Preliminary Programme

According to common understandings, voluntary associations were the main institutions in the formation of civil societies in Europe and the Nordic countries during the nineteenth century. Associational life has been narrated as a seedbed for learning civic engagement and participatory values, political know how and sociability, which conditioned people for future political citizenship. But why did this associational world, this civil society, emerge and develop? In relation to the vast literature on the subject, this paper offers another perspective on this historical puzzle.
The point of departure is that scholars of civil society have paid little attention to the material economic conditions behind the survival and stability of organizations in their explanations. Recent literature has shown the importance of state subsidies for boosting the third sector – but was this support a general feature? Another point of departure is that one needs to take the class character of civil society into consideration in order to reach a full understanding on the issue. We cannot presuppose that elite and popular association had the same material conditions of existence. This paper tries to offer a new kind of explanatory perspective on the rise and development of civil society in Sweden by discussing the economics of the first workers associations in Sweden.
The first Swedish workers’ organizations from the mid-1840s to the mid-1880s were focused on attaining political rights and representation, offered self-help, education and social and economic support, and were not engaged in socialist agitation and contentious politics. The middle classes and even the bourgeoisie often supported these endeavours in various ways, and ‘the people’, rather than a ‘class’, was the chief subject of political language.
By analysing the economics and strategies of a range of typical liberal workers’ association in Sweden, I argue that they were conditioned by the market. The organizations main source of income were private means and commercial activities and the economic strategies used, speak to the power of a commercial spirit. In the end, I argue that the popular segment of civil society was market dependent in various ways for its emergence and survival. (Show less)

In the paper, I will analyse the material preconditions of early bourgeois associations in Sweden, c. 1800–1870. Such expressions of civil society have earlier been studied from other perspectives, such as their formal organisational structures or concerning their ideological outlook. However, the economic foundations of these associations must be analysed, in order to grasp their overall role in the emergent capitalist state, where non-state associations were promoted by a dominant ideology encouraging civil society as a separate sphere from the state. Thus, there was a potential contradiction between civil society associations as ideological role models on the one hand, and as “real” phenomena on the other, dependant on financial aid and other forms of material conditions in order to perform their activities. The analysis forms a part of an ongoing research project on the socio-economic contexts of Swedish civil society in its earliest history.
The empirical examples will be delimited to a number of philanthropic and political societies, mainly in larger cities of towns, such as the Swedish variant of The Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the liberal Reform societies of the 1840s, as well as the Sharpshooters movement of the 1860s. Sources to their economic situations are mainly to be found in printed audit reports and protocols, the former of which were printed in periodical writings. Preliminary examinations show that the associations were dependent on a mix of private donations and fees and public infrastructural support; the latter mainly due to the fact that the association consisted of persons of the political elite and that the purpose of the association was to cultivate and heighten the morals of the working classes and the peasantry. (Show less)

The official Nordic vision of today, as stated by the main forums of the official Nordic cooperation, the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Nordic Council, is that of “the Region as the most integrated region in the world” (www.norden.org). This rather ambitious statement stems from the assumption that the widespread Nordic cooperation, with numerous transnational relations especially on the civil society level, have no counterparts in other regions. The normative idea of Norden as an integrated region is however not a novelty, but is firmly based on 19th century experiences and national ideologies. Focusing on Scandinavian responses to the ‘spirit of associations’, the paper examines transnational Nordic civil society initiatives and the emergence of transnational cooperation and Nordic voluntary associations in the 19th century. Some of these associations also had clearly pan-Scandinavian ambitions.

The first half of the 19th century is an important, if understudied, period for the development of civil society in the Nordic region. Contrary to the common image of stagnation and censorship, as in post-Napoleonic ‘Restoration’ Europe as such, the period witnessed the growth of civil society and the expansion and transformation of the public sphere. The Scandinavian region experienced a growing political life in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and the consecutive creation of new state structures and new constitutions. An interesting feature of the Scandinavian civil society, post 1815, is the pan-Scandinavian movement and its transnational endeavours to forge and cultivate a Scandinavian nationality. This pan-Scandinavian nation-building project, which gained momentum around the 1830s, centered on the civil society and the public sphere.

As early as 1792, Frederik Sneedorf, in his speech at the Nordic Society in London, emphasized that it is “through associations that all plans, being too comprehensive to accomplish for the individual person, begin and are carried out”. His goal was that of Scandinavian unification. The idea of the necessity of Scandinavian cultural or even political unification from below awakened the idea of association as the unique means to attain the end. The rise of nation-wide associations of all kinds, alongside local and regional ones, characterized European public and political life at the time to such a degree that it is later termed a midcentury “associational mania” and the “golden era” of voluntary associations (Nord, 2000, Hoffman, 2003). A specific feature by the association endorsed by Sneedorf, is the transnational or macro-regional character. In the Scandinavian area, new associations with a Scandinavian-wide ambition became widespread from the 1840s onwards. They contributed, in combination with what soon became a range of meetings and a conscious use of the printing press, in disseminating ideas of Scandinavian unification and fraternity. The paper will discuss the concepts and practice of Scandinavian associational life and early Nordic cooperation within a mid-19th century European civil society context. (Show less)

Formulated in view to the rise of democracy in the nineteenth century and confirmed by the collapse of party dictatorships in Eastern Europe, the dominant concept of civil society implies that the relationship between state and non-state actors is characterised by tension. In that understanding, the space between state, market, and the private sphere is where civil society voices dissent and exerts pressure on governments. Shifting the focus to the twentieth century and the Nordic countries, the idea that civil society is a thorn in the side of policy-makers does not seem to fit very well, since the state calls upon the third sector to help with the implementation of policies, and voluntary actors show a great propensity to serve this function. As a matter of fact, harmonious corporatism has been identified as one of the reasons for the success of a ‘Nordic model’ of governance. However, corporatism cannot mean that differences in interests, agendas, and ideas about the implementation of policies did not exist in the Nordic countries, and references to Nordic values or the homogeneity of Nordic societies do little to explain why dissent is – apparently – voiced less often and forcefully than in other countries. The paper identifies the seeming restraint of voice as a form of civil society actors’ loyalty toward the state, and studies the case of music policy in post-1945 Norway to explore this relationship. Using Albert Hirschman’s categories, the paper aims to identify mechanisms of how voice was discouraged and exit prevented. It does this by looking at voluntary bodies in amateur music from brass to rock bands both at national and local levels. (Show less)