THE LEFT AND THE NATION IN DENMARK AND SWEDEN, 1956-1980

The Left and the nation have historically had a precarious relationship, the rise of the New Left, 1968 and the 1970s are no exception to this. The following paper attempts to give a theoretical outline of the basic questions that confronted the Left when considering the nation, with a point of departure in the Scandinavian movements. These questions where about 1) defining the nation in relationship to other nations, 2) what social groups made out the nation and 3) constructing a narrative for the nation’s past, present and future, including the questions of transition to socialism and agency in this transition.

These questions were answered with different emphasis at specific times in the 1960s and 1970s. The paper sketches out how the emphasis changed focus over time. The international aspect was central to the 1960s, while mild bewilderment reigned about stratification and agency on the domestic level, leading to an atmosphere of domestic estrangement on the Left. In 1968, the rising student movement gave new answers to domestic agency and shifted focus from the Third World to the West itself, a tendency that grew as the protest cycle of the late 1960s and early 1970s rolled over Europe. In the 1970s, with the seemingly re-awoken working class, the Left could again find some kind of identification in their own societies, although it rested on a fictive, often historically inspired, re-construction of the working class as the agent of change and object of identification. With the process of de-industrialisation and the realisation that the protest cycle did not escalate to revolution, disillusion sat in on the brink of the 1980s.

Thomas Ekman Jørgensen
Saxo-Instituttet – Historie, University of Kopenhagen, Denmark

Thomas Ekman Jørgensen received his PhD in history in 2004 at the European University Institute in Florence for a dissertation on the Left in Denmark and Sweden in the post war period. The main areas of research are the New Left before and after 1968 and West European Communism, in particular the political language and the relationship between innovation and consolidation, both in terms of organisation and political concepts. Geographically the area of competence is Scandinavia, Germany and Italy, combined with a general knowledge of European developments. Current research concerns the crisis of liberalism and the rise of totalitarian movements after World War I in Germany and Italy.

Relevant Publications:
Transformations and Crises. The Left and the Nation in Denmark and Sweden 1956-80, Forthcoming Berghahn Books 2007; Studenteroprøret i Danmark 1968, with Steven L.B. Jensen, forthcoming Gyldendal 2007; “Utopia and Disillusion” in Axel Schildt & Detlef Siegfried, Between Marx and Coca Cola, Berghahn Books, Oxford/New York 2005; Opbrud i 1960erne, (main editor) Den jyske historiker, no. 101, July 2003.

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