What Every American Should Know About Europe

by Melissa Rossi

  Even the million bottles of booze confiscated annually by customs goes in the biofuel mix that now powers buses and taxes in Linköping.6

  Well, what else would you expect from a country long hailed as the world’s model society? With low crime, high incomes, a soaring economy, and a government that pays for health care, day care, and education from the first cry of birth to the last gasp of death, Sweden was long the most vibrant example of the “welfare state” that blends the best of Socialism and capitalism.

  Children are protected under Swedish law: in 1979, Sweden banned “smacking” children, becoming the first country to outlaw physical punishment of children, and the law was publicized on milk cartons; even advertising to children is banned. In 1999, Sweden introduced a law to limit prostitution. It didn’t go after prostitutes; it hit johns with a maximum of six months in jail and a minimum fine of fifty days’ wages. Swedish street prostitution dried up—although some say now there are more call girls.

  KILLING IKE’S SUICIDE CAMPAIGN

  Contrary to popular belief, Swedes do not have a high suicide rate. According to the Swedish Institute, that legend started after U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a blustery speech in 1960, striking out at Sweden for not fully committing to the Cold War—and for endorsing a system with Socialist elements that smacked too much of Communism for the black-and-white Cold War mentality. “Sin, nudity, drunkenness, and suicide,” he asserted, were all results of Sweden’s social welfare state.7 Swedes don’t deny the sin, nudity, and drunkenness parts (although nobody links them to the welfare state)—but they point out they don’t score high on the suicide list. Perhaps Ike was a victim of geographical confusion; Finns and Danes are indeed prone to do themselves in, perhaps because it’s so hard to keep up with the Swedes. It’s even difficult to compete with them on happiness surveys: 96 percent of Swedes say they are happy8

  Designed with an egalitarian eye as a “home for the people,” Sweden has high taxes—the wealthy may pay upward of 60 percent—but results are spectacular. Cities are well-kept, cultural programs and museums are well-funded, strikes are rare, roads are smooth, and everything from medieval squares to apartment laundry rooms are laid out in orderly fashion. With their country routinely topping quality of life charts—it’s the best place to be a woman and a mother, says a recent “Save the Children” report—Swedes can’t help but feel rather smug. For decades, theirs was the most successful socioeconomic experiment in the world, with Europe’s lowest infant mortality rate, longest life expectancy (for males), and one of the planet’s wealthiest societies.

  Swedes can get government funding (and work space) for “study circles”—when five or more learn a new skill, be it mastering Mandarin, putting on a play, or learning how to crochet. Another “Swedish model” benefit: 480-day maternity or paternity leaves with full pay; each year, a parent can take off sixty paid sick days to tend to their kids.

  DEVISING FRAMEWORKS AND INVENTING THINGAMAJIGS

  Is it the cold, the vodka, or the long winter nights that keep one homebound and bound to create? Whatever the reason, Swedes are known as designers and inventors, particularly of systems and handy gadgets, from the cream separator to the adjustable wrench—and engineering accounts for about half of Swedish GDP and exports. A few of the big names historically:

  Olof Rudbeck (the Elder) (1630–1702): Identified workings of the lymphatic system.

  Anders Celsius (1701–1744): Invented the world’s most-used temperature system.

  Linnaeus (aka Carl von Linné) (1707–1778): Developed classification systems for plants (and animals and minerals), launching botany and taxonomy and coining such terms as Homo sapiens. Also a stellar travel writer.

  Fredrik Ljungström (1875–1964): Invented steam turbine to produce electricity.

  Sven Wingquist (1876–1953): Invented ball bearings—crucial to Nazis in WWII.

  Ruben Rausing (1895–1983): Invented Tetra Pak drink carton.

  Rune Elmquist (1906–1996): Invented pacemaker.

  Swedish grace: Swedes are also famous for their lean furniture design—and are credited with being the hands that married beauty and functionality in the twentieth-century home. Ingvar Kamprad took the idea of simple utility to new heights with his chain of u-assemble furniture—IKEA—becoming the fourth richest person in the world in the process.

  The object of international media coos and the neighbors’ envy, Sweden first tumbled off her pedestal around 1986, when an assassin shot down Prime Minister Olof Palme—an event that rattled Sweden to her core, especially since violent crime was little known in the land of 9 million. The Midas touch that Social Democrats, who had formulated the country’s economic and social model, had exerted on the country vanished with him. Taxes kept increasing, industry stopped expanding, refugees from Yugoslavia, Iran, Iraq, and Somalia flooded in, and recession hit hard. By 1994, the “Swedish model” appeared to have fallen off the catwalk: the budget deficit was around $120 billion,9 unemployment shot up from 2 percent to 14 percent,10 industries packed up for Asia, and immigrants, homosexuals, and Jews came under attack.

  NOT EXACTLY MODEL BEHAVIOR

  When the Swedish economy nose-dived, racially motivated crimes blew sky high, as did crimes committed by immigrants. In 2000 alone, over 2,800 hate crimes were reported (many aren’t), and the majority were Swedes attacking immigrants. A few incidents:

  1991: Neo-Nazis kill Iranian immigrant.

  1992: Housing for asylum seekers torched seventy-nine times.

  1993: Neo-Nazis attack two Somalis and burn down a mosque. Neo-Nazi bands began gigging and selling white power recordings.

  1997: University of Stockholm reports that one-third of young Swedes doubt the Holocaust occurred.

  1998: Dance hall packed with young immigrants catches fire, sixty-three die, hundreds are injured; arson by neo-Nazis suspected.

  1999: Car bomb injures journalist investigating neo-Nazi activity; neo-Nazis kill union leader; three neo-Nazis rob bank, killing two policemen.

  2000: Neo-Nazis fatally stab nineteen-year-old Turk; seven “Middle Easterners” rape fourteen-year-old Swedish girl in parking garage; immigrants and Swedes kill seventeen-year-old Swedish neo-Nazi.

  2002: Enraged Kurdish father shoots his daughter—execution-style, in front of the family—because she refuses to go through with arranged marriage.

  2003: Mosque in Malmö set ablaze; several death threats to reporters investigating neo-Nazi activity; foreign minister fatally stabbed by Serbian immigrant.

  Rape rates skyrocketed during the 1990s, with about 350 gang rapes out of approximately 2,000 cases reported each year. The government is considering teaching self-defense to schoolgirls.

  Prime Minister Göran Persson’s long-lasting Social Democrat administration, which began in 1996, helped put the economy back on track—as did soaring demand for Ericsson phones and Swedish Internet technologies. Slammed with numerous social problems, however, the Persson administration was slow to act. On the one hand, to counter doubt among one-third of young Swedes that the Holocaust had happened, the government launched an education campaign about World War II and the treatment of Jews, publishing a book, setting up an Internet site, and making Stockholm the venue of an international forum about genocide. But the government shut its eyes tightly to growing neo-Nazi activity. After a string of murders and bank robberies by neo-Nazis in 1999, the media were gravely concerned by government inaction. For the first time ever, editors of the country’s four competing papers banded together to demand that the Persson administration wake up.11 Their coverage included pleas that the public, afraid to testify in court cases, come forward with information about racists and Fascists. Under the headline “They Threaten Democracy,” the papers listed the names and pictures of sixty-two “active Nazis.” Many of the pictured were fired, and some left the movement.

  WHITE POWER

  Nobody knows exactly how many active neo-Nazis live in Sweden; estimates range from 1,000 to
3,000, which does not sound like many. But these young racists are armed, organized, and dangerous; they killed at least sixteen immigrants, homosexuals, and police in the 1990s alone, and send out nail bombs to politicians. A dozen neo-Nazi groups, most formed around 1994, are spread out across Sweden—from Karlskrona in the south to villages in the north—running Internet sites and publishing magazines that extol the Aryan race, explain weapons, and run photos of police and journalists. Neo-Nazis sometimes train with the Swedish military, and then make off with caches of arms. Neo-Nazis are musical too: the two biggest “white power” record labels—Ragnarock and 88 Musik/Nordland—are located here, and Interpol estimates they now make over $3 million a year; some believe most Aryan music comes out of Sweden12 and that one in six young Swedes listens to “white power” rock. In 2003, rumors swirled that neo-Nazis are running training camps deep in the forests and are planning to launch a race war. On a brighter note, at least a few leaders have quit the movement, defecting to Sweden’s very active antiracist groups—who are known to brawl with neo-Nazis in marches.

  In 1997, Persson was hit by another unsettling revelation: Sweden had secretly conducted eugenics programs. Thankfully, at least one area was bright: the economy continued to grow and unemployment plummeted. But this administration has been continually troubled by acts that are atypical for Swedes—including 2001 protests in Göteborg against President George W. Bush, which threatened to turn into large-scale riots.

  SECRET SWEDEN

  In Sweden, you can read all the prime minister’s mail and access anyone’s tax returns. But the typically open Swedish government hid a few dark truths from the people. The government’s previous Nazi-like eugenics policy was cloaked in total secrecy until 1997, when Polish immigrant and muckraking journalist Maciej Zaremba displayed the skeletons in the closet. Among the findings published in Sweden’s largest newspaper Dagens Nyheter: at least 60,000 women (and men) were forcibly sterilized between 1935 and 1976, many for having gypsy-like features or being deemed of a mixed race by Sweden’s state-financed Institute of Racial Biology13 The institute, initially set up to study hereditary diseases, began the clandestine eugenics program in 1935, and greatly expanded it in 1941, as part of a plan for the social engineering of an optimized society. Danes sterilized 11,000 as well.14 Also an early proponent of eugenics: the United States, where sterilization programs were set up in such wholesome-seeming places as Vermont.

  A Swedish government commission admitted that sterilizations occurred, but said only 15,000 of them were forced; it awarded about $ 20,000 to each surviving victim.

  The fatal stabbing of foreign minister Anna Lindh in a department store in 2003 was just the latest appalling act in a land long believed to hold the secrets of societal success. Neo-Nazis were at first suspected, but her killer was a Serbian immigrant.

  Lindh’s assassin explained that Jesus had directed him to kill her; he’s now residing in a psychiatric hospital.

  Perhaps it’s no surprise that Swedish cities are turning more violent, although the incidence of crime is still much lower here than in most of Europe. But bizarre acts are unfolding in Sweden’s tiny villages as well—some making news for quirky charms, and some for dark acts.

  SMALL TOWN LIVING

  Tiny Uddebo in western Sweden is best known by the 400 residents for two things: the textile factory that makes plush bathrobes and the “chicken incident,” when one of the locals went nutty and whacked grocery shoppers with a frozen fryer. Village meetings, well-attended since in Uddebo there’s not much else to do, had grown boring, and residents wondered how to liven up the place and simultaneously put their small village on the tourist map. That’s when they consulted Mats Theselius, one of Sweden’s best-known designers, and that is also why extraterrestrials may someday be hovering in Swedish skies. His idea: an alien landing strip, circular of course, where extraterrestrials can easily touch down. Although Uddebo was never previously on record as a site of UFO sightings, many locals’ memories have been jarred in the planning of the work, known officially as “the Uddebo Weave.” Unclear is whether visiting ETs will be welcomed with one of Uddebo’s thick bathrobes.

  For all the knocks she’s taken lately, Sweden is still racing ahead. Her growing economy is now hailed as Europe’s second most competitive (just behind Denmark), her people are still happy whether on the slopes or throwing crayfish parties on the beach, and her immigrants—now known as New Swedes—are marketing their fresh perspective and putting out magazines such as Gringo. All supermodels must learn to mature; while Sweden took a few stumbles, she’s once again showing her grace, improving not only herself, but relentlessly trying to lift up the world.

  The Swedish government publishes numerous reports on how to tackle societal problems, the latest about how to end “honor killings” of women.

  History Review

  Sweden, now a neutral country, sits on the outskirts of world rumblings today, but she used to be in the thick of it all. In the seventeenth century, the Kingdom of Sweden rose as one of Europe’s great powers, running much of northern Europe’s trade, holding territories that stretched into Russia and across the Baltic Sea, and forever getting in wars.

  Swedish military might was helped out by rich iron-ore deposits and skill in producing formidable weapons. But the warrior was often benevolent; under Swedish rule, peasants in Eastern Europe were not serfs but free men, able to buy and sell land. Sweden introduced literacy to the masses in today’s Estonia, Latvia, and Finland.

  By the nineteenth century, nonstop battling had bled the country of vitality; in 1809, Russia won the land that is today’s Finland. That was a crushing blow—Finland comprised nearly half of Sweden’s territory, and the two had been united for six centuries. Swedes hired one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, (who later become their King Charles XIV), hoping he could grab back the lost territory. In 1814, Bernadotte showed up with land, all right, but it wasn’t Finland—he’d taken Norway, newly independent from Denmark. Norwegians, unhappy with the idea of Swedish rule, finally shook off in 1905, substantially trimming Sweden’s size when they left.

  Since 1814, when Sweden militarily locked Norway up in her kingdom, the country hasn’t actively fought in a war.

  Surprisingly, given her previous clout, Sweden stumbled into the twentieth century an undeveloped and poor agricultural nation. But thanks to plentiful wood, iron, and water, she galloped through the century. Cheap hydropower fueled Sweden’s steel mills, producing, among other things, ball bearings (a Swedish invention) and factories produced wooden safety matches (another Swedish invention). Another boon: Sweden wasn’t devastated in either world war. Unlike Denmark and Norway, Sweden escaped Nazi occupation during WWII. Exactly how Sweden slipped out of the war pretty much unscathed is a matter for future historians to unravel—Swedes were aiding both sides—but it was more than just waving the neutrality flag. Germany needed Sweden’s iron and ball bearings, which were instrumental in the construction of arms. Sweden had also allowed Nazis to practice military exercises and conduct weapons experiments there before the war,15 actions that violated the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler adored Swedish good looks—tall, blond, and blue-eyed, Swedes were the epitome of the Aryan race—another factor that may have contributed to his decision to spare Sweden. Whatever other elements came into play—not the least of which was the desire to preserve the country in an era of gruesome insanity—Sweden remained officially neutral during the war, serving at times as a safe haven for Jews, as in 1943, when around 8,000 fled there from Denmark.

  Heroes: Several Swedish diplomats, including Raoul Wallenberg and Per Anger, helped 100,000 Jews in Hungary escape. They opened “Swedish libraries” in Hungary that were actually safe houses, issued protective Swedish passports, and smuggled people out. The Swedish king also convinced Hungarian leader Admiral Horthy to stop the deportation of Jews.

  Postwar Swedish society was literally designed—most heavily by Social Democrats Gunnar and A
lva Myrdal, who shaped “social engineering” policies around the world. Heavily taxing the rich, the Swedish government promoted a “middle way” between Communism and capitalism that emphasized equality between citizens and took care of them all from nursery to nursing home. And it seemed to work—so well, in fact, that other Scandinavian countries eagerly adopted the “Swedish Model” and many hired the Myrdals as consultants.

  MEET THE MYRDALS: ALVA (1902–1986) AND GUNNAR (1898–1987)

  She pushed disarmament, free day care, and education for the masses; he pointed out that racism in the U.S. held back blacks and that the key to Third World development was land reform. Together, social scientists, politicians, and diplomats Alva and Gunnar Myrdal (he was also an economist) were the power couple of social engineering, whose reports, books, and ideas had dramatic effects all over the globe. After publication of their 1934 book, The Population Crisis, both were instrumental in designing the Swedish welfare state and both won Nobel Prizes: he in 1974 for economics, she in 1982 for peace. Gunnar was profoundly important in race relations, particularly in the United States, where the Carnegie Foundation gave him $300,000 to investigate the social dynamics of American life. The resulting book, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944, documented the shabby treatment of blacks in the mid-twentieth-century United States and greatly influenced the landmark court decision to integrate American schools.