The conclusion opens with interwar debates on the deportation of women working in prostitution, highlighting how for many reformers, trafficking was a migration problem to be solved through migration controls. Rather than protecting vulnerable women, however, anti-trafficking policies that relied on exclusion and expulsion safeguarded the perceived vulnerability of national borders instead. The conclusion then turns to contemporary examples in which humanitarian efforts to protect “trafficking victims” serve as punishments instead, particularly if individuals are unable to rehearse the script of ideal victimhood, and embody its accompanying form of gendered sexual respectability. It closes with a discussion of French prostitution policy in the postwar period, including the abolition of regulationism in two stages, in 1946 and 1960; the domestic security law of 2003; and the criminalization of sex buyers (the “Nordic Model”) in 2016. In each of these examples, advocates framed the respective laws as humanitarian, progressive, and protective of sex workers. Yet all were efforts to moralize public space, promote law and order, and comply with a larger infrastructure of migration controls.

This is a concluding chapter, and considers the general themes raised by the previously mentioned materials. These include the limits of globalization, the importance of small countries, and the often thin line between reality and fantasy in domestic and international image-making. While the Nordics have many faults, they have succeeded in creating an alternate image of democracy that emphasizes a balance between the individual, society, and the physical environment. For these reasons – and not withstanding criticisms – the Nordic Model remains important in the twenty-first century.

This chapter asks why the Nordic Model continues to fascinate us, although the conditions that helped to create it (Cold War, etc.) have largely passed. This is because the model has been updated to address cultural issues (women’s rights, environment, innovation) as much as or more than economic ones. The overall theme of a balance between the individual and society is especially attractive when Anglo-American societies seems out of balance.