The Swede hereafter
Swedish teen Greta Thunberg may now be one of the world’s best-known environmental activists, but some in her own country feel she’s going a bit far.
Sweden can lay claim to kickstarting global green politics, when it hosted the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, which placed sustainability on the agenda for the first time.
In 1991, it became one of the first countries to tax carbon, an initiative that helped cut greenhousegas emissions by 25% as the economy grew by 60%.
Following the UN’s Paris climate-change conference in 2015, Sweden legislated to be carbon neutral by 2045 – five years ahead of New Zealand – and the capital, Stockholm, aims to reach the target by 2040. The country is helped by the fact that it generates more than half of its electricity from renewable sources, mostly hydroelectric. Energy-intensive industries such as data centres use the low air temperature as free cooling. Attracted by the cold, cheap power and tax breaks, Facebook announced plans last year to double the size of its data centres in the northern city of Luleå. Power is also generated from burning waste, with power companies boasting that their only emissions are water vapour.
There is a strong awareness of the environment, partly because, like
New Zealand, the sea and large areas of unspoilt countryside surround the major cities. This green consciousness has led recently to a trend for
“plogging” – picking up litter while jogging.
Swedes also talk about flygskam, or flight shame, and it isn’t just a pretence at dinner parties. Flying numbers are down by 5%, and the Swede who has been most effective in exporting that message to the world is teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg. She began her protests outside the Swedish Parliament in August last year, when she was just 15.
Yet, if Thunberg has become an international phenomenon, not everyone in Sweden appreciates her methods. “Some feel they do enough for the environment already,” says David Crouch, a British journalist who lives in Gothenburg. “They follow rigorous recycling protocols in their homes, while the country is committed to carbon neutrality by 2045. They dislike Greta’s hectoring, moralistic tone.”
In many respects, measures to lower carbon emissions and improve the environment are helped by Sweden’s distinctive economic features. As
Crouch writes in his recent book on the country: “A history of taking bold political initiatives, a consensus culture, a long-term outlook and suspicion of short-termism, centrally planned housing construction, municipal intervention and partnerships with the private sector have all combined to create conditions in which Sweden could commit to going carbon neutral by 2045, and have a chance of actually doing so.”
Swedes talk about flygskam, or flight shame, and it isn’t just a pretence at dinner parties. Flying numbers are down by 5%.
his then home in Ystad, in the south of Sweden, he spoke of his ambivalence about the direction in which Swedish society was heading. On the one hand, he could see the social benefits, but on the other he was uncomfortable about the enforcement of politically correct attitudes.
Crouch is a fan of Knausgård’s work, but, he says, “There’s still a streak of oldfashioned sexism in Sweden. There is no evidence at all that men have been bullied by women – and I’ve tried looking for it.”
But perhaps Knausgård was speaking of a more subtle process, in which certain ideas are promoted and those that do not follow approved thinking are removed from the debate. The novelist believes this kind of progressive conformity is most obvious in the world of literature.
In response to a feminist critique of one of his books, Knausgård wrote a stinging attack on “the land of the cyclops”, as he referred to Sweden and its cultural guardians.
“The cyclops do not want to be aware of the parts of reality that don’t accord with how they believe it should be,” he declared.
Literature certainly plays an influential role in Sweden. Stockholm, of course, plays host to the Nobel Prize for literature, the most esteemed garland in letters. Last year, the award was postponed after the husband of one of the judges was accused of sexual abuse, leading to a conviction for rape.
If there are two things Sweden prides itself on, it is being the arbiter of literary greatness and world leader on women’s rights. To have a male predator associated, even just by marriage, with the Swedish Academy was a cause of national shame.
By convention, the Swedish Academy favours an idealistic kind of literature. Until 1912, it explicitly judged the quality of a work by its contribution to humanity’s struggle “towards the ideal” – in struggling towards that ideal, it managed to ignore Tolstoy, Ibsen and Zola.
Something of that worthiness has continued to hang around not just the prize but also Swedish literature in general. By far the most popular literary genre Sweden has exported in recent decades is Scandinavian noir – the crime novel with a social conscience.
In the worlds of Henning Mankell, creator of Wallander, and Stieg Larsson, author of the Millennium series including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a quasi-fascist corporate racism stalks the land, immigrants are routinely harassed and exploited and women ritually abused.
It’s ironic that Sweden should have produced such dark self-portraits because, in so many respects, it is one of the most enlightened places on Earth for women and immigrants to live. But perhaps there is a Nordic melancholy that feeds these novels, a sense of wintry existential anguish born of long cold nights. There is also a contemporary paranoia that can be traced to an event that traumatised Sweden, and continues to haunt its collective psyche.
In 1986, Palme, in his second stint as prime minister, was gunned down on the snowbound streets of Stockholm after visiting a downtown cinema with his wife. Despite multiple investigations, countless theories, and the conviction of a minor criminal that was later quashed, the murder remains a mystery and no culprit has been found.
Palme’s slaying is seen in Sweden as the end of its innocence. If nothing else, it coincided with the institution of freemarket reforms. Many intellectuals, such as Mankell, believed that Sweden became a much harsher place after Palme was killed, particularly for migrants from Africa and Asia.
Which brings us back to the issue we began with. According to OECD statistics, of the 28 nations it surveyed, Sweden has the highest negative gap in its employment rate between native and foreign-born populations. Non-European immigrants with low education had an unemployment rate of almost 37% in 2016. The overall unemployment rate is about 7%.
Many migrants struggle to penetrate the job market in Sweden, loaded as it is towards high-education, high-training, high-productivity work. It’s not overt racism that holds them back so much as the daunting bar to entry for those lacking the requisite skills and relevant education. In other large European cities, such as London and Paris, there is a much bigger pool of low-skilled or unregulated jobs in which new arrivals can find work. In Sweden, it can take a long time – several years – for migrants to access the job market.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Some experts in Crouch’s book suggest that if Sweden is going to accommodate its migrant population in a way that doesn’t leave them alienated and marginalised – and prey to the grenade-throwing drug gangs – then the Swedish model will have to be reformed once more.
“The debate bubbles up and then it disappears and bubbles up again,” says Crouch. “I think we need to be a bit more granular about it. Immigrants from some countries, such as the Syrians, are generally extremely well educated. They’ve got international business experience, they speak English, and Sweden is really bad at identifying those people who can be fast-tracked to make use of them for the economy. After all, there’s a skilled-labour shortage in Sweden.”
American political thinker Robert Putnam popularised the theory of social capital, in which he argued that homogenous societies are able to create more productive bonds of trust and understanding than those with diverse communities. In a crude sense, the status quo has worked well for the native Swedish population while failing to encompass a significant minority of newcomers.
But Crouch remains optimistic. As he says, in the latter part of the last century and at the beginning of this one, “Sweden coped pretty well with integrating people from the Balkans who were fleeing the wars there, and those fleeing the Iraq war.”
Probably the most popular Swede of the present era is footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović, who is a kind of national icon. Ibrahimović was born in Sweden, but his parents came from the Balkans in 1977. He is the poster boy for a new multicultural Sweden, towards which most Swedes – with the exception of followers of the nationalist Sweden Democrats party – want to move.
How to achieve a more inclusive social cohesion, while maintaining the economic model that has brought so much success, is the question to which no one yet has a convincing answer. Whatever happens, though, the tired, poor, huddled masses are still likely to receive a much warmer welcome in Sweden than in Donald Trump’s America.
Footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović is a kind of national icon and the poster boy for a new multicultural Sweden.