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The EU’s Crisis Decade pp 167–203Cite as

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There IS an Alternative: The Danish Formula of Inclusive Capitalism

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Abstract

The world has witnessed sea changes in the EU politics in the last decade, from the continuing rise of populist right parties (PRPs) in a number of EU countries since 2014 to the unexpected results of the Brexit referendum. In essence, the EU politics has entered into a watershed period, departing from the conventional consensus on politico-economic liberalization, in the form of European single market and single currency, to the anti-establishment and anti-EU, in the form of trade protectionism and populist nationalism. Despite their individual differences in national contexts, all these events shared a common striking characteristic—it was those left behind and economically disadvantaged voters who delivered such results. The phenomenon, as Goodwin (2017) indicates, was a ‘working-class revolt’, and with workers becoming the ‘core clientele’ of these populist movements, they have formed a ‘new type of working-class politics’.

The concise version of this chapter was first published by Asia Europe Journal (2019) Vol. 17 on 21 February 2019 at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10308-019-00538-2

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Due to the decoupling of economic growth from income growth, economists, such as Stiglitz et al. (2009: 12–18) and Coyle (2017: 19), call for designing a better indicator than the current one—gross domestic product (GDP)—to measure economic welfare so as to reflect the distribution of income, consumption, and wealth more correctly. Hay and Payne (2015: 26) propose a hybrid measurement of social, environmental, and developmental index (SED) to replace the index of GDP, while the OECD proposes the ‘Better Life Index’ and the World Economic Forum proposes the UN’s ‘Human Development Index’ as the alternative (World Economic Forum, 2017: 10).

  2. 2.

    However, David Author (2015: 3–30) from MIT contends that such worries of ‘automation anxiety’ (2015: 4) were overdue, because most automated systems lack flexibility. He predicts that middle-skill jobs combining specific vocational skills with middle level of ‘literacy, numeracy, adaptability, problem-solving, and common sense’, the so-called ‘new middle skill jobs’, will be growing in coming decades (2015: 27).

  3. 3.

    Hay and Payne (2015: 3–50) term it as ‘civic capitalism’ and Hutton (2015) terms it as ‘stakeholder capitalism’.

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    Chih-Mei Luo

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Luo, CM. (2020). There IS an Alternative: The Danish Formula of Inclusive Capitalism. In: The EU’s Crisis Decade. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6565-2_6

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