Ulf Nilson has also written of the pressures that Swedish women feel to conform to social norms by depositing their spawn at the kindergarten on their way to the office every morning: ‘Feminists start to more or less criminalise women who want to stay at home with their toddlers rather than leave them in the nurseries.’ But Daun suggests that the women are not so much pressurised into leaving their children as escaping from them. He quotes research that shows that, although Swedish women say they are forced to go back to work out of economic necessity, the truth is they are going back to their jobs because they find them more satisfying than staying at home with their children. As lovely as they are, newborns also possess an almost limitless capacity for being tedious; they can be challenging in all the wrong ways. So this desire to escape is quite understandable, but might it be just ever so slightly possible that the way in which Sweden has so wholeheartedly embraced day care from such an early age has had a negative effect on its children and, by extension, in the long run, Swedish society as a whole? Could this be part of the reason why Sweden suffers from comparatively high rates of juvenile delinquency and petty crime, for instance?
Few would go as far as Hendin and claim that Swedish mothers did ‘not experience the same joy in being together with their children as mothers in certain other cultures’ (after all, a certain class of English mother thinks nothing of packing her progeny off to boarding school at the age of eight), but he isn’t the only one to have questioned the indecent rapidity with which Swedish society moves to separate its young from their parents.
Writing in the mid-1980s, child psychiatrist Marianne Cederblad commented: ‘In Sweden we have . . . extreme expectations from an early age regarding self-sufficiency in children, and parents see the defiance of children during their refractory periods as positive and desirable.’ In a similar vein, Daun quotes a proposal on after-school care written in the seventies by the National Board of Health and Welfare as stating its responsibility was to ‘support the children in their release from close dependence upon adults’. I think it is safe to say the ‘earth mother’ is not a common Swedish archetype.
Am I the only one who finds it slightly chilling that the Swedish state believes it has an active role to play in the severance of children from their parents in what amounts to an institutionalisation of childhood? Shouldn’t the process of a child’s independence from its parents be a gradual, natural one, rather than something systematically imposed from birth by some or other ministry? One instinctively recoils when one hears about children being guided towards ‘taking their place in the collective’, as one commentator put it. Or am I just being old-fashioned or, probably worse in Scandinavian eyes, warped by my Anglocentric attachment to the primacy of family?
‘I’m not really uncomfortable with that,’ says Henrik Berggren when I voice my concerns about the Swedish childcare model. ‘I can see why you might be, but I think that the idea of emancipation of women is very strong on all fronts. Look at Germany where women have to choose between work or having children and they can’t do both.’
Some would argue that you can’t.
‘Well, right, but I see a lot of women doing it.’
But, if I may play the bigoted, chauvinistic dinosaur for a moment longer (a stretch, but I’ll give it a go), I also see a lot of families struggling and the children paying the price.
‘Well then, you should ask the fathers, what are they doing to help?’ says Berggren. ‘There is an American sociologist, David Popenoe, who wrote a book in the eighties which was really critical [of Sweden], and said essentially what you are saying – Swedish mothers were bad leaving their children in day care all day, that it was an inhuman horrible society. He is a very nice guy, I like him a lot, but he is a traditional American conservative who likes family values. He revisited Sweden a couple of years ago and wrote this really interesting piece which said “Okay, I have some problems with this idea of the family, but when I look at children in Sweden and the United States, studies show that in Sweden children spend much more time with their parents than they do in the US, and children are better, happier, every statistic is basically better.” He doesn’t like divorces – on that point Sweden is bad – but on all other points Sweden is a family-values society. It’s a society that takes far better care of its children than America does.’
UNICEF agrees; it recently awarded Sweden more first places in its child well-being survey than any other country (Denmark and Finland were second and third), including in the categories of ‘material well-being’, ‘health and safety’, and ‘behaviours and risks’. But, tellingly in terms of my isolation theory, Swedish kids performed notably poorly in terms of ‘family and peer relationships’ – they were ranked fifteenth – and not all that well in ‘educational well-being’ (eighth place – that’ll be all those schools where they write their own timetables).
Of course no one has the patent on parenting, and there are many, many approaches to raising children. Who is to argue that the Swedes haven’t hit upon the optimum strategy? Not me. I took my son to see Santa in the middle of summer, so I am hardly in a position to judge.
And who is to argue with the goal of gender equality? Sweden’s economy has undoubtedly benefited from encouraging more women into the labour market and, as time passes, their presence there reinforces this as the norm. If I were a woman I know where I’d want to live.
Chapter 10
Class
I THINK IT is fair to say that in the rest of the world, as far as they are thought of at all, the Scandinavian countries are broadly perceived as democratic, meritocratic, egalitarian and classless, populated by vaguely outdoorsy, blond, liberal, bicycle-riding folk who live in tastefully lit middle-class homes with Bang & Olufsen TVs in their living rooms, mid-range German estate cars in their driveways (Passat, not Mercedes), who holiday in Spain and slip a couple of notes in a Red Cross envelope every month. When we picture the people of the North we do not see a rigidly stratified society made up of, say, men in flat caps toiling at coalfaces, a bloated, self-satisfied bourgeoisie standing on their shoulders and an aristocracy in white suits and Panama hats playing croquet. We don’t visualise stately homes and terraced houses, hunting parties and working men’s clubs. And we wouldn’t for a moment imagine that Scandinavia’s government cabinets are made up of groups of men who attended the same costly private schools, the same universities, and belong to the same Pall Mall private members’ clubs.
Put it another way: picture a posh Danish person. How about a working class Swede? I mean an actual, proper white-trash, trailer-park Sven. A Norwegian chav? A Finnish aristocrat? Don’t be ridiculous. Though, as we have seen in Denmark, social stratification definitely exists in Scandinavia, notions of class are very, very different up here in the North. To the Scandinavians, having a House of Lords as part of your legislative process, for instance, would be deemed as archaic as using Spinning Jennies to make your clothes, or commuting in a pony and trap. I don’t think they would ever be able to fathom the concept of Debrett’s. They find the extremes of poverty and wealth, deprivation and privilege you find in the States downright horrifying. Scandinavian class structures tend to be far more subtle, income and status differences far less marked.
Walk through Copenhagen’s Central Station, or cycle into central Stockholm during rush hour, and you will be hard-pressed to tell the difference between those commuters on their way to a cubicle in an open-plan office, and those heading for the corner office on the top floor. That man on the mud-splattered mountain bike with one bicycle clip and a battered cycle helmet might just as easily be the head of the Central Bank as a deputy headmaster or office clerk. That woman in the herringbone-print H&M dress with the expensive-looking leather shoulder bag could be going to make lunches for schoolkids, or on her way to the Prime Minster’s office. Visit a Swedish or Danish company to interview the MD or CEO, as I have done on occasion, and more often than not you will be greeted by someone dressed in the classic Scandinavian
corporate uniform of dark jeans and a jacket worn without a tie, an ensemble designed to give little indication of his position or power in the company (it can sometimes seem as if the entire male population of the Nordic region over thirty is sponsored by Gant). Watch the live feed from the Danish parliament, meanwhile, and you will see MPs dressed in jeans and the kind of knackered knitwear usually found lining a dog basket; every day is dress-down Friday at the folksy Danish Folketing.
Informal dress codes are to be expected from such paragons of economic equality. Social forces such as Jante Law and lagom, as well as the Scandinavians’ deep-rooted instinct for consensus and conformity, their democratic systems, universal free education and redistributive tax systems all ensure they can look each other in the eyes as equals, no matter where they were born or what job they do. This is rightly a source of immense pride in the region. In Danish it is expressed as seeing one another at øjenhøjde, literally ‘eye level’; you regard those you meet as social equals, regardless of their job, wealth or status (a major downside of which is the crappy service you receive in cafés and restaurants throughout the region. I don’t mean to imply that one should look down on those who work in the service industry, but surely one has the right to expect one’s waiter or waitress to, like, bring you stuff without making it seem like a total inconvenience).
Where was I? Ah, yes, my point. All may seem clever and classless and free, but there is an elephant in the democratic, meritocratic, middle-class Scandinavian living room; it is wearing velvet robes, an ermine stole and a crown, and is glaring evidence that the class system is alive and well in all three Scandinavian countries. I am talking, of course, about the absurd, anti-democratic carnival that is the monarchy.
For once I am choosing my geographical terms carefully – the other two Nordic countries, Iceland and Finland, are of course republics, so we are specifically talking about the Scandinavians here – and you may be able detect just a hint of republicanism in my tone here too, but, well, come on, you guys! This is all so very disappointing. Those of us who look to the North for inspiration for a better way to live expect so much more from you than the timorous idolatry of a portly man in epaulettes or a woman in a tiara waving from a balcony. That’s the kind of nonsense us class-ridden, post-colonial, socially desiccated Brits cling to; this is not the cut of social democracy’s jib!
What are these ridiculous figureheads still doing squatting in your prime city centre real estate? Why do you persist with these Ruritanian mannequins, swanning around their summer palaces, waving from their yachts and occasionally deigning to lend their patronage to the soft-sexy issues du jour – environmental sustainability, polar bears, the Olympics – in the name of ‘work’? I am conscious that, as a guest in this part of the world, let alone an Englishman, it ill behooves me to criticise my hosts in this way, but really, what are these preposterous feudal throwbacks doing here in these otherwise exemplary egalitarian democracies? I bet they can’t believe their luck, the Scandinavian royals. One hopes they wake up every morning in perpetual fear of torches and pitchforks, but I fear the mob may never arrive at the gates of Amalienborg or Oscarshall because, by and large – and here’s the truly upsetting aspect of the whole sorry situation – the Scandinavians are actually rather fond of their royal families.
The Danes are the most fervent royalists of them all and, to be fair, their royal family – the Glücksburgs – is the only one which has anything like a legitimate claim to being an authentic, indigenous monarchy, with a history stretching back a thousand years to the time of Harald Bluetooth. But the jingoistic Norwegians love their king almost as much as the Danes love their Queen Margaret. According to a recent poll, King Harald enjoys between 60 and 70 per cent of public support. Harald must be a remarkable individual, either that or the Norwegians have very short memories, as their royal family is only a twentieth-century concoction, sired by Danish stock. Back in 1905 a newly independent Norway chose a Dane for their new king: Carl (Haakon VII), the second son of the then Danish king Frederick VIII, with his English wife Maud as queen – an ironic state of affairs given that the country had broken free of Danish rule less than a century earlier.
The Swedish royal family’s legitimacy is even more tenuous. The current king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, is descended neither from noble Viking blood nor even from one of their sixteenth-century warrior kings, but from some random French bloke. When Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809, the then king, Gustav IV Adolf – by all accounts as mad as a hamburger – left for exile. To fill his throne and, it is thought, as a sop to Napoleon whose help Sweden hoped to secure against Russia in reclaiming Finland, the finger of fate ended up pointing at a French marshal by the name of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (who also happened to be the husband of Napoleon’s beloved Desirée). Upon his arrival in Stockholm, the fact that Bernadotte had actually once fought against the Swedes in Germany was quickly forgotten, as was his name, which was changed to Charles XIV John. This, though, is where the assimilation ended: the notoriously short-tempered Charles XIV John attempted to speak Swedish to his new subjects just the once, meeting with such deafening laughter that he never bothered again (there is an echo of this in the apparently endless delight afforded the Danes by the thickly accented attempts at their language by their current queen’s consort, the portly and unintentionally comical French aristocrat Henri de Monpezat). On the subject of his new country, the forefather of Sweden’s current royal family was withering: ‘The wine is terrible, the people without temperament, and even the sun radiates no warmth,’ the arriviste king is alleged to have said.
The current king is generally considered to be a bit bumbling, but can at least speak Swedish, usually stands where he is told, and waves enthusiastically. At least, that was the perception until 2010, when the long-whispered rumours of his rampant philandering were finally exposed in a book, Den motvillige monarken (The Reluctant Monarch). Sweden’s tabloids salivated over gory details of the king’s relationships with numerous exotic women, visits to strip clubs, Dominique Strauss-Kahn-style sex parties, and his fraternising with members of the underworld. Hardly appropriate behaviour for the chairman of the World Scout Foundation. (The exposé followed on from revelations that the father of the king’s Spanish wife, Queen Silvia, was a member of the Nazi party. Awkward.) These days, whenever I see Carl Gustaf performing his official duties I can’t shake the feeling that he would much prefer to be trussed up in a dominatrix’s cellar.
The Scandinavian royals are often conflated with their Dutch bike-riding counterparts, but that is misleading. You won’t catch Queen Margaret down the bottle bank, or cycling to work at a soup kitchen. The Scandinavian royals still enjoy all the traditional trappings of monarchy – the gilded carriages, the Aston Martins, the yachts and the multiple, taxpayer-funded homes. They are also robustly protective of their ‘downtime’. In a recent exposé in Denmark, the Crown prince and princess, both of whom are enthusiastic riders, skiers and sailors, were revealed to be dedicating about six hours a year to official duties (I can’t remember the exact figure, but I am sure it was thereabouts). Remarkably, this appeared to have virtually no impact on their popularity, nor on their under-the-counter sponsorship deals – the Princess reportedly delights in her complimentary £20,000 handbags, for instance.
This in the country that welcomed Lenin, gave birth to Scandinavia’s cooperative movement and still marks 1 May with a gigantic piss-up in the main park in Copenhagen! The Danes would probably laugh at the deification of the Thai king by his subjects, or scoff at the deference Americans grant the office of president, but, and I speak from bitter personal experience, if you make a disparaging remark about, say, Queen Margaret’s awful dentistry, or point out that it is a slightly rum state of affairs that her entire family still has immunity from prosecution under Danish law, or that democratically elected government ministers must back out of her presence following official audiences, and you will be rounded on like a rat in a kennel.
S
o, whither the Scandinavian republican movement? you might ask. I know I did. In terms of popularity, in Norway and Denmark republicanism is right up there with Sharia Law and spicy food, but there are hopeful stirrings in Sweden. Ten years ago Swedish republicanism was a minority cause, with perhaps 7,500 members. Today it has three times that – still not much in a country of over nine million, but it’s a start. Ironically, the boost came not from the exposure of the king’s sexual adventures, but from the supposedly ‘fairytale’ wedding of his daughter to her fitness instructor.
‘With the scandal I think people actually felt a little bit sorry for the king and his family. But in the run-up to the wedding there was this discussion about how much the state had to pay, which turned people to the republican cause,’ Magnus Simonsson, spokesman for the Swedish Republican Association told me when we met in central Stockholm. ‘The day before the wedding there was a survey which was one of the first to show that less than half of the population supported the monarchy.’
I mentioned to Magnus my terrible disappointment that Sweden had a monarchy at all. ‘Don’t you realise,’ I said, perhaps a touch too imploringly, as we sat together on a bench in the entrance hall of the building where Simonsson worked as an advisor to a government minister, ‘you’re letting all of us down! If you still have your monarchy what chance have we got of getting rid of ours?’ He edged away from me slightly and gently explained that part of the reason that Sweden had tolerated its royal family for so long was that the country’s move towards democracy and universal suffrage had been a gradual, peaceful one. It is a similar story in Denmark. ‘By the time of the late seventies most people didn’t feel there was a need to get rid of the king because he didn’t do much and didn’t cost much,’ he said.
The Almost Nearly Perfect People Page 39
