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Historisk tidskrift 124:4 • 2004

Innehåll (Contents) 2004:4

Uppsatser (Articles)

Demokrati og kulturel nationalisme i Norden i mellemkrigstiden – en realpolitisk højredrejning?

Niels Kayser Nielsen

Fulltext (pdf)

Summary

Nordic Democracy and Cultural Nationalism in the Interwar Period – a Pragmatic Turn to the Right?

This comparative study argues that the political culture of the Nordic Countries took a distinctive turn to the right in the 1930’s. In part this was the result of the general European turn to right wing populism of the time, but in part it was also brought about by specific Nordic circumstances. In the 1930’s, these countries lacked a political culture that would allow the mobilization of the broad masses of the people and to establish a link between political participation and a common identity as a ”folk”. The task, therefore, was to give the concept of ”folk” a democratic content, alongside its cultural and nationalistic dimensions. A popular adherence to democracy was needed and an important way of establishing it was to combine the defense of democracy with a robust cultural nationalism. Not least the Nordic Social Democratic parties, which during the 1930’s became ”folkish” rather than socialist, used the fight against anti-democrats as a defense for a new democracy, while at the same time using the methods of ”folkish” modern mass mobilizations found in Europe’s totalitarian states.

Consequently, the Nordic countries followed a Sonderweg by creating a hybrid between political democracy and a cultural ethnic nationalism. This meant that in the Nordic countries much of the ”dangerous” nationalistic cultural and symbolic material, that fascinated so many Europeans in the interwar period, was used by political parties that were democratic and anti-fascist. By doing so, these political parties occupied the space available for and used by fascism elsewhere in Europe and as a result fascism did not reach political influence in the Nordic countries