7: Cultures of decision-making in Sweden and beyond
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Nordics, Policy, Covid-19, Coronavirus, Sweden

Those projects were classic Trojan Horses. The street food project was actually about starting difficult conversations about immigration, expertise, and shared governance and ownership, opened up via ‘the gift’ of better street food, for example. They were exploring how to evolve the remarkably successful 20th century Nordic Model for the quite different conditions of the 21st century. We wanted to better understand, based on insights from research, how strong institutions would actually produce and reinforce trust, from people to people as well as to institutions, in conditions of diversity.

“The impact of ethnic diversity (on trust) actually disappears when we control for institutional quality … I am not saying that immigration doesn’t entail problems for trust. But this is not written in stone, as many seem to claim.” — Bo Rothstein, University of Gothenburg

Then, as now with my work at Vinnova, the challenge involves building on the “structural foundations” Trädgårdh refers to, whilst recognising that it is increasingly dangerous to take the shortcut of assuming an entirely consistent pattern of beliefs and behaviours within Swedish people. This is a true ‘middle way’ project, for there are consistent patterns at work here — the reactions to the virus have largely been common sense, civic-minded, sensible and appropriate, with most Swedes switching to working from home without being ordered to do so, social distancing effectively, looking out for each other, not panic buying, not going on holiday, and generally trusting what the public health agency says.

There are also some advantages potentially underpinning the Swedish approach. Despite some major, highly-connected cities in classic mittel-European medium-density mode, many settlements are relatively distributed across a very large, relatively empty land mass. Sweden has the highest proportion of people living in single-occupancy households in Europe. Many in the country — perhaps a third of Stockholm’s workforce, for example— were able to switch to working from home easily due to the very high levels of fibre-to-the-home already in place. The population is healthy, relatively (but then hard-hit Spain’s and Italy’s is apparently healthier, so go figure.)

Given the primary impact of this first strain of the virus is on the elderly, Sweden’s pattern of living comes into play too. The elderly do not tend to live in intergenerational family units, say compared to an archetypal Mediterranean culture, but instead in care homes or in their own house. This has been seen as an issue within the Nordics for years. There have been questions of loneliness, isolation, health and wellbeing, basic empathy and ethics. Right now, however, it may be some kind of awful advantage.

“If you have a household with several generations, of course you are going to have a quick spread. We have a lot of single people living in Stockholm, in the big cities in Sweden, and that could sort of slow the pace a little bit.” — Björn Olsen, Professor of infectious diseases at Uppsala University

With social distancing, of course, the self-deprecating joke around here is that Swedes have been doing that for decades (and as usual, followed by a more pointed joke at the expense of the Finns, who do it even more.) In fact, Swedes are naturally gregarious, and strong communicators — yet there is also more than a grain of truth here too.

Twitter meme, March 2020

It is not exactly all Bergman all the time — except on Fårö, on Gotland, of course, where it is — but a walk in the forest, or a paddle in a deserted lake, may still be an archetypal Swedish condition, as indeed may be coding all night. The most common Friday night activity, stereotypically at least, is fredagsmys, which roughly means ‘Friday night cosy time with the family’, usually nachos, for some reason, and TV. This, as opposed to Friday night in Newcastle, say.

A lockdown, for many in the Nordic region, and as awful as it is in essence, will not feel the same as a lockdown in the Mediterranean. It will be awful, but differently so. Some form of introspection is part of the character, and personal space, mental and physical, has a different radius, a differing porosity. Robert Ferguson ‘Scandinavians’ is very good on how the melancholy Scandinavian is a completely invented trope — a kind of Nordicism, after Edward Said’s Orientalism — and entirely true at the same time.

A family relation of solitude, stoicism is also (un)comfortably at home in Sweden, a factor some suspect is at play behind the government’s approach. Yet Finland always has another level of hardy resilience up its sleeve — the legendary sisu — and they are in much firmer form of lockdown.

“Here in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity. It oozes out of me like a broken tube of toothpaste; it doesn’t want to stay within the confines of my body. A strange feeling of weight and volume. Soul volume perhaps, which rises like clouds of smoke and envelops my body.” — Ingmar Bergman

Naturally, there are cultural dimensions expressed in language, which can be difficult to comprehend as an outsider. Emma Löfgren writes well about this in The Local, the English-language news network in Europe, which is run out of Sweden and has been invaluable for folks like me throughout the crisis. She picks up on Löfven’s use of the word ‘folkvett’, which is an example of a Swedish word with no real parallel in English, like the equally nuanced lagom or duktig, for example.

“We can’t legislate and ban everything. It’s also a question of common-sense manners,” said Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, telling people off for not following recommendations. The translation of the last bit is not perfect. He used the word folkvett, the moral sense that every person is expected to have without being taught, and a word every Swede will instinctively recognise as being very, very bad if you do not have it” — Emma Löfgren, ‘Sweden’s coronavirus strategy is clearly different to other countries so who should people trust?’, The Local, 27 March 2020

Löfgren would know better than me, but the “manners” aspect of her translation doesn’t feel quite right, as she perhaps suggests herself. ‘Folkvett’ does somehow capture this almost moral imperative to ‘do the right thing’ for you and everyone else, almost alluding to ‘folkhem’, the central idea aligning much of Sweden’s ‘middle way’ success in the 20th century. But although it may be an “untaught” or unspoken rule, it is not convey the notion of ‘manners’ as such, which, to an English speaker at least, implies a class-based construction, pinned to aspiration. Here, it is related rather more to Nordic idea of the law of Jante, which is not actually a law, of course, but a kind of social and cultural heuristic as to how to be, the opposite of individualistic aspiration. It is a constant reminder that you are no better than your neighbour, and should not act as such.

What’s happening outside the window as I type is, at best, more of a peer-to-peer mutually-assured construction, a collective reinforced. At worst, it is conformity without question. But if it’s the former, folkvett could a profoundly useful material to work with — as long as we work with it.

Sweden’s intake of migrants in recent years has been enormous, comparatively, which is a great credit to the place. The way in which ‘New Swedes’ have been absorbed into, and thus enrich, the nation comes in for criticism, not least from the same right wing populists you find elsewhere in the West but also by meaningful and justified critiques. But on the whole, Sweden is richer, in all senses, as a result.

As is Swedishness. When I wrote about Finnishness for this book, I explored how the cultures in the Nordic nations are genuinely rooted deeply in the past, with all the stories around nature, seasonality, landscape, and climate contributing vivid threads of the tapestry, and yet they are entirely confections, with conjured mythologies providing elaborations on deeply modernised, urbanised nations, with constant reinventions, mutations, and appropriations. Due to the conditions in which they emerged as modern nations, the Nordic cultures, of all cultures, are designed, essentially. Swedishness is endlessly evolving.

This in turn means that government policy and communications during a pandemic have to be attuned to a richer, more diverse idea of Sweden than the one in which government’s laws, policies, structures, cultures, and indeed employees, were born in. This, on the whole, is done well — but it is also the single biggest project in the country, in a way, as our culture is the bedrock with which we can meaningfully address any major challenge, whether climate or corona.

This also requires a richer idea of what knowledge itself is. The Swedish policy on coronavirus, and its communication, is thus far being handled calmly, professionally, and apparently firmly based on doing what the science says — in a country with a generally high respect for such things. Remember, even our most famous activist is also the planet’s most successful advocate for ‘listening to the scientists’.

But, as David Runciman points out in the London Review of Books, assessing various government responses to the virus, that may not be so simple when it comes to the virus (and, I would add, climate and public health generally.)

“There’s no such thing as simply doing what the science says. This is partly because the science itself is political — how could it not be, when so much of it is the science of human behaviour? Models of the expected course of the disease under different policy regimes rest on assumptions about how people will respond to government injunctions to change the way they live. The point isn’t that the people who create the models are following their own political preferences — they aren’t saying that they want this or that to occur — but that anyone acting on the basis of those models will also be passing a judgment on their underlying premises.” — David Runciman, ‘Too early or too late?’, London Review of Books, Vol. 42 №7 · 2 April 2020 (my emphasis)

That implicit judgment, beyond the science, is crucial, and needs to be rather more explicit. There is considerable danger of placing too much faith in a certain kind of expertise; a technocratic, engineering-led culture, usually implied by the word ‘science’, as if certainties can be located in the lab (or in the big data imaginaries inside Dominic Cummings’s head), that truths can be ascertained, and surgically-precise instrumental policies put in place as a result.

Part of the issue is with the nature of science, and partly the other forms of knowledge not usually captured by the word ‘science’, and its particular expertise. The science cannot give simple answers to complex questions, particularly when there is no data about a pandemic like this. There are judgement calls ‘on top’ of that scientific advice, about many more subjective factors. They could be described as ideological, or political, or simply cultural. They are not bad things; if it were as simple as ‘doing what the science’ says, as if pulling a readout from a ticker-tape machine, we would not need politics at all. (Clearly, this is precisely the algorithmic governance outcome some are motivating for, though usually from a Californian Ideology perspective, rather than from these latitudes.)

So the Nordic model takes input from expertise, and balances political judgement, and democratic deliberative processes, ‘on top’ of this. How that happens varies even amongst these few tightly-knit countries. It’s fascinating to read the view of scientists discussing Sweden’s approach, noting the different interpretation of modelling and simulation to other countries:

That data has to be interpreted creates one level of variation. That data to drive simulations for pandemics like this may not coherently exist is another. That the models that chew on the data cannot precisely map something like real life is another. That the resulting policy suggestions rely on interpretations of human behaviour is another. And the results will be tempered by complex adaptive systems that are near-impossible to predict. And then there is luck, and “the pitiless crowbar of events”.

There are strong similarities, and differences, across the set of neighbouring Nordic countries of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, which makes them being a good case study for varying strategies. There are intense disagreements even across these neighbours of course, potentially due to the minute differences in the strength of agencies vis-à-vis ministries across these broadly similar cultures of decision-making.

“Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell argued that the tough actions taken by the authorities in Denmark and Norway were not based on scientific evidence. “I think it’s political,” he said. “You saw that the head of the Sundhetsstyrelsen [Danish Health Authority] actually went out and said that these are not the measures they had been recommending. “If it’s an overreaction, or if it’s an adequate reaction, we will not know until afterwards.” … Tegnell said that in his weekly online meeting with his counterparts in Denmark, Norway and Finland, his approach was respected. “I’m not going to name any names, but I do get a lot of support,” he said.” — Richard Orange, ‘The Nordic divide on coronavirus: Which country has the right strategy’, The Local, 31 March 2020

Despite the similarities, Sweden has also pursued subtly different trajectories to its close neighbour Finland in several ways. Finland appears to have retained many elements of its wartime sensibility, an instinct perhaps forged during their shattering defensive campaigns against the Soviet Union during World War Two. In Jared Diamond’s book ‘Upheaval’, post-war Finnish President Urho Kekkonen is quoted as saying “A national should rely only on itself. The war years taught us an expensive lesson in this respect.”

Finland retained strategic supplies at scale, as if it is a “prepper nation”, according to the New York Times. Sweden, largely a promoter of peace wherever it can be, at least according to the Times, has instead sold off or privatised strategic supplies when it joined the EU, meaning “the Swedish health and medical care system has been built around “just in time” deliveries.”

Privatisation occurs here too, and at scale, although the relatively strong public sector, and public infrastructures, are still in line with a general ambition to be the ‘world’s first fossil-free welfare state’, the stated goal of this government. And the healthcare system in Sweden is in good shape compared to many—we will see if it is as robust as Germany’s apparently is, another EU member of course—but overall, it takes a somewhat different management of public assets to its neighbour to the East.

That Times article also notes the reliance on citizens, and the general preparedness that Sweden tries to cultivate there, not least through the information campaigns that MSB, the national civic contingencies agency produces. Kieran Long, director of ArkDes, wrote a lovely piece picking apart the meaning of this document, ‘Om krisen eller kriget kommer’ (‘If crisis or war comes’) for Disegno, when a new version was issued a couple of years ago.