Should we unravel labor law ? Should we limit the right to strike ? Can we increase taxes without harming the competitiveness of companies ? These questions are not a summary of the questions that are going through the French social debate, but those that have occupied Swedish democracy for a few months.
A few weeks of major legislative elections in Sweden and after months of dominated exchanges, in France, by references to “ Scandinavian model », It was natural for The life of ideas to go and see the discussions on this subject in Stockholm. Because, contrary to what the continual French praise might suggest to our Nordic partners, this “ model Is the subject of strong controversies among them.
As often, what is idealized by distance, proximity to the nuance and complicates it … It is precisely this complexity that we would like to give to understand here. We have chosen for this, not only to publish analyzes, as we usually do, but also to translate directly, and with the agreement of their authors and publishers – that we thank -, extracts from recent books which seemed particularly significant. In doing so, we mainly supported the production of two independent intellectual institutions whose proposals diverge clearly, even if their diagnoses can often get closer: the Think Tank Arena, of social democratic orientation and close to the union movement, and the Sns (In English Center for Business and Policy Studies), a private partisan attachment center, essentially funded by the corporate world.
In the text which opens this file, the director of Arena, Håkan A. Bengtsson, delivers an overview of the Swedish model and discusses the evolution of its main components: social dialogue and the organization of the labor market, the wage policy known as “ united », A employment policy turned towards activation of public spending, a welfare state with a universal vocation, a great public service and finally labor law. According to the author, the main threat which today weighs on the Swedish model comes from the evolution of the labor market, where the social partners have partly lost their regulatory role, and on which globalization exerts increased pressure. It is mainly on this ground that the right and the left are now fighting.
This analysis is continued and developed by Anders Nilsson and Örjan Nyström of the union center Lowhich update the difficulties encountered by the two pillars of the Swedish model: compromise between work and capital, on the one hand, and the alliance between the working class and the middle classes, on the other. The first is radically upset by opening up to globalization, while the second is threatened by the rise in wage inequalities and the disparities in employment relations that are emerging, in Sweden as in most countries of the European Union, for the past twenty years.
These two concerns highlight the partial and often summary of French praise. Representing itself from Swedish social life as a long, quiet river and its institutions as a secular and unalterable device, these are generally based on the observation of good macro-economic performance of the Scandinavian model, and leave aside its micro-economic and sociological, even cultural and historical bases. However, it is precisely there that both the fragility of the Swedish compromise is revealed and the scope of the social transformation project carried by the social democracy which saw it born: it does not only seek to reconcile social security and economic performance in general, but to reach a certain form of society. The text of A. Nilsson and Ö. Nyström brings out in this regard the need not to be satisfied with a management social democracy, anxious to remedy the fate of the poorest, but to build a society which makes its different components on the basis of a certain conception of equality.
Of a much more liberal inspiration, the analysis of journalist Anders Isaksson emphasizes, not on the factors of weakening the historical pillars of the Swedish compromise, but on the individual abuses of which he would today be a victim. Far from being a cyclical criticism, this argument underlines the sagging of the work ethics which was, according to her, at the heart of this compromise. The figure of the lazy profiteer is at the center of this indictment woven at the junction of morality and economic rationality. This position does not lack subtlety: it places the liberal discourse on the right, not on the side of a massive criticism of the welfare state, but on the side of a denunciation of parasitic behaviors which undermine its legitimacy and efficiency ; Behaviors that the social democratic party would have encouraged, if not left to prosper. What to legitimize the workfarenot against, but in the name of the social matrix to which the Swedes remain very largely attached.
However, it would be reductive to bring this argument to a simple strategic contortion aimed at putting a right in the saddle most often reduced to the opposition in the Swedish history of the XXe century. The point raised by A. Isaksson seems to be taken very seriously by public opinion. Not only because it crumples the moral attachment of the Swedes to the fundamental principles of their welfare state, but because it risks threatening its general balance: when a model consumes as many tax energy as the Swedish model, differences and deviances take on a character of gravity higher than what would occur in a model where the tax pressure is less, tolerance for inequalities of infinite statuses and More usual family solidarity… for example, in France.
As we can see, the Swedish discussion on the welfare state is not being held away from the great ideological cleavages which cross the rest of the European Union. We even find most of the themes and questions that animate our own debates. This is what the inaugural article of HA Bengtsson. Globalization seems to have put our clocks significantly at the same time: if we do not make the same answers, we face the same problems and the same concerns.
We will probably retort that our inheritances differ. This is evidence. But HA Bengtsson also shows that the “ Swedish model Not armed all armed from the head of some visionary experts. It is the fruit of successive reforms and contributions that have evolved over time and some of which are very recent. He himself went through many tests: the French reader rarely knows that the unemployment rate in Sweden exceeded 10% in the mid-1990s.
The major difference may not be so much in our social inheritances as in our political cultures. What strikes the outside observer is the extraordinary political stability of Swedish democracy and its exceptional reform capacity. The recent pension reform – which has created so many heartbreak and difficulties in France – has thus been made in Sweden in a large consensus.
However, once again, it would be wrong to consider that Swedish democracy does not also know its difficulties. The political scientist Bo Rothstein at a point in the following pages, and suggests that ideological homogeneity, far from being a simple advantage, can in itself constitute a problem, even a denaturation of democratic life. Stigmatizing the proliferation of public institutes ad hoc To raise awareness of a number of social issues, he observes that the state apparatus is no longer just organized in order to implement political decisions, and more and more to disseminate an ideological production in opinion. So much so that the debate sometimes does not pass between the parties and the interest groups organized, but between the officials of these public institutes and other ombudsmans.
What B. Rothstein suggests without saying it openly is that this situation is a perversion of representative democracy which is particularly due to the fact that the social democratic party, by dint of being in power, would have ended up confiscating part of the state apparatus and imposing its ideological color. Significantly, this party is often designated in Sweden as the “ State carrier party “, As he has monopolized functions and responsibilities for many years. But here it is necessary to dissociate two points: what in theory looks at a possible perversion of representative democracy, and which concerns in particular the construction of a social democratic bureaucracy. On the first point, Rothstein’s criticism only has half. On the one hand, his vocabulary may seem too encompassing: “ the state apparatus »Note both central administrations, real belts of transmission of the executive, as well as public structures close to our” Independent administrative authorities ». However, it would be wise to distinguish more clearly here: they do not do the same work and do not obey the same system of constraints. On the other hand, many depends on the composition of incriminated institutes. After all, far from short-circuiting the parties and organized interest groups, they could be a meeting and discussion point. Why should we consider that public institutions must always be, by nature, instruments of execution and not places of deliberation, confrontation, staging of antagonisms that cross the social body ? Number of consultative institutions in representative democracies have this function precisely.
On the second point, on the other hand, that is to say with regard to the constitution of a bureaucracy dominated by a party and diffusing in opinion and the social body a determined ideological production, criticism is always useful and healthy. That of Rothstein joins many recent questions about the state of the social democratic party. The question deserves to dwell on it, because from all the Scandinavian countries, it is Sweden which was most strongly marked by the social democratic society project. What remains of this project ? As journalist Olle Svenning notes, this party is going through a deep intellectual crisis and seeks its second breath. Its leaders seem in search of a new “ great story ». The attempts of Prime Minister Göran Persson on the air of sustainable development would like to take place, but clearly struggle to recharge a “ movement The majority of members and activists have gradually turned away.
Do the Swedes have, however, real reasons to worry, wonders the foreign observer to read these contributions ? If it is advisable not to exaggerate, the fact remains that the difficulties are not illusory, as Wojtek Kalinowski shows in the last article in this file. Flatter figures for unemployment hide significant and little discussed biases in continental Europe. More generally, the Swedish engine consumes a lot of fuel and requires everyone an intense tax burden. If this pressure had to be further increased-and it may be necessary, in particular given the aging of the population-it would then go through a new test of which it is not obvious that it is unscathed. Not only the diatribes against the “ clandestine passengers (Hear, those who use and abuse the system) would multiply, but it is not unimaginable that the wealthiest categories refuse this new compromise. Because the universalist model that Swedish democracy has chosen and developed supposes a very homogeneous society. However, the transformations of the economy are digging more and more clear cleavages.