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

by Michael Booth

‘Authentic love and friendship is possible only between individuals who are independent and equal’,

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.

In other words, in eradicating social ills, the Social Democratic party also smothered its people’s motivation, ambition and spirit.

So, Sweden is probably not a society in which eccentrics, oddballs, contrarians or nonconformists are likely to flourish.

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 of wages guaranteed by law, to be taken whenever the parents feel like it up until the child is eight years old.

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.

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.

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?

Suicide and Scandinavia US psychiatrist

But Daun suggests that the women are not so much pressurised into leaving their children as escaping from them.

the truth is they are going back to their jobs because they find them more satisfying than staying at home with their children.

Could this be part of the reason why Sweden suffers from comparatively high rates of juvenile delinquency and petty crime, for instance?

‘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.’

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.”

Scandinavian class structures tend to be far more subtle, income and status differences far less marked.

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,

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

I am talking, of course, about the absurd, anti-democratic carnival that is the monarchy.

the Scandinavians are actually rather fond of their royal families.

‘The wine is terrible, the people without temperament, and even the sun radiates no warmth,’ the arriviste king is alleged to have said.

has to be said that the main topic of conversation on that front is how annoying the Swedes are.

‘We really like the Danes, they are lovely people,’ Åke Daun told me. ‘There are Danish characterisations of the Swedes, saying we are more efficient and hard-working, more serious and so on, while we think the Danes are charming, warm, lovely, a little chaotic. We envy their lack of alcohol restrictions.’ ‘The Danes have always been seen as the more easygoing, cosmopolitan, less working, more drinking, more frivolous people; less, shall we say, industrious than Swedes,’

many of the Swedes I spoke to seemed oddly oblivious to how disliked the Swedes are. I suspect they might be taken aback by the extent to which the Danes bad-mouth them to anyone who’ll listen.

pointing out that the Swedes could afford to remain aloof from the Nordic trash-talk as they have, by just about every measurement, ended up richer, and more successful than their neighbours.

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.

but to pluck out one sobering statistic, as I write Sweden’s ratio of tax revenue to GDP is 47.9 percent – the fourth highest in the world (with Denmark third).

One deeper issue did trouble me about Sweden’s long-term prospects: in rejecting their Lutheran principles to embrace consumerism and the various temptations of the modern world, had the Swedes perhaps thrown the puritanical baby out with the globalisation bath water? Put differently, consider all those old agrarian principles of self-sufficiency, caution, modesty, equality and parsimony, the instinctive urge to compromise, to cooperate and share – the very characteristics that laid the foundations for the Social Democratic experiment. Are these characteristics not inevitably, fatally eroded by increased wealth, consumerism, globalisation and urbanisation? Is the country’s great modern, urban experiment not de-stabilising the very foundations on which that modernity was constructed?

It is the only country in the world in which people over eighty years old make up over 5 per cent of the population (the global average is 1 per cent).

It has a highly developed state pension system which is expected to be able to cope with future demographic challenges; the IMF ranked Sweden seventh globally for its current elderly care and its future preparedness in terms of looking after an aging population.

transformed itself into a rather unique type of mixed economy, and introduced both some marked liberal economic tendencies and strict fiscal and banking controls.

there are historical skeletons in every closet, and yes, countries with homogenous, monocultural tendencies do tend to be a little too safe and dull, and insular. Looking to the future, the Nordic countries are also facing some serious challenges – aging populations, creaking welfare states, the ongoing integration of immigrant populations, and rising inequality. But it’s still Scandinavia. It is still the enviably rich, peaceful, harmonious and progressive place it has long been.