Culture, Health, and Religion at the Millennium: Sweden Unparadise ed. by Marie Demker, Yvonne Leffler, and Ola Sigurdson, and: Trust Us: Reproducing the Nation and the Scandinavian Nationalist Populist Parties by Anders Hellström (review)

Does Sweden have a burgeoning dark and corrupt side, as the late novelist Stieg Larsson implied in his Millennium Trilogy? Is the moral fabric of the country and her Nordic neighbors being unraveled by the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties? Have other social problems “unparadised” the region and raised doubts about the trustworthiness of political leaders? The authors contributing to Culture, Health, and Religion at the Millennium: Sweden Unparadised and Trust Us: Reproducing the Nation and the Scandinavian Nationalist Populist Parties offer tentative answers to these questions. Although these studies pre-date the dramatic events of 2015—when over a million migrants and refugees largely from the Middle East made their way to Western and Northern Europe—they anticipated the difficulties that the region now faces in preserving the liberal values of inclusion, tolerance, and integrity even as the Nordic states undergo substantial demographic changes.

In the introduction to their edited volume, Marie Demker, Yvonne Leffler, and Ola Sigurdson accept that the social-democratic Swedish model of progress, consensus, solidarity, and social equality has not met the challenge of managing a multicultural society. The last line of defense of this model is clinging to abstract values and letting more robust markers of identity slide. Accordingly, “state power has gone from a resource used for enduring public welfare and economic safety to a means for rallying the public around common values” (p. 9).

These values have in turn been downgraded: “If there is a certain shared ‘Swedishness’ in contemporary Sweden, it is the ideal of becoming a capable individual like Lisbeth Salander, who does not accept being dominated by anyone or anything” (p. 15). As those familiar with the Millennium Trilogy have observed, the rebellious, vengeful heroine runs roughshod over notions of consensus and solidarity. Demker elaborates on the paradoxical character of shared values: “As a majority of the Swedish population supports the promotion of a multicultural society, it is also less interested in upholding traditional Swedish values” (p. 69).

Gender equality may not sensu stricto be a “traditional” value, but it has been closely associated with Sweden for decades. In the most provocative chapter of the book, Andreas Johansson Heinö exposes a number of fallacies in Swedish policies regarding sexuality. In the name of tolerance and cultural liberalism, for a long period, Sweden did not prosecute honor killings, incest, sex with minors, or female genital mutilation. In this last case, immigrant women themselves had to pressure the Swedish government to criminalize the practice because “‘this is not culture, it is torture’” (p. 142). Heinö even contends that for a time, Sweden’s “sin myth”—a relativistic approach to right and wrong—evoked a backlash that drove some “offended” sections of society to embrace the same strict norms as the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Ola Sigurdson’s chapter on hygiene as metaphor, which applies ideas concerning purity and danger developed by English anthropologist Mary Douglas, also raises a sensitive issue not generally associated with liberal Sweden: that of racial hygiene and purity, which, before sterilization was outlawed in 1975, had underpinned programs leading to the sterilization of 63,000 people (95 percent of them women). The author explains that “the politics of sterilization was a way of pushing the Swedish society forward, with the state taking responsibility in the sphere of ‘hygiene,’ and it rested firmly on the three pillars of the Swedish model: progress, consensus, and centralism” (p. 44).

This edited volume also includes specialized niche studies of religious intolerance toward sects and cults in Sweden; film director Roy Andersson’s cinematic critique of the welfare state; and Swedish chick lit as a set of self-help manuals rather than, as elsewhere...