Sweden believes its own fantasies

In an article in the paper European, entitled “Sweden: A Trojan Horse inside the Community”, Gahrton in the winter of 1990 let the citizens of EC know that they might soon be subjected to an insidious campaign of swedification: “… will neutral Sweden, which is so proud over its 180 years of unbroken peace and its long history as a sovereign state, really be transformed into a loyal member of the European club?” the Swedish member of the Green Party asked. He disclosed to the Europeans that he doubted this, and advised all true friends of the community to do likewise.

The risk otherwise was, if I interpret Gahrton correctly in retrospect, that they would one day wake up to a Europe of Systembolag and LO-ombudsmen (that is, state monopoly on liquor and imposing trade union representatives). Even Gahrton’s opponents, or perhaps they in particular, the Swedish enthusiasts for Europe, could at this time manifest a peculiar form of national chauvinism, in the form of a strong belief in the contagious effects of Sweden’s distinctive character. Because Sweden was such an exceptionally fine country, it was almost Sweden’s duty to join the EC in order then to turn all Europeans into Swedes. Sweden didn’t really need Europe.

It was Europe that needed Sweden – in order to become more democratic, more transparent, more equal, more humane, more moral. Sweden had shouldered the burden of John Winthrop. Winthrop was the leader of a group of British Puritans who 1630 hade left the impious Europe to found the kingdom of the righteous in America. Aboard the emigrant ship Arabella, John Winthrop held a famous sermon in which he reminded his fellow-believers that they had not only their own salvation to consider.

Through the power of example, they would also help the rest of the world on to the narrow and right path: “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us”, he declared. Winthrop’s sermon still echoes in the speeches and proclamations of American presidents. The shining city! The beacon for freedom in the world! Europeans, not least Swedes, often smile ironically at the Americans who think that they are God’s deputy landlords on earth. But to consider yourself elected is not a bad habit that is uniquely American. That kind of thing has happened in the best of countries.

In Sweden, for instance. In his recently published history of Swedish religiosity, Gud i Sverige (“God in Sweden”), Göran Hägg tells the story of the strongly Swedish-nationalist youth church movement, which early in the 20th century propagated popular revivalism under the watchword “The people of Sweden – a people of God”. Well-known representatives of the movement were the future archbishop Nathan Söderblom, the future bishop of Västerås, Einar Billing, and the future bishop of Stockholm, Manfred Björkquist. Hägg quotes a sermon held by Björkquist in Örnsköldsvik, in the summer of 1914: “No people, apart from the people of Israel, has been the people of promise in the way that the Swedish people has been. This shall be said with great candour.

Our fathers in the 17th century knew this, and they pronounced it more than once. And the deeper we enter into the history of Sweden and the history of the Swedish church, it becomes ever clearer to us that the people of Sweden are in a special way called upon to be God’s people.” The idea of Swedish exceptionalism, Sweden as a shining city upon the hill, was of course not born with the youth church movement, nor did it die with it. Generations of Swedes living today have grown up in the conviction that their country, in a special way, has been called upon to be the beacon of peace and democracy and equality and welfare and anti-racism and environmental commitment and gender awareness in this world.

It must be said that the notion of Sweden during the post-war period as an exceptional country has not entirely been an illusion. In less than a hundred years, steady and strong economic growth, social consensus and outward peace turned an impoverished country of peasants into an affluent society where young people could afford to despise both television sets and parliamentary democracy. For a couple of decades, Sweden really appeared to be an almost unique society, not only to Swedes but also to many non-Swedes.

One thing often forgotten in this connection was that what had made Sweden special – especially rich, especially shining bright and new – was the opposite of conservative isolationism: what was typically Swedish was the will and the ability to assimilate everything modern, regardless of origin. “Few nations have emerged through such an intense interaction with the surrounding world as Sweden, and few nations have been so skilled at transforming foreign phenomena into Swedish ones”, Per T Ohlsson noted in his book from 1993, Gudarnas ö. Om det extremt svenska (“The Island of the Gods. On the Extremely Swedish”), a contribution to the Swedish debate over Europe that was especially strong at the time.

Those were dramatic years, the early 90’s. The Berlin wall had been pulverized. The Soviet Union had imploded. Yugoslavia had been torn apart by wars and massacres. And the foundation upon which the Swedish house of exceptions had been raised was beginning to crumble. A new Europe and a different Sweden were taking shape. The first-mentioned was obvious. The last-mentioned ought to have been but can still, twenty years later, cause surprise and alarm. Swedes in shock have refused, for almost three decades now, to believe that what is all the time happening in Sweden could happen precisely in Sweden. The Prime Minister is assassinated out in the street. Refugee locations are burnt down.

A populist xenophobic party such as New Democracy is voted into the Riksdag. Motorcycle gangs establish themselves like a kind of hamburger chains of antisociality. One spectacular act of violence after another creates large headlines and is then forgotten. Militant activists smash Gothenburg up. The Foreign Minister is murdered in a department store in Stockholm … You didn’t think that anything like that could happen in Sweden. Abroad, sure, but not here in the safety and security of Sweden. How come the delusion about Sweden as the Phantom’s Eden is so tenacious? Perhaps because Swedes have been so fond of the fantasy of themselves as the Phantom, the champion of the good in a jungle full of dangers and criminals.

“Exceptionalism in some form is present in all countries, regardless of system and background. What distinguishes Sweden from other countries in this respect it the degree, the depth and the durability, together with the circumstance that the national myths are covered with a thick layer of rhetoric about welfare and solidarity that often make them difficult to identify”, Per T Ohlsson concluded in Gudarnas ö. It might be added that if you had been born and bred in Sweden during the boom of the welfare state, exceptionalism would be in your blood, something impossible to think away. Ever since you were a small child, you would have understood that Sweden was different. Here, you never had to fear starvation, war, diseases or deadly reptiles.

When Swedish youths in the 70’s started exploring the surrounding world with the help of the Interrail card, this tended to confirm their notions of the rest of Europe as a wilderness where you needed salt tablets to protect you from the Mediterranean heat and hidden value bags as protection against light-fingered foreigners. It was fun to live dangerously for four weeks. But it felt good to get home to the clean and nice compartments of SJ, the Swedish State Railway. The conviction that Sweden was best did not exclude jeering or furious attacks on what was typically Swedish; on the contrary, it was rather an incentive for such attacks. In Sweden, you could safely repudiate safety.

That, precisely, was perhaps what was so special about Sweden. Göran Greider, born 1959, has nicely captured that special feeling of being born invulnerable, in some verses in the collection När fabrikerna tystnar (1995): “I grew up with the Apollo project and mass motorism./ It was the most optimistic childhood so far in the world./ I was hurdled on to a millennial shift./ I was born exactly at the right time, so the optimism will never leave me.” In the editorial library of Sydsvenska Dagbladet, I find a well-thumbed copy of a military manual from 1983, Svensk Soldat (“The Swedish Soldier”). One of the first pages shows a map of Europe: in the west there is a homogenous green bloc of countries. In the east, an orange bloc. In the middle, some islands of yellow: Albania, Yugoslavia, Austria, Switzerland, Finland and Sweden. (Ireland was yellow too, despite being located in the west.)

That was the way the world looked. The Western Bloc against the Eastern Bloc, and in-between the neutral and non-aligned states. In one way an extremely threatening picture. It was easy to imagine the green and the orange coloured fields pitted against each other, like two wolves eager to sink their teeth into each other’s throats. But at the same time, the post-war map of Europe felt reassuring and safe. What could happen in such a well-ordered world? Nothing really, except the worst. Any historical and political and cultural complications were buried under thick, monochrome layers of ignorance. It was not until far into the 90’s that Swedish opinion makers reluctantly had to realize that the so-called Eastern Bloc was not massive and homogenous, that there were and always had been a number of different nations, religions, cultures, mythologies and historical avatars.

That was when the trouble started. What line were you to take in relation to the conflicts on the Balkans, for example? Should you demand that US get out of Bosnia? Or the other way, that US go into Bosnia? Perhaps it might be best not to say or do anything at all. In the 80’s, the patterns of conflict were adapted to Swedish ideas of the world and self-conceptions in a completely different way: “The strategically important goals for the great power blocs in Scandinavia are not thought to be located in Sweden”, was the reassuring message in Svensk Soldat. If the war comes, it won’t come to Sweden. That was nice to know, especially since the fundamental guarantee for this eternal Swedish peace, neutrality, also made us Swedes unusually well suited to assist all others, those who had not been granted the privilege of living in Sweden. The policy of neutrality “also give us good opportunity to work for a better and more peaceful world”, Svensk Soldat concluded.

The people of Sweden, it was understood, were in a very special way called upon to be the people of peace. Looked at and understood in this way, the Swedish policy of neutrality was not at all an expression of cowardice and national egoism but on the contrary an obliging duty, a kind of sacrifice on the altar of global peace. Sweden took it upon itself to stand outside every conflict, not out of self-interest, but for the sake of all other nations. After all, someone had to slip into the shirt of the referee. Some people had to populate the shining city on the hill. Someone had to retreat from the world to pray for the souls of the sinners. The Swedes assumed the responsibility. On the 27th of May, 1990, Ingvar Carlsson, the Prime Minister at the time, published a programmatic article on the issue of EC on DN Debatt. “Credibility lies … at the heart of the Swedish policy of neutrality such as it was designed long before Nato and the Warsaw Pact even existed, and which has ever since then meant safety for several generations of Swedes, while at the same time contributing to peace and stability in all of northern Europe”, he wrote.

From this it followed, according to Carlsson, that Sweden could not become a member of EC if the member countries continued on their way towards a political union, perhaps in the direction of “a common policy in such areas as foreign policy and security”. If Sweden should turn into a completely ordinary country, a democratic European state among other democratic European states working closely together, this would jeopardize not only the safety of Sweden but also peace and stability in all of northern Europe. We could not be responsible for something like that. Just a few months later, however, the government and apparently also the world had changed its view, and in the summer of 1991 Carlsson submitted Sweden’s application for membership in the European Community. The Prime Minister had now reached the conclusion that membership was after all compatible with Swedish neutrality.

Heaven and earth might go up in flames, empires and walls crumble and fall, but he who seeks shall find: neutrality still stands. Turning over press cuttings from the debate over EC in the early 90’s, you’re not only struck by the dramatically different conceptions of reality – we were doomed if we joined, doomed if we didn’t. You are also struck by the fact that on one point, there was nevertheless consensus: neutrality was sacred. Even Carl Bildt, in an article in Sydsvenska Dagbladet in July 1990, encouraged the Swedes to safeguard “the very heart of our policy of neutrality”, but also assured them that this ambition was fully compatible with ”the expanded cooperation in foreign policy that we will see in the new EC”.

Yes, why not a European union – but first of all some reliable and honest Swedish neutrality. Why did the ”policy of neutrality” become a national fetish even at a time when many, gravely mistaken of course, believed that we were hastily approaching the nirvana of constant freedom from conflict? When the 80’s turned into the 90’s, the grammar of the world changed: from the clear and easily understood syntax of the cold war to an apparently irregular linguistic usage with archaic elements. The continued Swedish fixation with neutrality probably satisfied an elementary longing for stable norms in a time when everything seemed to be afloat.

That need is probably still with us. Interestingly enough a book on Neutralitetens tid (“The Time of Neutrality”) published this autumn by Britt-Marie Mattson, first reporter on Göteborgs-Posten, contained unmistakable undertones of nostalgia. The place where this text feels most at home is in the time before the change in grammar, the time of superpowers and social democratic hegemony. Palme and Sten Andersson are heroes. Göran Persson and Carl Bildt are suspicious individuals. Neutrality as a kind of Swedish counterpart to the first dollar of Scrooge McDuck, both a cherished souvenir of the past and a talisman to guarantee continued safety and success? Yes. This is probably how it has been. But I suspect that the sanctification of neutrality has also filled different psychological functions, more difficult to analyze.

In a culture like the Swedish, where national chauvinism has long been banned, the cult of neutrality has probably served as a permissible and encouraged expression for pent-up feelings of nationalism. The Swedish commitment to world peace and the Swedish spirit of consensus, as concretely translated into welfare policy and industrial peace, could be seen as two sides of a specifically Swedish feeling for the common good. It was something that you could be proud of as a Swede, in a modest and befitting way, without blushing or feeling ashamed. Sweden was a city of reason and benevolence, a city on the hill. Down there other nations sullied their hands and consciences. Up here morality, or perhaps the double standard of morality, remained immaculate. Strangely enough.

For to be honest, precisely the heavy moralization of the policy of neutrality ought to have made it almost unbearable to be Swedish. How could you, for example, without losing your self-respect, plead for the importance of Swedish neutrality in a Europe symbolized by the Berlin wall? Hard to understand. By closing your eyes, perhaps. Or playing the hypocrite. Or fantasizing. Or perhaps by combining these three strategies. The idea of a distinctive Swedish character, a Swedish birth-given right to practice a moralizing isolationism, has turned out to be strangely tenacious and long-lived. Thus, for example, Swedish opinion makers could defend their duty to bravely refuse taking a stand when Bosnian Muslims in the 90’s were subjected to fascist genocide.

And thus the hatred against Nato among many Swedish intellectuals is just as self-explanatory and automatic as their love for UN, in spite of the fact that the democratic claim of the former organization is greater than that of the latter. UN, after all, has a considerable number of dictatorships among its members. And so on. Thus the idea still lives on, of Sweden and the Swedes as a little more righteous than others, simply a little better. An expression of this is the shock that has befallen the country this autumn, after the Swedish Democrats were voted into the Riksdag.

It is true that the islamophobes of New Democracy sat there already in the early 90’s, and it is true that xenophobic parties for a long time have had considerable success in almost all of Europe. But still! How could it happen, here in Sweden? How have they managed to creep into our shining city? Well, you tell me. As “a first step toward the re-creation of a safe, Swedish Sweden”, SD wants Sweden to leave the European Union immediately, according to the party’s declaration of its guiding political principles on its home page. The pattern of thinking seems familiar