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Rescuing Welfare Society: Political Strategies for Mobilizing Civil Society in Denmark, 2010–2018

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Abstract

The article analyzes how civil society is constructed in two Danish civil society strategies from 2010 to 2017, the governmental programmes of the governments in question and the role civil society plays in the proposed upcoming reform of the Danish public sector, the Cohesion Reform. The article approaches civil society from a Foucauldian perspective meaning that it on the one hand analyzes civil society as a transactional reality, something which does not exist as such, but must be continually produced as a given thing with certain values. On the other hand, it means analyzing civil society as a central part of a governmental rationality, or governmentality, which represents the natural movements of society and which government must respect and govern according to. This means that the natural, vital and originary processes of civil society becomes a measurement for good and right government in contradistinction to the artificial, cold and bureaucratic state and thereby posited as the rescuer of welfare society.

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Notes

  1. All translations from Danish in this article are, unless otherwise stated, the author’s own.

  2. For a more thorough breakdown of the relationship and development of the state-civil society/third sector/voluntary sector in Denmark, see Bundesen et al. (2001), Fridberg and Skov Henriksen (2014), Habermann and Ibsen (1998), Henriksen et al. (2012, pp. 465–72), Henriksen (2015), Henriksen and Bundesen (2004), Kaspersen and Ottesen (2006), La Cour (2014, pp. 109–32), Villadsen (2016). The following section draws on this work.

  3. For more about the development of state-civil society/voluntary associations development before the era of the welfare state, see especially (Henriksen and Bundesen 2004; Kaspersen and Ottesen 2006; Sevelsted 2017).

  4. Bourdieu’s comments are originally about the state, but they are equally relevant for speaking about civil society.

  5. When I speak of the Cohesion Reform here, I refer to the document outlining the ideas behind it (Finansministeriet and Regeringen 2017) published in April 2017, since the actual reform is only starting to be suggested and rolled out from the fall of 2018.

  6. I use the notion ‘liberalist’ instead of ‘liberal’, because I want to invoke their adherence to liberalist ideology and distinguish it from the American notion of ‘liberal’ (meaning progressive). However, it is perhaps important to mention that over the last 20 years, the two biggest parties—Venstre and the Social Democrats—have converged on most central policy questions, why I have also distinguished between center-right and center-left governments.

  7. It should be mentioned that attempts to de-bureaucratize the public sector has been a mainstay in Danish politics since the 1980s from both sides of the political spectrum (Finansministeriet 2018, p. 6).

  8. One of the other components to rendering civil society a ‘transactional reality’ to Foucault is that the notion of civil society also opens up for a questioning of government by civil society, and civil society in this sense becomes a plane of reference not only for a state-centerd governmental rationality, but also for practices of civil society either critical of government or attempting to justify their own actions. The ‘transactional reality’ of civil society is thereby as much created by representatives of civil society as those of the state. However, the focus of this article is on the state centered governmental rationality.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two reviewers of this article for very thorough comments and constructive criticism that has helped improve this article.

Funding

This study was funded by The Carlsberg Foundation, Semper Ardens research project CISTAS—Civil Society in the Shadow of the State (http://www.cistas.dk/).

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  1. Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Porcelænshaven 18B, 2000, Frederiksberg, Denmark

    Mathias Hein Jessen

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Correspondence to Mathias Hein Jessen.

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Jessen, M.H. Rescuing Welfare Society: Political Strategies for Mobilizing Civil Society in Denmark, 2010–2018. Voluntas 30, 369–380 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-018-00064-6

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