Introduction: libertarianism in the Nordics since the 1980s

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the theme issue about libertarianism in the Nordics since the 1980s. It sets out the key ambition of our theme issue, namely to de-Americanize and transnationalize the study of libertarianism by approaching libertarianism as a movement and an ideology that has been introduced, translated and adapted into very different regional and national contexts across the world. In so doing, the essay argues that the historical conditions for libertarianism in the Nordics were set by the heritage of welfare statism, social democracy and social liberalism, in ways that underscored its nature as counter-ideology and protest. We argue that there is a distinct temporality across the Nordics, and we introduce the main contents of the issue contributions on, respectively, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.

Introduction

Libertarianism refers to a range of theories that give strict priority to liberty and natural rights, stressing freedom of choice, individualism and voluntary association over other values such as authority, tradition and equality.¹ Libertarians thus seek to maximize the realm of individual freedom and minimize the scope of public authority, typically seeing the state and other political institutions as the principal threat to liberty. However, libertarian theories diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems and on their visions of alternative societies. Moreover, they draw on and identify with a range of very different ideological families including liberalism, anarchism and conservatism. Libertarianism has consequently taken many different forms in time and space.

Although émigré Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek are counted among the figureheads of modern libertarianism, it is commonly portrayed as a distinct American phenomenon with roots in the 19th century.² It was further developed in the mid-twentieth century, when American free market thinkers began to describe themselves as libertarians, and looked back to constitutive debates around American federation to find historical legitimacy to this market ideal. In 1946, the Foundation for Economic Education – the first libertarian think tank in the world – was founded by Leonard Read in New York. In the following decades libertarianism developed into an underground movement of colourful periodicals, organizations and personalities, who had little apparent influence on society as such, but saw themselves as an embattled minority acting as a vanguard of radical capitalist ideas.

The development of the American libertarian movement is inextricably linked to novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand and economist Murray Rothbard. The former reached a popular audience with fiction books such as The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) and constructed a philosophical system she named Objectivism, which in the 1950s developed into a social and political movement, spawned by cadres of followers devoted to spread Rand’s gospel.³ An American heterodox economist of the Austrian School and a leading theoretician of so-called anarcho-capitalism, Rothbard became a central figure in the American libertarian movement in the 1960s and 1970s. He was moreover active in the Libertarian Party and founded a number of libertarian think tanks in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Cato Institute and the Ludwig von Mises Institute.⁴

In recent decades, the libertarian impulses emanating from Rand, Rothbard and others have been advocated by a range of prominent activists and politicians, such as former Libertarian Party nominee and candidate for the Republican Party in 2008 and 2012, Ron Paul. Moreover, commentators such as Patrick J. Buchanan have embraced the ideological alliance between libertarianism and paleoconservatism that Rothbard and his long-time collaborator Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. developed after the end of the Cold War era.⁵ This fusion eventually found support in the Tea Party Movement – and in the alt-right movement, which have many backers in the Republican Party, including Donald Trump.⁶ Libertarianism moved in this process from the periphery towards the centre in American politics. This development has also pinpointed tensions within the libertarian project, for instance, between an anti-establishment, sometimes nativist populist stance, a neoconservative appeal to moral order, and a globalistic idea of the primacy of the multinational corporation.⁷ These may, or may not, have squeezed out other possible articulations of libertarian politics, for instance, a radical cosmopolitanism following a strict natural rights argument, a localistic idea of the market as black market, barter or self-reliance, a certain hedonism in cultural and sexual affairs. As such, libertarianism is to be viewed, we propose, as a complex and changeable body of ideas. Developments in its signifiers and key concepts are not teleologically determined, but bound by actors, networks and contexts, which the very act of resituating libertarianism outside of the American framework shows.

While the literature on libertarianism is heavily focused on American networks, libertarianism has certainly manifested in regions of the world outside the United States, including, maybe counter-intuitively so, in the Nordic welfare states and in the heartland of what has conventionally been understood as social democratic political cultures. Inspired by American libertarian thinkers, in collaboration with transnational free market organizations, and fuelled also by important developments in liberalism at home, libertarian movements were founded in Sweden (Frihetsfronten), Denmark (Libertas) and Norway (Libertas) in the early 1980s. In parallel, a set of publications and newsletters appeared that played a central role in the organization of national and intra-Nordic exchanges. With a different timing (due to the particular Cold War context), libertarian cultures and strands of thought were introduced in Finland towards the 1990s. From the 1990s on, libertarianism was also, somewhat paradoxically, exported from the Nordics into the newly founded Baltic republics, for instance, from Sweden to Estonia through networks of political and economic advisers of the coalition government led by Prime Minister Carl Bildt from the Moderate Party.

By exploring libertarianism in the Nordics as an ideology and a network since the 1980s, the theme issue offers three contributions to the field. First, it seeks to expand on a literature that has been too heavily focused on the United States, mainly occupied with the activities of canonical thinkers, and (until recently) written primarily by insiders to the movement. Most importantly, we seek to de-Americanize and transnationalize the study of libertarianism by approaching it as a movement and phenomenon that has been introduced, translated and adapted into very different regional and national contexts across the world – often with a timing that reflected the transformation of specific politico-economic regimes and a certain search for the political futures. It is striking that this work has hitherto not been done in libertarianism scholarship, particularly considering the importance of transnational studies of neoliberal networks – these overlapped but also clashed with libertarian ones in important ways, as the essays in this issue also demonstrate.⁸

Second, by analysing the emergence, evolution and impact of libertarian ideas and networks in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, the theme issue aims to decipher the particular characteristics and importance of libertarianism in and across the Nordics. This involves analysing the specific constellations between indigenous sources – in particular the rise of a new Nordic neoliberalism and market turn – and transnational construction that made possible and formed the building of libertarian traditions in this region, known for its welfare statist heritages, its Third way mixed economy models, and the symbolic proximity to the USSR. Here, the contributions suggest that we need to consider both similarities and differences between the Nordics (Sweden, Norway and Denmark on the one hand, and Finland on the other), and the importance of Norden as an arena of transnational formation and exchange in its own right. Libertarians organized between the Nordics in processes of both cooperation and conflict, in so doing they apparently reproduced much older patterns of Nordic collaboration and exchange, and in the process, particularly Swedish libertarians appear to have been by far the most market radical causing reactions from Nordic comrades.

Third, using the Nordics as an entry point, the theme issue seeks to add to the debate about the distinctiveness of libertarianism as a political ideology and its affiliation to other ideologies, such as liberalism, conservatism, and, in particular, neoliberalism. While focusing mainly on its ideational side and semantic features, we also seek to understand libertarianism as an ideology and a movement by exploring the specificities of its networks and cultural expressions.

The remainder of this introduction (1) discusses libertarianism as a transnational movement and phenomenon beyond the United States and places the Nordic case in this context (2) describes the historical conditions for libertarianism in the Nordics; (3) examines the distinctiveness of libertarianism as an ideology in and beyond the Nordics; (4) explains the similarities and differences between Nordic libertarianism and Nordic neoliberalism; (5) and introduces the four contributions in more detail.

Libertarianism as transnational problem

We argue that the Nordics are a relevant case with which to transnationalize and de-Americanize the study of libertarianism, and that this region also brings out an important aspect of the history of libertarianism precisely in its role as both active export from dominant American networks, and active import in contexts where it played a role which American intellectuals had perhaps not intended. This transnational story is indicative of the ideological barriers and taboos that constrained the spread of libertarian ideas, but also of the conditions of possibility that could permit the explosion of such barriers. It also speaks to a larger problem to do with the conversions of liberalism and transnational modes of liberal thought after 1989.

While the literature is scarce on the subject, there have certainly been instances of libertarian thinking and movements in spaces outside of the American context. The variation in these, between indigenous sources and transnational construction, is key to demonstratedemonstrating both the weaknesses of libertarian ideology, which often remained fragmentary and squeezed between other liberal and illiberal traditions, and its paradoxical itineraries over time. In France, libertarianism’s domestic traditions were mainly to be found on the left, in anarchism and syndicalism, before the development of alt-right expressions in relation to a rejection of Islam and state corporatism in the 2000s.⁹ In the Netherlands, libertarianism struggled, quite like it did in the Nordics, with a profoundly social-liberal orientation and has led a rather marginal existence alongside a more important neoliberal and neoconservative current.¹⁰ In Belgium, on the other hand, key figures orbited around the think tank Libera! Created from a post-war network entitled Nova Civitas. Several of those went in alt-right direction, while others, like Guy Verhofstadt, developed Belgian neoliberalism as a more market-bound enterprise.

The Nordics lacked a tradition of revolutionary liberalism and there was little domestic political heritage that could be mobilized in view of developing libertarianism as an explicitly counter-ideological project. The active import of the American canon and its insertion into a Nordic context that, after 1989, was presented as a new market future, was therefore crucial. While the timelines vary between the Nordics, with the main exception being Finland, libertarians across the Nordic space used this canon to reinvent historical temporalities and project themselves out of a social democrat welfarist past, and into a future, where, they argued, a historically authentic form of pre-socialist liberalism could be recreated. In Finland and Estonia, the play with temporalities was equally important, serving to bring out a pre-Soviet era past in ways that often called to a true or original nation or Republic. In Finland, libertarianism could not really emerge from under the Soviet influence before 1989, after which single libertarian individuals appeared often as aggressive entrepreneurs and global market makers. Similarly, as Veikko Jarmala demonstrates in his ongoing doctoral dissertation, the Republic of Estonia merged the imagined recreation of historical property rights before communism, with a radical new set of market freedoms.¹¹

The strategic import of the libertarian canon allowed for this play with political time. The years before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall was a moment when temporalities were up for grabs, and the transnational activities of libertarians seem in fact to focus on places where the ideological meanings of time and space were shifting. In the early 1980s, at the time of Rand’s death (1982) and Rothbard’s founding of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute following his split with the Cato Institute (also 1982), the American libertarian scene underwent processes of upheaval and fragmentation. At the same time, however, Rothbard and Rand gained new followers beyond the American context, as several international networks and societies were created, including the International Libertarian Society, which held world congresses in the 1980s – at least four were organized in the Nordics: in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo and Tallinn.¹²

Happily lending his name to new libertarian institutional initiatives in the Nordics, for example by joining the editorial board of Libertas in Denmark, Rothbard (and Charles Koch) also placed significant interest in South Africa in the mid-1980s, where there existed a formerly leftist, anarchist dream of post-apartheid, laissez faire independent cantons.¹³ The so-called Groundswell Movement was mainly white activists who thought an autonomous market rule would replace a racial system with radical individualism, thus imitating both historically free black tribal societies and a white settler logic. South Africa faced an important moment of transition with the end of apartheid in view. With a similar view to systems change and to the mid-wifery of a new market economy, in which certain regimes of pre-existing property rights would be complemented with the formulation of new ones, economic libertarianism invaded Eastern Europe, including the Baltic republics (not least Estonia), in the 1990s.¹⁴

These transnational dimensions and the circulation of a specific idea of the market economy as the symbol of a new age of pluralization between historically pre-socialist legacies and ultra-modernity have not really been examined by the emerging literature on libertarianism. Importantly, transnational libertarianism unfolded in certain spaces, which were filled with a new symbolic value. South Africa was one, due to the legacy of the apartheid system, Eastern Europe another, because of the rapid transition from communism to capitalism. But in this volume, we want to highlight the Nordics as yet another important case, characterized by their famous in between third way model between capitalism and communism, were another. Such an in between was not possible within the cognitive frame of libertarianism (nor was it eventually to neoliberals), and in the Nordics, the libertarian revolution concerned not only a radical rethinking of the meaning of ‘market economy’ in this region but also the explosion of a set of profound cultural taboos that came out of the political culture of welfare statism. The 1980s saw a reformulation of the idea, or, some would say brand, of the Nordics in international liberalism. As demonstrated by many scholars, the Nordics found their place in the symbolic geographies of the world economy from the 1930s on, when the American diplomat Marquis Childs famously referred to Sweden as a ‘middle way’ between communism and capitalism, mainly due to the existence of the cooperative movement but also the socialization of housing that took place in the interwar period in response to the Depression, and the subventioning and collectivization of grain and dairy products.¹⁵

Even at the height of the Cold War, the Nordics retained the mythical symbolic capacity of efficient and relatively freedom-loving capitalist utopias and were oftentimes mobilized as examples also by intellectuals on the right end of the political spectrum. To Cold War liberals, in networks such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, for instance, the Nordics were the proof that forms of welfare statist regulation did not lead to tyranny but could bolster a plurality of class interests and harmonious capitalist relations.¹⁶ Nordic democracy became a hallmark, understood as deeply ingrained in collectivist structures such as the cooperatives or the trade union movement, which to liberals signified a democratic industrial society, but that libertarians would, on the contrary, see as part of a ‘slippery slope’ towards a totalitarian collectivism and corporativism. The Nordics was a highly symbolic geography, not in spite of, but because of, their welfare statist heritages and the symbolic proximity to the USSR. To undermine the idea of the in between model and turn it into a theoretical anomaly and ideological freak was of theoretical essence. It is frankly not clear here to what extent this was a prioritized move by American libertarians, several of whom journeyed repeatedly to the Nordics in these years, or a desire that came rather from within the Nordic context, where libertarian arguments at the same time became mobilized for a broader neoliberal assault on the welfare state.¹⁷ However, libertarian arguments were clearly present in a broader political context in the Nordics, in a way that is not reducible to periods of economic crisis (such as that of for instance Iceland’s Hayekian turn after 2008) but seems in fact a continuity that in many ways trouble existing accounts of political history of these decades.¹⁸ The history of these networks and ideas substantially challenges the story of the social democrat welfare state, and also helps understand the fractures and divisions that have characterized Nordic liberalism and conservatism in the last decades.

Conditions for libertarianism in the Nordics

Libertarianism marked a radical rupture with Nordic political languages and was, in definite ways, an ideological novelty and import. Nordic political democracy was strongly influenced since the late 19th century of social conservative, social liberal, and social democratic legacies. These found shared expression in widely shared political metaphors such as that of the welfare state as a ‘home’ – emphasizing organic relationships between state and society and falling back on an overarching conception of nation and people. While many debates can be identified throughout the 20th century in the Nordic space on the right limits to and the nature of welfare statism, in the Nordics, liberal languages were profoundly infused by or compatible with welfare state notions of social efficiency and harmony until the 1970s.¹⁹

This legacy of predominant social liberal culture and social compromise beyond the labour-capital or red-green divide set the conditions of a variety of libertarian responses across the Nordics in ways that were much different from its American scene. What, then, changed in the 1960s and 1970s in order to create a fecund terrain for libertarianism? Political scientists have tended to see the battle over the wage earner funds, in both Sweden and Finland, as the decisive factor behind the neoliberal backlash from the mid-1970s on, as the welfare state ‘overstepped’ its boundaries in historic compromises between social democratic parties and business from the interwar on.²⁰ But a number of structural changes can be observed across the Nordics in the 1960s and 1970s that provided libertarianism with the hateful enemies that it needed. At the same time, these changes might not have spurred the same historic responses, if American libertarianism, imported and adapted by Nordic actors, had not provided a new interpretational framework.

First, the emphasis on universal social security, generally praised by liberals, gave way to new forms of interventionism into both the industrial and the social fabric, mainly motivated by the radicalization of both social democrat parties and trade unions in the late 1960s. In Finland and Sweden, a renewed emphasis on economic democracy saw the formulation of new wage, investment and industrial policies alongside discourses of individual economic rights.²¹ Proposals for wage earner funds from the left were met with proposals for stakeholder capitalism through democratically and corporately controlled shareholder schemes from the centre right – much the same thing to libertarians. At the same time, the introduction of new themes of shareholder culture was certainly compatible with some libertarian visions and imaginations.²²

Second, developments in the industrial sphere were paralleled by a new social paternalism and heightened egalitarianism: in all the Nordic countries, changes in tax and marital legislation gave women a new and autonomous stance, so-called ‘state feminism’ made its mark on social democratic parties and led to ambitious childcare reforms and parental insurance, stressing the idea of the family as a legitimate space both of redistribution and of regulation. Ideas of women’s rights also strengthened cultural protectionist policies such as new censorship laws on pornography. These clashed with an ongoing liberalization in the cultural sphere, where new media technologies such as short-wave radio, satellite tv or the videocassette challenged national TV monopolies and became very concrete forms of new modes of circulation of ideas and cultural artefacts from the United States.²³

Third, in all the Nordic countries, the 1970s and 1980s saw a mounting pressure on forms of social regulation that had been liberating for the older generation but were perhaps experienced as oppressive by the young. Hence, a point made by all the papers in this volume, is the link made by Nordic libertarians between a certain form of planned welfarist model, and a culturally overregulated and prohibitive social sphere. As we will see, many key institutions of the Nordic welfare states – housing, alcohol culture, the public job market, media and TV – became objects for a new kind of liberal arguments and protests by the late 1970s and early 1980s, and re-casted from forms of protection to signs of a paternalistic state that pacified individuals into ‘sleeping’ citizens.²⁴ Such arguments were a direct counterpoint to historic framings of welfare statism, across the political spectrum, as a widening of citizenship.

Fourth, a vital generational change took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Youth in Scandinavia (as elsewhere in the Western World) not only grew up in unprecedented wealthy societies and moved to the city, without having the intention of moving back to the countryside, but also became increasingly internationally oriented thanks to television and travel. And by the 1980s, a generation had come of age that reacted strongly against what they saw as the boredom of social democrat cultural politics, and the leftist radicality of for instance 1968 gender politics. Nordic ‘68’ was a revolt not only against capitalism, imperialism and exploitation in the third world but also against what they perceived to be a technocratic, authoritarian and consumerist welfare state at home, which allegedly numbed and alienated its citizens by offering standardized consumption as their only pleasure. Their revolt involved demands to autonomy, self-determination and self-management.²⁵ Libertarians in the Nordics both reacted against and took inspiration from this precedent youth revolt. They disliked the social values informing ‘68’ but imitated the repertoire of social activism that it had injected into politics. They reappropriated the theme of youth culture. Indeed, in the Danish context, libertarianism was framed as a ‘youth revolt from the right’.

Fifth, libertarian critique presented a new version of Nordic globalism, in reaction to the increase in third world aid and the development of new solidarity networks between Nordic trade unions and resistance movements in the global South. The direct interest among Swedish libertarians for a future ultra-capitalist South Africa was a direct response to the links developed between social democratic and the ANC in the 1970s and 1980s.²⁶ In this manner, libertarianism introduced both a shaking up of the historical identity of the Nordics and a fundamental reinsertion into the symbolic geographies of the new world order. In Finland, libertarianism could really only develop after 1989, at which point libertarian thought developed in a strangely both tech-utopian and eventually ultranationalist direction. 1989 was not simply the end of the Cold War, in the Nordics, it meant a decisive turn to the West and the de facto embrace of capitalism.²⁷

Libertarian ideologies and networks

How are we to understand the nature of libertarian ideology and its relation to other ideologies, such as liberalism, neoliberalism and conservatism? The broad answer is that there are common concerns, as well as deep divisions, between libertarianism and these other ideologies.

As for the relations between libertarianism and liberalism, in his seminal work on the American libertarian movement, Brian Doherty simply equates the ideological outlook of key libertarian figureheads, such as Ludwig von Mises, with ‘unreconstructed nineteenth-century liberalism.’²⁸ And, indeed, there are many commonalities between those strands of liberalism, which stress free market economy, individual freedom and limited state government, and certain strands of libertarianism. In line with this, in an American context, the term libertarianism was created in the 1950s by a range of free market thinkers as a replacement for the word ‘liberal’, and as a synonym of what liberalism allegedly once meant, before it was distorted by Roosevelt’s more state-friendly New Deal liberalism.²⁹ Not only in the United States but also in the Nordic context, libertarians have identified themselves with and projected their ideological projects into traditions of what is often (also among libertarians) labelled ‘classical liberalism’. In Denmark, for example, libertarians have from the 1980s until today published on the international canon of classical liberalism and also sought to unearth, difficult as it is, traditions of Danish classical liberalism in order to portray their own intellectual activities as belonging to these traditions.³⁰ In this sense, ideological affinities and common concerns between certain strands of libertarianism and liberalism are obvious and important.

On the other hand, some strands of libertarianism clearly diverge from the ideological traditions associated with so-called classical liberalism (or ‘unreconstructed nineteenth-century liberalism’). Perhaps most importantly, the priority given to individual liberty is stronger in certain libertarian languages than it is in classical liberalism, for which reason many libertarians identify with anarchism or egoism rather than with liberalism.³¹ Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard are obvious cases in point here. Under the strands of libertarianism associated with these figureheads, if the state is deemed legitimate at all, its function is strictly limited to protect each person’s rights – primarily property rights – from force and/or fraud. Seen from this angle, libertarianism and classical liberalism, are arguably two very different ideologies.

To understand the specific character of libertarianism in and beyond the Nordics, it is even more important to decipher its relations to neoliberalism. These are severely complex and intertwined, though crucial differences between the two ideologies can arguably be discerned.

As seen in literature on American libertarianism, libertarianism and neoliberalism are often conflated. For example, three out of the five libertarian figureheads in Brian Doherty’s earlier mentioned Radicals for Capitalism – Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman – are also prominent actors in the massive literature on neoliberalism, which has emphasized the importance of the transnational networks of the Mont Pelèrin Society (MPS) as laying the preparatory groundwork for a global revolution in neoliberal ideas from the 1940s onwards.³² Moreover, many of the famous free market think tanks on the American right are by scholars interchangeably named neoliberal or libertarian (and sometimes neoconservative), and, overall, there can be no doubt that libertarianism and neoliberalism often overlap in terms of ideas and concerns, people and institutions, reference points and sources of inspiration. In the Nordics, it can be pointed out that the endogenous version of neoliberalism had strong neoconservative undercurrents – and libertarianism appears in clear contradiction to this with its sometimes libertine sexual politics and liberal attitude towards drugs for instance.

Nordic libertarianism vs. Nordic neoliberalism

Libertarian movements in the Nordics partly relied on the ideas and the institutional support of the neoliberal network. For example, Danish and Norwegian libertarians were members of the MPS and referred to figures such as Hayek and Friedman next to Rothbard and Rand. But libertarianism is arguably more than, or different from, neoliberalism, due to the radicality in claims to individual freedom and defiance of the state and in principle all collective institutions. Here, it should be remembered that neoliberalism is commonly defined by its positive notion of the state as the guarantor of a competitive order, by which neoliberals seek to distinguish their project from classical liberalism. This difference was noticed by Rothbard and Rand (who was by the way opposed to the libertarian movement at her time, criticizing its promoters for being ‘hippies of the right’, who misunderstood or ignored her objectivist philosophy). Indeed, Rand considered both Friedman and Hayek dangerous compromisers, while Rothbard often criticized Friedman for not arguing for wholesale privatization but for state-enforced solutions to various societal problems.³³ This argument is very relevant for the Nordic context where privatization was hotly debated in the 1980s but its particular path not yet identified. Importantly, despite inviting Rothbard to the Princeton meeting in 1958 and arranging a special session on the libertarian movement around the world in Hong Kong in 1978, the American libertarian movement never found a home in the MPS.³⁴

But to make things more complex, neoliberalism also differs remarkably from the paleoconservatism that Rothbard, deriving his thought from natural law, came to stand for and that clearly has a certain presence in the Nordics also through a certain reference to historical stereotypes of self-reliant free farmers opposed to the king (and occasionally, Vikings). If neoliberalism promotes itself through a language focused on markets, consumerism, individualism and globalism, paleoconservatism advances a vision centred on property rights, producerism, the family (as the basic family unit), and the local – as encompassed in Rothbard’s concept of homesteading (referring to the original appropriation of land and natural resources by the labour of farmers).³⁵ In this strand of libertarianism, with its stress on ethically defined communities and their familial households, social conservatism, rather than classical liberalism and neoliberalism, looms large and its co- existence with more libertine strands is paradoxical indeed.

In the Nordics, libertarian milieus have occasionally, not least in recent decades, cultivated some of the nationalist (also biologist and racist) traits that are found in Rothbard’s paleolibertarianism, though seemingly not directly inspired from it. This is most explicitly seen in Norway, where the history of libertarianism neatly coincides with the rise of the Progress party (Fremskrittspartiet). However, the breakthrough of libertarianism in the Nordic context in the 1980s and 1990s relied, as mentioned, much on the ideas and the institutional support of neoliberal networks, even if it also diverged from these ideas and networks. Neoliberal arguments, not least from Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, were already introduced in Sweden, Norway and Denmark as part of the planning vs. free market debates that raged in the immediate post-war period, where Hayek lectured in Sweden and Denmark and drafted Nordic members for the MPS.³⁶ Moreover, business communities in Sweden, Norway and Denmark established information agencies that were connected to and in various ways spread the ideological message of the international neoliberal network.³⁷ But neoliberalism as a movement and an ideology never really caught on in the Nordic welfare states in the post-war period, and the international neoliberal community of activists never took a great interest in this region, even if MPS had very energetic promoters of market thought in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, including the Norwegian businessman Trygve Hoff and Danish economist Christian Gandil.

Neoliberal icons were introduced and celebrated more systematically in the Nordics in the 1970s – the Nordic connection to neoliberalism has been stressed not least in the context of the Nobel Prize to Milton Friedman in 1976³⁸ – but the emergence of neoliberalism in the region in this period was rather the product of endogenous debate and dissident economists in the mature social democrat welfare state.³⁹ In contrast, as mentioned above, neoliberal networks were integral to the founding of libertarian movements in the Nordics in the 1980s, whose members did not exclusively talk of themselves as libertarians, but also as neoliberals, market liberals, liberals, anarchists, anarchocapitalists etc. However, Nordic libertarians were not merely neoliberals and the genealogical line of free market thought and activism does not travel simply from the MPS, but also from more hardcore libertarian movements and networks. Certainly, many Nordic libertarians subscribed to Randian and Rothbardian ideals of individual freedom, the right to property and the free market, which were much more radical than the ideals espoused by Hayek and Friedman, for whom the ‘neo’ in neoliberal concerns the ambition to use the power of the state (and other political institutions) to create ‘free market’ orders.

Moreover, the Nordic libertarians championed a political culture that was much more youthful, activist and provocative than the one characterizing the older generation of neoliberals in the MPS. Among this generation of Swedish neoliberals were, for instance, Arvid Fredborg, deeply conservative but also monarchist and nationalist, Sven Rydenfelt, and Ingemar Ståhl. The two latter became central influences on Swedish libertarians, but had, at least for Rydenfelt, been critics of welfare regulation in, for instance, housing and agrarian products since the immediate interwar period, and they were of a different generation than those predominantly young and urban elites who sought out libertarian ideas from the mid 1970s and early 1980s on. In Denmark, Christian Gandil, who had been a lonely second-hand dealer in neoliberal ideas since the 1940s, passed the MPS torch onto the new generation of Danish libertarians in the late 1970s.⁴⁰ In contrast to Gandil, they constructed a self-confident movement and a concrete political programme of reforming the Danish welfare state. This generational shift is important: it was a marked difference to the American libertarians whose texts were read and distributed, and it also brought new content in the sense of a profound attempt to popularize a new market gospel. While neoliberalism was a mainly elite driven affair, libertarianism had a popular or vernacular component that allowed it to explode certain ideological barriers in the Nordic space, where historically welfare statism had brought restrictions on commercialism and market culture. This vernacular element has, we propose, profound explanatory value because while the chains of influence of neoliberalism may be traced to elite gatherings and expert networks, libertarians often seem to have worked in the undertow and less through text than popular culture. They spoke to audiences in movements and organizations that had no apparent power but were culturally influential. Possibly, the lasting legacy of libertarianism in the Nordics was to popularize a market concept that was somehow alien to political traditions, and anchor this in a kind of new mass culture oriented towards the consumer logic. As such, it played a role of avant-garde, paving the way for much larger rearticulations of the role of the market in political life in the 1990s and 2000s.

Finally, the Nordic libertarian movements were often critical towards those national governments, which, in relation to economic crises – which had different temporalities across the Nordics – turned to neoliberal politics. In Sweden, for instance, libertarians describe with disgust how the Conservative Party, heavily influenced by neoliberalism in the early 1990s, reacted to the currency crisis and bank failures in 1991–92 by resorting to state-led subventions and credit lines. A similar critique was put forward in Norway by the central Norwegian libertarian Lars Peder Norbakken who in 1991 wrote scathingly about a Norwegian economy stifled by inflationary tendencies and political power over the central bank.⁴¹

Despite these criticisms, neoliberalism and MPS were not only crucial to begin with but also at a second stage, in adding to what seems to have begun as a youth protest culture a new emphasis on economic ideas and expertise in practical politics during the 1990s. After 1992 for instance, as the market revolution had been wone in the Nordics, Nordic libertarians, for instance, the economic advisors of the conservative Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, began exporting their expertise to the Baltic republics, which became important territories for mainly Swedish banks. Several Nordic MPS members helped draft the new constitution of the Republic of Estonia 10 years later.⁴² Advisors from the Nordics helped shape the Estonian free state and push for reforms that were seen as the realization of policies that could not yet be implemented in the other Nordics – Estonia lacked the heritage of the welfare state model. At this point, many of the radical libertarians of the 1980s changed nature and became policy advisors and neoliberal marketeers in their respective countries, as we will return to below. And in the 1990s, Estonia in particular also arguably became a neoliberal model for the Nordics, not least Sweden (functioning as a site for pension reform, for instance).⁴³

Overall, Nordic libertarians sought to reinterpret the welfare state from an understanding of it as a universal form of protection, linked in Nordic political language to an historic notion of collectivistic or corporatist freedom, to a radically new form of individual freedom. The novelty of this notion of freedom in the Nordic space needs again to be stressed. In contrast to neoliberal language, some libertarians tended to see freedom and natural rights as the overarching objective, and the market as a more subordinate organization form conducive to those rights. Sometimes, and in particular in Sweden, this led to a direct disinterest in libertarian circles for economic questions – but this varies case by case. This is yet another reason why we have chosen to label the new free market movements that emerged in the Nordics from the 1980s onwards for libertarian, even if they did not always, and some of them rarely, use the label themselves.

Contributions in this issue

Libertarianism is alive and well in the Nordics and has followed similar trajectories of leaving an early language of cosmopolitan radicality for alt-right proximity as elsewhere. An important literature on populism in the Nordics has indeed highlighted the Nordic innovation of the Progress parties, which were early in the Scandinavian contexts.⁴⁴ Our papers show that there was a tense relationship between libertarian and populist ideas, but that events in both the political landscape and in inner ideological dynamics have brought them closer together.

Our particular interest in this issue has been to understand the role played by libertarianism as a perhaps short-lived, but important ideology in the Nordic context, and we argue that in order to do so it is necessary to approach Nordic libertarianism as both network and ideology. In addition, we sought to analyse key ideas with a focus on deciphering external/internal influence and weigh transnational circulation and diffusion in relation to domestic context. This was particularly important to bring out how a libertarian, extreme, concept of individual freedom could be introduced both as a form of rupture and as a form of continuity, in different Nordic traditions and cultures. We have paid attention to divisions in libertarianism as they occurred across Nordic spaces, not least in relation to the progress parties and far-right discourse, and finally, all essays contain a reflection on the societal aspirations, roles and influences of libertarianism.

In Andersson’s paper, the Swedish group Frihetsfronten and its review Nyliberalen is discussed with a particular focus on the ideological significance of popular culture and youth protest. Andersson situates libertarianism in a specific context of disenchanted, urban protest culture and explores its link to the parallel rise of a very powerful kind of neoliberalism in the Swedish business federation.

Køber and Olsen analyze the rise of a libertarian intellectual tradition in Denmark with a focus on the intellectual society titled Libertas. The focus of this paper is on how, in political debates about privatization of the public sector and environmentalism in the 1980s and 1990s, members of Libertas introduced new types of welfare state critique and novel ideas of how to transform the Danish social order by means of privatization and marketization.

Innset’s contribution specifically examines the boundaries between an intellectual, theoretical libertarian ideological project and its twin in the rise of a populist and situationist or performative progress ideology that ultimately becomes nationalist. He underscores that the cosmopolitanism – an often priced value – of libertarianism was not a key ideological marker but in fact of rather minor importance as market freedom became more important than individual freedom.

In Strang’s, Kärrylä’s and Wuokko’s paper, the different political temporalities of libertarianism across the Nordics are of the essence, as Finland came late to libertarian thinking. The explanation here is shown to be the deep interplay between libertarian thinking and the Cold War, with Soviet influence making both ‘market’ and ‘freedom’ unthinkable in Finland before 1989. Development since is all the more interesting, as discussed in the paper with the example of the True Finns and the chair of Finland’s Chamber of Commerce, Risto Pentillä.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary fund [M19-0231-1].

Notes

1. See for example B. v. d. Bossen, ‘Libertarianism’, in Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2019), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/ (accessed 5 June); David Boaz, ‘Libertarianism’, in Britannica (2004), https://www.britannica.com/topic/libertarianism-politics (accessed 5 June); M. Zwolinski, ‘Libertarianism’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008), https://iep.utm.edu/libertar/ (accessed 5 June).

2. See the standard account B. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism. A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2007).

3. J. Burns, Goddess of the Market. Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

4. J. Raimondo, An Enemy of the State. The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2000); D. Bessner, ‘Murray Rothbard, political strategy, and the making of modern libertarianism’, Intellectual History Review, 24:4 (2014), pp. 441–456; J. Jensen, ‘Repurposing Mises: Murray Rothbard and the Birth of Anarchocapitalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 83:2 (2022), pp. 315–332.

5. Q. Slobodian, ‘Anti-’68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right’, Cultural Politics, 15:3 (2019), pp. 372–386; Jensen, ‘Repurposing Mises’; J. Ganz, ‘The forgotten man’, The Baffler, 15 December 2017, https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-forgotten-man-ganz (accessed 5 June 2023); J. Ganz, ‘Murray Rothbard’s American: Returning to the Ur-Text of Trumpism’, Unpopular Front, 20 May 2022, https://johnganz.substack.com/p/murray-rothbards-america?s=w (accessed 5 June 2023).

6. M. Cooper, ‘The Alt-Right: Neoliberalism, Libertarianism and the Fascist Temptation’, Theory, Culture & Society, 38:6 (2021): pp. 29–50; W. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

7. Cooper, ‘The Alt-Right’; Slobodian, ‘Anti’68ers’; S. Freeman, ‘Illiberal libertarians: Why libertarianism is not a liberal view’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 30/2 (2001), pp. 105–151.

8. See first of all Q. Slobodian, The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) and P. Mirowski & D. Plehwe (Eds), The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

9. Kevin Brooks, Why neoliberalism failed in France. Political sociology of the spread of neoliberal ideas in France 1974–2014 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2021).

10. For a recent account of neoliberalism in the Netherlands, see. M. Oudenampsen & B. Mellink, Neoliberalisme: Een Nederlandse Geschiedenis (Boom Geschiedenis: Amsterdam, 2022). See also M. Oudenampsen, ’In de Boksring van de Vrijheid: Den Uyl versus Hayek’, in M. Hurenkamp & R. Cuperus (Eds) Omstreden Vrijheid (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 2015), pp. 112–135.

11. Ongoing doctoral project, Veikko Jarmala, University of Helsinki, https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/fi/persons/veikko-j-jarmala (accesed 5 June 2023).

12. See Andersson’s paper in this issue. To our knowledge, no central archival collection exists of the ILS, but traces of these gatherings are found in various other archives such as for instance Swedish Timbro (Center för Näringslivshistoria archive center, SAF records).

13. L. Louw & F. Kendall, South Africa: the Solution (Johannesburg: Amagi Publications, 1986). C. R. Lynch, ‘Vote with your feet. Neoliberalism, the democratic nation state, and enclave libertarianism’, Political Geography, 59 (2017), pp. 82–91.

14. J. Bockman & G. Eyal, ‘Eastern Europe as a laboratory for economic knowledge: The transnational roots of neoliberalism’, American Journal of Sociology, 108/2 (2013), pp. 310–352. Jarmala, University of Helsinki. On the notion of economic libertarianism, see Andrew Gamble, ‘Economic Libertarianism’, M. Freeden, L. R. Sargent & M. Stears (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 405–421.

15. C. Marklund, ‘The Social Laboratory, the Middle Way and the Swedish Model: three frames for the image of Sweden’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 34/3 (2009), pp. 264–285. C. Marklund & K. Petersen, ‘Return to Sender – American Images of the Nordic Welfare States and Nordic Welfare State Branding,’ European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, 43/2 (2013). pp. 245–257.

16. See G. Scott-Smith, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the End of Ideology and the 1955 Milan Conference: Defining the Parameters of Discourse’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37: 3 (2002), pp. 437–455.

17. We have not been able to consult the American archives, so for this tentative conclusion, we rely on the clear evidence of transnational connections both from the US, and between the Nordics, as they appear from the Nordic sources.

18. L. Mjöset, ‘A Hayekian public intellectual in Iceland’, in, Q. Slobodian and D. Plehwe, Eds Market Civilizations. Neoliberals North and South, Princeton University Press, 2023), pp. 303–33.

19. F. Sejersted, The Age of Social Democracy: Norway and Sweden in the 20^th Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

20. J. Pontusson, The limits of social democracy. Investment politics in Sweden (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

21. I. Kärrylä, Democracy and the Economy in Finland and Sweden since 1960: A Nordic Perspective on Neoliberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

22. M. Wuokko, ‘The curious compatibility of consensus, corporatism, and neoliberalism: The Finnish business community and the retasking of a corporatist welfare state’, Business History, 63:4 (2019), pp. 668–685.

23. K. Östberg, 1968 – när allting var i rörelse: Sextiotalsradikaliseringen och de sociala rörelserna (Stockholm: Prisma, 2002); M. Wiklund, I det modernas landskap. Historisk orientering och kritiska berättelser om Sverige mellan 1969 och 1990 (Stockholm: Symposion, 2006).

24. See Andersson in this issue. K. Boréus, Högervåg (Stockholm: Tiden, 1994).

25. T. E. Jørgensen & S. L. B. Jensen, 1968 – og det der fulgte (København: Gyldendal, 2008); K. Dørum, Øyvind Tønnesson & R. H. Vaags (Eds), Arven etter 1968 (Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2021); Östberg, 1968 – när allting var i rörelse. See also the theme issue in Scandinavian Journal of History, 33: 4 (2008).

26. N. Glover, ‘Sweden, South Africa and the business of partnership in the 1990s: Marketing internationalism in an era of globalization’, Culture Unbound, 13:1 (2021), pp. 41–65.

27. O. Wæver, ‘Nordic nostalgia: northern Europe after the Cold War’, International Affairs, 68:1 (1992), pp. 77–102.

28. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 9.

29. J. A. Tucker, ‘Where does the Term Libertarian Come from Anyway?’, FEE Stories 15 September 2016 – https://fee.org/articles/where-does-the-term-libertarian-come-from-anyway/ (accessed 5 June 2023).

30. See, for example, J. L. Madsen (Ed.), Den moderne liberalisme. Rødder og perspektiver (København: Breidablik, 1997) and P. K. Klitgaard, ’Classical Liberalism and modern political economy in Denmark’, Econ Journal Watch, 12:3 (2015), pp. 400–431.

31. See also the discussion of these differences in M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 276–315, though Freeden here seems to discuss the differences between social liberalism and neoliberalism rather than between libertarianism and classical liberalism.

32. See first of all Slobodian, Globalists and Mirowski & Plehwe, The Road from Mont P´lerin.

33. Burns, Goddess of the Market, pp. 104–106, 116–119, 132, and, for example, Rothbard’s critique of Friedman’s environmentalist policies in the early 1970s, M. Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature – and Other Essays (Washington, D.C.: Libertarian Review Press 1974), pp. 115.

34. L. P. Liggio, ‘Mont Pelerin: 1947–1978, The Road to Libertarianism,’ Libertarianism.org (December 1 1979) – https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/mont-pelerin-1947–1978-road-libertarianism (accessed 5 June 2023).

35. Jensen, ‘Repurposing Mises’, pp. 317.

36. Sejersted, The Age of Social Democracy, pp. 291–316.

37. N. Olsen, ‘A Second-Hand Dealer in Ideas: Christian Gandil and Scandinavian Configurations of European Neoliberalism, 1945–1970’, in H. Schulz-Forberg & N. Olsen (Eds) Re-Inventing Western Civilisation: Transnational Reconstructions of Liberalism in Europe in the 20^th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), pp. 137–167.

38. A. Offner & G. Söderberg, The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy and the Market Turn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

39. J. Andersson, ‘Neoliberalism Against Social Democracy’, The Tocqueville Review, 41:2 (2020), pp. 87–107; S. L. Mudge, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

40. Olsen, ‘A Second Hand Dealer in Ideas’.

41. L. P. Nordbakken, Krisen i norsk okonomi: Ett resultat av feilslått okonomisk politik eller frie marknedskrefter? (Oslo Fremskrittspartiets utredningsinstitut, 1991).

42. Jarmala, ongoing.

43. For a perspective on the function of Estonia as political argument and model in Finland, see the contribution on the Finnish case in this theme issue.

44. For research on Nordic populism, see for example J. Rydgren, ‘Explaining the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties: The case of Denmark’, West European Politics, 27:3 (2013), pp. 474–502; J. Rydgren, ‘Radical right populism in Sweden: Still a failure, but for how long?’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 25:1 (2002): pp. 27–56. For research on Nordic neoliberalism, see for example N. Olsen, The Sovereign Consumer: A New Intellectual History of Neoliberalism ;(Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 185–240 and O. Insett, Markedsvendingen – nyliberalismens historie i Norge (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2020).