LONDON, 8 August 2003 — Find me a Swede who is holidaying abroad this summer and I’ll eat my newspaper. Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson for one cycled round the countryside with his new girlfriend, appropriately enough the head of the country’s government-controlled alcohol monopoly, which runs the system of wine and beer shops that ensures the average Swede can’t just decide to have a drink.
This is the European country that along with France loves itself the most. It is comfortable in its old ways, is wedded to a welfare state that produces an ultra-healthy population that claims more sick leave days than anybody else’s, and invariably manages, as it does today, to pull handsome economic growth out of a hat in spite of dire predictions of creeping sclerosis. It heads the Western divorce rate league and accepts late teenage sex unblinkingly and yet seems to walk happily in the pathways of its self-disciplined, Lutheran traditions.
The result: A feeling that the country will always do quite well on its own, thank you very much — despite having more multinational corporations per head than any other country and where even the garbage men speak passable English. It thus, say the pundits, provides an electorate that is unlikely to say “yes” to the Euro in the referendum Persson has called in six weeks’ time. He has begun a short and, one assumes, sharp campaign to persuade the reluctant Swedes to change their minds.
Sweden’s introversion can be quite charming when the sun is shining, as it has been this summer almost every day. The coast line is long, the country is dotted with lakes, and the population, despite a rising tide of refugees to a society that likes to do good, is small enough at 9 million for every Swede to have his (or her) own fifty meters of lakeside or seaside paradise, and more likely than not his own summer house.
If foreigners were clever they could turn their backs on overheated southern Europe would find they could still do it for peanuts.
But the other side of it is an almost aching reticence that makes friendship hard and uphill work, a winter so long and dark that even those with a benign genetic inheritance can become depressed and where the national mood can only be described as melancholic — as the writings of Strindberg and Stig Dagerman, the music of Stenhammar, the films of Ingmar Bergman and the poetry of Transtromer readily attest.
Yet the very self-absorption and quasi-isolationism of Sweden is Persson’s trump card.
The Swedes are almost Japanese when it comes to political debate -- it is the European consensus society par excellence. Not for nothing has the country been ruled by a single party, the Social Democrats, for 62 of the last 71 years.
Politics and law shun the adversarial style dominant in the Anglo-Saxon world. Apart from making divorce cheap, that also means that political arguments are rarely allowed to run away with themselves, a middle way is instinctively sought, and those who are supposed to know about something (in this case the politicians) are listened to with an attentiveness that ensures that when the Swedes enter the privacy of the polling booth their own instincts about what they would like to do can be subordinated to what they have been convinced is the right thing to do.
Besides, Persson is a popular man. In Swedish front-line politics he has no peer. He excels in political management, he has enormous natural charisma, he speaks and argues well.
But unlike his slain charismatic predecessor Olof Palme, who exhibited similar characteristics, he does not exude effortless superiority, a most un-Swedish thing in a nation that prides itself on not encouraging applause for individual success.
Swedes are being told two important things.
First, that the forthcoming Euro referenda in Denmark and the UK will be profoundly influenced by what the Swedish electorate decides. And, as a corollary to this, that Swedes will not be able to look at themselves in the mirror if they effectively take the lead in dividing Europe at a crucial, unsettled time.
Rather, their historic role is to help cement the countries of Europe together and to bequeath to a war-torn continent another virtue the Swedes have practiced for 190 years — the avoidance of war. The Euro, Persson is going to say again and again, is not so much about economics but about peace and security, about, as he said on Sunday, creating “a better continent”. And there is still a good chance he will win his “yes”.
