but here, alone among the small democracies of Europe, it recruited a following that seriously weakened the nation when the Second World War struck.

The Socialist Record in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark

In the Scandinavian countries to the north, the interest of foreigners was chiefly aroused by the experience of Socialist government. Here, as opposed to the major countries of Western

Europe, where interwar socialism produced little but disappointment and failure, democrats of Socialist sympathies could point to a record of administrative competence - and substantial

success in meeting economic difficulties.

In the 1920s, Socialist parties had attained power for the first time in all these countries and had become used to the responsibilities of office, but it was not until the Great Depression that they came to dominate political life. During these years they launched a series of experiments that gradually fused in the public mind with the wider image of a Scandinavian “way."

In the northern countries, socialism from the beginning had more to build on and was more congenial to local tradition than was true in the larger nations to the south. For Socialists everywhere, the crucial dilemma was reconciling collectivist economic philosophy with devotion to democracy and the rights of the individual. In France or Britain, Germany or Italy, these two goals frequently seemed opposed. In Scandinavia there was no such conflict of values. The individualism on which the Norwegians or the Swedes prided themselves had been accompanied by a strong emphasis on community action. A severe climate, a relatively sparse population, and a high degree of social homogeneity had encouraged an attitude that combined, in a fashion that was unique in Europe, a robust sense of personal freedom with a talent for working in common. The result had been the strongest movement of agricultural and consumers' cooperatives in the world—a movement that eventually came to include about half the population of Sweden and more than a quarter of the inhabitants of Norway and Denmark.

In addition, the Socialist parties of these countries—which resembled the British Labour party more than they conformed to any continental pattern—were notably undogmatic. They did not insist in doctrinaire fashion on the nationalization of basic enterprise; they preferred, where possible, to establish some mixed scheme for joint governmental and private regulation of the economy. The same was true of the trade unions, Far from confronting capital with uniform hostility and distrust, labor leaders were accustomed to settling their difficulties with employers through semiofficial procedures of arbitration and conciliation.

Thus, when the Great Depression struck, the Scandinavian nations were better prepared than were the nations to the south to deal in coherent fashion with the economic and social problems it raised. Working from the already existing tradition of common action, the Socialists substantially enlarged the sphere of government intervention in the economy. The Swedes, for example, concentrated from the beginning on maintaining purchasing power—a goal that the major nations of the Western world accepted only gradually, as the orthodox solutions of retrenchment and deflation revealed their inadequacy. The Swedish government was not afraid to borrow heavily in order to main

208 The Great Depression, 1929–1935