Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: the pioneers
- 1 From Singapore to Sacramento: a method of governance
- 2 It takes an island: the sources of governance
- 3 The crystal curtain: a culture of governance
- 4 Hail to the mandarins: the scaffolding of governance
- 5 The good disorder: the limits to governance
- 6 A transnational world: the practice of governance
- Conclusion: the new middle way
- Notes
- References
- Index
Introduction: the pioneers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: the pioneers
- 1 From Singapore to Sacramento: a method of governance
- 2 It takes an island: the sources of governance
- 3 The crystal curtain: a culture of governance
- 4 Hail to the mandarins: the scaffolding of governance
- 5 The good disorder: the limits to governance
- 6 A transnational world: the practice of governance
- Conclusion: the new middle way
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The Nordics have their own Alexis de Tocqueville. In the 1930s, a young American correspondent and later Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist named Marquis Childs undertook a journey to Sweden to examine the bold new experiment being pursued there in offering a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Not unlike Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French diplomat whose Democracy in America captured the spirit of the nascent United States, Childs's account of the emergent Nordic social model produced an unlikely classic entitled Sweden: The Middle Way (1936).
Against the background of a looming struggle between fascism and democracy, capitalism and communism, Childs’ short book chronicled the ways in which effective democratic governance could overcome ideological confrontation and deliver results. Through a detailed study of the cooperative system, Childs demonstrated how Sweden, and the Nordics by extension, fared between the “concentration of economic power in the hands of a few men” in the United States and “the trials and hardships in Russia”. While firmly in the Western camp, Sweden had somehow managed to intercept and absorb the revolutionary winds blowing from the East. The subtitle – The Middle Way – would become a cliché of centrist politics.
The book made a splash. At the time, the New York Herald Tribune reviewed it enthusiastically: “[It] reads like the best political news in years. [It] sounds gloriously like what we used to think of as American: a method of sane compromise and steady progress, each step tested by the sole criterion: does it work?” US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the midst of that most ambitious of middle-way kind of experiment, the New Deal, sent a delegation to Sweden. He reasoned thus:
I became a good deal interested in the cooperative development in countries abroad, especially Sweden. A very interesting book came out a couple of months ago – The Middle Way. I was tremendously interested in what they had done in Scandinavia along those lines. In Sweden, for example, you have a royal family and a Socialist Government and a capitalist system, all working happily side by side. Of course, to be sure, it is a smaller country than ours; but they have conducted some very interesting and, so far, very successful experiments. They have these cooperative movements existing happily and successfully alongside of private industry and distributions of various kinds, both of them making money. I thought it was at least worthy of study from our point of view.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Pursuit of GovernanceNordic Dispatches on a New Middle Way, pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Agenda PublishingPrint publication year: 2021