Tassinari has grown fond of Scandinavia after living there for several years. He calls the Nordics a frontier, geographical and existential: the society we would all like to inhabit. And yet Scandinavia also sheds light on a paradox: on the one hand, the things we admire: from the welfare state and universal healthcare, to education and gender parity. On the other, he tries to dig into the mindset that is required for such policies to work, the unwritten code that makes the Nordic model tick, and some of the dark shadows that come with it.
Through some imaginative anecdotes and case studies, from labour-market reforms to the puzzling Swedish response to COVID-19, Stella Polare systematizes what Tassinari has learned from Scandinavia for states, Europe and global governance and that is applicable to us all.
Before starting as the founding Executive Director of the EUI’s School of Transnational Governance in 2017, Fabrizio Tassinari served for almost a decade as Senior Researcher and Head of Unit at the Danish Institute for International Studies, the Danish government’s independent research institution for foreign affairs. After stints at Johns Hopkins’ University in Washington DC and at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, he also taught at the Universities of Copenhagen and at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he was the recipient of a German government’s Alexander von Humboldt award.
A longer English-language edition of the book is due to be published by Agenda later this year. An excerpt of the book was published by Italian political magazine Linkiesta.