Dear all on the Scandinavian Politics list,
Several items of interest.
1. SWEDEN'S BUGGING LAW. There's been British-style parliamentary drama in Sweden this week. A new law that permits the state to monitor all electronic communication that traverses the country's borders, even without any suspicion of crime, was approved by parliament late last night. (I won't comment on the symbolism of Sweden's football team getting torn apart by their Russian opponents at pretty much the same time.)
As you might expect, and as Jacob Christensen has observed on his excellent blog (http://jacobchristensen.name/2008/06/16/fra/), this law has been massively controversial. It has no visible support anywhere in the Sweden outside the governing parties (although it was actually the previous Social Democtatic government that initiated it). Indeed, several MPs from three of the four right-of-centre coalition parties threatened to vote against the bill. Departure from the party line by only four of them would have deprived the government of a majority. But several last-minute concessions persuaded all but a couple of Liberal MPs to support their government.
Among the many interesting aspects of this episode are (a) the threatened breakdown in parliamentary-party discipline, which is unusual in Sweden, and (b) the fact that several of the rebel MPs were both young and elevated up their respective parties' lists in the 2006 election by their high proportions of personal preference votes.
2. WORKSHOP REPORT. Last week a very interesting and, by all accounts, successful workshop took place in London. The theme was Political Outsiders in Swedish History. A report written by the organiser, Mary Hilson of UCL, is attached as a text file.
3. NEW BOOKS. Concidentally, Mary Hilson has just published a book on modern Nordic history that I suspect will be extremely useful for both teaching and research.
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/book.html?id=329
Equally useful will be a new edition of David Arter's textbook, Scandinavian Politics Today, which will be out in September.
Meanwhile, enjoy summer.
Best,
Nick Aylott.
--
Dr Nicholas Aylott, senior lecturer (docent) in political science
School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University College, Stockholm
SE-141 89 Huddinge, Sweden
www.sh.se/samhallsvetenskaper
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Political Outsiders in Swedish History
A workshop with the above title was held at UCL on Friday 6 June 2008, organised by the Nordic History Group (UCL Department of Scandinavian Studies), in co-operation with Lund University and Malmö University College, and with financial support from the Political Studies Association's Scandinavian Politics Specialist Group and the UCL Centre for European Studies.
The aim of the workshop was to bring together historians and political scientists to explore one of the fundamental assumptions about the so-called Swedish model, namely that Swedish political history is seen as having been characterised primarily by a political culture of compromise and consensus. Traditionally, the crucial turning point for the establishment of the Swedish model was understood to be the 1930s, when several historical milestones - notably the 1933 'cow-deal' and the 1938 Saltsjöbadsavtal - established a political settlement that was to endure for most of the twentieth century.
Recent historical scholarship has traced the roots of the model back to the Enlightenment or even earlier, citing the institutions of early modern peasant society as the forerunners of a distinctively Swedish political culture of compromise and consensus. Within Swedish historical writing, and within more general perceptions of Sweden, both externally and internally, the 'consensus view' of Swedish history has thus become established as a Swedish Sonderweg, and even to take on the characteristics of a national myth. However, given the apparent demise of some aspects of the model in recent years, a re-assessment of its historical roots seems timely, and appropriately enough, this workshop on national myths in Swedish history was held coincidentally on the Swedish national day.
The political outsiders discussed in the papers presented at the workshop were all outsiders in a double sense: they were often radicals in their own day, but they also stand outside mainstream Swedish historiography. Five papers were presented. Lars Edgren (Lund University) discussed the little-known C19th Lund radical Nils Rudolf Munch af Rosenschöld, drawing on his journal Fäderneslandet to examine links between democracy, nationalism, anti-semitism, gender and sexuality in a political movement largely ignored by Swedish historians. Irene Andersson's (Malmö University College) paper examined the women's organisation Frisinnade Kvinnors Riksförbund to present a more nuanced view of gender politics in the first decade of full citizenship, in the 1920's - a decade that many contributors discussed as a 'lost decade' in Swedish history writing.
Stefan Nyzell (Malmö University College) dealt with suppressed aspects of the history of the Social Democratic Party itself, taking as his point of departure the so-called Möllevången riots in Malmö in 1926. Magnus Olofsson (Lund University) presented work from his recent doctoral thesis on the rural protest movements in Skåne in the 1860s, showing how farm tenants used various forms of violent and non-violent protest to assert their rights against larger landowners. Finally, Mary Hilson (UCL) presented an overview of recent historiographical developments, emphasising the role of contingency in the development of the so-called Swedish model in the first half of the twentieth century.
Comments on all the papers were provided by two political scientists, Lee Miles (University of Liverpool) and Christine Agius (Salford University). There was general agreement that while it was important to acknowledge the often peaceful nature of Swedish political development seen over a long historical period, the role of conflict in Swedish society at different times should not be overlooked. Also the role of international politics in steering internal Swedish developments was emphasised.
The small size of the workshop (about 12 participants overall) allowed for wide-ranging discussion on a variety of topics, and useful parallels were also drawn with the other Nordic countries, Denmark in particular. The workshop was an excellent example of the cross-fertilisation and useful exchange of ideas that can arise from inter-disciplinary collaborations between historians and political scientists in this way.
It is hoped that this work will eventually result in the publication of a volume with the same title.
Mary Hilson, UCL
June 2008
