Reconsidering the Crisis Agreements of the 1930s: The Defence of Democracy in a Comparative Scandinavian Perspective

This article examines the Scandinavian countries’ response to extreme political movements in the interwar period. Historians have considered the crisis agreements of the 1930s as pivotal to Scandinavian resistance to fascism. The present article revises this explanation by conducting a comparative empirical study of political practice and rhetoric. The comparison makes it clear that the socio-economic measures were primarily aimed at combating the economic crisis. However, the social democratic labour parties conceptualised their social and economic policy as a defence of democracy after Hitler seized power in Germany. The findings indicate that the social democratic solution to the depression in Scandinavia left no political space for either communism or fascism.