The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  Historian Henrik Berggren has written a highly acclaimed biography of Palme. I probably should have realised that anyone who spends years writing a biography is likely to have a positive approach to their subject, but for some reason this didn’t enter my head when I shared my thoughts about Palme: from what I had read about him, I said, he seemed at worst a kind of preachy ideologue, at best naive.

  ‘I don’t think he was naive at all,’ Berggren replied. ‘He was actually quite unusual for a Swede in that he was rather hard and pragmatic, a wily politician, actually. He was like Bobby Kennedy, someone who could be very moral, but totally ruthless in pursuing his political thoughts. Palme did two things: he thought the Vietnam war was a total catastrophe and used his position as PM of Sweden to maximise critical impact on the US; at the same time he was very concerned about Swedish neutrality and defence and wanted us to be able to defend ourselves against the Soviet Union, so he upheld connections with the US to get technology, and with NATO. Some Swedes have a very tough time dealing with the fact that Palme was both. The right wing say, okay, he didn’t collapse our relationship with the US, but that could have happened, he was playing with fire, while the left call him a total hypocrite . . . He was part of a whole generation – like Trudeau [Pierre Trudeau, former PM of Canada] – of aristocratic radicals in the sixties who came from the technocratic class, were self-confident, a bit arrogant, but embraced radical ideas.’

  When I was in Stockholm I also caught up with Ulf Nilson, the veteran journalist who has been a correspondent and columnist for Swedish newspapers since the 1950s. As Nilson will proudly tell you, he has met every US president from Johnson to the latest Bush along the way. He knew Palme personally and agrees with Berggren that, beneath the ideology, he was a most pragmatic politician.

  ‘We were actually fairly good friends,’ Nilson told me. ‘I travelled all over the world covering him and every time we met he would say, “Your father was a stonecutter,” approvingly. To him, I was noble, from a noble family, because he had this romantic idea about the pure worker. He was actually an aristocrat, from a slightly noble family. He wanted to convert everybody but of course he used his power in millions of dirty ways – he was, after all, a politician. They’ve got to dirty their hands, otherwise they can’t exist.’

  Nilson calls himself a ‘Swedish dissident’; he is no fan of the Social Democrats and never has been. He left Sweden in 1968 and hasn’t lived there since, but visits regularly. I wondered what he thought about my Swedish totalitarianism theory.

  ‘In a sense it is totalitarian,’ he agreed as we sat in the canteen at the offices of the newspaper for which he is a columnist, Expressen. ‘Of course, you can’t compare it to Nazi Germany or North Korea, it isn’t as bad as that, but there is a creeping totalitarianism which is defined as conforming, to do like others. Nobody really questions the kind of society we have, that’s what I dislike so much about Sweden. Indoctrination is what you would call it.’

  Åke Daun would seem to agree, writing in Swedish Mentality that ‘All deviance from group norms and common group patterns is potentially threatening to the individual.’ But when I asked him about Swedish totalitarianism he rejected my theory: ‘I don’t buy that description, no. We didn’t experience it as something that was coming from the top. It was a modern state and that’s how a modern state should be organised, in all its details.’

  Rather than totalitarianism, both Berggren and Daun perceived a different force at work in Sweden over the last hundred years: modernism. ‘Swedes are not interested in history,’ Daun told me. ‘Swedes look at their country as modern.’

  Henrik Berggren compared his country’s approach to the UK’s: ‘The way Britain deals with modernity is fascinating. You are not modernists. This is the great difference. I find it very appealing that in Britain the argument “this is modern” is not going to trump everything else the way it does in Sweden. But, on the other hand, you realise that at some point you need to make a push into the modern. Britain resisted that and has been stuck with a lot of old, not very well-functioning, systems.’

  But still, how did the Swedes allow one party to exercise such immense power and impose such radical policies for so long, relieving them of such a large chunk of their earnings in the process? I am aware that a transparent democratic process took place every few years in which they elected the Social Democrats, but as they slowly watched their rights and freedoms being eroded, and felt the long tentacles of the state rummaging around for any remaining tax kronor hidden in their underwear, did the Swedish people never once say ‘Enough is enough’? Or, were they like the proverbial frog in a pan of cold water, oblivious to the incremental temperature change as they were brought slowly to a rolling boil?

  As a child, when I read about the Berlin Wall I used to wonder, ‘It must have taken the East German authorities ages to build it, how come the Berliners didn’t rise up and stop them?’ Had the Swedes experienced a similar kind of collective torpor when faced with the gradual, but unprecedented, expansion of their centralised state and its interference in their lives? Did they never feel the tentacles?

  Chapter 8

  Guilt

  IF AN ANIMAL kingdom simile is required – and when is it not? – then perhaps more apt than than likening the Swedes to frogs would be to say that they were the most diligent of worker bees, happy to toil for the good of the hive. But what made the Swedes such perfect subjects for benign totalitarianism?

  Historically, several factors paved the way: the alleged Viking egalitarianism; Lutheranism, with its emphasis on collective sacrifice, social justice, equality, self-control and denial; a comparatively weak feudal system; high levels of centralisation from the sixteenth century onwards; and the emergence of the trade union and cooperative movements. Above all, Sweden had a far larger landless peasant population than, say, Denmark, and a far greater concentration of wealth in a small number of rich landowners – it was a society ripe for what you might call, if you wanted to annoy some socialists, collective social vengeance.

  So the hungry, dutiful populace was ready to be shaped and guided by an unholy trinity: the extraordinary and lasting accord between the Social Democrats, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) and the Employers Association (SAF). The role of the latter was especially remarkable. Its core was made up of fewer than twenty families, prime among them the industrialist–banking family, the Wallenbergs. These three entities – the Social Democratic government, the unions and the company owners – would cooperate to a remarkable degree over the coming decades on matters such as wage levels, childcare provision, women’s rights, employment law, economic policy, and even foreign policy, allowing some of the most progressive social innovations the world has ever seen to be imposed upon a broadly accepting (baa!) Swedish public. As T. K. Derry writes of Sweden’s history of industrial action, ‘The Swedish record is quite outstanding: with a total labour force approaching four million it experienced five years in which the average loss of working days was no more than five thousand, and in one of these years the figure fell to four hundred.’

  Modernity became the golden carrot dangled in front of Sweden’s citizens by its ruling powers. Initially led by the four-time prime minister, Per Albin Hansson, then by his successor, Tage Erlander (who held the post for a total of twenty-three years), and then Palme, the Swedes were encouraged to cast off their old ways and move as one towards the light. If something was deemed modern, it was good. A rational, enlightened country such as Sweden had no need for folklore and buckled shoes, for rituals and community customs. Trade unions were modern. Collectivism was modern. Neutrality was modern. Economic and gender equality were modern. Universal suffrage was modern. Divorce was modern. The welfare state was modern. Eventually multiculturalism and mass immigration were deemed modern. Spending an hour every Sunday morning listening to a second-rate theology graduate wearing an over-sized ruff that looked like a slide projector was not modern. Neither, for that matter, was nationalism
– the Swedish national anthem does not once mention the word ‘Sweden’.

  For me, the most extraordinary role in this supposedly socialistic, redistributive society was played by the company bosses. Even when Sweden skirted perilously close to outright socialism with the mooted Wage-earner Funds (effectively a way for the workers to eventually take over the means of production, a concept Tribune magazine called at the time ‘one of the purest socialist proposals that has ever found its way into an election manifesto’), these wealthy, reclusive capitalist families were right there, if not actually holding the reins of power, then at least advising the driver. The Wallenbergs, Sweden’s most prominent and powerful old-money family (equivalent in many ways to Denmark’s Møller–Mærsk shipping dynasty, and comparably significant to Sweden’s GDP) became so intertwined with the country’s government that, at one point during the Second World War, Jacob Wallenberg, who had by that point inherited the company with his brother Marcus, handled national trade negotiations with the Nazis. Later the Wallenbergs were business partners with the government in founding Sweden’s ambitious nuclear programme. At its height, the company employed almost of a fifth of all private sector workers (around 180,000 Swedes).

  All three factions in Sweden’s ruling triumvirate benefitted hugely from the country’s extensive collaboration and trade with the Nazis during the Second World War. The Swedes had been selling iron to the Germans since the fourteenth century and clearly saw no reason to stop.

  ‘Until the time of Stalingrad, [Sweden] seemed to be neutral, firmly on the Nazi side,’ writes Andrew Brown. ‘Swedish volunteers went to fight in Finland against the communists, and German troops and supplies were allowed to transit the Swedish railway system. After Stalingrad, Sweden was decisively neutral on the winning side. This was long and very bitterly resented, especially in Norway.’ Ulf Nilson agrees, describing his homeland as ‘an extension of Germany’s war industry’ up until at least 1943.

  Thanks to this ruthless pragmatism Sweden, the serene swan, sailed through the 1939–45 conflict – during which its GNP rose by 20 per cent – and in the decades that followed its wealth grew to match that of the US in per capita terms. But its reputation was permanently tarnished by its often personal connections to Nazi Germany (Hermann Göring was married to a Swede, for example). As Norway’s King Haakon put it at the time: ‘There must be no more talk of Sweden as the big brother.’

  I bring up the Second World War here not to rub the Swedes’ noses in it (okay, perhaps just a bit), but because their post-war economic and social miracle would not have been possible without the devastation and subsequent rebuilding of much of the rest of Europe. Sweden’s neutrality left it unscathed, placing it in a prime position to exploit Europe’s rapid, Marshall Plan-fuelled growth. As a result, for some years afterwards, Sweden had the fastest-growing economy in the world after Japan’s.

  The Swedes seem to have taken a collective, unspoken decision to avoid reflection on their conduct between 1939 and 1945, but the writer Sean French, who is half Swedish, feels that in burying their guilt about their betrayal of their Nordic neighbours during the Second World War, and about their extensive trade with the Nazis to the direct cost of Allied lives, the Swedes have paid the price in the longer term: ‘After the war, the agreement that they would go for growth, retain a national consensus and, tacitly, bury the past, worked very well. But it’s left a kind of scar . . . And in order to achieve that success it gave up division: so there’s agreement, or apparent agreement, on everything.’ Though you could argue that Sweden is no longer fully neutral, participating as it does in international peace-keeping missions, French also points out the brazen hypocrisy of a country which has a ‘huge commitment to peace and neutrality while at the same time fostering a huge arms industry’, Sweden is the world’s eighth largest arms exporter.

  As historian Tony Hall writes in Scandinavia: At War with Trolls, ‘The collective weight of Swedish shame built up slowly – shame for not helping the Finns was replaced by shame for turning their backs on the Norwegians, for not standing up against the Germans, for sending some Balts to certain death – until shame and guilt seemed to be the natural state of the Swedish conscience.’

  I asked the historian Henrik Berggren about the Swedes’ war guilt, or lack of it. One of my more outlandish theories was that the Swedes’ ostentatious political correctness, in particular with regard to their openness to immigration and multiculturalism, was a manifestation of this repressed guilt: they realised they had let us all down, and were now trying to make up for it. Surprisingly, for once he agreed with me.

  ‘Yes, it is war guilt, I think so,’ he said. ‘Because prosperity in general in moral people does tend to create a sense of guilt. If you have a lot and someone else has a little you get guilty anyway, if you are of the Protestant persuasion.’

  ‘Or if you have gotten rich off the back of others’ misery.’

  ‘Quite. I think the war really, as you say, compounds the guilt very much. I think Sweden felt we had a little bit of a mission trying to deal with this. I mean, I think we apologised to the Norwegians and the Danes, but it was very superficial, token stuff.’

  Looking beyond the Second World War, if we can ignore the Swedes’ role in Hitler’s expansionism then, considering they achieved such a consistently high standard of living, admirable levels of gender and economic equality, and built a compassionate welfare state, is it really a problem that their country might have veered towards just a teensy bit of totalitarianism from time to time?

  Well, yes. Particularly if, for instance, you were one of the sixty thousand Swedish women – mostly working-class – who were forcibly sterilised or coerced into being sterilised between 1935 and 1976 during the country’s unfortunate eugenics misadventure.

  As early as 1922 the Swedes had an Institute for Racial Biology, in Uppsala. A leading Swedish politician at the time, Arthur Engberg, wrote: ‘We have the good fortune to belong to a race that is so far relatively unspoiled, a race that is the bearer of very high and very good qualities,’ adding that it was about time they protected said superior race. Such views led to the sterilisation of ‘lesser’ specimens in a programme which, according to one commentator, was ‘second only to [those of] Nazi Germany’. The two regimes shared the same goal: the purification of a race of tall, blond, blue-eyed people. In 1934, laws were strengthened so that women deemed ‘inferior’ were sterilised against their will, along with male juvenile delinquents. Even in 1945, after the world had become aware of what the Nazis had been up to, 1,747 Swedes were sterilised, and in 1947 the figure had increased to 2,264. ‘How could men like Per Albin Hansson1 . . . and Tage Erlander condone, indeed order, this shockingly undemocratic, cruel, and unfair program?’ asks Ulf Nilson in his book What Happened to Sweden? ‘The answer is quite simple,’ he continues. ‘They really thought that by eliminating the inferior unborn, a cleaner, healthier race would gradually be produced.’

  During the sixties and seventies the Swedish state also became notorious around the world for the large numbers of children it took into care, sometimes for apparently spurious, even ideological, reasons. When it was revealed that Sweden’s Orwellian-sounding Child Welfare Board had proportionately taken more children into care than any other foreign country, journalist Brita Sundberg-Weitman wrote: ‘This is a country where the authorities can forcibly separate a child from its parents to prevent them from giving it a privileged upbringing.’ According to the UK-based Tetra Pak heiress and publisher of Granta magazine, Sigrid Rausing, the Swedish state ‘created a society of conformity and concrete, state surveillance’; ‘took excessive numbers of children into care’; created schools that were ‘joyless and mediocre’; and secretly monitored communists. The Swedish state was, she writes, ‘a repressive machinery where individual rights were potentially sacrificed to powerful social norms’.

  Nor would the totalitarian question have been academic for those Swedes unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with HIV at
a time when their government was seriously considering forcible quarantine for people with the condition. Or, today, if you are transgender and want your new gender to be recognised, but aren’t prepared to be sterilised as Swedish law currently requires, despite a ruling by the European Council pointing out that this violates human rights. Or if you are a Swedish mother and want to stay at home with your young child, but find yourself accused of being old fashioned, a traitor to feminism. Or, simply, if you find it a disincentive to offer up more than three quarters of your wages to politicians in the form of direct and indirect taxes (as the saying goes, ‘Swedish people are born free but taxed to death’).

  Opponents could have disagreed, of course, put their heads above the parapet, but that is not the Swedish way. As the authors of Modern-Day Vikings, Christina Johansson Robinowitc and Lisa Werner Carr write: in Sweden ‘life can be difficult for those who do not “cooperate”.’ Until relatively recently, a Swede who felt they had been denied their basic rights had little recourse for appeal in the Swedish courts, which were unable to address claims against Swedish law. While social rights were elevated, civic rights were comparatively weak, particularly at the height of Social Democratic rule – individuals had to go to the European Court of Human Rights if they felt they had a significant case against the authorities.

  ‘The individual was more and more dependent on the state and municipal administration, the unions, the associations, and the officials. In other words: the system,’ writes Ulf Nilson.

  Henrik Berggren – who will hate me for placing him again in the ‘defender of Sweden’ role here, but he does a convincing job – concedes that the Swedish state still has extraordinary influence over the lives of its citizens, but argues that it exercises its powers with transparency and compassion: ‘Yes you are transferring an enormous amount of power to the state, but it depends how the state uses that power. Now, most of the time the state has used that power benevolently, and has respected human rights and things like that. It does not follow logically that you are going to sterilise people because you have a welfare system. The problem is that you transfer so much power to the state that a certain idea can gain a power and momentum.’