GRAYSON HOWARD: Good afternoon. My name is Grayson Howard. I'm a sophomore English major
here at Hillsdale College, and I will be introducing
our speaker today. Christopher Caldwell is
a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of
Books and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. A graduate of Harvard
College, his essays, columns, and reviews appear in The Wall
Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, The
Spectator, Financial Times, the Claremont
Review of Books, and numerous other publications. He is the author of reflections
on the revolution in Europe, immigration, Islam,
and the West, and The Age of Entitlement-- America Since the '60s,
forthcoming January, 2020. Please welcome
Christopher Caldwell. [APPLAUSE] CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: Gosh. Well, thank you, Grayson. I would like to thank everyone
at Hillsdale for coming, but particularly the people
from the Center for Constructive Alternatives, Matt Bell. I want to thank Kim Ellsworth
for organizing things. And so I guess that
what I'm doing here is trying to figure out with
you whether Swedish socialism constitutes a
constructive alternative. [LAUGHTER] Maybe we can start by saying
there are two basic ways, I think, to think
about socialism. The first is as a doctrine
related to communism. And among followers
of Karl Marx, socialism is often just
another word for communism-- you talk about the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics. But more usually, socialism
reflects an outcome after Marxist
revolutionaries have had to make compromises
or accommodate reality. It's the sort of government--
a socialist government-- you get when
revolutionaries are thwarted by entrenched
powers of some kind, or by the weakness of their
own revolutionary leaders, or by popular dislike of it. Socialism described this
way tends to be unpopular. So those who promote
socialism tend to look at it in the second way. The second way to
look at socialism is as its own separate
thing that has nothing to do with communism. And in this
understanding, socialism is just carrying out some old
and time-honored human impulse, such as charity, or the golden
rule, or Christian ethics, except in an up-to-date way that
adjusts to modern conditions. And this is the kind
of socialism that's the more popular of the two. And I think that this
is the kind of socialism that today's millennials,
or young people, are talking about when
they identify themselves as socialists in such
strikingly high numbers. I think many of us have seen
the poll that was carried out by Reason magazine in 2014 that
showed that 42% of millennials call themselves socialists or
are happy to call themselves socialists. I think I'm less surprised
or alarmed by that poll than many people. If you really look at it
very closely, only 16% of these so-called
socialists realize that socialism means
government ownership of the means of production. 64% of these socialists
say they would prefer that the economy be
run on a free-market basis. And 55% of them aspire to
start their own businesses. [LAUGHTER] So I think that kids like this-- they would not choose to live in
the Soviet Union of the 1950s, or the Albania of the 1960s. But the problem is,
while they're not ready to fight for
socialism, they might be convinced to
vote for people who want to fight for socialism. They seem to want a nicer
version of our own system which, in itself, is not
an indefensible desire. And they've lately taken to
calling that desire socialism. And that's why people
like Bernie Sanders point to Sweden-- and particularly Sweden
in, say, the 1970s-- as a model. And certainly, it
is a real challenge. You can say that
ABBA and Bjorn Borg are more attractive figures
than Marx and Engels, right? But I think the argument
is about more than that. Sweden, in the 1970s,
actually seemed to square a lot of circles
in terms of policy. It was, at the time, the
most egalitarian country in Western Europe. But it was also the fourth
richest country per capita in the world. It had very high, almost total
working-class union membership. But at the same time, it had
perhaps Europe's best developed culture of entrepreneurship. So there would seem to
be things worth studying. And a lot of people
back then said, well, we could do that, if
only we could figure out what this Swedish model was
and follow it ourselves. And that leads to
the two questions that will preoccupy me
for the next half an hour, say, which is, what
is this Swedish model? And why do we think that
it can be replicated? So the things I'm going to talk
about in the next half hour are, first, the origins
of Swedish socialism in the 19th century, its
relationship to Marxism, its early development
up into the 1930s. Then the golden age
of Swedish socialism-- after the '30s, but
especially after the '60s, and into the 1980s, which showed
these surprising strengths that I talk about,
like an ability to coexist with
entrepreneurship. Then its decline in the 1990s. And then a new twist
on Swedish socialism-- I would like to
ask, to what degree is it responsible for
Sweden's immigration problem? Because I do think that, when
you think of Sweden today, the one thing you
must understand is that it has a uniquely
disruptive immigration problem, even by European standards. And then finally, I will
get to this question of whether the Swedish model
is viable, even for Sweden. And if so, whether it is
replicable for the rest of us. Now, if there's any
place in the world where socialism ought to work the way
Bernie Sanders describes it-- that is, where it ought to be
thought of as ancient wisdom, rather than Marxist ideology-- it's Sweden. I mean, if you go back to
the beginning, Sweden had-- unlike other places in Europe--
it had no contact with Rome. It was a total stranger to
the complex, differentiated, articulated society that
Roman conquest always brought in its wake. I mean, there are primitive
places all over Europe. But Sweden didn't
even have any contact with this complex society. It didn't even have feudalism. It was primitive. It was uncultured. Its literature figures
in the most marginal way in this great blossoming
of European literature that covers almost every
European country from Germany, to France, to Spain, to Italy,
to Poland, to the Netherlands. And it was really poor. So in the late 19th century,
20% of the population of Sweden immigrated. And since much of it is
to this part of the world, there are probably many
children of that immigration in this room. So I don't have to
explain that to you. But there were upsides to
this being downtrodden. Sweden had a strong
idea of equality. It had a powerful idea of
social solidarity and community of the sort that you
might associate only with military
cultures like Sparta. The historian Sheri Berman-- who was, in general,
highly sympathetic to Swedish socialism-- she notes the way that, even
in the late 19th century, Sweden was neither
industrial nor democratic. And what that means is that
the Swedish Workers' Party-- which is the forerunner
to the party that created the Swedish socialist system-- they could claim to
have really brought about industrialism
and universal suffrage in a unique way. By the time most socialist
parties appear on the scene, that system is already
all set up so that most socialist parties are
basically just divvying up the spoils in a way that
is more favorable to them. The Swedish Socialist
Party was really closer to the roots of Swedish society. Nonetheless, as
people became aware in the 1920s and the 1930s
what the Russian Revolution was actually doing,
socialists in Sweden aroused the same
kind of distrust that they did everywhere else. They were attacked
as secret communists. They were accused of caring more
about Swedes of certain classes than they were about defending
Swedes against foreigners. And in the 1928 elections,
the Swedish socialists were just wiped
out, which is what was happening to
socialist parties all over Europe at the time. But the Swedes went back
to the drawing board. And in 1932, they campaigned
on a very different idea. They campaigned
that Sweden ought to be what they called a
folkhemmet, or people's home. They even called this
national socialism. And I don't say
this to accuse them of being Nazis, really, as some
of their political opinions do. But we should know
that, in Sweden today, when the historians we might
refer to as politically correct talk about
socialism's early years, they find it embarrassing
and a little bit creepy. What I will say is that
Swedish socialists were not like their contemporaries
in France and Spain. In France and Spain,
socialists really were trying to create
an international world working-class solidarity. What Sweden was doing
was a lot more similar to what FDR was doing
in this country. If it was a socialism,
it was a socialism that was tied to a great
deal of national feeling, and even nationalism. And that's why-- I think that
nationalism is why-- the Swedish socialists were the
only European socialist party to survive the 1930s in power. And they were aided in
that by having some really extraordinary leaders. So that began what
we can call, say, the golden age of
Swedish socialism. And it's an interesting thing. With only a couple
of minor hiccups, with only a couple of
minor interruptions, Sweden had only
three prime ministers between the early 1930s
and the late 1980s. And I'll go over them briefly. You had Per Albin Hansson,
who was the FDR of Sweden. He came to power in 1932, ruled
till the end of World War II, kept Sweden neutral
in the war, which will be important
later on, and created this folkhemmet ideology. Then his successor
was Tage Erlander. This was the great divisor
of big socialist programs, kind of like Sweden's
equivalent of LBJ. But if you imagine LBJ ruling
for an entire generation, you get an idea of what an
impact Tage Erlander had. And then, finally,
there was Olof Palme, who first came to power in
1969 and ruled most of the time until he was assassinated
mysteriously in 1986. He is a tendency we didn't
have in this country. He's what maybe the United
States would have been like if, say, Ted Kennedy,
instead of Ronald Reagan, had been president in the 1980s. So Hansson,
Erlander, and Palme-- these are giants of
European socialism. And over that period,
it is hard to think of another triumvirate who
held such an important position for so long. And the only one I can
think of, actually, is Ted Williams,
Carl Yastrzemski, and Jim Rice in left field
for the Boston Red Sox. [LAUGHTER] All three of them-- same period
of time, '30s to the '80s-- all three of them
in the Hall of Fame. We can talk about the Red Sox
instead, if anyone would like. But anyway, under those men,
anyhow, the Social Democratic Party dominated Sweden. We're talking about from the
end of the Hoover administration to the end of the
Reagan administration. We're talking about
from the Wall Street crash in the Great Depression
until the internet age. And so think of these people
with their American analogs. If you had FDR, LBJ, and Ted
Kennedy given half a century, unlimited resources,
and zero opposition to build their own
kind of socialism, what would it have looked like? And I'll give you some examples
of what it did look like. Let's start with one
typical and really ambitious program that would
be very consequential for the future of Sweden. In the early 1960s,
Erlander declared that all Swedes had a right
to modern humane housing and that he would build 1
million units of housing. Now, given that Sweden had only
6 million people at the time, that's a ton of housing. It created a glut of building. It drove up the construction
and workers' salaries. So it did some things
that people liked, but it created problems, OK? This was called the Million
Programme for the number of units he was going to build. Most of these Million
Programme housing units-- they were apartments
in big complexes on the outskirts of town. Sweden has a relatively
small population. It's got about the same
population as Michigan, but it's twice as
big as Michigan, so it's actually
got a lot of room. Swedes don't have
to live that way. They don't tend to like
living in apartments. And the result was that a
lot of these apartments built in the '60s were either
empty, or in very low demand in the future. And that's going to be an
important consideration, which I'll come back to in
a couple of minutes. But there were impressive things
about-- or seemingly impressive things about-- this Swedish
welfare state, things where people seemed to be
able to have their cake and eat it too. First of all, it seemed to offer
generous wages and equality without denting
anybody's work ethic, and generous welfare plans. Second, it had huge
top-income tax rates, but it didn't seem to limit
entrepreneurship at all. And in fact, as I
said, Sweden was-- for much of the
last century-- one of the most entrepreneurial and
innovative countries on earth. So in the old days, you had
Electrolux vacuum cleaners. You had Volvo. You had Saab. Saab was, originally,
an airplane company. Sweden, by the way, I believe,
is the only country of its size that makes its own fighter jets. Then you had retailers. The Swedes
revolutionized retail. We didn't realize it until
the global economy started. But companies like IKEA, H&M-- those are all
companies in Sweden, but they really made
quite an impression in our part of the world. And then, on top
of that, you have the newer high-tech companies
like Spotify or Ericsson phones. I mean, it's a very
impressive business culture. There's a young Kurdish Swedish
economist, Tino Sanandaji, whose family
immigrated to Sweden at the turn of the
century to point out that this reputation for
being an entrepreneurial place is not an illusion. The reputation for being able
to unite entrepreneurship and socialism kind of
is, because if you really look at it, if you look
at the 1950s as the time when the Swedish welfare
state started operating at full throttle, then
almost all of these companies were either already
there before it started or they were founded
after it really began to decline
which, I would say, came at the start of the 1990s. And I'll talk a little
bit about how it declined. The Swedish welfare state,
the Swedish socialist system, was surprisingly disciplined. And that's how they
succeeded in doing things that no one thought
were possible for a socialist system. But after the 1980s, Sweden
really began to do what run-of-the-mill socialist
countries are all supposed to do if you believe the models,
which is it let its benefits run beyond the taxes that it
was raising to pay for them. And that's a
run-of-the-mill problem, but there were problems
specific to Sweden, too. They had a complicated
scheme of what they call wage-earner
investment funds, which was a tax that was
meant to be used to slowly buy out private firms
and turn them into public ones. And that wound up sowing
a lot of insecurity. I think the country
was also a bit caught by surprise
by the competition that the end of the
Cold War had unleashed. So I think it lost a lot
of its shipbuilding, which was a major industry, to
foreign countries like Korea. But basically,
between 1990 and 1994, Sweden's GNP contracted by 6%
and its level of employment fell by 12%. It's one of the largest
peacetime contractions that we know of in
any single country. There are global downturns,
but this is just one country falling through
the floor at a time of general global prosperity. And by that time,
Sweden was dealing with another big problem,
which is immigration. Now I'll talk about
that for a little bit. When I was writing a
book about immigration in Europe several years
ago, ever since then, I've been asked, what
country in Europe is really in the worst shape
faced with immigration? And I never have any hesitation
in answering, Sweden. Sweden's immigration problems
are maybe not quite as obvious as the ones in, say, France. And they take a
little bit of tracing. Their origins go back to the
middle of the last century. But I'd like to
explain why I think Sweden has such a big problem. Sweden was officially
neutral in World War II, which means that
its prosperity was not interrupted by the war. But in fact, it was also a
big supplier of iron ore, in particular-- and the
machinery, to a lesser degree-- to the Nazi government. So when 1945 came, Sweden
was really well capitalized. And this was a time when all
of Europe needed to be rebuilt. And Sweden was the only
advanced Western country besides the United States that
had its entire industrial base intact. And so Sweden was going
to get rich, rich, rich. I mean, in retrospect, Sweden's
post-war growth rates-- there was something
inevitable about them. Sweden grew 4% a year between
the end of the Second World War and the oil crisis of 1973. And it's from that,
I think, that a lot of this idea of the Swedish
welfare state as a real miracle came about. In fact, Sweden grew
7% a year in the 1960s, which was of a Chinese rate. But the economy was so hot
that Sweden needed labor. And it just needed more hands
to keep these factories running. And so the result was a
series of labor agreements with foreign countries along
the lines of the gastarbeiter programs-- the guest worker
programs-- that Germany had. So Sweden started by
offering special deals to Italy and Hungary in 1947. And then, in the
'60s, when they worked through those
workforces, they wound up offering the same to
Yugoslavia and Turkey. Finns-- many Finns
are Swedish-speaking. They were coming in
throughout the same period. And this immigration
was quite a success. And the problem was that
they couldn't shut it off, even when the economy
began to go south. This is because of certain
moral considerations in foreign policy. Sweden had always had a-- you could call it
a pacifist country. They didn't participate in
World War I or World War II. But just because you don't
want to get wrecked in war, it doesn't mean you necessarily
renounce your aspiration to shape the world. So Sweden has always had a
crusading, humanitarian side. And perhaps it's a way of
atoning for its cooperation with Nazi Germany
in World War II. It became much
more demonstrative about this side of itself. In 1968, there was some
persecution of Jews in Poland. And many left. Sweden took them. Sweden took all the Greeks,
offered spots to all the Greeks who felt themselves
persecuted by the government of the colonels
between 1968 and-- I believe it was-- '74. It took a lot of
people in from Chile. It was a main
destination for leftists who felt they had to
leave Chile after the coup by General Pinochet
in, I believe, '73. But then, after Olof
Palme came to power-- he's the third of the
leaders that I mentioned. He was a much more
anti-American, progressive internationalist. And when he came
to power, I think Sweden lost the habit of
saying, no, altogether. It was then that
Swedish politicians started referring to
their country as a, quote, "moral superpower," unquote. So Sweden took refugees
from the Somali War, from the Bosnian War
in the early '90s. They took refugees from Algeria. They took Iraqis and
Afghans in the new century. And then, four
years ago, in 2015-- if you remember when refugees
from the war in Syria began marching into Europe-- the Scandinavian countries
were, most people believed, extraordinarily generous. And I'll give you the number
of refugees they took. Denmark processed 21,000
asylum applications. Norway processed 31,000. Finland processed 32,000. And Sweden took 162,000. And this has turned the
country of Sweden upside down. Many European countries have
tried to limit immigration over the years on the
grounds that they wouldn't know where to put them. This is not a problem that
Sweden had, at least at first, because it had all this housing
that it had built in places outside of major cities. So in housing projects in
places like Rinkaby and Tensta, outside of Stockholm,
these places tended to fill up
with foreigners. Now, we should not
exaggerate the role of the Million Programme. I mean, immigration,
by now, has outstripped the ability even of Sweden
to provide crisis housing. And since 2015, it
seems that every summer camp, and off-season
hotel, and gymnasium floor has been used to
house immigrant beds. But until recently, there were
places to hide immigrants. And this is a very
important thing if you want to
understand why Sweden has taken so many migrants. In Stockholm, you don't
notice that you're living in a highly-diverse
metropolitan area in the single European country
that has been most overwhelmed by migration. In fact, it looks like
a low-migration country. But in fact, it's not a
low-migration country. It's a segregated country. And what you have is the
usual paradox of segregation-- which is, the more
segregated a country is, the bigger a problem it
has, but the more harmonious it looks. And so that's where
you are with Sweden. All over Europe
now, there's talk about how, if migration
isn't slowed down, this or that country is going
to lose its culture, et cetera. In Sweden, it's already
too late for that. And the numbers in Sweden
are really extraordinary. Sweden's population
is 19% foreign-born. It is 32% of foreign origin. More than 30% of the babies
are born to foreign mothers. Right now, Sweden's
Muslim population is 8%. According to a Pew
Research Center, if immigration continues
at the present rate, in the year 2050-- which is 31 years from now-- Sweden will be 30% Muslim. If refugee flows
were to stop today, and there would be zero
migration for the next 30 years, Pew projects
that Sweden would still be 21% Muslim in the year 2050. And this is important when we
think about Swedish socialism, because the peculiarities
that made Sweden special are disappearing. And these, I think,
are the peculiarities that made it possible to sustain
socialism for so long there. So really radical parties have
begun to crop up in Sweden. They've begun to get
double-digit results in elections. And what they generally
complain about is, primarily, the size of
immigration, but also the effect of the size
of immigration on what remains of the
socialist welfare state. So Tino Sanandaji, the economist
whose insightful remarks on entrepreneurship I
mentioned just a second ago, he pointed out that the
population of Swedes of Swedish origin is roughly
stable at 7.7 million but that the country as a
whole, due to immigration, now has over 10 million people. And it's growing at a rate
as fast as Bangladesh. Sanandaji is a very
interesting guy. He's a very
mischievous economist. And he loves to throw
out these factoids. It's just his way. One other thing
he's done is he's tallied the net benefit
per migrant of migration. And he's found that
it's a net loss. I should just say, he's
a very fascinating guy. He's much criticized
on talk shows and by proper intellectuals. But he self published a book
on this subject of migration, from which I draw some
of these statistics. And it became the number-one
bestseller in Sweden, for quite a while. But anyway, I would say
that maybe, in fact, the greatest gift of
immigration to Sweden has been a set of
immigrant intellectuals who have revealed the
Swedes to themselves, or revealed things
about their new country that the Swedes themselves
had a hard time noticing. So I've already
mentioned Tino Sanandaji, but I would like to mention
in particular the economist and politician Mauricio
Rojas, because I find his models so interesting. They taught me so much about
Sweden when I was studying it. I met him about
15 years ago when I was writing a lot about
immigration and Sweden's growing inner cities. And Rojas was a figure. He was the closest thing in
Sweden to, say, Jack Kemp. He was the guy who
was testing out the appeal of free-market ideas
to non-traditional voters. And Rojas arrived in Sweden-- as you may guess,
from his name-- from Chile as a young
leftist in the 1970s. And he was a refugee
from a country that had put all its effort
into building socialism. And the socialist project there
had met tremendous resistance, not just from the middle class,
but eventually from the army. And so he suddenly
wound up in this country where 100% of the
people seemed to think that socialism was a great
deal and that everyone should imitate it. And so he began to wonder, why? Why wasn't Chile
able to imitate it? Why couldn't
everyone imitate it? And the usual response
of people in Sweden was, well, you didn't get
the program exactly right in every detail. You have to
renominate the workers to the workers' councils
biannually instead of annually, stuff like that. And you know how a lot
of utopias are this way. They have a lot of promise. But you get one
tiny detail wrong, and you wind up in a civil war. [LAUGHTER] So when people were
talking to him that way, Rojas said, no, it has to be
something deeper than that. That can't be the way
that Latin America is going to get Swedish-style
socialism because, in fact, that's not the way Sweden
got Swedish-style socialism. And in his work as an
economic historian-- and a bit less so, but in
his career as a free-market politician-- he went slowly through Sweden's
long history and its culture, some of the things I've been
discussing this afternoon. And that, I think, was really
the right place to look. The most important
thing he discovered was how widely Sweden
diverged from the history of other countries. It was a particular place. A lot of its particularities
came from its peasant origins. It had this tremendous
tradition of egalitarian that we've been talking about. But it didn't have much of a
tradition of individual rights. That was a strange
thing about it. Then there were
other peculiarities that came from its homogeneity. For instance, there was a
sense of shame in not working, in not carrying your
share of the load. And this homogeneity, Rojas
also found, extended to opinion. Swedes expected to
agree with one another. And that made its
development very different from other Western
European nations. A lot of European
nations developed as a way of finding a compromise
between clashing interests-- classes, or noble
houses, or even nations. I mean, the United Kingdom is
the classic example of that. But actually,
Sweden didn't really have many competing interests. And as such, there
were lots of things that were typical of the
West that it didn't really have in quite the same way,
like freelance intellectuals, an obsession with a free press. In Sweden, both
radio and television were state monopolies
into the 1980s. It didn't have a Western idea
of the separation of powers, because the goal
was not arguing. The goal was agreeing. And so Rojas looked
at these things. And he said, well,
of course, you can build socialism
in a place like that. But most places
aren't like that. And he asked people
to try to understand how strange Swedish
socialism was by asking them to look at more
normal, less controversial Swedish things. And he took the
example of a piece of Swedish modern
furniture, like a table. And I'll close with the
conclusion he drew from it. He said, the Swedes
look at a table. And they're so
provincial that they think it's just a normal table. But Rojas, having
grown up in Chile, could see actually how
different the Swedish table was. And I will quote
from an essay of his. He says, "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 in which is deemed detestable
not only aristocratic pomp or individualistic
petty Bourgeois swagger, but also any attempt
to be noticeably different from the masses of
the people or to act without some kind of
collective cover." And I think, with that, Rojas
had discovered the solution to the problem that we've spent
the last half hour discussing. Swedish socialism arose
from peculiarities of Sweden's national character. Not only that-- it relied on
social and economic capital that had been built up before
Sweden became socialist. And this was not a program that
could be replicated elsewhere, no matter how long
one studied it. In fact, it was not
a program at all. It was a culture. If you have that
kind of culture, it will probably be pretty
easy to build socialism. But if you don't, you'd
probably be wiser not to try. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER: Thank
you, Mr. Caldwell. We now have time for Q and A,
so please come to the microphone if you have a question. AUDIENCE: Hello, Mr. Caldwell. I think language is
important, especially if we're going to convince
people today who want socialism here that we shouldn't have it. And you make quite a case for a
collectivist mindset in Sweden, along with their homogeneous
society, until recently. But many of the
other speakers here would have said that Sweden
really doesn't have socialism because the government
doesn't own the agents or means of production. So how would you reconcile
your calling what Sweden has socialism, as opposed to those
who would say they really don't? CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL:
That's a good question. One is, it's very egalitarian. It's highly redistributive. The other is there is a
government role in many of Sweden's largest industries. And I think the goal of,
certainly, the Erlander government-- I believe, as they put-- was to decommodify social goods. So you're right, and
that's the reason I think that we're
talking about it today. It was not a full-blown
Soviet-style experiment in rejiggering a society. But it went very far. It went farther in the
direction of redistribution than probably any
other European society. And that was what I think
people meant by that word. AUDIENCE: Yes, thank you very
much for a very interesting perspective on Sweden. We had an exchange student
from Sweden in 1974, Annika. And she was so Swedish-- blonde hair, beautiful eyes. When she walked down the
streets of our tiny little town in northern Michigan, people
would just stop and stare. The people in
Rogers City thought that they knew a lot about
Sweden, because they had-- [CLEARS THROAT]
excuse me-- saunas. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, my feeling about
the politicians today who are pushing
socialism is they don't want us to be Americans. Americans are unique. Americans like being wealthy. We want to be wealthy. That's why we work so hard. And what do we do
with our wealth? We try to make
other people happy. We work hard. And when I was young, my mother
would say, you're not French, you're not Dutch. You're an American. What do you think about that? [LAUGHTER] CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL:
Well, I think that I was making a
pretty similar point-- that the different countries
have different cultures. When you live in a vast and
varied culture like our own, where a lot of people actually
don't know each other, and there is not a lot of
communal provision of security, you will need actually to
aspire to accumulate money. I think that that need was
less pressing for people who came from a Swedish
culture, or at least it was perceived as less pressing. I think that it's
become more pressing as their society has globalized,
as there are lots of new things that leave them uneasy. And I think that's one of the
reasons why Sweden is changing, one of the reasons why
the Swedes themselves are growing more skeptical
about their welfare state. AUDIENCE: Thank you so
much for coming here. I, myself, have never hosted
a Swedish exchange student. But I do have a
question for you. So clearly, mass
immigration into Sweden negatively affected Swedish
social and public institutions. And my question
for you would be, what effects do you
believe mass immigration into our own country will have
on our institutions in society? And if those effects
are negative, how does the threat
of mass immigration really square up to a
few socialist politicians running for national office? [APPLAUSE] CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL:
Uh-huh, yeah. [APPLAUSE] Immigration has been-- I mean, I think immigration is
disruptive wherever it happens. It has benefits to
wherever it happens. But the balance is
different than Europe because, in most
European countries-- and I'm sure this
is true in Sweden-- it's not considered OK to have
people come into your country who cannot have
access to benefits. As soon as immigrants
make themselves known, they are eligible for
a lot of benefits. And there's been a big outcry,
and it's probably more limited than it has been in
recent waves of migration. But if you're a Swedish migrant,
if you're a migrant coming into Sweden, you get a check. Now, that means that they can
exist on the fringes of society forever. There is not the need to
assimilate the way there was-- I mean, the American system
of tolerating illegal immigration-- where people
are living at the margins-- it has its
imperfections, obviously. For one thing, it creates
illegality, et cetera. But it does force people
into the workplace. And I think the workplace
is the main place that people get assimilated. And that does not happen to
the same degree in Sweden. So I think that's the main way
in which Sweden is being more negatively impacted than here. There's another issue
that comes up in Europe. And that is the fact your
immigrants, generally-- it's changed a bit in the
last 10 years, or 15 years. But the great pool
of immigrants in most of these Western societies
come from adjacent cultures. So the tone of
American immigration is set by Latin Americans. The tone of European
immigration is set by North African and
Middle Eastern Muslims. This is a subjective thing. But I would say that the gap
between American and Latin American culture is
extremely narrow, compared to the gap between European
and Muslim culture. That's a problem. It's a bit less of
a problem in Sweden, because you have such a big
diversity of Muslim cultures. So it's not like you have-- as you do in Germany, say-- a huge Turkish
subculture that's like a country within a country,
or Algerians in France, or Moroccans in the Netherlands. But it does create
expectations of the country and of its institutions. And there's not
time to go into it, but you can consider the
debates over halal meat in public schools where
probably a third of the kids are foreign born. And you have a measure of
how migration actually puts a bigger stress on Sweden,
I think, than it does on us. AUDIENCE: [CLEARS THROAT] Sorry. So echoing the first question,
evading the question of whether or not something is
or is not doctoral socialism, I know that Norway
and Sweden tend to have a Canada-America-type
comparison when we're talking about Scandinavian economies. I know that Norwegians
really pride themselves on having handled an
immigration crisis a lot better and that they have,
famously, oil money that keeps them floating. So I'm wondering if you
could expound a little bit on contrasting Norwegian
social democratic concepts and Swedish social
democratic concepts, especially as Sweden
has become more, I should say, socially
democratic and less straight-up socialist. So how do those
two come together? Sweden's, obviously,
a dumpster fire. And Norway prides itself on
not being a dumpster fire. And it seems to be the
only difference is that-- CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL:
Not being a what? AUDIENCE: A dumpster
fire, right? Like [EXPLOSION EFFECTS]. CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL:
Oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: So other than handling
immigration well and having a ton of reserve oil, is there
something magical about Norway? I mean, they both have
the Protestant work ethic, as Sanandaji would say. Yeah, could you just expound
on that a little bit? Because I find Norway to
be an interesting contrast with Sweden. CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL:
Yeah, I'm not sure I can expand on that,
because that would require a greater knowledge of the
Norwegian immigrant system than I actually have. A contrast that I have noted,
that I wrote quite a lot about in past years, was
between Denmark and Sweden, because it's very obvious
where Malmo in Sweden meets Copenhagen and Denmark. There was a bridge built
there a couple of decades ago. And so they've become
kind of like twin cities. And Denmark has-- since 2001-- had a really draconian
anti-immigrant regime. Let's say, it's not an immigrant
ban, or anything like that. But there are a series of
laws meant to prevent things like chain migration-- that is, groups of
migrants importing brides from their villages, who then
have children, who bring brides from their villages, and the
children being brought up in the foreign language. This happens a lot with
people from Pakistan and from eastern Turkey. The Danish attempt
to limit these things has resulted in a drastically
different social profile, I think. I think Denmark's foreign born
percentages is well under 10%. And Sweden's is at 20%. I don't think
Denmark is considered a really intolerant country. But they have a very
different relationship to migration now
than Sweden does. And so I think that's the
comparison I've looked at. I'm sorry I can't tell
you more about Norway. AUDIENCE: I have a question
regarding the Swedish elections of 1928 and 1932
and the distinction you see between the
perception of socialism in 1928 and in 1932 and
the rise of the folkhemmet. Can that be attributed
to, or is it partially attributable
to, the ripple effects of the international recession
that goes on in the 1930s-- the Great Depression
in the United States, and the financial insolvency
of Germany, and France, and Britain-- to some extent? CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL:
Yes, I think it's a very troubled time. And there are a lot of-- the closer one looks
at Sweden, the more one sees peculiarities. It's tempting to
look at all these as, here are things that
were happening in Europe. But the countries
were quite different. And Sweden, when
you think of it, is really across
a rather large sea from the mainland of Europe. And so one thing
that happened, when you talk about the transition
from just a purely socialist program to a socialist
nationalist program, is that Sweden didn't
have a real right wing that had claimed
that nationalist mantle. And I think it's
because, in World War I, Sweden was neutral. And in fact, a lot
of what we think of as the right-wing
movements of the 1920s-- these were demobilized people
who had been in the military. They had a strong
feeling of solidarity with the people they had been
fighting in the trenches with, and a strong feeling
of having been betrayed by their government. I mean, there were countries-- France and Germany lost
3 or 4 million people in the First World War. And so nationalism tended to
be claimed by those people. There was no one
claiming nationalism in the same way in Sweden. And so when the crash came--
which brought, I think, an increase in
unemployment in Sweden, as it did everywhere else-- there was not a ready-made
political polarity between the Marxists here
and the street-fighting paramilitaries there. There was a lot more fluidity. And I think that that made the
social democrats more capable of forming up, of making an
attractive offer to the voting public. SPEAKER: We have time
for one more question. AUDIENCE: Thank
you for your talk. You mentioned earlier that there
were a few prosperous companies that started in Sweden,
such as Saab and IKEA. And I was wondering, did they
start in the socialist time period? And if they did, how
were they able to thrive? CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: Right. So that's what I was-- I must have been unclear,
because I mentioned the economist Tino Sanandaji. And one of the things he said
is that there's a group that-- actually, while
you had socialism, and while you had
entrepreneurialism, they didn't date
from the same time. They lived side by side. They weren't part
of the same system. And what he was saying is
that, let's say Electrolux, and IKEA, and H&M, came out of-- I think IKEA and H&M were both
founded during the Second World War when the rest of Europe was
not founding companies at all. But they came before the
high tide of socialism. You know what I mean? And Spotify, and Ericsson, and
those high-tech companies-- they came after the
decline of socialism. So while you might
still call Sweden a social democratic
country today, it's not confidently so,
or noticeably that much more so, than other
European countries. So his argument--
which I endorse-- is that you had a period
of entrepreneurship, you had a period of
social democracy, and then another period
of entrepreneurship. SPEAKER: Thank
you, Mr. Caldwell. CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
