Hi, the last newsletter about the Five Swedish Paradoxes was my most-read-ever, so I’ll use it as the launching pad for a mini-series of articles exploring each one. Normal service with letters about climate change and stories will be resumed afterwards.
The first paradox: I trust you, even if I don’t like you
The paradox is high social trust at the same time as social distrust.
Swedes believe in each other at the same time as they don’t want anything to do with each other.
‘I’ll help you as long as you leave me alone’.
And partly this high belief in other people stems from the fact that Swedes don’t indeed need to interact with each other.
Neighbours? Who? Stockholm may be a city of two million but often it feels like everyone living here is pretending they are in their little cabin out in the forest. When you hear the neighbour coming up the stairs, you dart into your apartment and hide. When you’re passing on the street, you might nod, but avoid eye contact. You’re more likely to invite your school friends who live in London to your parties than you are to invite your neighbour that you see every day; because you try to pretend they don’t exist.
But if you dropped your wallet on the street? Of course your neighbour would keep it safe and return it. Ideally through posting it through your door with a brief note. No need to get all intimate about this. If you accidentally left your door unlocked and ajar all weekend while you were away on a cruise to Finland? Of course your neighbour would never even think of going inside and helping themselves to your fine collection of fair trade coffees. You trust this person, this stranger. You trust them to, at least, leave you alone.
Likewise the government; the tax agency, the student loans agency and, ugh, estate agents. Are they annoying, yes. Do you wish you could replace them with an app, also yes. But do you suspect they may be trying to constantly push you around and cheat you? What a shocking suggestion!
‘Hey brother/Do you still believe in one another?’
Ok, current events are indeed showing us that this rule is breaking under the impact of a polarised society. But that emphases even more just how high trust has been and still is.
As you can see from this chart from Our World in Data Swedish people’s trust in each other is still far higher than most countries, but has sunk to ‘only’ 60%. Meanwhile British people – they may talk to you in the pub if they meet you, but they won’t be leaving their drinks unattended around you.
Corona case study
Looking at how this high-but-falling trust looks within Sweden we can take the corona measures as an example.
This survey from Kantar Sifo commissioned by the Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) shows that over two-thirds have quite or very high trust in how the Public Health Agency has handled the pandemic. And this is despite there being some fairly significant debate and distrust over the agency, especially on social media!
Now although people like to point out that ‘twitter isn’t a real picture of society’ the very active critics of the Public Health Agency there are part of an actual trend in Swedish society.
Help me shift this elk off my skis, neighbour?
The historical basis of trust in Sweden can be traced back to how people needed to depend on each other to simply survive in a cold, rocky and thinly-populated country through the ages. Even those who might have wanted to abuse their fellow-Swedes’ trust might have been forced to think twice when they knew they’d need help getting the harvest in, or need medical help or assistance in a blizzard or forest fire. Likewise the nobility and royalty couldn’t just execute and exile people by the thousands. During the height of its imperial power Sweden had a population of less than a million – in a country the size of France. So when industrialisation took off over the past 300 years the workers banded together for support and the employers needed to deal with that...if they wanted to have any workers at all. A pact was formally sealed in the 1930s where both owners and workers agreed to get along and all make lots of money, and the Social Democrat era was based on that. The modern Swedish state and society as we know it is based on these hundreds or even thousands of years of gritted-teeth compromise between kings and peasants and miners and mine-owners.
But that’s all changing, hence the fall in trust. The big male-dominated unions and big industrial workplaces that this society was built on have been shrinking. More people work in service jobs and there are more jobs that demand a very high level of education. Also after the local financial crisis of the 1990s politicians of both left and right started to look for ways to shift the costs of the welfare state and scaled back ambitions to build homes. At the same time women have won a better place in society, and Sweden’s global links mean a historically high proportion of the population is born abroad. For some Swedes, especially white men, this all looks like a time of decay and crisis compared to the country of full employment, guaranteed housing and conservative values they remember, or think they remember. Hence the rise of the Sweden Democrats, a party that draws on these feelings and polls around 20%.
Political polarisation near the North Pole
As we see from this chart from the SOM Instutute at Gothenburg University, supporters of this party have the lowest trust in the Public Health Agency of all, and in fact have the lowest trust in government agencies in general. Coupled with the party’s xenophobic position, this means we have a situation where maybe one in four Swedish men now have relatively low faith in their fellow-citizens. Something that is ironic is that this desire to Make Sweden Great Again could itself be seen as an un-Swedish attitude.
At the same time we can’t ignore that segregation in Sweden on the basis of income and also ethnicity is increasing.
Many immigrants were once housed by the migration authorities in public flats, and since the state decided not to build any more of those back in the 1990s certain areas of cities have stagnated and become over-crowded as new immigrants are placed there, or want to live close to family, friends or familiar people. At the same time white Swedes move out in response, and also move their children out of schools they see as having a high proportion of immigrants. Although many people may say to pollsters they trust people, the behaviour of even non-racist Swedes who vote with their feet or by choosing schools away from immigrants points to a loss of faith in certain neighbours in particular. Likewise people who grow up in immigrant areas where Swedish may largely exist as a second-language tend to poll lower as regarding their trust in the authorities and each other; the police often complain it is hard to investigate crimes such as shooting because people won’t talk to them in such areas.
‘Oh, if the sky comes falling down, for you/There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do’
So we have a situation where trust among people in Sweden may still be high, but it is being eroded from several directions at once, from people who vote right and left and based on internal Swedish concerns and also under pressure from global factors such as migration, neo-liberal economics and financial crises.
But the way I see Sweden is to think of a really big iceberg in the sun. Even if it’s melting, it’s still really big and cold; and even if distrust is at an all-time high in Sweden, it’s still likely that you’ll find that it’s surprisingly high if you come form somewhere else.
And that, I suppose, is a kind of paradox of its own.
I trust this letter has helped you understand Sweden more. If so, then send it to someone else you trust would enjoy it. or let me know, since encouragement will mean I’ll publish the rest of the mini-series sooner.
Yours (but also very much mine)
Loukas Christodoulou