ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter lays out the argument and the structure of the volume. It makes the case for understanding much of the profound change in Nordic societies over the past roughly 40 years through the lens of neoliberalisation, affecting not only Nordic welfare states, labour markets and policies but also mentalities, culture and even the very idea of Nordic democracy. The Nordic countries have been important laboratories for neoliberal reform, and key intellectual, political and economic developments in the Nordics since the 1970s share the characteristics of neoliberalisation elsewhere – while at the same time displaying distinctive indigenous elements that operate within and through the language and institutions of welfare state progressivism, labour market solidarism, developmentalism and universalism. This chapter also argues that there is important variation across the Nordic countries in the timing, form and degree of neoliberalisation, a differentiation we explain through historicisation as the Nordics have followed different trajectories of capitalist development and different political histories.
