Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

This alliance of labour and farming—facilitated by the unusual independence of Scandinavian peasants, conjoined in fervently Protestant communities unconstrained by traditional rural subservience to priest or landlord—was to form the long-term platform on which Europe’s most successful social democracies were built. ‘Red-green’ coalitions (at first between Agrarian and Social Democratic parties, later within the latter alone) were unthinkable everywhere else; in Scandinavia they became the norm. The Social Democratic parties were the vehicle through which traditional rural society and industrial labour together entered the urban age: in that sense Social Democracy in Scandinavia was not just one politics among many, it was the very form of modernity itself.