Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  In this period you have processes such as the creation of a national narr­ative, a heroic story (often involving, among other things, gathering ar­ound a char­ismatic leader, inventing a semi-mythic past, and sometimes killing off some poor minority that happens to st­and in the way and offer a conven­ient common enemy and/or scapegoat for mounting social and economic prob­lems), spreading liter­acy, homogenizing language and scrapping local iden­tities, instituting market laws and standard­ized court syst­ems, getting rid of large parts of corporal punishment, gra­d­­ually increa­sing the emoti­onal and economic enfranchi­se­ment of lar­ger groups into the state (vote for bourgeois men as well as conscription into the armies), i.e. tur­ning people into “citizens”. And, of course, there is schoo­ling: turning kids into pupils and pupils into citizens. “Everyone” learns to read and write.

  Classical social anthro­pologists of nationalism, such as Ernest Gellner and Benedict And­erson, have noted there was an inherent link be­tween the growth of 19th cen­tury nationalism and the requirements of the capita­l­ist-indus­trialist econ­omy, and they are prob­ably right.

  From these nation-building efforts, another great modern sociological force is awakened. When citizens begin to read, gather in small­er spa­ces, comm­unicate more easily, and have more in common in terms of inte­rests and sorrows, a “civil sphere” is born.

  People download a whole mental world of “ongoing events” fitting within a greater story, shared largely by any random person you meet on the street. Memes (ideas and cultural patterns) spread more easily. Stran­gers become oddly acq­uainted by means of a new world of abstra­ctions: What is the time, what is this address, what is your nationality?—and later: What is your passport, your personal iden­tity number? The French Marx­ist theo­rist Althusser has argued that an “ideological state apparatus” comes online, one that appeals to each per­son as a citizen, which there­by “creat­es” the citizen, the subject of a state.

  And with the nation state and the civil sphere, “the individual” can be born since our “selves” no longer remain as inti­mately tied up with our clan, our family, our land. People start identifying with their nat­ion­alities, their class, their ideas, their professions and intimate relation­ships—a bet­r­ayal of all identities of old, but an expansion of our overall freedom to find our own paths, and, in some ways, an expansion of our circle of soli­darity. We now care about people we’ve never met, given we share the same nationality.

  But the birth of a nation is a dangerous affair. You grab thousands—no, millions—of people’s attention for years; mold and discipline their minds: they become school teachers, doctors, professors, engineers, law­yers, adm­in­is­tr­ators, accountants, scientists, military officers. Then you direct the awesome power that emerges as all of these spec­ialists collabo­rate. Before you know it, you are capable of sending manned exped­itions to the moon and taking pictures from within the rings of Saturn.

  It’s true, the Chi­n­ese had been edu­cating man­dar­ins—the culturally refined and meritocratically organized admin­­­­istrative class of the empire—for millennia. Medie­val Europe had mona­steries with monks, nuns and scri­bes, and some corresp­onding structures had appeared in the Arab em­pires and India. But this was different. The extent of differentiation and spec­ificity of the modern profess­ions were staggering. And then all of these people, competencies, forms of know­ledge, forms of control, were un­lea­sh­ed—upon nat­ure, yes, but even more so, upon the human soul: working, mold­ing, trans­forming, transmuting, con­trolling, steering; all stimulating new shared patterns of thinking, sensing, feeling and behav­ing.

  The birth of a nation is dangerous business because of the great powers unleashed when an emergent pattern coordinates millions of people’s time and attention. What will this power do? In what image will it shape hum­anity? What will it do to nature and the environment? What ethics will restrain it? Who will control the controller? Wonders arise and abo­und: the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the World Fair. And when this power turns to murder and oppression, there is horror unbound: col­onial opp­ression, the Belgian Congo, mechanized warfare, eventually Gul­ag. And be­cause there is a civil sphere, it can be manipulated by rela­tively small groups or even a single person—for noble purposes or wicked ones.

  There are any number of candidates for the lead roles in this story of the nation state, but I would like to specifically mention two. The first is Napoleon Bonaparte. It is true, of course, that Napoleon became the dic­tator of France and was crowned emperor, even marrying a Habsburg prin­cess, in effect betraying the ideals of the French Revolution he claim­ed to serve. But if you look at his political regime: citizen enfranchise­ment, nationalism, standard­iz­a­tion, rationalization, homo­gen­ization, the modern legal system (called Code Napoleon )—this is certainly a herald of, and model for, the modern nation state. The philosopher Hegel noted that Ger­many should follow suit. And Germany did.

  The second protagonist is the public school. That many, then most, then all people go to public schools, is a development so radical and per­vasive that it really has no counterpart in history. Not only is basic literacy spread to every­one—from the piano playing mansion girl to the drunk, train hopp­ing hobo looking for work—but the nation state begins to mold the breed, in the role of pupils, into its mental framework. Millions of peo­ple taught and taught, and disciplined and manipulated for years on end. This even includes physical education for military purposes and pub­lic health. The democratic states legitimize their control over years of chil­d­ren’s lives in terms of civic virtues the children are thought to acqu­ire: reasoning, independence, a sense of equality, responsibility, self-discipli­ne. All of this works in tandem with the stimulation of science and engin­eer­ing. Arm­ies of school teachers are raised and in turn taught to respect the autho­rities of universities within natural sciences and human­ities. The public school transformed humanity in the image of the nation state.

  But of course, there are other contenders for the protagonist role of the nation state. The police is one. Police forces emerged in France and Eng­land—first in 1667 in Paris, when law enforcement was centralized under Louis XIV’s absol­ute monarchy.

  But criminological historians generally draw a line at the so-called Metropol­itan Police Act of 1829 in London. At this moment the police was given a lot of its present shape. The ori­ginator of the reform, Sir Rob­ert Peel, explicitly relied upon the uti­litarian phil­os­opher Jeremy Bent­ham, who also suggested the panopticon model of crim­inal justice: a pri­son where all cells are open to surveillance from a central tower with sha­ded windows.

  The army redcoats were redressed in blue and armed with bat­ons rat­her than rifles so as not to cause confusion among the unruly work­ers. With this kind of organized, cen­tralized mono­poly of violence, targ­eting not foreign powers, but the delinquents and rioters of the population itself, you have a new kind of state formation. This model is then exported across the world until more or less all countries have police forces—today sometimes larger than the regular army.

  But who were the police officers expected to discipline? The workers, of course—another contending protagonist in the history of the nation state. Workers. There were so many of them, crammed into such narrow spa­ces, under such strong pressures and strains, during such chaotic and dra­m­atic up­heavals, with such high-stake games and so many temp­ta­tions.

  The police show up in tandem with the industrial proletariat. To this day, all over the world, our criminal justice systems and policing target the lower classes of society. It is also the chil­dren of this segment who were first given basic education on a mass scale, before the peasants, which tur­ned urban­ized workers into citizens before the rural peasantry.

  The bourgeois class existed already in the early modern period. But it was only with industrial capitalism that the proletariat emerged in full. Histor­ians have perhaps insufficiently
emphasized the intimate conn­ec­tion bet­ween the industrial worker and the nation state.

  Napoleon and schools—or perhaps the police and the proletariat, play­ed the major roles. The nation state is an emer­gent pattern of gov­er­nance, of human self-organ­ization, of the man­agement of complexity.

  The cen­tral insight here is that the sheer volume of political power increases. People begin to be freed from their immediate soc­ial surr­oun­dings (your extended family and vocation) and to be integrated instead in a more abstract common social reality: the nation state. Your individua­tion as a unique person is married, as it were, to your integration into a nation. (I will return to the issue of (in-)dividuation and integration to­wards the end of this chapter.)

  When the individual “becomes” something more than her social role in the family or the village, she gains a kind of individual identity. And thus her “soul” can be con­quered, tamed, sed­u­ced, manipulated in new and more profound ways. Napoleon’s words echo through this period:

  “A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty dis­tinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.”

  In other words: You no longer buy power with mercen­aries, because power lies in the minute control of the soul. The greatest power—the great­est force of birth, creation and destruction—lies beyond the early capitalist structures, beyond the human agency coordinated by money.

  The individual’s innermost thoughts and drea­ms can be alig­n­ed with a more abstracted social order of things, her lon­ging and lust and search for immortality can be tied to the nation, its victories, tragedies and progress. Again, there it is: the increasing intimacy of control.

  Who, then, will control the mechanisms and institutions that awaken and shape these powers, and for what purposes? The history of the 20th century, and its great wars, seem to revolve around this very question.

  3. The Welfare State

  In the 20th century this tendency towards greater intimacy of control takes on yet another level of magnitude. With the emergence of the welfare state, built “on top of” the nation state, forms of coordination and control that hitherto had been unimaginable become reality.

  The strangest part is perhaps that the dramatic expansion of the state’s control mechanisms happens so effortlessly, so inconspicuously. No­body notices, really; it just sneaks up in the most self-evident manner. And it changes everything.

  Early signs of a welfare state show up already in Bismarck’s Germany, beginning in the 1880s. Even if some sprouts are visible al­ready in the 1840s in Pru­ssia, it is only with Bismarck’s united Germany that redistri­bution of wealth is quite delib­erately used as a means to increase the en­franchisement of cit­izens into the state project (and, as many have noted, to curb socialist movements and reduce the threat of rev­olution). [29]

  The manner in which I here consider the welfare state is not only a matter of redistribution of wealth. It is rather, and primarily, a whole world of inter­related mechanisms of controlling and coordinating peo­ple’s bod­ies, minds, per­sonalities and beha­­viors.

  At a very basic level, we see how the soc­ial expenditures of states went up, especially after the Second World War. In the US, for instance, in­come taxes went up dramatically from 1935 (14.6%) to 1940 (40.7%), due to the war effort. After the war taxes stayed at that level, even slowly in­creas­ing (by 2015 it was 46.5%). [30]

  What you see here is a vast expansion of the capacity of the state to coll­ect taxes in an orderly fashion over longer periods of time—earlier forms of states had simply not permeated the economic life of society to any com­parable extent. Also, the economies were much larger, so the de facto reven­ues were increased by powers of ten. What, then, is this increa­sed revenue used for?

  Enter the minions of the welfare state: social workers, psychologists, soc­­iologists, statisticians, public health officials, urban planners, more doc­tors and nurses and assistant nurses, dentists, account­ants, eco­no­m­ists, political scientists, public relations experts, employment counselors, more teachers, liberal professors—and, of course, admin­ist­ra­tors, admin­istrators, administrators. An endless onsla­ught of highly edu­ca­ted people—profess­ionals—monitoring and con­trol­ling increas­ingly com­plex and intimate parts of human interactions.

  It is difficult to overestimate the scope and force of this transformation. These highly specialized people develop innumerable competencies in every­day life: how to measure us, how to avoid conflict, how to nudge us in different directions, how to steer conversations, how to elicit replies from us.

  The sociologists Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose made a name for them­selves by studying these many minute and subtle techniques soc­ial wor­kers, counselors and accountants use to govern society. Without these many micro-techniques of control, the state we know today could hardly exist.

  Miller and Rose noted, quite clearly, that the modern state app­aratus relies entir­ely upon this massive, ongoing everyday activity. They also note these activities often underpin the existing economic and social power struct­ures in society, in everything from social work to acc­ount­ing. [31] Being leftwing sociologists, Miller and Rose naturally worry this intri­cate web of control may have become too influenced by “neo­liberal” market logics of present-day capitalism. This political stance aside, Miller and Rose still touch upon something cru­cial: the enormous amount of coordinating and controlling “mic­ro actions” people perform every minu­te of the hour, every day.

  This is, unsurprisingly, also what I have found in my earlier ethno­gr­aphic stud­ies of the police. Sitting in the backseat while the police patrol­led the inner city, I noticed any number of subtle strat­e­gies of con­trol. Similar findings are present in other police ethno­graphers like Loïc Wac­quant, Abby Peterson and William Ker Muir. The security and social ser­vices serve us, but they also control us. Serving one person often means controlling another’s behavior.

  Welfare and control, to a large extent, go hand-in-hand. They are two sides of the same coin. Think about it. In Sweden today, this “free” society, the state keeps almost everyone in school for twelve years, gets involved with broken fam­­ilies, brokers toxic marital relations, teaches us about safe sex, sexuality and gender equality, peers into the very cavities of our bodies: the mouth, the vagina, feeling through our breasts for cancer­ous lumps, recommends us what to eat, funds our smaller newspapers, sup­ports us in getting our lazy buts to the gym, treats our madness—if neces­s­ary, force-feeding the non-compliant patient with drugs and liquid nour­ishment. Is this level of control not approaching what George Orwell ima­gined in his novel, 1984 ?

  And yet—strangely—the people of Sweden (and other welfare states) hardly seem to mind. Sure, there are a few frustrations and scoffs at exag­gerations here and there, but by and large, people appear to feel relatively free, not oppressed nor violated.

  Even if the Nordic countries offer a prime example, the growth of the welfare state is not isolated to these. The Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen famously described the “three worlds of welfare capitalism” in his 1990 book with the same title, noting there are different systems: the social demo­cratic (Nordic countries), the conservative (Germany, Jap­an) and the liberal (the US). Other taxonomies have been proposed, but they tend to largely overlap with Esping-Andersen’s. Even if the welfare syst­ems are different and their levels of pervasive­ness vary, the overall pattern holds across the developed world: the rise of the welfare state, and with it, a great leap in the level of intimacy of control.

  Never before have societies controlled the bodies and souls of their pop­ul­ations to a comparable degree. Never before have abstract patterns of power encroached this much on everyday life: minds molded with cog­nitive behavioral therapy and drugs, bodies shaped with health cam­paigns and changed with surgery, relations affected with counseling, bro­k­er­ing and advice. What a strange matter of affairs!
/>   I am presenting this development of control as if it were an oppressive monstr­osity. And it can be. In totalitarian societies it certainly is. As this power and control grows—which seems to be the case even today, given all the new research about behavior and all the available information and all the lear­ning and acquired silent know­ledge of the professionals—then so do the risks of people feel­ing viol­ated, subtly manipulated. Or disap­pointed, be­cause the expect­ations and general sense of entitlement also grow with higher welfare.

  But it doesn’t have to be oppressive. For the most part it isn’t. Rath­er, what we see is a steady expansion of social rights or positive free­doms . Social rights are, in opposition to negative freedoms, the ser­vices peo­ple can expect from society. Negative freedoms have to do with what you can expect people not to do: imprison you, stop you from going about your business, stop you from expressing an opinion, harm your body. These are human rights or civil liberties expressed negatively, by what people must not do. Positive freedoms deal with the things people are legally bound to give you, if you ask: basic education, health­care, a sub­sistence minimum. Not then the “freedom from ”, but rather, the “free­dom to ” (as many theorists of social rights, e.g. Erich Fromm, Sir Isaiah Berlin have noted).

  There will always be a tension between the positive freedoms and the negative ones. If you, for instance, use the forced labor of one person to give someone else a basic subsistence, it would obviously mean you have sold out basic human rights. Hence, many libertarians and conservatives have argued, we would do best to scrap the idea of social rights altoge­ther. Further­more—so the argument goes—too many social rights can lead to unreal­istic expect­ations and foster a population of spoiled brats, unwilling to and incapable of taking responsibility, lacking any industriousness and resource­ful­ness.