Scandinavia's real lessons to America

The so-called Scandinavian model is playing a starring role in the U.S. public debate, thanks principally to the Democratic Party primary campaign. In this new article for the American magazine Foreign Affairs, Fabrizio Tassinari takes issue with the terms of that debate. He argues that the real Scandinavian lessons are not in some utopian vision of universal health care, but in the practices defining the future of liberal democracy.

Tassinari explains that inasmuch as the Scandinavian model used to be a "middle way" between capitalism and socialism, today it is a middle way trying to balance forces that pull democracy in opposite directions.

The article has been the most read on Foreign Affairs since its publication, and has been the object of public debate in Scandinavia too, for example in this editorial in Svenska Dagbladet.