Though I set out to redress the rose-tinted imbalance in the reporting on the Nordic region in the Western media, as well as to get a few things off my chest, I hope, too, that I have shed light on some of the more positive aspects of Scandinavia – the trust, the social cohesion, the economic and gender equality, the rationalism, the modesty, the well-balanced political and economic systems, and so on. Right now, the West is looking for an alternative to the rampant capitalism which has ravaged our economies, a system which might avoid the extremes of Soviet socialism or American deregulated neo-liberalism. Really, as far as I am concerned there is only one place to look for the economic and societal role model of the future, and it is not Brazil or Russia or China. The Nordic countries have the answer. Even little Iceland is recovering, with higher growth than most of the rest of Europe. Up here, even when they get it wrong they soon figure out how to get it right without any blood being spilled.
I hope, too, that in my own clumsy, reductive, probably at times racist (is it racist if the target is rich people?) way I have demonstrated the fascinating diversity that exists here; that though they may look alike at first glance, the Nordic peoples are wildly, fascinatingly different from each other. They have different genetic roots, different mentalities, different histories and different economic systems. Some have oil and gas, others have trees or hot air. One has the euro, another is outside the EU altogether, and I haven’t even touched on the diversity within these supposedly ‘homogenous’ countries – Sweden’s striking north–south divide; the hundreds of regional dialects in Norway; the Sami, and so on.
And there is an element of the Nordic happiness phenomenon that I have not yet mentioned, at least not explicitly. One of the keys to happiness, experts tell us, is autonomy in one’s life – the luxury of being able to decide your own destiny and achieve the fulfilment of self-realisation. It is no coincidence that the region that is consistently judged to have the highest levels of well-being and life quality, and the happiest, most fulfilled people, also has the greatest equality of educational opportunity and, according to a London School of Economics study comparing the incomes of fathers and sons over thirty years, among the very highest levels of social mobility in the world. The four main Nordic countries occupied the top four places on the list.
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. This cannot merely be a perception, an empty slogan like the American Dream (the US came way down on the LSE’s social mobility scale, incidentally). In Scandinavia it is a reality. These are the real lands of opportunity. There is far greater social mobility in the Nordic countries than in the US or Britain and, for all the collectivism and state interference in the lives of the people who live here, there is far greater freedom to be the person you want to be, and do the things you want to do, up here in the North. In a recent poll by Gallup, only 5 per cent of Danes said they could not change their lives if they wanted to. In contrast, I can think of many American states where it would probably be quite an uncomfortable experience to declare yourself an atheist, for example, or gay, or to be married yet choose not to have children, or to be unmarried and have children, or to have an abortion, or raise your children as Muslims. I don’t imagine it would be easy being vegetarian in Texas, for instance, or a wine buff in Salt Lake City come to that. And don’t even think of coming out as socialist in any of the fifty states. In Scandinavia you can be all of these things and no one will bat an eye (as long as you wait and cross on green).
Crucial to this social mobility are the schools. The autonomy enabled by a high-quality, free education system is just as important as the region’s economic equality and extensive welfare safety nets, if not more so. In Scandinavia the standard of education is not only the best in the world, but the opportunities it presents are available to all, free of charge. It is the bedrock of Nordic exceptionalism.
Some might argue that the reality of Nordic autonomy is that you are free . . . to be Nordic. If you are a Muslim who is looking to build a mosque, or an American who wants to drive a large car, espouse your deeply held Creationist beliefs and go shopping with your platinum card on a Sunday, or even if you are English and choose to conduct yourself according to archaic forms of baroque politeness, you are likely to experience varying degrees of oppression and exclusion should you come to live in this part of the world.
This is true. Scandinavia is struggling to integrate its non-Western immigrants in particular. In Sweden over the past two decades, average household incomes for non-European immigrants have actually declined compared with those of native-born Swedes. They now bring in 36 per cent less money per month compared with 21 per cent less in 1991. But it is comparatively early days yet. Immigration didn’t really begin in this part of the world until the late 1960s and, unlike Britain, its immigrants did not arrive from former colonies already fluent in the language and familiar with the cultural norms. It’s going to take a generation or two for things to change. And the Breiviks will not win. They never do. Immigration will continue in the North – it has to for many reasons – and integration will continue to improve. I am confident of this, although they might want to think about dropping all this ‘second-generation Dane’ nonsense and start occasionally giving the jobs to the applicants whose surnames don’t end in ‘-sen’.
Back in the sixties, Susan Sontag wrote that Sweden was in desperate need of some kind of revolution, something to cause a rupture of the established social order and behavioural norms. Well, Sweden has had its revolution, and so has the rest of the Nordic region. It may not have taken the form Sontag had in mind, but the hundreds of thousands of immigrants to Scandinavia are challenging and revitalising these societies, turning these sometimes monotonous monocultures into kaleidoscopic multi-ethnic models of diversity. It has been a bumpy ride so far, but there are hopeful signs that the real issues are being addressed and that one day things might smooth out.
I didn’t mention it but the day after the Malmö crayfish orgy, the city’s annual festival continued with more al fresco feasting – mainly of Turkish, Indian, Arabic and Chinese food – but this time the streets of the city were packed with the most multiethnic crowd I have ever seen on the streets of a Scandinavian city. The atmosphere was terrific that day; it felt to me like there was a genuine sense of community and that, contrary to much of what I had heard about Malmö in the Danish media, this was a city at peace with itself.
But of all the countries of the North, and ironically given the inflammatory rhetoric of its right-wing politicians over the last decade, I would argue that Denmark seems to be leading the way towards a properly integrated, multiethnic Nordic society. Danish immigrants are less segregated than those in Sweden; traditionally they have been more spread out among the provinces, and they mix more with the indigenous population. This has meant that the Danes have been confronted more directly with the challenges of integration, but they have also made more progress.
As that great voice of reason and wisdom, the Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen said to me, ‘In Denmark there are ghettoes, but you also have the Turk on the street with his tobacconist shop; and they drive the bus, they are placed in villages so they have to deal with the neighbours, and are very much more part of society.’ No one is claiming this process has not been difficult, but once this initial, often fraught, occasionally violent getting-to-know-you phase is over, I like to hope that things will settle down. As Richard Jenkins writes in his study Being Danish, ‘A multiethnic Denmark is not an option to be accepted or rejected; it is an existing fact of life, for better or worse, [but] integration is much less problematic than the rhetoric of politicians on the national scene would have us believe.’
It is going to take time – Britain has had over half a century and still isn’t there yet – but let’s hope that human nature and Nordic pragmatism will triumph over fear and prejudi
ce.
Speech over.
I have one more hope. A heartfelt plea to the people of the North.
Every once in a while, a Nordic politician or member of the Nordic Council issues a clarion call for the Nordic countries to integrate further, to come together to form a proper Nordic Union, to unite economically and militarily, with a joint army, joint foreign policy and even a joint currency. Something along the lines of the EU, but without the squabbling and corruption.
A former Danish government minister, now chairman of the Danish delegation to the Nordic Council, Bertel Haarder, told me that greater pan-Nordic cooperation is inevitable and to be welcomed. ‘It is already happening,’ he said. ‘And the Arctic is going to be one area where it will be vital in the future.’
The Swedish historian Gunnar Wetterberg also believes the combined 26 million people of the North could have a greater influence in the EU, and rightfully demand a seat at the G20. He has pointed out that the Scandinavian countries were unified once before, in the fourteenth century, when the threat of German traders brought the Norwegians, the Swedes and the Danes together under the rule of the Danish Queen Margaret I – the Kalmar Union. In the end Scandinavia did not take to being ruled from Copenhagen, but that was mostly because the Danes slaughtered most of the Swedish nobility. I don’t think they would do that again.
The short-lived Scandinavism movement of the nineteenth century raised the possibility once again. In an address to to a Scandinavian scientific congress, the great Danish physicist H. C. Ørsted said: ‘Let 6 million Scandinavians place their entire weight on one scale, and surely it shall not be found too light.’
Today we have the aforementioned Nordic Union. It has opened up trade between the five countries, coordinated effective ‘soft power’ cooperation between them in terms of overseas aid, and has worked hard to paper over historic conflicts and foster cultural ties between the member states. Now that the Nordic people are not 6 million as they were in Ørsted’s day, but 25 million, a proper union would carry even more weight. Could the next step be full unity – the five countries, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Norway and Finland coming together in a properly integrated economic and military Nordic Union?
Though there has been increasing discussion about this in the Scandinavian media in recent years – with some suggesting a Federal States of Scandinavia as a northern alternative to the faltering EU – it is still relatively unlikely. Just in case, though, my plea to the Nordic people is this: please don’t.
For if you ever really did band together in such a way then, truly, the rest of us would not stand a chance.
Index
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
Aalborg, 26, 84
Aalto, Alvar, 262
Aarhus, 212
ABBA, 320, 385
Absalon, Bishop, 86
Absolut Vodka, 384
advertising, 35
Afghanistan, 118
Aftenposten (newspaper), 176–7
Ågerup, Martin, 60–1, 64, 74, 81, 123
agriculture, 28, 193
Aha, 187
Ahokas, Paulina, 255
Ahtisaari, Martti, 6
AIDS see HIV/AIDS
Aittokoski, Heikki: attitude to Finland, 282; on Finnish alcohol consumption, 253–4; on Finnish education, 275; on Finnish identification with Europe, 289; on Finnish–Russian relations, 271, 273; on Finnish taciturnity, 242; on Swedish Finns, 260, 261–2
Åkesson, Jimmie, 340
Åland Islands, 260
Alcoa, 151–2
alcohol consumption: Denmark, 20, 30, 72, 245; Finland, 158, 223, 224, 244–56, 285; Iceland, 131, 139, 147, 158, 248; Norway, 158, 166, 171, 248, 249; Sweden, 158, 247, 248–9, 293, 300, 321, 384; and violence, 253–4
Alexander II, Tsar, 226, 227
Amma, 108–9
amusement parks, 30
Andersen, Benny, 103–4
Andersen, Hans Christian, 25, 83, 385
Angry Birds, 6
animals see flora and fauna
Anka, Anna, 365
Aristotle, 201
Arkitema and Arkthing, 151
arms industry, 355
art and architecture, 6, 25, 153
asylum seekers, 331; see also immigration and multiculturalism
Atlas Copco, 297
August, Bille, 93
Auvinen, Pekka-Eric, 279–80
bacon industry, 28, 118–19
ballet, 25
Bangstad, Sindre, 181–4
banks see financial services
Baugur Group, 139–40, 141, 142
Bawer, Bruce, 179
The Beatles, 387
Bech, Rasmus, 113
Becirov, Bejzat, 327–8
Beecham, Thomas, 167
Belgium, 19
Beowulf, 50
Berggren, Henrik: on Palme, 348–9; on Swedish childcare, 369–70; on Swedish conformity, 362–3; on Swedish culture, 386; on Swedish–Danish relations, 381; on Swedish immigration and multiculturalism, 332–4, 335–6; on Swedish monarchy, 377–8; on Swedish state, 358–61; on Swedish war guilt, 355–6; on viability of Swedish model, 383, 385
bestiality, 84
Better Life Index, 123
Beverly Hillbillies (TV series), 192
Bier, Susanne, 6
Billund, 111–12
Björgólfsson, Björgólfur Thor, 139
Björk, 148
Bjørnskov, Christian: on Danish happiness, 116; on Danish labour mobility, 60; on Danish overoptimism, 123; on Danish trust levels, 44–5, 45–6, 48, 49, 51, 53–4
black market, 66–7
Blåvand, 109
Blekinge, 22
Blue Lagoon, 159
book buying, 134
Borgen (TV series), 6, 76–7
Borish, Stephen, 99
Bornholm, 22
Bournonville, August, 25
Brande, 108
Breivik, Anders Behring, 172–5, 181, 186, 322, 337
Brideshead Revisited (TV series), 11
The Bridge (Broen; TV series), 6
Brown, Andrew: on Palme, 347, 362; on Stockholm, 315; on Sweden in Second World War, 354; on Sweden’s future, 384; on Swedish immigration and multiculturalism, 330; on Swedish taciturnity, 302
Brown, George, 269–70
Brown, Gordon, 131
Brunei, 47
Brynjólfsson, Bjarni, 136–7, 142
business life, 45, 304, 352–4
Cameron, David, 295
Canada, 54
Carl XVI Gustaf, king of Sweden, 374, 375, 377, 378
Carr, Lisa Werner, 357–8, 362
cars: costs of buying and running, 62; driving laws, 323, 346; Volvo and SAAB, 297
Cederblad, Marianne, 368–9
celebrations see parties and celebrations
celebrity, attitude to, 29
censorship see freedom of speech
Charles XIV John, king of Sweden, 374–5
childbirth, 71–2, 303
children: in care in Sweden, 357; childcare, 275, 365, 367–70; freedom and safety, 18, 30, 43; happiness at school, 279–81; parental leave, 225, 364; school shootings, 279–80; well-being survey, 370; see also education
China, 71, 121, 278
choirs, 39, 42–3, 102–4
Christensen, Jasper, 30
Christensen, Kaare, 115
Christian II, king of Denmark, 21
Christian IV, king of Denmark, 21
Christian X, king of Denmark, 133
Christianity see religion
Christmas, 101–2, 219–21
Churchill, Winston, 24
civic rights, 356–8
class issues, 31–2, 40, 56–61, 371–9
climate change see global warming
clothes, 92, 164–5, 191, 224, 372
clubs see societies, clubs a
nd groups
Cnut, king of England, 9, 51
Cold War, 268–72
Colombia, 36
company life see business life
Copenhagen: atmosphere, 187; Christiansborg Palace, 29, 76–7; Christianshavn, 30; crime, 119; Danish attitude to, 188; employment, 110–11; Icelandic love for and investment in, 143, 144–5; Istedgade, 231; Nationalmuseet, 29; Nøriebro, 323; social conformity, 90–1; Tivoli, 145
Copenhagen, battle of (1801), 22
Copenhagen, English bombardment of (1807), 22
Copenhagen Business School, 55
corruption, 41, 47, 141–2, 205, 221
Corruption Perception Index, 41, 47
crime: and alcohol, 253–4; Denmark, 119, 250, 323; Finland, 223, 250–1; Iceland, 129; Sweden, 321–30, 368, 384
Danish People’s Party, 180, 181, 335, 336, 337, 338–9
Daun, Åke: on Danes, 380; on Norway’s national day, 163; on Sweden’s future, 384; on Swedish attitude to love, 229–30; on Swedish childcare, 367–8, 369; on Swedish culture, 385; on Swedish immigration and multiculturalism, 331–2; on Swedish modernity, 350; on Swedish monarchy, 377; on Swedish self-sufficiency, 361–2; on Swedish taciturnity, 302–4, 308–11
debt, 67–9
Denmark, 15–124; advanced industries, 45–6; agriculture, 28; alcohol consumption, 20, 30, 72, 245; art and architecture, 6; attitude to celebrity, 29; attitude to mistakes, 118–19; attitude to success, 94–6; bacon industry, 28, 118–19; bestiality, 84; black market, 66–7; brain drain, 78; business life, 45; car costs, 62; childbirth, 71–2; children, 18, 30, 43, 367, 370; class issues, 31–2, 40, 56–61, 372–3; clothes, 92, 372; corruption, 41; crime, 119, 250, 323; crossing the road, 2; culture, 25–6; Danish language, 9, 29, 30, 214–15, 229; debt, 67–9; defining statistic, 62; and denial, 119; diet, 3, 29, 72–3, 107; drugs, 323; dullness, 121–3; economic performance, 79, 119–20; education, 28, 32, 45, 58–9, 70–1, 73–4; employment laws, 19; environmentalism, 120; fat tax, 118–19; films, 6; flag, 104–6; flora and fauna, 29, 30; freedom concept, 389; freedom of speech, 335–9; fuel bills, 62; future, 123–4; gender equality, 364–5, 366–7; and Germany, 23–4, 110, 120–1; government, 28; happiness, 1–5, 28–30, 113–24; health and health care, 37, 58, 71–2, 72–3, 119; history, 21–4, 167; holidays, 60, 109; home ownership, 62, 68; and Iceland, 133, 137, 138, 143–7; immigration and multiculturalism, 4, 54, 182, 184–5, 296, 322, 331, 335–9, 381–2, 391; and innovation, 122; insularity, 24–8; labour mobility, 59; life expectancy, 72; manners, 42, 101–2; monarchy, 373–9; national character, 8–9, 11–13; news coverage, 27; and Norway, 111, 163–4, 193–5, 211–13, 374; oil industry, 193–7; parking, 29; parties and celebrations, 17–18, 19–20, 98–102, 170; pensions, 68, 74; public services, 70–5, 78–9, 119; railways, 79, 283; and regional geopolitics, 209; religion, 85–7, 96; restaurants, 6; road tolls, 62; rural areas, 83–5, 89–93, 107–12; savings, 68; self-image, 298; shops, 1, 5, 8, 92; smoking, 73; social cohesion, 39–61, 102–4, 117; social conformity, 2, 88–106; social connectedness, 39–43; societies, clubs and groups, 39–41, 42–3; subvocal communications, 241; suicide rates, 250; and Sweden, 111, 294–5, 298–9, 304, 380–2; taciturnity, 240; taxation, 1, 2, 5, 62–9, 74–9, 81–2, 118–19; trust levels, 41–56, 117; TV, 2, 6, 30, 76–7; and UK, 9–10, 11; urban migration, 57–60, 110–11; wages, 62; wealth distribution, 32–6, 37, 48–9, 56–61, 76–8; welfare state, 19, 27, 48–9, 51–2, 55–6, 58, 64–6, 74–8, 331; wind turbine industry, 45; work ethic and productivity, 18–19, 80–2
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