INTRODUCING THE THEME

E. J. Hobsbawm has designated the years 1848–75 as ‘The Age of Capital’; they might as well be characterised as ‘The Harmony Liberal Era’. Not least so in Scandinavia, where the capitalistic breakthrough was accomplished with a minimum of those internal class struggles and internal–external national struggles that accompanied the general European development.

This relatively smooth outcome depended in the final analysis on circumstances that gave nationalism and economic liberalism – the two dynamic ideologies en vogue at the time – a less militant and problematic appearance in Scandinavia than elsewhere. As for nationalism, both Norway and Sweden could boast of an ancient domestic culture united by a common enough language spoken by a homogeneous population with few and small ethnic minorities (Lapps, Finns and Gypsies). A dogmatic view of economic liberalism (the ‘Manchester’ or ‘classical’ variant) was immediately confronted with hard Scandinavian facts that made atomistic individual freedom on the market seem unrealistic, at any rate in the short run. Norway and Sweden were both poor, sparsely populated and vast countries, circumstances which – from a nationalistic view – called for co-operation and for active intervention or guidance from the comparatively resourceful national state. The result was – to borrow Professor Rune Slagstad's pregnant wording – ‘a liberalism chastened by the State’, busy in ‘staging capitalism’.

Economic growth resulting in national prosperity played a key role in the political programme of the Scandinavian harmony liberals.