The 'Nordic model' is often seen to exist in political economy, where, according to many commentators, the main components of the model have been the universal welfare state, centralized wage-bargaining structures and high level of taxation. However, the argument in this article is that the 'Nordic model' should be seen as a broader concept, ranging from social and economic policy to foreign and security policy. In addition, the central claim here is that the socio-political history of that model is crucially important in providing understanding of the linkages in ideational inspiration across these different policy sectors. The 'Nordic normative legacy' and the experience of nation-and state-building and construction of national identity were important in the construction of the welfare state. However, the 'Nordic model' was traditionally based on a form of 'welfare state nationalism' that is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in the 'global age'. The main problem comes from confronting the challenges of multiculturalism. It is one of the central arguments here that the decline of Nordic internationalism and the 'crisis' of the welfare state are inherently linked. The 'Nordic model' is not well equipped to deal with the blurring of the boundaries between internal and external -domestic and foreign. However, as Nordicity and its social foundations are still largely intact, the task now is to rejuvenate the 'Nordic model' and move away from welfare state nationalism towards a more inclusive concept of welfare state internationalism.

Since 2011 and the onset of the economic crisis, Finnish governments have pressed for structural reforms, including unpopular cuts to family benefits and services. This article analyses the government discourse used for legitimating some of these reforms: the cutbacks in the child benefit and the restriction of full-time childcare. It also assess whether this discourse bore the hallmarks of a neoliberal austerity discourse, which could suggest that the reforms were not just a matter of fiscal balancing but also a matter of neoliberal welfare state restructuring. We argue that the economic crisis was central in the powerful 'communicative' discourse used by the governments for legitimating unpopular cuts. Not only did it draw on ideas from an austerity discourse advocating financial sustainability, fiscal prudency and debt reduction, it was also impregnated by ideas from a neoliberal worldview questioning some of the main principles of the 'Nordic' family policy model.

The future of the Nordic model of welfare has been widely debated in the academic literature. Some argue that the Nordic model is not sustainable under the conditions of globalization, while others argue that the way in which the Nordic model has produced long-term stability under uncertain structural conditions is evidence of the opposite. This article advances a different perspective through analyzing discourses and frameworks of meaning associated with the Nordic model, using Sweden and Finland as cases. Based on semi-structured elite interviews, I argue that while there is a consensus on the benefits of maintaining a Nordic model, the very ideas concerning the value foundations and institutional architecture of the model differ greatly between elites. There exists a variety of legitimate ideas associated with the Nordic model and, consequently, these approaches, all of which claim ownership of the term, represent legitimate facets of it, even when they initially would seem to contradict each other.

Since the 1970s, Finland has conducted family policies that could be labelled social investments, for example, investments in workfamily balance or public childcare, while at the same time it has protected the economic standard of families with children through various income transfers. However, after the 2008-2009 financial crisis these policies including those with socially investing objectives have been increasingly subjected to cuts in benefit levels and entitlements in order to lower public expenditure, which raises the question if there has been a shift away from social investments and redistribution towards austerity policies. By analysing government programs from the period 2007-2015, this article discusses if, and to what extent, such a change can be traced in the Finnish government discourse. More specifically the article studies the narrative stories used to legitimise changes (reforms) in existing family policy and to what extent these changes were informed by a social investment perspective focusing on 'new' social risks, a traditional redistribution perspective emphasising 'old' social risks, or a neoliberal austerity perspective advocating fiscal austerity and welfare cuts. We argue that the first two perspectives were dominant prior to and during the first phase of the international financial crisis, whereas the third perspective became dominant after the crisis. Moreover, the results show that the main storyline in the legitimisation of the reforms was stories of 'progress' in combination with stories of 'control' and helplessness'.

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