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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I'm Lee Chung-Grechault, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Welcome to part two of our conversation with Professor Corey Bladd. We're talking about his paper, Searching for Saviors, Economic Adversities, and the Challenge of Political Legitimacy in the Neoliberal Era.
I still find it interesting that you chose to focus on Sweden and Finland for this. So many people hold up the Nordic model as this great equalizer and a capitalist system. So why exactly didn't that work there, and then why do we still see a Rise of Nationalist parties in those two countries? Yeah, that's a great question.
This was definitely intentional, and part of my interest in examining Nordic model welfare capitalism is to kind of highlight not necessarily the differences but the similarities. And one of the things that you see, and this comes out of the paper a little bit more explicitly, is that there are tremendous similarities in terms of increased cost burdens and increased costs associated with really just daily life within the context of both Sweden and Finland. Traditionally, the idea of welfare capitalism was that these costs could be mitigated, or these costs could be the impact of these cost increases could be reduced by either through the mechanism state regulation in some capacity, or through the kind of actual provision of services in a more specific way, where the state will pay for these, you don't have to pay for these. You do indirectly through taxes, but you get my point.
So that kind of reality comes into conflict with the fact that nationalist parties are tremendously ascendant in these economies just as much as they are in more quote unquote liberal capitalist economies, like the Anglo American model in the UK and the US. So it can't just be kind of singular effects, or singular causes that are producing this kind of rise of overall nationalism. And one of the things that I've been wanting to kind of highlight is that it really is a kind of a combination of factors that have allowed common conditions to really kind of dictate political outcomes. And in that vein, the idea that even in welfare, you know, kind of broadly generous welfare capitalist economies and societies, you can still have challenges to everyday life in exactly the same way that you have in other economies and in other societies, whether we're talking about what's going on.
You know, a more, you know, Atlantic capitalist traditional model or, or, and anywhere else in the context of the world. Obviously, there are tremendous differences there. But the problem ends up becoming that welfare capitalism for all of its kind of broad scale benefits. And there are many isn't able to kind of do much in terms of shifting economic realities in terms of industry standards in terms of overall kind of broad scale economic change.
So, you know, one of the kind of hallmarks of the 70s and 80s has been kind of a decrease in manufacturing capacities, particularly informally at for work still have went, but I'm familiar with dominant affluent capitalist economies, like those in Europe and North America. So this manufacturing decline has really placed a tremendous emphasis on retraining broad scale portions of population so higher education to your education becomes much more fundamental. That in the European context, or, you know, it varies, of course, but in a continental context, you know, comes with the expectation that that's that's a social reality that needs to be provided for regards to, you know, say provision and in Scandinavian economies that's true, although it is shifting a bit. But the kind of underlying notion that you now have to have that higher education order to engage with this new form of service and knowledge economic work in order to get the salaries that are going to allow you to kind of deal with increased cost burdens becomes a much more kind of daunting perspective.
So, ultimately, again, long story short, I know being low winded here college is that the kind of underlying notion of economic shift. So the population that dominated manufacturing in Sweden, in Finland, really, in many other places tended to be male, and tended to be kind of you didn't necessarily need a tertiary education in order to succeed in an economy with that was dominated by manufacturing jobs. You could make a good living didn't have to, you know, quote unquote waste four years, you know, going through going getting a degree and could really enter into the large scale economy as a as a labor as a consumer. And as a participatory member of the Swedish or Finnish society, as that shifts and changes, you have a population that essentially feels left behind, because they're they haven't, they haven't shifted, you know, in many cases, the ability to kind of, you know, move to Helsinki or move to Stockholm and just, you know, kind of get a nice good tech job becomes, you know, daunting, if not impossible for large portions of population.
And as that population starts to kind of increase in their, some capacity and their ability to produce and consume the other portion of the population becomes deemphasized because they're no longer really kind of predominant members of a growth sector of the economy. That's true of a lot of places, particularly in advanced capitalist economies. So the reality is that the same shifts and changes that happen in the UK, the United States, Canada, etc, happened in Scandinavia as well. So they've taken longer to kind of show up because of that kind of increased buffer of the welfare state.
But for all intents and purposes, even that buffer has proven really kind of unable to deal with large scale changes in how people make their money, or in this case, how people make less and less money over time. Did you see that that was as dramatic in Scandinavian countries as it was in, you know, you mentioned the UK, this is the case less as well where a lot of the frustration is sort of too pronged, at least here in the US you have this economic adversity. You have, for example, white males who didn't need higher education before to get a very dependable job with benefits. Now they don't have access to that, but then also US has a lot of new immigrants.
Did you see that as much in Sweden and Finland where you had immigrants coming at the same time as this economic shift was happening? And then that also contributes to the rise in nationalism and xenophobia as well. Right, great question. That's so one of the reasons why I picked the just position of Sweden and Finland is because of their disproportionate immigration demographics.
Sweden has been a high in migration country, particularly as of late the end of the 2000s into the 2010s, as a result of the various refugee crises, you know, kind of beginning in predominantly East African exodus to the Syrian conflict that just generated huge numbers of refugees and people experiencing a match of hardship. So as those refugee populations ends as, you know, kind of the usual kind of flow of labor migration into Sweden increased dramatically during this period. You had a little bit of an increase in Finland, but not nowhere near as much. And that's that's kind of very explicitly kind of for now in the overall immigration statistics.
If immigration was the quote unquote cause for the rise of nationalist parties, we should see a dramatic increase in nationalist support in high immigration receiving countries. And we do see to a certain extent, if you take a look at France and if you take a look at the UK and if you take a look at the US and you take a look at Sweden, you do see kind of dramatic increases. But you also see this increase in low migration countries like Finland, for example, or Hungary is another kind of wonderful example. And in some countries, Greece, for example, which has really been a really incredible example of kind of a conduit country, you know, in between, you know, these centers of out migration and right on the border of in migration centers, Germany, France, Sweden, for instance.
You see, you know, certainly a bump in nationalist party support, but you don't necessarily see in Greece that kind of broad scale support that you've seen in other places. So it doesn't appear that immigration can be a monocosyl factor in the overall increase of these nationalist party support. So the, and in fact, if you look at Finland, support for the the Finns party is much more kind of formalized and it's much more kind of integral part of the Finnish parliament over the past, in a much more kind of integrated way. And for example, the Sweden Democrats who just now in the past election kind of ascended to this kind of, you know, position of significant influence within the Swedish parliament.
So you've got this kind of similar trajectory in terms of nationalist party increase with very, very divergent potential causes. This doesn't mean that increased numbers of immigration, increased numbers with regards to immigration isn't a factor. It does mean that it's not the factor. I would argue that a much more consistent causal factor is the kind of sustained adverse, disassigned adversities and the increasing downward costs, the increasing burden placed on households in terms of, you know, having to provide larger percentages of overall annual income towards housing, food, education, healthcare, all of these different costs, that commonality, it underlies increased overall support for nationalist parties and you see this in terms of the limited amount of voting data that we have.
And you see this kind of this underlying influence with regards to the kind of broad scale popular support for overall groups and one of the kind of, you know, interesting demographic kind of more anecdotal than anything else outcomes is this as you put it this kind of increase support in white men in the US, in the UK, you know, I guess that the same general pattern although that obviously the racial gender histories in these various societies differ dramatically. But the support of a very common constituency in all of these respective countries for nationalist parties or at least nationalist party platforms and in nationalist party support ultimately ties back to the fact that those were the same populations that received, you know, privilege in terms of the kind of jobs that you could get and this really shows up in the US context, you know, when this, you know, 1945 through 1971 golden age of American capitalism was taking place, and when you had all these people who were buying homes and cars and had manufacturing jobs, they were all white, and not all, but they a significant portion of them were white and a huge portion of them were male, predominantly or primarily because of the sustained racial segregation that existed in the United States, so it was a protected class, it was a protected racially class in the US example. And while that might not have existed in Sweden or Finland, the same general populations, you know, locally predominant populations that's just because of the demographics of Scandinavia also kind of near that US, but it's really that shift in change of manufacturing that I think is much more causal factor than anything else. Really fascinating paper and I might add you have a great academic reference here in the beginning, so your parents might have done it with just one job but now you're working for less and twice as hard.
And so I'm going to talk about this from Ben drop kick Murphy's sums us up very nicely. So Corey glad thank you again so much for speaking with us today. Thank you very much I really appreciate it and I hope everybody stays safe and well. Thank you Professor Corey glad he's the author of searching for saviors economic adversities and the challenge of political legitimacy and the neoliberal era.
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