Magnus Ryner: Capitalist Restructuring, Globalisation and the Third Way: Lessons from the Swedish Model.

Magnus Ryner

Capitalist Restructuring, Globalisation and the Third Way: Lessons from the Swedish Model

Routledge, London and New York, 2002, 288 pp.

ISBN 0-415-25294-6 (hbk) 65.00 [pounds sterling]

Throughout the post-war era, Sweden was hailed for its economic-political model, which successfully combined rapid economic growth with full employment, a solidaristic wage across the whole economy, a generous welfare state and gender equality in the workplace, to create one of the most egalitarian and wealthy societies in the world.

In the early 1990s, however, the model collapsed. Similarly to other countries, neoliberal policies with a focus on price stability and low inflation were adopted, at the expense of full employment as a main policy goal. Swedish society as a whole was restructured in a market-oriented direction.

This change was also expressed, first, in Sweden's application to join the increasingly neoliberal European Union in 1991, and then in its accession in 1995. Unsurprisingly, the rise and fall of the 'Swedish model' has been at the centre of academic analysis in political science for decades. In this book, Capitalist Restructuring, Globalisation and the Third Way: Lessons from the Swedish Model, Magnus Ryner summarises and engages with this debate well. Beyond this, he makes the following three crucial contributions to academic knowledge:

First, the discussion of Sweden is placed within the general debate about the Third Way vis-a-vis traditional social democracy and its focus on an integral welfare state, based on decommodification and social citizenship universalism (chapters 1 and 2). Contra Giddens and co., Ryner makes it clear that, in the case of Sweden, the abandonment of these classical socialdemocratic policies was not due to structural necessities in a changing global economy, but was the result of conscious political decisions and initially open-ended struggles (pp. 48-54 and 132-58).

He thus successfully demonstrates that 'the constraints identified by Third Way advocates are in fact socially constructed and transitive constraints, created through human practice that can be changed through alternative practices' (p. 1).

Second, Ryner makes it clear--as have others--that social-democratic decision-makers were not just responding to pressures from Swedish transnational corporations and general global restructuring when they abandoned the Swedish model in the early 1990s. Rather, social democrats consciously supported this shift towards neoliberal economics as the best way forward. It has not been explained, however, why Swedish social democrats chose to do this. Ryner's compelling argument is that the turn to social-democratic neoliberalism in the 1980s was made possible, and appeared natural, with the rise of technocratic Keynesianism from the late-1940s onwards. Originally inspired by a Marxian-Keynesian synthesis, driving a reformist economic policy with the goal of controlling capitalism's chronic crises (pp. 75-8), technocratic Keynesianism from the late-1940s onwards focused on social engineering. According to Ryner, 'this rearticulation is the beginning of the process that made it possible for social-democratic economic state managers to interpret the crisis of the 1970s and the 1980s, not as a crisis-tendency of capitalism that needed to be met with countervailing regulation, but as a falsification of Keynesian ideas that validated the "null hypothesis" of monetarism' (p. 183). The voluntary adoption of neoliberal policies by social democrats from 1985 onwards was a logical result, and ushered in the abandonment of the Swedish model in the early 1990s.

Third, Ryner's analysis of the rise and fall of the Swedish model is accomplished through the employment of a holistic, comprehensive neo-Gramscian theoretical approach, which is sometimes also labelled 'transnational historical materialism'. He is thus able to place Swedish developments within the wider processes of the international political economy (pp. 67-8, 95-8 and 99-122), and to take into account agents as well as structure, ideas as well as material factors, without degenerating into either an economic determinist, or an idealist, empirical pluralist analysis. In this respect, Ryner's book is a model investigation of the impact of globalisation on a particular country, the conceptual framework of which--though not the specific results can--be transferred to, and used in, other case studies.

Unfortunately, and this is really the only shortcoming of Ryner's book, this theoretical accomplishment is not fully developed and outlined. By grounding his investigation in an analysis of the social relations of production (e.g. pp. 69, 126-32, 144-7), Ryner overcomes the problem of comparative political economy approaches, which separate the economic and the political, and thus cannot acknowledge the historical specificity of capitalism.

Likewise, through this starting-point he is able to overcome the separation between the domestic and the international in traditional International Relations and International Political Economy approaches. Ryner does all this, and he does it well.

Nevertheless, due to a failure to coherently outline his own approach--concepts are introduced at different places throughout the book--and to contrast it to other approaches, the book ultimately does not reach its full potential. The conceptual and methodological appendix is rather short and underdeveloped. It simply outlines Robert Cox's by now well-known distinction between problem-solving and critical theory (pp. 193-4), and makes some basic remarks about the relations between structure and agency (pp. 195-8) and between material properties and ideas (pp. 198-202) without, however, engaging with recent developments in these areas. In any case, theoretical reflections should have preceded the empirical argument.

Having said that, Capitalist Restructuring, Globalisation and the Third Way: Lessons from the Swedish Model is an excellent book, and a 'must-read' for scholars interested in Swedish political economy and in comparative political economy more generally. It is, further, of high interest to those who are concerned with the fate of social democracy in today's global economy, and the possibilities of alternatives to the currently hegemonic neoliberal restructuring drive.