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Australia and Sweden: The Politics of Economic Vulnerability

The recent visit of an ACTU delegation to Sweden to see what might be learnt from the experience of that country’s labour movement is yet another example of the perennial fascination that the Swedish model exercises over the minds of Australian democratic socialists. Sweden’s much vaunted achievements in the fields of welfare provision, labour market policy to minimise unemployment, and corporatist wage bargaining are frequently seen as panaceas for all Australia’s woes. The desire to emulate such achievements is far from irrational and, of course, Australian socialists have not been alone in admiring the Swedish model; one only has to remember Tony Crosland’s advice to the British Labour Party in the fifties that salvation lay in taking the Swedish path of avoiding nationalisation like the plague and piling on the welfare. But admiration notwithstanding, any serious proposal that we might try to emulate the Swedish example requires a realistic appraisal of the structural antecedents of that achievement and an evaluation of the extent to which other countries are characterised by similar or equivalent circumstances. I have argued elsewhere against the Crosland thesis by attempting to demonstrate that the historical circumstances which had produced a large and united party of the Right in Britain made that country fundamentally less conducive to the politics of social democratic welfarism than was the case in Scandinavia, where divisions based on history and economic interest have fractured bourgeois political solidarity right up to the pre-