Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is no longer fantasy; it is Sweden. "I know of no study.... of totalitarianism that is so organized, so thorough, and so instructive as this book."—Book News

ROLAND HUNTFORD

The New Totalitarians

"It will take more than a single volume to disillusion Americans about 'democratic socialism' and the 'free' welfare state, but if any book can do it, this is it!'—Human Events

When this book was first published, in 1972, the Social Democrats had ruled Sweden for almost forty years. They seemed destined to continue doing so for forty years more. Since then, however, they have lost two elections in a row, and the country has been governed by the non-socialist parties instead. Remarkably little has changed, however. The corporatism which lies at the heart of the Swedish system, and which was my central theme, continues on its way. Sweden is run in much the same way as before. The main difference is that the corporatism of the left has been replaced by one of the center.

By definition, almost, the functionary prefers a corporatist system and collective ethos. Both put institutional loyalty before

The New Totalitarians

The sense of little having changed except the faces at the top is enhanced by economic policy. Keynesian principles still reign supreme. Sweden remains a country of high government spending and gargantuan taxation. Taxes account for over half the Gross National Product, the highest in the Western world by far.

Although its Utopian image may have faded, Sweden remains, if not a model, at least a political laboratory. If a single issue may be said to have broken the Social Democratic hold on office, it was nuclear power.

In 1974, some time before it was of public concern elsewhere, nuclear energy had become a political question in Sweden. The dangers of present-day reactors, the various risks of pollution, became a matter of votes. It was part of a ground swell—also ahead of its time—of concern for the environment. The so-called "Green Wave" decided the fate of the government. Eco-politics had arrived. Since Sweden has been traditionally devoted to the

1. The New Totalitarians

And yet, many of the scientific necessities are already with us. We have foolproof contraceptives, illimitable communication, electric energy and gadgetry in abundance. Their proper application waits only upon the correct social machinery: science, as always, is several lengths ahead of politics.

The victory of technology over man, says Huxley in a foreword to one of the later editions of his novel, requires only a highly centralized totalitarian government. But, he says,

Of all people, it is the Swedes who have come closest to this state of affairs. They have the necessary background and

Economic security by itself does not necessarily imply a love of servitude. Other conditions are required: on the side of the rulers, a thorough understanding of the interaction between economics and power; and on the side of the ruled, submission to authority and a reverence for the expert. Also, in both cases, an aversion to individuality, an instinct for the collective, a suspicion of parliamentary institutions, a worship of the State, and a preference for government by bureaucrat rather than by politician.

But otherwise, Brave New World is enough. 'Industria'

The New Totalitarians 13

2. The Historical Backround

The reasons for this difference are complex and contentious. But geography must have played a part. Protected from invaders by the Scandinavian watershed, and a long, labyrinthine coastal archipelago that even in modern times has been a formidable barrier, Sweden did not need the defensive mechanism of independent military barons that evolved in the anarchy of the Dark Ages on the European mainland. Moreover, communications in Sweden were better than on the Continent. Roads were admittedly non-existent, but an indented coastline and a honeycomb of natural inland waterways were there for the sailing. The country is ice- and snow-bound for several months of the year, but travel has always been easy by sled and ski. Thus nature discouraged baronial autonomy and promoted the exercise of central power.

Since the early Middle Ages, many of the Swedish nobility-had been dutiful royal functionaries. In the seventeenth century, it became their principal occupation. Charles XI, one of the great reforming kings, then decimated their estates by recovering alienated royal lands. To retain their position, while submitting to the new order, they converted themselves from a class of land-owners to a class of titled

In consolidating his authority, Gustav possessed yet another advantage. Unlike England and other Western European states, Sweden had no urban middle class to obstruct royal despotism. The country has always been divided into a mass of peasantry, and a thin crust of merchants and bureaucrats at the top, subservient to the monarch.

registers, removed from the Church: it was then transferred directly to computers.

In various forms, this attitude has persisted through the years. There have been very few fights over principle; men have seen the greatest virtue in submission and acquiescence. Today, a Swede will most often show the same reluctance to suffer for an idea as his sixteenth-century predecessor.

the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century gave it an unchallenged hold on the population. Its educational monopoly upheld cultural isolation and a monolithic structre of intellectual life. A few pundits prescribed the lines of thought

In the meantime, Erik's half-brother, Duke John,* had developed ambitions on the Swedish crown. To enlist the support of Poland, John married Catherine Yagellonica, the sister of the Polish king. John crossed to Finland to raise a rebellion, but was captured by Erik before he could do so, and removed to Sweden, where he was thrown into prison. John, having been forgiven and freed, deposed Erik in 1568, and, in turn, imprisoned him. The king was supposed to have gone mad, but whether this was really the case, or whether a charge of insanity had simply been trumped up in order to

^* Although in most systems of nobility 'Duke' was a territorial title, in the Swedish royal house it was a personal one, conferred on the younger sons of the king.

* The state of Sweden, and the manners of its kings, may be gauged by the legend that the poison was administered in pea soup.

Oxenstierna gave form and permanent strength to the

The battle of Narva made Sweden once more the arbiter

of European affairs, an ally worth the courting. Charles now attacked Poland, the long-held goal of Swedish ambitions, annihilating the Polish army. In 1707 he turned on Peter once more, and became the first modern leader to know the discomforts of invading the endless plains of Russia. The king of Sweden chased the Tsar's armies towards Moscow. But the Russians replied with the same scorched earth policy that broke Napoleon and Hitler. Baulked on the direct road eastwards, Charles turned south into the Ukraine. In the summer of 1709, he attacked the Russian army at Poltava, a fortress on the Vorkla, a tributary of the River Dnieper. He was repelled, with the loss of almost 10,000 men. But he still had 15,000 troops with his cavalry intact. He withdrew his army from Poltava to Perevelotchna, on the Dnieper. Crossing the river with a skirmishing force, he set out to fetch reinforcements. A day or two later, the army capitulated to the Russians without firing a shot.

Gustaf's son, Gustaf IV, presiding over the disasters of the Napoleonic wars, was made scapegoat for the national misfortune, and deposed. The crown was then offered to Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte,* one of Napoleon's marshals. This was a device to acquire the protection of France against Russia, for Napoleon was still the ally of the Tsar, and theoretically able to shelter a dependent. In 1810, Bernadotte landed in Sweden, and declared war against England. In 1812, Bonaparte broke with Russia. Bernadotte, foreseeing the collapse of France, refused to follow his erstwhile master, made friends with the Tsar instead, and joined the coalition against Napoleon, being granted Norway by the Allies as reward. Bernadotte also foresaw the expansion of Russia, and decided that the safety of Sweden depended upon her abandoning Eastern Europe. Finland was irrecoverable: by acquiring Norway he hoped to accomplish the necessary reorientation, and avert Russian suspicion.

Norway had belonged to Denmark since the fourteenth century, but the Danes made the unfortunate mistake of supporting Napoleon after Sweden changed sides. In 1814, Bernadotte invaded Denmark, forcing her to cede Norway and join the Allies.

Sweden was now, as she had been three centuries earlier, obscure and isolated.

Perhaps non-belligerency, meaning the bare avoidance of hostilities, more aptly describes the Swedish condition than neutrality, which implies an attitude of mind as well. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Sweden vacillated between France and Russia. With the rise of Germany, Swedish sympathies veered accordingly, and after the French defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870, Sweden became in spirit a German colony in the north. In 1914, Sweden supported the Central Powers, and members of the government suggested a policy that they dubbed 'active neutrality', by which they meant helping the Kaiser by all means short of fighting. Exactly the same phrase was resuscitated half a century later under similar circumstances, in this case to describe an anti-American posture during the Vietnam War

* * *

One of the gravest obstacles to the fulfilment of Utopia has been the development of individuality. It brings too much incertitude and too much resistance to the calculations of authority. But the Swedes have been spared that burden; among them the concept of individuality and the development of personality have been grossly retarded down the centuries. The Swede has never emerged from behind the veil of the group; he is conscious of himself only through some general category, as a member of a people, a clan or a party. He has preserved untouched a devotion to an hierarchical order of things and an unprecedented devotion to corporate organization. Sweden has remained a country, not of individual citizens, but of groups and guilds. The industrial revolution found a receptive environment in Sweden and did not have to grapple with the inappropriate mentality of Western Europe. Sweden is a country in which modern institutions have been grafted onto a medieval frame of mind.

That is the real distinction between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. Medieval man, with his instinct for the

Indeed, most Swedish writers and poets are steeped in a morbidity and cruelty that is recognizably medieval. They reduce mankind to stereotypes, treating their characters, not as individuals, but as formalized symbols. To read a modern Swedish novelist, or see a modern Swedish film, is

most often to feel a nearness to the world of the Middle Ages. Thus The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman's medieval morality film, is in fact a typical example of modern Swedish cinema. Individual values and spontaneity are overshadowed by a dark, oppressive sense of destiny. It is as if Boccaccio, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rousseau and the apostles of the European personality had never been born.

revolution in personal development, spared them opposition. Individuality means, almost by definition, resistance to authority. Neither grew up in Sweden. Retaining an instinctive submission to hierarchical organization, acting and thinking in groups, ever reluctant to oppose orders from the top, the Swedes have eased the task of their reformers and administrators down to the present day.

partly a confirmatory body; its main function was to approve royal ordinances. But it had one important constitutional role: it decided the powers of the king. Provided he ruled successfully, the king obtained the privileges he desired.

Gustaf derived his strength from an alliance with the bureaucrats, reinstated in the authority lost during the Age of Freedom. But as his reign progressed, he became infected

For a long time, the Age of Freedom was condemned as an age of falsehood and inefficiency, proof that parliamentary supremacy meant political corruption. The bureaucracy was widely regarded as the only reliable guarantor of public honesty and it was this principle that guided the development of Sweden from royal despotism to a form of constitutional rule. If the bureaucrats were anxious to retain their traditional power, they had the support of a nation that mistrusted politicians.

^* The king was shot at a masquerade in the Stockholm Opera House by Captain J.J. Anckarstrom, a former officer in the household regiment. Verdi wrote his opera, Un hallo in maschera, around this incident

^* By comparison, the English working classes were partially enfranchised by Disraeli in the Second Reform Bill in 1867; Bismarck did the same in Prussia in 1866. Sweden followed suit a quarter of a century later.

fight for the vote was therefore against the legislature, instead of within it, as in other countries. As a result, the extension of the franchise in Sweden had the paradoxical effect of diminishing respect for the Diet, leaving a permanent stain on parliamentary institutions.

If, despite its high material standards and technological advancement, Sweden was, until the 1950s, a mainly peasant land, it was because of a unique form of industrial organization. This was the bruk, an industrial settlement lying away from the towns, out in the countryside. There were hundreds spread over central and southern Sweden. In the isolation of these small colonies, there grew up a powerful sense of community. It was in the bruk that many of the institutions of modern Sweden grew up; it was the cradle of the Swedish Welfare State.

If the bruk worker was not wholly free, he was at least looked after by his master. Provided he worked satisfactorily, he would be cared for in his old age, with a roof over his head and a small pension. The bruk-owner also provided free medical Care and schooling.

With the advance of industrialization, manufacturers acquired more political power, and the bruk-owners began to influence lawgiving with their paternalistic traditions. For this reason, Swedish industrial legislation always had a heavy streak of welfare.

The worker felt an ingrained loyalty for his bruk and

^* The bruk survives, many Swedish firms retaining the ancient form in a modernized version, still working away from the cities in rural manufacturing colonies. In these industrial outposts in the forest, the social organization and the mentality of the old bruks lives on, virtually untouched.

* These attitudes still flourish. The brukspatron, however, no longer exists, his place being taken by the managing director. The contemporary Swedish managing director is not only a man of distinction (or infamy) among businessmen, but a father (or stepfather) to his workpeople. I once met a taxi driver, a rabid Socialist and trade unionist, who boasted how once he had been chauffeur to one at a certain bruk. It was like hearing a simple Catholic peasant talk reverently of an audience with the Pope.

But at the beginning of this century, unions and employers manoeuvred themselves into a position over wage demands from which retreat was impossible and which, in 1909, led to the only General Strike in Swedish history. The unions soon capitulated before the strength of the employers, and the strikers returned to work, their demands unsatisfied. The strike had weakened the unions and discredited the LO.

Alien borrowings had been the exclusive concern of the upper classes, and the mass of the population had, until the exodus to America, been steeped in a national tradition alone. Now repatriates and letters home brought American influence to Sweden.

This continued unrelieved until the defeat of Germany in the First World War brought some Anglo-Saxon influences. But German culture still held sway and German remained the second language of Sweden until the Nazi collapse. The emergence of the United States as a super power swept German culture from Sweden, substituting Americana instead. Within five years of the end of the war, English replaced German as the principal foreign language, and Sweden was thoroughly Americanized. Culture follows the sword.

48 The New Totalitarians

In Sweden, then, the technological revolution of the twentieth century was exceptionally favoured. It had come to a country with little political feeling, but a love of bureaucracy, where the population submitted to an hierarchical order of things and accepted autocratic rule. They were well adapted to a centralized administration, and had uniform attitudes controlled by a monolithic educational system. They were steeped in a collective mentality, and the individual was at a discount. They were completely materialistic, and unencumbered by spiritual baggage. Culturally undeveloped they accepted what was put before them, and adopted whatever was new. Other people's wars benefited them commercially, but they escaped hostilities themselves. Geographically and intellectually isolated, they were spared conflicting influences from abroad, subject only to one trend at a time. The situation might have been tailor-made for the system that was to come.

They have a title to the historical aspirations of the Swedes. Those persons who accept a Western political creed, revering Parliament and putting the individual above the collective, find themselves in a risible minority embracing alien concepts and consigned to the lunatic fringe. It is the Social Democrats' doctrine that holds sway, even in the camps of their adversaries. The Centre Party, which most nearly resembles the Social Democrats in having the same native collectivist roots, is the largest and most successful of the opposition factions. On the other hand, it is not really of the opposition; it is merely out of office. Thus a change of government would mean no change of course. More to the point, the Social Democrats express a national feeling that pervades public life, and they do so better than their rivals. This gives them a foundation deeper than mere politics. Upon it they have built a privileged kind of power, unobscured by electoral setbacks. It has not come of itself; they have had to work single-mindedly for it.

When the Social Democrats succeeded a Conservative

crease in the output of wood pulp, foundation of national wealth, was forty-three per cent. Industrial production for 1939 was sixty-five per cent more than in 1929: world trade stagnated during the same period. Sweden had done better than most countries in mending her fortunes. By 1940, she had not only overcome the Depression but, making up for her late start, had overhauled the rich industrial states of the West.

In all this, there lies a curious parallel with Russia. In both countries, the 1930s saw the establishment of basic industries and the execution of the groundwork for future progress by regimes that, driven by a compulsion to overcome national backwardness, were obsessed by the priority of economic advancement. In each case, the tasks were accomplished, with the obvious difference that whereas the Soviet Union employed despotic rule, the Swedes enjoyed a constitutional form of government.

in a similar way, see their movement as the political arm of the technological revolution, its purpose that of transmitting and distributing to the population the benefits of what scientists and engineers have achieved. To do this properly, the Social Democrats believed in the necessity of a planned economy. But they also understood that, while the planners propose, the producers dispose, so that their schemes would be futile until the economy gave the wherewithal to manipulate. While beginning the erection of the apparatus of central planning, they were also vigorously engaged in breathing new life into Swedish industry. It was one thing to encourage investment and build new factories but, unless the workers agreed to work, plans for expansion were so many empty words. At the end of the 1920s, and the beginning of the 1930s, strikes and lock-outs were ravaging Sweden. Industrial peace was seen to be vital for industrial progress, and it was pursued with the same urgency as the purely technological and economic prescriptions for putting the country on its feet.

The country wanted an end to conflict, and the Social Democratic government was elected in 1932 on a promise of

At first the trade unions were infuriated by the legislation, which they inclined to see as a device to shackle themselves. But they were mollified by the discovery that the bosses, whom the new arrangement might be supposed to favour, turned out to sympathize with them. Both sides disliked the prospect of the law's obtruding itself into their disputes; they both disliked even more the underlying threat of government interference. When the Social Democrats came to office in 1932, the unions wanted to keep the State out of the labour market with perhaps more urgency than under a Conservative regime. Before, it had been a question of repelling the employers, enemies from the outside; now what was at stake was the containment of an internal rival, the party, for the control of the labour movement. The employers were equally anxious to keep the authorities at bay. Self-preservation drove both sides together and, they conscientiously devised a system of central bargaining which enabled them to settle their disagreements privately - or at least be seen to do so.

Collective bargaining had long been accepted as demonstrably rational and efficient. Unions and employers accepted the principle; what remained was to centralize it, so that the LO and the Employers' Confederation could negotiate for the whole country. They conferred on and off for five years and, in 1938, codified their ideas in the Saltsjobaden agreement, named after the Stockholm suburb where it was signed. It was the peace treaty between labour and capital. The signatories agreed that their interests were the same, and that antagonism would get them nowhere. They committed themselves to the peaceful settlement of industrial disputes. Strikes were outlawed as long as the agreement was in force. The right to strike was not, however, abolished; it was regulated. In order to strike without breach of faith, it was necessary to repudiate the agreement, which required at least a fortnight's notice. Under the guise of rules of procedure, a cooling-off period had thus been built into the system.

Inviolable discipline is obviously another vital condition of wage bargaining. Again, this follows automatically as a consequence of the nature of the Swede. Swedish workers

beyond the usual remedies of fiscal and monetary policy in the establishment of special devices to counteract business cycles. The main ones are these. In the fat years, firms may set aside part of their surplus which, deductible from taxable income, is placed in a blocked bank account. When the lean years arrive, the money may be withdrawn for investment and expansion. The government decides when this is to happen, and what schemes are to be financed. Then, the Labour Market Directorate, the official body supervising questions of employment, has contingency plans for road building and other public works which are started when a recession appears. Furthermore, the Directorate has a device to mop up surplus labour when the country goes through a bad patch. This is a scheme for vocational retraining, partly financed by an industrial levy, and always in readiness. Its total capacity is about 7,000, which was invoked to the full in 1971 for the first time for over a decade.

The first Swedish old-age pension was contributory, dependent on the total paid and partially subject to a means test, When first granted, in 1914, it was 56 kronor annually. At the contemporary rate of exchange, it was equivalent to £3, £35 in terms of 1973 purchasing powers. As incomes rose, and whole working lives were passed under the scheme, payments increased correspondingly, reaching 728 kronor* in 1947. The following year, the Social Democrats made the first basic alterations in the system since its inception by granting a fixed pension irrespective of the contributions paid, and by abolishing the means test. It was a recognition that the country was now on its feet, and what the Social Democrats called 'the harvest era', or the reward for past deprivation, was about to begin. The new pension was 1,000 kronor** annually: in 1951, it was given its present form by being tied to the cost-of-living index. The pension at the beginning of

^{** £70 (\$310)} at current rates; £280 (\$677) in 1973 terms

Democrats', he was no more than speaking the historic truth.

Long ago, the Swedish Social Democrats abjured Marx. And in the sense that they have discarded his ideological paraphernalia, and now rarely study him, this may be taken at face value. But in the way that they think and act, they suggest a deep and pervasive Marxist streak in their intellectual make-up. Professor Herbert Tingsten, a Swedish political economist, and former Social Democratic ideologist, puts it in these words: 'The historical-philosophical concepts, from which Marx developed his more detailed economic and social theories, have maintained their authority to a far greater degree than the theories themselves. The materialistic interpretation of history is still, as a rule, accepted as a significant and true dogma, even if there is rarely any attempt to explain with any exactitude what exactly it consists of. A general mood of economic determinism has surrounded the economic debate. It is enough to mention the continuous reference to "progress", as some kind of independent, motive force. A reform is sufficiently justified if it is said to be in line with "progress".'

Industrial Peace and the Rise of Modern Sweden 67

4. A Planner's Promised Land

A number of economic devices enable the government to steer industry. Credit is rigorously controlled by the central authorities. Taxation is so designed that companies find it increasingly difficult to finance themselves, and investment and expansion depend on State loans. Since these, in their turn, depend on whatever conditions (and they need not necessarily be economic) the government decides to impose, there is considerable scope for direction. To take one example, placement of factories can be steered. When Volvo, the motor car manufacturers, expanded their plant in 1970, they were compelled by this means to transfer some production to Umea, in northern Sweden, about 800 miles from their headquarters in Gothenburg. Left to themselves, the directors would scarcely have done so, since economically the move was indefensible. But politically, the government required it, in order to bring employment to a depressed area.

desired, particularly in the supervision of daily business and insight into company affairs. The next step is, obviously, the State in the boardroom. This is Social Democratic policy. It started in 1971 with the major banks, who now have government directors on their boards. Shipyards are the next in turn, and doubtless large industrial concerns will follow not long after. Only one or two State directors have been appointed to each bank and, being in every case a small minority, they cannot exercise formal control. But their words carry weight; they are the commissars. It is not the intention, at least during the 1970s, to have a majority of State directors on private companies. One agent on each board is enough; he can relay government orders, and report back on private company matters. By his presence, power has been transferred from the shareholders and directors to the government, without altering the forms of ownership. The arrangement gives the State all the control it needs, while ensuring local autonomy, allowing market forces to work within prescribed limits, and

in Sweden, and are given priority by the authorities when granting permission to establish new shops.

Since 1963, the Swedes had flirted with ideas of approaching the EEC, forced by the necessity of preserving export markets. They were vague in their intentions for a long time but finally, in 1971, they rejected full membership on two main counts: that it was incompatible with their neutrality, and that it would interfere with their particular brand of development. In particular, the government was unable to accept free movement of labour and free movement of capital. That the free movement of capital was not condemned on principle had been demonstrated in the abortive negotiations with Denmark, Finland and Norway for a Nordic Common Market in 1969, when the Swedes made this a condition. But in that situation they were the biggest nation, and clearly wanted to extend their economic power to their neighbours. Dealing with the EEC, however, Sweden was a small nation and therefore at the receiving end of capital movement, implying the intrusion of alien influence. As far as the move-

Diet did not originate legislation; it passed or rejected measures formulated elsewhere

All this holds still today. The 1809 constitution has been periodically amended as circumstances changed, but its fundamental principles have remained unquestioned. As the franchise grew and the position of the monarchy declined, a Cabinet system evolved. But there was still nothing in the constitution that compelled the government to have a majority in the Diet. The appointment of the government continued to be a royal prerogative. Ministers were not then, as they still are not, required to sit in the Diet. Until the beginning of this century, the king could and did force governments on the country, against the will of the Diet, and against the verdict of the electorate. Only since 1917 have the principles of a constitutional monarchy been fully accepted, and the government required by custom to enjoy the confidence of the Diet

Although the Diet, after the enactment of the 1809 constitution, had begun to grope towards modern parliamentary forms, the power of the bureaucracy continued unabated, spilling over from the administration into politics. Civil servants still dominated the Cabinet. In the 1850s, when loose Diet coalitions of a Liberal and Conservative complexion appeared, the forerunners of genuine parties, they both courted the civil service. A Liberal Minister of Finance, J. A. Gripenstedt, thought it vital for his political survival

A Cabinet minister has the function of giving force to

If the Swedish Central Bank exercises a unique and absolute control over financial affairs, it is not entirely due to its very extensive powers, which, in effect, make private banks its branches. It is also a consequence of the quasi-civil servant attitude of bankers.

The Directorate of Social Affairs enjoys untrammelled power in the custody of children. An administrative order issued by a petty official is sufficient to take any child away from its parents and have it brought up by any person (or institution) and in any way seen fit. This is no modern contrivance; it is an old arrangement brought up to date.* In the last century, it was not infequently used to ensure that the

^* Illegitimate children are automatically wards of child welfare boards, the local agents of the Directorate of Social Affairs. They have to be brought to child care centres regularly for inspection, and their mothers are legally compelled to undergo any cross-examination which the officials see fit to carry out to retain custody. Unmarried mothers are particularly exposed to the removal of their children.

Child welfare authorities are in contact with every citizen at one time or another. By law, every birth must be reported to the local child welfare centre. A representative will then visit the home to assess conditions and report findings to the doctors at the centre. It is unwise to resist entry, because that will arouse suspicions of maltreatment, with consequent danger of official action. Moreover, there is a legal compulsion

on the citizen to report all suspicions of maltreatment to the child welfare centres. Anonymity is guaranteed, so that the suspected parent, like the victim of the Spanish Inquisition, need never know who his accuser is.

The intention of the Swedish child welfare arrangements is to protect children from maltreatment. But the form which they take is obviously a gross violation of the integrity of the citizen. Yet native disapproval of this state of affairs is rare in the extreme. I once asked a man, a schoolteacher, university graduate and supporter of the Liberal party, whether he was

5. The Corporate State

Its roots he in the agricultural system. Until well into the nineteenth century, the Swedish peasant had preserved the archaic system of strip farming. Although nominally his own landlord, he was not his own master. His holdings were not continuous, but distributed over a maze of disconnected patches so narrow that it was impossible to cultivate them separately, and the land of each village was therefore worked collectively as one large farm. The villagers worked together in gangs, with precise regulations governing their actions. Economically, each village was considered as a unit, and book-keeping and sales were handled communally. It was collective farming, centuries before the Bolsheviks imposed it in Russia. The only difference was that, rather than having managers imposed by a despotic central power, the ancient Swedish collectives were ruled by elected village councils. But once in office, councillors exercised dictatorial powers, to which the villagers submitted abjectly.

The reform turned the life of a whole nation upside down. Yet there was no resistance to it: Sweden is one of the few countries in which agrarian reform has not caused unrest. The peasants meekly razed their homes, and built new ones, more or less within the prescribed time limits. Although they disliked the change, the population submitted without protest to the dictates of authority, because that is what they were used to. The government had demonstrated that reform, however profound, could be imposed without trouble.

providing the solace of the group. Driven by a compulsive longing for the collective, many Swedes took the pledge, while drinking clandestinely, in order to gain admission. After 1850, the revivalist movement, offering social activities in addition to purely religious meetings, displaced temperance as the main outlet for a collective mentality that continued with undiminished vigour. A revivalist fervour swept the country during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the belated arrival of the devotional content of the Reformation. After 1860, the introduction of freedom of worship released pent-up religious feelings-, and there was an explosion of free churches. But by the end of the century, religious enthusiasm was spent, and the temperance societies regained their supremacy. In 1900, the temperance movement claimed a third of the Diet members of all political parties, imposing restrictive drinking laws. The temperance movement had developed into a popular organization of the modern Swedish type; it not only satisfied a group mentality, but exerted political power as well.

The form of habitation encouraged a sense of community. Houses were huddled wall to wall along a single street. Privacy was not respected and anybody was permitted to enter a home unasked. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, a bruk contained on average about 300 inhabitants. Within the confines of so small a number, it was impossible to escape public scrutiny, and the usual pressures of Swedish society were magnified, so that conformity seemed like a law of nature. The bruk did not, like the old agricultural village, have the law behind it in imposing conformity but, in the power of consensus, it possessed compulsion enough. Demanding a highly developed sense of the collective, the work of the bruk generated a pattern of living that left no place for the individual. Out of this developed a profound sense of corporate identity.

^* No irony intended.

In order to do this, the employers, by tacit agreement,

Each side will often try to help the other out of difficulties. For example, in 1969, a high official of the Employers' Confederation was told by a LO acquaintance that a certain firm was paying its employees more than the central agreement prescribed. This is quite as serious a breach of contract as cutting wages, and the LO man was concerned because of the threat it posed to the structure of the Labour Market. In the first place, it implied that the company had tried to improve production and attract labour by using wages as a bait. Under the Swedish system, that is heresy, because it means introducing competition, which is inconsistent with order. It also weakens the power of the central authority by allowing freedom of action at the periphery. The theory of central wage bargaining is that the principals establish norms for the whole country, and regulate any local variation. There must be uniformity and monolithic control, since bidding for labour, the natural consequence of full employment, introduces elements of disorder.

In very private moments, men of the LO and the Employers' Confederation will admit that they like and understand each other, and that it is something of a strain to have to go through a ritual quarrel demanded by political rules. Sometimes the mask slips. In 1971, the placidity of the Swedish Labour Market was seriously disturbed by a strike of civil servants. They belonged to a splinter group beyond the power of the LO, and the government countered with a harshness unknown since the beginning of the century. The purpose was to crush the mavericks and re-establish the monopoly of the LO, a goal much desired by both the LO and the private employers. Nevertheless, the appearance of conflict horrified them and, although engaged at the time in a particularly stiff round of public negotiations, the LO and Employers' Confederation rapidly dropped their mask of belligerency to treat each other with unwonted public courtesy.

But under normal conditions, the same bellicose ritual is re-enacted. There are interminable and acrimonious negotiations, during which open rupture is threatened, only to be averted at the last moment by what appears to be the retreat of the capitalists. The unions can then show that they have forced the employers to increase their original wage offer. But since that offer was adjusted in order to make the final compromise what the Minister of Finance would like, the necessary display of aggressive bargaining can be mounted

without damage to the economic situation of the day. The consequence of this is that the man on the factory floor will accept as a righteous triumph the kind of wage increase which, if it were communicated as a simple decision by his employer, would raise his spleen and drive him to strike.

It may be objected that a device of this nature is bound to be seen through. A few leaders of society do understand the situation, but the man in the street does not. There are a number of reasons for this. In the first place, the average trade unionist has long been indoctrinated by the Labour movement, so that he believes, more or less, in the authenticity of militancy in the central wage bargaining. The mass media also keep up the pretence, because the Labour Market is tabu. An exposure would never be tolerated, because the communicators, by instinct and conditioning, protect the institutions of the State. There is also the propensity of the Swede to take appearance for reality. As long as he has the correct scenery and sound effects, he is perfectly happy. And yet there may be limits to his credulity. An outbreak of wild-cat stoppages in 1969-70, culminating in a miners' strike in northern Sweden, had its roots in alienation from the official trade-union leadership, and an inchoate suspicion that the LO was in league with the government and the employers.

Without written laws, this guild structure is rigidly maintained by silent understanding. A certain lawyer, employed by the public prosecutor's office in Stockholm, discovered that he was legally entitled to promotion, privileges and a rise in salary. Despite continuous requests for what was his due, he obtained no satisfaction. Eventually, a senior official hinted that he ought to act through his central organization. Despite the absence of a closed shop, or rules on the subject, he did so. Within a week he obtained by proxy what he had failed to secure directly in a year, with retroactive effect from the time of his first application, into the bargain. The lesson driven home was that everything, even that which was of right and a matter of course, had to go through the central organization; that the administration upheld the corporate State.

A persuasive argument for inclusion in a central organization is that, in practice, it is usually the only means of influencing the government. Under the Swedish constitution there is a system of consultation by which government measures must be submitted to public comment before being presented to the Diet. Theoretically, the private citizen has the right to give his opinion; in practice, however, only the central organizations, or subsidiary corporative bodies with relevant expertise, are heeded. Not all organizations are admitted to the process: those that are, acquire the official status of 'consultative bodies'. Strictly speaking, they are only supposed to be involved in measures affecting the working conditions of their members but, in practice, this limitation is meaningless, since virtually all legislation may be so construed. Their comments have the same force as those of the Diet; usually rather more, because they represent expert knowledge, where the Diet only offers political cliches. It is usually easier to achieve an amendment to a new law via a

When Swedes talk of the democracy of the popular organizations, they mean a form of direct democracy. Their theory postulates that, since members of a popular movement and a central organization can make their voices heard through their local branches, they have a means of directly influencing the government. Thus a man theoretically has several channels to the government, according to the number of organizations to which he belongs, of which his vote at Diet elections is only one. Therefore, the Swedes believe they are more democratic than other democratic nations which only have their parliaments. That is the myth by which they live. In fact, the corporate organizations are reflections of the State. As the Diet is circumscribed, and the Executive all-powerful, so in the organizations the administration rules, and the representative assemblies are of little account. As a natural consequence, functionaries of the State and the central organizations work together as a kind of freemasonry in the running of the country.

sense. This means civil servants on the one hand, and officials of the organizations on the other.'

The business of ruling Sweden, then, is conducted not in parliamentary institutions, but in a kind of secret society.

issues. This is part of the compact of 'licensed intrigue'. The government agrees to treat directly; in return, the central organizations suppress parliamentary conflict. Organizations find that they can achieve their aims by talking privately to the government, where political debate gets them nowhere. Understandably, they keep matters of substance off the floor of the Diet, for settlement in an extra-parliamentary manner.

Threat of political trouble is used by corporate organizations as blackmail recognized in the process of 'licensed intrigue'. If the government proves obdurate in a particular matter, it will be raised in the Diet - but not too harshly. Whereupon, to avoid public controversy the government almost always changes its mind, reopening talks. And, in its turn, the organization stops the debate.

Control of parliamentary activity may be exerted by clandestine, external pressure; more frequently it follows from the composition of the parties. Very few Diet members sit as individuals. Whatever their party, they are usually nominated, and elected, as the representatives of corporate organi-

The nationalization of the chemists illustrates both this

This was precisely what the government wanted, and the sole point at issue was whether the future organization was

Let Mr Rune Westerling, the man who negotiated on behalf of the Apothecaries' Society, tell the tale in his own words: 'We had to keep the negotiations confidential, because there was so much at stake. I couldn't have let our 400 members into the secret, because you can't stop them talking, and we'd have been embarrassed by the publicity, You know how it is, when it's a question of money, people

tend to complain. However much they might have got in compensation, they'd always want more.

'Besides, it's always better to negotiate behind the scenes, because it ensures a constructive atmosphere. The government always appreciate that, and as we kept our members ignorant of what was going on, the Diet was not allowed to know what was going on either.

'The Board of Management was pledged to secrecy, and we only told our members after the agreement with the government had been signed. Most of them accepted the change on the spot. About ten per cent were angry: they had wanted to fight the takeover on principle. But they were, after all, a very small minority, and very soon all opposition had died away.

116 The New Totalitarians

A leading official of the Confederation of Swedish Industries has this to say of his members (if he appears critical, dispassionate, and in some ways an outsider among his own countrymen, it is because he knows "Western Europe well, and has lived in the United States):

ing the householders, some official explained his wishes to the secretary of the house-owners' association and he, in his turn, saw that they were carried out. The secretary had considered it his natural duty to act as an agent of authority; the members all felt it natural to accept the rescripts of their association.

On the face of it, the tenants' associations are betraying

If the corporative principle has been accepted in administrative practice, it was late being enshrined in the law. It made its debut in 1970, in legislation introduced by the Social Democratic government for consumer protection. It is designed not only to regulate conditions of sale, ensure good quality and abolish the concept of caveat emptor, but to influence manufacturers in the selection and design of products. It is, in fact, a means of steering production. Now if the law stopped there, it might be good or bad, according to your point of view, but it would remain a piece of Western jurisprudence. But something has been added to remove that characteristic. It is not the State itself that will enforce the law, but a corporate organization. It did not exist when the law was drafted, but had to be created. In the manner of all Swedish corporate bodies, it is to be a non-governmental agency that will execute government policy. It will be constructed as a central organization, representing the consumers.

The Corporate State 121

This is not exclusively a Government opinion. There is little reason to suppose that it does not follow the general consensus

6. Judiciary and Ombudsman

^* The upper classes. The vocabulary of snobbery has been abolished and replaced by that of vulgar sociology.

Some Swedish authorities might regard the idea of the law adumbrated above as old-fashioned, and as uniquely a means of codification. On that interpretation, it is a passive instrument, lacking in ideological content. The more advanced theoreticians see it as an agent of indoctrination. There was an instance of this in certain fiscal legislation. Although the Swede implicitly accepts high taxation* he still cheats the exchequer. Heavy fiscal burdens caused tax evasion to swell during the 1960s. It ceased to be the prerogative of the affluent, and affected all conditions of men. Understandably, the government was perturbed, although not on economic grounds. While the financial losses were noticeable, it was the alienation of the citizen from the State implied by activity of this kind that was the real cause for concern. It threatened the sense of community upon which Swedish society is based, and the control of the citizen founded on that concept. Legislation was invoked to stop this mental rot.

The comment of the Ombudsman, Mr Arne Bexelius, is

^* See page 174 ff

this: 'Swedes on the whole do identify themselves with the State, but the aim of the new legislation is to get at the exceptions.'

Acquittal* in Swedish criminal cases is rare; so, for that matter, is a proper legal battle. It is not only that the police, the prosecution and the judge dislike a fight, but so do most defence lawyers. Almost all trials take the form of a plea of guilt, qualified with a request for leniency on personal, humanitarian or psychiatric grounds. Partly, this is a natural consequence of Swedish legal practice, which gives the prosecution great privileges in running a trial. The police are allowed to conduct what is in all but name their own preparatory examination without bringing the accused before a judge. There is no equivalent of the English remand proceedings, and a man may be held in custody for months while the police prepare their case. On the other hand, they rarely take a suspect into court unless they have a cast-iron case, and conviction is a foregone conclusion. Since the aim of this procedure is to make the judiciary appear infallible, acquittal would not only be an affront to the prosecution, but it is a scar on the system.

This attitude is not peculiar to the police, but is common to the whole legal profession. The exceptions are not frequent, and the lawyer who likes putting up a fight in court is not admired. On one occasion, an attorney of this rare kind was publicly attacked by the prosecutor as 'the disgusting kind of man who defends a client that he knows is guilty'. In other countries, that might be interpreted as arrant bullying, if not a threat to the rule of law. But it is unfair to judge one country by the standards of another. Under Swedish conditions, the outburst was quite understandable. It was saying, in other words, that the lawyer in question had broken the conventions, thus wasting the prosecution's time and endangering the system. Above all, a man was being reproached for the unpardonable misdemeanour of introducing controversy where consensus was accepted.

*The jury system is unknown in Sweden, except in libel cases, Judges sit alone, or together with assessors.

It is worth remarking that, although almost all this man's clients had been convicted, he was not an incompetent lawyer in Swedish eyes. In the same way, skill in obtaining discharges would not necessarily distinguish the accomplished lawyer. Even to the average man, it is the mark of the good lawyer that he makes the system work. The fate of his clients is a secondary consideration. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that in Sweden the man of law is considered, not as the guardian of personal liberties, but as an agent of the State.

134 The New Totalitarians

7. The Rule of the Apparatchik

Party and unions, then, appear as arms of the State. Both reach out into the country and

Trade-union representatives and party agents are matched at every level. This means that the citizen has contact with both the main branches of the Labour movement at all stages of its hierarchy. Moreover, this form of organization allows party and unions to meet constantly at all levels, so that incipient conflicts can be nipped in the bud. Since in this kind of work party members are almost invariably trade unionists as well, and local representation is often united in the same people, perfect union of both organizations is ensured.

The weakness of the Diet, and its irrelevance to the search for political advancement, are not the arcane discoveries of political theorists, but truths so evident to the average Swede as not to be worth discussing. He knows that, although Cabinet ministers are nowadays expected to sit in the Diet, it is in the bureaucracy that they achieve their position, seats being provided as an afterthought. And he also knows full well that a Diet seat is usually the reward of a party hack or a stalwart of a corporate organization.

not about men, hut impersonal interest groups or disembodied manifestoes. This is partly a consequence of proportional representation. The huge constituencies involved, with their cohorts of participants, mitigate against personal identity. The average Swedish constituency sends fifteen members to the Diet, and engages 150 candidates at a General Election. On the other hand, most European countries have some kind of proportional representation without necessarily abolishing the significance of the individual candidate: Germany is a case in point. But the Swede has consciously banned personality from politics; he has done so to obtain peace of mind. As a corollary, he has no respect for the Diet, which he sees as an assembly of nonentities. To him, the Diet's function is to toe the party line, and keep the files moving. The real power lies elsewhere.

All Swedes know that the best way to power lies in the apparat of the Labour movement. Ambitious young men do not go into politics; they go into the bureaucracy. Hitherto, the most profitable branch has been the trade unions, because they are rich and powerful, with enormous patronage at their disposal. The party, obviously, has been another fruitful source of promotion and office. But the ABF, which, in a way, is the Dominican Order of the Swedish Labour movement, has also provided an ever-open gateway to advancement. Apart from its function as a talent scout for party and unions, it offers its own organization, a path to the ruling circles of the State for those not robust enough for the cut-throat intrigue of the rest of the Labour movement. An outstanding product of this machinery is Mr Arne Geijer, secretary general of the LO since 1950. Mr Geijer started his career in the administrative division of the ABF, transferring to the LO when he had risen quite far and shown his paces.

A professor at Uppsala University once talked very freely to me about political bias in the Swedish academic world.

As a natural consequence of these attitudes, the apparatchik has emerged as the only kind of person who gets on in political life. To be one is the goal of many an ambitious

146 The New Totalitarians

Dominating the machinery of the State is convenient, but it is the fruit of power rather than the fount. Before the Labour movement can secure its position, the party must guarantee continuity of office. In a conventional totalitarian country, this is achieved by force. But even there, indoctrination is vital in order to mould the populace in the image of the party and to restrain opposition below the point at which it becomes uncontrollable. Again, the Russians have a word for it: agitprop.

The ABF works with the so-called 'study-circle'. It is a small group around a leader, conceived as the antithesis of a class under an instructor. It has been adopted in order to make pupils feel a sense of community with the leader, but at the same time to ensure that they turn to him as an infallible guide and interpreter. The word 'circle' has been construed literally. Classes are arranged in a circle, because it symbolizes equality and community. There is neither head nor tail and everybody sitting round appears to be of equal worth. Study circles are so organized as to obviate the necessity for teachers with specialized knowledge, depending instead on leaders trained to run discussions. Textbooks and course material are designed to that end. They provide the particular information required, leaving the circle leader to interpret and impart it. Circle leaders undergo periodical courses at ABF residential colleges, where they are taught the elements of dialectic and the methods of guiding discussions.

Although local ABF branches enjoy a certain autonomy, they are submitted to central control by inspectors from head-quarters in Stockholm. These inspectors correct teaching methods and adjust interpretation. Although there is no formal compulsion to accept their presence or their views, rejection is practically unknown. If for no other reason, subordinate functionaries accept central direction through an anxiety not to antagonize superiors in the hierarchy, conceivably jeopardizing a promising political career. Thus, by monopolizing textbooks and directing the individual study circle leaders the ABF headquarters exercise complete centralized control of everything that is taught in the organization all over the country. Ultimately, this means that the Labour movement leadership prescribes the exact curricula for political indoctrination and adult education for hundreds of thousands of Swedes. This centralization, coupled with the flexibility of teaching methods, ensures that training and propaganda follow changes of policy accurately, and that the requirements of the politicians are rapidly translated into action.

Course material for this period had to convey an awkward set of ideas. On the one hand, it propagated the concept of 'more equality', which could be taken to mean more jam for everyone. On the other hand, the government was pressing for wage restraint and patience in the reduction of working hours, in order to halt inflation and maintain productivity. And on all sides rose the demands born of rising expectations. The ABF, executing the ideas of government strategists, reconciled the two demands by preaching increases for low wage earners and restraint for those with higher pay in the name of working-class solidarity - and equality. At the same time, the idea was hammered home that greater welfare was as valuable as more money, and therefore further marginal benefits ought to be accepted in place of wage increases. In this way, the rank and file were saved the puzzlement of reading one thing in the party manifesto and of seeing something quite different in reality. Under those conditions, the party would have damaged its credibility, almost certainly with disastrous results at the ballot boxes.

154 The New Totalitarians

For various reasons, the ABF had not been able to do its job properly at Kiruna. Local party and trade-union officials had been insufficiently trained and, furthermore, strong Communist influence had weakened the influence of the Labour movement. Consequently, the miners were not disposed to accept wage restraint. And, to cap it all, the miners' union had fallen into weak hands. The government realized that to interfere would be playing with fire, and left the affair to the trade unions. The LO started by replacing

sitting government.'

For that reason, one of the most important things that a study circle leader has to learn is how to listen. In this way, he can gauge his pupils' concerns and form an idea of what has earned their disapproval in party policy. His duty then is to coax them to put their criticism into words. At all costs,

he must prevent the feelings from being bottled up. Among Swedes, this is often necessary and always difficult, because their nature is to brood, to nurse resentment and to have difficulty in rationalizing critical thoughts. The study circle enables critics to make their voices heard, so that, instead of joining the opposition, they can function inside the Labour movement. In this way, the ABF maintains a very necessary dialogue between leadership and members of the Labour movement.

In this way, many of the strains of industrial society have

Adult education in Sweden has always been the concern of corporate organizations. The Centre party, the Liberals, the Temperance movement and half a dozen other interest

In dingy halls, and in what there was of spare time, the ABF educated the working class. They did not exactly have to work from scratch. Illiteracy was unknown; compulsory schooling has a long tradition in Sweden. Since the early seventeenth century, the whole population had been taught the three R's. But beyond that, there was nothing. The ABF set out to fill the gaps, and did so successfully. Through the Labour movement's night classes, the early trade unionists acquired sufficient education to meet their employers more or less as equals. To take a trivial example, one of the first things a trade unionist was then (as he still is) taught was how to read a balance sheet, so that he could refute employers' pleas that they could not afford higher wages. By thus eradicating the blind hatreds brought on by feelings of inferiority, the ABF did much to avoid worse conflicts than the Swedes had; perhaps they prevented revolution.

strategists had foreseen that high rents would be a grave political liability. It is also worth remarking that the party rarely conducts its own propaganda, except at elections, preferring to allow other organizations to carry out that sort of work. There is within the Labour movement a carefully adjusted division of responsibilities.

164 The New Totalitarians

Disestablishment of the Swedish State Church has been contemplated for some decades. Superficially, there ought to be no difficulty. On the showing of the party, only four per cent of Swedes are practising Christians. And the agnostic bias of the Social Democrats has, quite reasonably, given them a preference for not being involved in running an institution in whose tenets they do not believe. But disestablishment has been shelved, debated, shelved again and investigated by various commissions of inquiry; in short, subjected to the usual wiles of official procrastination. The national consensus of opinion was in favour of disestablishment. The clergy have certainly felt that separation of Church and State would give them more freedom. But that was precisely what the government did not want. Disestablishment would mean dismantling official supervision of a certain category of Swede, and therefore weakening the political influence of the party. It is the fear of losing a measure of ideological control over the population that has been uppermost in deciding government attitudes.

Mr Gunnar Gustavson, who was once leader of the Social Democratic majority in the Diet committee on disestablishment, had this to say: 'The Church is a kind of link between the individual and society, in the same way as the popular organizations. Separating Church and State could have

The proper comparisons with Sweden He, however, in her

To be fair, Norway, Denmark and Sweden are not strictly comparable. All are admittedly Welfare States, and the heartland of Social Democracy. But Norway and Denmark, having suffered Nazi occupation during the last war, learned that principles must sometimes be put above material comfort. The Swedes never learned that lesson. The concept of principle seems not to exist for the Swede: he sees the world in economic terms alone. In the late eighteenth century, when Catholicism and Judaism were prohibited in Sweden, a

pamphleteer called Anders Chydenius proposed the admission of Catholics and Jews to the country on strictly utilitarian grounds. Sweden, poor and backward, needed capital and creative talent, and Chydenius suggested that, to remedy the deficiency, rich and clever men ought to be enticed from abroad. Assuming that the most desirable acquisitions would either be French, which meant Catholic, or Jews, he proposed that they ought to be permitted to retain their own forms of worship. His suggestion was accepted and foreigners settling in Sweden were allowed to practise a religion other than that of the State Church. Swedes themselves had to wait a century for the same privilege: Chydenius was interested in political economy, not toleration. By contrast Macaulay, the champion of Catholic and Jewish emancipation in England, was concerned solely for the well-being of his fellow-citizens. When in 1834 he helped to carry the removal of their civil disabilities (religious toleration was already old) in the House of Lords he spurned economics, and argued on moral principles alone.

The personal inhibitions against change are extraordinarily powerful. Take the case of a schoolteacher whose personal convictions, class, family and background persuade her to vote Conservative: 'My reason assures me that that is what I ought to do. But I have a struggle to follow my reason. I have a bad conscience, you see. I don't approve of what the government is doing - politically. They're destroying all the values I believe in. They're persecuting the individual and building up the collective. So I've got to vote against them. But then, as I say, my conscience tries to stop me. I feel that we have it so good, life is so easy, our standard of living is rising - I've got no right to vote against the government that's giving us all this. I feel that I'm betraying my fellow-citizens. I suppose, that's proof that I've been conditioned properly. Well, I vote the way I've reasoned, but I feel guilty every time I go to the voting booths.'

'There is another psychological barrier with deep historical roots. It derives from our tradition of consensus.

It is only fair to add that this man is an academic, and has travelled widely, lecturing for a time in America, so that he has standards of comparison and the necessary perspective to acquire personal insight. He exemplifies this curiosity of Swedish life, that criticism wholly from the inside is impossible, for the native tradition is conformist. All resistance demands a measure of alienation and the adoption of foreign models. This comes from being an outsider, like a Catholic, or from the cultivation of other people's political ideas. Amongst Liberals and Conservatives, this means the import of Anglo-Saxon concepts. On the left, it is acquired by identification with Mao, Castro and the rest. This puts the extreme left in Sweden in the same boat as the right. They are the only true opposition and both have had to import the intellectual wherewithal to oppose.

It became clear that the refusal of building permission and the imposition of the levy had endangered the new church. Such obstacles invariably lead to long delays, and if the site were left undeveloped for longer than a certain time, for any cause whatsoever, planning permission would automatically expire, and the whole procedure would have to be started over again, with no guarantee that approval would be forthcoming a second time. What the authorities gave with one hand, they could take away with the other. To avoid the risk of the church failing to materialize by default, the Minister of Finance, Mr Gunnar Strang, was approached with a request for a dispensation on the levy and the building ban. He refused, saying that the Catholic Church had no place in Sweden. In fact, at the time, all churches had been put on the list of inessential buildings whose construction was banned. 'We are,' to quote Mrs Alva Myrdal, the ecclesiastical minister at the time, 'dismantling the Church bit by bit. And where necessary we are using economic means to do so.'

himself as a liberal; he was not a government supporter. 'It's not a religious question,' he said, 'it's purely economic.'

'But,' I asked, 'is there not a case for making an exception for something that touches people deeply? After all, the Catholic community is small, but devout, and to be deprived of their church is like taking a part of their life.'

'But,' said I, 'the effect is to impede people in the exercise of their religion.'

'From which I gather that you disapprove of directly prohibiting the erection of churches.'

'Yes, because that's equality. After all, we're only treating the Catholic community like everybody else.'

'I see nothing wrong with that. Well, look, I don't see what you're getting at. Economics is something natural, isn't it? You can't escape the consequences. And in this case, it's that the Catholics can't get their church. There's no need to go into politics or religion, because that'd be artificial.'

To administer the money, a special State bank has been established. It has powers to make industrial investments, to help State industry and to make loans to public authorities. The interesting thing about all this is that the fund and the bank are beyond parliamentary control. Both, on the other hand, are firmly in the hands of the executive. They are run by boards on which the government is represented and, in deference to the corporate principles of Swedish society, the trade unions, the Social Democratic party and the LO as well. In practice, this means that it is the Labour movement apparat that rules the roost. It is certainly not the Diet. The consequence is that the party and the government are building up funds at their disposal, and acquiring an influence over the economy that gives them independence of the Diet. And that is erosion of the foundation of constitutional democracy, which is the power of parliament to refuse supply. While the executive has arrogated financial resources to itself, the legislature has been consigned to impotence.

10. Welfare as an Instrument of Control

Welfare in Sweden has taken a militant form, used in order to exert a kind of tyranny by insistent benevolence, to make the State appear all-seeing and all-caring. It has been employed

^* About £245 or \$590.

^** About £12 or \$28.

There is in each locality a so-called temperance board, whose purpose is to supervise the behaviour of the citizen. It is an administrative body, with considerable powers of coercion. By law, it is empowered to recommend for compulsory treatment in a State institution any person who

^* Preface to Brave New World (1948 edition).

regularly uses alcohol to the detriment of himself and others'. The provincial administrative boards issue the necessary orders, generally following the advice of the temperance hoards. There is no appeal against an order. Where necessary, the police use force to impose it. It is important to note that this is a case in which the citizen may be deprived of his liberty by an administrative order without due process of law. The influence of the temperance board extends beyond the custody of heavy drinkers. The police are required by law to report to the board every arrest, prosecution or contact in which drunkenness is involved. That information is used to compile a list of citizens who drink. About 200,000 entries are made annually. Recurrent 'black marks' bring the attention of the committee, with investigators entering the home and the threat of commitment to an alcoholics' institution. In 1970, the temperance boards investigated 68,137 cases of alcoholic abuse, 0.85 per cent of the population. Of these, approximately 5,000 were committed for treatment (about 0.6 per 1,000 of the total population): the hard core of alcoholism.

Habits, however, say more than statistics. "Whereas the

of the temperance lobby, he was an enthusiastic wine

tated the population by depriving them of independence. That, at least, is the way reactionary politicians, frustrated by the limits imposed on their campaigning, will sometimes express it in very private moments. The government side puts the same thing in different words. Professor Bror Rexed,* the director general of the Directorate of Social Affairs, expresses the situation thus: 'Social welfare limits political action, because nobody will tolerate a threat to their benefits and the power of the Welfare State.'

deeply embedded in the public consciousness. On the other hand, internal changes, that is to say those that leave the political stage scenery untouched, are perfectly acceptable, provided they are understood to promote the Welfare State. As a result, profound reforms are easily and rapidly carried out, the only condition being that they guarantee political continuity and stability.

It might be argued that the Swedes need no such urging. There are admittedly pockets of resistance. Old country people may sometimes nurse a pride in managing on their own, and a suspicion of charity. Occasionally somebody from the middle classes will consider the acceptance of welfare degrading. The numbers are, however, insignificant. But the Swedish authorities are obsessed with the necessity of bringing everybody into their system, and consequently worried by any group, however small, which remains outside. Reluctance to disestablish the Church for fear of losing control over the residue of practising Christians is one example. Another is the case of older people who, with the obstinacy of a peasant upbringing, prefer to manage on their own, and refuse to accept public assistance. The social welfare authorities have sought these out, persuading them to renounce their prejudice, and bringing them aid.

The Directorate of Social Affairs, the agency in charge of all health and welfare matters, ranges over all fields concerning the well-being of the citizen, from pre-natal care to

This last includes the running of the prisons. But, as its title implies, it is concerned not with punishment but with treatment. It has been decided by expert debate, and accepted by public opinion, that crime is a sickness. This is connected with another debate, that on free will against determinism which, in Sweden, took the form of personal responsibility against environment. This has been settled in favour of environment, and the general conclusion is that all crime is not only a form of mental disease, but the product of unfavourable circumstances. It is one of the virtues of a monolithic State of the Swedish type that theories rapidly become consensus, and consensus policy, so that this view of crime has for some time been officially adopted. Lawbreakers in Sweden are, therefore, in theory, not punished for an evil act, but treated for a disease. Their care is considered to belong to the domain of social welfare, rather than criminal law. The rigid demarcation between legal and social spheres has been deliberately softened.

This was a famous example of a form of conditioning and suggestion. The Swedes have been taught for a decade that crime is a form of disease. More than that, they have been taught to regard it as a form of asociality. Indeed, in Swedish law, as it was beginning to take shape at the end of the 1960s, crime is defined not in terms of moral depravity or ethical wrong but purely and simply as asociality. It is not the act,

It has become common in Sweden to discredit an opponent by suggesting mental disease or an unbecoming background. It is, of course, impossible to say dogmatically that this has been ordained by the rulers of the country, but it happens that the trend has advanced with the propagation of the official views that personal responsibility is at a discount and that it is environment alone that counts in human behaviour. Not only has what might be termed a behaviourist view of opposition become prevalent among the general public, but it dominates intellectual debate and the mass media. If somebody departs from the fashion of the day, he will not be given the credit of his opinions, but explained away as the product of an unfortunate environment. This is particularly true in book reviews. The tendency is to dismiss the rebel in psychiatric terms, with the implication that sanity is equated with conformity.

The power of this kind of thinking is reinforced by the working of the law. In criminal practice, a man may not refuse to be treated as a psychiatric case. The authorities, and the authorities alone, decide. To do them credit, most criminals accept without demur. Major trials usually result in conviction, but with the rider of psychological disturbance. Seen with English eyes, this provides the interesting situation of a man being judged fit to plead, but not responsible for his actions. But the Swedish public thereby receives the impres-

sion that crime necessarily implies diminished responsibility.

changed, so that most practitioners have become publicly employed. Then, by a reform introduced in 1970, doctors employed in hospitals were prohibited from attending private patients. Furthermore, the system of health service reimbursement was changed so that, financially, private practice would become unattractive, and young doctors would be forced into public employment.

If people wanted to escape this degree of organization and control, the system would be seriously undermined. But it is one of the great advantages of the Welfare State that it has lent itself to the prevention of this undesirable state of affairs. In the first place, the Swede has been taught that nowhere else can he obtain the security to which he has grown accustomed at home. This means that he is, in general, afraid of moving away because he has been led to believe that beyond the frontier there is no security at all.

Understandably, there are many Swedes amongst the professional and moneyed classes who find the maternal solicitude of their government stifling, and who will often talk, and occasionally do something, about emigrating. Perhaps the most celebrated example was Professor Hannes Alfen, a nuclear physicist, who moved to California. He is the titular head of a small, but select and highly qualified brain drain, mostly to America. In the welter of statistical information with which the Swedes provide themselves, emigration must take an extremely modest place. Yet it is impossible even to obtain figures. They do not appear in the official statistics, and emigration is scarcely ever mentioned in the press. Government departments parry inquiries on the subject, and may even deny its existence. In short, the brain drain is taboo.

All education is a form of moulding the young according to the ideas of their elders. The character of the age, the nature of society and the ambitions of its rulers will naturally affect the specifications set forth. 'The study of liberal arts and of the philosophic sciences avail much in Christendom,' writes Humbert de Romans,* the medieval Dominican. 'It avails for the defence of the faith... it avails to the honour of the Church.' For Victorian England, Dr Arnold gave his celebrated definition of schooling as the production of 'a Christian, a gentleman and a scholar in that order'. Turning to Sweden in the last third of the twentieth century, we learn from Mr Olof Palme, the Prime Minister (and sometime Minister of Education), that, 'You don't go to school to achieve anything personally, but to learn how to function as members of a group'.**

his individuality in favour of the group, is technologically orientated, and socially well adjusted. To this end, the educational system was profoundly altered during the 1950s and 1960s. From imparting knowledge, its aim was changed to that of guiding social behaviour.

During the Reformation, the schools were turned into a monopoly of the Church. Similar arrangements have existed elsewhere, but usually in a form that ensured independence

Sweden, where manpower of all kinds is at a premium, the system uses teachers more intensively, and therefore exploits them more economically.

values. A neatly symbolic reform was the abolition of the so-called student examination, or matriculation. This was not so much an academic attainment as a mark of social class. Upon passing his examinations, the matriculant was entitled to wear a little white peaked cap, similar to the distinguishing headgear of members of the Imperial German student corps. Since higher education in Sweden used to be a privilege, the student cap became the symbol of the bourgeois and the official classes. With the spread of learning and the cultivation of the proletarian mystique, it was treated by men of the left as the hated badge of a despised class. A writer well known among the Swedes, Vilhelm Moberg, made his protest by refusing to don his cap. Others have done likewise. The last student caps were awarded in 1968. Their disappearance was widely billed as a blow for equality and a herald of change.

But these are clearly superficial messages. What are the underlying aims of the new Swedish schools system? Let one of its architects, Mr Sven Moberg,* deputy Minister of Education, explain: 'Education is one of the most important agents for changing society. It has been integrated into our scheme for changing society, and its purpose is to turn out the correct kind of person for the new society.

'The new school rejects individuality, and teaches children to collaborate with others. It rejects competition, and teaches cooperation. Children are taught to work in groups. They solve problems together; not alone. The basic idea is that they are considered primarily as members of society, and individuality is discouraged. We want to produce individuals who are integrated into society.'

adjusted, good member of society. It teaches people to respect the consensus, and not sabotage it.'

It is a truism that to change people it is desirable to cut off the past. In the Swedish schools, the study of history has been truncated and the emphasis laid on the development of the Swedish Labour movement. The French Revolution is seen as the beginning of things. Otherwise, the European heritage and the classical background have been dismissed, and an atmosphere created in which only recent decades appear to count. 'Nothing matters before 1932'* cries a student of political economy at Lund University. 'The young economists,' says Professor Gunnar Myrdal, 'don't know anything about history, and they don't care.' Of course, the antihistorical bias of younger intellectuals is a universal phenomenon, at least in the West. What is distinctive about Sweden is that this bias is, if not exactly shared, at least encouraged and exploited by authority. It is, naturally enough, a Social Democratic aim to steer Sweden to the left. This is expressed in educational bias. A guide for teachers in the higher classes issued by the Schools Directorate suggests how social development may be

Centralized control of textbooks has been an invaluable aid to the enforcement of official policy and the undermining of incipient criticism. At one point, the Schools Directorate decided, against the wishes of many teachers and, indeed, the advice of some of their educational advisers, that language teaching should take place by the so-called 'direct method', that is, without translations, and solely through the medium of the foreign tongue concerned. To enforce the rescript, only those textbooks were approved that followed the system.

^* At the time, the jurisdiction of the commission was confined to the nine-year basic school, and certain subjects in the gymnasium. It did not yet include political economy in the latter, whence the example was taken.

214 The New Totalitarians

'The literature of the Roman Golden Age,' writes Mr Delblanc, 'is interesting in many ways. For example, it

Individual attainment is disparaged; it is proficiency within the group that is favoured. The Swedish schools aim at produring citizens who will devote their talents to the service of

'It is also desirable to touch on psychology's view of religion as a compulsive neurosis with infantile characteristics. The relationship between the Marxist and psycho-analytical viewpoints can thereby be illustrated.'

pointed out that there is no reason why a father cannot stay at home to look after the family while the mother goes out to work. At all events, children were persuaded that both can and must work. This was to eradicate the traditional attitude of women that their business was to catch a breadwinner and avoid gainful employment. It was also to destroy the customary belief that a woman's place is looking after a family and substitute the idea that her proper duty is by the man's side, in office and factory.

Economic common sense suggests that as many women as possible must go to work. But there are other reasons as well. Educational theorists want to get both parents out of the home, so that children are forced out as well. The family bond is to be weakened, and children brought up in creches and day nurseries. Compulsory pre-school training will be established by the middle of the 1970s.

Mr Ingvar Carlsson, the Social Democratic Minister of Education, has said that pre-school training is essential to 'eliminate the social heritage'. By this, he means that progress

than that, their knowledge of languages is practically invisible. Put simply, they know neither German nor French. They think that they can speak English, but in reality they cannot even do that.'

correct tendencies if he is to be of use to his society. A conservative is clearly unwanted in the Swedish world. So, indeed, is anybody with a particular creed and independent and steadfast views, be he of the right or the left. What is required, as the architects and administrators of Swedish education so ingenuously announce, is people predisposed to change. Not change of a particular nature, but change for its own sake.

Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History has been one of the great tracts for our times, at least in the English-speaking world. Its message - that the West ought to renounce egocentricity and, by paying more attention to other cultures, put itself in perspective - appeals to the age of uncertainty. But Toynbee speaks as a man of the West. Admittedly he betrays a whiff of ambivalence, but the sense of his life's work is that he wants to provide a cure for the ills of the civilization into which he was born. There lurks behind his writing a pride in the power and achievement of the West; he has been one of the articulate few to praise the European bourgeoisie, 'the most powerful and inventive class that the world has ever seen'. To use him, as many do, in order to discredit the West is scarcely defensible. He wanted the West to imbibe a sense of proportion; from that to the repudiation of Western culture is a long step. Unfortunately, what Toynbee presented as critical analysis has been interpreted as abuse, and it is this misconception that has been widely adopted as the message.

The attack on the West has been supported by the mass media, most particularly school radio and T v. As mentioned before, it has been made respectable in the interests of international equity, and the atonement for European sins. But it has not widened Swedish horizons, it has merely shifted them. By diverting attention to other quarters of the globe, and inducing a specious glow of solidarity with faraway peoples, it has deepened Swedish isolationism by cutting links with Continental neighbours. Trade and economics have been no antidote. The expansion of Swedish trade with Western Europe, and a resultant commercial interdependence, have not been accompanied by an intellectual approach to the Continent; but rather the reverse. These developments have not gone unnoticed by the outside world. A French diplomat taunted a Swede in Brussels when Sweden made her half-hearted approach to the Common Market, by saying: 'You would make such good Asians or Africans. Why are you such bad Europeans?'

making a bold step into the. future, as fathering a relapse into their past.

Nevertheless, it may be asked why the change occurred so swiftly and painlessly. Toynbeeism, it may be argued, while by now a perfectly respectable creed, has nevertheless not triumphed elsewhere in the West, and is still the subject of controversy. It has not yet informed a whole educational system in other countries. But in Sweden it has (albeit in a twisted form) conquered without hindrance. There has, after all, been considerable admiration of the various forms of "Western culture among Swedes. Old gentlemen display yet misty eyes at the thought of Goethe, Schiller and Heine; Balzac and Victor Hugo have their distinguished worshippers among academics. Less than fifteen years ago, it was assumed and taught that Sweden was an adjunct of the West, and that the West was the best of all possible worlds. All that is now past. Pseudo Toynbeeism has triumphed, and a nation appears to have turned a collective mental somersault at the crack of some intellectual whip.

^* In a speech to schoolchildren

proportion of applicants can be nationally established, and the number of entrants adjusted. Two aspects of this system are worth noticing. In the first place, there is no longer any question of passing or failing an exam. What used to be called a pass is no guarantee of matriculation; with the stigma of failing removed, what remains are low points. As long as the examination is completed, a pupil is deemed to have completed his studies. Secondly, to get into a higher school, he must rise above a certain level of attainment. But, since the measure is relative, it is advantageous to be in a class with a poor average ability, because it is the hindmost pupils, whatever their ability, who are discarded. Those who do not make the grade are shunted off to vocational training, if they had not beforehand been persuaded to move over of their own free will. Thus, the comprehensive school, in the right hands, can be an efficient and relatively painless mechanism for sorting the young and making the best use of the available raw material.

It has become official policy that encouragement of extraordinary talent is wasteful, since it concentrates too much

were a singularly docile body, intent only on taking degrees, and letting off steam, when necessary, by the politically innocuous methods of womanizing or drinking.

In research, control of the universities and the institution of rigorous financial measures have given the State a well-nigh absolute hold on all activities. A small committee, reporting directly to the Prime Minister, decides on research policy in all fields, and related agencies, notably the University Chancellor's Office, administer it in detail. Each single project must be centrally approved before it can be started in a public institution, and all financial grants are likewise centrally made. Small schemes are discouraged, and large ones favoured, the effect, if not the intention, being to simplify management by reducing numbers. This promotes the governmental direction of virtually all research. So urgent is this power considered to be that university research workers have been required to reject all foreign grants for activities within Sweden, in order to close loopholes in supervision. Under certain condition exceptions may be made, but only with the permission of the central authorities