Societal Transformations: Sweden Wasn’t Sweden Until It Became Sweden

Any conversation between a liberal and a conservative will eventually arrive at a moment equivalent to the following.

Liberal: “Sweden is able to provide a strong social safety net and a strong capitalist economy, why can’t we?”

Conservative: “We are not Sweden and what the Swedish put up with would not be acceptable over here!”

But is that latter statement true?  Sweden provides universal healthcare, education, preschool childcare, and retirement income at moderate costs.  Those are all things that voters claim would be good for us to have in our country.  We tend to welcome and, eventually, cherish such benefits when they are made available.

Thomas Piketty, in Capital and Ideology, has returned with another masterpiece, this one investigating the economic development paths taken by the various governmental entities throughout the last several centuries.  He concludes that our socio-economic systems are arrived at by choices that we either make or have imposed upon us.  There are no fundamental laws or other factors at work that naturally produce effects over which we have no control.  If we wish, we can restructure our society in many different ways and still meet our needs.

“Inequality is neither economic nor technical; it is ideological and political.  This is no doubt the most striking conclusion to emerge from the historical approach I take in this book.  In other words, the market and competition, profits and wages, capital and debt, skilled and unskilled workers, natives and aliens, tax havens and competitiveness—none of these things exist as such.  All are social and historical constructs, which depend entirely on the legal, fiscal, educational, and political systems that people choose to adopt and the conceptual definitions they choose to work with.  These choices are shaped by each society’s conception of social justice and economic fairness and the relative political and ideological power of contending groups and discourses.  Importantly, this relative power is not exclusively material; it is also intellectual and ideological.”

“The Swedish case is…interesting because in the twentieth century the country became synonymous with social democracy.  The social democrats of the SAP came to power in the early 1920s, when the party’s historical leader, Hjamal Brenting, was elected prime minister.  The party subsequently held power more or less permanently from 1932 to 2006, and this long period in government allowed it to develop a very sophisticated welfare and tax system, which in turn achieved one of the lowest levels of inequality ever observed anywhere.  People therefore often think of Sweden as a country that has always been inherently egalitarian.  This is not true: until the early twentieth century Sweden was a profoundly inegalitarian country, in some respects more inegalitarian than countries elsewhere in Europe; or, rather, it was more sophisticated in organizing its inequality and more systematic in expressing its proprietary ideology and shaping its institutional incarnation.”

We do not have to be tomorrow who we are today.  And for the purposes of the current discussion, Sweden was not the Sweden we know today until it became the Sweden we know today.

Until the late nineteenth century, Sweden was a monarchy with a curious political makeup consisting of four components: “the nobility, the clergy, the urban bourgeoisie, and the landowning peasantry.”  Representatives of these classes obtained the relative right to vote in its parliament, the Riksdag proportional to the amount of taxes they had paid.  Economic systems can be categorized by the manner in which they treat private property.  In the most conservative systems, private property is elevated to one the highest rights, if not the highest.  In this era, property implied income, from which taxes followed; and it was this contribution to taxation that defined one’s political power. This notion that from wealth flowed political power became even more firmly established around 1865.

“The quaternary Riksdag regime was replaced in 1865-1866 by a censitary parliament with two chambers: an upper house elected by a small minority of large property owners (barely 9,000 electors, less than 1 percent of the adult male population), and a lower house, also censitary but considerably more open in that roughly 20 percent of adult males were entitled to vote for its members.”

The term censitary refers to making voting dependent on a property or tax qualification.

“What was unique about the censitary system in effect in Sweden from 1865 to 1911 was that the number of votes each voter could cast depended on the size of that voter’s tax payments, property, and income.  The men sufficiently wealthy to vote for elections for the lower house were divided into forty-odd groups, and each group was assigned a different electoral weight.  Specifically, each member of the least wealthy group could cast one vote, while each member of the wealthiest group could cast as many as fifty-four votes.”

“A similar system applied to municipal elections in Sweden in the period 1862-1909, with the additional wrinkle that corporations also had the right to vote in local elections, again casting a number of ballots that depended on their tax payments, property, and profits.  No voter in an urban municipal election, whether a private individual or a corporation, could cast more than one hundred ballots.  In rural towns, however, there was no such ceiling; indeed, in the municipal elections of 1871, there were fifty-four rural towns in Sweden where one voter cast more than 50 percent of the votes.  Among these perfectly legitimate democratic dictators was the prime minister himself…”

If one thinks of this as a crazy system completely divorced from democratic principles, Piketty reminds us that the United States, driven by ideological fervor, has been moving in a similar direction.

“Of course, no one today is proposing that the right to vote should depend explicitly on wealth…Nevertheless, recent years have witnessed the development of various doctrines and ideologies, most notably in the US Supreme Court, whose purpose is to eliminate ceilings on private contributions to political campaigns; this is tantamount to granting potentially unlimited electoral influence to the wealthiest individuals.  The issue of limiting the power of wealth also comes up in relation to jurisdictional inequalities: for instance, certain disputes are now subject to private arbitration, which allows the wealthy to avoid judgement by the public court system.  Access to higher education is also influenced by wealth: many American and international universities give special consideration to the children of wealthy donors…”

We are at a unique point in our history.  Combined health and economic crises are bearing down on us as we head into an incredibly important election.  By the end of this year, things will have changed—for the better or the worse.  Sweden’s example should give us hope.  If one has specific changes in mind, one should promote those changes through party politics and party voting.  One can be sure that those opposing those changes will be doing the same.  Piketty provides these words of advice.

“…the very rapid transformation that took place in Sweden demonstrates the importance of popular mobilization, political parties, and reformist programs in the transformation of inequality regimes.  When conditions are right, these processes can lead to rapid radical transformation by legal parliamentary means, without violent upheaval.”

Or, things can get even worse…