Pauli Kettunen The Multilayered Historicity of the Nordic Welfare State

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Pauli Kettunen
The Multilayered
Historicity
of the Nordic Welfare State

• NordWel Summer School
  Hanasaari, 21-26 August 2008

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Argument for a cross-disciplinary history of the
present

• paradoxical images of current change
  globalisation as a national challenge
• critique of neo-institutionalism
• critique of the search for origins
• critique of reductionism
• historicity pathdependency and contingency
• historicity histories and comparisons as a
  reflexivty of social practices
• the Nordic model new meanings to old
  institutions?

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Globalisation and the making of competitive
national us

• the notion of Nordic model as a target of
  external challenges
• the notion of Nordic model as a response to
  external challenges
• defining globalisation as a national challenge
• the webs of structural power operating
  throughout the world system (Susan Strange)
• the critique of national gaze (Ulrich Beck)
• nationalism inherent in global economic
  competition
• competition state (Philip Cerny, Wolfgang
  Streeck, Ronen Palan Jason Abbot etc)
• from the Keynesian welfare state to a
  Schumpeterian workfare state (Bob Jessop)

27.5.2008
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History matters?

• history matters (Douglass C. North)
• neo-institutionalism history as a dimension of
  national economic performance capacity
• history tends to become synonymous to national
  specificities
• taken-for-granted distinction between the
  nation-state actor and the external environment
  of action.

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The search for origins?

• the current interest in the origin of the
  Nordic welfare state
• the 19th century processes of modernisation or
  structures of pre-industrial rural community
• socialism or nationalism
• the rise of Social Democracy in the 1930s or the
  Reformation and the making of Lutheran state
  church in the 16th and 17th centuries
• critique of the obsession with origins and the
  idol of origin (Marc Bloch)
• the beginning does not explain the phenomenon
• the presentism of the idol of origin

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The multi-layered historicity of the present

• does not simply try to explain what we see in our
  present but also to make explicit something that
  we did not see
• the ways in which the different historical
  layers, developed in different periods of time
  and mediated through mentalities, traditions,
  values, epistemic practices and social movements,
  are present in the Nordic welfare states
• A history of the present is concerned with that
  which is taken-for-granted, assumed to be given,
  or natural within contemporary social existence,
  a givenness or naturalness questioned in the
  course of contemporary struggles. (Mitchell
  Dean)

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The Nordic welfare state as a history of the
notion of society

• conceptual history as a history of the present
• society as a givenness questioned in the
  course on contemporary struggles
• historical layers of the Nordic society
• modernising nation-state society as an agent
• society as public power and synonymous to the
  state
• society of virtuous circles
• wage-work society adjusting universalist social
  citizenship and the normalcy of wage work and
  salaried work (cf. the thesis of
  decommodification by Gosta Esping-Andersen)

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Critique of reductionism

• old functionalistic reductionism deriving social
  reforms and regulations from the needs and
  problems of industrial modernisation
• a newer variant of reductionism the welfare
  state as a project
• how to take into account the temporal incongruity
  between discourses and institutions
• how to dismantle the politics inherent in social
  and economic political decisions
• how to take into account the relationships
  between planning (knowledge) and conflicts and
  compromises (interests)
• how to take into account the varying agents of
  social security

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Histories and comparisons as reflexivity of
social practices

• the tension of experience and expectation in
  modern historical and political consciousness
  (Reinhart Koselleck)
• risk in social policy
• historicity institutional and discursive
  preconditions that enable and limit the agency,
  on one hand, and an insecurity and openness of
  the horizon of expectation, on the other hand
• path dependency and contingency intertwined
• cf. path dependency and convergence
• (international) comparisons as a form of
  reflexivity
• histoire croisée (Michael Werner Bénédicte
  Zimmermann)
• transnational history, Sozialpolitik
  transnational (Christoph Conrad)
• international comparisons in the making of the
  Nordic model of national welfare state

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New meanings to old institutions?

• globalised capitalism and the questioning of the
  Nordic notion of society
• old institutions of the welfare state modified to
  serve new functions for competitive national
  community
• discussion on models encounters between
  transnational capital and national institutions
• social policy as a productive factor (the
  Lisbon strategy of the EU)
• the Janus face of the social subjects of
  innovation and objects of activation
• continuities and discontinuities in the search
  for social capital and in activation policies