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April 7 - April 18, 2024
If the Finns really have the best education system, how come they still think all Swedish men are gay?
And why do all of them hate the Swedes?
Back then, I had come to think of the Danes as essentially decent, hard-working, law-abiding people, rarely prone to public expressions of . . . well, anything much, let alone happiness
Scandinavia, though, really is terra incognita. The Romans didn’t bother with it. Charlemagne couldn’t care less.
You could even go as far as to argue that we Britons are, essentially, Scandinavians. Well, a bit.
The Danes are masters of revels such as these. They take their partying very seriously, are enthusiastic boozers, committed communal singers, and highly sociable when among friends. They give good fest, as they call it.
More than 754,000 Danes aged between fifteen and sixty-four – over 20 per cent of the working population – do no work whatsoever and are supported by generous unemployment or disability benefits. The New York Times has called Denmark ‘The best place on earth to be laid off’, with unemployment benefits of up to 90 per cent of previous wages for up to two years (until recent reforms, it was eleven years).
Denmark has a much more laissez-faire attitude to booze than the rest of the region; there is no state-owned alcohol monopoly here as there is in the other four Nordic countries. In Carlsbergland alcohol is sold in every supermarket and corner shop.
Though Denmark did manage to hold on to Norway for a few hundred years more, henceforth the Swedes would play a far more proactive role in the region’s history, mostly by holding Denmark’s head in the toilet bowl while Britain and Germany queued up to pull the handle.
Christian IV was fortunate not to have lived to witness one of the darkest days of Danish loss. By the terms of the Treaty of Roskilde, signed a decade later in 1658, the Danes were forced by the Swedes to relinquish what are today the southern Swedish regions of Skåne, Blekinge and Halland, as well as the Baltic island of Bornholm (the latter was eventually returned and remains Danish).
In other words, while the Swedes forged forwards with their great modernist, progressive social agenda, the Danes retreated, seeking refuge in their parochial, National Romantic vision. Parochialism remains the Danes’ defining characteristic,1 but their radically recalibrated sense of identity and national pride has created a curious duality best described as a kind of ‘humble pride’, though many often mistake it for smugness.
The Danes do seem to have an uncommon facility to get on with each other regardless of age, class or outlook. Egality comes easily to them.
handshake is free. Anyone who has tried to conduct business in France or America will have soon become aware of the massive inconveniences involved with living in a society where the default setting is to assume the other person is trying to pull your trousers down.
Over half of the Danish adult population – as much as two-thirds according to some estimates – either works in the public sector or is financially supported by it in the form of benefit payments.
Active in Danish politics since the 1960s, Lykketoft was there, or thereabouts, when most of the key decisions that shaped contemporary Denmark were made, not least those that have seen the tax burden double from 25 per cent of GDP in 1960 to its current world record of just under 50 per cent today.
I point out that Sweden’s economy is doing significantly better than Denmark’s, and has been doing so for many years. Denmark is slowly sliding down the BNP charts while Sweden is holding its own.
Though the Nordic people have largely grown out of religion, boasting the lowest church attendance of all the Christian countries, and though its impact on society today is little discussed, their particular form of Christianity, Lutheranism, has been a formative influence on the Nordic psyche and remains fundamental to the way people here behave and relate to one another.
Once Luther had challenged the Catholic hegemony there was no looking back, at least as far as the Scandinavians were concerned. Catholicism was virtually eradicated within a few decades.
The need to cling together, to identify shared values and stick resolutely to them regardless of prevailing winds or fashion, could well have its roots in the history of Danish territorial loss. They clung together on their flat little life raft, and soon learned not to rock the boat. Hygge is a highly effective way to skirt controversial topics, or sweep unhappy memories under the carpet
On the face of it, the Danes have considerably less to be happy about than most of us, yet, when asked, they still insist that they are the happiest of us all.
Where they are unique, or at least supreme, is in their trust and social cohesion.
The sense is that the Danes, conscious that they have an extremely limited talent pool when it comes to international statesmen, are very reluctant to attack their prime candidate.
This started me thinking: what would happen if you were to extract the very essence of Nordicness to create some kind of ultimate Nordic society? Would you end up with a society that was even more successful, even happier than the Danes’? Or could a country perhaps be too Nordic? It turned out someone has already tried this.
YOU COULD ARGUE that Iceland shouldn’t even be in this book – the Icelanders probably would. After all, their country was founded by people who wanted to get away from Scandinavia, and they went to a great deal of inconvenience to achieve this, so it hardly seems fair to drag them back again.
And in terms of gaining an insight into Nordic exceptionalism, the only aspect in which the Icelanders could be described as exceptional in recent years is their economic mismanagement, which isn’t the kind of exceptionalism we are looking for.
Most of all, the chief reason Iceland is worthy of our attention is that its recent financial escapades are highly revealing of the latent dangers of the classic small, homogenous, tightly knit Nordic social model. A country can, it turns out, be too Nordic, and Iceland is that country.
It was the first time tear gas had been used in Iceland since protests against joining NATO in 1949. The right-wing coalition, led by Prime Minister Geir Haarde and in power since the 1940s, were finally ousted.
After all, much of the success of the Nordic countries has been ascribed to three key factors: their homogeneity, their egalitarianism, and their social cohesion, all of which Iceland boasted in abundance, in some cases to a greater degree than any of its Nordic siblings.
Lewis drew a direct causal link to the economic crash from the introduction of fishing quotas in the early 1980s.
The Danes have a saying about the Icelanders which long predates the economic crisis, but which seems more apt than ever: ‘They wear shoes which are too big for them, and keep falling over their shoelaces.’
Perhaps this inbred sense of superiority was one of the reasons why all criticism of their banking sector was so easily quashed in Iceland. Any criticism from outside was dismissed as bullying, as was the case in 2006 when the Danish national bank published a report warning that Iceland’s banks were on the path to oblivion. The Icelanders dismissed this as jealousy.
The Guðmundssons were among roughly fifteen families, collectively known as ‘The Octopus’, whose ‘blue hand’ had a grip on much of the Icelandic economy. Several of them have now left Iceland in shame, while others are keeping a low profile.
In a country with only 319,000 people, everyone is pretty much guaranteed to know everyone else within one or fewer degrees of separation, and Iceland’s ruling class does seem to have had an especially incestuous history.
For centuries Iceland’s intellectual class were almost exclusively educated in Copenhagen, and even today the Danish capital is an important – perhaps still the most important – cultural metropolis for Icelanders.
We have established that Icelanders are, essentially, western Norwegians with a touch of Celtic blood. So how come, when they were tempted with easy money from the international markets, they proved unable to exercise the strict fiscal self-control that their Norwegian ancestors have displayed with their recent oil wealth? Could it be that the Icelanders, for all their Lutheran, social-democratic, Nordic roots, had their heads turned by the free-market-capitalist American dream?
As a result, their genetic homogeneity and small, tightly connected population didn’t translate into trustworthiness, accountability, openness, a strong civil society, long-termism, individual self control – all of those things that have made the Nordic countries so successful. Instead, their genetic disposition towards high risk and a historic lack of Protestant inhibitions created the perfect climate for a corrupt, nepotistic, anti-democratic economic free-for-all.
The split from Denmark and the writing of the Norwegian constitution in 1814, which is what they are supposed to be commemorating today, was only really the beginning of a long, slow, rather low-key effort to wrestle free from Sweden’s grasp that did not culminate in full independence until 1905.
Syttende Mai may largely be a post-war revival of a national identity contrived in the late nineteenth century, a romanticised imagining of rural traditions that probably never really existed, but there is no doubting the sincerity of those who take part.
While the ever-sensible Swedes sensibly celebrate after their exams, in Norway they tie one off before their exams, which is either a mark of collective confidence or utter nihilism,
‘Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.’ Joan Didion
Prior to 22/7, as the attacks are more commonly referred to in Norway, the country had the strongest mainstream right-wing party in all of the region, and one of the strongest in Europe: the Fremskrittsparti, or Progress Party.
As we have heard, since I visited Eriksen that second time, Norway has had a general election. The comedians are now in power – the Progress Party being part of the new ‘blue’ governing coalition. The party started out in the early seventies as an anti-tax movement. Today, it is run on a hybrid right-wing/welfare-state platform of a type which can seem quite odd from a UK or US perspective, blending as it does calls for increased public spending, with emphasis on care for the elderly, together with more conventionally right-wing fear-mongering about non-Western immigrants. It is a similar
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HAD TO leave Oslo, ‘that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon them,’ as Knut Hamsun puts it in the opening line of his masterwork Sult or Hunger.
The success of modern Norway – of its welfare state, its virtually unparalleled standard of living, and its strong regional infrastructure, services and random, expensive and architecturally innovative museums – is to a great extent founded on oil.
In early 1965, representatives from each of the three governments met to thrash out a deal to divide up the North Sea shelf, a deal that was agreed and ratified at some haste in March of that year – greatly, it would transpire, to the Norwegians’ advantage.
Back to the North Sea negotiations. In truth, the Danes didn’t do too badly out of their own little patch of the sea bed. The so-called Dan Field began producing oil in 1972 and the country became self-sufficient in oil by 1991. At their output peak in 2004 the Danes were producing around 142 million barrels a year.
The Greeks are a rather extreme example of a nation corrupted by cheap money, but the truth is the Norwegians have been somewhat corrupted too. To depict them as paragons of parsimony, untainted by their fantastic windfall, like the lottery winner who returns to his factory job and his usual place at the bar unaffected by the millions in the bank, is slightly misleading.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Norway’s social structure is the fact that about a third of all Norwegians of working age do nothing at all. Over a million of them live on money from the State, the majority of them pensioners, but also a sizable number (340,000) on disability, unemployment or sickness benefits – proportionally the largest number in Europe. The picture is equally worrying for Norwegian children, who rank below the European average in terms of literacy, mathematics and sciences, with the trend worsening over the last ten years.
was neither the first nor the last time I would have cause to marvel at the Finns’ famed dependability in a crisis. (I might add that, while I was trying to get my voice recorder to work, the lovely PR woman for Rovaniemi who accompanied us on the visit had called the Finnish national broadcasting company and they had promised to bring me a replacement machine within the hour. I remind you, this was up in the Arctic Circle.)
He blames the early twentieth-century Finnish temperance movement that grew out of a class struggle between the ruling classes and the emerging industrial working-class labour movements. The working classes couldn’t be trusted with the vote because they were blotto most of the time, at least according to the establishment. By way of a response, those labour movements moved to self-impose mandatory abstinence in the form of prohibition, but the plan had a flaw of which both sides were well aware: in those days the Finns drank even less than they do now, around 2 litres per annum.
