The Social Laboratory, the Middle Way and the Swedish Model: three frames for the image of Sweden

Abstract

While Sweden was first proposed as a ‘social laboratory’ due to its unique homogeneity in the 1920s, it only evolved into a positive example for others with its framing as a ‘middle way’ between totalitarianism and capitalism during the 1930s. While some questioned whether this Swedish balancing act could be exported, others saw the middle way less as precise ‘plan’ than as a pragmatic and provisional, yet principled, method of trial and error. The framing of the ‘Swedish model’, by contrast, emerged in the 1960s with reference to the internal organization of Swedish political economy. While the middle way had been characterized by a non-ideological and conciliatory pragmatism between extremes, the Swedish model represented a highly ideological vision of egalitarianism, which abstracted the Swedish experience and made it possible to export elsewhere. As it became more relevant to other societies, the Swedish model was also injected with a Utopian-Dystopian tension which the originally rather Eutopian image of the middle way had largely lacked.

Keywords:

• social laboratory
• middle way
• Swedish model
• New Deal
• pragmatism
• Utopianism
• models
• methods

Notes

1 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes.

2 Other countries too, and not least Denmark, have been described as social laboratories. Manniche and Fleure, Denmark, a Social Laboratory, 180.

3 Myrdal, Nation and Family.

4 Sweden's second laboratory after Urban Hjärne's laboratorium chemicum was Christopher Polhem's laboratorium mechanicum, later renamed Modellkammaren (Model Chamber). To the extent that one may embrace a mechanistic conception of society and human relations it would in fact be quite correct, at least in a literary sense, to consider the ‘laboratory’ as a place for the testing of ‘models’. Meijer, Nordisk Familjebok.

5 Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, s.v. ‘laboratory’.

6 For a detailed study of Tolman's later career as protagonist of American welfare capitalism, scientific management, and ‘social engineering’, see Östlund, Det sociala kriget och kapitalets ansvar. See also Recchiuti, Civic Engagement; Lindsay, ‘Sociological Field-Work’, 124–6.

7 Park, ‘The City as a Social Laboratory’, 1–19.

8 Larsson, Det moderna samhällets vetenskap.

9 For example, the Rockefeller Foundation did not only fund the Social Institute in Stockholm in the 1920s, it also funded the Yale Institute of Human Relations. Here, Alva Myrdal engaged with the latest research on human relations in the laboratory of human relations.

10 For example, later in the 1930s, both William I. Thomas and Dorothy Thomas would visit Stockholm on the invitation of their friends Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, and both taught at different times at Bagge's Social Institute.

11 Ansökan till Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial från Ivar Bendixson och Gösta Bagge, humanistiska fakultetens protokoll 5/12 1925 (bil. 21), Stockholms högskolas arkiv, Riksarkivet (RA).

12 Musiał, Roots of the Scandinavian Model; Musiał, Tracing Roots of The Scandinavian Model.

13 Ratzlaff, ‘The Community Education Movement in Sweden’, 167–78.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 While finding this rather amusing, Ratzlaff apparently also expressed his admiration for this trait in Swedish character. Ratzlaff, ‘The Community Education Movement in Sweden’, 167–78.

17 Indeed, in American public rhetoric at this time, Anti-German sentiment lingered since the First World War. Yet, Germany provided inspiration for early American social science, and the Germans appeared less foreign to Anglo-Americans than for example Slavs or Hispanics did.

18 Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way, 160.

19 Ibid., 160

20 Ibid., 161.

21 Ibid., 161.

22 Ibid., 161.

23 Ibid., 163.

24 Ibid., 163.

25 Ibid., 164–5.

26 Naturally, if Swedish capital and labour did not reach an agreement, other capitalists and other workers elsewhere would reap the profits of cancelled Swedish orders. Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way, 165.

27 The ‘middle way’ is also a highly generic phrase, which denotes the ‘golden mean’ in many different languages, e.g. via media or thalweg. Miller, ‘The Democratic Theory of Cooperation’, 29–37.

28 Dickinson had been professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, later Assistant Secretary of Commerce, and finally Assistant Attorney General, and would the same year play a pivotal role in the Schechter Case. Swenson, Review of Hold Fast the Middle Way, 178–80.

29 Schlesinger, Jr. The Politics of Upheaval.

30 Alfred North Whitehead as quoted in Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval, 647.

31 Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval, 651.

32 Ibid., 649.

33 In 1938, Gerard Swope chaired a commission to study labour policies in England, a classical destination for such endeavors, which also went to Sweden.

34 Roosevelt quoted in Woodward, The Comparative Approach to American History, 302.

35 Milton quoted in Woodward, The Comparative Approach to American History, 302.

36 In 1935, a project called the United Regions of America was proposed and duly mapped by the National Resources Board (NRB), Roosevelt's surviving planning bureau from the First New Deal. The NRB identified 16 metropolitan regions that it believed would be more rational and effective units for national planning than the 48 states. National Resources Committee, Regional Factors in National Planning; Wescoat, Jr., ‘“Watersheds” in Regional Planning’.

37 Tugwell, Battle for Democracy, 22.

38 ‘Why’, Louis Brandeis, one the leading architects of the Second New Deal and proponent of the small scale ideal for America, significantly asked, ‘should anyone want to go to Russia when one can go to Denmark?’ Brandeis quoted in Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval, 221. See also Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940, 326–48.

39 Other American economists accepted that such a system might be technically and theoretically possible in the USA, but concluded that it would depend upon the political and organizational setup of the American labour market if it would succeed. Harris, Hedges and Zander, ‘Discussion’, 197–206.

40 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 325.

41 Myrdal, Population, A Problem for Democracy.

42 Myrdal, Hur styrs landet?, 63. During his stay at Harvard in Spring 1938, Myrdal met with Schumpeter, and the two may have developed this idea in parallel.

43 Interestingly, while repeating Gunnar Myrdal's arguments from Population, A Problem for Democracy, Alva Myrdal did not express the uniqueness of Sweden as straightforwardly in the English language version of the Folk och familj, entitled Nation and Family. Myrdal, Folk och familj, 20; Myrdal, Nation and Family.

44 Wigforss in Molin, Försvaret, folkhemmet och demokratin, 32.

45 Statements concerning the general level of satisfaction in a given polity do indeed rely upon a certain degree of generalization. It should perhaps be noted that Wigforss spoke at a time (1940) when Sweden was in a rather unfavourable position with regard to the warring parties of the Second World War; when the so-called samlingsregeringen co-ordinated a five party coalition, excluding the Communists, and when widespread self-censorship was in place. These factors, in all probability, contributed at least to some extent to underline the feelings of ‘unity’ and ‘solidarity’ which Wigforss ascribed to economy and social democracy. For the relationship between censorship, self-censorship and Swedish authoritarian press policy during the Second World War, see for example Hilding Eek, Om tryckfriheten, especially ‘Avsnitt III. Reaktionära strömningar i lagstiftning och presspolitik. 1940 och 1941 års lagstiftning och presspolitik’, 228–30; Alf W. Johansson, Den nazistiska utmaningen, in particular ‘Censur och självcensur i Sverige under andra världskriget’, 237–52.

46 Wigforss, ‘Om provisoriska utopier’.

47 Myrdal, Amerika mitt i världen; see also Nikolas Glover's contribution to this volume.

48 Myrdal, Amerika mitt i världen, 51.

49 Undén, ‘Tal av Östen Undén vid Sveriges inträde i FN 19/11 1946’.

50 Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way.

51 Ibid.

52 Scott, The United States and Scandinavia, 108–9.

53 Hinshaw, Sweden: Companion of Peace.

54 Hinshaw, Sweden: Companion of Peace, 208; Scott, The United States and Scandinavia, 109.

55 Scott, The United States and Scandinavia.

56 Tingsten's thesis stirred a considerable debate in Sweden, where the conclusion tended to be that politics had to be reloaded with a new task: that of social equality as well as economic democracy, alongside the traditional ones of political democracy and judicial equality. See Tingsten, Från idéer till idyll - Den lyckliga demokratin; Tingsten, Strid kring idyllen; Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties.

57 It is well worth noticing that Eisenhower spoke of a doubling of the suicide rate, not the world's highest suicide rate. As there is no explicit mention of Sweden in this respect one could of course assume that Eisenhower in fact discussed a fantasyland. Later, his speech would however be firmly connected to the myth that Sweden had the ‘world's highest suicide rate’. Eisenhower, 246 – Remarks at the Republican National Committee Breakfast. Available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/

58 Eisenhower, 246 – Remarks at the Republican National Committee Breakfast.

59 Ibid.

60 The probably most critical image of Sweden yet to come was British journalist Roland Huntford's 1971 book The New Totalitarians which would supply some of the standard ammunition for anyone bent on Sweden-bashing. In his view, the Swedes in fact constitute a virtually void tabula rasa for social engineers, ideologues and experts to be the willing material for various more or less unnatural attempts at manipulation and control. In emphasizing the unique lack of ‘culture’ among the Swedes, Huntford – in contrast to Eisenhower – almost overdrew the negative image of the Swedes so that in fact his warning that what had happened in Sweden could happen elsewhere too came out as rather improbable. Huntford, The New Totalitarians. See also discussion in Carl Marklund, ‘Hot Love and Cold People’.

61 See Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream; Zunz, Why the American Century?

62 Servan-Schreiber quoted in Stråth, Folkhemmet mot Europa, 205.

63 Certainly, great differences between different countries have not stopped reformers from looking abroad for inspiration: Not only Sweden and the USA have served as models of modernity which has been consciously exported to many very dissimilar societies during the post-war period: so have the socio-political models represented by China, Great Britain, France, Japan and the Soviet Union, too. From that perspective, it might have mattered less that Sweden was homogeneous, as its main symbolic role would be that of a contrast to other models epitomized by other – equally unique – societies.

64 The author wishes to acknowledge an anonymous referee for this formulation.

65 For a discussion on globalisation and the national ‘we’, see Kettunen, Globalisaatio ja kansallinen me.