The Nordics have their own Alexis de Tocqueville. In the 1930s, a young American correspondent and later Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist named Marquis Childs undertook a journey to Sweden to examine the bold new experiment being pursued there in offering a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Not unlike Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French diplomat whose Democracy in America captured the spirit of the nascent United States, Childs's account of the emergent Nordic social model produced an unlikely classic entitled Sweden: The Middle Way (1936).

Against the background of a looming struggle between fascism and democracy, capitalism and communism, Childs’ short book chronicled the ways in which effective democratic governance could overcome ideological confrontation and deliver results. Through a detailed study of the cooperative system, Childs demonstrated how Sweden, and the Nordics by extension, fared between the “concentration of economic power in the hands of a few men” in the United States and “the trials and hardships in Russia”. While firmly in the Western camp, Sweden had somehow managed to intercept and absorb the revolutionary winds blowing from the East. The subtitle – The Middle Way – would become a cliché of centrist politics.

The book made a splash. At the time, the New York Herald Tribune reviewed it enthusiastically: “[It] reads like the best political news in years. [It] sounds gloriously like what we used to think of as American: a method of sane compromise and steady progress, each step tested by the sole criterion: does it work?” US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the midst of that most ambitious of middle-way kind of experiment, the New Deal, sent a delegation to Sweden. He reasoned thus: