Sweden's two nations revealed in Yes and No camps

Martin Woollacott, Guardian News Service, London

It could be said of Anna Lindh that she died for Europe. Had she not become such a vivid and ubiquitous champion of that cause in a campaign marked by a violence of language and feeling unusual in Sweden, she would surely not have been a target for an assassin's knife.

And, when Swedes vote this Sunday on whether or not to adopt the euro, it may be that her final achievement will be to tilt the balance toward acceptance of the common currency. If a vote of sympathy had that effect, it might in turn help solve the problems of identity with which the country has struggled ever since the Swedish model began to falter, and which entry into Europe has aggravated rather than alleviated.

Although the Swedish referendum debate has been dominated for much of the time by economic arguments, it has been, at a deeper level, a clash between two nations. Two nations in the sense that the better off tended to be in the Yes camp and the poorer classes in the No camp.

Two nations in the sense of a split between urban and rural areas, including a deep difference between the north and south of the country. Two nations in the sense that the bulk of the political establishment favored a Yes vote while, throughout the campaign so far, a majority of voters have wanted the opposite result.

As the commentator Goran Rosenberg puts it, this represented "an almost total disconnection between popular and institutional politics". Finally, it has been a clash between two nations in the sense that the No camp looks toward an idealized Sweden of the past and the Yes camp looks, at least in theory, toward a future Sweden fully integrated into Europe.

Yet the emotional power of nostalgia, the strong attachment to Sweden's unique social achievements and also the xenophobic appeal of reactionary groups, have been much more evident than the engagement or vision of the pro-Europeans.

The pro-Europeans offered mainly an accountant's calculation to do with jobs, prices and investment decisions, while predicting unhappy consequences if the country stayed out of the eurozone.

The trouble was that these were precisely the arguments that had persuaded many Swedes in 1994, when the country voted on entry into the EU. Within months of joining, the polls were recording majorities against Europe, as the promised economic benefits failed to materialize or, at least, did not do so in any spectacular fashion.

Since then, and particularly in recent years, Sweden has experienced some hard times, with the usual combination of unemployment, welfare cuts and the development of a less egalitarian society, which other European societies have all faced to some degree or another.

Other countries also regretted the erosion of welfare state, national industrial base and close community, but Sweden has a particularly strong folk memory of a golden time when it had achieved an extraordinary balance between economic efficiency and social justice. Whether joining the EU had much to do with the loss of that balance was questionable, but many made that equation.

In the referendum debate, the argument that joining the euro would help solve Sweden's economic problems was essentially unprovable, since the future of the eurozone as a whole cannot be easily predicted. A number of economists made short work of it, tipping the debate toward the No side and making it clear that the government's appeal should have been made on the political grounds that adopting the common currency was inherent in the decision that the country made in 1994.

Yet the question about Sweden, as the euro debate has proved, is whether it really did make that decision in 1994. Arithmetically it came in, but emotionally much of Swedish society stayed out. In the succeeding years the polls did not change.

Those who had supported the decision to join remained in the main rather half-hearted Europeans, those who had opposed it were not converted, a shift to a more European identity did not take place, and the political parties remained divided, both internally and from one another.

Goran Persson, the Social Democratic prime minister, heads a party which is almost as split on Europe as it was in 1994, when leading figures in the party held rival meetings in city squares. His minority government is supported in parliament by two parties, the Greens and the former communists, who are at least formally committed to withdrawal from Europe.

His constrained campaign, presenting the issue as a technical matter, while also preventing opponents in his own party from freely expressing their objections, was a product of these difficulties. He aimed at a debate that would be largely technical but instead got one that revived all the animosities of the past. It was characterized by unexpected rancor, by accusations of betrayal and even treason, and showed Swedes losing trust in their politicians and each other.

Against this background Anna Lindh shone because of an enthusiastic rather than a tentative Europeanism, and because of her energy, her charm and readiness to appear with members of other parties and with industrialists, with all those who had the European cause at heart. She represented in herself a link between the Social Democratic past, the past of the Swedish model, and the European future.

An activist and organizer from girlhood, she was against joining the European community when she was in the Social Democratic youth wing and quarreled vigorously with friends who took a different view. But in her own political life she made the journey from the time when Sweden was, or appeared to be, a country that made its way through history essentially alone, to a time when it had to see and embrace a future within the European project.

The Swedish writer Arne Ruth, in an essay entitled Is Sweden a European country?, years ago described the "long established political and intellectual distance" between Sweden and continental Europe. While Sweden could and should remain in some ways special, that distance, he argued then, was diminishing inexorably. "Sweden's future can no longer be seen as the brilliant trajectory of a unique pioneering spirit, moving at a different speed from the rest of the world."

It would be tragic, he suggested, if the energies of Swedish society were to be wasted in "vain attempts to keep the myth of the Swedish exception alive".

Ruth felt that the trauma caused by the assassination of Olof Palme in 1986 had been part of a waking up to new realities. Between that assassination and this one, Sweden has moved in the direction that Ruth prescribed, but with a reluctance that sometimes has had an almost mournful aspect.

It was common among ordinary Swedes in 1994, for example, to describe the European choice as one "between plague and cholera". Perhaps this new tragedy will change Sweden's perception of itself once more. It would be a tribute to Anna Lindh and her readiness to see joy in the future as well as achievement in the past if it did.