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

by Michael Booth

For all its scenic wonder, the cost of visiting Scandinavia coupled with its discouraging climate (not to mention the continuing existence of France) tend to dissuade most from holidaying here.

You will be familiar with the concept of ‘six degrees of separation’ – the idea that the world’s population (or Kevin Bacon’s co-stars) can be joined together by six relationships. In my experience, between Danes, the degree of separation is three, perhaps fewer. When two Danes who do not know each other meet at a social gathering they will take, on average, no more than eight minutes to discover either a direct mutual acquaintance, or at the very least a friend-of-a-friend connection (I have actually timed this). More than three degrees of separation is genuinely rare.

All of the Nordic countries have high levels of trust, but the Danes are the most trusting people on the planet. In a 2011 survey by the OECD, 88.3 per cent of Danes expressed a high level of trust in others, more than any other nationality (the next places in the list were filled by Norway, Finland and Sweden respectively, with the UK a creditable 10th, but the US way down in 21st out of 30 countries surveyed).

The theory goes that, if there is trust in society, then its bureaucracies will be more straightforward and effective – the cost and time of transactions between companies will be reduced and less time will be spent paying lawyers to draw up costly contracts, and in litigation. A 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.

It is true that the Danes are not the most adventurous of people. Some might backpack around South-East Asia or South America in their twenties, but they tend to stick closer to home thereafter. As we’ve seen with the annual summer-house exodus, many are quite happy to go on holiday an hour away. Come July they clamber aboard their Citroën Berlingos and head to their wooden houses on the coast, and that’ll do them.

Folkelig pervades a great deal of Danish popular culture and life. One must remain vigilant at all times if one is to have any hope of avoiding it. I failed to do this when I agreed to attend the residential choir week in Jutland I mentioned earlier. This was the single most intense period of exposure to folkelig I have ever experienced in my time in Denmark, involving six days singing popular hits of the seventies and eighties together with four hundred retired public-sector workers. By midway through the second day I was experiencing a profound identity crisis; by the third day I was making plans to leave Denmark for ever; but by the fourth day I had become strangely becalmed by the easy-listening arrangements and collectivist atmosphere.

Perhaps Danish happiness is not really happiness at all, but something much more valuable and durable: contentedness, being satisfied with your lot, low-level needs being met, higher expectations being kept in check.