The spread of COVID-19 as a global pandemic has provided many a tragic spectacle, some at intimately local levels, others at national scales. Some of these larger tragedies--the fumbled national responses in countries like the U.S. and Brazil--were eminently predictable. What else, after all, would you expect from a country like ours when it’s led by a willfully ignorant and calculatedly callous gibbering egomaniac? Trump’s own dismal failings are compounded by a healthcare system run on a for-profit basis, and the kind of fragmented response that is inevitable in such a federated, devolved state. And they are exacerbated by his cruel, calculated politicization of social distancing and mask wearing.
More interesting, in some ways, are the failings one might not have predicted. I’m particularly thinking, for personal and political reasons, of Sweden, where the government decided not to enact a national stay-at-home order or to offer widespread testing. The contrast with its neighbors--Norway and Denmark, as well as other European nations--could not be more stark. It’s a story told in exceptionally-high death rates, exceptionally-low testing levels, and a public health and governing apparatus that will, because of the foregoing, be exceptionally-poorly informed about the state of its national health, all while hemorrhaging public trust.
I should stress, before I continue, that I’m an informed observer--both of Sweden itself and the historical literature on the country--rather than an expert. But it strikes me that the particular way in which the Swedish state failed to rise to the occasion maps broadly onto the country’s subtle political crisis, as well as onto different schools of thought about the place often portrayed as the most enduring and comprehensive of the world’s social democracies.
When I use the term “social democracy,” I refer to a political philosophy, translated into governance, which argues that the traditional choice between different kinds of rights is a false one. This is a choice that has its origins in the 1920s and 1930s, when liberals in Europe and North America argued that the liberal state could successfully protect its citizens’ civil and political rights, but could not intervene to promote social and economic wellbeing without compromising those other fundamental rights. On the other hand, the Soviet Union and fascist states, in very different ways from each other, sought to protect or cultivate social and economic rights, but did so expressly at the expense of civil and political liberties.
During this period a growing number of countries began to reject this choice, effectively arguing that it was a false and misleading one for their country’s citizens. The U.S. shift in this direction in the form of the New Deal, proved only temporary. But not before it successfully gave the lie to claims that government intervention to protect people’s economic and social wellbeing would automatically give way to dictatorship and authoritarianism. Most European countries, within the next few decades, would go further than the U.S. in developing comprehensive systems of governance and political consensus designed to enshrine social democracy. Sweden was among the earliest and most thoroughgoing social democracies, and indeed Roosevelt’s New Dealers were dispatched to the country and wrote widely about its success in offering its citizens the good life without compromising their political freedoms.
Enough of this digression. There seem to be three broad schools of thought among those historians and popular writers documenting Sweden’s recent past and the country’s construction of an elaborate, comprehensive, and successful social democracy.
The first, which is an exclusively polemical one, argues that Sweden did not build a social democracy, but rather a dictatorship. Or rather, that social democracy invariably leads to a kind of bureaucratic dictatorship. In this telling--primarily by right-wing pundits in the English-speaking world--Sweden is inhabited by ten million unthinking, unfeeling drones, who stumble through their dreary, grim, irredeemable lives, slaves of a vast bureaucracy that squeezes the life out of them with its tentacles. This interpretation is primarily a cudgel used by right-wing provocateurs to frighten citizens in English-speaking countries, and to encourage them to maintain their low expectations of what an effective democratic government can accomplish in their name.
The second broad strand of thinking suggests that Sweden has indeed built a successful social democracy, but that if you want to look for the origins of this success, you must peer deeper into the mists of the Nordic past, and locate it in early-modern or even medieval forms of social solidarity, proto-democracy, and ethno-linguistic homogeneity. Occasionally, proponents of this scholarship will suggest that origins can be found in early-twentieth century features of culture or forms of social organization. But no matter the precise origins of Swedish social democracy, they are cultural and, in this telling, it would be a fruitless endeavor to seek to replicate them or learn particular lessons from them.
Thus, some Swedes tell a story of national exceptionalism rooted in culture and in different scales of solidarity and homogeneity. At its most benign, this story simply promotes a search for roots in Sweden’s early history. At its most malign, this story underpins the fascism of the far right Swedish Democrats, who argue that they are the best defenders of the Swedish welfare state precisely because they will only allow those who are properly (i.e. ethnically) Swedish to access its benefits, lest its “mongrelization” by migrants invite decline. Whatever the intentions of this narrative, and whomever the tellers, it suggests that Sweden’s social democracy is a product of and therefore works best in the context of ethnolinguistic homogeneity, or sameness.
There are any number of problematic features of this grand narrative. If we can imagine ourselves as time-travellers to 1950s or 1960s Sweden, and in conversation with the ageing, leading lights of the Social Democratic Party, which governed the country uninterrupted between 1932 and 1976, we might also imagine the response of those figures if we put to them the suggestion that they had it easy in constructing Sweden’s remarkable social democratic state because of the marvellous cultural and social homogeneity the country enjoyed.
Such a narrative would likely seem wildly misplaced to social democrats who labored between the 1910s and 1940s to build public trust in their program. It would have seemed wildly misplaced because to them for many years the differences in social class--between the middle and working classes, never mind elites--seemed at times insurmountable. And it would have seemed wildly misplaced because to them for many years the differences in occupation within those classes--between urban and rural workers--seemed unbridgeable. Their social democratic framework did not slip magically into place because of the structure of Swedish society and the elements of Swedish culture. It did so in spite of those things, and because of the hard and imaginative political work the party and its allies performed.
This particular flaw of the account of Swedish social democracy that finds origins in Swedish cultural and social exceptionalism demonstrates the limits of anachronistic historical thinking. That is, we run into problems of accuracy and interpretation when we read our own categories and interpretations of the world seamlessly back into the past. The assumption of scholars promoting this Swedish historical exceptionalism is that because their country did not confront the racial differences that have shaped the emergence or absence of social democracy in the U.S., Sweden did not confront the overriding source of social differentiation that affects nation-building and -maintenance. Racial thinking was far from absent in nineteenth and twentieth century Sweden (just ask Sami communities in the country’s north), but there were other categories that in that time and place mattered more, and social class and occupation were seen as the core and most potentially destructive divisions that social democrats needed to confront.
This flawed narrative of cultural exceptionalism, deliberately or otherwise, also seeks to generalize the origins of social democracy, and portray them as a slow, steady, organic, and perhaps even inevitable development. Such a narrative removes Swedish social democracy from its broader European and global context and also ignores how strenuously many in Sweden fought its emergence and endurance: rival political parties who bitterly contested its implementation; central bankers and industrialists who created a new Nobel Prize to undermine social democratic economic credibility; American presidents who associated it with cultures of permissiveness; neo-fascists who seek to undermine its commitment to civic rather than ethnic nationalism.
So what does all of this have to do with the Swedish response to COVID-19? The response of the government--a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, relying on votes from the centre-right Liberal and Centre parties--was to promote business as usual. It promoted this response relying on a narrative of Swedish exceptionalism. Sweden, the logic went, possessed an exceptional culture, in that natural solidarity and deeply-enshrined cultural habits would see them safely through the pandemic without the need for activist intervention from the government. Other countries might require strict guidelines and a massive testing regime. Not Sweden.
Swedes, after all social distance naturally, treasuring their personal space; frowning on small-talk on public transit; peering through apartment peepholes to avoid chance encounters with neighbours in landings or stairwells; etc. [Q: How do you identify a Swedish extrovert? A: They’re looking at your shoes!] Hi-tech workplaces would be easily converted to see some of their members work from home. Swedes could, in other words, do what no others could, and ease through the pandemic unscathed: not by virtue of harnessing the country’s robust healthcare structure, powers of redistribution, or public trust for proactive measures, but by simply being Swedish.
But of course there is the third way of thinking about the origins and trajectory of social democracy in Sweden. It involves not the dishonest abuse of Swedish history and contemporary society to frighten FOX viewers and Daily Mail readers. Nor does it involve imagining Swedish social democracy as emanating from an ethno-cultural past (whether or not the invocation of that past is designed to accomplish sinister ends).It involves thinking about social democracy in Sweden, as elsewhere, in several ways.
As particular, in the sense that it grew out of specific periods with their own pressures and contexts, global as well as national. As contingent, in the sense that the social democratization of Sweden was not inevitable, and that the project can be undone. As the product of labor and argument and contestation and battles lost as well as won. And as ideological, in the sense that it was motivated by specific ideals about how to organize the relationship between politics and economics to make a better world.
The creation of the country’s robust social democratic framework required alliances between the Social Democratic Party and the agrarian party that has since shifted to the right. It required a form of corporatism that saw the state referee durable agreements between workers’ and employers’ associations. It required resisting the orthodoxy which saw other left parties remain tied to representing only particular classes, with the economic stasis or inflexibility in the face of global changes that sometimes came to imply. And it required the active and consistent reimagination of the political and economic modernity with which the party was able to brand itself and its political work for decades.
Governing with a conscious nod toward this historical interpretation would have seen social democrats turn not toward cultural exceptionalism. Rather, it would have been based on high levels of trust by the public in the state; on considerable state capacity; on a welfare structure comparatively well-endowed when it comes to weathering a crisis of this sort; on powers of redistribution; and on a tradition of state activism in pursuit of the greater, public good.
This makes the current Social Democrat government’s decision to forswear the use of the systems and structures at its command to address a dangerous pandemic all the more tragic. It is a decision which, consciously or otherwise, relies on a misplaced narrative of cultural and social exceptionalism. And it is in keeping with the state of the Social Democratic Party, which struggles to govern in the spirit of its predecessors.
But there’s a reason it is out of practice. For the last six years or so the Social Democratic Party has governed Sweden with its coalition partners as a minority government, reliant now particularly on votes from the right. The neo-fascists in the far right Swedish Democratic Party fulminate in vain despite their comparatively strong electoral performance. But the centre-right parties which prop up left-leaning coalitions while extracting considerable concessions have figured it out: the best way to exercise power in pursuit of their aims is to do so wherever possible without assuming responsibility. [As a Californian, I am familiar with these methods: for many years the Republican Party was a small minority of the state's legislature, but it used supermajority rules to ensure that, in a state with a population growing in numbers and complexity, it could control the budget and taxation process and starve the state into austerity with a mere 35% of the vote, while handing Democrats the blame for a process they couldn't control.]
The concessions their agreements with the governing parties have extracted have set Sweden on autopilot toward austerity. Not, to be sure, the dramatic, slashing kind that Britain and other countries’ right-wing parties, as well as many U.S. states governed by both parties, inflicted in the aftermath of the recession. Sweden’s path to austerity--or the Americanization of its social and economic structures, if you will--will be slower and subtler. It will be longer in the making. It will be harder to allocate blame. From day to day the changes might seem so small as to be hardly worthy of consideration.
There might not be a direct line to draw between historical and contemporary narratives of cultural exceptionalism, the strange approach of the current Swedish government to combating a global pandemic, and the country’s broader crisis of social democracy. But it is hard for me to believe they are unrelated. Generations of social democrats in Sweden have built something important: a comprehensive social democratic framework that offers the country's citizens an impressive quality of life, and which served for many years as a durable example of civic nationalism in action. My fear is that the response to the pandemic offers some insight into how and why it might crumble.
More interesting, in some ways, are the failings one might not have predicted. I’m particularly thinking, for personal and political reasons, of Sweden, where the government decided not to enact a national stay-at-home order or to offer widespread testing. The contrast with its neighbors--Norway and Denmark, as well as other European nations--could not be more stark. It’s a story told in exceptionally-high death rates, exceptionally-low testing levels, and a public health and governing apparatus that will, because of the foregoing, be exceptionally-poorly informed about the state of its national health, all while hemorrhaging public trust.
I should stress, before I continue, that I’m an informed observer--both of Sweden itself and the historical literature on the country--rather than an expert. But it strikes me that the particular way in which the Swedish state failed to rise to the occasion maps broadly onto the country’s subtle political crisis, as well as onto different schools of thought about the place often portrayed as the most enduring and comprehensive of the world’s social democracies.
When I use the term “social democracy,” I refer to a political philosophy, translated into governance, which argues that the traditional choice between different kinds of rights is a false one. This is a choice that has its origins in the 1920s and 1930s, when liberals in Europe and North America argued that the liberal state could successfully protect its citizens’ civil and political rights, but could not intervene to promote social and economic wellbeing without compromising those other fundamental rights. On the other hand, the Soviet Union and fascist states, in very different ways from each other, sought to protect or cultivate social and economic rights, but did so expressly at the expense of civil and political liberties.
During this period a growing number of countries began to reject this choice, effectively arguing that it was a false and misleading one for their country’s citizens. The U.S. shift in this direction in the form of the New Deal, proved only temporary. But not before it successfully gave the lie to claims that government intervention to protect people’s economic and social wellbeing would automatically give way to dictatorship and authoritarianism. Most European countries, within the next few decades, would go further than the U.S. in developing comprehensive systems of governance and political consensus designed to enshrine social democracy. Sweden was among the earliest and most thoroughgoing social democracies, and indeed Roosevelt’s New Dealers were dispatched to the country and wrote widely about its success in offering its citizens the good life without compromising their political freedoms.
Enough of this digression. There seem to be three broad schools of thought among those historians and popular writers documenting Sweden’s recent past and the country’s construction of an elaborate, comprehensive, and successful social democracy.
The first, which is an exclusively polemical one, argues that Sweden did not build a social democracy, but rather a dictatorship. Or rather, that social democracy invariably leads to a kind of bureaucratic dictatorship. In this telling--primarily by right-wing pundits in the English-speaking world--Sweden is inhabited by ten million unthinking, unfeeling drones, who stumble through their dreary, grim, irredeemable lives, slaves of a vast bureaucracy that squeezes the life out of them with its tentacles. This interpretation is primarily a cudgel used by right-wing provocateurs to frighten citizens in English-speaking countries, and to encourage them to maintain their low expectations of what an effective democratic government can accomplish in their name.
The second broad strand of thinking suggests that Sweden has indeed built a successful social democracy, but that if you want to look for the origins of this success, you must peer deeper into the mists of the Nordic past, and locate it in early-modern or even medieval forms of social solidarity, proto-democracy, and ethno-linguistic homogeneity. Occasionally, proponents of this scholarship will suggest that origins can be found in early-twentieth century features of culture or forms of social organization. But no matter the precise origins of Swedish social democracy, they are cultural and, in this telling, it would be a fruitless endeavor to seek to replicate them or learn particular lessons from them.
Thus, some Swedes tell a story of national exceptionalism rooted in culture and in different scales of solidarity and homogeneity. At its most benign, this story simply promotes a search for roots in Sweden’s early history. At its most malign, this story underpins the fascism of the far right Swedish Democrats, who argue that they are the best defenders of the Swedish welfare state precisely because they will only allow those who are properly (i.e. ethnically) Swedish to access its benefits, lest its “mongrelization” by migrants invite decline. Whatever the intentions of this narrative, and whomever the tellers, it suggests that Sweden’s social democracy is a product of and therefore works best in the context of ethnolinguistic homogeneity, or sameness.
There are any number of problematic features of this grand narrative. If we can imagine ourselves as time-travellers to 1950s or 1960s Sweden, and in conversation with the ageing, leading lights of the Social Democratic Party, which governed the country uninterrupted between 1932 and 1976, we might also imagine the response of those figures if we put to them the suggestion that they had it easy in constructing Sweden’s remarkable social democratic state because of the marvellous cultural and social homogeneity the country enjoyed.
Such a narrative would likely seem wildly misplaced to social democrats who labored between the 1910s and 1940s to build public trust in their program. It would have seemed wildly misplaced because to them for many years the differences in social class--between the middle and working classes, never mind elites--seemed at times insurmountable. And it would have seemed wildly misplaced because to them for many years the differences in occupation within those classes--between urban and rural workers--seemed unbridgeable. Their social democratic framework did not slip magically into place because of the structure of Swedish society and the elements of Swedish culture. It did so in spite of those things, and because of the hard and imaginative political work the party and its allies performed.
This particular flaw of the account of Swedish social democracy that finds origins in Swedish cultural and social exceptionalism demonstrates the limits of anachronistic historical thinking. That is, we run into problems of accuracy and interpretation when we read our own categories and interpretations of the world seamlessly back into the past. The assumption of scholars promoting this Swedish historical exceptionalism is that because their country did not confront the racial differences that have shaped the emergence or absence of social democracy in the U.S., Sweden did not confront the overriding source of social differentiation that affects nation-building and -maintenance. Racial thinking was far from absent in nineteenth and twentieth century Sweden (just ask Sami communities in the country’s north), but there were other categories that in that time and place mattered more, and social class and occupation were seen as the core and most potentially destructive divisions that social democrats needed to confront.
This flawed narrative of cultural exceptionalism, deliberately or otherwise, also seeks to generalize the origins of social democracy, and portray them as a slow, steady, organic, and perhaps even inevitable development. Such a narrative removes Swedish social democracy from its broader European and global context and also ignores how strenuously many in Sweden fought its emergence and endurance: rival political parties who bitterly contested its implementation; central bankers and industrialists who created a new Nobel Prize to undermine social democratic economic credibility; American presidents who associated it with cultures of permissiveness; neo-fascists who seek to undermine its commitment to civic rather than ethnic nationalism.
So what does all of this have to do with the Swedish response to COVID-19? The response of the government--a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, relying on votes from the centre-right Liberal and Centre parties--was to promote business as usual. It promoted this response relying on a narrative of Swedish exceptionalism. Sweden, the logic went, possessed an exceptional culture, in that natural solidarity and deeply-enshrined cultural habits would see them safely through the pandemic without the need for activist intervention from the government. Other countries might require strict guidelines and a massive testing regime. Not Sweden.
Swedes, after all social distance naturally, treasuring their personal space; frowning on small-talk on public transit; peering through apartment peepholes to avoid chance encounters with neighbours in landings or stairwells; etc. [Q: How do you identify a Swedish extrovert? A: They’re looking at your shoes!] Hi-tech workplaces would be easily converted to see some of their members work from home. Swedes could, in other words, do what no others could, and ease through the pandemic unscathed: not by virtue of harnessing the country’s robust healthcare structure, powers of redistribution, or public trust for proactive measures, but by simply being Swedish.
But of course there is the third way of thinking about the origins and trajectory of social democracy in Sweden. It involves not the dishonest abuse of Swedish history and contemporary society to frighten FOX viewers and Daily Mail readers. Nor does it involve imagining Swedish social democracy as emanating from an ethno-cultural past (whether or not the invocation of that past is designed to accomplish sinister ends).It involves thinking about social democracy in Sweden, as elsewhere, in several ways.
As particular, in the sense that it grew out of specific periods with their own pressures and contexts, global as well as national. As contingent, in the sense that the social democratization of Sweden was not inevitable, and that the project can be undone. As the product of labor and argument and contestation and battles lost as well as won. And as ideological, in the sense that it was motivated by specific ideals about how to organize the relationship between politics and economics to make a better world.
The creation of the country’s robust social democratic framework required alliances between the Social Democratic Party and the agrarian party that has since shifted to the right. It required a form of corporatism that saw the state referee durable agreements between workers’ and employers’ associations. It required resisting the orthodoxy which saw other left parties remain tied to representing only particular classes, with the economic stasis or inflexibility in the face of global changes that sometimes came to imply. And it required the active and consistent reimagination of the political and economic modernity with which the party was able to brand itself and its political work for decades.
Governing with a conscious nod toward this historical interpretation would have seen social democrats turn not toward cultural exceptionalism. Rather, it would have been based on high levels of trust by the public in the state; on considerable state capacity; on a welfare structure comparatively well-endowed when it comes to weathering a crisis of this sort; on powers of redistribution; and on a tradition of state activism in pursuit of the greater, public good.
This makes the current Social Democrat government’s decision to forswear the use of the systems and structures at its command to address a dangerous pandemic all the more tragic. It is a decision which, consciously or otherwise, relies on a misplaced narrative of cultural and social exceptionalism. And it is in keeping with the state of the Social Democratic Party, which struggles to govern in the spirit of its predecessors.
But there’s a reason it is out of practice. For the last six years or so the Social Democratic Party has governed Sweden with its coalition partners as a minority government, reliant now particularly on votes from the right. The neo-fascists in the far right Swedish Democratic Party fulminate in vain despite their comparatively strong electoral performance. But the centre-right parties which prop up left-leaning coalitions while extracting considerable concessions have figured it out: the best way to exercise power in pursuit of their aims is to do so wherever possible without assuming responsibility. [As a Californian, I am familiar with these methods: for many years the Republican Party was a small minority of the state's legislature, but it used supermajority rules to ensure that, in a state with a population growing in numbers and complexity, it could control the budget and taxation process and starve the state into austerity with a mere 35% of the vote, while handing Democrats the blame for a process they couldn't control.]
The concessions their agreements with the governing parties have extracted have set Sweden on autopilot toward austerity. Not, to be sure, the dramatic, slashing kind that Britain and other countries’ right-wing parties, as well as many U.S. states governed by both parties, inflicted in the aftermath of the recession. Sweden’s path to austerity--or the Americanization of its social and economic structures, if you will--will be slower and subtler. It will be longer in the making. It will be harder to allocate blame. From day to day the changes might seem so small as to be hardly worthy of consideration.
There might not be a direct line to draw between historical and contemporary narratives of cultural exceptionalism, the strange approach of the current Swedish government to combating a global pandemic, and the country’s broader crisis of social democracy. But it is hard for me to believe they are unrelated. Generations of social democrats in Sweden have built something important: a comprehensive social democratic framework that offers the country's citizens an impressive quality of life, and which served for many years as a durable example of civic nationalism in action. My fear is that the response to the pandemic offers some insight into how and why it might crumble.
