ABSTRACT
Scandinavian politics since the 1930s has been characterised by an unique combination of features: a high level of relative dominance of democratic socialist parties and a marked achievement in the field of welfare state provision. To many commentators the link between these phenomena borders on the obvious. It is because Scandinavian Social Democracy has pursued the path of gradual parliamentary reform that it has reaped the fruits of the consistent electoral victory required to implement its welfare goals. At times this strategy has meant moving forward ‘at the pace of a tortoise’. However, in a longer perspective, it has guaranteed slow but ineluctable progress towards a more humane and egalitarian society. Already the industrial working class are firmly entrenched within the state apparatus and, assuming only that Social Democracy can, as it has in the past, arrive at compromises with other social groups, there is no inherent reason why the Social Democratic image of society should not eventually be broadened further to include the basic industrial and economic rights of citizenship. In such a view, socialism and social harmony may not be as irreconcilable as some on both Left and Right have tried to suggest.
