Preliminary Programme

This paper analyses the transformation of the ideas on economic policy of the Portuguese Socialist Party (PS) in the 1970s. In this decade, the PS went from advocating an economic democracy characterised by “nationalising, planning and [encouraging] workers’ self management” to defending “the encouragement and protection of the private sector, the return of the technicians to the government, and a request for European aid.” This rapid transformation happened in the turbulent context of the Carnation Revolution. The Portuguese transition to democracy coincided with the international economic crises of the 1970s, and it attracted major international attention due to its possible implications for the process of détente in Europe. Notably, the European social democracy was very active in promoting a liberal democracy in the Iberian country. Therefore, taking into account both the national and the international contexts, Granadino analyses how the PS accommodated the changes in ideas on economic policy to its ideological production. Furthermore, he connects this transformation to the conceptual and cultural transfers from European social democracy (Show less)

The paper examines the use of the concept ‘economic democracy’ in Finland and Sweden, with focus on the social democrats. Kärrylä looks at how the concept changed as result of political struggles and changing economic ideas. During the 1970s and 1980s, economic democracy was related especially to the concept of wage-earner funds. The idea had transnational character, as it was discussed in many European countries but without concrete results. In Sweden, the social democrats turned to support a system of transferring corporate profits into collective funds, which within a couple of decades could have become major owners of Swedish companies. The centre-right parties and Swedish business opposed the plan fiercely, resulting in increasing political conflict. In 1983, the wage-earner funds were established in a form that did not change the ownership structure of Swedish industry. Finnish social democrats followed the development closely and wanted to avoid the conflict that had broken out in Sweden. Ideas of collective and regional wage-earner funds were eventually watered down into voluntary and individual ‘personnel funds’, introduced in cooperation with the conservatives in 1989. After having been a core concept, economic democracy practically vanished from political rhetoric after the turn of the 1990s. Due to its apparent incompatibility with neoliberal economic thought, economic democracy was discarded instead of giving it new contents (Show less)

the history of transnational tensions around employment-related policies will be analysed by researching (dis)continuities and contestations of the employment conceptions of leading social democrats in Sweden and Finland in the formative phase of globalization. In taking into account inter- and cross-national impacts on the employment conceptions and policies of Nordic social democrats, it will give critical insights into debates on economic and employment policy. This means mapping multi-layered historicity, similarities, differences, interaction and relations between competitiveness-oriented Finnish social democrats’ “third way” type of “Bad Sillanpää” policy and the premises of the Swedish social democrats’ Third Way Programme in the 1980s. The paper indicates, for example, that Nordic social democrats adapted to a competition state paradigm by accepting financial market deregulation by the year 1986, i.e. before the deepening of European integration and the end of cold war. Furthermore, it seems initially that Finland’s Social Democrats practised a ‘third way’ type social democratic policy of the 1990s long before its adherents such as Tony Blair in the UK. (Show less)