Europeanization and the Scandinavian Model: Securing Borders and Defending Monopolies

Abstract

Although global authority is diffused and amorphous, European cooperation has created a regulatory regime with distinct ideas, institutions and modes of political bargaining at the regional level. European-wide norms of efficiency and market allocation contrast with long-held Scandinavian norms of redistributive justice and market intervention. According to Thomas Boje and Sven Olsson Hort:

in the self-concept of most Scandinavians, as well as among the majority of social science researchers working in a comparative context, the Scandinavian model appears as the most developed form of a welfare society. Societies which have a high level of equality and in which care-taking of the weakest groups in a priority, and equal opportunities for all social groups to work and achieve self-determination have been nearly realised.

(Boje and Hort 1993: 9)