Everything I read about the Swedish Social Democratic government of the last century suggested an organisation that was driven by one single, overarching goal: to sever the traditional, some would say natural, ties between its citizens, be they those that bound children to their parents, workers to their employers, wives to their husbands, or the elderly to their families. Instead, individuals were encouraged – mostly by financial incentive or disincentive, but also through legislation, propaganda and social pressure – to ‘take their place in the collective’, as one commentator rather ominously put it, and become dependent on the government.
Berggren has a slightly different spin on the Swedish state and its role in its citizens’ lives: rather than meddling and controlling, in his provocatively titled book Är svensken människa? (Is the Swede Human?) he and his co-author Lars Trägårdh argue that the real aim of the Swedish government was to liberate its citizens from each other, to set them free and allow them to become fully autonomous, independent entities in charge of their own destinies. Far from being the collectivist sheep their neighbours perceive them to be, Berggren and Trägårdh argue that the Swedes are ‘hyper individualists’ – more so even than the Americans – and that they are ‘devoted to the pursuit of personal autonomy’.
I found this theory a little confusing at first: the idea that the most collectivist, conformist, consensus-orientated people in Scandinavia were in fact driven by a rampant, American-style individualism sounded, frankly, wrong.
‘The point we are making is not to be confused with being unconventional, or to do with independent thinking,’ explained Berggren. ‘We are talking about autonomy in terms of not being dependent on other people.
‘The Swedish system is best understood not in terms of socialism, but in terms of Rousseau,’ he continued, generously assuming that I knew the slightest thing about Rousseau. ‘Rousseau was an extreme egalitarian and he really hated any kind of dependence – depending on other people destroyed your integrity, your authenticity – therefore the ideal situation was one where every citizen was an atom separated from all the other atoms . . . The Swedish system’s logic is that it is dangerous to be dependent on other people, to be beholden to other people. Even to your family.’
But isn’t family a nice thing?
‘Yes, dependence is sort of the natural condition of human beings. So I think that’s where you get some of the negative aspects that come from giving so much power to the state,’ admitted Berggren. Nevertheless he generally felt that when it came to the Swedish state’s role in people’s lives, the ends justified the means. He gave an example.
‘When I talk about this to US college students, halfway through they say, “But that’s horrible, you are saying you become dependent on the state,” and I say, “But look, okay, when you go to college how do you pay tuition?” And they say, “We have to apply for finance.” I ask them, “Well, what are the conditions for you to get financing?” “Well, it depends on my family.” “Ah, so if you have rich parents then they have to pay for you. But what if you have parents who don’t agree with what you want to study? It sounds like you are pretty dependent on your parents.” This is not the kind of problem we have. We can study anything we want to. It’s a small example, but its telling.’
Sweden’s ‘statist individualism’, as he terms it, enables the very purest form of wholly independent love to blossom between two people. Wives don’t stick around because their husband keeps the joint bank account pin code in a locked drawer in his desk, and husbands don’t hold their tongues because their wife’s father owns the mill. ‘Authentic love and friendship is possible only between individuals who are independent and equal’, he and Trägårdh write. So the Social Democrats are, in effect, über cupids.
Berggren pointed out that this is completely counter to the way they do things in Germany, for example, where state support is funnelled through the family and thus perpetuates the institution of the family, with the father at its head as the breadwinner. ‘Sweden is set up differently. The main objective is not to be dependent on your family, the wife shouldn’t be dependent on her husband, the children should be autonomous when they are eighteen, old people should not be dependent on their children taking care of them, and therefore to a large extent the state steps in and provides these things.’
‘But,’ I wondered, ‘doesn’t this just replace one dependency with another – the state – which takes us back to those concerns about totalitarianism?’
‘We are not arguing that people are totally independent, because they are dependent on the state. One take is your totalitarian take, but I don’t buy that. I think its a rather even trade-off. You can get an awful lot of autonomy by accepting a democratic state is actually furnishing you with the means to be autonomous in this way, and reach a certain self-realisation. I wouldn’t take it to its extreme, too far and you do end up with a totalitarian state.
‘For Americans and Brits the state is such a bogeyman, such a horrible menacing thing, and in the States now they can’t even have a health system because they are so scared of the state. But the point here is not that the state is saying this is how you should live your life, but it is providing you with the support structure. Society is unequal and people don’t have the same opportunities, but we are trying to lift everybody to the same level so they can achieve the same kind of freedom and self-realisation which only a small group could do previously.’
It seems to me that the problem with this form of social engineering is that it takes many of the Swedes’ underlying characteristics, particularly their love of being alone and isolated, and really lets them run with it. Thus, today in Sweden most students live by themselves – not for them Young Ones-style squats; the Swedes have the highest divorce rate in the world (although some might look upon this as a positive, of course); the highest number of single-person households; and more of their elderly live alone than in any other country. It also reinforces the generally accepted notion – in Sweden – that one should be able to solve one’s own problems. Swedes don’t like to ask favours of each other: they keep their problems to themselves and suffer in silence. Being duktig is one facet of this: if you are duktig then you don’t need any help, and as duktighet is the ultimate ideal for Swedes, to ask for help – or even to give it – is a kind of low-level social taboo.
Why are the Swedes so hell-bent on achieving self-sufficiency and independence? Why did these radical social changes – childcare, divorce, secularism – take hold in Sweden to such a great extent?
‘I think that positive experiences of self-sufficiency played a part,’ writes Daun. ‘Self-sufficiency as a value may have existed for a long time, but because of a number of social changes it could only be expressed concretely in the 1960s. The same kinds of social changes in other countries – for example increased frequency of women wage-earners, better birth-control measures, diminished power of Church and tradition, less informal social control – have not had anything like the same impact. We may thus assume that Swedish couples, even before the 1960s – possibly long before – have related to each other with a greater emotional distance than have their counterparts in many other places in the world.’
In Sweden, self-sufficiency and autonomy is all; debt of any kind, be it emotional, a favour, or cash, is to be avoided at all cost. The Swedes don’t even like to owe a round of drinks.
‘Many Swedes seem to have a strong need for independence. It can express itself in a desire to be alone, to “avoid people”, but also to avoid “being indebted”,’ writes Åke Daun. In one study cited in his book, 70 per cent of Swedes said that they could endure being separated from their friends for quite a long time. When the supposedly loner Finns were asked the same question, only 41 per cent said that they could sever contact with friends, and almost twice as many said that they become unhappy or depressed during such times of comradely separation. Daun’s conclusion: ‘Close and deep friendships are more important to Finns than they are to Swedes.’<
br />
Greta Garbo’s ‘I want to be alone’ was no schtick. She meant it.
Swedish autonomy also seemed to me to be much more passive than the kind of independence the Americans strive for. It is not about achieving something, striking out on your own, grabbing life by the lapels and wringing every ounce of potential from it, it is about being able to get your teeth seen to on a regular basis, for spouses to be able to take separate holidays, or for pensioners to be free to decide what to have for dinner. As the authors of Modern-Day Vikings put it, ‘The American wants the freedom to do, the Swede wants the freedom to be.’ Of Olof Palme Andrew Brown writes witheringly, ‘When he died, he left a country where no one was poor and no one had room for optimism.’ In other words, in eradicating social ills, the Social Democratic party also smothered its people’s motivation, ambition and spirit.
‘I know why you say this, and this is at the heart of the book, you are perfectly right,’ Berggren said when I expressed the same concerns about Scandinavian sameness – the stifling conformity, and so on – as I had to Richard Wilkinson when he and I had talked about Denmark. ‘This is the point. I think there is a conformity involved here. It is usually much easier to be eccentric in a diverse society. I don’t think Sweden will generate the kind of thinking that comes out of specific groups who develop a strong sensibility of the self, and own values and things like that; here it’s a rather general conformism.’
So, Sweden is probably not a society in which eccentrics, oddballs, contrarians or nonconformists are likely to flourish. But there is one rather large segment of society for whom Sweden has been, and continues to be, a kind of paradise.
* * *
1 Still a national hero in Sweden, Hansson allowed the movement of around a million Nazis through the country’s territory during the Second World War.
Chapter 9
Hairnets
WOMEN’S RIGHTS WERE a key element of the Social Democratic social revolution, as well as being central to their economic plan. Though women’s suffrage came later to Sweden than the other Nordic countries (1921; the Finns like to remind their ‘modern’ neighbours that their women got the vote in 1906), and all the countries of the North can justifiably claim to be paragons of feminism, Swedish women have subsequently seen their position in society advance even more comprehensively thanks to a raft of policies concerning gender equality, childcare and positive discrimination.
For some years Sweden had a dedicated Ministry of Gender Equality (recently amalgamated with the Ministry of Education) charged with overseeing legislation aimed at eliminating discrimination in the workplace, bringing more women into the labour market and making sure that every advert for cleaning products featured a man with a mop and a bucket rather than a woman. Partly as a result, Sweden now has some of the most generous parental leave allowance in the world, with sixteen months’ leave on 80 per cent per cent of wages guaranteed by law, to be taken whenever the parents feel like it up until the child is eight years old. Two months of this are assigned exclusively to the father. ‘Daddy leave’, as it’s known, was introduced in 1995 and today 85 per cent of Swedish fathers take advantage of it.
Newsweek magazine recently ranked Sweden second on its list of the best countries in the world in which to be a woman (after Iceland, where presumably the women have now removed all sharp objects from the reach of their men); and Save the Children placed it at number three on its ‘best places to be a mother’ list, after Norway and Iceland (with Denmark in fifth place). The latter ranking probably has much to do with the fact that Sweden has the cheapest childcare in terms of percentage of average wages in the Nordic region: it costs a little over a hundred pounds per month to park your little bundle of joy in a crèche (compared with five, or even ten, times that in the UK). By age twelve to eighteen months over 82 per cent of Swedish children are in day care, or dagis as it is known. The highest figure of its kind in the world.
The Swedes have never quite plucked up the courage to have a woman prime minister (unlike their Nordic peers), but almost half of Sweden’s MPs and currently more than half of government ministers are women, making the British government look positively Arthurian. Swedish women’s rights organisations are, however, still quick to remind us that they remain woefully under-represented in the higher echelons of the corporate world, and that women’s pay still lags behind men’s.
Meanwhile, Swedish men are reputedly the least chauvinistic in the world. A 2009 survey by the University of Oxford revealed that Swedish men help out more with household chores than men of any other nation. You might think the Swedish male’s softer, more caring side would be another quality for the pros column, but not according to former Miss Sweden Anna Anka. In a newspaper interview she once described Sweden’s ‘velvet dads’ – those stay-at-home fathers identifiable by the baby sick down their fronts and whip marks on their backs – as ‘nappy-changing sissies’. She believes Swedish men could benefit from rediscovering some of their Viking forefathers’ machismo.
This, as Finnish men will again point out with glee, has been one downside to Sweden’s feminist revolution. As if all those Swedish soldiers clutching their make-up bags when the Russians rattled their sabres wasn’t enough of an embarrassment for Swedish manhood, the shift in the gender balance towards greater equality seems to have emasculated them even further. Divested of their roles as the bread-winning protectors of the fairer sex, Swedish men have now been gelded to the extent that they struggle even to engage in the most basic interplay of the genders. Flirting, courting, pitching woo, call it what you will, this has now become a political minefield. I am told that Swedish men have been cowed by their ascendant womenfolk into discarding any pretence to gallantry or courtly manners. I have also heard this argument made in relation to Danish men, and one assumes it applies in Norway, too. According to the many Danish women I have spoken to about this (the poor creatures, we must assume, having been magnetically drawn to my unbridled British masculinity), courtly manners have no place in Scandinavian society. Their men have lost touch with their masculinity and in doing so relinquished their role in the art of seduction.
This is hardly the men’s fault. In my experience old-fashioned chivalry is about as welcome among Scandinavian women as chastity belts. Hold a door open for a Danish woman in a department store in central Copenhagen, as I used to do before I knew better, and you risk a look either of baffled suspicion or outright hostility (‘Don’t you oppress me with your gallantry!’). The kind of gentlemanly manners expected in the UK or US bewilder and amuse Scandinavian women. At a restaurant with a group of Danes during the first year I moved here, I made the mistake of standing up when one of the female diners returned to the table. The conversation stopped and all those gathered stared at me expectantly. I tried to explain why I had done this in the middle of dessert but realised that, actually, I didn’t really know (later, one of the other guests told me that they had all thought I was going to make a speech). Early on in our relationship, my wife found it hilarious that I would automatically walk on the outside of the pavement when I was with her, and always tried to outmanoeuvre me.
‘I went into a meeting here at the office the other day, and I had a bad toe, and there were all these young men sitting around and not one of them offered me a seat. And I am their boss!’ Danish newspaper editor Anne Knudsen told me. Her two sons have been brought up to show such courtesies, she said, but she did concede that there is an entire generation of Danish men who have been taught otherwise. ‘A lot of men of my generation say they are afraid of taking on those old-fashioned roles. They come from that generation where they were slapped down for these kind of things and constantly taught that they were not good enough. The new generation just hasn’t been brought up to know about it. They’re just badly brought up.’
Meanwhile, foreign women who date Danish men wonder what they have done wrong when the men suggest sharing the bill at the end of the evening, and neglect to pay them compliments. Don’t blame the poo
r man, that’s how they’ve been raised, I tell them, laying my cape over an approaching puddle.
‘It turned out he was actually quite keen on me,’ said one English girl who dated a Dane (and eventually married him, I am happy to say) and was mystified by the fact that he would pass through doors in front of her, fail to get up when she entered a room and never give her gifts. ‘But for ages I assumed he was either gay or somehow backward.’
You could argue there is another, more serious, cost to Sweden’s state-led radical feminism than lots of misguided foreign men holding doors open like so many freelance concierges. The social and economic pressure on women to return to work soon after childbirth means that Scandinavian children tend to be enrolled in day care at a younger than average age (in Denmark almost a quarter of six-month-olds attend some kind of regular day care), and for more hours per day. Some observers have claimed that separation from the mother at a young age lays the foundation for a whole host of neuroses and anxieties in later life, as well as exacerbating the inherent tendency of Swedes towards independence and isolation. Could this ‘abandonment’ be one of the explanations for all those single-person households, for instance?
In his book Suicide and Scandinavia US psychiatrist Herbert Hendin observed that the Swedish approach tended to encourage independence in their children at a very early age. Swedish children were, he said, taught that to be dependent on another person – even one’s own mother – is a failing. ‘Children are encouraged to separate from their mothers early on, socially and psychologically,’ agrees Åke Daun in The Swedish Mentality. ‘They deny the existence of any such need and mask it behind an ostensible self-reliance.’
The Almost Nearly Perfect People Page 38
