The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

by Michael Booth

The Finnish ruling classes continued their efforts to depict their lower orders as wanton boozers in the wake of the Second World War. The last thing the Finnish workforce should be doing was drowning their sorrows when there was a nation in need of rebuilding! As well as losing valuable agricultural land and prosperous towns to Russia following border changes, Finland was forced to pay heavy war reparations and desperately needed economic growth to pay for them. So, put down that bottle, Mika! Buck up, and get on with rebuilding the country!

In his essay ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, the late Yale political scientist Samuel Huntington pointed out that Finland bestrides one of the world’s key cultural fault lines, dividing the two civilisations of Christianity and Orthodoxy. In a sense, the Finns are forever torn between the history they share with Christian Europe thanks to the Swedish influence – the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and so on – and that of the Orthodox world, with its tsarist and communist systems.

Today, though their prominence is waning, the 300,000 or so Swedish Finns who live in Finland still exercise a surprising amount of influence in the higher echelons of the establishment and in industry (perhaps the most famous case being Björn ‘Nalle’ Wahlroos, an outspoken banker and one of the richest men in Finland, who has come to symbolise a particular kind of free-market-capitalist Swedish Finn).

But in the seventies the lefties were thought of as actually extremely unpatriotic – they would have sold the country to Moscow if they had the chance – but I never wanted anything to do with that.’

Many attributed Finland’s success at keeping Moscow at bay during the 1970s to one man: Urho Kekkonen. Initially as prime minister and then president for twenty-five years, he guided Finland along a diplomatic tightrope up until his resignation due to ill health, aged eighty, in 1981.

FINLAND’S MOST LAUDED achievement of the Post Cold War era has been its education system, not that you would know it if it had been left to the Finns to broadcast the fact. Naturally, it took foreigners to point it out that Finland has the best schools in the world.

basic understanding of Finland’s history had led me to expect a much more insecure, culturally superficial nation. Instead I found a people possessed of a steely reserve that was more than just stamina or sisu, more than mere macho tolerance for pain and endurance; the people here have demonstrated a bottomless reserve of resilience, resourcefulness and pride, as well as an agile political pragmatism honed over many centuries.

We have finally arrived at the central piece of our Nordic puzzle – the hub, the crux, the Rosetta Stone by which so much of the cultural, political, social and inter-relational history of Scandinavia can be deciphered. This is the country which has done more than any other to define how the rest of the world sees Scandinavia: as modern, liberal, collectivist and – kräftskiva parties aside – more than a little dull.

The abiding view of the Swedes from their neighbours to the south is of a stiff, humourless, rule-obsessed and dull crowd who inhabit a suffocatingly conformist society, and chew tobacco. The Danes love to tell each other stories of Swedish prissiness, drone-like obedience, or pedantry.

Please, though, a moment’s silence for SAAB. It enriched the tapestry of the motoring world over the years, but fell victim to American corporate mismanagement and its own wilful quirkiness. When news of its demise was announced, a million architects and graphic designers sighed deeply and turned to their Audi brochures.

This desire to avoid causing friction extends from Swedish politics (to the extent that dissenting voices can be undemocratically silenced, as we will discover), to the corporate world, famously characterised by its consensus culture.

Hiring Danes to kick butt is quite common practice in Swedish companies, apparently. Swedish managers are just too consensus-orientated to push through unpopular decisions.

In Sweden, the concept of ‘fashionably late’ is akin to ‘fashionably flatulent’.

Stockholm is exceptionally beautiful, Scandinavia’s most impressive capital – like Edinburgh crossed with Venice. At least, that’s how it looks on the waterfront, but behind the granite grandeur lies a grim concrete zone not unlike Croydon. As Andrew Brown writes, central Stockholm ‘was almost entirely rebuilt and dehumanized in the Sixties’.

‘From 1971 to 1981 Malmö’s population declined by almost forty thousand, but they were still building four thousand flats a year, so there was lots of empty space.

Thanks in part to the media attention it received in the run-up to Denmark’s 2001 general election, the DPP became the third-party power broker in the Danish coalition government, and went on to use their position to get numerous draconian immigration proposals passed into law.

The Danish newspaper editor Anne Knudsen agreed with her compatriot: ‘In Sweden you have a surprising level of vindictiveness in the political discourse,’ she told me. ‘Of course, the Sweden Democrats are awful, but the mainstream really hates them; there is this hatred of people who do not share their tolerant opinions. I shouldn’t say totalitarianism, but

They called it Folkhemmet (the ‘People’s Home’). It was the most generous, progressive and extensive welfare state in the world. Folkhemmet ensured its citizens never went hungry or homeless, that they were cared for when they were sick, and provided for when they grew old. For much of the twentieth century the Swedes enjoyed full employment, some of the highest wages in the world, ample national holidays, and unprecedented economic prosperity.

Hand in hand with the unions (until recently, if you joined one of the larger Swedish unions, you automatically became a member of the Social Democratic party), and together with a small group of industrialists, the party set wages and ensured that Swedish industry was almost completely free from labour disputes (at least up until the national strikes of 1980).

What Happened to Sweden?

No figure epitomised this self-righteous, finger-wagging approach more than the Social Democratic prime minister of the seventies and eighties, Olof Palme.

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.

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.

The truth is that the great Swedish social democratic adventure hit the buffers a couple of decades ago when the country’s economy tanked and the then government introduced quite radical privatisation programmes, reduced taxes and began to tackle the welfare state.

To achieve authentic, sustained happiness, above all else you need to be in charge of your life, to be in control of who you want to be, and be able to make the appropriate changes if you are not.