Dear all on the Scandinavian Politics list,
Five brief notices.
1. We still have places for one or two papers in the panel proposal submitted to the organisers of the PSA CONFERENCE in Manchester next April (www.psa.ac.uk/2009). Do let me know if your interested.
2. A communication on POSTDCOC MOBILITY from Helsinki University.
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The Nordic Centre of Excellence: The Nordic Welfare State - Historical Foundations and Future Challenges (NordWel) announces mobility fellowships for postdoctoral researchers working within the research themes of the Centre.
The mobility fellowship covers a 2 - 12 months visit in one of the institutions participating in the Centre in the time period between 1 July 2009 - 31 December 2010 (please see the attachment for details).
For more information see NordWel's web site: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/nord-wel/
Call for Applications as attachments.
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3. No one will have failed to notice that the BANKS CRISIS spread devastatingly into Europe last week. I won't comment on the collapse of Iceland's three main banks, except to refer you to a nice, concise article in this week's Economist (www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12382011); and to speculate gloomily that, with those banks' debts apparently amounting to nine times Iceland's GDP, some very lean years are surely in store for the country.
Rumours persist that Swedish banks' exposure to the collapsed property-bubble in the Baltic states could yet land at least one of them in severe difficulty - although, interestingly, there has also been criticism that such rumours haven't been investigated more energetically by Sweden's economics journalists.
4. Danish party politics displays yet more instability, this time affecting the Social Liberals (insightfully chronicled, as usual, by Jacob Christensen, http://jacobchristensen.name/2008/10/14/amnitzb%c3%b8ll/). But it's Sweden where the fun has really been occurring recently.
Amind the financial crisis, some eyebrows were raised at the timing of a press conference on Wednesday October 8th, at which the Social Democrats and the Greens announced an alliance between them, with the goal of forming a full coalition government after the next election. Even odder, perhaps, was that this alliance was given a specific shelf-life - until 2020, to be precise. But the main talking point was the clear statement that the Left Party, the third member of the quasi-coalition of 1998-2006, was to be exluded from the alliance. This was because of the Left's refusal to be bound to the fairly stringent fiscal norms that all the other parties accept - a radical position that might be an electoral liability for office-seeking parties that were associated with it.
The reaction of the Left was predictably angry: its leaders repeated their pledge to vote against any government that excludes them, including a coalition of Greens and Social Democrats. But what the Social Democratic leader, Mona Sahlin, appears to have "totally misjudged" (to quote a Swedish political columnist) was the subsequent reaction from within her own party. From all quarters of the labour movement came furious protests that it was too soon to marginalise the Left.
Within a couple of days, and to the Greens' obvious frustration, Sahlin had backtracked. The government issue remained open, she said, and talks with the Left would continue. A year and half after becoming party leader, Sahlin's authority has been powerfully weakened. There are also serious doubts now about her cautious, ongoing attempts to nudge the Social Democrats towards the political midfield. And Swedish voters are little the wiser about how the three left-of-centre parties will present themselves in opposition to the governing Alliance for Sweden (whose four leaders have pledged to deepen their parties' co-operation) in 2010.
5. For anyone who's noticed a certain stagnation in our group's website, there are technical problems that I'm trying to resolve with the PSA webmaster.
Best,
Nick.
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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
