Small, distant and obscure, the Nordic nations have played a role in the development and history of the welfare state far outweighing their geopolitical, economic or cultural importance. Homogeneous populations, efficient, adaptable economies and sheltered circumstances combined to propel Scandinavia along a unique course of peaceful social and eventually social democratic development. However much foreign observers may admire this harnessing-together of prosperity, placidity and progress, other nations are unlikely to replicate the Nordic experience. There are few lessons in this sense here, but much interest in understanding what it is that has made the North one of the social laboratories of the twentieth century, however unrepeatable its experiments.

Among Scandinavia's unusual features, its social policy has attracted most attention, justly regarded as the pinnacle of achievement in these respects. The Nordic welfare state has assumed an aura of world-historical significance, founding its claim on a laborist or social interpretation that integrates this most recent phenomenon into a longer sweep of modern history. Descendant from theories of bourgeois revolution, the social interpretation of the welfare state is part of a conception of the course of European development that has for quite some time enjoyed the status of a standard. It regards the welfare states of certain countries as a victory for the working class and as evidence of the left's ability to implement universalist, egalitarian social policy on behalf of the least advantaged.