“It became a kind of symbolic starting point of talking about the Scandivan countries as being more significant, in terms of the ideas that one could derive from these societies than from their geopolitical role or their economic impact,” says Carl Marklund, a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Sweden’s Södertörn University. The Scandinavian countries had largely recovered from the Great Depression by the time Childs’ book was released, while the US was still in the grip of sky-high unemployment.
The economic policies that insulated Scandinavia from the Great Depression were rooted in pragmatism, not ideology, Marklund says. “These are very small, export-oriented economies, and it’s very important both for labour to retain jobs and for capital to export goods.” While the US could lean on high immigration rates and the UK on its empire for a supply of cheap labour, the Scandinavian countries were compelled to put in place policies that kept their economies functioning reliably.
It was during this era that our modern-day perception of Scandinavia was forged. While the UK struggled to keep hold of its dying empire, and the Nazis rose in Germany, Scandinavia was surprisingly stable. “In comparison to these societies, the Nordic societies stood out as being kind of quaint backwaters, where there was this sweet combination of modernity and tradition.”
When the world has confronted crises of capitalism, Scandinavia has stood in as a hopeful symbol of a less turbulent way of existence. It’s not so much that Scandinavia itself is so remarkable, but that it is our lodestar when things get rough elsewhere in the world. And we’re not fussy. Any Scandinavian country will do. In the 1990s, when the global financial crisis forced the Swedish government to bail out its banks, US media fretted that the so-call Swedish model was over. So, Marklund says, the world found a new Sweden: Denmark.
“The US media needed some Nordic countries to still be a beacon for progressivism. So all of a sudden Denmark kind of stood out as being the representative of precisely the same values that Sweden had already been hailed for.” When the world needed a Scandinavia, there it was, offering us a way out of whatever mess we were in. But it wasn’t until the turn of the century that Scandinavia’s success started being expressed in terms of happiness.
“I don’t think that anybody really thought in those terms,” says Anu Partanen, a journalist and author of The Nordic Theory of Everything who grew up during the 1990s financial crisis in Finland. “The short answer is that the Finns think it is ridiculous. Finns by national character are not happy people.”
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The world, on the other hand, insists on telling Scandinavians that they’re happy. In the most recent World Happiness Report in 2018, Finland topped the rankings, followed by Norway, Denmark and Iceland. The problem, however, is that happiness is a notoriously slippery term.
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