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

by Michael Booth

I thought back to the previous day’s soul-sapping adventures in my new home. In the morning there had been the usual dispiriting encounter with the sullen checkout girl at the local supermarket who, as was her habit, had rung up the cost of my prohibitively expensive, low-grade produce without acknowledging my existence. Outside, other pedestrians had tutted audibly when I’d crossed the street on a red light; there was no traffic, but in Denmark preempting the green man is a provocative breach of social etiquette. I had cycled home through the drizzle to find a tax bill relieving me of an alarming proportion of that month’s income, having along the way provoked the fury of a motorist who had threatened to kill me because I had infringed the no-left-turn rule (literally, he had rolled down his window and, in the manner and accent of a Bond villain, shouted, “I vill kill you”). The evening’s prime-time TV entertainment had consisted of a program on how to tackle excessive chafing of cow udders, followed by a twenty-year-old episode of Murder, She Wrote, and then Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?—its titular, life-altering rhetoric somewhat undermined by the fact that a million kroner are worth only around $180,000, which in Denmark is just enough to buy you a meal out with change for the cinema.

The Danes were Lutheran by nature, if not by ritual observance: they shunned ostentation, distrusted exuberant expressions of emotion, and kept themselves to themselves. Compared with, say, the Thais or Puerto Ricans or even the British, they were a frosty, solemn bunch. I would go as far as to say that of the fifty or so nationalities that I had encountered in my travels up to that point, the Danes would probably have ranked in the bottom quarter as among the least demonstrably joyful people on earth, along with the Swedes, the Finns, and the Norwegians. Perhaps it was all the antidepressants they were taking that were fogging their perception, I thought to myself. I had read a recent report that said that, in Europe, only the Icelanders consumed more happy pills than the Danes, and the rate at which they were popping them was increasing. Was Danish happiness nothing more than oblivion sponsored by Prozac?

By the time Oprah descended from the heavens I had actually left Denmark, having finally driven my wife to the end of her tether with my incessant moaning about her homeland: the punishing weather, the heinous taxes, the predictable monoculture, the stifling insistence on lowest-common-denominator consensus, the fear of anything or anyone different from the norm, the distrust of ambition and disapproval of success, the appalling public manners, and the remorseless diet of fatty pork, salty licorice, cheap beer, and marzipan.

So, Denmark doesn’t always come first in all the categories of these wellness, satisfaction, and happiness surveys, but it is invariably thereabouts, and if it isn’t number one, then another Nordic country almost inevitably is. Occasionally New Zealand or Japan might elbow their way into the picture (or perhaps Singapore, or Switzerland) but, overall, the message from all of these reports, which continue to be enthusiastically and unquestioningly reported in the media, was as clear as a glass of ice-cold schnapps: the Scandinavians were not only the happiest and most contented people in the world, but also the most peaceful, tolerant, egalitarian, progressive, prosperous, modern, liberal, liberated, best educated, and most technologically advanced, with the best pop music, coolest TV detectives, and the best restaurants to boot.

After some years of watching the Danish happiness bandwagon roll relentlessly on from a distance—interspersed with regular visits that, if anything, only served to confuse me more (Weather still shitty? Check. Tax rate still over 50 percent? Yep. Shops closed whenever you need them? Oh, yes)—I moved back there. This wasn’t some magnanimous gesture of forgiveness, nor a bold experiment to test the boundaries of human endurance: my wife wanted to move back to her homeland and, despite every molecule of my being screaming, “Don’t you remember what it was actually like to live there, Michael?” I have learned from harrowing experience over the years that it is usually best in the long run if I just do what she says.

No matter where I turned for my news, I could not escape the (Iceland aside) almost exclusively adulatory coverage of all things Scandinavian. If our newspapers, TV, and radio were to be believed, the Nordic countries simply could not put a foot wrong. These were the promised lands of equality, easy living, quality of life, and home baking. But I had seen a different side actually living up here in the cold, gray north and, though there were many aspects to Scandinavian living that were indeed exemplary, and from which the rest of the world could learn a great deal, I grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of nuance in the picture being painted of the region.

What makes the current Nordic mania so unlikely is that during the twentieth century the popular cultural influences tended mostly to flow in the opposite direction. Socialize with Scandinavian males of a certain age, for instance, and the conversation will at some point almost certainly turn to the sketches of Monty Python or the Police Academy movies. The women, meanwhile, will share misty-eyed memories of the male cast members of ER, or of their time working as au pairs in New York. More recently, a whole new generation are all familiar with Homeland, Mad Men, and House of Cards. The Scandinavians are totally up to speed with every aspect of the US political scene. I wonder how many US congressmen could name the Danish foreign minister?

Also, though stereotypical depictions usually include reference to their sexual liberalism and physical beauty, somehow they still manage to project an image of being pious, sanctimonious Lutherans. It is a neat trick to be thought of as being both deeply hot and off-puttingly frigid, isn’t it? And it doesn’t help that the Scandinavians are not very forward when it comes to coming forward: they aren’t ones to boast. It is against their rules (literally, as we will discover).

“Why do you think people will want to know about us?” they asked. “We are all so boring and stiff.” “There must be more interesting people in the world to write about. Why don’t you go to southern Europe?” It seems Scandinavians tend to regard themselves rather as we do: functional and worthy, but plagued by an unremitting dullness that tends to discourage further investigation. Industrious, trustworthy, and politically correct, the Scandinavians are the accountant at the party, five countries’ worth of local government officials, finger-wagging social workers, and humorless party poopers.

“If you had to be reborn anywhere in the world as a person with average talents and income, you would want to be a Viking,” proclaimed British news weekly The Economist, ever so slightly backhandedly, in a special Nordic-themed edition. But where were the discussions about Nordic totalitarianism and how uptight the Swedes are; about how the Norwegians have been corrupted by their oil wealth to the point where they can’t even be bothered to peel their own bananas (really: we’ll get to that later); how the Finns are self-medicating themselves into oblivion; how the Danes are in denial about their debt, their vanishing work ethic, and their place in the world; and how the Icelanders are, essentially, feral?

The Danes have a refreshingly laid-back approach to their work-life balance, which, as we will see, has had major consequences—both positive (the happiness) and potentially negative (sometimes you do really need to buckle down and do some work: during a global recession, for example). I have met few “live to work” types in this country; indeed many Danes—particularly those who work in the public sector—are frank and unapologetic about their ongoing efforts to put in the barest minimum hours required to support lives of acceptable comfort. The Danes work almost half the number of hours per week they did a century ago, and significantly fewer than the rest of Europe: 1,559 hours a year compared to the EU average of 1,749 hours and the US average of 2,087 (although the Greeks work 2,032 hours, so clearly, this is not a cast-iron measure of productivity). According to a 2011 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study encompassing thirty countries, the Danes were second only to the Belgians in the laziness stakes—that’s globally.

Once upon a time, the Danes ruled all of Scandinavia. They like their fairy tales, the Danes, but this one is true. The Kalmar Union of 1397 was an historic high point for the Danes, with the then queen, Margaret I, ruling a loosely unified Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The union held for over a century until, in 1520, the then Danish king, Christian II, rashly beheaded around eighty Swedish nobles in the so-called Stockholm Bloodbath, something of a diplomatic faux pas.

Improbably, considering his background, it is thanks to Gini that we have what many believe is the single most revealing piece of evidence—statistical or otherwise—for the root cause of Nordic exceptionalism, not to mention the most helpful guide to answering the ultimate secular question of our age: how to be happy. This is the Gini Coefficient, a statistical method for analyzing the distribution of wealth in a nation, which he introduced to the world in 1921. The Gini Coefficient quantifies how large a percentage of the total income of a society must be redistributed in order to achieve a perfectly equal distribution of wealth. It remains to this day a brilliantly concise way to express the inequality of a group of people as a simple figure (although technically, I am told, it is not actually a coefficient).

If Gini is the best indicator of income equality, and if income equality is the key ingredient for a social utopia, then why is it the Danes, the southernmost members of the Nordic clan, the ones with the highest taxes, the most meager natural resources, the worst health, the most ignoble history, the very worst pop music, and the weakest economy, who are so regularly held to be the happiest people in the world, and not the more equal and, by most parameters, the much more successful Swedes? I wondered what to make of this, so I rang Richard Wilkinson. “Well, my answer is going to be a little bit disappointing,” said Professor Wilkinson with a sigh. “I don’t really think measures of happiness internationally are necessarily very dependable. For instance, for an American to say they are not happy sounds like an admission of failure, but for a Japanese person it sounds like bragging to say they are, so I think one has to be very careful. We find there are systematic problems with subjective measures related to inequality.

“Do Danes really leave their bikes unlocked?” I was once asked by a British radio interviewer with an especially rose-tinted view of the region. Not in Copenhagen, they don’t, but it is true that, out in the countryside, front doors, cars, and bicycles are often left unsecured. If you drive around the country lanes you will find fruit and vegetables on sale in stalls to be paid for via honesty boxes, and, as I have mentioned, people do leave their kids sleeping in strollers outside cafés and shops, even in the cities, and they let their children commute to school alone, often by bicycle, from as young as six or seven years old. But beyond these few examples, I had to admit, I couldn’t really come up with much more evidence that the Danes were any more trusting—or, by implication, trustworthy—than the rest of us. After all, one encounters honesty boxes in rural England, too, and you need only open a Danish newspaper to find plenty of stories about Danish swindlers, smugglers, crooks, and fraudsters. (In fact, when talking all this over with my Danish publisher, he said that it was the Swedes he really trusted the most. “They simply don’t have the imagination to lie or cheat,” he said.)

Top of this camp’s agenda is the downscaling of Denmark’s welfare state, which they feel has become unsustainable, and the reduction of Denmark’s taxes; they place less emphasis on economic equality and more on motivating society’s wealth-generators to improve Denmark’s poor productivity growth. This second camp argue that, far from creating the economic equality that Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia enjoy today, the region’s welfare state systems were actually founded on a broader social equality, which existed long before the public sector and high taxes. Bjørnskov claims that research into prewar trust levels shows that the Danes have always been a trusting people, and that trust and social cohesion prepared the way for the welfare state, not the other way around. “If you want to redistribute wealth, then it is easier in a high-trust society because you believe that the money will be distributed well to deserving people. We’ve always had trust, and this trust is the cornerstone of the welfare state,” he told me. “Yes, today Denmark has low inequality and the greatest happiness, but if there was a correlation you would also expect it to be true for other countries with low inequality. But it’s not.”

As for the Vikings, they rampaged, raped, and pillaged, had slaves and kings, and wrote epic, boastful poems about themselves. None of this can be said of their modern descendants (aside from the kings, with whom we will deal later). It seemed a little too convenient that the Scandinavians had inherited only the positive traits of their forefathers. Yet still, I had to admit that my faith in the value of wealth distribution had been slightly shaken.

The second curious anomaly about these supposedly careful, parsimonious Lutheran Danes is their gargantuan, world-leading private debt levels. Though Denmark’s national debt is relatively modest at half the EU average, according to a recent IMF warning, the Danish people have personally indebted themselves up to their Gucci glasses. Today, Danish households have the highest ratio of debt-to-income of any country in the Western world: the Danes owe, on average, 310 percent of their annual income, more than double that of the Portuguese or Spanish, and quadruple that of the Italians. An astonishing figure, yet something rarely discussed in the Danish media or at Danish dining tables. And, of course, this doesn’t stop the Danes from sucking their teeth at those devious, lazy, “live for today” southern Europeans.

This was all fine as long as the value of the properties continued to soar, but then came the inevitable bust; house prices plummeted from 2008 onward, leaving many with negative equity. Today, just about the only people in Denmark who are solvent are the pensioners who paid off their mortgages before the interest-free loans were introduced; the massively indebted thirty- to forty-year-olds are, I believe the correct economic term is, “screwed,” not least because the Danes’ productivity has never come even remotely close to keeping up with their spending.

But cold statistics don’t always cast Denmark in such a glowing light. In general terms, the United Nations Human Development Index—which assesses how developed a nation is based on such things as life expectancy, literacy, and gross national income per capita—places Denmark in sixteenth place, below countries like Ireland and South Korea and all the other Nordic countries save for Finland. More specifically, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the most widely accepted international ranking list for school standards, takes a particularly dim view of Denmark’s education system. Its most recent report, in 2009, placed Denmark in the bottom third of the top thirty countries in most of the key categories, below even Britain in the sciences, which is really saying something (in contrast to Finland, which is invariably at, or near, the top). “Who cares?” said Ove Kaj Pedersen when I put Denmark’s poor PISA performance to him. “PISA is measuring something that doesn’t really count in the Danish situation. If you take our social skills, the way of collaborating, empathy, the ability to work in teams, Denmark comes in number one.” Pedersen—who I think it’s fair to say might have a bit of an agenda, having been chairman of the board of education in Denmark for many years—pointed out that in modern Denmark, with its profusion of small or medium companies with their flat hierarchies, these social skills were far more important than high scores in “the three Rs.”

If I can return to my choir metaphor for a moment, as I discovered during the twiddly bits of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” when you are but one singer in a choir of hundreds, it is really quite easy to contribute nothing yet remain part of the group. Switch off and mouth the words and no one will call you out because they are too busy concentrating on how they are sounding. It is easy to coast. There is a growing feeling that too many Danes have been doing just that for too many years. The most high-profile case in the media recently concerned “Dovne Robert” (Lazy Robert), a well-educated, physically able man in his thirties who has been signing on for the dole for more than eleven years, playing the system like a maestro with his Stradivarius. There was a predictable outcry, which does seem to have moved the debate forward a little, but Robert now makes a nice living as a media figure so is, essentially, still unemployed.

Does he not accept the Right’s argument that taxes are a disincentive to work, to innovate, to take risks? Naturally, he does not. When one looks at middle-class disposable income in the United States and Denmark, once things like childcare and health insurance are taken into consideration, they are on a par, he says. In Denmark you get all these things for free—75 percent of childcare costs are paid for by the State, along with health care, of course, and much elder care—while in the United States you pay lower taxes but then have to pay for these services. It is merely a matter of at what stage you pay for them. “The real difference is that those who have a high risk of being ill or unemployed are better off in our system, and those who have a very high income are not. They are better off in other parts of the world. But does that mean that those high achievers, highly skilled people, migrate from Denmark to avoid tax? That’s the real question.” Skilled politicians rarely ask questions to which they do not already have answers, and Lykketoft has one. There is no evidence to support this, he says. The wealth generators are staying in Denmark—there is no brain drain.

Many would point out that the key to Sweden’s success is that it slashed taxes, greatly reduced its public sector, and underwent a massive privatization program in the 1990s. Denmark is only just now beginning to be forced to consider such reforms. Lykketoft disagrees. “Yes, but they have taken advantage of devaluation during the financial crisis and they have sold their large stock of public companies, and that cannot continue.” In other words, according to Lykketoft, Sweden’s recent economic performance is based on external factors, and the selling of the family silver. Lykketoft is one of the most highly regarded politicians in Denmark, respected across Denmark’s political spectrum, but I can’t help feeling he has his head, if not buried in the sand, then at least sporting some hefty noise-canceling headphones.

is where my parents-in-law live, I hasten to add). I know Denmark’s peninsula less well, largely because every time I have visited I have departed shortly afterward wondering why I ever went there in the first place. Jutland is windy and smells of manure. The people are blunt and chippy, mistrustful of Copenhageners and their fancy ways, and perhaps a little narrow-minded. The men wear denim dungarees and ride farty little motor scooters. The women, it has to be said, are staggeringly beautiful (particularly in Aalborg, for some reason), but Jutland offers little by way of cultural entertainment or natural beauty that you can’t get on Zealand. (Aside that is, so I’m told, from a brothel where those with a taste for, let’s call it, “pleasures of the fur,” can indulge.)

In the well-appointed visitor center across the road from the churchyard where the stones stand, they were selling the usual Viking tat—bottles of mead, paper napkins decorated with runes, CDs of Templar music—while an exhibition charted the various, largely fruitless archaeological excavations that had taken place there. The Danes have been searching for royal remains among the Jelling stones for centuries, but only ever seem to find Obélix-style menhirs.

But I am afraid to say that over the years I have come to detest hygge somewhat. It wasn’t the cheap, fizzy beer (how did they ever have the nerve to claim it was “probably the best”? It’s like claiming Wonder Bread is the best bread), the curried herring, or the communal singing in which the Danes inevitably indulge when more than two of them gather together and which can drag out a formal Danish dinner to interminable lengths, that ultimately turned me against hygge; it was more hygge’s tyrannical, relentless drive toward middle-ground consensus; its insistence on the avoidance of any potentially controversial topics of conversation; its need to keep things light and breezy—the whole comfortable, self-congratulatory, petit bourgeois smugness of it all.

“When people hygge, they engage in a mutual sheltering of each other from the pressures of competition and social evaluation.” In this way hygge can seem like self-administered social gagging, characterized more by a self-satisfied sense of its own exclusivity than notions of shared conviviality. Linnet also wrote that hygge “acts as a vehicle for social control, establishes its own hierarchy of attitudes, and implies a negative stereotyping of social groups who are perceived as unable to create hygge.” The inference here is that only Danes really know how to have a properly hyggelig time; pity those poor foreigners with their la-di-da cocktail parties, their gladiatorial dinner-party discussions, and sophisticated soirées.

From a British perspective, the Danes’ enthusiasm for their flag can be quite unsettling—and I always find it odd that the Danes can be quite condescending about American patriotism and their relationship to the Stars and Stripes. When you spot the Dannebrog on the packaging of innumerable products in Danish supermarkets (everything from potatoes to dish liquid), or flying from buses on the occasion of some minor royal’s birthday, it can sometimes seem like the entire country has been set-designed by Leni Riefenstahl. But the truth about the Danes’ love of their flag is not as sinister as first impressions might have you believe. Though the Dannebrog has been slightly tainted in recent years by the right-wing Danish People’s Party’s xenophobic nationalism (awhile back they attempted to pass a law to put the Danish flag on car license plates, but failed), the Danes do not see their flag-waving as a nationalistic gesture. It’s just, well, hyggelig.

If I am honest, the real goal of my Jutland odyssey was to buy my very own Lego Death Star. I had hoped that, here in the bosom of the Lego corporation, it might be a little cheaper than in Lego’s flagship store on Strøget, the main shopping street in Copenhagen. Surely Legoland would offer a discount for the faithful who had made the pilgrimage through the Jutlandish hinterlands. Finally, I found it. That receptacle of cherished memories and childhood dreams. On its front was a picture of the famous and magnificent orb of evil rendered with uncanny perfection in knobbly plastic bricks. Gingerly, breathlessly, I turned the box over in my hands trying to find the price, transported back thirty years by the familiar tinkling sounds as hundreds of pieces shifted around inside. A tear welled. And then I found it: six hundred dollars! For a box of colored plastic! Forget it.…

We Danes are a hard-pressed folk. No one pays as much tax as we do. No one works so much, no one has more physical illnesses as us, no one has more expensive cars, no one has more impossible children or worse schools. —Rasmus Bech, writing in Politiken, April 2012 Herr Bech might do well to check the figures for the Danes’ working hours (and he neglects to mention the awful weather), but, that aside, he does a fine job of highlighting key elements of the Danish happiness paradox. 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.

Over the years I have asked many Danes about these happiness surveys—whether they really believe that they are the global happiness champions—and I have yet to meet a single one of them who seriously believes it’s true. They appreciate the safety net of their welfare state, the way most things function well in their country, and all the free time they have, and they are proud of the recent international success of all the TV shows they have exported, but they tend to approach the subject of their much-vaunted happiness like the victims of a practical joke waiting to discover who the perpetrator is.

Here’s another convincing theory, posited by a Danish friend of mine: “We always come top of those surveys because they ask us at the beginning of the year what our expectations are,” he said. “Then they ask us at the end of the year whether those expectations were met. And because our expectations are so extremely low at the beginning of the year, they tend to get met more easily.” Could that be the secret of the Danes’ contentedness? Low expectations? It is true that, when asked how they expect the next year to pan out, the Danes do typically expect less than the rest of us, and when their low expectations are fulfilled, so are they. Happiness has never been an “inalienable right” in Denmark, so it could be that the Danes appreciate it all the more when it manifests itself—their turbulent history of loss has made them grateful for any crumbs of joy that come their way.

A few years ago, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southern Denmark, Kaare Christensen, published a slightly tongue-in-cheek overview of what he saw as the possible reasons for the Danes’ happiness, entitled “Why Danes Are Smug: A Comparative Study of Life Satisfaction in the European Union.” His explanations ranged from the fact that the Danes might have been drunk when responding to questionnaires to their surprise 1992 European Championship in soccer victory (not only did they beat Germany in the final, but it took place in Sweden: a joyous confluence of multiple revenge fantasies). But Christensen and his team also concluded that low expectations were key: “If expectations are unrealistically high they could also be the basis of disappointment and low life satisfaction,” writes Christensen. “Year after year they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark.”

This might well be another of the keys to the Danes’ happiness—and I suspect this applies to any kind of long-term happiness. Proper, deep, enduring joy usually requires a remarkable facility for denial, something which the Danes have in spades. I do not, of course, mean self-denial here. As we can conclude from their alcohol, tobacco, hash, and sugar intake, the Danes deny themselves few pleasures. I am talking, for instance, about their denial of what it costs to be Danish—the literal cost, via their taxes and the cost of goods in their shops but also the spiritual costs in terms of their relative lack of ambition and dynamism, the denial of those sometimes necessary conflicts, and the loss of freedom of expression and individualism denied them by Jante Law and hygge.

“In Denmark we do not raise the inventive, the hardworking, the ones with initiative, the successful or the outstanding, we create hopelessness, helplessness and the sacred, ordinary mediocrity.” He seems here to be echoing something else Mary Wollstonecraft observed. She wrote that the Danes’ love of money “does not render the people enterprising, as in America, but thrifty and cautious. I never, therefore, was in a capital where there was so little appearance of active industry,” later adding that “the Danes, in general, seem extremely averse to innovation.” As The Economist put it in their Nordic special edition, Scandinavia is a great place in which to be born … but only if you are average. If you are averagely talented, have average ambitions, average dreams, then you’ll do just fine, but if you are extraordinary, if you have big dreams, great visions, or are just a bit different, you will be crushed, if you do not emigrate first.

We assume they are more or less Scandinavian—a gentle people who just want everyone to have the same amount of everything. They are not. They have a feral streak in them, like a horse that’s just pretending to be broken. —Michael Lewis, “Wall Street on the Tundra,” Vanity Fair, April 2009 In 2009 the US journalist Michael Lewis wrote a now famous—and famously unflattering—article on Iceland for Vanity Fair, detailing everything from its deluded debt orgy to the rudeness of its men and, rather ungallantly, the plainness of its women. Iceland was, Lewis concluded, a macho, patriarchal, risk-prone society.

I drove onward until the terrifying majesty of Vatnajökull hove into view. This is Iceland’s largest glacier, 8,300 square kilometers and one kilometer deep. Lonely Planet tells me that it is three times the size of Luxembourg, which is only really useful if one has a decent grasp of the size of Luxembourg, which I don’t. Even from many miles away your eyes widen at the scale of it as it sprawls over the mountains like a great, frosted muffin-top, its white icing oozing down the valleys. Vatnajökull reaches the sea and crumbles into hundreds of icebergs at Jökulsárlón bay. As they proceed at a dignified pace into the Atlantic, these bus-size clumps of ice glow blue, as if lit from within. It is like watching dozens of really cool vodka bars pass by.

Standing next to Strokkur, I even managed to convince myself of a causal link between the geysers and the Icelanders’ economic buccaneering. They had become so emboldened by the sheer fact of their survival on this fiery, bubbling, exploding island that they believed they could master any mysterious, destructive forces the world could throw at them, whether they be violent geothermal activity, ferocious climate, or the international money markets. If you can eke out an existence on this pyrotechnical lump of barren rock, few external threats are likely to daunt you.

The eminent Swedish ethnologist Åke Daun once described Norway’s May 17 as a “national delirium.” Talk to Danes and Swedes about the day and they will roll their eyes and chuckle as if to say, “Those Norwegians aren’t like us. Very nationalistic. Rather stuck in the past. Still, they’ve got all that oil so they can do as they please.” Some actually come right out and say all this, adding that the Norwegians are right-wing, reactionary, insular, nationalistic flag-wavers (this from Danes who, as we have heard, will stick their national flag in the cat’s litter tray given the appropriate feline-orientated anniversary).

Finland does celebrate its independence from Russia (in 1917), but in a typically Finnish, introspective kind of a way. The day plays out almost entirely in private homes and on television, something I suspect is only partly explained by the fact that it falls in December and so any marching would have to negotiate knee-deep snow, and more because that’s just how Finns are.

The Danes pounce on any evidence of Norwegian laziness. They love to hear stories of migrant workers from Sweden manning Norwegian fish-processing factories, for instance, or waiting in their restaurants. “I went to Oslo, and not once was I served by a Norwegian waiter!” is a common refrain among Danes returning from the Norwegian capital (there are 35,000 Swedes working in Norway, tempted by wages of up to $47 per hour for semiskilled work in shops, and so forth). One story in particular that has gladdened many a Danish heart concerns a number of Swedes working in a Norwegian processing plant, where they were reported to be employed to peel bananas. And it’s true! I checked: the bananas are used in a popular Norwegian sandwich spread. Lazy Norwegians and exploited Swedes all in one anecdote. The Danes could hardly contain their delight.

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. More than 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. With a striking lack of self-irony, the Norwegian media is often heard to complain that “all young people want to do these days is be something in the media.”

There was much mirth in the rest of Scandinavia when, in 2011, Norway was reported to have run out of butter. A fad diet that recommended ingesting vast quantities of the stuff had swept the nation and cleared out domestic stocks. To protect its own dairy industry Norway imposes extravagant duties on imported dairy products and, as a consequence, the price of butter shot up. People began panic-buying, supplies of domestic butter produced by Norway’s Tine Dairy monopoly ran out, and soon Norwegians began asking Danish friends to fill their suitcases with Lurpak butter when they came to visit. “It’s a disgrace and it is embarrassing,” harrumphed Torgeir Trældal, spokesperson on agricultural affairs for the Progress Party. “The last time we received free food supplies from our neighboring countries was during the Second World War.” “I’d rather be a battered citizen of the EU with a mouth full of buttery cookies, than a filthy rich Norwegian chewing on unbuttered toast,” wrote one rather graceless Swedish journalist at the time, adding, “There is an irresistible irony when a small country awash with oil money can’t manage to supply its people with something as basic as butter.… Our own home-cooked traditional saffron buns will taste that much better when we think that the Norwegians will have to do all their cooking with margarine.

Ask any journalist about their worst nightmare and it will likely be that they have conducted a fascinating, revealing, intimate interview with someone really, really famous and then come rushing home, for once actually excited about transcribing the conversation, only to discover that their tape recorder hasn’t worked. It happened to me when I was interviewing the most famous man in the world. I had traveled to the capital of Lapland, Rovaniemi, on the edge of the Finnish Arctic Circle, together with my ten-year-old son. It was July, the season of the white nights, with twenty-four-hour sunlight. One o’clock in the morning was just like one in the afternoon; deeply discombobulating. Finland was also in the midst of a rare heat wave. Together, the raging white light and the sweltering heat created a whole heap of cognitive dissonance as we arrived that evening at Santa Claus Village, “The Official Home of Father Christmas,” amid the pine forests fifteen miles north of the city. We stood in our shorts and T-shirts, waiting in line to enter Santa’s grotto, listening to Christmas carols, watching videos of reindeer gamboling in the snow, and trying to summon some yuletide spirit.

Santa listened attentively to my brilliant, original questions (“What would you like for Christmas?” “What do you do for the other 364 days of the year?” and so on), and gave excellent answers with a hint of a Finnish accent (to the first: “That the children of the world have good health and education”; to the second: “It’s a year-round job!”), ho-ho-hoing in an only slightly forced manner at the conclusion of each answer. Just before we left, we had a chance to make our own wishes. My son asked for world peace. I asked for a Maserati. It could not have gone better. But then I returned to my hotel room, casually pressed play, and instead of the Christmas-y Frost-Nixon I had expected, my state-of-the-art Marantz digital recorder merely presented me with an insolent “Error” message. After jabbing at its buttons frantically for ten minutes in the manner of a laboratory chimp attempting to activate his food supply, I realized wearily that there was only one solution. Usually, I would do what any good journalist would have done: try to remember as much as possible from the interview, and make the rest up; but as I had been recording for radio, this clearly was not going to wash. We would have to do a retake. Back to Santa’s log cabin we went.

The Finns are also the most courteous of all the Nordic people. Admittedly this is a close call, a little like saying that the orangutans have the best table manners of all non-human primates, but as an Englishman living in this region you come to appreciate politeness wherever you find it. They are hardly David Niven, but Finns do wait for you to disembark from trains, stand aside to let you through doorways, and rarely ask how on earth you make a living from writing. The more I got to know about them, and in particular their country’s harrowing, conflict-riven history, the more my affection and respect for the Finns grew to the point where, these days, I am an unashamed groupie and cheerleader for all things Finnish. In conversations regarding the relative merits of any two countries—the vast majority of which, by definition, tend not to concern Finland—I will be heard to say, “Ah, but you see, that never happens in Finland,” (if it’s something bad), or “They have far more of them in Finland” (if it’s something good, like holidays, for instance).

A Danish relative who had been to Helsinki on a business trip described a cold, gray pre-Glasnost Soviet-style city peopled by dour giants who turned into drunken maniacs at the first pssscht of a beer can. His business contacts had taken him to a memorably grim strip club on the second floor of a suburban tower block. He shuddered at the recollection and refused to provide further details, other than to confess to waking up, literally, in a gutter the next morning.

In preparation for my first trip to Finland, I acquainted myself with the work of their most acclaimed filmmaker, Aki Kaurismäki (sadly not the director I met in the bar). His films, like The Match Factory Girl and The Man Without a Past, were so unremittingly morose they made Bergman look like Mr. Bean. A typical Kaurismäki film presents a cast of, essentially, gargoyles, who toil in wretched jobs (coal mining, dishwashing), exchange grunts, and drink heroically. Eventually some of them shoot themselves to death. The end. This would appear to mirror their auteur’s outlook on life: “I more or less know I will kill myself, but not yet,” Kaurismäki told a recent interviewer. I do hope he doesn’t. I love his films and their strangely life-enhancing wretchedness, but tourist-board promos they are not.

Finnish bears no resemblance to, and has virtually no words in common with, the other Nordic languages. Most Finns speak Swedish, but few Swedes speak Finnish, and when Danes or Norwegians meet Finns they speak English. In Norway, Sweden, and even Iceland, my second-rate Danish means I can understand most of what I see written around me, but in Finland my Danish was as much use as Klingon (which, now that I think of it, Finnish resembles). On my first day of largely aimless wandering, I grew obsessed with spotting outlets of what I presumed was a highly popular Italian restaurant chain, called Ravintola. Virtually every restaurant in the city appeared to be part of the chain. Was it a throwback to some communistic government-run monopoly? I wondered. Turns out, ravintola is Finnish for “restaurant.