In Chapter 2, I discussed the political economy of the Third Way as construed around a new concept of capital, a kind of capital that, in the form of knowledge, skill, and potential, is defined by its location within people and its creation in social and cultural relations. Third Way discourse can be understood as an economic language construed around the capitalization of knowledge, a capitalization that leads to an understanding of individual potential, talent, and creativity as the key assets, indeed the raw material, of the new economy: “Human capital is the 21st century equivalent of the 19th century dependence on natural resources. Modern enterprise and wealth creation depend upon the development of people.”1
The key to growth in the new economy is the transformation of these assets into marketable goods, thus turning knowledge into capital and value. In other words, growth depends on the development of people.
Let us consider briefly the fundamentally ambiguous notion of growth. Growth is a powerful notion of progress because it implies a direction toward a better state of affairs, an accumulation of some kind of surplus, a growing of something into something better or at least more. To us, it is often silently presumed to mean economic growth, but growth could, of course, have many other meanings, and it has also had many other meanings in the history of modernity. To that extent, growth, like capital, is a historically specific concept, one that changes meaning with social and economic change and with changing definitions of what is considered to constitute strategic value at every given point in time. In consequence, growth policies—the political activities aimed at promoting value and prosperity—reflect definitions of what value is and what is considered to be improvement. The modern definition of growth as economic growth, that is, of capital accumulation and aggregate national income, standardized in the quantitative gauge of GDP, is more recent than we care to remember. It originated during the immediate postwar period and the reconstruction of European economies under American influence. The notion of growth as a process of linear economic expansion is a conceptual invention of industrialism, which replaced notions of the economy as an organic and ecologic system.2 Linked to this reconceptualization of growth was a move, in socialist debates, from conceptions of growth as culture and human development to economic prosperity as the foundation of working class advancement.3 Notions of individual improvement and human growth became linked to industrialism, and industrialism itself became understood as a culture of improvement, contrary to the way in which utopian socialist thinkers saw industrialism as the destruction of individual—and cultural—growth. Industrialism became equated with progress, not least in the productivism of Swedish social democracy.4
The Third Way draws on these tensions in debates on growth in socialist history, from utopian thinkers such as William Morris and Raymond Williams in the United Kingdom and Rickard Sandler in Sweden, to the theoreticians of industrial affluence such as Anthony Crosland, Ernst Wigforss, and Tage Erlander. However, it also draws on the legacies of the last decades. The Third Way contains continuities from the critique of affluence of the late 1960s, as well as from a neoliberal concept of growth, linked to freedom and entrepreneurship.
These different strands of thought are reflected in the specific meaning of the concept of growth in the knowledge economy. Because growth stems from the expansion of human capital, which occurs through processes of learning, the notions of growth and learning become almost synonymous. As such, learning is conceptualized not only as the cultivation of individual character but as a process of economic expansion. There is de facto a double bind in the contemporary notion of growth, where the term growth refers both to a process of economic accumulation and to a process of individual growth. Growth discourses of the Third Way are concerned not only with notions of productivity and profit but also with notions of self-improvement and self-fulfilment. These economic and individual processes are presumed to be frictionless and virtually identical.
This double bind is mirrored in almost all key metaphors of the value production in contemporary economic discourse. It is also clearly expressed in the rise of education as a central means not only of social but of economic reform, indeed as a new form of industrial policy.5 Modern education policies are the means for both economic and social rationalization and for the self-exploration of curious, innovative individuals. The same is true for cultural policy, which also emerged as a new form of growth policy in the 1990s.6
This double bind of growth is not new in the history of social democracy, nor is it new in the history of capitalism. Rather, the idea of industrial progress, throughout the history of social democracy, has also taken the form of disciplining individuals, of the political creation of industrial man, a process that can be seen as the accommodation of values of self-fulfilment with the demands of technology and economic modernization. There is a central tension in social democracy’s notion of modernization between connotations to industrial change and to individual development. Indeed, social democracy’s notion of emancipation is inherently related to its notion of efficiency. Its various modernization discourses have emphasized the relationship between improvement on the individual level and the aggregate effects in terms of economic and social progress. Consequently, there are strong links in social democratic discourse among the elements of improvement, growth, emancipation, efficiency, and even culture. In Third Way discourse, it is these tensions that are reflected in the parties’ rhetoric of freeing the potential of all and in growth policies aimed at turning this potential into productive capital.
In both countries, the period beginning with the mid-1990s has seen the creation of growth strategies organized around human potential, knowledge, and creativity. The SAP came back to power after the 1994 election with a new growth program for the knowledge age. In this program, the concept of economic growth (tillväxt) was redefined as human creativity (skapande) and represented as a natural process of human growth and fulfilment. Indeed it was conceptualized with the term växande, which means human growth, as if human growth and economic accumulation were the same process. Growth was a question of humankind wanting to “dream, think, and create.” It originated in “the human thirst for knowledge.”7 In the United Kingdom, policy spoke more bluntly of the economic necessity of “tapping the potential of all.” The Competitiveness White Paper of 1998, Our Competitive Future, argued that the route to competitiveness in the new economy lay in “the way we exploit our most valuable assets: our knowledge, skills, and creativity.”8 In this way, human potential and creativity came to occupy a central position in a new social democratic strategy for the creation of prosperity, as, indeed, new forms of goods to exploit and put to use. While Swedish discourse was more romantic—“together we explore the infinite potential of humanity”—the message was the same, namely, making the most of national brainpower to be competitive in the global race for knowledge. The Swedish Innovation Strategy, in words that echoed the European Lisbon Strategy, spoke of making Sweden the most competitive knowledge-based economy in Europe by 2010:9
This redefinition of growth as a question of creativity, potential, and talent has led to new framings around education and learning as policies as part of the growth strategy aimed at bringing out the productive potential of the people. The process of innovation begins, as the Swedish Innovation Strategy puts it, in innovative people. Because growth policies must foster innovative minds, policies for education and early learning have become increasingly charged with teaching creativity and fostering young people’s capacities for original ideas and actions with, as it were, bringing out the talents of every child.10
In the knowledge age, to “leave no child behind” is not just a moral but an economic imperative: “A nation the size of ours simply cannot afford to waste the abilities of any child, discard the potential of any young person, leave untapped the talents of any adult.”11
In Sweden, the old institution of the preschool, förskolan, has gained new emphasis because it is now seen as the first stepping-stone in lifelong learning. Thus preschool education received its first curriculum in 1998; the aim of early learning was defined as fostering a culture of learning, through play, pedagogical instruction, and fun, thereby also fostering creativity. It is through children’s play that vital processes of creativity and interaction, the social dispositions of learning individuals, are created. In social democratic rhetoric, the objective of reform of preschool education was described as to help children grow and develop their talents. Traditionally, Swedish social democracy rejects what is called the commercialization of childhood, and this position was also echoed in the 1990s, as it was stated that early learning must “let children be children” and should not apply the demands of working life on the youngest.12 Meanwhile, the Swedish Innovation Strategy included the organization of a national program for entrepreneurship, from preschool to high school, for the purpose of teaching creativity and fostering positive attitudes toward entrepreneurship and risk taking. In early learning, this strategy was oriented toward the stimulation of problem solving through children’s play, whereas in high school it allowed students to set up small companies of their own.13 In this manner, preschool education was directly linked to growth and entrepreneurship.
Creativity, potential, and talent are all notions that take on a very specific meaning in the growth discourses of the Third Way. In both countries, creative thought is defined as the capacity to think critically and make a difference, see new solutions to problems, and come up with original ideas. Creativity is risk taking, initiative, and the ability to see new combinations of knowledge. Creativity is what gives pupils the opportunity to become innovative, enterprising, and capable of leadership, all qualities that are ultimately defined by the entrepreneur. Policies aimed at fostering creativity are about helping young people gain self-esteem and helping them pursue their particular interests and talents—helping them grow as individuals. In Sweden, there was a new focus on children’s culture in the 1990s, with government investments in art and literature for children as something that would help children grow and give them the means with which to realize their innermost ambitions.14 But “growing” here referred to the highly ambiguous process of both individual growth and economic growth, a process of learning wherein children were to become creative, not only for their own sake but also in the hope that they will grow up to become the next generation of competitive entrepreneurs. In the United Kingdom, putting creativity on the national curriculum was first suggested in the Business Manifesto in 1997. It was then taken up in the Schools White Paper in 1997 and resulted in the creation of a national curriculum for creativity. In the famous words of Blair, “entrepreneurship doesn’t begin in the boardroom, it begins in the classroom.”15
Entrepreneurs are the crucial link in the process of wealth creation in the knowledge economy because entrepreneurs are those individuals in society who turn the amorphous and nebulous mass of original ideas into useful knowledge, that is, knowledge that can become market commodities in the form of competitive products or services. As with other raw materials, the potential value of talent and creativity depends on finding the applicability and use that turn individual creativity into gold and allow nations to move up the ladder of value-added production. The contemporary notion of creativity is one that is inherently related to the idea of use and applicability. As such, it reflects a highly normative idea of what knowledge and creativity are. It is not creativity in itself that is at a premium but those forms of creativity that can be put to use. The ultimate meaning of this is that the process of human growth is defined by market applicability and commercialization.
This is a notion of creativity that is explicitly informed by the notion of innovation in the new economy, that is, a notion of development that is no longer that of invention, hence the process of thinking up new ideas or products, but rather the process of constantly finding new uses and new applications.16 Creativity denotes a kind of economic expansion that is about the constant development of new ideas and new uses. This is a reflection of the understanding of modernization as a process of constant, accelerating change. In a world of perpetual innovation, competitive advantage has to be reasserted constantly, and the skills of the workforce need to be continually upgraded; otherwise, competitiveness will decline. Therefore, the meanings of creativity, talent, and potential are intrinsically related to the needs of the new economy and to a specific notion of useful knowledge in the knowledge economy. Ultimately, creativity is about fostering creative workers who are capable of thinking up new opportunities for themselves in a changing world:17
Pupils who are creative will be prepared for a rapidly changing world, where they may have to adapt to several careers in a lifetime. Many employers want people who see connections, have bright ideas, are innovative, communicate . . . and are able to solve problems. In other words, they want creative people.18
These changes in the notion of creativity to a kind of individualized modernization process—where the purpose of originality is to be risk taking, entrepreneurial, and use-minded—reflect the new mode of governance, discussed in previous chapters as the governance of culture, attitudes, and dispositions. The emphasis on early learning and children stems from the perception that learning is not primarily about acquiring skills but about aptitudes or even cultural norms, and as such it needs to be forged in the individual from its very early years. This is a very specific understanding of improvement as a process that takes place within people, in the form of individual adaptation to changing demands for skills and attitudes. Learning, in the United Kingdom, is “a culture of continuous self-improvement,” the “continuous education and development of the mind and the imagination.”19 This is a rhetoric that falls back on historical legacies in social democracy’s ideas of education as a tool for the cultivation of competent, educated citizens. But it is also a perspective that seems to run counter to important strands of thought in the history of social democracy—to do with equality and democracy.
The Third Way gives new relevance to a central tension in social democracy’s outlook on education between education as a utopian ideal concerned with self-fulfillment and autonomy, on the one hand, and a technocratic orientation that sees in education a means with which to create productive workers, equipped with the skills and competences needed for the more efficient functioning of capitalism, on the other. In the history of social democracy, both of these strategies have an emancipatory bearing but in radically different ways—the former acts as a critique that rejects an education system and a concept of knowledge that reproduces the values of the prevailing production order, while the other identifies the improvement of that very order as the route to reform. To socialist thinkers, such as R. H. Tawney or Rickard Sandler, education was the process of discovering a more fulfilled self and of fostering a radical ideal of equality. Education was a means for fulfilling potential in the sense of escaping the fragmentation of the mind caused by industrialism and the alienation of the worker by the machine, that is, of restoring the self.20
In Sweden, the tradition of folkbildning, the self-education movements and study circles of the early labor movement, stemmed from just such an egalitarian ideal, even if this also merged with a strong disciplining emphasis on the creation of the socialist self. A key to educational debates in the history of Swedish social democracy is the tension between the notions of bildning and utbildning. Bildning lacks an English translation but could be translated as cultivation or civilization and is close to the German term Bildung, which signifies a process of self-exploration and self-cultivation. It identifies learning and knowledge as the tools with which to understand the world, and it has strong historic connotations to high culture and elite education. Bildning stands in contrast to utbildning, education, particularly in the form of skills and vocational training. Folkbildning came about historically as a rejection of this divide between academic studies and vocational training and drew on radical discourses of knowledge as the tool with which to understand the power structures of society and participate in its shaping. Folkbildning was built on principles of mutuality and freedom; it was turning workers into socially and politically aware citizens. The self-education movement remains an important institution in Swedish society.21
The notion of knowledge in the social democratic tradition is, thus, deeply associated with self-cultivation as a form of emancipation, as the process of becoming aware of social and economic structures in society to be able to question them. Education was part of a social democratic critique of the capitalist economy and the privileges of power in capitalist society. This conception of education as a radical tool started to change in the postwar period, as social democracy increasingly identified education as a means with which to create a skilled, suitable workforce adapted for economic and technological change and capable of delivering the productive economy.22 The expansion of education, under Erlander in Sweden and Wilson in the United Kingdom, was linked to a human capital argument, in which the “cultivation of the mind” was essentially the process of creating skilled workers for the industrial economy. In the 1950s and 1960s, extending educational opportunity was part of social democracy’s project to create the industrial economy. As the Norwegian historian Francis Sejersted points out, the productivism and growth orientation of Swedish social democracy implied a deeply technocratic outlook on knowledge. Human capital theory was a strong component of the creation of comprehensive education in Sweden in the 1960s, a project later dismissed by a radical generation as the “knowledge factories” of standardized learning.23
This productivist streak around education mirrors in contemporary social democratic notions of competence, employability, and life-long learning. New Labour’s outlook on education clearly draws on such a technocratic strand in British laborism going back to the Webbs, Crosland, Wilson, and Callaghan. To Wilson, education was about the creation of an educated working class for the scientific age.24 To New Labour, lifelong learning is the creation of knowledge man, the constantly learning, flexible, entrepreneurial person. Policies of lifelong learning are about creating “a well educated, well-equipped and adaptable labour force,” capable of a life in the knowledge economy.25 Part of New Labour’s skills strategy was the creation of a University for Industry, modeled on the Open University. The latter was created in 1967 as part of a White Heat attempt to create a university based on distance learning to compensate for workers being denied access to academic education. The purpose of the University for Industry was to use ICT and wireless learning to provide the skills needed by business and “change attitudes to learning and acquiring skills in the new century.”26
In Sweden, the expansion of higher education in regional colleges in the 1990s was motivated by the need to fight unemployment and increase the competence of the workforce.27 At the same time, the idea of the knowledge society brought about a renaissance for alternative notions of education and the tradition of folkbildning. In social democratic discourse of the 1990s and 2000s, the ethos of folkbildning as that of fostering alternative values of education was declared more important than ever in an era of rapid technological shifts and increased need for critical thinking. Folkbildning was thus seen as part of a public responsibility to guarantee the prevalence of an alternative radical ethos to the commercialization and marketization of other areas of education but also as an alternative path for individuals who had fallen out of the mainstream education system.28 With the emergence of a social democratic growth narrative in the period from the mid-1990s, the notion of bildning also saw a remarkable resurgence, viewed as the route to personal advancement through new means, such as competence saving, lifelong learning, and employer-led training courses. The expansion of higher education through the creation of regional colleges and the government drive for improving the skills of the long-term unemployed in the kunskapslyftet were defined as policies for bildning. However, this was a new and treacherous notion of bildning, which increasingly focused on marketable skills, employability, and entrepreneurship and thus seems closer to technocratic ideals than to the radical ideas of folkbildning.
In this manner, when social democracy today speaks of the freeing of potential and the liberation of selves that stem from learning and education in the knowledge society, it silences a central conflict in the history of social democracy—the conflict between radically different interpretations of the real meaning of “the cultivation of the mind.” The Third Way, with its references to growth as human growth and its emphasis on education as a dual process of economic and individual improvement, ignores such tensions in notions of knowledge and education and presumes that self-improvement and economic improvement are the same thing. When New Labour speaks of creating a culture of self-improvement, the idea of self-improvement that this contains is, despite the emphasis on love of art, music, and poetry, essentially an idea of improvement that is about acquiring the dispositions in demand in the new economy. To “equip ourselves with knowledge and with understanding” is linked to innovation and entrepreneurship. The richer life that the arts can bring is instrumental to “developing the intellectual capital that is now at the centre of a nation’s competitive strength.” Fostering an enquiring mind and nourishing the soul creates added value for business. Learning breaks vicious circles of underachievement and builds confidence and independence, the tools for individual achievement and success on the labor markets of the new economy.29 In this manner, Tawney’s radical notion of self-exploration becomes merged with a Fabian idea of productivity because the Third Way presumes that individual self-fulfillment and market efficiency ultimately lead to the same goal, namely, a more knowledgeable society made up of learned individuals.
In both countries, the growth discourses of the new economy tie into narratives of British and Swedish identity because the values of national identity are also defined as economic values and sources of growth and prosperity. Thus, discourses on creativity go one step farther than hitherto discussed; creativity is not only something that resides in people and can be fostered and brought out by politics, but it is also something that resides in the common cultural heritage of the nation-state and is rooted in collective memory and history. Creativity is defined in both the United Kingdom and Sweden as something particular to British and Swedish identity—a national inclination toward thinking up new and good ideas. Swedes are a “creative and curious nation.” The United Kingdom is “an island of creativity.” This is, in fact, an integral part of the competition strategy. Because both countries rule out the possibility that European countries can fend off the competition from “Chindia” with low wages, they must compete on the higher part of the value-added chain by being original, creative, and novel; by the ability to “lead and not take after others.”30 There are clear assumptions in this of a new global division of labor, where the European creativity legacy is a competitive advantage. The specifics of an Enlightenment heritage in European culture become sources of growth.31
In this manner, the cultural heritage becomes a kind of bank of creativity that can be put to use in the new economy, a virtual pool of knowledge into which one can tap. Third Way growth policies have brought about a new interest in the historic heritage, architecture and design, and libraries and museums as national creative resources and sources of learning. Just as the understanding of education as a central means for growth has brought about new affinities between education and economic policy, the development of new growth policies has also meant a rapprochement between policy areas such as culture and trade and the creation of a plethora of new institutions such as councils and task forces for design and the creative industries. Swedish and British art, design products, and music are exhibited at world fairs as markers of progress, just as, at the dawn of industrialization, it was industrial success and sophisticated social policies that were on display.32 In the intangible world of the new economy, appearance, form, and the values associated with a specific brand are key to competitive advantage. Following this logic, national identity and attributes have also become integral parts of growth strategies. Today, creating a national brand name is a strategic concern for governments increasingly engaged in something that might be described as a capitalization of national stereotypes, a process in which these are also constantly reasserted.
Part of New Labour’s strategy of national rejuvenation was the renewal of the British trademark and the image of the United Kingdom. In the 1990s, New Labour tried to represent itself as a youthful political project not only through the celebration of pop music and a trendy art scene but also through its economic appraisal of the creative industries—the successful export commodities of Britpop, Britart, British cuisine, and British fashion.33 Much of this is remembered as “Cool Britannia.” Its more opportunistic expressions, such as the famous Downing Street receptions where the prime minister mingled with pop stars and artists, have been much ridiculed, but they were part of a wider reappraisal of the role of culture in contemporary capitalism.34
The origins of Cool Britannia were in a 1997 Demos report entitled Britain TM: Renewing Our Identity. Its message was that the British trademark was in a sad state. During the decades of decline, the very notion of being British had gone from that of a nation proudly ruling the world to a “backward-looking has-been, a theme park world of royal pageantry and rolling green hills, where draughts blow through people’s houses.” As such, being British had become a major liability to British industry in a time when appearance was at a premium. The solution was bluntly put as “rebranding.” It was necessary, for reasons of competitive advantage, to rethink the very meaning of Britishness into something more modern and dynamic. The United Kingdom was a trademark that needed careful managing, just as corporations manage their brand names and labels. A well-managed national identity has positive externalities for national firms and is, therefore, a task for government, part of social democracy’s reinvented role of state and its responsibility to create the best conditions for business.35
The idea of Cool Britannia drew on a curious mix of the postmodern historian Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined community, as it spoke of the need for new shared stories, and a crude management approach that was directly borrowed from the corporate sphere.36 History became a source of images and narratives about the common past, which could be turned into a competitive label. Rebranding, to Demos, had to be about a new fit between elements of the historic narrative of Britishness and the future. This new fit was somewhere between the Empire, cricket, and multiculturalism. Diversity and the postcolonial legacies of Empire were thus made part of the notion of creativity as a national attribute, through the celebration of British writers, artists, and designers such as Salman Rushdie, Nitin Sahwney, and Oswald Boateng.37 Diversity, however, also gave rise to core tensions in the project. It proved difficult to airbrush collective memories of Britishness from less marketable experiences of Empire. The Demos report’s naïve suggestion that a successful rebranding of the United Kingdom might require a “tour of the Monarch of all sites where there is still bitterness about Britain’s past—from Ireland to Iran” was repudiated by the report of the British Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, which stated that the “Rule Britannia mindset” was a major problem in the rethinking of the imagined community of Britain:
Britain seems incapable of shaking off its imperialist identity. The Brits do appear to believe that “Britons never never never shall be slaves” . . . But it is impossible to colonise three-fifths of the world . . . without enslaving oneself. Our problem has been that Britain has never understood itself and has steadfastly refused to see and understand itself through the prism of our experience of it, here and in its coloniser mode.38
This tension between attempts to accommodate the colonial past and turn it into competitive advantage, on the one hand, and more critical notions of diversity on the other resurfaces regularly in New Labour’s debates on Britishness, testifying to the contested nature of identity and the fine line between progressive identity politics and populism.39
Diversity is a highly contested issue in Sweden and, more than anything, Swedish creative industries seem concerned with the reproduction of images of Sweden as a country of green forests and blond women. Nation branding emerged as a central part of the growth strategy in the 1990s in connection with a new emphasis on export commodities such as pop music or Swedish design. In 1998, a government bill on design identified design policies as crucial to selling Swedish products, by giving them a particularly Swedish identity. Swedish design had a competitive edge that had to be associated internationally with something called “the image of Sweden,” Sverigebilden.40 In 2004, the Swedish Innovation Strategy defined the projection of a positive image of Sweden abroad as a crucial part of the innovative strategy, part of a government strategy to “make Sweden visible, highlight the values the country stands for and the opportunities it offers.”41
What then is the image of Sweden? Paradoxically, it is the values defined in the Party’s 2001 Program as values in conflict with commercialism, which are the components of the brand name of Sweden. As in the case of the Cool Britannia debate, attempts to brand Sweden depart in understandings of particular Swedish assets and Swedish particularity. In Sweden, these are the values of Swedishness—solidarity, cooperation, and equality. In a speech on the image of Sweden, the Minister for Culture Leif Pagrotsky spoke of the legacies of Olof Palme and Anna Lindh as traditions that “evoke respect and add to the positive image of Sweden.” More than anything, the image of Sweden draws on the famous model of welfare, which, “even when some find it loathsome, distinguishes us from Swaziland or Switzerland.”42
Gender equality, solidarity, and democracy are all parts of the brand name of progressive Sweden, one that no longer connotes the crisis-tinged notion of Sweden in the early 1990s but is, rather, a fundamentally positive asset. Profiling Sweden, then, is about banking on the values of the People’s Home and its symbolic value as the role model of the world, “the decent society”:
Sweden needs profiling. Profiling means to be different, to have a profile that stands out and does not blend in with the wallpaper: to go against the tide, to dare to take a different course and express different values. We have in Sweden a number of values and opinions that get much attention. For instance, we put a lot of money in soft, human values in our society, things like equality, the environment, children’s place in society, family policy. We are a society that in other countries is often seen as a more humane society. This is nothing we should be ashamed of, and we should not try to adapt to others . . . we need to stand up for the fact that this is the way that we have decided in Sweden that we think a decent society should be organized.... this is very efficient, very powerful . . .43
The progressiveness of the Swedish model—its solidarity, equality, and decency—is, thus, not just a role model in terms of economic and social justice but a marketing strategy for Swedish industry as well.
The rise of nation branding is a good illustration of the turnaround in the political consciousness in both the United Kingdom and Sweden in the decade from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, from the humiliating and painful attempts to regain the confidence of international capital for debt-ridden national economies to managing the brand names of success stories. Perhaps Leif Pagrotsky expresses this best when he says “In the 1990s, I sold government bonds, now I’m selling Sweden.”44
In growth strategies of the 1990s, culture became part of a concept of growth having to do explicitly with economic accumulation. This has a particular relevance as seen from within the history of social democracy because culture, as Raymond Williams once pointed out, is a notion of improvement that, in the history of social democracy, is inherently related to self-fulfilment and happiness—“wholeness”—and on a par with the fragmentation and disruption caused by the division of labor that separated the workers from the products of their work.45 From its very early history in worker’s guilds and Chartism, social democracy has contained a cultural critique of capitalism as the destroyer of the harmonious working class self. These articulations have varied from the nostalgic, for instance in the arts and crafts movements and the ideas of William Morris or the socially conservative aesthetics of Swedish arts and crafts, to the radical, such as Raymond William’s genealogical critique of culture and economy or the egalitarian ideas of folkbildning. The Third Way, in its articulations of a cultural growth policy, seems to break with these historic notions of culture as an alternative order of value and to transform it into a market commodity like other commodities.46
The emphasis on the creative industries in the United Kingdom has been paralleled in Sweden in the development of a new social democratic cultural policy that has increasingly identified culture, design, and music as crucial export commodities. In 1995, a government White Paper on culture argued for the role of culture in the new economy as part of the innovation strategy.47 These ideas went back to the 90s Program (90-talsprogrammet), which called for a radical cultural policy; however, they also seemed to mark an important break with social democracy’s ideological legacies around culture. The SAP’s first cultural policy program, drawn up in 1952, came about as a reaction against the commercialization of popular culture and the emergence of new culture markets, a tendency that the party rejected.48 This was strengthened in the 1970s with the development of a social democratic cultural policy, the role of which was to protect cultural expression as a realm beyond the market.49 This rejection of the commercialization of culture was reiterated in cultural policies in the 1990s, and the party’s 2001 Program explicitly rejects the commercialization of cultural expression, “a development whereby capital and market dominate and commercialise culture.”50 Culture is not a means of market making but a means of personal growth and autonomy: “Knowledge and culture give people the opportunity to grow and broaden their perspectives, free people’s thoughts and their creative abilities. This is a crucial balance to the constant attempts of economic and social elites to grasp power over thought.” However, it is also a means of economic growth: “Knowledge and culture are the tools for human freedom and growth or social progress and economic growth.”51
This reflects the ambiguity in the contemporary notion of growth, and the rejection of commercialization is also, interestingly, at odds with the SAP’s own economic policies. Nevertheless, Swedish social democracy is troubled by the adverse effects of commercialization on the cultural access of underprivileged groups, and it warns against the market as a threat to the diversity of cultural expression.52 In contrast, New Labour, in line with the way that it sees the market as a driver of creativity and consumerism as an expression of identity, has identified the commercialization and marketization of culture as means of democratization and of spreading cultural access to the underprivileged. New Labour links culture as commodity with democracy and access, which, as we shall see, is also the case in education. Its celebration of both pop culture and pop art clearly contains such an idea of marketization as a way of spreading culture to the masses. This has led to what critics see as a kind of objectification of the “masses,” where cultural policies also draw on ideas of the cultural preferences of the “people.”53
Social democracy’s identification of culture as a commodity clearly draws on legacies from the neoliberal policies that, in the 1980s, exposed cultural institutions to market models based on principles of supply and demand. But the Third Way also seems to contain a much larger notion of cultural value as something that is fundamentally about individual happiness and social progress. In Sweden, design is not just an export commodity; it is also about individual welfare through better homes and work environments. Design “for all” is about enabling and empowering weak groups. In this sense, good design becomes a means not only for competitive export products but for reconciling economic and social change, making sure that physical planning takes into account the needs of disabled groups.54 In the United Kingdom, culture has gained importance for the fostering of strong communities and civic renewal. The cultural secretary Tessa Jowell repeatedly emphasized culture as having a distinct value on its own terms. Culture was “a way of daring to aspire to the future.” Culture was a “hug of love,” a way of “finding one’s place” in times of rootlessness and alienation. In both countries, culture is stressed as source of stability and identity and of an intangible feeling of belonging. 55
This emphasis on culture as a means of forging trust, social cohesion, and identity stands in a rather obvious but highly complex relationship to impressions of pervasive economic and technological change and their disruptive effects on individual lives and collective identities. Culture emerges as a means of holding us together in a time when allegedly everything comes undone. The collective memory, heritage, history, libraries, and archives become part of an identity politics that seems to contain a reassurance of stability in a changing world. Policies for promoting access to the collective memory, for instance in the digitalization of archives or the opening up of forgotten museum collections, are a way of strengthening the ties between individual and society. Ironically, the heritage of the old industrial society—old mills, factories, and manufacturing plants—acquires a new role in this, as the remnants of working class culture that somehow constitute the link between a past of manual work and the electronic future.56 In postindustrial cities like Glasgow, Newcastle, Malmö, and Göteborg, culture is a source of regeneration. In the United Kingdom, this process of urban transformation has been compared politically to the way that, in Victorian times, architecture and design were the means to forge a public ethos and create public spaces that transmitted a sense of grandeur and hope for the future.57 As Minister for the Creative Industries James Purnell put it, “Once we were the workshop of the world, now we have to become the world’s creative hub.”58
This reflects a search for order in which economic and cultural values merge. Like education, culture becomes a means for both industrial success and the creation of happier individuals with a stronger attachment to economy and society. This is an ambiguous process. Contemporary social democracy seems to partly appreciate the radical potential of culture, perhaps in the absence of other, political utopian visions. Its economic policies represent not only the commodification of culture but also an attempt to give it value. Cultural policies in the 1990s broke with decades of chronic underfunding.59 But the couching of the cultural in economic terms also leads to a process in which cultural value becomes economic good, and the role of culture in social democratic ideology changes fundamentally. The approach that the Third Way takes to culture, as the source of a new creative industrial revolution, is potentially devastating for the idea of culture as critique. The Third Way’s most radical cultural articulations define culture as an expression of individualism and as a kind of self-fulfillment that is instrumental to finding one’s place in the new world and becoming a full citizen. These are definitions and statements that, today, are very close to labor market discourse because the Third Way sees productive participation as the primary definition of self-fulfillment. To “find one’s place and purpose” is a rhetorical construction very close to the idea of finding a use of one’s talents and skills, which reflects the ideas of applicability that underpin the new economy. Ultimately, these values are connected to the economic. Hence, the British Young Roots Program, designed to give young people a way to connect with their heritage, is also motivated by its effects on fostering creativity and entrepreneurship. Beyond its importance for our sense of identity, the historical heritage is also a new industry, “mine in an era when other mines are closing.”60
In this manner, while the Third Way embeds its notion of culture within its larger narrative of economic and social improvement, it silences its potential role as a reaction against the effects of new production orders and new technologies. William Morris’s ideas of beauty are no longer a radical argument for equality and social transformation but an argument for the commercialization of marketable products, just as design, in Sweden, despite the political insistence on its role in a welfare society, is ultimately about competitive export commodities. Industrialism, with its mass production and erosion of craftsmanship was, to Morris, incompatible with art, and culture, to Morris, was a radical emancipatory ideal. Only from the equality brought about by socialism could art and culture spring.61 In the same spirit, Swedish social democracy embarked on large-scale projects of the democratization of culture in the postwar period, for instance through its attempt to put art in public spaces such as the tunnelbana, the Stockholm subway. To contemporary social democracy, cultural values and market values are virtually the same. This stands in sharp contrast to Raymond William’s notion of culture as a reflection on what values in society are valuable to us. In William’s words, culture is “the court of appeal in which real values are determined,” in contrast to the “fictitious” values of the market.62
There is also something inherently nostalgic in the Third Way’s approach to culture, which seems to defuse its potential as utopian critique in social democratic ideology. The idea of Cool Britannia came about in a distinctly postimperial moment with the end of the lease on Hong Kong, a moment, moreover, of millennium spleen.63 New Labour’s grand cultural project for the millennium was the Millennium Dome, built as a museum of the future in the London borough of Greenwich, through which the Prime Meridian runs. The Dome stood as a curious monument to the new economy, in an explicit flirtation with the world exhibitions of the Victorian era.64 In Sweden, the design strategy of the 1990s was intimately concerned with memories of the People’s Home, through constant revocation of the aesthetic legacies of 1920s and 1930s functionalism. The recent, massive interest in Sweden in the interwar period has led to the reestablishment of social engineers Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in Swedish political culture, cast in the 1990s as dangerous social utopians, rethought in the 2000s as legitimate advocates of rational social change and creators of a modernist aesthetics.65 The 1990s saw a virtual gold rush for functionalist objects in Scandinavian and international auction houses. The successes of Swedish design as an export commodity draw on these images of Sweden as a rationally planned society of continuous social reform. Inherent in this is a nostalgia that goes back to the Swedish idea of modernization as a process of safeguarding glories of the past.
As the Swedish example testifies, social democracy’s contemporary appraisal of culture is ambiguous, and its debate on the role of culture, creativity, and identity is a contested field, one that perhaps is best described as a field of competing discourses around the value of culture. There is a fine line between appraising and evaluating in the sense of giving value to the noneconomic, intangible, and immeasurable values of culture, on the one hand, and turning cultural expression into commodities, on the other.
New Labour’s infatuation with the pop music scene ended when the New Musical Express rejected the New Deal for the young unemployed because it took away the unemployment benefits that had created the conditions of survival for young musicians in postindustrial areas.66 Pop music was appreciated as an important source of urban regeneration and a successful export product but not as a political expression. Ironically, many of the successes of the British creative industries emerged from unemployment and social marginalization in cities like Manchester or London and were also important sources of political expression, indeed, critics of Thatcherism. Although its cultural policies have embraced postmodern culture, they have done so in terms of individual consumerism and not as political critique. New Labour drew very selectively on the critical cultural studies that came from the British New Left in the late 1960s. It understands cultural representation as an appeal to individual consumerist preferences but not as a way of challenging power structures. As Timothy Bewes puts it, this is a cultural policy, where the relationship between culture and politics is defined by the absence of any cultural or ideological vision distinct from the economic one and where culture per definition affirms the values of the capitalist world.67