For the briefest of moments, four skyrockets, one in each of the Nordic colours, lit up the autumn night over downtown Oslo. The fireworks marked the opening of the grand finale of Nordic Nature Conservation Day on 6 September 1970.Footnote 1 For the multitudes watching the national primetime broadcast of the display taking place in front of Oslo City Hall, the red, white, blue and yellow of the Nordic flags existed only insofar as they took the television presenter's word for it. In terms of broadcasting, that is, Norway was still a country of black-and-white television, transmitted by a state-owned monopoly. The messages of the Nordic Nature Conservation Day, however, were anything but black and white – they were, in fact, multihued, and furthermore left at the mercy of too many stakeholders for any one in particular to gain control. The day was contested both in planning and execution.
Surrounding the Conservation Day was the European Conservation Year (ECY) 1970, the first international, state-sponsored environmental awareness raising project of a period later to be considered part of an ‘ecological turn’.Footnote 2 By the mid-1960s well-established concerns about local pollution and degradation of air, soil, water and wildlife had morphed into a global and even civilisational doubt regarding humanity's ability to preserve the planet. What came to be known as ‘the environment’ was emerging as an area of government policy as well, and environmental institutions developed at different speeds across the Nordics.Footnote 3 Challenging any reformulation of public policy, however, was the basic assumption of environmental critics that continued economic growth was simply incompatible with the task at hand. The post-war Nordic governments rested on a promise of growth and prosperity delivered by interwar class compromises in organised politics and in the labour market.Footnote 4 The main organisations for nature conservation had long been understood, relatively speaking, to be apolitical protagonists on behalf of the common good. Faced with the growing fault line separating those advocating economic growth from those demanding its suspension, governments and conservationist organisations alike found themselves forced into a transition threatening their fundamental principles.Footnote 5
When the ECY kicked off in 1970 it represented the fruits of five years of planning by the Council of Europe (CoE) and its eighteen member countries.Footnote 6 Lacking supranational powers the CoE settled on a non-binding ECY mandate which encouraged countries to strengthen their national regulations and coordination of environmental protection. Each country, then, was left to formulate and organise the ECY efforts most relevant to it. Denmark, Norway and Sweden established an informal intermediate level of coordination of their efforts as they negotiated the ECY concept with other CoE members. Subsequently, they coordinated their national plans for the actual campaigns. This intermediate level of organisation also allowed Finland, which did not enter the CoE until the end of the Cold War, to join the Scandinavian countries and strengthen the Nordic imprint upon the event.Footnote 7
The Nordic countries shared more than the effort to shape the emerging impression that humanity had placed its survival at risk. Throughout the post-war era their policy-making processes were all characterised by variations of the same corporatist system which helped define the notion of a particular ‘Nordic model’ of government.Footnote 8 The organisation of the ECY, nationally as well as regionally, came to reflect this structure at the peak of its post-war iteration. Whether the ECY was similarly organised in other countries with an inclination towards corporatism remains unexplored, but the combination of state and volunteer contribution appears widespread.Footnote 9
Recognising the corporatist structure of the Nordic ECY organisations is necessary to understand their function and eventual output. This article argues that nuances in the respective national institutional frameworks and practices of corporatism came to affect the degree to which governments sought to influence the presentation of environmental problems during the ECY. Consequently, the freedom afforded to those challenging the underpinnings of post-war prosperity and stability varied significantly among and within the Nordic countries at a politically charged moment.
This article begins by introducing key concepts related to corporatism and their relevance to the topic at hand. When it turns to Nordic Conservation Day and ECY the article proposes specific regional and countrywide interpretations to unpack the varying impacts of corporatism upon the efforts of governments and organised citizens to spread their respective agendas. A concluding section argues that the differences between the Nordic countries should be seen as a result of variations both in environmental insitution building and in the strength with which the states wielded their power through corporatism.
The Corporatist Exchange
Corporatism's basic characteristic is the structured representation of organised interest in policy making by the state. Its Nordic, democratic expression falls within what Philippe Schmitter has termed societal corporatism, as opposed to the authoritarian state corporatism historically associated with Mediterranean and Latin American states.Footnote 10 Peter Munk Christensen and his co-authors have provided a further distinction to separate two schools of research and their diverging conceptualisations of corporatism. The political economy school concerns itself with the shape of the state's interaction and coordination with organised economic interests and the pursuant macro-economic effects. The interest group school, by contrast, emphasises corporatism as ‘a variety of democracy more than a variety of capitalism’, opening the concept for research into any field of policy.Footnote 11 Whereas the first prioritises negotiations and regulations of the labour market, fisheries or agriculture, the second engages with the mediation of group interests in policy making by way of their inclusion in administrative bodies.Footnote 12 Favouring the latter perspective, Christensen et al offer a definition of corporatism which fits even the present article: ‘the institutionalized integration of privileged organized interests in policy making and implementation’.Footnote 13 A key contention of this article is that the building of an apparatus both national and Nordic for the purpose of structuring and executing a year-long information campaign does indeed constitute a policy process whereby organised interests were given privileged and institutionalised status. The distinction between policy and implementation captures the dual purpose of the ECY organisation to both plan and execute the programme for 1970. Throughout this corporatist process the contested object was knowledge about humanity and its environment.
The dynamic exchange of power inherent to corporatism presupposes a balance between risks and rewards to participants. PerOla Öberg and colleagues interpret corporatism as an institutionalised political exchange which presupposes that ‘the state offers policies of interest to the organisations which, in return, provide tacit consent, approval or active support of government policy that is of interest to the state’.Footnote 14 This article expands on the ways in which the items being exchanged might be framed or understood. Importantly, this exchange may yield more than the net sum of whatever is passed from one party to the other. In the context of political communication or marketing, for example, mere association with the credibility or reputation of an exchange partner represents value added.
Corporatism and Environmental Policy
A common denominator in the study of Nordic corporatism has been the changing legal and bureaucratic arrangements surrounding interest group representation and its impact upon policy processes. Fluctuations in the number of boards and committees serving those purposes have been equated with ebbs and flows of corporatism.Footnote 15 A reduction in the number of such bodies over the two or three decades leading up to the turn of the century has supported the claim that the less rulebound process of lobbying gradually supplanted corporatist practices.Footnote 16 The years studied here fall within the preceding era, regularly regarded as the high point for Nordic corporatism before the major changes and partial decline set in.Footnote 17
In the case of environmental politics, however, this periodisation needs nuance. The general assessment may hold true given that industry and labour kept their seats at the table even in bodies regulating environmental policy, but the national societies for the conservation of nature complicate the picture. Their role was in flux by the late 1960s when both the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SNF) and the Danish Society for Nature Conservation (DN) lost their legal status as interest group representatives in the public handling of nature protection cases. Bo Rothstein claims this was the early stage ‘of a rapidly moving downward spiral where Swedish conservationists were successively being manoeuvred out of decision-making bodies’.Footnote 18 Similarly, the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature (NNV) went from a ‘pre-bureaucratic expert body assisting a limited government administration in the 1950s, with an important advisory role and participation in decision making, to being reduced to one of many actors contributing specialist statements’.Footnote 19 In 1971, just one year after the state had entrusted NNV with vast ECY responsibilities, it was left entirely out of the political process, resulting in the 1972 creation of the Ministry of Environmental Protection.Footnote 20 The parallel is evident to Rothstein's observation that even while the Swedish state left conservationists out of policy and decision making it kept inviting them for informational and educational purposes. The Norwegian state fiscal budget for 1972 reflected this tendency in that the continuing and even increasing grant to the NNV no longer constituted a separate item but was instead lumped in with environmental ‘informational activities’.Footnote 21
Within the NNV itself, as well, ambitions to influence public opinion grew in relative importance over this period, in tandem with the development of a more vocal environmental protest movement.Footnote 22 The increasing politicisation of the environment entailed a struggle to define the field in public.Footnote 23 From a Swedish perspective, Anna Kaijser and David Heidenblad have argued that the growth in activism was in part enabled by the same establishment which increasingly shut out conservationists, as it offered them ‘something to rally against’.Footnote 24
The turn towards an educational role for environmental organisations invites a reconsideration of general historical perspectives. Research on the international environmental politics of the late 1960s and 1970s has tended to emphasise formalised commitment. Consequently scholars have been inclined to downplay or even disregard awareness- or competence-raising initiatives such as the ECY, viewing them as evasive gestures of lip service which came at the expense of real policy change. Such acts of communication have even been called ‘smoke’ which historians must learn to ‘look past’.Footnote 25 In one of the rare publications explicitly discussing the ECY within this field, Jan-Henrik Meyer similarly frames its significance in terms of policy consequences – in this case, as a ground breaker for the more policy-oriented 1972 UN conference on the human environment in Stockholm.Footnote 26 Instrumental analyses such as this should be complemented by investigations into the processes by which knowledge, in the sense of rationally founded claims about reality, have been circulated.Footnote 27
The greatest strength of the ECY was its power to focus attention at a crucial time. By favouring the analytical inclusion of agency, the corporatist exchange allows for a political history of environmental knowledge.Footnote 28 The complexity of agency is reflected in the stakeholders’ various motivations behind their ECY participation. Messages which appeared to contradict one another may have been tolerated or even encouraged because they still brought forth a common basis of understanding or shared knowledge: the environment had been inadequately protected against industrialisation and political action was needed.Footnote 29 Whether the specifics of one message were compatible with another was relatively unimportant when the aim was to demonstrate basic environmental awareness. Like the commercial concept of branding or the reputation management practices of nations or regions, the message initiator's desired outcome can be strengthened by an association with certain qualities or values.Footnote 30 For governments, this may have represented a means of acknowledging the popular demand for environmental protection while deferring decisions as to what that protection might look like.Footnote 31 For the Nordic conservation societies in their role as national umbrella organisations, the ability to integrate divergent views represented a necessary condition of success.
Organising the ECY
The ‘ECY is basically a starting point, and its primary achievement must be to create new attitudes’, said R. R. Boote, the CoE organisational head of the ECY, at its opening conference in Strasbourg in February 1970.Footnote 32 Boote's seemingly bland statement in fact foregrounds a number of ways in which the rarely researched ECY represents an event worthy of exploration. The ‘starting point’ hints at the broader significance of the ECY as a catalyst for international environmental cooperation and at the potential of its interplay with emerging state bureaucracies tasked with environmental protection.Footnote 33 The ambition to ‘create new attitudes’ hints at the development of an ‘ecological turn’ in the broadest sense, anticipating, for example, the oft-cited Earth Day in the United States.Footnote 34 The CoE even encouraged some form of corporatist partnership when it suggested that participating countries foster ‘long-term cooperation between the organisations concerned’ to achieve a broad commitment to nature conservation, and that they create the ‘consultative machinery required to achieve the co-operation’.Footnote 35 Directed to the diverse membership of the council, these hints and suggestions would have found more sympathetic ears with the Nordic countries than with many others.
The sometimes remarkable contradiction between elements in the Nordic ECY programmes was a function of the cooperation and consultation encouraged by the CoE and embodied by Nordic corporatism. In each individual country, as well as in the regional arenas, the bodies tasked with developing ECY initiatives brought together government officials and conservationist or environmental organisations. As a result, any tension between them was integrated into planning. Friendly cooperation notwithstanding, these state and non-state actors filled fundamentally different roles, complicating any ambition of streamlining messages.Footnote 36 The state represented the nation as a collective, by implication giving voice to consensus or, at the very least, to democratically decided positions. Activists, on the other hand, bore no obligation other than to fight for their cause and, by implication, work to the detriment of any opposing view. Interestingly, in the case of the ECY, the Nordic conservation societies were tasked with managing Conservation Day on behalf not only of their countries but also of the Nordic region. Yet, the ‘owner’ of the ECY remained the states themselves. The attempts at programme oversight that did in fact occur were marked by an interest in excluding certain views rather than crafting and pushing a specific message. Differences among the Nordic states in their message management ambitions are indicative of national variations in corporatist and bureaucratic practices.
Alongside the national processes to prepare and implement the ECY ran a track of Nordic cooperation serving multiple purposes, often rooted in the greater political context of the post-war decades. Nordic self-coordination within the CoE discussions about the ECY was formalised at a meeting of Nordic ministerial officials in Copenhagen in the fall of 1966. Making good on a Nordic Council recommendation from 1964 that the Nordics coordinate their land-use planning for recreational areas, they also decided to include the upcoming ECY planning in this shared effort.Footnote 37 Any sectorial utility to environmental officials notwithstanding, the overall political benefit of highlighting the Nordic community within the CoE and beyond it must not be underestimated. Nikolas Glover has identified the 1960s as ‘an era that saw an overall boost in attempts to actively promote foreign awareness of Nordic cooperation’.Footnote 38 Glover has shown how the Nordic pavilion at the world's fair in Osaka, which was also in 1970 and also presented an environmental agenda, was motivated by commercial interests.Footnote 39 Such official exhibitions differed sharply from the ECY in their reliance on centrally validated topics, images and texts. Moreover, the Nordic handling of the ECY was politically rather than commercially motivated – a desired manifestation of the political ambition of institutionalised cooperation. Contemporary difficulties in areas of economic or security policy inspired exactly these sorts of openings of new political frontiers as leaders sought to bolster the legitimacy of Nordic cooperation.Footnote 40
At the very least, any message of Nordic relevance would be aimed at domestic audiences. Nordic cooperation offered a safe haven in a political climate where cold war allegiances and the question of EEC membership sowed discord. The ultimately unsuccessful Nordek plan for economic cooperation is a case in point from the late 1960s. Whereas the Nordics were tasked with finding an alternative to economic cooperation and other aspects of their European commitments, Rolf Tamnes notes that Nordic cooperation ‘offered comfort for those who wished to avoid the agonies of making a decision’. Nordic cooperation appeared to denote consensus and harmony, having become ‘a powerful celebratory phrase’.Footnote 41 Grassroots mobilisation, as in the local organisation of the ECY, had often constituted a goal of its own for Nordic cooperation, as the social democrats in particular sought validation for a signature Nordic solidarity.Footnote 42
The conservation societies went along with the formalisation of Nordic coordination, but international relations were hardly their main concern. Looking back on his years of SNF leadership, Mads Segnestam said that ‘it felt more like some sort of luxury or a bonus granted for work well done that you were allowed to take part in international meetings, rather than a self-evident part of the solution to Swedish environmental problems’.Footnote 43 Even key government representatives in the environmental sector appear to have regarded Nordic cooperation as a sideshow at best. Lars Erik Esping, head of the Swedish delegation and the Nordic coordinator in the ECY planning sessions in Strasbourg, saw no need for Nordic references in his ECY start-up memorandum from 1967 where he presented his suggestions for a Swedish effort.Footnote 44 Olav Gjærevoll, the highly influential botany professor and former Labour cabinet minister in charge of the Norwegian ECY organising committee, was internationally inclined but with an Atlanticist outlook rather than a Nordic one. His May Day speeches throughout the 1960s demonstrate his consistent and urgently expressed loyalty to NATO and to the cause of European integration, to foreign aid and to the United Nations, with no mention of the Nordics.Footnote 45
In the autumn of 1967 the nucleus of the Nordic ECY coordination committee took shape, as delegates from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland attended informal deliberations on how to proceed. The occasion chosen to initiate Nordic ECY planning was the annual fall conference of the SNF. Each country sent one government delegate and one representative of the national conservation societies. The SNF's invitation was extended ‘in consultation with’ the Swedish conservation authorities and even enclosed a government memo on Esping's behalf. Further highlighting the corporatist partnership, the SNF handled the minutes from the deliberations, de facto serving as an administrative arm for an undertaking initiated by the national governments in the Nordic Council.Footnote 46 Thus emerged the corporatist side of the ECY at the Nordic level.
The CoE member countries each established a national committee for the ECY. Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway all invited dozens of volunteer associations and state agencies, as well as business and trade organisations, onto their national committees.Footnote 47 These committees were all headed by the nation's prime minister or a cabinet member. Formally reporting to this committee in each country, and in reality running its day-to-day operation relatively independently, was an executive committee with a secretariat which was led by a scientist or official trusted by the government. In Norway, this individual was Professor Olav Gjærevoll, serving chairman of the clearly corporatist Nature Conservation Council and, by 1972, his country's first minister of environmental protection. His Danish counterpart was Sten Bjerke, head of nature and landscape conservation in the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and a former forester. The Swedish leader was Lars Erik Esping, a head of department in Sweden's recently established Environmental Protection Agency (SNV) and a former ten-year secretary general of the SNF. In Finland, the leader was Reino Kalliola, a state nature protection inspector who differed from his executive committee leadership peers in his lack of administrative support at home, where his office consisted of only one other civil servant.Footnote 48 Although the politician and scientist Gjærevoll enjoyed a freer role than the three career civil servants, he too represented loyalty to the state apparatus and a moderate strand of activism seeking to work within the system. The office assisting Gjærevoll in his other role as chairman of the Nature Conservation Council was in fact the same ministerial department that ran the government's nature conservation operations.Footnote 49
All four states included conservationist societies, other NGOs and non-state experts on the executive committees and their several subcommittees. Among the three Scandinavian countries the ECY secretariats differed in their proximity to the government. Norway was aligned closest to the conservationists – Gjærevoll's ECY secretariat was physically detached from ministerial officials and in fact shared office space with the NNV national headquarters. The executive committee's full-time secretary, Per Valset, came from the private sector.Footnote 50 When the ECY closed shop after 1970 Valset stayed behind and joined the NNV's administration, his first year's salary fully funded by a special allocation in the NNV state subsidy.Footnote 51 The ministry also calculated that official ECY programme items could piggyback on state funds that Gjærevoll's ECY secretariat, itself state funded, would help the NNV apply for and carry out in the NNV's name. In a sense, as Vilde Paalgard has observed in her analysis of the ECY in Norway, the arrangement would mean a turning of the tables, whereby the official secretariat came to serve a private association rather than the other way around.Footnote 52
In Denmark and Sweden, the secretariats remained in-house government operations. In the early planning, the managing director of the Danish Society for Nature Conservation had suggested that his organisation take on the administration of the ECY, and that its chairman, Vald Mikkelsen, also be appointed chairman of the Danish ECY executive committee.Footnote 53 Bjerke, on the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, evidently declined, taking the chairmanship for himself and appointing as his chief secretary an experienced civil servant, Pierre Bigandt. In Sweden, where an environmental administration was already in place, there was little need to establish an alternative headquarters. Helge Jonsson shifted over from his editorial position at the Swedish state broadcasting corporation (SVT) to take up the position as Esping's chief aide, then stayed on as the SNV press secretary after 1970.Footnote 54
Mobilised Contrasts
As opposed to the four Nordic skyrockets which opened the Oslo ceremony, the spectacular fireworks display that marked its end should be taken as symbolic of the ‘message’ of the Nordic Conservation Day – one of force, presence and relevance but not unanimity or clarity of direction. This message appears to have been intended. Even the main component of the Conservation Day event was inherently decentralised: more than six hundred beacons on rocks and hilltops throughout Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden were lit in succession to form four chains all leading into Oslo. With each beacon in turn, local authorities and voluntary associations played a ceremonial part, conveying their own agenda for the event.
The Oslo organisers had planned for and encouraged a torchlight march ‘by nature-interested youth’ to colour the downtown streets and to be met in front of City Hall by the climactic Nordic bonfire where the beacon chains converged. A PR consultant for the NNV wrote in an internal memo a month before the event that the march would ‘make a strong visual impact and strike a connection with the beacon relay’.Footnote 55 Strict demands were set for the march in terms of television requirements for its presentation and timing, but exactly what the marching youth should shout, sing or display on banners was deliberately left open, aside from the prohibition of ‘foreign policy slogans, personal attacks or pure party politics’.Footnote 56 The assumption that nature conservation could be apolitical reflected the general tendency in the Norwegian ECY to prioritise agenda setting and awareness raising over the propagation of particular solutions. Tighter restrictions might have fractured the organising coalition and threatened the overarching message that nature conservation must be embraced by all.
At some point the organisers must have accepted the fact that the torchlight march would turn into a full-on political demonstration. A mere month after its rise to national fame through the Mardøla hydropower development protest, a loose-knit deep-ecology activist organisation called the ‘Cooperative Groups for Nature and Environmental Protection’ (snm) remained entrusted with handling the march.Footnote 57 The Mardøla protest came to define environmentalism in Norway, Peder Anker notes, with resistance to hydropower developments as the key to distinguishing ‘friends from foes’.Footnote 58 Enlisting youth from emerging activist hotbeds such as the downtown Oslo Cathedral School in its planning, the snm helped transform the torchlight march into a seemingly never-ending procession of banners bearing the names of waterfalls and rivers soon to be known as shorthand for some of the most contentious issues in Norwegian politics in the 1970s.Footnote 59
The less politicised commentary of the live television broadcast noted that ‘the march includes people from all parts of the country and of all ages’ but stumbled by labelling the folkdance performances and formal proclamations of the subsequent ceremony a ‘celebration . . . or a demonstration’. The march indeed resonated with the visuals of the beacons, but even more so with the beacons’ ancient message of resistance. Paradoxically, the fresh veterans of Mardøla were received in front of City Hall not only by the state's official Conservation Day celebration but by full-dress Royal Guardsmen, potent symbols of the government which had forcibly ended the snm's high-profile civil disobedience protest in the northwest mountains the week before.Footnote 60 Activists and authorities contested the symbols of the state, region and nature itself, bringing their own most pressing issues rather than those most likely to reflect a national or regional consensus. The folk dancer in Oslo who was asked to make a solemn declaration ‘on behalf of all youth’ had been retained on the dubious assumption that this population spoke as one. The absurdity of assuming that young people in an era of upheaval would gather around any common message at all manifested itself on the surrounding streets among the approaching torches. Organised to convey unity, the event facilitated discord.
By representing the nexus of the four Nordic beacon lines, the Oslo ceremony was unique, but the hundreds of local Conservation Day events across the Nordics present interesting comparisons nevertheless. The sheer diversity of their messages betrays the priority given to mobilisation and numbers over message control. In Denmark those attending the lighting of beacons would hear the same brief Nordic declaration which was read at every other site, but, depending on where they lived, they would also hear other kinds of speeches by local notables such as vicars, headmasters and even a chief veterinary surgeon.Footnote 61 In Norway attendees would hear politically elected mayors, a deputy county gardener, natural scientists and passionate reporters injecting opinion into their coverage. ‘The nature we have today is a loan only’, one insisted.Footnote 62 In Sweden, organisers specifically left the details and messages of the hundreds of conservation day events to local trios representing the SNF, a scout federation and an outdoors association.Footnote 63
Diversity and Control
Understood as a political campaign, the scattershot event that was Conservation Day could be read as failure. Yet a closer study of the organisation and motivation behind the ECY suggests that the mixed messages were welcomed, tolerated and perhaps sometimes ignored. The disregard for message discipline on Conservation Day in Oslo was matched in full by the Danish ECY organisers, their ministry-centralised planning notwithstanding. Structural similarities such as those between the Swedish and Danish authorities’ in-house secretariats, that is, are poor anticipators of the degree of freedom awarded to the contributing partners in each country. Sweden's organising committee appears to have kept a shorter leash, even sometimes denying official status to activities deemed excessively controversial. The enlistment of partners as well as the handling of internal controversy sheds light on the ways the corporatist exchange of the ECY affected the central programming in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
All three countries based their ECY effort on the idea that members of the national committee would contribute programme items of their own. Across the Nordics, and in highly similar ways, including coordination with local military officials, civil organisations bore particular responsibility for planning and implementing Conservation Day on a grassroots level. Municipal functions including renovation and cultural heritage administration invited attention from local authorities. State broadcasters cooperated by airing specially produced documentaries.Footnote 64 The executive committees all identified schools as a crucial arena, ensuring the production of relevant teaching plans. Interestingly, the method of both preparing and circulating materials for schools differed in ways that reflect the overall differences among the national ECY organisations. In Denmark the production of a week-long plan dedicated to nature and its protection was delegated to a group led by a representative of the main teachers’ union. The teacher travelled the country introducing the plan on behalf of the Danish ECY.Footnote 65 Such independence strikes a contrast with Sweden, where planning for a similar teaching week was taken over by an existing state study group assembling a wider environmental curriculum.Footnote 66 Much the same way the Swedish ECY itself was integrated into the existing environmental protection bureaucracy, school outreach was tied to the state education board, whose executive committee representative also chaired the youth and education subgroup.Footnote 67 The Norwegian education subgroup was chaired by a conservation-friendly biology lecturer from a teacher's college in Oslo, who himself produced six slide shows with taped commentary for schools, as well as television, and a booklet for teachers with suggestions for classwork on natural protection.Footnote 68 Thus, similarities across the Nordics are apparent in the common choice to engage large institutions by way of corporatist partnerships, yet clear dissimilarities appear in the willingness of central bodies to streamline contents, both in relation to schools and in a wider sense.
Denmark's national ECY committee encouraged and funded a highly divergent set of political and aesthetic items. Most remarkable in their diversity were the many subcommittees tasked with specific outreach or event programmes. Participating organisations were more or less allowed to run free with crafting their messages. An illustrative and high-profile example from early 1970 was the ECY exhibition at the Camping 70 fair in Copenhagen, allegedly the largest of its kind to appear in Scandinavia. The official opening ceremony was marred by a clash between the Danish minister of culture, Kristen Helveg Petersen, and William Horsten, the secretary of the Outdoor Council, an umbrella NGO representing dozens of environmental and recreational associations. The council secretary expressed his true feelings to expose the obvious but often suppressed political tensions inherent in the topic at hand. According to a reporter at the scene, Horsten ‘made use of his podium time to attack the authorities so fiercely’ that the minister ‘had to abandon his prepared remarks and instead answer for his ministry’.Footnote 69 However strong the disagreement over policy, however, the Outdoor Council remained close to the centre of Denmark's ECY plans, receiving state funds for the production of brochures and holding a seat on the executive committee.Footnote 70
Among the caravans and tents at Camping 70 the Danish ECY committee had paid for space not only for Horsten's council and for government entities but also for displays by the DN and the far more rebellious NOAH. NOAH had been established the year before by students and scholars from the natural sciences and it occasionally ridiculed the mainstream DN.Footnote 71 The inclusion of NOAH in the Danish ECY executive committee came only months after the group's establishment and on the personal recommendation of committee chairman Sten Bjerke.Footnote 72 A pervasive tone of irreverence helped accentuate NOAH's political radicalism and sense of urgency. Following the DN's announcement of an ECY photo contest headlined ‘Man and nature’, NOAH launched a spoof contest under the alternative headline ‘Man pollutes nature’, with a prize of zero kroner.Footnote 73 On the opening day of an exhibition by NOAH, attended by the mayor, in the capital's City Hall, the same NOAH also presented a nearby chemical factory with a ‘Turd Prize’ for pollution.Footnote 74 The following day the marble halls of a suburban library were put to use by residents invited by NOAH to ‘bring their own material’ to a ‘spoil-it-yourself exhibition’.Footnote 75 Its confrontational activism notwithstanding, NOAH received substantial public funds from the ECY committee for the travelling exhibition and for a widely read book based on its contents, as well as for travel and expenses with the official Danish delegation to the CoE conference celebrating the ECY.Footnote 76
An abiding lack of commitment to any central message followed naturally from a lack of funds in the Danish ECY committee. Voluntary work was a necessity to pull off the ECY at all, the daily Politiken reported. Said the minister of culture: ‘I applied for more funds for conservation year events, but now we have to make the money count’.Footnote 77 The minister's personal dislike for centralised control may have contributed to his leniency.Footnote 78 The independence afforded to NOAH was shared by other external organisations which received Danish funding as well. A renowned scout leader received a grant to organise four island youth camps to teach participants about cultural heritage management while experiencing the simple life of the outdoors.Footnote 79 The youth camp format adopted aesthetic, practical and democratic traits from the concurrent ‘hippie camps’ consuming Danish newspapers during the same months, with some reporters blurring the lines between the two camp formats and portraying both as representing youthful rebellion, social criticism and environmental activism, sometimes even with a certain sexual innuendo.Footnote 80 Perhaps in the interests of a semblance of balance among the external parties invited to act on the government's behalf, the pro-EEC Europabevægelsen received monthly direct payments for administrative services to the ECY secretariat for half a year.Footnote 81 The organisation's chairman at the time was a centrist, pro-NATO Social Democrat known to disfavour the leftward turn of his party, as well as of society more broadly.Footnote 82
Contrasting with the Danish diversity of expression was the comparably tight regulation of programme access of the Swedish organisers. Corporatism allowed for both models. Whereas the Danish appeared to delegate more responsibility to various outside participants, the Swedish kept their decision making closer to the centre and to state and industry actors. Rothstein's observation that Swedish conservationists and activists were enlisted for educational purposes holds true, in that they were relied on to do the legwork around the country rather than to craft strategy and make decisions. In particular, this tendency came to light in the executive committee's subgroup for media and public relations. The Swedish media group stood apart from its Danish and Norwegian counterparts in its mandate to supervise the contents of projects displaying the official ECY emblem.
The manning of the media subgroup itself betrayed its burgeoning hostility to provocation and radicalism. Among its most influential voices was the Swedish National Federation of Industry's chief of information, Anders Pers, who was entrusted with the task of outlining an ECY media plan for the group's initial meeting. Other members of the subgroup represented government agencies, agricultural producers, Swedish national radio, the Swedish Tourist Association and the temperance movement. The leader of the main conservationist organisation (SNF) was already serving in a subgroup tasked with local events, including Conservation Day; in the media group, there were no conservationists.
Well into planning, late in the summer of 1969, the media group suggested for itself a role as a ‘normative and coordinating body’ for all informational matters pertaining to the official ECY programme. All publications, posters, films, lectures, conference programmes and exhibitions were to be evaluated for their general objectivity before being approved for inclusion in the national ECY programme. In public one-way communications, a group memo argued, ‘the recipient is practically without any possibility of getting their questions answered. It is a condition of the ECY's success that objectivity is maintained within each separate project’. The memo went on to specify that this dictate precluded any attempt at achieving balance by having two different projects present divergent views, as it would be unrealistic to reach each audience member with both of them.Footnote 83
Exhibitions in particular came to absorb the group's attentiveness to perceived imbalances. A planned travelling exhibition within the official national programme, said to take a ‘radical, debating and controversial’ shape, occasioned a rapid application of the rules which had just been put in place.Footnote 84 The media group ‘emphasised that exhibitions . . . be crafted in a manner such that they do not cause conflict between opposing interests’.Footnote 85 The group's chairman repeated his argument to the executive committee, tying it directly to the pressure for consensus brought about by the corporatist structure of the Swedish ECY organisation: ‘one should consider the nuanced composition of the [ECY] national committee in the choice of programme items’, he insisted.Footnote 86 The exhibition, Miljö för miljoner, was then required to undergo factchecking before being approved for the programme. Upon receiving the material for consideration, however, Esping responded that time had grown too short to accommodate this process. In any case, he saw several other problems which forced him to deny the exhibition a spot in the programme: ‘The presentation of contents appears far too biased. . . . It would be more in line with the ECY intentions and in tune with the other features within the ECY frame if the exhibition had pointed to concrete solutions’ (emphasis in original). Esping went on to add that it would have been reasonable to ‘let all concerned parties make themselves heard’.Footnote 87
Esping's decision recalls what Glover calls a centripetal communicative ideal in his analysis of contemporary corporatist image building efforts on behalf of Sweden abroad. Glover finds state and industrial actors’ emphasis on a centrally managed message to be fundamentally at odds with the growing pressure from activists and intellectuals to embrace whatever conflict and disharmony a decentralised and more provocative campaign would create. Such a centrifugal communicative ideal, again in Glover's terms, presupposed public participation and debate, as did the rejected travelling exhibition. Esping and the media subgroup's demands for balance and objectivity make sense with regard to a centrally crafted message of compromise but relatively little sense with regard to any effort to provoke the exchange of divergent views among the audience.
In fact, the handling of exhibitions directly ties together the centripetal promoters described by Glover with their kindred spirits in the ECY media group. Pers, who was part of the Swedish Industry Federation and a former director of the Swedish information office in New York, took part in both.Footnote 88 A few months before the ECY media group gained its new supervisory role, the national promoters had been shocked by the critical messages of an exhibition they had commissioned for the opening of a ‘Sweden house’ in downtown Stockholm. They first postponed, then cancelled, the exhibition after opening it for a single day.Footnote 89 Pers contributed to the organisers’ failed attempt to avoid embarrassment.Footnote 90 When the ECY media group met at the height of the Sweden house conflict and just before the ultimate cancellation, Pers was present and accepted the task of drafting the guidelines which would later help the ECY reject the Miljö för miljoner exhibition.Footnote 91 Most likely the on-going Sweden house debacle and the ensuing press coverage informed his decision with the rest of the media group to tighten control.
Following formal approval of the new guidelines, the Swedish ECY secretariat even took care to pass them on to its Nordic partners. ‘As you surely know there are examples of exhibitions in this country that have hardly fulfilled their intended purpose. . . . This is one of the reasons we want some degree of “management” of our public outreach’, the members wrote to the DN. The Swedish message of ‘consideration for the total public relations aspect of the campaign’ does not appear to have made a substantial impact on other Nordic countries, however.Footnote 92
In Norway the lack of message coordination on Conservation Day reflected the substantial freedom given to participants in the national ECY apparatus. As was the case in Denmark and Sweden, the Norwegian executive committee delegated tasks to a set of subgroups, but there was no established clearinghouse comparable to that of the Swedish media group. On the contrary, the activist, writer and editor Ragnar Frislid of the NNV was handed the role of ‘producer’ of the Norwegian ECY, turning out books, a correspondence course, movies and exhibition plans. Along with the NNV secretary general he also drafted the budget on which the authorities based their allocation of public money.Footnote 93
The dominant positioning of Frislid and the conservationists caused little friction until the increasingly divisive topic of hydropower development could no longer be suppressed in the Norwegian executive committee meetings. The only committee member playing a part reminiscent of the industry friendly role of Pers in Sweden was Harry Bjerkebo, a director of the generally pro-development Norwegian Water and Electricity Authority (NVE).Footnote 94 Late in 1969 the widening differences of opinion between the conservationists and Bjerkebo prompted him to protest the official ECY sponsorship of Frislid's book Mennesket i naturen, which Bjerkebo accused of being scientifically unsound and casting undue suspicion on an entire industrial sector. Bjerkebo asked for stronger oversight, whereas Frislid had been allowed to roam free, being required only to submit occasional outlines to Chairman Gjærevoll. He argued that if negative aspects of hydropower were to be brought up, they had to be presented alongside the positive ones. This Norwegian echo of the balancing requirement in the Swedish guidelines remained Bjerkebo's position alone; the remainder of the committee accepted the premise that the ECY would necessarily be ‘biased in favour of nature conservation’.Footnote 95
The striking difference between the handling of pro-industry objections in Sweden and in Norway, respectively, as well as the apparent absence of significant conflict in the Danish executive committee, invites comparative reflection.Footnote 96 Notwithstanding their similar cooperating structures, the institutions dominating ECY nationally differed in several ways which help to illuminate their varying propensities for centralised message control. First of all, the state conservation bureaucracies in the three countries did not develop in parallel. In Sweden the existence of a separate directorate starting in 1967, represented by Esping, allowed for state conservation authorities to take control to an extent which must have been out of reach for the more modest Norwegian and Danish ministerial sections, both of which relied on conservationists and other civil associations to a degree not required of the Swedes. This state dominance may have contributed to the more traditional corporatist fabric of the Swedish executive committee. Principal interest organisations from labour and industry were represented, as were the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and the Royal Board of Education.Footnote 97 In Norway the only state representatives on the executive committee were Bjerkebo and a civil servant from the relevant ministry; municipalities, labour and private industry had none.Footnote 98 The Danish executive committee stood even farther from the Swedish model of established corporatist partnerships, placing its exclusive emphasis on associations and offices specifically dealing with some aspect of nature or the outdoors.Footnote 99
In addition, the differences in informational discipline among the three countries surfaced in the ways in which they were guided by overarching concerns. The Swedish executive committee, as shown in the exhibition example, consciously managed its programme according to the stated aim of avoiding conflict. From the key position afforded to its media subgroup, communications as a professional field established an assertive, if not dominant, presence in the organisation. In the Norwegian central organisation, ecologically oriented natural scientists and activists assumed command by taking four of the seven seats on the executive committee.Footnote 100 They also counted among their supporters Frislid, who attended their meetings as a ‘special consultant’, and Valset, the ECY secretary who sympathised with the NNV to such an extent that he took employment there after 1970. To this group, the aim of spreading the word of ecological balance and a scientifically informed familiarity with nature was the core concern. The Danish organisation barely fit any sort of similar scientific or professional category, as its overarching perspective derived from the pragmatic need to facilitate the broadest set of ECY activities nationwide for the lowest cost possible. ‘The executive committee has seen as its core mission to enlist the widest possible range of participants’, read a memo which also noted that the committee had particularly looked for activities which could be carried out for free or with ‘minor grants to otherwise voluntary and idealistic efforts’.Footnote 101 If any professional field can be said to have dominated the Danish leadership's outlook, it would have been that of administration. A crude summary of the overall situation, then, might be that, in Sweden, the chief concern was the maintenance of consensus; in Norway, the dissemination of scientific knowledge; and in Denmark, compliance with the budget. The corporatist exchange proved relevant to all.
The clear impact of dissimilar national organisational practices does not mean that corporatism was weaker in one country than in another, nor that centrally approved programmes precluded deviant efforts from partners which were acting independently. Several key traits are common to the Nordic ECY programming in general and to the Nordic Conservation Day in particular. First, the ECY was by intention and necessity an endeavour uniting state and private interests across virtually all areas of civil society. Every country depended on partnerships with non-state actors. Second, the tighter Swedish manoeuvring space notwithstanding, all of the Nordics left much room for local interpretation of the task at hand. Local officials and association representatives would themselves write speeches and summon communities to action under the conservation day slogan ‘Nature of the Nordics – Future of the Nordics’.Footnote 102 Mayors of all stripes would assign blame and argue for change according to their ideological outlooks. Scouts, home guardsmen and outdoors enthusiasts would set up conservation day activities for Nordic children along hundreds of beacon sites, defining in the process what it meant both to be Nordic and to take care of nature. And, quite uncontrollably, the Nordic peoples that the beacons were said to mobilise would gaze at their bonfires or follow them via the media, attributing their own meanings according to whatever allegiances they had to those attempting to tell them what it was all supposed to mean.
Governing and Legitimacy
The corporate exchange which was manifested in the organising committees of each country helped bring about the national programmes of the ECY. What, then, was being exchanged? Firstly, resources were traded, with money going from the state to cooperating organisations and work hours, skills and knowhow flowing in the opposite direction. Driving this part of the exchange was an urgency to make the ECY happen both on the government and the volunteer sides. The Nordic governments also shared the goal of projecting the relevance and benevolence of their region to both European and domestic audiences. Nationally, the joining of forces with organised conservationism enabled the states to reassure their populations that the new and pressing topic was well in hand. No regulatory change was required for this part of the corporatist exchange to happen, as it was fuelled by the circulation of knowledge, decoupled from legislation.
The legitimacy of representing the nation and the Nordics flowed from the state to the cooperating partners. Organisations big and small, along with their versions of reality, were granted the importance of official partners. It was within this infusion of legitimacy that the greatest differences among the Nordics were found. The Swedish organisers emphasised message discipline to a greater extent than Denmark and Norway, leaving the emerging radical environmentalism out of the exchange, as it strayed from the requisite consensus. For their own reasons the Danish and Norwegian committees tolerated a greater deviance from official policy among the participants in the exchange.
One explanation for the differences would emphasise continuity and another would emphasise dynamics and transition. The latter would point to the on-going development of structures governing the environment. Denmark and Norway did not yet have in place a consolidated environmental administration, leaving those defending the post-war state and its reliance on industry and consumption without a governing base similar to that of Sweden. The proceedings outside Oslo City Hall indicate the absence of an institutionalised effort to control the staging of discord. The dominance of the Swedish media group and its affirmation of traditional corporatist influence illustrate the opposite. A speculation could be made that the likelihood of similar control materialising in Norway would have been greater only a few years later, as in the evident willingness to exclude organised conservationists from the planning of the Department of Environmental Protection. On the other hand, differences may have endured. In public information campaigns on nuclear power later in the 1970s the ECY experience appears to have been repeated as the Danish effort invited critics to participate and the Swedish did not.Footnote 103
Although all three countries are regularly considered examples of consensus-based egalitarianism, an explanation emphasising the political cultures of the three countries would point to the ECY as an expression of continuous differences among their governments. The force with which corporatism has been applied has been tied to the strength of social democratic dominance.Footnote 104 Mary Hilson highlights Sweden, where prolonged consensus has also been seen as a manifestation of hegemony, and offers up Denmark as a contrast. The Danish trade unions lacked the bargaining power that went with the centralisation of its Norwegian and Swedish counterparts, and the social democratic governments of the first two post-war decades rested more often than not on the support of other political parties.Footnote 105 The strength of social democracy in Norway, with the Labour party out of government for only three weeks between 1945 and 1965, suggests similarity to Sweden, yet the ECY was planned by centre-right governments in both Norway and Denmark. The institutional lag discussed above further explains how the case of the ECY appears to place Norway closer to Denmark.
Seen as one, the two explanations complete the picture. The discord and dynamism of the emerging policy field of the environment, displayed in full by the ECY, point to the late 1960s as a moment of transition. The continuity of the corporatist modus operandi, with both organised interest and the state grasping for control over institutions as well as information, points to the fight for post-war structures to live to govern another day.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was carried out at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo (UiO) and financed by the Nordic Branding project within the UiO:Nordic initiative. In addition to the project group, the author wishes to thank Nikolas Glover, David Larsson Heidenblad, Vilde M. Paalgard, Helge Pharo, Hilmar Rommetvedt, the anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for valuable insights and suggestions.
