will retreat. "Nice idea, but unaffordable."
Meanwhile, we are being treated to endless homilies from the pundits about how Europe is being "left behind" by a dynamic United States. We are sclerotic, hidebound, unproductive and lazy. There is hardly a column by Janan Ganesh in the the Financial Times that doesn’t rehearse such points, but there are official reports too, such as a recent one by Mario Draghi about the need to boost Europe’s competitiveness. Draghi is writing about the EU, of course, but what he says should be taken to apply, mutatis mutandis to all the other places that might once have aspired to Universal Scandinavia.
The rhetoric of being "left behind", though, the tacit appeal to progress and to a direction of travel, raises the quest of where that travel is to, particularly in the context of a United States that is abandoning democratic norms, where the judiciary is politicized, where women are being deprived of the right to choose, where migrants are being deported en masse, where fascist mobs are pardoned by the President, where opponents are threatened with state persecution, and where a new oligarchy has both acquiesed to and encouraged a fresh authoritarianism. And of course this comes on top of much longer-standing horrors in the US such as crippling health care costs, tyranny on the workplace, miniscule leisure and vacation time, a racist carceral system, frequent mass killings with guns, chlorine-washed chicken, corn-syrup in everything, widespread nostalgia for white supremacy, to begin a long list. Make your own, I don’t have space here.
The progress we are in danger of missing out on if we don’t pull up our socks is supposed to be towards growth and prosperity. If we don’t abandon the few anticipatory relics of Universal Scandinavia that remain, we will fall further behind. We need to do this for the money and for the relative position of our states in some global race. Except that, as in the case of the United States itself, the people being asked to tighten their belts now, to accept longer hours, shorter holidays, worse health care, reduced food and environmental standards, are not, on the whole, the ones who will get to see the money. GDP per capita might rise, but since that’s an average measure it is entirely compatible with all the benefits being harvested by the diminishing numbers of the highly advantaged, Meanwhile the professional middle class becomes proletarianized, even as its members are mocked as the "elites".
What of those other aspects of Universal Scandinavia: the possibility of poltical community, the availablity of art and culture, education and literacy, access to nature, opportunities to travel and the ending of artificial barriers between people, and the rights people enjoy as humans or as citizens? In fact all the goods that aren’t easily assimilable to an increase in per capita wealth and income.
One thing that has happened is that systems and institutions that are key components of a functioning social system have ceased to be considered as such. Either they have been reconfigured on the model of for-profit enterprises and expected to survive by generating their own revenue (e.g. universities) or they have been starved of funding in the interests of "efficiency" with short-term cost-reduction being very much in the minds of policy-makers but the cost of the long-term consequences — probably falling on someone else’s budget — not so much. The human beings who run most public services have often compensated for fiscal neglect by working harder and self-exploiting out of a sense of professional committment. But that has diminished over time as people feel like suckers, especially when treated as punchbags by politicians and derided by right-wing pundits. And while the state can often count on the professional dedication of people who were recruited and trained when there was a proper service they were serving, those people are ageing, retiring, quitting. Attracting smart and competent new people to work in education, criminal justice, social work and so forth is a different matter.
As for the rights our societies used to value for human being or for citizens well, many of those have been thrown away in Europe’s attempt to seal itself off from outsiders. (Universal human rights are inconvenient when the population has come to be hostile to people who might invoke them.) But relatedly, I think there’s also a sense in which the key values that define the non-economic aspects of Universal Scandinavia have been hived off by politicians into the accountability sink of human rights law.2 With treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights and laws such as the UK’s Human Rights Act in place, politicians can simply proceed as if those boxes have been ticked and no longer have to commit to the values that inspired those laws in the first place, protections being, supposedly, in place. The inadequacy of such an approach is illustrated by the UK’s various ongoing administrative scandals (Windrush, Grenfell, Post Office, Infected Blood) where the human-rights legal guardrails proved utterly ineffective but where a strong public commitment to the underlying values by politicians and civil servants might have protected the victims. There’s every difference in the world, for example, between being able to satisfy a court that nobody’s right to a family life has been infringed and pursuing the goal of making it possible to choose to have a family in reality and being able to satisfy a court that nobody’s right to a family life has been infringed. There’s similarly a vast difference between certifying that a building meets official safety standards and workng to ensure a building is actually safe.
My point here isn’t the argue for the full attainability of Universal Scandinavia. Indeed, I’m not unaware of the material, demographic, environmental and other constraints that we face, nor of the extent to which historic European prosperity rests upon the exploitation of others, past and present. It is rather that the very meaning of "progress" has been stripped of its, er, "progressive" content and reduced to growth in national wealth, income and power. British and European leaders are increasingly abandoning any positive vision of a functioning social system to which they aspire and which realizes human values and secures vital rights and freedoms. Even as the US regresses into barbarism and abandons all pretence at liberal ideals, it is rhetorically saluted as the future that risks leaving "us" behind.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Greg Koos 01.29.25 at 1:04 pm
I am involved with a few humanities-based not-for-profts. Your observation of a pre-demoralized incoming work force is startlingly true. It helps me understand the tensions between younger workers and older workers. Thank you for this insight.
PeteW 01.29.25 at 2:56 pm
Great post.
From time to time I irritate right-wing friends by pointing out that the Nordic/Scandi “socialist” countries perpetually score tops in comparisons of health, happiness AND wealth.
And that what they do is hardly rocket science so why can’t we all give it a try?
In response I either get disengagement or some hand-waving about how they are special cases due to unexplained or spurious reasons.
It gives me a nip of short-term pleasure. But when what remains of Universal Scandinavia’s (successful) economic model finally falls under the never-ending assault of a vicious, inhumane capitalism, what will be left?
MisterMr 01.29.25 at 3:16 pm
So, I skimmed the first pages of the Draghi’s linked document. Draghi is a centrist, not a leftist but not that right wing either.
In the document Draghi speaks of increasing “productivity” (technology), not directly “competitivity” (slashing wages and social benefits). In fact the argument is that we (EU) should increase “productivity” in various neoliberal way in order to keep the european “social democracy” alive.
It seems to me that the problem is that up to a certain point in the past (not really that close from my POW) there was an expectation of a growing pie, so the tensions about the distribution of that pie were smaller.
Now instead there is the perception that the pie is not gonna grow, so there is a much stronger battle to increse one’s share of the pie against other ingroups.
engels 01.29.25 at 3:53 pm
Agree with most of this.
I think “progress” today probably means “non-binary faces in high places” or “driverless cars on Mars” depending on who you ask. And I think you could say neoliberalism (or whatever is succeeding it) is a utopia, just (to quote Kafka) “not for us”.
Jeremija Krstic 01.29.25 at 4:25 pm
Scandinavian model appears to be a “corporatist” model, which is explained by wikipedia as “political system of interest representation and policymaking whereby corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, come together and negotiate contracts or policy (collective bargaining) on the basis of their common interests.“.
And then: “Corporatism developed during the 1850s in response to the rise of classical liberalism and Marxism, and advocated cooperation between the classes instead of class conflict.”
So, it’s a compromise model (most compatible with fascism, incidentally, but never mind that), designed to smooth things out to prevent a Marxist uprising. But these days Marxist uprisings are not in the cards, so good bye Scandinavian model, hello predatory capitalism.
Chris Bertram 01.29.25 at 4:50 pm
@Jeremija, no point in getting too hung up on the “Scandinavian” thing, it is just a a label I reached for to point to a kind of inclusive, somewhat egalitarian, liberal democratic realistic utopia. The sort of society that some British post-war (and into the 60s and 70s) might have presupposed as “where we hope to be heading” might have done just as well.
syd bolton 01.29.25 at 11:26 pm
Your references to Byron brought me back to another Hellenic poet, CP Cavafy, who also significantly influenced Auden. The principal trope of his most famous poem, Waiting For The Barbarians is that the barbarians are always imminent but never arrive and the collective fears, political upheavals, a ‘kind of solution’ all remain tantalizingly potent and portentous. Whether that is an optimistic or pessimistic potential is left ambiguous and serves everyone’s needs, be they for a scapegoat or a saviour. The barbarians’ failure to arrive is the poem’s calamitous moment. In contrast the barbarian Trump and his mob have not only arrived but taken the scrolls and immediately trashed and burned them, greedily grabbed the glittering prizes and are running amok throughout the city state. So what next? The Barbarians have arrived and they are no kind of solution at all. What does civilised society now do? It can’t invent another kind of barbarian (can it?). Is it slaughtered by the mob or does it join them? When the marauding stops and the barbarians are bored and satiated where do they go next? Is there a poem “After the Barbarians?”. Is there any kind of solution?
Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 01.30.25 at 1:37 am
The only reason the phrase “a woman’s right to choose” was ever used was because what it was a euphemism for was always extremely controversial. So we know that “citizens and leaders” can’t generally be said to have been looking forward to that. Maybe this applies to the rest of the vision too.
John Q 01.30.25 at 3:32 am
The revelation that it’s possible to build and operate LLM models very cheaply has eliminated a big lead the US had over China, but also over Europe. What’s needed most is not old-fashioned industrial policy (though that would be fine) but an alternative to the products of the tech bros, based in democratic countries (that is, not US or China).
As recent US entrants like Bluesky and Substack have shown that’s not difficult to do in many cases. Probably the most urgent is an alternative to Starlink. The EU managed that with Galileo (GPS) and could do it again.
A break with the US is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for renewed progress.
CHETAN R MURTHY 01.30.25 at 4:51 am
Chris,
I read your post and cannot but think about how vastly richer we are, than when we -started- to build that “Universal Scandinavia”. So vastly richer, and yet, we’ve decided it’s too expensive now? Yeah, that’s b/c the rich, the truly rich, have stolen the increase in productivity from us. I look at the UK, and wonder: is Labour going to ever decide to claw back all the money the rich stole ? Ever? Ever?
I guess not.
It’s not about “it’s too expensive”. Rather, “the money got stolen by a buncha thieves, and here we are, unwilling (not unable, but unwilling) to do anything about it”.
JPL 01.30.25 at 6:18 am
The notion of ‘progress’ should be thought of as describing an open-ended process, guided by ideals which we’re always falling short of, maybe less so than in the past, not as a “journey” (yuck) toward a destination, like a utopia. It’s not a straight line, but the general trend should be towards the ideal, which, again, we can never arrive at. The open-endedness is a necessary feature of the notion, just as in the notion of the scientific understanding of the world, ever since Adam and Eve ate the apple (to put it metaphorically). Science doesn’t end, and neither does the pursuit of happiness. So I would reject the notion that everyone used to look forward to a future called “Universal Scandinavia” or British post-war utopia, or at least they shouldn’t have been doing that, and I see no reason at all to give up hope of progress in the open-ended sense, in spite of all the complaints you raise. I disagree that the term ‘progress’ has been reduced to referring to growth in wealth, income, power and bigger yachts. Understanding is and always ought to be open-ended, and so should imagination. (And no, the notion of an ideal is not the same as the notion of a utopia.) Is it fashionable to be so cynical and defeatist, is that why everyone is so despairing?
Ken Lovell 01.30.25 at 6:50 am
Missing ‘*’ before the last paragraph.
Tm 01.30.25 at 8:47 am
While we are lamenting the murder of utopia by the oligarchic class, huge mass protests are or have recently been going on in countries like Serbia, Georgia, Iran, to name a few, Assad’s regime has finally been toppled. In recent years, progressive opposition parties won elections in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Senegal, Uruguay, Colombia, Brazil, to name a few.
People will not give up fighting for freedom and justice. We must not give up hope and concede defeat. The oligarchic fascists are a joke, they are insecure toddlers with no grasp of reality. This will not end well but it will end. We must not give up working for a better future.
Salem 01.30.25 at 9:05 am
I’m interested to know when this time was supposed to be. The gay marriage stuff means we are deep into the 2000s, but if no-one is saying “we can’t afford this,” we are pre-GFC. Maybe this was briefly true one Thursday morning in August 2007?
The vision of a positive future has always been as contested as the means to achieve it.