Hi this is the second in a six-part series about the paradoxes that define Sweden. How this country is not one thing or the other, but is a mass of contradictions. I’m a writer and trainee-teacher who’s lived in Sweden for 15 years since moving from England.
Today’s paradox is how Sweden can be very individualistic while at the same time collectivistic, Some may think Sweden is a ‘socialist country’ but at the same time it is clearly a very capitalist one. How do we square this circle?
In the first part of the series I defined the paradox we look at today as ‘how the society can seem at the same time to be super individualistic and hyper-collective depending on how you look at it. In reality? They’re both true at the same time.’
Århem, in the middle of our street
Similar to what I said last week about how Swedes trust and (mis)trust each other at the same time, Swedes are both all about the togetherness and the separateness at the same time, and in a way people here do both, in order to be able to exactly do both.
Getting rather abstract? Let’s imagine that apartment building from last week. Do you live all together? Absolutely yes. Do you pay for things together? Absolutely yes. Do you have to decide things together? Absolutely yes. Do you av´ctually meet and socialise together? Absolutely no, and I’m offended that you suggested it, go and jump in a fjord.*
The apartments I’m talking about are what would be called in England housing associations, or maybe co-ops in America. They are the main way that people ‘own’ their apartments in Sweden, and most terraced housing is owned and run the same way too. You don’t really own the apartment, you own the right to live there and do things to it within your walls. Outside it’s all decided by the committee, which you vote for and get yourself get elected to. So it’s a collective solution, and it makes sense, since mending roofs and balconies and lifts is expensive. But it’s also a very individual solution, since it means no one has to actually talk to or deal with their fellow residents, apart from the handful of retired or enthusiastic people who want to sit on the board. No one has to knock on their neighbour’s door for help, since they can ring the association's helpline, No one has to talk to people about keeping the noise down since (in theory) there are rules that everyone has to abide by. No one has to organise a cleaning rota since the board pays for a company to come and do it.
This kind of system exists outside of Sweden, of course, but I describe it here because it works as a model for the whole of Sweden and the whole paradox of ‘collective individualism.’
All under the same roof
Sweden has socialised healthcare. Sweden has socialised unemployment insurance. Sweden has socialised education. What Sweden does not have is socialising. People all live inside the structure of a society that is like a big apartment block that provides a big roof for everyone precisely so that no one has to talk to each other on the daily basis.
The nation that was once made up of isolated farmers and hunters that once depended on their neighbours has now got together and, by paying fees and taxes, erected a super-neighbour – the state and other bodies, which take care of them instead.
Ok, when it comes to the history of this I’m exaggerating to what extent the system was built to meet people’s needs. The comprehensive Swedish state was built up, above all, to prosecute Sweden’s constant wars starting in the early-modern period, about 600 years ago, and ending about 200 years ago. The state needed to know exactly who everyone was and where they were, so that it could call on them as soldiers or as tax payers. Likewise central institutions were needed for Sweden to punch above its weight. A poor country needs a national bank when it has no rich merchants just sitting around ready to lend money, like the Dutch and English had. So what has happened in Sweden is that a warlike empire has, after losing its final imperial wars to the Russians, become transformed into a social-scientific nation that continued to use central and collective solutions in peacetime, because they were traditional and more efficient – for things like engineering projects, scientific research, education and housing.
By the 20th century the collective-individual paradox was part of allowing people to detach themselves from social bonds because society was so all-embracing. Sounds like a contradiction? Well, it’s a paradox. Sweden’s focus on education, bureaucracy and trade unions has meant that people have been able to go to school, maybe to college or university, enter a trade or profession, and make their way in the world regardless of who their family was and regardless of whether thei family approced and wanted them to stay on the farm. Well, maybe, not totally regardless, but it has allowed people to make what’s called a ‘class journey’.
Freedoms to be the same
The American dream may be that you can be whoever you want, no mater where you come from but, research suggests, this has largely actually been a Swedish reality. People here are relatively mobile and can choose their lives, rather then following in their parents’ footsteps.
Personally I have always been struck by the number of people in ‘elite’ professions who come from working-class backgrounds, since in my birth country of England the most powerful professions tend to be dominated by people from powerful families, or who have had expensive educations from a young age in private schools.
While I get annoyed often at the Swedish inflexibility and need to see that you have gone through exactly the right educational stages before you are allowed to move on, I can recognise that this is also a form of liberal freedom – if the system is inflexible and simply rewards you for going through the system, then the system is also open to anyone no matter what they are coming from. The anonymous collective structure frees the individual from intimate and personal social bonds.
That’s the theory, anyway. The ‘Swedish dream’ has flaws inside it just like all the other dreams. Sweden’s freedom of the individual is still skewed to benefit people who are seen as having certain forms of power, wealth or cultural or background attributes. And yes, even Sweden’s old aristocracy hasn’t disappeared into some kind of egalitarian much, but rather exists as a discreet presence within things like property, politics and even the media and the arts.
But what this all adds up to is that you should not be surprised if you see that Sweden has both extremely individualist characteristics and also extremely collective ones. These may seem paradoxical, but they are usually part of the same thing, and working to create the whole. For example, Sweden has the most free market in education in the world, and companies and organisations are able to set up their own private schools, but at the same time this is only made possible by such schools all getting taxpayer’s money. Once again, extreme individualism of the separate apartments happens under the big high-rise roof that has been built by centralised power. They’re part of the same thing and allow each other to exist.
Your very humble servant (in no very real nor legally binding way)
Loukas Christodoulou
*Fjord? No, I didn’t get that wrong. Sweden does have a few fjords: on the west coast next to Norway.