I was struck by this when I used to travel by train in my younger days. Everywhere you went, you met people who had opinions about Sweden — and not always positive ones. The welfare system, in particular, came in for a lot of criticism. “Your country is a socialist experiment,” said an American in Prague. “You have high taxes and no freedom,” remarked a German on a train through Spain. They had a point, of course, but at the same time they didn’t understand a thing.
For it was also a system that worked. A high level of trust, a strong sense of responsibility, a social safety net that actually held. Not perfect — no system is — but functioning in a way that few other societies have managed to achieve.
However, the system had inherent weaknesses. It presupposed a homogeneity that was rarely articulated but which was crucial. The welfare systems were based on trust and sincerity, as opposed to anonymity. It also presupposed that citizenship was exclusive. The requirements for becoming a Swedish citizen were high, and the system was, in practice, designed for a fairly limited group of people.
A welfare system that covers everyone — including those who have recently arrived and have not contributed — is not a welfare system. It is charity. And charity does not work on the same scale, for it requires a reciprocity that arises only from a sense of belonging.
Before the turn of the last century, all this was self-evident. A nation needed a shared culture, a shared origin, legislators or ‘founding fathers’ to look to. It wasn’t ethnocentrism — it was simply how the world worked. People moved, intermingled, adapted. But the core remained.
Today, we have lost our way in the details. Either we get bogged down in social constructivism — everything is ‘socially constructed’ and therefore interchangeable — or in a metaphysical racial biology that might just as well have been taken from the 19th century. Both are fallacies. Reality is simpler: people need community, culture and stories.
Nations must, from time to time, reinvent themselves. Create a relevant founding narrative, a moment of birth when one can say: ‘this is where we began.’ France has the Bastille. The USA has the Declaration of Independence. Norway has Eidsvoll and 17 May. Finland has its independence from Russia. And Greece has its liberation from the Ottomans.
Sweden has no Liberation Day, because we were never liberated. No Declaration of Independence, because we were never colonised. On the contrary, Sweden was the dominant power in the Nordic region — the country from which the others liberated themselves. Finland broke away. Norway broke away. Skåne was conquered and became Swedish, not of its own volition. Our history is a story of empire and expansion, not of liberation and self-determination.
And it’s frowned upon to be an empire these days. It doesn’t sit well with the prevailing social climate. You can’t build a modern identity on the era of Swedish imperial power or the conquest of Skåne. So what do we base it on?
This is where it falls apart. Both the era of Swedish imperial power and the ‘social democratic model’ have been dismantled. Local alliances and co-operatives have been forgotten. The past that is actually Swedish does not fit into the self-image we wish to project.
What happens to a country that lacks a founding myth? We are seeing it right now. Without a shared narrative, identity becomes an empty shell. And empty spaces are filled — by consumerism, corporate jargon, by superficial political mantras that tug and tear, by opposing narratives claiming the country was never worth anything.
The welfare systems were part of the narrative, but not the whole of it. They rested on something deeper — a tacit agreement on a sense of belonging. When that is called into question or dissolves, the foundation disappears. Not overnight, but slowly, inexorably.
Sweden needs to reinvent itself, shed its skin, emerge from the chrysalis. Perhaps not as a great power, not as a welfare state, not as a social laboratory — but as an entirely new chapter, one that both embraces deep roots and branches out towards the skies.
