Subscribe
What is most important? What the voters think, or what the rest of the world thinks?
Sweden is a country that has made its “brand name” an institution, perhaps unlike most other countries. Sverigebilden, literally the “Sweden image”, is a term that has been used academically to describe the view and opinion of Sweden that people have abroad. For many years it has served as a topic of interest for economic sectors such as tourism and industry, who are dependent on Sweden having a positive image among foreign potential visitors, investors and customers. But in later years, the term has become associated with the consequences of mass immigration, and is often made reference to ironically or with derision.
Every government of Sweden in recent memory has appealed to Sverigebilden to justify or emphasise various political issues, be it welfare, law and order, or industry. It is deeply rooted in the political psychology of Sweden to maintain posture on the international stage, and this of course has consequences for how political changes occur in the country.
Roots of Swedish vanity
Every nation, state, and country needs to care for its international standing. In Sweden however, the established political class has been raised in an environment where this has been one of the number one priorities, for a number of reasons. Some of them are legitimate and understandable, while others are exactly that, vanity.
Originally, Sweden’s need to make a mark in the public consciousness of Europe came from the country’s vulnerability in the 1500s, after having recently deposed the Danish kings of the Kalmar Union and started its path towards becoming a nation-state. Sweden needed to shed its image of being a barbaric boreal backwater, and sought to establish itself as one of Europe’s major kingdoms, often through means of propaganda. The kings of Sweden assumed the role of protectors of the Protestant faith, and sought to spread its history (often infused with fictional inventions) throughout Europe. In the Early Modern period, this was a matter of survival – legitimacy, refinement, and political maturity were necessary instruments to find allies in the wars and crises that plagued the period.
Achieving and then dramatically losing status as one of Europe’s great powers in the course of a century left an impact on the political psychology of Sweden, which scrambled to find a new source of legitimacy and reason for being. Repeated territorial setbacks must have yielded the country disillusioned with the worldly politics that engaged Europe, and the country started developing what it was left with.
In the 1960s Sweden was a non-aligned country crammed between Nato and the Soviet bloc. The country walked a fine line of not arousing too much suspicion from either one of the super powers that surrounded it, and this required cultivating a constructive and inoffensive image (though not always consistently, as certain incidents regarding the Vietnam War showed). Over time, this was influenced by Swedish engagement for the developing part of the “third world”.
At the same time, Sweden increasingly came to the attention of observers in the Anglosaxon world for its social policies, which were considered radically progressive at the time. This polarised the “Sweden image” particularly in the United States, but it also led to the embrace of controversy from the Swedish left – as such, Sverigebilden became a tool to justify progressive politics, as opposed to merely a strategy for security in the Cold War. The liberal and progressive phenomenon associated with Sverigebilden of the 1970s became items of pride for those who would come to shape the following decades of Swedish politics.
As the Cold War then waned, Sverigebilden largely shed the vestiges of the country being unaligned in a militaristic world, and focus instead began to fall on promoting Swedish, in particular social democratic, social policies and worldviews. This is when the commitment to maintaining a particular international reputation started to show its obvious drawbacks; the policies that underpinned Sverigebilden must be advanced at almost all costs, was the message from politicians from the left to the right. This is how Sweden came to outdo most other European countries in non-European immigration, for example, the perhaps most emotionally charged social policy question of the 21st century. This is also how Sweden has to its detriment “over-implemented” so many restrictive EU directives, in order to maintain the image of the country as a global cooperative and constructive partner.
Even today, many adherents of the political establishment reject various conservative or nationalist proposals as “un-Swedish” by their very nature, reflecting a view that Swedishness itself is forever tightly linked to commitment to the Sweden image of the 2000s.
Vanity propelling political change
The effect that the mandatory attention to the Sweden image has on Swedish politics is two-fold. First of all, it means that political correctness is very strong, and has often been conflated with Swedish national identity itself (though the grip that this has on society has diminished rapidly as of late). This obviously hampers political reform, as does the self-perception of superiority that often comes with Sverigebilden.
But this also means that there are limits to how much negativity that can be associated with the country, in the eyes of the government. As the public image of Sweden was tarnished during the migrant crisis and sexual crime wave from 2015–2018, many changes started to happen in the country that seemed geared toward improving this reputation. Sverigebilden places a large emphasis on social stability and harmony, and if this image is no longer projected abroad, it must be rectified with great urgency.
Today Sweden has a government that actively promotes negative campaigning for Sweden as a destination for asylum seekers. A government that has started promoting remigration, and just recently opened the doors for renegotiating the European Convention on Human Rights, in order to guarantee no obstacles to the deportation of criminal foreign citizens.
On the surface, this might appear banal; the government of Sweden is an acknowledged right-wing coalition that set out its mission to, among other things, correct fatal mistakes of the Swedish immigration policy. But the parties that are holding the reins in the government ministries are not the typical populist nationalists that usually promote redrafting established conventions and remigrating immigrants; it’s the Moderates, a centre-right party with a strong neoliberal impulse, that contributed greatly to opening Sweden’s borders in the 2000s and enforced the progressive, hyper liberal Sweden image.
It is not uncommon for Western centre-right parties to do a full 180-degree turn on these issues in the 2020s. But in Sweden, the rhetoric has shifted very quickly, and there is one incident in particular that illustrates how the commitment to Sverigebilden likely sped up what could otherwise have taken decades.
One social media scandal later
An Eritrean man, registered as a refugee in Sweden who arrived in 2017, raped a Swedish 16 year-old girl, but was not sentenced to deportation. News of this incident spread like wildfire on social media, and reached Elon Musk, who took the story to greater heights. In a matter of days, the Swedish government responded harder than they have done to any previous similar case (of which there are very many).
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson vowed to lobby for changes to the European Convention on Human Rights, immediately joining the ranks of national leaders such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who in May rallied a number of other European governments to review the charter. Sweden was notoriously not a part of this agreement, to the disappointment and embitterment of many voters.
Yet one social media scandal and a few outraged international headlines later, and the Swedish government has made remarkable strides in that direction.
To compare, in the United Kingdom, which is having its national image increasingly tarnished by lawlessness, the discussions to withdraw from the ECHR have gone on for many years without results. Much of what the Swedish government is doing when it comes to migration in general is unthinkable in most of Europe, even in fairly right-wing countries.
There are few Western countries as corporatist as Sweden. Enterprises, politics, and the public are expected to pull in the same direction, and although there is a frustrating delay, when the ship finally has turned around, it does so with a remarkable conviction. All in the name of preserving the Sweden image.