The Nordic countries have a long history of being celebrated as models of democracy and they continue to be so today. This project builds on the observation that the nature and characteristics of the “democracy” championed by the Nordics has changed. No longer distinctively connected to national and popular sovereignty, public participation, social equality, or labour market arrangements, Nordic democracy is increasingly associated, rather, with rule of law, human rights and economic liberty. No longer a social democratic alternative, the Nordics are today excelling as exemplars of the universal principles of liberal democracy at the end of history.
What accounts for this redefinition of Nordic democracy? How did it transpire, who were the main actors and their networks? How does it relate global changes of economy, politics, and governance in general, and to neoliberalisation, understood as a process of state-driven market expansion, in particular?
We analyse the neoliberalisation of Nordic democracy in three work packages (1) the relation between law and politics; (2) corporatist arrangements and associational life; and (3) the production of knowledge and ideology.
The project members are Johan Strang (PI), Stefan Nygård, Maiju Wuokko, Ilkka Kärrylä, Sophy Bergenheim and Maika Absetz.
Browning, C. S., Lehti, M. (Ed.), & Strang, J. (Eds.) (2025). Nordic Peace in Question: A Region of and for Peace. (Nordic Studies in a Global Context). Routledge.
Kärrylä, I. (2025). Naming, Claiming and Blaming an Intellectual Tradition: Translations and Receptions of the Term ‘Neoliberalism’ in the Nordic Countries. Scandinavian Journal of History, 50(4), 430–457.
Kärrylä, I. (2024). The Young Finns Party and the Plan for Neoliberal Retasking of the Welfare State in Post-Cold War Finland. Contemporary European History, 33(2), 497–513. doi:10.1017/S0960777322000480
Kärrylä, I. (2024). Ideological and pragmatic transformations: the adoption of neoliberal ideas by Finnish and Swedish conservative parties since the 1970s. Scandinavian Journal of History, 49(1), 114–140.
Kärrylä, I., Strang, J., & Wuokko, M. (2023). Fragments of libertarianism and neoliberal ascendancy: ideological features and limitations of the liberal breakthrough in Finland. Journal of Political Ideologies, 28(3), 392–411.
Nygård, S., & Ørskov, F. F. (2024). National socialist cultural diplomacy and Scandinavian popular culture: debating the German-Nordic Writers’ House in the 1930s. National Identities, 1–18.
Strang, J. (2026). Nordic Democratic Exceptionality after the End of History: A Neoliberalized Constitutional Imaginary? In J. Komarek, B. Aasa, M. Bán, & M. Krajewski (Eds.), European Constitutionalism the Other Way Round: From the Periphery to the Centre (pp. 357-371). Cambridge University Press.
Strang, J. (2025). Rights against the welfare state: Timbro and the Neoliberal mobilisation of legalist constitutionalism in Sweden 1980-2000. In J. Andersson, & C. Howell (Eds.), Nordic Neoliberalisms: Perspectives on Economic, Social and Cultural Change in the Nordics after 1970 (pp. 55-74). (Nordic Studies in a Global Context). Routledge.
Wuokko, M., Kuorelahti, E., & Jensen-Eriksen, N. (2026). More than meets the eye: Finnish employers and the centralised labour market model, 1960s–2020s. Scandinavian Economic History Review, 74(1), 19–39.