The Present Crisis and Strategies for Renewal

Abstract

Whether a series of dramatic socioeconomic and political changes is taken as an indicator of a crisis in terms of disruption and decline, or whether such transformation should be seen rather as part of a dynamic adjustment process, is largely a matter for interpretation (Mishra, 1990: 15). The relatively slow growth in the public and private sectors in Denmark during the 1970s and 1980s can be con­strued either as a consolidation of the welfare state or as the beginning of its end (Amoroso and Winckler-Andersen, 1991: 32). However, the fact that there is always room for interpretation does not mean that we are delivered up to a theoretical relativism, according to which any one interpretation is as good as any other. For the disruptive effects of the political and socioeconomic events in the 1970s can in one sense be said to constitute an objective fact. These events could not be incor­porated into the discursive surfaces of the post-war settlement. New types of socioeconomic problems and political protest contested the habitus of the Danish welfare state, and revealed a symptomatic lack of fast and flexible response. Various counter-measures were launched, but a hard kernel of undomesticable issues remained, and societal dislocation was thus unavoidable.