What Scandinavian designers offered at the time was something entirely different: International modernism in its purest form. The architects of the time, most notably Arne Jakobsen, were heavily inspired by German and American modernists. They were just better at it.
Jakobsen designed most of his chairs for a skyskraper in Copenhagen that's essentially a copy of Lever House on Park Avenue in NYC, and his mania for designing every last item in the skyskraper mirrored that of Mies van der Rohe, a German-American. At the time, it was considered "American" by Danes.
If there's anything special about Scandinavian design, and I believe there is, it's the constant search for purity.
There's not a single period in Scandinavian art history since the Protestant reformations of the 16th century that isn't dominated by the search for purity. Even baroque art from Scandinavia is strangely cool. It just happens to in vogue today, and since we practiced for centuries and it's engrained in our culture, we're very, very good at it.
Culture is much deeper than whatever political currents dominate a country at one partical point in time.