There's trouble in paradise! Scandinavian researchers are beginning to question — just as their national leadership is — whether paternalistic controls on their citizens' drinking comprises a workable alcohol policy for the twenty-first century. At the same time, the control policies of such Northern European countries have never gotten greater respect than today as templates for international policy! Where this will all end in a unified Europe is anybody's guess. Stanton here reviews a seminal work in this debate for the journal, Nordic Alcohol and Drug Studies.

Nordisk alkohol- & narkotikatidskrift, 18(1), 2001, 106-110

Review of Broken Spirits: Power and Ideas in Nordic Alcohol Control

Morristown, NJ

Alcohol control policy, theory, and research are notable for their regionalization: to wit, (1) alcohol policy has been most formalized politically, including state alcohol monopolies, in the Nordic countries; (2) this state action has been accompanied by social research and academic theory centered in (and largely restricted to) Nordic — along with English-speaking — nations; (3) great differences in historic and cultural perspectives towards beverage alcohol are apparent around the world and throughout Europe, and the nations with the strongest anti-alcohol, "temperance" histories and attitudes are the strongest purveyors of alcohol control policies.

To these three keynotes of modern alcohol policy development, we can add an historical shift that takes on a seminal role of its own — this is economic globalization, embodied in European integration. A change in economic realities towards internationalization and consumer-driven marketplaces has changed the conditions underlying Nordic alcohol policy, including forcing a confrontation of different national and cultural drinking and alcohol policy traditions. Looked at from this perspective, we are observing, simultaneously, a distinct liberalization of Nordic alcohol policy, and a growing sensitization of the rest of Europe to drinking problems and the need for enhanced alcohol controls. To place Scandinavian and national policies and temperance academic theories in a cultural and historic context is to question their scientific purity and inevitability. Thus, the alcohol policy control model tends to subordinate the idea of cultural differences, both in drinking styles and control mechanisms. Formal alcohol control policy is predicated on the ideas that (a) alcohol always requires elaborate formal controls, (b) primary aspects of these controls can be generalized, (c) sterner controls (up to a very high level of constriction) are good, loosening of controls is bad. These ideas are embodied in the single-distribution — or total consumption — model of alcohol abuse, which holds that national drinking problems rise sharply with rising aggregate national consumption.

The proponents of this model — more accurately an alcohol worldview — are thus placed in a strangely divided position. That is, contemporary developments in the Nordic countries contravene the recommendations of the major alcohol policy academics whose views had been most realized in these countries. At the same time, pan-European and international venues give these advocates more scope to identify alcohol problems and to propose heretofore unconsidered, or unpopular, policies for nations whose attitudes towards alcohol have been relatively laissez-faire. In short, there are good and bad signs for those who wish to spread alcohol control ideas largely pioneered in Scandinavia.

Landmark research and theory compendiums in alcohol control policy, steeped in temperance-nation ideology, have appeared in each decade since the 1970s, including the 1975 publication of Alcohol Control Policies in Public Health Perspective by Kettil Bruun and his colleagues, the 1981 publication by the National Academy of Sciences of Alcohol and Public Policy: Beyond the Shadow of Prohibition, and, most recent in this chain, Alcohol Policy and the Public Good by Edwards and colleagues, published by WHO in 1994. The long lists of authors attached to each volume are nearly all from Nordic or English-speaking countries. If there is a prototype of research represented in these volumes, it is to relate empirically changes in policy to consumption and problem outcomes — an epidemiology-driven basis for policy.

Broken Spirits: Power and Ideas in Nordic Alcohol Control takes a different tack in the study of alcohol control policies. Its academic roots are in cultural analysis, social history, public management, and media analysis. From this position, it considers that, "[t]he fragmentation of the alcohol policy sector is an irreversible historical fact in the Nordic countries and, as such, marks the end of one of the most pretentious(!) endeavors of social control in capitalist societies." This fragmentation, accompanied by the partial but continuing dismantling of the traditional state alcohol monopolies in the three principal Nordic nations, is related to a series of national, pan-European, and even larger economic forces.

Broken Spirits is the product of the Study of Nordic Alcohol Policy Systems, initiated in 1996 by the Nordic Council for Alcohol and Drug Research. The project was coordinated by Pekka Sulkunen and Christopher Tigerstedt, who together with Caroline Sutton and Trygve Ugland comprised the project steering committee. Consisting of separately-authored chapters involving 13 individuals, the book presents itself as a coordinated effort to understand this social change in process.

Broken Spirits describes the post-World War I creation of state alcohol monopolies in the Nordic countries, including Iceland, as "a spectacular historical experiment in social control." In the monopoly nations, state alcohol control took its place in an array of policies aimed at economic redistribution and the creation of a healthy, "good" life. In other words, alcohol policy was part of a larger Nordic national esprit and panoply of laws and institutions representing the modern social welfare state. In particular, state alcohol monopolies required a strong form of legitimized state power.

Even within this perspective, alcohol occupied a special position, however. There can be no question that there is a Nordic sensibility towards alcohol, reflected in both traditional attitudes and styles of consuming the beverage. Broken Spirits explicates and refines Levine's identification of English-speaking and Nordic nations (nine in total) as Temperance cultures, characterized as those which "drank alcohol primarily in the form of strong spirits and . . . [which] were largely Protestant. . . . [s]ince it is only relevant to be a teetotaler within a context where alcohol is experienced as problematic." [I]t may be that "Finland, Norway and Sweden are influenced by a very high and concentrated (in time) consumption practice that often leads to intoxication, public disorder, and crime."