The way we can prove this, the liberal thesis continues, is to take broad unilateral action, sacrificing things like the strength of NATO, and see if Russia and Red China do not reciprocate in kind.
The neo-liberal thesis regarding state interference is further refuted, and the political economy perspective further reinforced, when another proxy indicator of the degree to which governments intervene in work and welfare arrangements is analysed.
We introduce the three cases, critically discuss the (liberal) convergence thesis and its descriptive and explanatory claims, and explain why studying the Scandinavian welfare states can further our understanding of the nature of the civic turn and its driving forces.
Three of the articles in this special issue use Scandinavian countries to test the liberal convergence thesis in three policy areas outside the naturalization trajectory: labour market activation (Breidahl), family reunification (Bech, Borevi & Mouritsen) and the school (Fernández & Jensen).
These strong institutional, structural, and ideational similarities make them some of the most likely candidates to converge if the liberal convergence thesis is correct that global and European pressures external to the welfare state are the main drivers of national integration policy.
If external pressures were main drivers of policy change, as in the liberal convergence thesis, convergence would be particularly likely between Scandinavian welfare states, which are similarly vulnerable to the structural squeeze of global competition and immigration because of their comparatively strong redistributive schemes and high wages.
The liberal convergence thesis, associated with the work of Joppke (2007) and others (e.g., Goodman, 2010; Green, 2007; Müller, 2007), has been challenged in comparative and single case studies (e.g., Bonjour & Lettinga, 2012; Jensen, 2016; Meer & Modood, 2009; Mouritsen, 2013; Borevi, 2014) as well as theoretically.
To Cahn and Carbone's credit, their book is nuanced enough to complicate this liberal-friendly thesis.
Finally, the claim that I am resurrecting an ugly tory tradition ignores the fact that both Chesterton and Belloc were not conservatives but Edwardian liberals, whose thesis on a property-owning democracy inspired Tory MP Noel Skelton in 1923, Antony Eden in 1946, Mrs Thatcher in 1979 and me today.
This has even meant that governments have changed their courses of action, incorporating anti-immigration measures into their strategies for managing diversity (Ferruh, 2012), a situation that has been aggravated by contradictions within the immigration politics of the liberal states forced by theses contextual restraints (Hampshire, 2013).
