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During the First World War, conflicts between the people’s sacrifices and their political participation led to crises of parliamentary legitimacy. This volume compares British, German, Swedish and Finnish debates on revolution, rule by the people, democracy and parliamentarism and their transnational links. The British reform, although more about winning the war than advancing democracy, restored parliamentary legitimacy, unlike in Germany, where Allied demands for democratisation made reform appear treasonous and fostered native German solutions. Sweden only adopted Western political models after major confrontations, but reforms saw it embark on its path to Social Democracy. In Finland, competing Russian revolutionary discourses and German- and Swedish-inspired appeals to legality brought about the deterioration of parliamentary legitimacy and a civil war. Only a republican compromise imposed by the Entente, following a royalist initiative in 1918, led to the construction of a viable polity.
The twentieth-century process of secularization does not mean that institutional church and Christian ideas were irrelevant for twentieth-century societal projects – such as the introduction of democracy, the improvement of school and education, the framing of national identities – or in the establishment of welfare-states. On the contrary, this publication is built on the presupposition that secularization runs parallell with the sacralization of the state. It can be argued that Christianity has been decisive for how the modern European society evolved in the twentieth century, e.g. concerning how Christian history and Christian values were a part of the new national and social imaginar...
Whatever happened to the poster child of European social democracy? For a young generation of socialists, the Swedish experience has been an obvious reference and inspiration. But what remains of the Swedish model today is, in fact, a failed project in decline. This book is the first comprehensive study of the rise and fall of one of the most influential political movements of our time. Ostberg depicts the rise of one of the 20th century's best organized labor movements and Sweden's development from one of Europe's poorest countries to one of the richest and with the most extensive welfare. During the last 90 years, Sweden had a social democratic prime minister for 72 years, including a 44 y...
Schoolteachers and the Nordic Model examines the cultural distinctiveness of the Nordic teaching profession and teacher training compared to examples from Europe and North America. The book explores the concept of these ‘teacher cultures’ as various dimensions of professional identities, recruitment patterns, teachers’ social status, values and knowledge. It considers how Nordic teachers ́ socio-cultural backgrounds and their shifting societal roles compare with continental European examples, analysing the societal consequences of teacher cultures for the current Nordic welfare states. Offering a unique focus on teachers, the book uses a shared comparative and historical approach to a...
From West Indian sugar and bottles of Southeast Asian arrack to French red wines, English felt cloth, and Mediterranean lemons, many global wares ended up in the Scandinavian borderlands during the late eighteenth century. This book explores how and why these goods came to be there and analyses what smuggling can reveal about the emergence of global trade, the formation of the nation state, and the development of consumer society in Europe’s northernmost outskirts. This book shows that the global underground was ubiquitous in the Nordic countries and fundamentally altered them, politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Through re-evaluating the role of smuggling the book complem...
The terms ‘Nordic’ and ‘Scandinavian’ are widely used to refer to the politics, society and culture of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. But why have people felt the need to frame things as Nordic and why has the adjective Nordic become so prominent? This book adopts a rhetorical approach, analysing the speech acts which have shaped the meanings of the term. What do the different terms Nordic and Scandinavian have in common, and how have the uses of these terms changed in different historical periods? What accounts for the apparent upsurge in uses of the rhetoric of Nordicness in the 2010s? Drawing on eight case studies of the uses of Nordic and Scandinavian from the nine...
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The COVID-19 pandemic, the surge of populism, the climate crisis and many other destabilizing factors in our time, all point at the expectation of trustworthy knowledge and reliable organization devoted to knowledge production and dissemination. However, universities remain enmeshed in economic liberalization and ensuing cultural struggles where their funding, governance and practices reflect market imprints – even academic ideals such as originality, or social ideals such as relevance have been transformed into measurable units and thereby risk losing their historical sway. This predicament is the focus of this book. The book explores the rise of neo-liberalization in academic system in a...
How the expansion of primary education in the West emerged not from democratic ideals but from the state’s desire to control its citizens Nearly every country today has universal primary education. But why did governments in the West decide to provide education to all children in the first place? In Raised to Obey, Agustina Paglayan offers an unsettling answer. The introduction of broadly accessible primary education was not mainly a response to industrialization, or fueled by democratic ideals, or even aimed at eradicating illiteracy or improving skills. It was motivated instead by elites’ fear of the masses—and the desire to turn the “savage,” “unruly,” and “morally flawed...
Between Brexit, efforts to ‘Make America great again’, and ongoing appeals for patriotic consumption to boost economies, the intersection between national identity, marketing campaigns, and consumer choices has been brought to the fore. This book maps out this terrain and provides a framework for how research on ‘Made in’ campaigns and programmes in individual countries can be placed into a broader historical context. The book argues that the history of ‘Made in’ can be used to shed light on society at large: the actors that have promoted it, the institutions that have regulated it, and the cultural environments that have attributed it meaning. At times ‘Made in’ has been a b...