At 3:45 PM -0500 12/12/02, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> > That's a revolution? Breakdown of the governance system?
>
>Yes. I do not buy revolutionary eschatology, if you will. In my mind,
>revolution is but a menas to an end - or at least it seemed so 100 years
>ago. Today we know that countries that did not use that means (e.g.
>Sweden) got closer to the socialist ideals than countries that did (e.g.
>Russia).
Compared with the rest of Europe, Sweden was less urban and more agrarian, until very recently in history. It had a unique agrarian heritage of free peasants and a strong centralized state. It seems that both socialist revolutions and social democratic developments had roots in peasantry.
***** The Historical Roots of the Swedish Socialist Experiment Mauricio Rojas Associate Professor Lund University
... The agrarian heritage
The "eccentricity" of Sweden or its remoteness from "normal" European standards found its expression in post-medieval times in a distinctive social and political structure. Four intermingled elements characterised Sweden from the times when Gustavus Vasa founded the Swedish absolutist state (1520s) until the middle of the nineteenth century. First, the very modest development of urban life and, consequently, the restricted social and political presence of the Swedish bourgeoisie and other urban social strata. Second, the weakness of the Swedish aristocracy as well as its character of a "state-aristocracy". Third, the massive presence of a well integrated peasantry, never reduced to serfdom and effectively controlling -- but not always as owners -- the factual processes of agrarian production. Fourth, the development of a strong dynastic state based on a privileged relationship with the peasantry. To be more exhaustive, some lines have to be drawn that can be helpful in understanding contemporary Sweden.
Swedish towns were latecomers in a European perspective. The first, Birka on lake Mälaren, existed during the ninth and tenth centuries. Stockholm, at the mouth of Mälaren, grew, not without a considerable German presence, only during the second part of the thirteenth century. It was under the influence of the Hanseatic city-states that most Swedish towns developed at that time, but their strength, in the context of a very undeveloped monetary economy, did not suffice to give birth to any kind of really independent bourgeois environment. These "nugatory towns", as P. Anderson called them 6, were easily subordinated by the new Swedish centralised state, built up by the Vasa dynasty 7. Stockholm, as late as the 1820s, had no more than 80,000 inhabitants, and the Swedish urban population did not break the ten per cent barrier until the 1850s. This late and feeble urban development is an important factor bringing about the non-existence in Sweden of any independent bourgeois or petty-bourgeois cultural or political tradition comparable to what has been normal in many other parts of Europe. The historical weakness of Swedish liberalism or the absence of strong political traditions stressing the individual rights of the citizens and the putting-up of barriers to the extension of the political sphere, are all surely related to this fact. The same reason explains why most modern European revolutions, being typically urban movements, never get a foothold in Sweden.
The weakness of bourgeois social groups and urban traditions was not compensated in the Swedish case by any strong aristocratic tradition, this being the other main source of European individualism and resistance to the expansion of centralised political power. The fragility of the Swedish aristocracy manifested itself in the non-feudalisation of the country, as well as in the marginal importance of the manorial system. The Swedish nobility was not only numerically limited, but also very poor in comparison with most of its European counterparts 8. The growing absolutist state, particularly at the time of Gustavus Adolphus and the spectacular irruption of Sweden as the dominant Baltic power during the seventeenth century, was able to enlist this feeble aristocracy into its swelling ranks, and at the same time public service became the main path to ennoblement. The exceptionally long-lasting internal peace, like the well-known Swedish tradition of compromises and non-violent resolution of conflicts, certainly has a lot to do with the weakness of the Swedish nobility, not to mention the absence of strong independent urban classes and ethnic/regional divisions.
The absence of important aristocratic and urban traditions has had, culturally speaking, an enormous impact on the configuration of modern Sweden. The fascinating austerity and naturalism of "Nordic design", the Swedish passion for simplicity and the natural, the evident dislike of purely ornamental or ostentatious elements, the illegitimacy of luxury and a very sober relation to money, all these are expressions of a culture bearing the mark of a still unchallenged peasant heritage, eschewing not only aristocratic pomp or individualistic petty bourgeois swagger, but also any attempt to be noticeably different from the mass of the people or to act without some kind of "collective cover" 9.
The agrarian population, the real base and soul of Swedish society until the end of the nineteenth century, was a very integrated compound of several socially and economically differentiated elements. The dominant group, constituting the majority of the rural population during most of the period under consideration here, was formed by the freeholders (skattebönder) and the leaseholders cultivating royal (kronobönder) or noble land (frälsebönder). The real condition of these different types of bönder (peasants) was actually quite the same. Payment of taxes or rents made no great difference. The essential aspect was the freedom of the peasants, expressed not only in social or economic terms (absence of serfdom and insignificance of the manorial system), but also in political terms. Maciej Zaremba's attempt to catch the unique position or nature of the Swedish peasantry is perhaps illustrative: "The Swedish word bonde is indeed untranslatable into other languages... The translation problem expresses an exceptional history - the Swedish peasantry has never allowed itself to be constrained to a feudal condition, and through the ages it has exerted a political influence that no other European peasantry has approached." 10
The freedom and the strength of the peasant stratum was obviously correlative to the existence of a weak aristocracy and feeble towns, and it laid the particular basis of Swedish absolutism. It created a peculiar symbiosis between peasant freedom and autonomy on the one hand, and the strength of centralised dynastic power on the other. The power of the Swedish monarchy rested on its ability to keep direct control over the agrarian population, and the freedom of the peasantry rested on the capacity of the monarchy to keep the nobility in a subordinate position. This mutual dependence or symbiosis marked both people's lack of hostility to the state and the paternalistic rule of the latter 11....
This combination of state control and popular freedom, of subordination and autonomy, has give rise to two different historical narratives, each stressing one side of this peculiar Swedish equation of a strong state with people's freedom. Both of them are true in some sense, but unilateral. In one historical narrative the Swedish peasant is "the most and best controlled in the whole world, a compliant tax-payer and disciplined soldier" 14. In the other narrative the Swedish bonde is the most noble and indomitable of human beings, knowing in the words of the medieval Swedish Frihetsvisan ("Song of Freedom") that "freedom is the best thing".
These two opposite historical narratives are very similar to the ideologically polarised understanding of the situation of contemporary Swedes: the Swede as a totally controlled subject of the powerful welfare state and the Swede as an emancipated citizen thanks to the intervention of the state-society. This continuity in the narrative of Sweden is of course no accident. The root of the polarisation is this peculiar combination of freedom and subordination that runs all through Swedish history.
The existence of a free peasantry with its own political representation, forming the fourth estate of the Swedish diet (Riksdag), had no counterpart outside the Nordic countries. This often passive but not unimportant peasant estate was to play a vital part in scotching the inglorious attempts made from time to time by the Swedish nobility to achieve real autonomy. Equally important, but often ignored, was the interconnection that existed between the central bureaucracy and locally based or elected authorities. Magnus Mörner has described this interconnection and stressed the paramount importance of local grassroots authorities in the following way: "...for the overwhelming majority of the Swedes, until the mid-nineteenth century at the least, the local community and, to some degree, the region, were normally more important than the national level. The parish and, with regard to justice, the district of the assize court, härad, provided the framework for people's lives from the cradle to the grave. Led by the chief minister, himself elected by the parishioners, the parish meeting was simultaneously the grassroots organ for local autonomy and a vital channel of communication between King and peasants. The interaction helped to ensure domestic peace. The traditional parish framework even survived the local tensions caused by the process of consolidation." 15 The same observation allows Eva Österberg -- a leading Swedish historian -- to speak about a kind of historical "Swedish model", preceding and creating the conditions for its later version 16.
What is central here is the peculiar construction of state power in Sweden. It was not based on social diversity or any kind of balance of power among different social groups or regions. Sweden was not a mosaic, a "multipolar society", and in this sense it cannot be included in mainstream Western European development. Sweden was much more a monolithic society, tightly integrated and integrative, with a very high degree of ethnical, social, institutional and cultural homogeneity, with a hierarchical order in which local communities and central state authorities were only differentiated parts of a continuum. The national state, which in Western Europe was often both the result of and the mediator among highly differentiated and not so infrequently conflicting interests, was in Sweden the expression of an unusual social cohesion.
This, then, is the background explaining why such things as the classical ideas of the division of power and that state power must be externally controlled, are not generally prevalent in Sweden. And the same can be said of the exceptionally high tolerance of extreme levels of taxation exemplified by the Swedish population. The political order, not being historically the expression of the clash of opposing forces, has in Sweden a legitimacy and a position that is quite alien to "continental" Europe. The unimportance of constitutional rules in Sweden as well as the pervasive normative attributions of state bureaucracy are expressions of the same historical background. This kind of integrative and pyramidal relationship between civil society and state, this confident but often suffocating embrace between the rulers and the ruled, is today at least as evident as it was in the past. In this sense no break is discernible in Swedish history, and this is very much an essential reason for the strength of the Swedish socialist experiment.
The great transformation
Swedish society experienced a series of profound structural changes during the nineteenth century and the three initial decades of the present century. A deep transformation of the agrarian structures in the first half of the nineteenth century, coupled in the following decades with economic liberalisation and important infrastructural investments, created central pre-conditions for a quite spectacular industrial breakthrough during the closing decades of the same century. This was also a time of massive emigration and increasing urbanisation....Simultaneously, these momentous transformations, deeply disrupting people's lives and exposing them to new and often threatening situations, generated a need for a social and political order re-establishing that sense of security and protection, of safety and confidence, that is so well embodied in the untranslatable Swedish word trygghet, a word that better than any other expresses what is still today the conspicuous life-motive of an important part of the Swedish population 18....
The most spectacular changes preceding the industrial breakthrough in Sweden took place, in a very classical manner, in the agricultural sector. The consolidation process together with an important demographic increase were the key factors behind the very impressive agricultural transformation that began during the second half of the eighteenth century. The process was quite unique in Europe because it was based on the expansive force of the bonde-stratum, further strengthening its historical position. Consolidation or enclosure was in Sweden a popular process, even though some great landlords like Rutger Maclean in Scania made an important contribution. Its economic results in the form of increased production, technical progress, intensive commercialisation, colonisation of new tracts and expanded demand stimulating the development of non-agricultural sectors, are today widely recognised 19. But the enclosure process was not without its pangs in Sweden and severely shook the foundations of traditional Swedish society.
The most visible change in this sense was the end of the ancestral social and economic order embodied in the village community. The Grand Old Man of Swedish economic history, Eli Heckscher, summarised the issue in this way: "The most serious problem accompanying the enclosure reform was the disintegration of the village community. A way of life that had certainly not been free from friction but nevertheless had provided a good deal of neighbourly solidarity and many a pleasant tradition was shattered when the villages gave way to homesteads located far apart." 20
The process of enclosure, severely reducing the rights of the poorer sections of the agrarian population, and compounded by sustained demographic growth, led to increased mobility, social differentiation and proletarisation in the countryside 21. The bonde-stratum, for the first time in Swedish history, became outnumbered by agricultural lower classes depending increasingly on non-agricultural occupations for their survival. This process goes a very long way towards explaining the amazing drift away from the countryside starting after the famine of 1867-68. Urbanisation and, most dramatically, emigration are testimonies of a time of distress, loss of confidence and definitive disintegration of the old society. In a forty-year period one million Swedes, coming from practically all social classes, left the country in a wave of emigration second only to Norway's in its relative intensity.
The bonde-dominated modernisation of Swedish agriculture had important political consequences. After the abolition in 1865 of the old diet (ståndsriksdagen) peasants became the predominant force in the Second Chamber of the new Swedish parliament, the only one elected by direct suffrage. This position was eventually lost at the beginning of the present century, but the new Peasant Party (Bondeförbundet, later Centerpartiet), founded in 1913, was strong enough to play a crucial role both in the consolidation of social democratic dominance in the early 1930s and the formation of the first non-socialist government after that (in 1976).
This process of agrarian modernisation, complemented by other important developments (institutional changes, educational reforms, creation of technical high schools, infrastructural improvements etc.) made possible Sweden's very dynamic response to the stimulus generated by increased international demand in the mid-nineteenth century. This paved the way for the spectacular industrial breakthrough experienced by Sweden in the four decades before World War I.
Swedish industrialisation was built upon a strong combination of four elements: abundant natural resources, market-oriented institutional reforms, an activist state making important investments in education and infrastructure, and first-class human resources. This last factor is very important to notice, because it is the key to a successful utilisation of the favourable natural and institutional conditions that Sweden possessed or created at that time. No technological gap was observable between Sweden and the most advanced industrial countries, and epoch-making Swedish innovations explain the international success of many of the industrial companies that today still form the bulk of the Swedish export sector. Brilliant innovators and vigorous entrepreneurs found a very suitable labour force, with a very high comparative level of literacy and education. This capacity to reach, practically from the beginning, a technologically leading position, is an essential part of the Swedish success story, laying stress on the economic and social factors allowing Swedish population, from top to bottom, to be so well prepared to capture the new possibilities opened up by the second industrial revolution. Previous social equality, the control of agricultural productive resources by a broad peasantry, the co-operative relationship between state and people, the existence of common cultural standards and strong national institutions, all these elements are of central importance for understanding the Swedish economic miracle at the end of the nineteenth century....
<http://www.openrepublic.org/policyanalyses/SocialismVs.Capitalism/19960101_THE_SWEDISH_MODEL_EXPLAINED_STOCHOLM.pdf> ***** -- Yoshie
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