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This article analyses the reception of Scandinavism in the Dutch and Flemish press from the start of the nineteenth century and up to the end of World War I. It demonstrates that increasing knowledge of the pan-Scandinavian movement occurred in tandem with a growing interest in Scandinavian culture more generally and affected the Dutch language in its definition of both 'Scandinavia' and 'Scandinavians'. Press coverage of Scandinavism was mainly dictated by the movement's newsworthiness and Dutch understanding of the movement as either a political unification project and/or a more modest cultural programme developed in step with current events. Pan-national activism in Scandinavia was also deemed of interest because of its significance for similar initiatives in the Dutch-speaking world. Scandinavian nation-building processes became an inspiration for burgeoning Greater Netherlandism, as well as for the Flemish and Frisian national movements. Overall, the article contributes to the study of Scandinavism in particular by exploring how the movement was received outside its borders, and to the study of pan-nationalisms more generally by applying a comparative and transnational perspective, thus amplifying the central but often neglected role played by pan-national identity cultivation in the European nation-building discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the First World War, the legitimacy of established polities was challenged everywhere in Europe. Not only the combatant great powers but also smaller states witnessed a resurgence of constitutional disputes and competing ideological conceptualizations of revolution and reform, the will of the people, democracy, and parliamentarism. While these controversies primarily focused on the future of the national polities concerned, historical experiences and discourses accelerated by the war and the Russian Revolution were transnationally interconnected and contributed to discursive transfers between political cultures. Swedish and Finnish socialists were linked by their internationals, liberals were connected by transnational debates for and against 'Western' democracy and parliamentarism, and conservative politicians and academics were involved in ideologically oriented networks. This article reconstructs transnational links and discourses in order to understand the exceptionally confrontational dynamics (which, in Finland, partly led to a civil war) and the outcomes of the Swedish and Finnish constitutional debates in 1917-1919. It examines the nature of the transnational connections of eight Swedish and Finnish conservatives, liberals, revisionist socialists, and far-Left socialists, analysing their argumentation on constitutional questions in published works and parliamentary speeches as illustrative examples of the political groups they represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articles in this special issue, entitled Reform and Revolution in Scandinavia, 1917-1919: Entangled Histories and Visions of the Future, deal with the political turmoil in Scandinavia in the late 1910s, accelerated by the First World War and the revolutions in Russia in February/March and October/November 1917 and eventually in Germany in the autumn of 1918. Their special focus is on the political debates about reform and revolution and the related visions of the future of political order and social structures in national contexts and across borders. The articles examine how actors with different agendas in different contexts exploited the opportunities opened up by a window of change. None of the Scandinavian countries were directly involved in the theatre of war, but the whole of Scandinavia was associated with the hostilities in many other ways. The revolutionary processes in Russia affected Finland directly but - reflecting the events spreading from Petrograd - the debates about the legitimacy of the established political order intensified in all Scandinavian countries. The articles demonstrate how the debates and political processes took diverse forms in varying national contexts but were often more dependent on international relations, transnationally interconnected and entangled, than has traditionally been recognized in nation-state-centred historiographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1975 and 1983 the Swedish labour movement discussed a proposal to establish wage earner funds that would gradually shift the ownership in medium to large companies from employers to workers. This article starts by shedding light on the genesis of the proposal in the 1960s and 1970s and the reactions it provoked in Swedish society. Focus then switches to how the Meidner plan was understood in Italy in a time of pronounced social conflict marked, on one hand, by the redefinition of the relationship between trade unions and politics and, on the other hand, by soaring opposition among the various trade unions and the growing distance between the two major leftist parties. These divisions reverberated on the ways the wage earner funds – in their various versions – were understood by the organizations of the Italian labour movement; the assessment of the plan's feasibility and its applicability to the Italian case came to reflect conflicting views on industrial and economic democracy and on the relationship between Nordic social-democracies and Italian reformism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]