Histories of Human Rights in the Nordic Countries

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Histories of Human Rights in the Nordic Countries

Hanne Hagtvedt Vik, Steven LB Jensen, Linde Lindkvist & Johan Strang

To cite this article: Hanne Hagtvedt Vik, Steven LB Jensen, Linde Lindkvist & Johan Strang (2018) Histories of Human Rights in the Nordic Countries, Nordic Journal of Human Rights, 36:3, 189-201, DOI: 10.1080/18918131.2018.1522750

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/18918131.2018.1522750

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Histories of Human Rights in the Nordic Countries

Hanne Hagtvedt Vik^a, Steven LB Jensen^b, Linde Lindkvist^cand Johan Strang^d

aDepartment of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway;^bThe Danish Institute for Human Rights, Copenhagen K, Denmark;^cDepartment of Theology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden;^dCentre for Nordic Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

ABSTRACT

Do the Nordics warrant the label‘global good Samaritans’in human rights promotion? Is the Nordic welfare state a close to perfect realisation of human rights norms? Alternatively, do Nordic international and domestic human rights policies constitute a peculiar ‘Nordic human rights paradox’ where norms are supported internationally while not being implemented at home?

In what is the ﬁrst collection of articles on Nordic human rights history, we take issue with previous scholarship,ﬁnding it often to be unsubstantiated and lacking a basis in historical contexts and relevant source materials. This also includes the stream of historical studies in the past decade, where, until recently, the Nordic countries have represented something of a blind spot.

However, the lack of prior interest in the region means there are several promising avenues for historical investigations of both the Nordic countries in human rights history and the role of human rights in the history of the region.

KEYWORDS

Human rights history; Nordic countries; Denmark; Finland;

Norway; Sweden;

transnational history

For some time, human rights have been in search of their own history. As a result of recent explorations, human rights historiography has become muchfiner in its granu- larity. Moreover, the Anglo-American bias has been challenged as new geographies have been brought into focus. Even small states like Botswana and Jamaica have entered this literature, not merely as sites of large-scale or entrenched human rights vio- lations– an identity often reductively and habitually imposed on the countries of the Global South– but as actors with illuminating or influential roles in the emergence of international human rights after 1945.¹This represents an important step forward for the largerfield and invites a reassessment of predominant perceptions of how human rights acquired their current prominence in moral, legal and political discourse. The historiography of human rights now appears ready to integrate other exotic destinations in novel ways.

At ﬁrst sight, the Nordic countries present scholars with very diﬀerent challenges from those associated with the Global South. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway

CONTACT Hanne Hagtvedt Vik h.h.vik@iakh.uio.no

1See James Kirby,‘Beacon of Hope: Human Rights and Decolonization in Botswana, 1960–1980’(DPhil thesis, La Trobe Uni- versity 2017). On Jamaica, see Steven LB Jensen,The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization and the Reconstruction of Global Values(Cambridge University Press 2016). On Latin America, see Patrick William Kelly,Sover- eign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics(Cambridge University Press 2018).

https://doi.org/10.1080/18918131.2018.1522750

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and Sweden are all among the richest countries in the world. Moreover, by virtue of their famous welfare state model and reputation for the promotion of international peace and solidarism, they have often been recognised – rightly or wrongly – as leading nations in the ﬁeld of human rights. Furthermore, they were invited to and given central roles in the United Nations (as well as the League of Nations) right from the start. At the same time, we are dealing with small state actors who have had to adapt and conform to the decisions and deﬁnitions of the great powers and who have often struggled to gain recognition and make their mark on the international scene.²

The history of human rights can be approached in different ways, but in a Nordic context three main choices present themselves. The first is to write histories of how Nordic state and non-state actors have contributed to the making of international human rights norms at various moments in time. The second is to integrate the Nordic countries into the transnational history of human rights in the post-1945 era, where both actor and thematic focus become more contingent, depending on questions of time and space. Finally, the third is to attempt to understand how norms have evolved, changed and operated through the interweaving of local, national, regional and global political, legal and cultural processes within and beyond the Nordic countries. These three choices allow for different types of historical narratives and thus also call for different forms of approach. Focusing on the interests, agency and political interventions of Nordic actors is very different from centring on global processes in the human rights field, where the Nordic countries have more often reacted to international trends and processes. Similarly, studying processes at an international level is different from a more inte- grated and transnational position that also pays careful attention to various local and national contexts.

This collection of articles represents an effort by Nordic historians to write histories of human rights in the Nordic countries.³ Developed through a series of workshops and conference panels between 2015 and 2018, the collection encompasses histories from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.⁴ The special issue is the first of its kind. Therefore, in order to properly place the thematic issue in the relevant literatures and suggest how this newfield of historical research should develop in the years ahead, the introduction is longer than normal for a special issue of the Nordic Journal of Human Rights. We begin by critically engaging with existing bodies of literature on human rights and the Nordic countries, before presenting the individual articles of this collection, all of which illustrate future paths for engaging in Nordic human rights history.

2Stefan Nygård and Johan Strang,‘Conceptual Universalisation and the Role of the Peripheries’(2017) 12 (1) Contributions to the History of Concepts 55.

3It is not, however, theﬁrst attempt by Nordic scholars to write on the history of human rights. See, for instance, Carl-Gustaf Andrén,‘De mänskliga rättigheternas religiösa och rättsliga bakgrund’(1975) 4 Svensk teologisk kvartalstidskrift 158; Alf Tergel,Human Rights in Cultural and Religious Traditions(Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 1998); Ove Bring,De mänskliga rättigheternas väg: genom historien och litteraturen(Atlantis 2011).

4Iceland remains, for the most part, outside the scope of these articles, partly (because the country is relatively small and has played−both regionally and internationally−a less prominent role in thisﬁeld, but more importantly due to the absence of empirical work by historians on that particular national context. The Nordic countries share many historical experiences (and to a certain extent, a common language) and continue to enjoy close cultural and political relations, which makes them a natural framework for a special issue.

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Progressives on the Periphery

The international historical literature on human rights has burgeoned during the past decade. From the mid-2000s, a group of historians – including Kenneth Cmiel, Reza Afshari, Mark Mazower and Samuel Moyn–began questioning what they saw as teleologi- cal and sometimes self-congratulatory accounts of the rise of human rights law, activism and discourse in the twentieth century as high points of moral development. In such accounts, the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 stood out as an unequivocal triumph of human rights ideas in global politics. Moyn’s The Last Utopia, in particular, has gained much attention for suggesting alternative chron- ologies and interpretations of key events and developments.⁵ The main contribution of these studies lies in their success in establishing human rights as aﬁeld of critical historical inquiry. The last few years have seen a stream of empirical studies on a wide range of actors and shifting geographies behind the revival and revitalisation of human rights in international politics after 1960, as well as on the construction and uses of human rights norms in varying political contexts.⁶

The blossoming of human rights history has been intimately bound to a more general transnational turn in historical scholarship. Methodological interventions in the field have asserted that the history of human rights must be written as a polycentric history that takes into account the different ways in which human rights norms have acquired social and political significance over time. With a few notable exceptions, however, empirical studies have strongly focused on the Anglophone world, and particularly on the United States. Undoubtedly, the rise of human rights in many respects coincided historically with the emergence of the United States as a global superpower, and numerous accounts have documented the important links between US politics and the emergence of international human rights after 1945. Nonetheless, at the same time, recent scholarship has suggested that the US quickly withdrew from the human rights-project and that it was West European countries that made human rights part of the anti-communist Cold War struggle.⁷It is also telling that accounts stressing the 1970s as a watershed moment in human rights discourse tend to focus on the appropriation of human rights language by Jimmy Carter’s administration after the 1976 presiden- tial election, thus ignoring the fact that many crucial developments in the history of human rights –including the consolidation of international human rights law –have other geographical backgrounds and were initiated with other local challenges in mind. While important work is being done to bring other geographies into view, the process of challenging US-centred accounts of human rights history has only just begun.⁸

5Kenneth Cmiel,‘The Recent History of Human Rights’(2004) 109 The American Historical Review 117; Mark Mazower,‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950’(2004) 47 The Historical Journal 379; Reza Afshari,‘On Historiography of Human Rights Reﬂections on Paul Gordon Lauren’s The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen’(2007) 29 Human Rights Quarterly 1; Samuel Moyn,The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History(Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2010).

6For a recent reflection on the state of thefield, see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann,‘Human Rights and History’(2016) 232 Past &

Present 279.

7Marco Duranti,The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics and the Origins of the European Convention(Oxford University Press 2017); Samuel Moyn,Christian Human Rights(Penn 2015).

8See, for instance, Mark Philip Bradley,The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century(Cam- bridge University Press 2016); Steven LB Jensen and Roland Burke,‘From the Normative to the Transnational: Methods in

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The Nordic countries occupy a puzzling space in the twentieth-century literature on human rights. Few of the available works offer anything more than passing references to the interventions of Nordic actors in the making of international human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ensuing international and regional treaties, the establishment of human rights institutions, and the evolution of the transnational human rights movement. Often, as in Moyn’s influential study, the Nordic countries are not mentioned at all. Similarly, other major historical accounts of human rights history provide no more than superficial mentions of the Nordic states’

relation to human rights developments.⁹

If the Nordics do appear in histories of human rights, they are generally presented as vehicles of progressive change, with Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden referred to as examples of leading forces for the development of aspects of international human rights. Notable examples include the way some scholars have noted the active participation of the Nordic states (especially Denmark) in thefinalisation of the Universal Declaration and the European Convention of Human Rights, championing the right to democratic participation and the rights of minorities and aiding the construction of what would become the European Court of Human Rights.¹⁰Others have pointed to the role played by Denmark, Norway and Sweden in initiating the process against Greece under the aus- pices of the Council of Europe after the 1967 coup d’état, a process which also helped to stimulate the multifaceted international campaign against torture in the 1970s.¹¹Others still have noted the early appearance of Helsinki Committees in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and, more generally, the willingness of Nordic states, at least from the 1970s, to support non-governmental human rights actors.¹²In his thorough account of human rights in international politics since the 1940s, Jan Eckel notes that Scandinavia was one of the most fertile soils for Amnesty International during its first years. Moreover, he highlights the significance of Sweden, especially the Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme, in boosting the legitimacy of the international campaigns against Apartheid and the Pinochet regime in Chile.¹³ Important as these references are, however, they remain selective, effectively omitting moments when the Nordic countries failed to live up to the image of forerunners in the human rights field. Furthermore, Nordic

the Study of Human Rights History’in Bård A Andreassen, Hans-Otto Sano and Siobhán McInerney-Lankford (eds), Research Methods in Human Rights: A Handbook(Edward Elgar 2017).

9This includes Johannes Morsink,The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent(University of Penn- sylvania Press 1999);AW Brian Simpson,Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention(Oxford University Press 2001); Daniel J Whelan,Indivisible Human Rights: A History(University of Pennsylvania Press 2010); Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde and William I Hitchcock (eds),The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford University Press 2012).

10See for instance Mary Ann Glendon,A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Random House 2001) 160.

11Barbara Keys‘Anti-Torture Politics: Amnesty International, the Greek Junta, and the Origins of the Human Rights“Boom” in the United States’in Iriye and others (n 9); Barbara Keys,Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s(Harvard University Press 2014).

12Aryeh Neier,The International Human Rights Movement: A History(Princeton University Press 2012) ch 6; Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network(Cambridge University Press 2011).

13Jan Eckel,Die Ambivalenz des Guten: Menschenrechte in der internationalen Politik seit den 1940ern(Vandenhoeck &

Ruprecht 2014) 611–13; Patrick William Kelly mentions human rights involvement on behalf of Northern European gov- ernments in the aftermath of the Chilean coup in his‘Magic Words: The Advent of Transnational Human Rights Activism in Latin America’s Southern Cone in the Long 1970s’in Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (eds),The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s(University of Pennsylvania Press 2013) 102, note 61.

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interventions are usually presented out of context, disconnected from the domestic and regional concerns from which they originated.¹⁴

A Nordic Human Rights Paradox?

The situation outlined above is not signiﬁcantly better in interdisciplinary human rights studies either. The Nordic countries have of course featured in human rights research, but the approaches have often been too normative, generic or theoretically oriented.

This has meant that relevant studies, at least from the historical perspective, have tended to be neither suﬃciently context-sensitive nor adequately engaged with the transnational historical space in which international human rights diplomacy emerged. In addition, they have usually been founded on a rather limited empirical source base.

Simply put, the disciplinary gaps between the normatively orientedﬁeld of law, the theoretically focused discipline of political science and the empirically orientedﬁeld of history have remained too large to overcome.¹⁵

One interpretative framework that has emerged from this disparity is that of the‘Global Good Samaritan.’Some human rights scholars have stressed the Nordics’signiﬁcance as

‘norm entrepreneurs’or‘moral superpowers,’as states which, due to their size, location

and domestic politics, have been able to pursue‘altruistic’ aims in their external aﬀairs, including the promotion of human rights and humanitarian law in their foreign policies and development aid programmes.¹⁶ According to Christopher Browning, the Nordic countries have succeeded in forming a unique brand of internationalist solidarism, which in the 1960s and 1970s came to involve a moral component that was soon equated with human rights.¹⁷ Yet, contrary to what such general assessments might suggest, there is little scholarship detailing the ways in which Nordic state and non- state actors have helped to establish and shape the contemporary human rights regime, and even less on how human rights norms have been engaged with domestically. The idea of the Nordics as global good Samaritans in the ﬁeld of human rights is not, in other words, a product of careful historical inquiry, but rather a reverberation of the Nordic states’recent rhetoric in international politics.

A more promising interpretative framework is the idea of the ‘Nordic human rights paradox.’ This paradox consists of the alleged contradiction between how the Nordic states, on the one hand, act as ‘moral superpowers’ in relation to international human

14For other examples, see Micheline Ishay,The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era(Uni- versity of California Press 2004) 306–307; Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi,Human Rights at the UN: The Political History of Universal Justice(Indiana University Press 2008) 247, 272; Paul Gordon Lauren,The Evolution of International Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press 2011) 43, 51, 129, 119, 181, 208.

15For two exceptions, see Mikael Rask Madsen,‘From Cold War Instrument to Supreme European Court: The European Court of Human Rights at the Crossroads of International and National Law and Politics’(2007) 32 Law & Social Inquiry 137;

Hanne Hagtvedt Vik and Anne Julie Semb,‘Who Owns the Land? Norway, the Sami and the ILO Convention 169 on Indi- genous and Tribal Peoples’(2013) 20 International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 517.

16Annika Bergman,‘Co-Constitution of Domestic and International Welfare Obligations: The Case of Sweden’s Social Demo- cratically Inspired Internationalism’(2007) 42 Cooperation and Conﬂict 73; Christine Ingebritsen,‘Norm Entrepreneurs:

Scandinavia’s Role in World Politics’in Christine Ingebritsen, Iver Neumann, Sieglinde Gstohl and Jessica Beyer (eds), Small States in International Relations(Washington University Press 2006) 273; Christine Ingebritsen,Scandinavia in World Politics(Rowman & Littleﬁeld 2006) 3, 21; Alison Brysk,Global Good Samaritans(Oxford University Press 2009) 28–29.

17Christopher Browning,‘Branding Nordicity: Models, Identity and the Decline of Exceptionality’(2007) 42 Cooperation and Conﬂict 27.

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rights and aim to‘externalize domestic norms of solidarity, equality and (social) democracy,’while on the other hand, showing‘scepticism, at the domestic level, toward constitutionalism, judicial review and individual rights within the Nordic states by reference to national legal culture, democratic tradition and a certain constitutional temperament.’¹⁸In their exploration of this paradox, Malcolm Langford and Johan Karlsson Schaﬀer argue

that‘existing essentialist accounts, which emphasize values, culture and ideas as the key

factor shaping Nordic approaches to human rights,’ deserve to be challenged, calling instead for a more‘theory-driven approach’in order to make‘the alleged NordicSonder- wegless of a paradoxical enigma.’¹⁹

While the idea of a human rights paradox makes for an interesting starting point for critical reflection on the way Nordic actors have historically engaged with human rights, it is also potentially misleading. It assumes that the shifting fortunes of human rights in Nordic contexts after 1945 can be reduced to a fairly simple distinction between external activism and internal scepticism. This overlooks the patchiness of Nordic actors’ external engagement and the selective embrace of human rights ideas at the domestic level. In contrast to Langford and Schaffer, we claim that what is needed at this stage is, primarily,fine-grained empirical work documenting how Nordic human rights policies have evolved over time rather than more theorising on those policies.

The problem with the idea of a ‘Nordic human rights paradox,’ is, in short, that it tends to be presentist in outlook, relying on assumptions rather than solid empirical evidence.²⁰

Thus, we believe that the overall aim of interdisciplinary human rights studies on the Nordic countries should be to shift focus from conceptualised framings of Nordic human rights politics and policies to more contextualised studies of the nuances and complex historical evolutions herein. In doing so, we require more studies that are written on the basis of wide-ranging work with primary sources such as published reports, newspapers, scho- larly articles, autobiographies, artwork, and, crucially, unpublished documents in the archives of government agencies, non-governmental organisations, private newspapers, and intergovernmental organisations. Moreover, interviews (when possible) are also needed. Only with such materials will we understand how, for instance, Nordic politicians, diplomats, jurists, activists and interest groups, artists, immigrants, and schoolchildren have engaged with human rights ideas and language. Furthermore, we may understand how their engagement has been part of global processes, and whether Nordic voices have been signiﬁcant or not in shaping such processes.

Absence of Human Rights in Histories of the Nordic Region

Much as historians of human rights have paid little attention to the Nordic countries, human rights are also conspicuous by their absence in the history-writing of the Nordic countries themselves. A leading narrative in recent Nordic historiography is the rise

18Malcolm Langford and Johan Karlsson Schaﬀer,‘The Nordic Human Rights Paradox: Moving Beyond Exceptionalism’, Uni- versity of Oslo Faculty of Law Research Paper No 2013-25 (2015) 2.

19Ibid. 1.

20See Jensen in this issue for a similar criticism of Jonas Christoﬀersen and Mikael Rask Madsen,‘The End of Virtue?

Denmark and the Boomerang of the Internationalization of Human Rights’(2011) 80 Nordic Journal of International Law 257.

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(and, for some, the fall) of the Nordic welfare state, which has enjoyed the reputation of being a close-to-perfect realisation of the Universal Declaration with respect to both its political and social dimensions. From this perspective, it might be surprising to ﬁnd that human rights are virtually absent from standard accounts of the history of the Nordic model.²¹The reasons for this absence are a matter of speculation. Perhaps historians have tended to focus on concepts likefolkhemmet(‘the people’s home’−the political slogan associated with the Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson (1932−1946)), which, by virtue of its connotations of both nationalism and solidarity, has been more useful for articulating Nordic exceptionality. More likely, however, is the obvious explanation that human rights simply did not play an important role as a mobi- lising concept during the formative years of the welfare state. Indeed, recent conceptually sensitive accounts of the history of the Nordic welfare states have highlighted the signiﬁ- cance of words like ‘welfare policies’ (välfärdspolitik, velfærdspolitik, hyvinvointipoli- tiikka),‘security’ (trygghet, tryghed),‘society’ (samhälle, samfund, yhteiskunta),‘growth’

(tillväxt),‘freedom’(frihet, frihed), and the nexus of‘planning’and‘social engineering.’²² For historical actors,‘human rights’in general and the UDHR in particular were seen as more relevant in regions with more severe challenges to both democracy and social justice.

Moreover, human rights have also failed to play a central role in historical accounts of the democratisation of the Nordic region. Instead, narratives of the NordicSonderwegto democracy have tended to focus on the role of the free Nordic peasant as the basis for an egalitarian conception of democracy, the role of the Reformation in producing a strong state apparatus and trust in administration, or the homogeneity of the Nordic populations, which allegedly made the Nordic countries able to balance nationalism with democracy during what scholars often refer to as the age of the masses.²³ In general, the historical advance of democracy in the Nordic countries has been addressed in terms of widening popular sovereignty rather than as a quest for individual or human rights. To be sure, there are important national diﬀerences here, with the Eidsvoll Constitution of 1814 playing a signiﬁcant role in Norwegian national narratives.²⁴ Overall, however, the histories of the democratisation of the Nordic countries have focused on how ‘the people’ claimed control over the government rather than how individuals liberated themselves from state oppression.

21Neither Niels Finn Christiansen and others (eds),The Nordic Model of Welfare(Museum Tusculanum 2006) nor Mary Hilson, The Nordic Model: Scandinavia since 1945(Reaktion 2008) mention human rights. In Pauli Kettunen and Klaus Petersen, Beyond Welfare State Models: Transnational Perspectives on Social Policy(Edward Elgar 2011), human rights are mentioned only in connection with a methodological discussion of the transnational turn in social policy history (p 231), and in the welfare state special issue of the (2001) 26 (3) Scandinavian Journal of History, human rights are taken up only in relation to a 1998 ruling of the Icelandic Supreme Court (p 265).

22Nils Edling, Jørn Henrik Petersen and Klaus Petersen‘Social Policy Language in Denmark and Sweden’in Daniel Béland and Klaus Petersen (eds),Analysing Social Policy Concepts and Language: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives (Policy Press 2014); Nils Edling (ed),The Changing Meanings of the Welfare State. Histories of a Key Concept in the Nordic Countries(Berghahn 2018).

23See Johann Pall Arnason and Björn Wittrock (eds),Nordic Paths to Modernity(Berghahn 2012); Niels Kayser Nielsen,Bonde, stat og hjem. Nordisk demokrati og nationalisme–fra pietismen til 2. verdenskrig, (Aarhus Universitet 2009); Øystein Sørensen and Bo Stråth (eds),The Cultural Construction of Norden(Scandinavian University Press 1997); Jussi Kurunmäki and Johan Strang,Rhetorics of Nordic Democracy(Finnish Literature Society 2010); Henrik Stenius,‘The Good Life is a Life of Conformity: The Impact of the Lutheran Tradition on Nordic Political Culture’in Øystein Sørensen and Bo Stråth (eds), The Cultural Construction of Norden(Scandinavian University Press 1997) 161–71.

24For a recent discussion, see Karen Gammelgaard and Eirik Holmøyvik (eds),Writing Democracy: The Norwegian Consti- tution 1814–2014(Berghahn 2015).

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In fact, to the extent that historians have addressed human rights as part of the history of democracy or the welfare state in the Nordic countries, it has more often been from a critical perspective, pointing to the failure of the welfare regime to live up to human rights norms. This perspective became particularly popular in the 1990s when, in the wake of the Cold War, it became important for historians to contribute to the dismantling of the idea of Nordic exceptionality. An unintentional landmark in this respect was Yvonne Hird- man’s book Att lägga livet tillrätta (1989), which, in examining the ideology of social engineering, opened up a discussion on paternalistic and oppressive elements in the history of the welfare state.²⁵ Since then, much important work has been done from an explicit or more often implicit human rights perspective on sterilisation laws, minority policies and other instances of abusively homogenising welfare policies.²⁶ This much- needed introspective turn coincided with an increased concern among legal and political scientists about the weak tradition of constitutional protection of individual rights in the Nordic welfare state.²⁷In this context, human rights were not seen as intrinsic to the idea of the Nordic welfare state; rather, they were viewed as a liberal or even conservative Euro- pean legacy that had failed to take root in the Social Democratic North. Writing on the Swedish post-war period, Johan Östling, for example, identiﬁes human rights as one of the lessons not learned in Sweden due to its lack of involvement in WWII.²⁸

In a well-informed analysis of the contested historiography of the Swedish model, Urban Lundberg and Mathias Tydén lament the stalemate between traditional (Social Democratic) welfare-state apologists and critical constitutionalists, calling instead for a more contextual approach to the history of the Nordic welfare state.²⁹ Our conviction is that this perspective deserves to be accompanied by a similar approach to the history of human rights in the Nordic countries. Indeed, against the background of recent calls for a stronger focus on social justice among human rights scholars, the time is surely also ripe for a fresh-eyed examination of the relationship between the Nordic welfare state and human rights.³⁰To date, the most interesting historical appraisals of the relationship between the welfare state and human rights have been conducted on immigration, an area that, from the outset, is marked by tensions between the national welfare paradigm, on the one hand, and the universal character of human rights norms and the international commitments of the Nordic states on the other.³¹

In a recent provocative book, the Norwegian historian Terje Tvedt identiﬁes human rights as the secular state religion of the new internationalised Norway–a Norway that

25Yvonne Hirdman,Att lägga livet tillrätta: Studier i svensk folkhemspolitik(Carlssons 1989).

26Maija Runcis,Steriliseringar i folkhemmet(Ordfront 1998); Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen,Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland(Michigan State University Press 1996). More recently, see Malin Arvidsson,‘Att ersätta det oersättliga: statlig gottgörelse för ofrivillig sterilisering och vanvård av omhänder- tagna barn’(DPhil thesis, Örebro University 2016).

27Jaakko Husa,‘Nordic Constitutionalism and European Human Rights-Mixing Oil and Water?’(2010) 55 Scandinavian Studies in Law 101; Martin Scheinin (ed), The Welfare State and Constitutionalism in the Nordic Countries (Nordic Council of Ministers 2001); Lars Trägårdh, Bemäktiga individerna: Om domstolarna, lagen och de individuella rättighe- terna i Sverige (Fritzes oﬀentliga publikationer 1999). See also the special issue of the (2009) 2Nordic Journal of Human Rights.

28Johan Östling,Sweden after Nazism: Politics and Culture in the Wake of the Second World War(Berghahn 2016).

29Urban Lundberg and Mathias Tydén,‘In Search of the Swedish Model. Contested Historiography’in Helena Mattson and Sven-Olov Wallerstein (eds),Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State(Black Dog 2010).

30See, above all, Samuel Moyn,Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World(Harvard University Press 2018).

31See for example Grete Brochmann and others (eds),Immigration Policy and the Scandinavian Welfare State 1945–2010 (Palgrave 2012).

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began to emerge in the 1960s and that has crystallised since the‘end of history’ in the 1990s.³²Unreflective in its promotion of a multicultural society, foreign aid and a gener- ous immigration policy, universalist human rights replaced nationalism and nation-build- ing as the hegemonicdoxaof Norwegian politics, suffocating critical thinking and analysis among politicians and academics on the long-term consequences of immigration for Nor- wegian society and culture. Tvedt’s analysis calls for more empirical research on, for example, the relationship between human rights and nationalism, democracy and the welfare state, and on the relative importance of human rights in comparison to other facets of internationalism in the global age (e.g. neo-liberalism). However, it also calls for studies on changing notions of the concept of human rights and, most of all perhaps, studies on the critics of human rights in different periods of the history of the Nordic countries. Indeed, to the extent that human rights has become a universally cele- brated idea, it has also become a contested concept which different actors have tried to mobilise and define for their own purposes.

If human rights have largely been absent from the domestic historiography of the region, so too have they been relatively neglected in the history of the foreign policy of the Nordic countries. By contrast, the leading themes have been security policy, international alignment and cooperation, European integration and development aid.³³ Again, the most probable explanation for this absence is that human rights played a negligible role for the key actors in Nordic foreign policy. Indeed, the histories of Nordic engagement in the League of Nations suggest that Nordic actors prioritised neutrality, international law, minority issues, disarmament, and the position of small states. Later, at the United Nations, peacekeeping, social justice and solidarity were also emphasised, while walking the tightrope between East and West.³⁴Admittedly, the Norwegian UN Secretary General Trygve Lie placed the symbolic cornerstone of the UN Headquarters in New York on a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1949 and proclaimed the year thereafter that he believed it would prove to be one of‘the greatest documents of history.’³⁵Nevertheless, neither he nor his Swedish successor Dag Hammarskjöld can be said to have prioritised human rights eﬀorts. Hammarskjöld even sought to downplay the signiﬁcance of human rights, mainly from the realisation that these discussions led to deeper polarisation among the principal powers.³⁶Instead, the international brand of the Nordic countries

32Terje Tvedt,Det internasjonale gjennombruddet: Fra‘ettpartistat’tilﬂerkulturell stat(Dreyers Forlag 2017).

33The histories of Danish and Norwegian foreign policy and foreign aid have been explored in research projects resulting in four book series published between 1996 and 2005. One of the Norwegian projects resulted in a book length synthesis in English: see Olav Riste,Norway’s Foreign Relations: A History. (Universitetsforlaget 2001). For a study on Swedish foreign policy inﬂuenced by recent historiographic trends, see Andreas Tullberg,‘We Are in the Congo Now: Sweden and the Trinity of Peacekeeping during the Congo Crisis 1960–1964’(DPhil thesis, Lund University 2012) 260. For Finland, see Christopher S Browning,Constructivism, Narrative and Foreign Policy Analysis: A Case Study of Finland(Peter Lang 2008).

34See Norbert Götz,Deliberative Diplomacy: The Nordic Approach to Global Governance and Societal Representation at the United Nations(Republic of Letters 2011); Norbert Götz and Heidi Haggrén,Regional Cooperation and International Organ- izations: The Nordic Model in Transnational Alignment(Routledge 2009); Eckel (n 13) 151–53.

35Memorandum by UN Secretary General Trygve Lie on a 20-Year Program for Achieving Peace Through the United Nations.

April 20, 1950, FRUS, 1950, The United Nations; The Western Hemipsphere Vol II Document 218 <https://history.state.

gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v02/d218> accessed 25 April 2018. On Norway’s engagement with the human rights issue in the early post-war years, see Kjersti Brathagen, ‘Competition or Complement to Universal Human Rights? The Norwegian Position in a European Convention on Human Rights, 1949–51’in Rasmus Mariager, Karl Molin and Kjersti Brathagen (eds),Human Rights in Europe during the Cold War(Routledge 2014) 15–25.

36JeﬀKing and Alan JT Hobbins,‘Hammarskjöld and Human Rights: The Deﬂation of the UN Human Rights Programme, 1953–1961’(2003) 5 Journal of the History of International Law 337.

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as global good Samaritans was achieved by other means. For example, histories of the ethical dimension to Nordic foreign policy and especially foreign aid suggest that the driving motives were not conceptualised in terms of human rights, but rather as Lutheran mission, solidarity, democratisation or even in terms of exporting the Social Democratic welfare state.³⁷

This absence of human rights in the history of Nordic foreign policy thus raises important questions. What were the reasons for this disinterest? When did human rights become important for the foreign policies of the Nordic countries and why? And in what ways were international-level developments reﬂected in local and regional situations?

Our Intervention

Our contribution is motivated by the conviction that historical methods and approaches can avoid the common pitfall of analysing the present in the light of a mythological past and thereby add depth and complexity to the understanding of human rights. In emphasising the shifting meanings, definitions and implications of human rights norms over time and in different spaces and locations, historical research demonstrates clearly that human rights are not a historical constant that exists independent of time, space and context. Norms are crystallised in authoritative documents at particular points of time, but these international documents are founded on specific and often quite diverse impulses of various historical, phi- losophical, ideological and cultural origins. In a way, the various declarations and conventions represent a form of collective memory, alieux de mémoire, of past and current ideas and events, sometimes dramatic in character. Even at the time of their adoption, those involved interpreted the results differently or emphasised diverging aspects of the texts. The documents were then constantly debated and reinterpreted in complex processes at different levels and geographies. Acknowledging the significance of past contingencies and the multiple contexts and impulses that have shaped and continue to shape what we today recognise as human rights norms makes us better equipped to understand the present.

As is evident from the exposition above, we currently lack a robust body of historical studies exploring shorter time periods and the various themes and actors within human rights in and beyond the Nordic region. Consequently, there is insuﬃcient basis for period- isation or other synthesising interpretations. Instead, for some time it will remain necessary for historians to individually and collectively pursue Nordic human rights history on all possible fronts, focusing on Nordic agency in forming international human rights, on the reception and appropriation of these norms and on the role of the Nordic countries in a transnational history of human rights. However, as will become clear from the contributions in this collection, we see a rough contour of shifts, beginning in the late 1960s, from a reactive to a more active stance toward human rights in the Nordic states. This was then followed by the emergence of much higher international ambitions in the 1980s and beyond, thereby mirroring the general trend towards the rise of human rights as adoxaof international aﬀairs.³⁸The Nordic

37On the promotion of democratic ideals, see for example Helge Pharo,‘Small State Anti-Fascism: Norway’s Quest to Elim- inate the Franco Regime in the Aftermath of World War II’(2018) 7 (1) Culture & History Digital Journal 1. On the export of Scandinavian norms in family planning, see Sunniva Engh,‘From Northern Feminists to Southern Women: Scandinavian Population Aid to India’in Helge Pharo and Monika Pohle Fraser (eds),The Aid Rush: Aid Regimes in Northern Europe during the Cold War Volume 1(Unipub forlag 2008) 253–83.

38Kristine Kjærsgaard,‘Confronting the Greek Military Junta: Scandinavian Joint Action under the European Commission on Human Rights, 1967–1970’in P Villaume, R Mariager and H Porsdam (eds),The‘Long 1970s’: Human Rights, East–West

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countries’eﬀorts in international human rights bodies and initiatives varied, were issue-depen- dent, and were founded on a basic expectation that such norms had already been secured for the populations of the Nordic states. Our studies of the Nordic countries can be seen to target a microcosm of the development of human rights around the globe in which norms evolved, changed and operated through the interweaving of local, national, regional and global political, legal and cultural processes within and beyond the Nordic countries. The emergence of the modern notion of indigeneity, protected by international indigenous peoples’rights, is possibly the most striking examples of this: local, national and regional developments related to the Sami people became interwoven with developments elsewhere and gained an international and global framing, creating multiple arenas for political contestation and normative instruments.³⁹ This collection opens with a broader assessment of the intellectual context in which human rights were received in the region. Johan Strang examines the tradition of Scandi- navian Legal Realism–by some regarded as the philosophy of the Nordic welfare state– and how leading representatives perceived human rights from around the time of the First World War until the decades following the Second World War. This tradition was scep- tical towards natural law and human rights, and Strang asks how these legal realists envi- sioned international law, democracy or the welfare state without human rights. At the same time, he also demonstrates that these views were by no means static; rather, they evolved with the changing times.

In her article on human rights in Interwar Finland, Ainur Elmgren traces how leading public advocates during the 1930s waged a battle for civil rights that expanded the notion to previously excluded categories of people, such as political prisoners, the mentally ill and refugees. Elmgren analyses the usage of a notion of human rights that drew on traditions of liberal humanism, Christian anarchism and the socialist labour movement. The article illustrates a very interesting application of the notion that predates the modern human rights discourse that emerged from the 1940s, but it also demonstrates how politicised and controversial its usage was at this point in the Republic of Finland.

The third contribution shifts the focus to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Kjersti Brathagen examines early attempts to undertake human rights education by studying eﬀorts to disseminate the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in Norway from 1948 to 1952. It relates UNESCO aims to the national education system by illustrat- ing the challenges of translating global documents in meaningful ways into achievable educational goals in local contexts.

In his exploration of Denmark’s human rights policies from 1948 to 1968, Steven LB Jensen argues that a closer interaction occurred between the domestic and international spheres than was previously understood. Jensen examines Danish positions at the UN in the late 1940s and shows how they were inﬂuenced by domestic interests. Moreover, he studies the debate on the new Danish constitution in 1953 to show how an internationalist outlook was reﬂected herein. His investigation of engagement with human rights during these years reveals a complex pattern and only a slow, gradual movement

Détente, and Transnational Relations(Routledge 2016) 51–69. On human rights in development aid policies, see Kristine Midtgaard [now Kjærsgaard],‘Human Rights in Danish Development Aid, 1975–2010’in Helge Pharo and Thorsten B Olesen (eds),Saints and Sinners: Oﬃcial Development Aid and its Dynamics in a Comparative and Historical Context (Unipub forlag-Oslo Academic Press 2013).

39Vik and Semb (n 15); Hanne Hagtvedt Vik,‘Indigenous Internationalism’in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds),Inter- nationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History(Cambridge University Press 2017) 315–39.

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towards the more progressive stances with which the Nordic countries would become identiﬁed. Internationalism in the human rightsﬁeld was a feature that evolved over time.

Kristine Kjærsgaard provides the special issue with a women’s rights perspective through a focus on gender equality and Danish parliamentarians’ engagement with the UN Women’s Decade from 1975 to 1985. She focuses on the actors and networks established to promote this political issue domestically. Interestingly, the politicians involved often needed to travel abroad–for example, to a UN World Conference on Women in Nairobi – and engage with international processes in order to secure institutional change and political action at home.

In recent decades, Nordic civil society organisations have been extremely proactive in international processes, playing the roles of both facilitators and innovators. Linde Lindk- vist shows how the Swedish Save the Children Federation adopted such roles in the development of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. This followed the organisation’s ‘rediscovery’ of children’s rights during the 1970s, which gradually formed the basis for both a brokering and agenda-setting role in international negotiations during the 1980s. The article oﬀers an illuminating insight into how the Convention came into existence and how issues such as female genital mutilation and children in armed conﬂicts were addressed in international human rights law.

The ﬁnal article, by Hanne Hagtvedt Vik and Skage Alexander Østberg, examines Norway’s support for human rights treaties. In the late 1970s, leadership in human rights was added to Norway’s‘engagement policy’, which formed a vital component of its foreign policy. This, in turn, shaped the country’s approach to drafting human rights treaties in the 1980s. The article explores three of these drafting processes–relating to torture, children and indigenous people–and documents how Norway’s system of legal dualism enabled the country to pursue ideologically and politically desirable projects under the rubric of international legal norms.

Together, the articles in this special issue provide a broad overview of the histories of human rights in the Nordic countries throughout most of the twentieth century. Moreover, these histories represent traditions, ideals and challenges that the Nordic countries have carried with them into the twenty-first century and that continue to influence these countries’dealings with human rights to this day. The collection should serve as an antidote to the view of the Nordics as unconditional supporters, from the very establishment of the UN (or even during the interwar years), of international efforts to protect human rights.

Rather, their interactions with such eﬀorts have been ambiguous, inconsistent and have changed over time. Above all, the collection should be read as a call for further empirical studies of Nordic human rights history−studies which will allow us to better conceptualise and understand that history and also the history of international human rights.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewer as well as those who participated and provided valuable feedback during the conferences and workshops organised by the Centre for Nordic Studies at the University of Helsinki (2015), by UiO:Norden in Oslo (2017), by the Congress of Nordic Historians in Aalborg (2017) and by Human Rights Studies at Lund University (2017).

The editors are co-founders of the Nordic Human Rights History Network (established in 2017).

Vik has been the coordinating editor of the special issue.

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Funding

For funding support, we would like to thank the Academy of Finland [grant no. 297032] and Riks- bankens Jubileumsfond.