16.1 Introduction: Neoliberalization of Nordic Democracy?

The Nordic countries have a long history of being celebrated, by themselves as well as by others, as ‘models of democracy’ and, to a certain extent, they continue to be so today. The starting point of this chapter is the observation that the nature and characteristics of the ‘democracy’ championed by the Nordics has changed. No longer distinctively connected to national and popular sovereignty, public participation, social or economic equality, or civil society and labour market arrangements, Nordic democratic exemplarity is today increasingly associated with rule of law, individual and human rights as well as economic freedom. No longer a social democratic alternative, the Nordic countries are today excelling as exemplars of the universal principles of (neo-)liberal democracy that became dominant after ‘the end of history’.

There are always good reasons to be suspicious of claims to Nordic exceptionality. Nonetheless, this chapter proceeds from the idea that the Nordics shared a distinctive interpretation of the democratic ideals during the short twentieth century, the time that in Scandinavia itself has been labelled the Age of Social Democracy, the Labour Party State and the Golden Epoch of the Nordic Welfare State.Footnote ¹ This distinctiveness was not so much a matter of different constitutional arrangements, but rather of the ideas, beliefs and values that determined the boundaries of the political discussions, that is, the constitutional imaginary of the Nordic post-war welfare states.Footnote ² The Scandinavian anomaly becomes especially evident when one considers the recent literature on European post-war democracy. To be sure, like elsewhere in Western Europe, the democratic regime that emerged in Scandinavia after WWII was largely anti-ideological, corporatist, bureaucratic, mundane and male,Footnote ³ but it is less easy to see how the Nordic countries fit into post-war narratives of a ‘Christian Democratic moment’ or a ‘centre-right political hegemony’.Footnote ⁴ Above all, it is very hard to force Scandinavia into Jan-Werner Müller’s idea of a ‘constrained democracy’.Footnote ⁵ According to Müller, the lesson from the interwar period, the totalitarian experience and WWII was that popular sovereignty was perilous and that democracy had to be protected from being its own wrong. The solutions included rigid constitutions guarding the rights of the citizens on the one hand, and an international framework of treaties and courts that kept the national government in line on the other hand. Contributing to all of this was also a threat from domestic as well as Soviet communism. As such, it has been argued that post-war constitutionalism and the Western European engagement in human rights emerged primarily with the conservative aim of restricting the power of the national governments or even as a romantic quest for a lost Christian civilisation.Footnote ⁶

The Scandinavian constitutional imaginary of the post-war era was built on very different premises. The prevailing interpretation was that it had been the solid democratic traditions on the one hand and the progressive policies of the Social Democratic governments on the other hand, that had saved the Nordics from totalitarianism. ‘Constraining’ democracy was not on the agenda, as that would endanger rather than protect democracy. It would alienate citizens from the state and make it more difficult for the governments to pursue the progressive policies needed to protect democracy in the first place. In contrast to Müller’s idea of a ‘European post-war democratic settlement’, historians have therefore proposed a ‘Scandinavian post-war democratic settlement’ that could be understood in terms of a special ‘social democratic constitutionalism’ or a ‘popular constitutionalism built on a folkish heritage’.Footnote ⁷

Among the key elements of this constitutional imaginary was the idea that popular sovereignty was firmly in the hands of the national parliaments, while the judiciary was comparatively weak. Indeed, according to the Scandinavian legal realists, who dominated the theoretical discussions on the relation between law and politics in the region, the task of the judiciary was to assist rather than constrain the popular will, to serve as ‘rational technicians’ at the service of the elected politicians.Footnote ⁸ This firm belief in the primacy of politics over law was combined with the ambition to spread democracy across society, building on the traditionally strong position of the local assemblies in Nordic governance, but focusing as well on engaging citizens in a highly active and influential associational life. These so-called people’s movements (folkrörelser) did not form an alternative to the state, but served to connect the citizens to the state in an intricate form of ‘democratic’ corporatism.Footnote ⁹ Adding to this, there was also a strong egalitarian ambition connected to the Nordic concept of democracy, associated with the redistributive social welfare state.

The degree to which this imaginary differed from (continental) European ones is of course debatable but, more often than not, the idea of a distinctive Nordic version of democracy also built upon an explicit or implicit rejection of Europe, its political solutions and historical traditions.Footnote ¹⁰ Nordic democratic distinctiveness was legitimized by embracing national narratives of peasant freedom and Lutheran legacies, which were given much weight and specific and sometimes quite tendentious interpretations during the social democratic age.Footnote ¹¹

This chapter is motivated by the observation that many of these elements of Nordic democratic distinctiveness have been challenged or abandoned during the past decades, but also by the lack of not only empirical studies but also of theoretical tools by which this transformation can be understood in its specific political and transnational context. The notion of a constitutional imaginary can provide one such tool. To be sure, the constitutional imaginary of a society is per definition hegemonic, but it can change as a result of political crises, the establishment of a new constitutional settlement or a shift in political dominance.Footnote ¹²

There is certainly no shortage of literature on the transforming nature of Western democracy. During recent years there has been a virtual boom of books on the ‘crisis of democracy’, its ‘hollowing out’ due to the incapability of the traditional parties to connect with the citizens, the challenge from right-wing populism, or the democratic deficit of the EU.Footnote ¹³ Without diminishing the significance of this literature, this chapter will draw particularly on the bourgeoning literature on neoliberalism. One important reason for this is that neoliberalism in many ways represents an antipode to what the Nordic countries by virtue of their social democratic dominance and extensive welfare states have traditionally been understood as representing. Thus, to the extent that the Nordic democracies have been neoliberalized, it has been a paradigmatic shift in Nordic political culture. Another reason for focusing on the neoliberalism-literature is that it has arguably come the furthest in forging a historical perspective on the transformations of global politics and society at the end of the twentieth century. In a certain respect, this literature has even succeeded in bracketing ‘a neoliberal age’ starting at the end of the Keynesian post-war period and (perhaps) ending with the 2008 financial crisis.Footnote ¹⁴

The literature on neoliberalism and democracy is also quite large and growing rapidly. Thomas Biebricher distinguishes between analyses that point at a restriction of democracy under neoliberalism and accounts that focus on a replacement of democratic procedures with market logics.Footnote ¹⁵ The first category includes studies of how economic policy and the market have become insulated from democratic pressures through, for example, an increased autonomy of central banks,Footnote ¹⁶ commitments to various international treaties protecting trade interestsFootnote ¹⁷ or a juridification of democracy that commits and restricts legislators to pre-existing rules.Footnote ¹⁸ Studies in the second category point at the pervasiveness of neoliberal reason and value systems,Footnote ¹⁹ at the institutionalization of competition at all levels of society,Footnote ²⁰ and at the empowerment of the consumer on behalf of the citizen.Footnote ²¹

While tremendously inspirational, much of this literature is hampered by a rather one-dimensional normative ambition to criticise neoliberalism on the one hand, and by an ill-placed urge to forge rigid definitions of both neoliberalism and democracy on the other. At times, the concepts appear as universal ideas with a stable and unchangeable meaning, as ideal types whose realization in everyday politics always ends up as somewhat incomplete. The approach in this chapter is historical and constructivist. The aim is to deconstruct and operationalize neoliberalism as a historical process – neoliberalization – that has taken different forms in different political contexts. Transnational connections and influences were important but need to be studied as appropriations and adaptions to various local contexts and traditions.Footnote ²² Neoliberal ideas and policies were introduced with different intentions, purposes and challenges in the Nordic region, than in, for example, the Anglo-American world or in Eastern Europe. Moreover, ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘democracy’ are political key concepts – Grundbegriffe in the terminology of Koselleckians – that have been subject to continuous political controversy and struggle that cannot be separated from the history of these phenomena themselves.Footnote ²³ Indeed, studying conceptual change is a way of studying political transformation. As such, the main question in this chapter is not so much how neoliberalism is replacing or restricting democracy, but rather how the term ‘democracy’ itself has been redefined. Such a conceptual perspective is necessary in order to understand why and how neoliberals were able to present their ideas as a call for a democratization of the Nordic societies. It is only by acknowledging the arguments of neoliberal actors themselves that we can understand how and why the transformation of the Nordic constitutional imaginary took place.

All of the above-mentioned perspectives on the tensions between neoliberalism and democracy would merit examination also from a Nordic perspective and the literature is growing rapidly.Footnote ²⁴ This chapter, however, will focus on the key elements of the Scandinavian post-war democratic settlement and, as such, the principal hypothesis is that ‘democracy’ during the past decades has become defined less in terms of participation, interest articulation, negotiation, compromise and equality, and more as a set of fixed rules regulating the rights and freedoms of the individual. The argument is not that this transformation is unique to the Nordic region: similar developments have occurred across Europe and beyond. However, the Nordic countries form a particularly interesting case due to their continuous assertion of democratic exceptionality.

16.2 Redefining the Relationship between Politics and Law

The judicialization of politics – and of the concept of democracy – has become a central topic of discussion both in the Western world in general and in the Nordic region.Footnote ²⁵ The shift from politics to law is related to many processes such as globalization, European integration, as well as an increased attention to minorities and identity politics. Identifying the key actors is a difficult task, but during ‘the long 1990s’, there was, in the Nordic region, a growing confrontation with the idea of Nordic democratic exceptionality. The criticism came mainly from the opponents of the Social Democratic hegemony, but there was a wide sense among intellectuals, historians, political and legal scholars that something was happening with the concept of democracy. At some point, however, the idea of Nordic democratic exceptionality returned in a more juridified and constitutionalized form and was furnished with historical roots as legitimation.

The confrontation took place particularly after the end of the Cold War, when the Nordic model lost its legitimacy as a ‘middle way’ between capitalism and communism. Even more importantly, the accelerating European integration meant that the idea of Norden as ‘the other Europe’ lost currency, provoking a re-evaluation of Nordic democratic traditions. To be sure, there had always been a conservative critique of the Social Democratic hegemony and of the legal realist instrumentalization of lawFootnote ²⁶ but, starting in the 1980s, a number of liberal intellectuals managed to get more attention to their ideas than previously. In Denmark, Henning Fonsmark’s Historien om den danske utopi (The History of the Danish Utopia) challenged the Danish left-wing’s cultural radical monopolization of the concept of democracy, calling for a liberal alternative.Footnote ²⁷ In Norway, the historian Rune Slagstad bracketed the Labour Party state as a particular historical period in Norwegian political history, focusing on its statist ambitions and on its troublesome conception of the relation between law and politics.Footnote ²⁸ In Finland, the Social Democratic hegemony had always been weaker than in the other Nordic countries, but the young IR-scholar Risto E. J. Penttilä made a name for himself as a liberal intellectual by criticising Finnish statist traditions and by his attempt at re-establishing the liberal Young Finns Party.Footnote ²⁹ In Sweden, the reorientation was most closely connected to a criticism of the paternalistic and oppressive features of the welfare state. Professional as well as amateur historians delved into the atrocities committed by the Scandinavian welfare states, such as the forced sterilizations.Footnote ³⁰ Especially active was the market friendly think tank Timbro.Footnote ³¹

Across the Nordic region, the state was increasingly becoming viewed as a threat to the individual. Among legal and political scientists, there was a rising concern about the lack of judicial review, and the weak protection of individual rights in the Nordic countries, arguments that were inspired by and connected to the processes of Europeanization. More often than not, the proposed remedy was to cast doubts about democratic traditions and call for a Europeanization of Nordic law. The Swedish legal scholar Joakim Nergelius called for a stronger role for both domestic and international courts in the political system, welcoming it as a turn towards common liberal principles of a division of powers, whereas the Danish political scientist Marlene Wind criticised Denmark as a democratic anomaly where the parliament has exceptional powers.Footnote ³²

That something was happening to Nordic democracy did not go unnoticed by the contemporaries. In the late 1900s, all three Scandinavian parliaments commissioned large-scale public inquiries into the state of power and democracy in their nations.Footnote ³³ The internationalization of the legal system following the globalization of the economy in general and European integration in particular were central themes, but the degree to which this was seen as a threat to democracy was different in the three investigations. Whereas the Swedish and particularly the Danish investigations were more positive, the Norwegian one was quite concerned that popular rule was ‘cutting its wings’ with the shift of power from the domestic political representatives to the international institutions and their rules.

Now, it is certainly presumptuous to interpret the redescription of democracy as a sign of neoliberalization alone. At the same time, there is no denying that the idea of rigid legal constitutionalism, of justified limitation of parliamentary power, the appeal to inviolable individual rights to bind temporary majorities, are key elements of neoliberal classics like Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960).Footnote ³⁴ More recently, it has become part and parcel of the critical literature to point at neoliberalism’s preference for the judicial and executive rather than the parliamentary powers or even to propose that law has become ‘the code of capital’.Footnote ³⁵ Constitutionalism is a handy vehicle for forces that want to shield the market from democratic politics. In neoliberal experimental grounds like South America in the 1970s and 1980s or Eastern Europe in the 1990s, ‘rule of law’ became synonymous to a constitutional protection of individual and property rights.Footnote ³⁶ The globalization perspective is also important. As shown by Quinn Slobodian, cementing the rules of the global market in various international treaties and courts, thus protecting them from national legislators, has been part of the neoliberal agenda since the 1930s.Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, Honor Branbazon has argued that market principles and economic freedoms have, during the last decades, developed into Grundnorms of the global order.Footnote ³⁸

In particular, there is something to gain from connecting the Nordic countries to the growing literature on the uneasy relation between neoliberalism and human rights. Most famous is arguably Samuel Moyn’s contention that human rights, in focusing on sufficiency rather than equality, have served as a powerless companion, or even as a Doppelgänger, to neoliberalism.Footnote ³⁹ Jessica Whyte, in turn, has forcefully argued that ‘neoliberals’, including both the key intellectuals (Röpke, Hayek, Friedman) and key institutions (WTO, EU), have used human rights not merely in order to protect the rights and freedoms of individuals but the rules of the market economy as such.Footnote ⁴⁰ From this perspective, social democracy was as totalitarian as communism and (perhaps even more totalitarian than) fascism as it threatened the central values of liberal market economy. From a British perspective, Danny Nicol has even more explicitly made the case that human rights legislation in general and the ECHR in particular serve as a ‘constitutional protection of capitalism’.Footnote ⁴¹ Not only does he follow Whyte in arguing that human rights give neoliberalism a human face, he also suggests that human rights dethrone politics by suggesting that there is a law superior to, and beyond the reach of, politics. In practise, human rights serve as a rhetorical tool to justify the supremacy of international law over national legislation, which, according to Nicol, is at odds with the traditional model of British constitutionalism, which sees the parliament as supremely sovereign.

To be sure, these are uneasy arguments in times of Brexit-nationalism and populist rhetoric of ‘taking back control’ (not to speak of Orban’s calls for an illiberal democracy). At the same time, it is certainly the case that the idea of popular and parliamentary sovereignty as the core of the very concept of democracy has been an important part of British as well as Scandinavian reluctance towards European integration throughout the post–WWII-period.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, the first successful ECHR-case against a Nordic country was the Sporrong-Lönnroth case, which concerned property rights and targeted the ‘illegal’ expropriation of real estate. By conservatives this was celebrated as a victory over the legal realist tradition, which, according to some notable critics, had been in ‘secret marriage’ with Social Democracy throughout the twentieth century, and become acutely dangerous when Olof Palme’s government set out to ‘introduce socialism’ in the 1970s.Footnote ⁴³ At the same time, it would be wrong to interpret the Sporrong-Lönnroth-case parochially as the point in time when the European human rights regime finally arrived in Sweden. The case also figures prominently as a turning point in international literature, for example, in Danny Nicol’s account of how the ECHR has contributed to constitutionalizing neoliberal capitalism across Europe.Footnote ⁴⁴ The juridification of politics relates to the development of global capitalism and cannot be seen as a development peculiar to the Nordic countries, but it is certainly the case that the recent developments clash dramatically with the post-war constitutional imaginary in Scandinavia and with how democracy was conceptualized in the region in the mid-twentieth century.

The human rights perspective is crucial in order to understand how the critics of traditional Nordic democracy during ‘the long 1990s’ thought they were arguing for a democratization of Nordic political culture. For them, the idea of Nordic democratic exceptionality was built on forged premises and perhaps also on a misconception of democratic principles. As such, they called for an adjustment of Nordic political culture to the European mainstream. The human rights-perspective is also important in order to understand how and why the political left co-opted this idea of individual rights as a fundamental aspect of the notion of democracy. Human rights thrived as ‘the last utopia’ and as an attempt to resurrect politics on a moral basis after 1968.Footnote ⁴⁵ Rights-rhetoric was used by the left wing as a criticism of the technocratic and oppressive social democratic welfare state. Individual and human rights became an important part of not only the political rhetoric, but also of the political practise as domestic and international courts became sites where the interests of vulnerable minorities could be defended. Increasingly, and arguably more so in Finland and Norway than in Denmark and Sweden, the left tends to refer to ‘the constitution’ and to ‘individual rights’ in order to further their political aims. One explanation for this is simply that the left has embraced economic liberalism and scaled back on their ambition to replace capitalism with economic planning and public ownership, aiming instead to tame and manage it through legislation. Another explanation might be that the increasing awareness of the cultural heterogeneity of the Nordic societies (and the increasing de facto heterogeneity) calls for a more judicial and rights-based approach to democracy. The progressive and political welfare state was perhaps only possible in the comparatively (or blindly) homogeneous societies of post–WWII and at the cost of somewhat oppressive homogenizing policies. A final hypothesis for the left-wing embrace of a rights-based constitutional language is perhaps that it serves the conservative (!) aim of defending the welfare state in a period when it has been under prolonged relentless neoliberal fire. Indeed, there are significant signs of a corresponding anti-constitutional turn in the political right. In Finland, representatives of both the neoliberal and the populist right have denounced the left-wing opposition, as well as Human Rights lawyers like Martin Scheinin, as ‘constitution-Talibans’ that make political change impossible.Footnote ⁴⁶ Be that as it may, Nordic democracy is no longer, as it was during the 1960s and 1970s, associated with popular sovereignty but rather with a more constitutionalized notion of democracy, based on the notion of a strong protection of individual rights. Individual and human rights have become key parts of what we today consider the Nordic democratic tradition or the Scandinavian constitutional imaginary.

16.3 Transforming the Nordic Corporatism

It is often argued that associational life provides the best perspective for studying Nordic conceptions of democracy.Footnote ⁴⁷ Civil society scholars talk about a special Nordic ‘popular mass movement model’ characterized by high membership figures but by passive membership. The logic was representation rather that participation and, as such, the members trusted the association looked after the interested of its members in negotiation with the state. The aim of the voluntary organizations was never to challenge or overthrow the state but to connect citizens to the state, to channel interests and contribute to the progress of society as a whole. The relationship between the state and the organisations was intimate, to the degree that it was sometimes difficult to discern the boundaries between state and civil society actors.

This Nordic corporatist notion of democracy was also criticised in the 1990s. Critics argued that it was undemocratic that an individual could increase his vote or influence by joining these powerful associations and that the close relationship between the associations and the state was a system that was liable for corruption. Some even claimed that the Nordic statist societies lacked a conception of an independent ‘civil society’, pointing to the fact that, in the Nordic languages, state and society are often used interchangeably – a discussion that either was blind to or aimed at undermining Nordic corporative traditions.Footnote ⁴⁸ There were, of course, many reasons for the re-evaluation of Nordic corporatist traditions and for the transformations that it has undergone during the past decades – globalization, digitalization, social media, and so on. It is, however, also easy to connect this debate to the neoliberalism literature. Scholars like Wendy Brown or Laura Morales have argued that neoliberal rationality compels people to make individual choices like consumers on the market, rather than to promote their interests through collective mobilization.Footnote ⁴⁹ Of particular importance are, of course, the labour market arrangements. Scholars point at a diminished role of labour market associations following from the slow but steady decline in trade union membership, while the employer’s seem to turn their organizations into think tanks and lobbying organizations rather than as parties in a negotiation. Indeed, the traditional tripartite negotiation system, central to Nordic democracy since the 1930s, has in all Nordic countries been questioned and modified towards more decentralized forms of wage bargaining. Scholarship point at flexibilization, deregulation, decollectivization and decentralization as key features of neoliberalization on the labour market and that this has also been the case in the Nordic countries.Footnote ⁵⁰

At the same time, the neoliberalization of Nordic democracy has not led to a more decentralized notion of democracy, but rather to a strengthening of the state on behalf of the associations. The associations are no longer trusted to represent interests and to solve issues among themselves. Their autonomy has decreased. The state can ask them to carry out state functions, for example in the welfare sector but, in that case, they tend to be treated as corporations or social enterprises, not as grass-root movements with a democratic responsibility. When it comes to influencing key decisions on a national level, the associations are today more and more seen as lobby organizations, whose power consists in their direct contacts to leading politicians, not in the fact that they represent a constituency of citizens.Footnote ⁵¹ Democracy is no longer understood to be something that should take place across society, but rather in Schumpeterian terms as an issue for professional political elites.Footnote ⁵²

There are also good reasons to claim that the Scandinavian countries have largely abandoned the third and final feature of the Scandinavian post-war democratic settlement, the idea of democracy being closely associated with economic equality. The literature on the shift from welfare states to competition states is extensive and points at declining redistribute ambitions across the Nordic region.Footnote ⁵³ During the mid-twentieth century, many social democrats nursed the idea that their task was to develop the political democracy they inherited to a social and onwards to an economic democracy. With economic democracy, the idea was that the workers should not only be able to participate in decision-making in the industries but also, through the notorious wage earner funds, to gain ownership of the companies themselves. This idea was vehemently criticised and abandoned during the late 1970s and early 1980s.Footnote ⁵⁴ In many ways, the notion of economic equality has been disassociated from democracy during the past decades.

16.4 Discussion: Nordic Democracy after the End of History?

The aim of this chapter has been to discuss changes in the constitutional imaginary in the Scandinavian countries through a discussion of the notion of democracy. Using neoliberalization as a perspective, the chapter has argued that the democracy championed by the Nordics is no longer primarily connected to national or popular sovereignty, public participation or civil society and labour market arrangements, but rather to rule of law, human rights and political and economic freedom. To be sure, as emphasized above, this is a global development and as such not peculiar to the Nordic countries. Arguably, however, the transformation is of a more profound significance in the Nordic political culture, which traditionally (albeit to different degrees in the different countries) has prioritized popular sovereignty, associational life and equality over individual rights and economic freedom.

Moreover, while the focus here has been on conceptions of democracy within the Nordic states, I think that the general hypothesis also finds support in previous and ongoing scholarship on Nordic foreign relations. Studies on Nordic development aid, for example, suggest that there has been a shift in the way that the governments have understood the criteria of ‘democracy-promotion’.Footnote ⁵⁵ If democracy-promotion during the 1960s and 1970s was understood in terms of supporting national consolidation, popular sovereignty, corporatist structures and economic equality, Nordic development policies and projects have since the 1990s become a matter of requiring that the countries adhere to a pre-defined set of principles of human rights and rules for international trade.

How are we to make sense of this transformation? At a more general level, one could perhaps relate the redefinition of Nordic democracy to Francis Fukuyama’s infamous notion of an End of History.Footnote ⁵⁶ The idea that a particular notion of western liberal democracy in 1989 emerged, not merely as victorious, but also as a kind of pinnacle and end-point of humankind’s ideological development. To borrow from the French intellectual historian François Hartog: we reached the age of presentism where it was no longer possible to imagine a society radically better than the liberal democracies of the western world.Footnote ⁵⁷ Whereas the great ideologies of the modern period (1789–1989) were characterized by the utopian promise of a radically better future, human rights and the more constitutionalized form of democracy served more as a critique of these utopian visions, portraying the future more in terms of threats to the present. At such a point, it became important to cement the principles of the universal good in constitutions in order to protect them from future revisions.Footnote ⁵⁸

It is easy for an intellectual historian to overplay the significance of the ideational. More materialistically inclined historians would probably pursue the transformation of Nordic democracy in terms of an Europeanization of the legal and political frameworks in the Nordic countries since the 1990s, a globalization of the economy that has narrowed down the variety of capitalist systems or the dawn of a country ranking industry that has served to streamline national political horizons.Footnote ⁵⁹ There is, however, something to be said for the contention that the Nordic countries no longer purport to represent a different form of democracy; instead, they have become the countries with the best implementation of the universal principles of liberal democracy, the western post-Cold War doxa that emerged in the wake of the End of History. The Nordic embrace of human rights as a leading principle in domestic politics was part of this transition from Nordic democratic exceptionality as difference (and superiority) to exceptionality as superiority.Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, in 2011 Fukuyama himself suggested that ‘getting to Denmark’ was the ultimate aim for countries around the world.Footnote ⁶¹

Paradoxically, at the same time as western conceptualizations of ‘democracy’ were narrowed down to a particular form of liberal democracy, there was also a cultural turn and return of the Sonderweg-narrative in Nordic historical scholarship on the welfare state. If ideas of Nordic peasant freedom and Lutheran legacies in the mid-twentieth century had been used by Social Democrats to fend off totalitarianism and to legitimize social reforms,Footnote ⁶² they were now turned against Social Democracy and operationalized as part of an argument that depoliticized the welfare state and turned the Nordic model into a question of DNA. The cultural turn was operationalized to dismantle ‘the social interpretation of the welfare state’.Footnote ⁶³ The Nordic Way was no longer a result of partisan Social Democratic policies, but the outcome of longer historical trajectories and socio-cultural features inherent in the Nordic societies and, as such, it became possible to neoliberalize the welfare state in the name of the Nordic model.Footnote ⁶⁴

Finally, the normative lesson from associating human rights or constitutionalism with neoliberalism is usually to dethrone law and human rights as the ultimate manifestation of ‘the good’ by pointing at the economic and social inequalities it contributes to or is incapable of fighting.Footnote ⁶⁵ This has also been the purpose of this chapter. But the converse must also be considered: does the association with individual and human rights bring neoliberalism into a more positive light from a historical perspective? The time is probably ripe for intellectual historians to take the prospect seriously. There were undoubtedly some good sides to neoliberalism as well, also and perhaps particularly in the Nordic countries. The political message of individual freedom, the juridification of democracy and the rise of human rights have provided vulnerable minorities and individuals with strong political arguments and sometimes even constitutional guarantees and, thus, neoliberalism has contributed to the downfall of at least some of the abusive paternalism associated with the social democratic welfare state. Studying the transformation of the constitutional imaginary of the Nordic region, we should avoid falling into the trap of a nostaligizing a perfect Nordic democracy that never was.