Abstract
In 1965 the Danish writer Henrik Stangerup argued that ‘we are experiencing today in Scandinavia one of the most important experiments in world history’. ‘That may sound pretentious,’ he continued, ‘yet it isn’t. The Scandinavia of today is the world’s avant-garde society. What is taking place among us will happen in other countries tomorrow, as soon as they have reached a comparable level of freedom and welfare.’1 One writer praised Sweden with these words in 1970: ‘any book on Sweden’s social and economic structure tends to read like a paean of statistical superlatives. This would be wearisome. But Sweden deserves her reputation. In so many ways she is ahead of the rest of us.’2 This chapter will attempt to ask exactly when, why and how these ideas were influential within the British policy-making community, for as we have seen in Chapter 2, during the 1950s and 1960s confidence gradually drained away from the British ‘model’. Experts and decision-makers searched ceaselessly for some other and more ‘successful’ country to copy, and they often thought they had found what they were looking for in Scandinavia.
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Notes
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An Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project well summarised in R. Rose, ‘Ten Steps in Learning Lessons from Abroad’, ESRC Future Governance Papers 1, 2001, pp. 1–20.
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Advocated recently by J.S. Hacker, ‘Bringing the Welfare State Back In: The Promise (and Perils) of the New Social Welfare History’, Journal of Policy History 17, 2005, pp. 125–54.
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© 2012 Glen O’Hara
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O’Hara, G. (2012). Archetype, Example or Warning? British Views of Scandinavia. In: Governing Post-War Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230361270_3
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