The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  ‘I think they think of themselves as more Scandinavian than European,’ said Neil Hardwick. ‘But that is changing. I don’t think the Finns feel any connection to Denmark. Norwegians are outdoor people, like them, with their mountains, skiing, and loads of money, but Iceland isn’t really on the map.’

  ‘Some people do think of themselves as Scandinavian; some don’t and aspire to be European,’ says Aittokoski. ‘I want to be both. I want to represent the Nordic model and the Northern European way of doing things. Scandinavia is a good group to be included with.’

  My 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. I came expecting neurotic, post-colonial victims with a fragile sense of culture, instead I discovered a rare, quiet heroism.

  ‘You should never describe us as victims,’ Laura Kolbe had said to me. ‘Our national culture has been about a kind of building up of the heroic element of our losses and wars. There has always been a consensus to make the future together better, and that is the heroic element. Our wars have forced the nation to unite. Our history has been very dramatic compared with Sweden’s, which has been the calm, beautiful, rich, industrialised, modern nation where nothing has happened since 1809. Little Finland has all the time been going through wars, changes, revolutions, the humiliation of the 1990s . . .

  ‘But,’ she added with a broad smile. ‘It’s never boring here.’

  Which leads us nicely to our final destination . . .

  * * *

  1 Pacino plays an LA cop who for some reason is sent to an Alaskan town to solve a murder. He eventually resorts to barricading the windows of his hotel with all the furniture in an increasingly crazed attempt to block out the sun. Then he goes mad and Robin Williams kills him. Apart from the Robin Williams climax, that was me in Finland.

  SWEDEN

  Chapter 1

  Crayfish

  IT IS A Friday evening in Stortorget, Malmö. Around me a crowd of thousands stands pressed tightly together beside long tables, their arms interlinked, swaying in time to a song sung in Swedish to the tune of ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’. The tables are cluttered with empty bottles and cans, the detritus of the largest crayfish orgy in the world, which is now reaching a crescendo of salty sucking and slurping.

  The traditional Swedish crayfish party – the kräftsvika – is one of the Swedes’ few self-sanctioned days of public disorder, a rare moment of unguarded merriment when they permit themselves to unleash their (otherwise dormant) Viking spirit. It is held every year in mid-August, as the last hurrah of summer before the murk of winter draws in. And there is no point in tiptoeing around this: everyone is absolutely shit-faced. Including me.

  Bearing in mind my experience in Kuopio, the absence of any children when I arrived in Malmö’s main square should have given me warning that, an hour or two hence, I might find myself ruddy-faced and country dancing with an elderly lady I had never met before. The lady in question is clutching an empty schnapps bottle in one hand, while I’m wearing a conical paper hat and a plastic bib decorated with cartoon crustacea. Skål!

  ‘Helan går, Sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej!’ The folk band on stage have picked up the tempo now, playing what is best described as ‘hoe-down’ music, with banjos, harmonicas and violins. The Swedes are famed for their vast canon of drinking songs and everyone gathered here seems to know the words. Several revellers have climbed on to the tables and are dancing gingerly, but with enthusiasm, arms in the air, silly hats akimbo, their shirts still tucked firmly into their shorts. It is time for me to crawl off to a darkened room.

  This is Sweden.

  This is so not Sweden.

  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 – kräftsvika parties aside – more than a little dull. We have reached the largest, most populated (9.3 million), by just about every measure the most successful, occasionally the most infuriating, and undoubtedly the most influential country of them all (sorry Denmark, but deep down, you know it’s true): Sweden.

  As Finnish historian Laura Kolbe had said to me, Sweden is like a sun, a magnet, at times perhaps a kind of black hole (albeit one with sleek sofas and excellent day-care facilities), to which all Nordic people have turned their faces in admiration, been drawn to (or, in some cases, consumed and then spat out by), at some time or another over the last half-millennium. It is the elder brother, the head boy, the role model. We have arrived at, as The Guardian once put it, ‘the most successful society the world has ever known’.

  Over the centuries, all of its Nordic siblings have felt the wrath of an aggrieved or threatened Sweden, as indeed has a large swathe of Central Europe, though these days the famously peaceable, supposedly neutral Swedes prefer not to dwell on their bloodthirsty rampages. The Finns, the Norwegians and the Danes all have cause for residual resentment and envy towards their goody-goody, high-achieving neighbours. And sure enough, for all the brotherly front these four nations show to the world, with their Nordic Unions and Councils, the open borders, and the Scandinavian cliques that form around swimming pools from Phuket to Gran Canaria, the deeper you dig, the more of them you speak to (and the more inebriated they are), the more the outsider will detect a persistent, niggling animosity towards the Swedes. It may be comparatively low-level, the vestigial wounds of centuries of tension, rivalry and betrayal, but it is there, trust me, and the Swedes are always the focus. It is there in the grudging way the Danes react to Swedish economic success and the global domination of IKEA (it hardly helps that the Swedish company insists on naming its least dignified products – door mats, and so forth – after Danish towns). It is there in the relish with which the Norwegians tell you of their banana-peeling immigrant Swedish workforce. And it’s there when the Finns murmur about ‘homo’ Swedish men and the Winter War.

  To the rest of us, of course, a Swede is a wholly benign, admirable thing. The accomplishments of twentieth-century Sweden are legion and, mostly, noble: from its rationalist, respectful secularism, to its industrial might and economic success and, of course, its compassionate, all-embracing, shining beacon of a welfare state. For much of the last hundred years, Sweden has been seen, and has very much seen itself, as the social laboratory of the world: a heroic blond collective intent on pioneering better ways of living, abiding by higher, more modern moral codes, and writing really catchy four-minute pop songs.

  How we lap up news of their free schools and foundation hospitals, their harmonious ‘middle-way’ consensus politics, and their economic and gender equality. The latest Swedish innovation to grab the attention of the British media are the Kunskapsskolan (Knowledge Schools), with their free-form, open-plan style of education with no classrooms, where children set their own academic targets and draw up their own timetables. If my school had been run on that basis we would have gone the full Lord of the Flies within the first morning, but when the British media sees that Sweden has them, it wants them too.

  Right now, the Swedish model has the attention of the world’s policymakers and politicians. From David Cameron to François Hollande, and even Barack Obama, many a moderate Western political leader has fantasised about emulating Sweden’s mixed economy and consensus-driven politics. This serene Nordic swan always seems to achieve its goals with minimum fuss and discord: whether it be implementing progressive labour laws, orchestrating an economic recovery following a banking misadventure, or being very, very go
od at tennis, the Swedes never break a sweat.

  The boldest of Sweden’s recent social experiments has been in the field of multiculturalism. Over the last forty years Scandinavia’s largest country has welcomed more immigrants than any other European land. Today, almost 15 per cent of the Swedish population was born outside of Sweden (compared with just over 6 per cent in Denmark, the next-largest immigrant population in the North), and if you include the next generation, almost a third of the population was born outside of the country. That’s an astonishing statistic for a country which, up until the late nineteenth century, was made up of homogenous, isolated rural communities, and whose foreign policy has for the last two centuries been characterised by insularity and neutrality. Although, as we will see, this development has not been without its consequences.

  In the last few years the world has also looked to Sweden for tips on how to cope with its various banking and economic crises, Sweden having endured a similar credit-induced rollercoaster decades ago. In 1985, after the government had deregulated the credit market, the Swedes made the most of the so-called ‘Santa Claus’ credit with which they were showered, and paid the price when their housing bubble inevitably burst. By the early 1990s Sweden was in crisis: unemployment quadrupled and the budget deficit soared. But the government moved quickly to tidy up the mess, implementing major public sector spending and tax cuts while preserving the core of its welfare state; reforming and privatising services to a far greater extent than even Mrs Thatcher had dared; encouraging schools to opt out of the state system; allowing patients to choose any doctor, including private ones, and charge the state, and so on. Perhaps most importantly, they put the banks on a short leash from which they have never been released. This positioned the country well to cope with the fallout from the recent global economic crisis and so, once again, onward sails Sweden, seemingly oblivious to the earthquakes around it.

  Like Denmark’s similar ‘bumblebee’ model (high taxes, large public sector, extensive welfare state), Sweden continues to defy the warnings of many economists, warnings which have been sounding in one form or other since the Second World War. Sweden is, if not booming, then at least doing very well for itself. As I have already mentioned, it is fourth on the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitiveness Report, and tenth on the UN’s Human Development Index, ahead of Denmark and Finland. Norway takes first place – its extravagant oil wealth ought to ensure its position as the richest Nordic country in absolute terms for many decades to come – but Sweden’s industrial output continues to dwarf that of all its neighbours. Its great strength lies in fostering large-scale international corporations, like Tetra Pak (the world’s largest food-packaging company), H&M (the second largest clothing retailer in the world), industrial engineering firm Atlas Copco, Eriksson, Volvo, and that global chain of marriage graveyards, IKEA. In fact, almost half of the largest companies in the Nordic region are Swedish.1

  Less happily, unemployment has been running at a comparatively high rate for some years: it is currently at 7.3 per cent (and Swedish unemployment figures are about as reliable as Joan Collins’s age, so it is likely a good deal higher in reality). Most seriously of all, youth unemployment is far higher than in any other Nordic country (approaching 30 per cent). Nevertheless, both Sweden’s GDP and its growth figures continue to outstrip others in the region. Government debt is declining too – in stark contrast to the rest of the continent: it represents 35 per cent of GDP, compared with an average of 90 per cent of GDP in the eurozone.

  As well as selling us spangly boob tubes, awkward-to-open milk cartons and Ödmjuks (my personal favourite IKEA product-range name – it’s for a tea set), Sweden also boasts several notable cultural exports in recent years. These include its domination of the world’s airport bookstores with the whole Nordic Noir movement – chiefly, the 35 million-selling Henning Mankel and the 60 million-selling Stieg Larsson. Sweden is also the world’s third largest exporter of music (after the US and UK). There is a raft of Swedish composers and producers who seem to share an uncanny flair for overproduced, tinny teen pop. All those brilliant, shimmering, infuriatingly catchy Katy Perry, Pink and Britney songs – they were all written by Swedes.

  And, Sweden also has a bald prime minister, which is absolutely a step in the right direction as far as I am concerned.

  I have visited Sweden many times over the years, mostly Malmö, but also the capital and elsewhere, and gotten to know quite a few Swedes socially, but, as with the Norwegians, my image of them was still largely defined through the eyes of my Danish friends and family. I shouldn’t have hoped to get any kind of balanced view of a country from its great historic rival, and didn’t.

  ‘I went to Sweden once,’ I remember a Danish friend saying to me, before adding drily, ‘I think . . .’

  I asked another how a recent trip to Gothenburg had gone. ‘Sweden was great,’ he said. ‘In the seventies.’ Ouch.

  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.2

  A Danish friend told me this anecdote just the other day:

  ‘A group of Swedish colleagues met every Friday afternoon to share a bottle of wine as an end-of-week treat. After several weeks, one of the party suddenly stood up and said, “I really think we should declare this bottle of wine as a tax perk.” There was some discussion among the rest of the group and it was agreed, they must declare the 5 krona tax to the appropriate authorities.’

  Here is another, from a friend who was visiting some Swedes he knew in the suburbs of Stockholm:

  ‘I was waiting on the station platform to catch the train into the city when this Swedish guy in a suit came up to me and said, “I am sorry, but that’s where I stand”. The platform was only about a third full, but he had his special place where he waited for the train every day, and I was occupying it. I moved.’

  The only alternative to the Danes’ withering description of the Swedes tends to come mostly from an equally slanted, overly credulous international media. British and American newspapers and magazines long ago decided that Sweden was a paragon of progressive social policies, mixed capitalism, groovy furniture and sourdough bread-baking hipsters with beards and fixies, and they are sticking to that line no matter what.

  I wanted to dig a little deeper into this Stepford Wife of a country. Surely no race could be as pedantic and humourless as the Danes made the Swedes out to be, nor as perfect as the left-leaning media claimed. The truth, presumably, lay somewhere in between.

  * * *

  1 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.

  2 The truth is, when I first moved to Denmark, the Danes’ descriptions of the Swedes as being cold, stiff and not a little Germanic was not far removed from my initial impression of the Danes, although I obviously didn’t mention this at the time. I have since come to the conclusion that it is probably quite healthy for the Danes to have an even more formal, rule-obsessed neighbour to the north with whom to compare themselves favourably, and I see no need to disavow them of their self-image as beacons of chillaxery and fun.

  Chapter 2

  Donald Duck

  A DECEASED, BADGER-HAIRED, New York Jewish–American political essayist might not be the most obvious first source for revealing insights into Sweden, but Susan Sontag lived there for twelve years back in the sixties and seventies during which time she made a handful of, by all accounts not especially good, sub-Bergman-esque films and, more interestingly from my point of view, wrote a fabulously bitchy, poison-pen farewell to the country upon leaving.

  Son
tag did not find the Swedes a companionable race. ‘Silence is the Swedish national vice. Honestly, Sweden is full of prosaic, graceless mini-Garbos,’ she wrote, adding for good measure that the Swedes were clumsy, mistrustful and ‘devoted to rules’, not to mention being misanthropic alcoholics: ‘The Swedes want to be raped. And drink is their national form of self-rape,’ she wrote, pulling the pin from her polemical grenade before hurling it over her shoulder as she boarded her Pan Am flight to JFK. Even Swedish neutrality turned out to be less a high-minded gesture of humanist principle and more a manifestation of collective paranoia (not to mention hypocritical – more than half of Swedes were pro-German during the Second World War, Sontag pointed out).

  Perhaps the lack of success of her films tainted her view of her hosts, but Sontag even managed to turn what many perceive as one of the Swedes’ great strengths into a negative: ‘I am convinced that the Swedish reasonableness is deeply defective, owing far too much to inhibition and anxiety and emotional dissociation . . . I find it little short of pathological.’ Their porn was of the wrong sort, too, it ‘degrades sexual feeling . . . like illustrations for some male gynaecologist’s encyclopadia . . . numbing to men.’

  Oh, and they overcooked their vegetables.

  Above all, Sontag appears to have been bored to the very brink of insanity by her reticent, unexpressive, timid Swedish hosts. I know quite a few Swedish people and, in truth (and with the caveat that I haven’t met all 9.3 million of them), I find them not so much boring, as reserved (unless there are crayfish and schnapps close at hand, of course). On the plus side, they do listen to you with a selfless attentiveness, rarely interrupting even when you are clearly spouting drivel, and they laugh at your jokes (either out of politeness or pity, I don’t know and, frankly, does it matter?). As one guidebook on the Swedes put it: ‘The more you talk, the longer they listen – and the quieter they become.’ They are the perfect audience for a flatulent blow-hard such as myself. I like them.