As one of the most influential ideas in modern European history, democracy has fundamentally reshaped not only the landscape of governance, but also social and political thought throughout the world. Democracy in Modern Europe surveys the conceptual history of democracy in modern Europe, from the Industrial Revolutions of the nineteenth century through both world wars and the rise of welfare states to the present era of the European Union. Exploring individual countries as well as regional dynamics, this volume comprises a tightly organized, comprehensive, and thoroughly up-to-date exploration of a foundational issue in European political and intellectual history.

Democracy is today a concept that is overwhelmingly positively evaluated almost everywhere, but even the most universalistic oriented accounts generally discuss a number of paradigmatic cases such as Athenian democracy, French democracy, or American democracy. A lot has been written about socio-economic and cultural backgrounds of democratic regimes as well as their institutional settings. By contrast, not much is known about the political manoeuvres and speech acts by which "democracy" has been tied to particular regions and cultures in concrete historical situations. This book discusses a series of efforts to rhetorically produce and reproduce a particular Nordic version of democracy. It will show that the rhetorical figure "Nordic democracy" was a product of the age of totalitarianism and the Cold War. It will explore the ways in which "Nordic democracy" was used, mainly by the social democrats, to provide the welfare politics with cultural and historical legitimacy and foundations, and thus acknowledge the ideological and geopolitical context in which the "Nordic welfare state" was conceptualised and canonised.