The Swedish Laboratory
THREE weeks ago I was in the Foreign Office in Stockholm when a communique was put out concerning the Norwegian-Swedish ministerial discussions about improving and extending the link between the port of Trond- heim in Norway and the Swedish midland province of Jamtland. Shortly this communique was followed by another saying that there was to be an exchange of naval visits between Sweden and Russia during the summer. I Should the Swedes be ashamed of this ? Many observe l have suggested as much, and some Swedes seem to have taken, their strictures to heart. But when journalists write about th_°, Swedes being morally perplexed and consumed with angsl because of their position between the two massive powers 01 black and white, they write about a handful of people li Stockholm, Gothenburg and elsewhere, but not about the popti: lation generally, which wastes no time thinking or talking abow Sweden's place in the world.
Huge air raid shelters have been scooped out of the roc on which Stockholm stands and there is room for the entire population in them. Officially at any rate Sweden is civil' defence-minded, far more so than Britain, but the exchanges of the cold war seem to leave people unmoved; and if there i6 any fear of the cold war becoming a hot one and scorching Sweden (as it almost certainly would) there is not much sign Of it. Those long years of neutrality and the more recellt growth of prosperity, political stability, and everything that i5 summed up in the phrase 'Welfare State' must inevitablY have made the man in the street reluctant to contemplate tha hypothetical catastrophe that could sweep it all away. OI1! cultivates one's garden, and makes a good job of it. Ants so the political game in Sweden seems to a foreigner infinitelY tamer and more reasonable than the game as played in other non-Communist countries.
The lack of political and social tension may or may not be a healthy symptom. Many Swedes and many foreign observers have spent much energy warning of the dangers which it conceals. When the Welfare State.. is achieved, what then 1 The questions which preoccupy the Liberals and Conserva' tives of the Opposition are, in spite of the few who aro genuinely alarmed. by the growing concentration of power in the 'State,' far more managerial than political in nature. 1110 area of agreement among all parties is so extensive as to pre' dude almost entirely the stimulating (if often artificial) dialectic which keeps alive our own interest in the details of government' All is reasonable. Examine what you please—standards oi construction, hospital organisation, the decorative arts, t.110 machinery of conciliation and compromise, traffic regulations, the community's concern for the well-being of the individual everything (except the laws governing the sale and consumption of alcohol, and these are soon to be changed) is reasonable. Everything works. Everybody works (a forty-eight-hour week). There are no 'problems '—except, perhaps, the prof), lem of knowing what life itself is about once one has orderect its surface satisfactorily, and of coming at ways and means of preventing an island of sanity from turning into a psycho' logical prison, an air-conditioned nightmare. Without vision the people may perish, but without discontent they all certainly open to boredom. The divorce rate, suicide, the immersion in vicarious violence, the laxity of sexual moralitY among the young—in Stockholm one may find people to talk night and day on such topics. A friend of mine declares that whereas Sweden in thc Twenties and Thirties was a sort of political laboratory int° i which the western world might peer, it is now instead tho psychological laboratory in which may be studied the strains and stresses to which the wellfarer becomes subject when th,,c political passions have dwindled down into nothing for !act of fuel to feed them. There is truth in this, no doubt, 10,,` I am not at all sure that it is not too easy to take a gloonV view of the experiments. When an individual comes success: fully to the conclusion of .a sustained endeavour, he is all too likely to know a sense of deflation, purposelessness, ennui, the taste of ash in the mouth. If he is a wise man he NO, himself with everyday details and confines himself to the shot' view. Can this not also be true of a society ? "0 leave nr easy, leave me alone ! " ought, one feels, to be the cri ae, comr of the Swede' who goes diligently and profitably abol?` his business and in his spare time contrives to manage 1119f private life as best he can. The visitor might also ask hini5e! to what extent sexual and alcoholic extravagances have the't , cause in climate and topography, which cannot be mollified or ' Modified by legislation. Romanticism bred by long winters and elegiac landscapes is not to be exorcised by either statistician or sociologist. On the contrary; and it may be all too true that the more reasonably the surface of life is ordered, ,the more restless grows old Adam below. Can his demands ne met without cracking pavements in the just city ?
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