Jonathan Power
An examination of the Swedish soul must begin, I’m afraid, with sex. Not Volvo, not IKEA, not Alfa Laval nor H&M. Not Strindberg nor Dagerman nor even Astrid Lindgren and Pippi Longstocking. Not the welfare state, not income equality nor criminal justice. Not the Lutheran Church nor collective bargaining. Not the Vikings nor 200 years without war. It’s that three letter word—and the half-myth about Swedish promiscuity—that is our starting point.
The town I live in, Lund, across the bridge from Copenhagen, hosts not only Scandinavia’s oldest university and cathedral, it is full of high-tech companies including some of the ones mentioned above and many computer technology, biotech and pharmaceutical start-ups. It is where I have lived for the last eight years. It hosts thousand of students and the weekends are notoriously wild. But the students are bright and after I’ve given a lecture I like to take those who want to out for a drink.
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Sally Laird
Discuss this piece at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
I live in Denmark, the happiest country in the world. This summer, the University of Michigan published the results of its World Values Survey, and there we were, top of the happiness league—again. Several recent studies have produced the same result: in 2006 Denmark ranked first out of 178 countries on the University of Leicester’s Map of Happiness (40 places ahead of Britain); it was first again in the Dutch World Database of Happiness in 2005, and has come top in every Eurobarometer survey for the past 30 years.
What is the secret of the Danes’ content? “Cold, dreary, unspectacular Denmark” was how two mystified Americans described the place on ABC News, adding, unappetisingly, that it was a country where “stoic locals wear sensible shoes and snack on herring sandwiches.” Danes pay the highest taxes of any nation in the world (starting at 42 per cent, rising to 68 per cent), enjoy fewer hours of sunshine than Britain, have a higher divorce rate than most Europeans, live only averagely long and smoke and drink far more than is good for them. So what’s going on?
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Mark Cousins
I saw the Abba musical Mamma Mia! recently. I was in Stockholm, the capital city of Abba-ness, and the film—which I was desperate to see—was playing in the Skandia; one of the world’s loveliest cinemas, designed by the great architect Gunnar Asplund.
As I sat down in Asplund’s barrel-like auditorium, I thought to myself: this film cannot work. A movie needs to create a coherent world. How can this one do so? Anglophone, melodious, Swedish pop tunes from the 1970s and 1980s were shoehorned into a west end mega-musical set in Greece—all done with an eye trained on the tourist dollar—and now filmed by the English theatre and opera director Phyllida Lloyd, who also directed the stage version but has never made a movie before. The cast is led by Meryl Streep, the high priestess of dramatic realism in American cinema, singing and dancing in the manner of Debbie Reynolds. She is joined by a former James Bond, Pierce Brosnan, the brooding Swede Stellan Skarsgård, that bag of ferrets Julie Walters, and Colin Firth. Sweden-Greece-England-America; different acting styles and traditions; realism and artifice competing. I was surely about to see, at best, a curate’s egg.
The curtains open, the first song, “I Have a Dream,” begins. A girl is singing, a sun is setting. Pierce is dashing to JFK in a yellow cab, intercut with Firth, who’s in a hurry too. The girl’s two best friends arrive on a Thomas Cook Greek island. They find everything side-splittingly funny. We, the audience, are not privy to the joke. Fake energy, dramatic clichés, one-note character types. I was right, I think. But about ten minutes later, I change my mind. The dramaturgy is still creaky, the psychology is molecule-thin, but the movie has blasted me into believing. And its mistral force comes not from the things critics usually write about—nuances of script, social insight, dramatic complexity—but from what lies between.
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Andrew Brown
From the 1960s to the 1980s, the world looked to Sweden as a socialist country that worked. Affluent, egalitarian, moderate, it seemed the blueprint for a kinder, more rational future. In 1977, I moved there with my Swedish wife, Anita. I lived an apparently utopian life—raising a child, working in a small factory, living in an efficient modern home, becoming a fisherman. I found it intensely frustrating. By the 1980s, the country and my marriage were falling apart. The prime minister was shot dead on a street in Stockholm. Swedish industry was crumbling. Through the cracks in the social dream, a very different vision of Sweden emerged: a disillusioned, nervous, greedy country, suddenly unsure of its identity and place in the world. Now, 20 years later, I have returned to travel the length of Sweden—and to reflect on my experiences of a country I have loved, hated, and come to love again.
Communists and detectives
Once my Swedish was up to the task, I learned a lot about my new country from the novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, about the policeman Martin Beck. Between 1963 and 1975, this man-and-wife duo produced ten police procedurals set in Stockholm, which sold all around the world. They are excitingly written, realistic about police work and full of period detail. But most of all they illuminate the orthodoxy of the Social Democratic years. The strangest thing about Sweden, to an English eye, was always its conformity. It did not matter what the orthodoxy might be: the point is that everyone knew what was acceptable and proper to believe. The Beck stories taught me most when they were most absurd, because they exaggerated what everybody then believed about progress and society. Sjöwall and Wahlöö were communists, and in the 1970s there was an assumption that communism, while imperfect, was at least a form of socialism; and socialism then seemed as completely inevitable as global capitalism does now.
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Ernst Hillebrand
The centre-left parties of western Europe are in retreat. They have lost power in a number of countries in the past few years, even in places where they have governed with some success. The centre left looks set to lose out in Italy and has lost direction in Britain. Four of the five Nordic countries—social democratic societies par excellence—now have conservative heads of government. The German SPD is in power as a junior coalition partner but threatened by a new party to its left; in France the Socialists are in a mess. Is this merely the normal swing of the pendulum, or is it the result of something deeper and more worrying for the centre left?
It is hazardous to try to draw general conclusions from experience in such a wide variety of countries. Yet one thing at least seems clear. This development marks the end of a political-ideological cycle: the centrist technocratic project known as the “third way” in Britain and the Neue Mitte in Germany. It was developed most explicitly in Britain—based partly on ideas borrowed from Clinton’s Democrats—but has had influence throughout Europe.
This project enabled the centre-left parties to establish themselves as the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the 1990s. Voter expectations and global political and economic conditions had changed since the mid-1980s, and the centre-left parties proved able to adapt to them. The project’s various manifestations had this in common: a combination of moderate neoliberal economic and fiscal policies along with an insistence on the continuing role of the state, including the welfare state, and a liberal-progressive standpoint on cultural issues—proof of an enduringly “progressive” ethos. Labour market reforms and the reorganisation of welfare benefits were coupled with an acceptance of EU-driven deregulation and competition policies (and in some countries privatisation). The centre-left parties presented themselves to the new middle classes as effective managers of capitalism. At the same time, education was allotted huge tasks—indeed, it seemed almost to take the place of redistributive fiscal policy as the main instrument of social reform. The idea was that investment in education would, over time, help solve issues of social justice, unemployment and competitiveness.
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prospect
Can David Cameron learn anything from Sweden, and its conservative party Moderaterna? The two parties are certainly friendly. There are regular informal meetings between them in London and Stockholm, and in February, Cameron spent two full days in Sweden.
Like the Tory party, Moderaterna has recently undergone perhaps the most dramatic makeover in its history. But unlike Cameron’s team, Moderaterna has had the chance to contest and win a general election.
Moderaterna’s development over the last few years, and some of its electoral tactics, could serve as a blueprint to the Tories as to how to win power. However, Cameron should be careful; travel too far down this road towards the political centre, or even centre-left, as with Moderaterna, and it may cost him later.
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Philip Ball
I have just spent a week 120 miles above the Arctic circle listening to a hand-picked group of 17 scientists discuss how to make synthetic life forms. Like it or not, this is going to happen, possibly in the next few years. Some will find that shocking, even blasphemous. To others it will seem a tremendous opportunity, scientifically and economically. Some hope it will help to solve urgent global problems. In any event, there is clearly some explaining to be done.
We are not the first to imagine making life anew to our own design. In Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), the scientist-priests who rule the technological utopia of Bensalem on a Pacific island reveal how life has become clay in their hands:
We make by art, trees and flowers to come earlier or later than their seasons: and to come up and bear more speedily than by their natural course they do. We make… their fruit greater and sweeter and of differing taste, smell, colour and figure… We have also parks and enclosures of all sorts of beasts and birds… By art likewise we make them greater or taller than their kind is, and contrariwise dwarf them and stay their growth. We make them more fruitful and bearing than their kind is, and contrariwise barren and not generative…
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Alex Renton
A short history of fish canning
I love museums of food—the more arcane, the better. My favourite is the Museum (and theme park) of Noodle Soup in Yokohama, with its working replicas of seven of the greatest ramen restaurants from around Japan, its galleries of porcelain soup bowls and—when I was there two years ago—an exhibition of the evolution of instant noodle packet design. I’ve long planned to visit the New York State Museum of Cheese, about which the New York Times recently wrote a story titled, “Is one museum honoring cheese really enough?” New York Times headline-writers do not do sarcasm, of course.
In June, I went to the Hermetikkmuseum in Stavanger, on Norway’s fjord-cracked western coast. This house of treasures has nothing to do with occult philosophy; rather, it’s devoted to the more exciting business of canning fish under pressure. It was the French who started commercially preserving fish in sealed metal, around 1830. But by the beginning of the 20th century, Stavanger was Europe’s major production centre, chiefly because of the vast quantities of brisling and sild—young herring—in the seas nearby. Jealous, and facing a shortage of fish, the French sought a legal ban on the Norwegians calling their product “sardines,” maintaining that the true sardine was the Mediterranean clupea pilchardus, which had been named after Sardinia.
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Annie Maccoby Berglof
I marked international women’s day at a dinner at the Savile Club, the legendary retreat of London’s literary giants. The list of previous members could double as the English syllabus of an American college, pre-Foucault: Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells and CP Snow. Even Henry James, who was practically English, made the club. The list goes on and on, with members even today sharing one other requirement besides artistic merit: they are all male.
Despite, or maybe because of, the membership restrictions, another exclusive club, Svea Britt—the Swedish working women’s association in Britain—picked the Savile as the perfect site to usher in international women’s day. And so on 8th March, the elegant 19th-century club rooms (which, like many grand London settings, are available for hire) were taken over by 90 Swedish women, two Americans and one Frenchwoman: Laurence Auer, the dinner speaker, honoured for her four years as deputy press secretary for foreign affairs to outgoing president, Jacques Chirac, and for being the first woman to hold the job.
At exactly 6pm, the women poured into the Mayfair club and into the all-male cloakroom, where a fierce attendant swatted them out. “No women’s coats in here.” A few grumbling members fled towards the back bar, while others ducked down to a basement, where they glued themselves to glowing green computer screens.
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Aatish Taseer
The last time I saw Isak Nilsen, we were eating okra and mutton in my flat near the diplomatic quarter of Damascus. The 22-year old Norwegian, who had been in Syria for four and a half months, seemed impatient to go before a sheikh and make the simple testimony—”There is no God but God and Muhammad is his Prophet”—that would introduce him to the society of the believers. Three days later he was on a plane back to Oslo, evacuated from a country where the faith put him at risk.
Isak’s Christianity was different from most of my European contemporaries. He was a theology student on his way to a career in the Norwegian church. He really believed that Christ had died on the cross for our sins and was the son of God. Yet now Isak was on the verge of converting to Islam, with its “clarity,” its “completeness” and its willingness to enter spheres of public life from which his church had long since retreated. Two days after our lunch the faith he was about to embrace did enter public life, but it was an entry far more violent than he would have liked. The same words that were to have been his conversion testimony had become the slogans of an angry mob attacking his embassy, burning his flag and threatening his friends.
For the past six weeks I had been in Damascus talking to young people about the place of religion in their lives. The Syrian capital is, to those interested in understanding Islam and Arabic, the key—what Boston is to liberal secular types. Abu Nour University, which reached its zenith under the late grand mufti of Syria, Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, is a favoured destination for students from non-Arab Muslim backgrounds hoping to gain or regain knowledge of the religion. On an average day Chechens, Indonesians, Pakistanis and British and American Muslims crowd the university’s corridors on their way to Koran and Arabic classes. The approach to Abu Nour is through a famous Damascus souk dotted with 13th and 14th-century minarets. Nearing the giant, still-new marble edifice, one begins to see bearded, robed and veiled figures from across the globe, standing out among the Syrians no less than Ella, my tall, blonde girlfriend.
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