Nordic Democratic Exceptionality after the End of History

This chapter explores the transforming constitutional imaginary of the Scandinavian welfare states. Suggesting that the Nordic countries shared a distinctive interpretation of the democratic ideals during the heydays of the social democratic welfare state, the chapter argues that the breakthrough of neoliberalism has fundamentally transformed the Nordic constitutional imaginary. No longer connected to national and popular sovereignty, public participation, labour market arrangements or economic and social equality, Nordic democracy is today increasingly associated with rule of law, individual and human rights, as well as economic freedom. The chapter connects Nordic developments to the recent literature on the constitutional theories in neoliberal thought. Scholars like Samuel Moyn, Quinn Slobodian and Jessica Whyte have amply shown that many leading neoliberals strove to restrict or replace democratic procedures with constitutionally protected market arrangements. In a Nordic context, these ideas were put forward in the debates particularly in the 1980s, but more often than not connected to the processes of globalisation and Europeanisation since the 1990s. As a result, the Nordics ceased to represent a democratic alternative but conformed to the neoliberal mainstream that emerged with the End of History.