The Nordic popular movement culture

The Nordic popular movement culture was strong enough to, together with Roosevelt’s new Deal, raise the principle of the welfare state in the global arena, and introduce Keynesianism as a practical policy. This cultural tradition had its roots in several popular movement mobilizations.

1. The Nonconformist churches were almost entirely a Swedish phenomenon. It was a revolt against the state church, the Swedish cannon monarchy’s KGB, and its monopoly of thought. It had already begun to spread as early as the eighteenth century, partly as tolerated lay congregations in the north where the distances were too great for the clergy to manage. But it did not take organizational form until the middle of the nineteenth century with the help of immigrant English craftsmen, returning Swedish-Americans, and American mission money. The Free Church was strongest in the new industrial small towns where there was often no other organized collective life.

2. The Grundtvigian revival was the closest equivalent in Denmark and Norway. It claimed that the church consisted of the congregation, not of the clergy, and that the laity therefore had to take power. Grundtvigianism was primarily a matter for the peasants who used its network to invent and organize the popular high school, organize cooperatives in the fight against the landowners, and political peasant parties that took power in Denmark in 1901 and in Norway as early as 1884, albeit in coalition.

3. To compensate for the somewhat sectarian character of the Free Church in Sweden, a temperance movement was organized from the mid nineteenth century. It was practical where the Free Church was ideological, and took on the task of raising the poor out of their booze and making it a power. Temperance people founded libraries, organized the culture of the countryside, introduced the principle of equal suffrage a generation before was recognized in society at large, and generally served as the liaison officers of the popular movement culture.

4. The labour movement was of course common throughout the Nordic region and developed over time into the main force of the popular movement culture. It looked different in the different countries. In Denmark where it was first introduced it was mainly in Copenhagen that it became a force in the otherwise petty-bourgeois agricultural country. In Norway and Sweden, with their industrial small towns, the movement spread more evenly. And in the slightly industrialized Finland, it was largely crofters and farm workers who supported the movement. The Nordic labor movement is said to have been German-influenced with its strong emphasis on the Political Party as a central organizational form. But in practice there were also influences from the Anglo-Saxon non-conformists with its emphasis on the growth of the individual – ”we demand back our human value” was the refrain of the most popular Labour anthem – and in Norway there was also a strong addition of American anarcho-syndicalism that gained hegemony for a short period in the twenties. In the 1920s, the Swedish labor movement was the most militant and well-organized in the world, while the Finnish labor movement was crushed after a lost civil war. But together, the Nordic labor movements were so strong that they could take state power in the thirties and for a generation remain the strongest political force in their countries.

5. In Norway and Finland there were also movements for national independence. However, these were diametrically different. The Norwegian movement was based on Gruntvigian farmers and non-conformist fishermen and was anti-bureaucratic. Nationalism was something that was given because the bureaucracy relied on a Swedish king. The Finnish movement was conservative and a matter for the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie, which was striving for more leeway in the Tsarist empire. In Norway, the national coalition took power in 1884 as a union between all popular forces. In Finland, the national bourgeoisie took power in an uprising against the revolutionary Russian government in 1917, in alliance with Germany and to suppress its own labor movement.

Together, these movements created a cultural hegemony in the Nordic societies, which completely overshadowed common bourgeois cultural forms. They appointed the leading politicians, created communities that controlled them, and trained these communities in common approaches that were largely anti-elitist and democratic.

The Nordic popular movement culture was at its strongest around 1900-1940. It began to decay when it gained state power. Governing a state demanded bureaucratization and the taming of popular power. In Denmark and Norway, the opposition to the German occupation could to some extent revive the tradition, and the labour, peace and environmental movements of the sixties and seventies were also a certain resurgence. But in all the Nordic countries, the popular movement culture today is greatly enfeebled.