The project ‘The struggle over the welfare state’ has studied the history of the welfare concepts in Sweden. Its starting point was that the ‘welfare state’, ‘welfare policies" and the ‘welfare state’ are changing and contentious key concepts in politics and public debate. Key concepts of this kind can be described as words with a condensed linguistic content, a complex mix of political and social context, experiences and meanings. They structure problem definitions and agendas and their definitions frame plans, proposals and decisions. The guiding questions have been about who used the terms, which meanings that actors have given them and how meanings and connotations changed over time. The project’s time frame, ca 1850 to the present, has been shortened for the Swedish monograph to cover the period up to the mid-1970s. My chapter on Sweden to the English anthology, which I edit, covers the history until today.
The project has generated several important results. One of them concerns my hypothesis about limited significance of ‘the people’s home’ as contested key concepts before the 1980s which was confirmed. Swedish politicians did not debate the meaning of this metaphor when they fought for power over the ‘welfare policies’ and the ‘welfare state’. More important, the study provides good grounds to modify the strong interpretations of Swedish politics as marked by a fundamental consensus on policy content. Welfare policy has been fundamentally contestable, even during the long period when the Social Democrats held a hegemonic position in Swedish politics. These two results have the character of the confirmed starting points, the ideas that guided the project proved in other words, be fruitful. Three main results that I want to highlight are:
1) My study maps and analyses how the welfare concepts’ intersecting and superimposed meanings worked over time, how different political actors when using the terms could take up and stress different aspects of the broad spectrum of connotations. I demonstrate, and this all new and important, how from the 1930s onwards four different ways to understand the ‘welfare state’ co-existed and competed: a historical way where the welfare state was seen as enlightened absolutism, the administrative understanding which described the complex and bureaucratized modern society, a power political definition where the welfare state represented a democratic state and, finally, a social understanding focused on social reforms and rights. The social-political understanding soon became dominant, and incorporated the understandings centred on administration and political power. But was always possible for different actors to do highlight different aspects and in this way change the connotations. I see this this archaeological excavation of the various historical layers of significance that were available to players at different times, as essential; the ambiguity, political adaptability and historical contingency of the concepts become apparent.

2) Using ‘welfare politics’, their central concepts, the Social Democrats conquered a privileged position in Swedish politics. This happened in the 1930s, undoubtedly a formative decade, and my study shows how the conceptual changes and reforms were interlinked. A new political vocabulary grew up around ‘welfare’, a noun which since then has maintained a central position on its own and in the varying conceptual compounds with ‘policy’, ‘state’ and ‘country’ and many more. The crucial importance of the 1930s separates Sweden from Norway and Denmark, where the 1950s became important decade for corresponding welfare debates. This result from the intra-Nordic comparison is significant, yet somewhat difficult to interpret; it could be seen as an argument for the Swedish self-understanding, promoted publicly already in the 1930s, that Sweden was a world leader in social reform. Leading Swedish Social Democrats used ‘the welfare state’ already in the late 1920s to describe their desired social policy objectives, this completely independent of the British writers who are commonly cited as the inventors of the term. For many years, the Social Democrats refrained from using the term ‘welfare state’ in party programmes and election propaganda. This because the term had easy-accessible negative connotations (such as bureaucratization and authoritarianism), and instead they used synonyms as ‘welfare society’ and ‘the strong society’.
3) Like all concepts, the welfare concepts are subject to change through history. Both meanings and temporalities, there perspectives and horizons, change over time. The four different ‘welfare states’ contained distinctly different timings: the historical understanding looked mainly backwards, the administrative and political power understanding were often used to diagnose the present, whereas the social welfare state was about transformation, about the reforms aiming to transform society and the future. ‘Welfare politics’ were used in this way in 1930s and later. ‘Welfare’ and ‘welfare state’ often entailed a similar future-oriented focus up to 1970s; they could connote descriptions of the present state of affairs as well as plans for the future, plans for more and better welfare. ‘Welfare’ also received new meanings in the early 70s; I show how issues like environmental protection, gender equality, economic democracy and workplace codetermination were included into ‘welfare policies’ and how the broadened concept mobilized both supporters and opponents. My book in Swedish ends with the discussions in the late 1960s and 70s about the inclusion of ‘the welfare state’ into the Instrument of Government's basic principles. These deliberations demonstrate ‘the welfare state’s’ strong impact; it was about to become a constitutional concept. At the same time, it is to be remembered that the attempt to get a strong wording of the constitution failed, which again shows the concept’s fundamental contestability.
The changes since about 1980 show this very clearly; the social democratic state was challenged and the previously dominant understanding of ‘welfare’ and ‘welfare society’ as synonyms were broken. ‘Society’, sometimes called ‘civil society’, was now portrayed as opposite of the ossified over-bureaucratic state. This process, summarized as the crisis of the welfare state under the pressure of budget deficits and neoliberalism, also changed concept’s temporalizations. Welfare reforms were marketed as ‘restorative reforms’ needed to defend the old welfare system, or described as necessary adjustments to the market which were needed to increase ‘efficiency’ and ‘freedom of choice’ and therefore, at least according to some, transform the welfare state into something different. The diminished importance of future expectations and the increasing preoccupation with a complex and expensive contemporary welfare sector become evident in the recent changes: the rise of ‘the welfare’, in definite form, as the general term for what used to be called ‘welfare reform’ and ‘welfare policy’. Consequently, much current public discourse on “the welfare” has changed from present to past tense and included a salient trait of nostalgia, a longing for the lost welfare state. The increasing popularity of ‘the people’s home’-trope provides a good example of this development.
The interesting new questions arising from the project include questions about state theory and state-society boundaries, visible in the binary opposition between rule of law and welfare state which was established early. Comparative studies of the changing views on the relations state-society-individual concerning welfare could generate fresh insights. Even more rewarding is the topic of transfer and transnational relations between countries; that is, question about the emergence of a transnational conceptual universe and how ‘the welfare state’ has travelled worldwide and acquired different meanings in different countries. There are ample opportunities for studies incorporating multiple countries and languages - a study of ‘the welfare state’ as a transnational, global and historical concept.
Kampen om välfärdsstaten, where I write the history of the welfare concepts in Swedish politics and debate in a wide contextualized perspective, and the edited volume The Changing Meanings of the Welfare State are the project's main publications. The latter, with a chapter on the conceptual development in each Nordic country with introduction, background, a chapter on Sweden and the conclusion written by me, has gained more weight during the latter part of project. A publication on the conceptual history of the welfare state, by historians from the Nordic countries, can have a good academic impact, and this gives it high priority. The Nordic network has provided an important milieu for my project. We have staged two conferences, one of which is partially financed by my project, with working sessions where Nordic and international commentators participated and open sessions with lectures and discussions. The anthology, which in the background chapter traces the previously unknown history of the welfare concepts in Germany, the UK and the US, has made it possible to explore the various transnational connections and influences which were important also in the Nordic countries.
My public activities include a few interviews, one for the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond’s website (http://www.rj.se/Forskningsnyheter/2015/Valfarden-alltid-ifragasatt/) and a longer for the journal Språktidningen 2016: 1 (http: // Language Newspaper .com / articles / 2015/12 / home-sweet-welfare state). I have given a public lecture, talked to folk high-school students about my research, written some reviews and answered questions from journalists.
One open access-publication is published and available in Finland and Sweden, two other OA-studies will be published in scholarly journals in 2017.