Human rights in the Nordic countries

The Nordic countries have succeeded in profiling themselves internationally as leading representatives and advocates of human rights. The purpose of this paper is to show that this was not a linear and self-evident development, but a complicated history that involved innovative redescription of both the national legal-political language and of the concept “human rights”. For sure, human rights fit well into to the image of the Nordic countries, who by virtue of their long history of peace and strong belief in the authority of international law and the United Nations have been said to represent a particular form of “small state idealism”. However, if human rights are considered as something emerging out of the experience of the Second World War, a renaissance of natural law, Anglo-American liberal thought, or Christian Democratic, Catholic, Personalist philosophy, Scandinavia turns out to be a much more complicated case. The Nordic countries did not experience a Christian Democratic renaissance after 1945, nor did they witness a profiled Gustav Radbruch-like conversion from value relativism and legal realism to natural law. Instead, there was a continuity, even a fortification of Social Democracy in politics, and value relativist-legal realist in scholarly theory. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it will discuss the ways in which leading Nordic legal and political theorists confronted the call for (moral) universalism in the wake of the Second World War. In particular, the paper will examine Scandinavian reactions to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention of Human Rights. The hypothesis is that the Scandinavian theorists, on the one hand, externalised human rights, rending them significant for countries with totalitarian experiences, but without relevance for the Nordic societies which had proved democratic and solid. On the other hand, the hypothesis is also that the scholars redescribed and softened the legal realist legacy as it was no longer possible to denounce the concept of “rights” altogether. The second aim of the paper is to explore when human rights became part of the Nordic brand. In as much as Samuel Moyn (2010; 2014) is correct in claiming that human rights emerged in the western world in the 1970s as “the last utopia”, replacing the dashed hopes of capitalism and socialism, the paper will put forward the hypothesis that the major utopia of Scandinavia – the Nordic welfare model – survived another 20 years beyond the 1970s. But in the early 1990s, the Nordic countries witnessed a deep economic crisis, which in combination with the accession of Finland and Sweden to the European Union signified an end to Nordic exceptionalism (Browning 2006). It was a period when the Nordic countries, in more general terms, stopped thinking about themselves as essentially different from Europe, but rather as a place where the common western and European democratic principles were implemented better and more thoroughly than anywhere else. This was when the Nordic governments claimed “human rights” as part of their public diplomacy strategies.