Nordic Democracy – Fact or Fancy

An article written by the Finnish President, Tarja Halonen, a well respected figure on the European science. As a citizen, democracy has begun to be my worries, not only after the US specific measures against the terrorism, bu also after seeing what happens in Italy and in France in the last years. We have to learn from the North.

From welfare states to partnering societies – the new framework for changing welfare

There are different views on welfare in our world. It does not exist or is very limited for a large majority of our fellows human beings in the world, It is restricted voluntarily to a living minimum (some would say less) in the US and some European countries, and it is extremely developped in some central european countries, such as France and Germany, and in the Nordic European countries. This working paper, written in 2006 by Elina Palola, Taina Rintala and Annikki Savio, insists on the necessity of renovating welfare policies by introducing the notion of partnership, and thus developing democracy … and efficience. It is part of a global concept that I personally call the next step of (social) democracy, after the failure of the british third way.

Conclusion

The concept of partnership as a means of social description suggests a crumbling of old social structures, a constant flow of messages and a resultant reconstruction of social reality (Allardt 1998, 93). A sign of the change of social structures and practices is that we have increasingly moved from representative democracy to deliberative democracy: With the emergence of various partnership networks, there is no longer any need to make traditional distinctions, divisions and categorisations – for instance, between the public and the private or the economy and the social – but different processes and dimensions intertwine to an ever greater degree; at the same time the arenas of impartial communication disappear.