The Swedish Model: From Welfare State to Project Industry
There is a disturbance in the main square. It’s the early ’90s in the southern Swedish city of Malmö, the country’s third-largest, and passers-by complain of groups of young men lurking in the shadows or acting menacingly on the street corner. They’re too old to behave like obstinate teenagers. And it’s too late at night; they should be at home preparing for their exams or tomorrow’s work.
A meeting is held, social workers are assigned, a project is born: Arab ’92. (Of course, naming a project Arab ’92 would be inconceivable thirty years later, as the danger of being accused of stigmatization prevents many a civil servant from defining the very problem that they seek to solve.) With funding secured, the project workers are tasked with an easy enough objective—talk to the young men currently menacing street corners; find out about their grievances; see if they can be trained for the labor market. Arab ’92 coffee mugs are manufactured; a staff employed; an office established. Then, without much notice, the project vanishes, as do its clients, and no one really bothers to follow up. It’s just one of those things. Maybe these street corner guys started families, or they were sucked into the underworld.
New groups have since arrived in Sweden, and new social problems have sprung up—all, of course, requiring well-funded projects staffed and administered by good-hearted Swedes. The supposed beneficiaries of these projects, on the other hand, seem to flow through the system untouched, leaving only an ever-increasing number of project workers behind. Nevertheless, the project industry has become an integral part of the Swedish welfare system, as a complement to existing government or municipal agencies, a way of testing new methods in unchartered territory, and a reassurance that something is being done about social problems that may seem unsolvable.
This industry has also created a new job market for individuals to establish themselves as project workers. One project is usually followed by another. With no end in sight, this industry has fostered a breed of benevolent coffee drinkers and paper pushers who excel in their ability to fill in grant applications. Naturally, their project evaluations tend to include recommendations for further projects.
Since the end of World War II, Sweden has been envied for its modern industry and carefree lifestyle. The policies of the dominant Social Democrats contributed to a high standard of living, relative equality, and—a cost many were prepared to accept—a sense of conformity. Lately, news reports have focused on organized crime, fatal shootings, and failing social safety nets, along with an increased sense of precariousness and distrust in the general population. And although mid‑twentieth-century social conformity is no more, over time, as the entire government apparatus has become better educated and more middle-class, officials and politicians have arguably adopted a more uniform outlook on the world than in the old days of Social Democratic hegemony. But the center of activism has moved from political parties to nongovernmental officials and managers. Social democracy has been seriously weakened as a governing program, and disappointed working-class voters have migrated to the Sweden Democrats, a populist party critical of the country’s immigration policies.
Building the Swedish Welfare State
Sweden emerged from the disasters of World War II less damaged and better equipped than its European neighbors. As the senior party from the wartime coalition government, the Social Democrats began introducing welfare reforms such as a basic pension, general child allowance, and sickness cash benefits, later supplemented with universal health insurance and additional pension benefits.
The 1950s saw several educational reforms, the initial outlines of the nine-year compulsory comprehensive school, and subsidies for vocational and adult training. The public sector grew at a level acceptable to most opposition parties while income taxes actually remained lower than in the United States until the 1960s. Higher education was also expanded, unemployment benefits doubled, and a new maternity allowance in 1962 provided mothers with a six-month period of paid leave. The economy soared and the pundits of the day wrote books about the period known as “The Record Years.” At the time, the public image of Sweden’s welfare state as stable and effective seemed well-earned.
Sweden’s transformation from a society of widespread poverty in the nineteenth century—when one in four Swedes emigrated to America in search of a better life—to one of prosperous consumerism after World War II was very much a collective effort involving all of Swedish society. The changes were also spurred on by the success of the export industry and the governmental and bureaucratic structures already in place in the seventeenth century. A public school system was inaugurated in 1842. A coalition of Liberals and Social Democrats passed the bill that guaranteed universal suffrage in the 1921 elections. Reformist ideas dominated the labor movement, combining radical social policy with reliance on capitalist dynamics of production. The informal relationships which governed business and government interaction were given legal structure in 1938. This national consensus, which regulated future agreements on wages and working conditions, became known as “the Swedish Model.”
America had its New Deal; Sweden had “the Strong Society.” The postwar prime minister who coined that phrase, Tage Erlander, tied his legacy to this notion of a distinctly Swedish system for regulating relationships between the different sectors of Swedish society. The stability of the state and the hegemonic strength of the Social Democrats were personified by Erlander, who from 1946 would lead the government for an uninterrupted tenure of twenty-three years.
Tall and witty, in a more sly than urbane manner, Tage Erlander became a national father figure. Few Swedes had a university degree before World War II; Erlander did, graduating with degrees in political science and economics in 1928. Despite his patrician education, as a politician he was considered a man of the people. One favorite party anecdote claims that his wife Aina returned his used pencils after he retired and left office—the pencils were marked, “Belongs to the State.” He would appear on the only talk show on the only TV channel and tell ironic, countryside jokes that people still remember.
Since Erlander handed the premiership over to his protégé Olof Palme in 1969, no other politician has come close to attaining his stature. In 1968, the Social Democrats received 50.1 percent of the popular vote in the parliamentary elections, the highest total ever achieved by a Swedish party. Going into the upcoming elections in September 2022, however, the party now lingers at 25 to 30 percent in the polls.
The Origins of the Project Industry
A pat story could be told about the journey of Swedish society from the success and optimism of the ’60s—whose visions of progress combined sunny bucolic sceneries with ultramodern kitchens—to the pessimism and anxiety of the current moment. Today, Swedes are more likely to hear cautionary tales of children being mugged and their grandparents being robbed of both their cellphones and their dignity.
What changed? We could point to structural changes in the global economy. As in the United States, the oil crisis in 1973 was an inflection point. Or perhaps it was politics—the Social Democrats’ hegemony made the party enemies on both the right and the left, drawing ambitious challengers to the status quo. Perhaps there is an element of cultural change. Somewhere between the resounding electoral victory in 1968 and the present day, the Swedes of the “Strong Society” stopped asking John F. Kennedy’s question of what they could do for their country and began asking, what was in it for them?
The Swedish attraction to social democracy has a complicated history. The long reign of the Social Democrats can be attributed to the party’s ability to attract both radicals and liberals, and its ability to balance these opposing wings of Swedish politics. The Social Democrats also displayed a strong sense of moral conservatism, which spoke to unionists and teetotalers alike. Expecting everyone to work and to perform his or her duty, a culture of conscientiousness lay at the heart of this reformist movement. The spirit of Martin Luther kept peering over its shoulder.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the economic system and its culture came under fire in ways that are reminiscent of today’s climate change debate. The prevailing concepts of both prosperity and welfare were questioned. A new kind of critique gradually came into view: what do we risk losing if we rely too much on the government to take care of our children, our elderly, our everyday lives?
The 1960s youth culture looked collectivist, but its lasting impact was its individualism. While it changed morals, affected minority rights, and unleashed new cultural expressions, it primarily offered a way out of societal restrictions. It fostered a new kind of individualism: you could now “do your own thing”—whether as a street musician or stockbroker. Even money was free to do its thing, as American writer Thomas Frank put it in his 2000 book, One Market under God.
This too is the trajectory of Swedish social democracy. Through its various reforms, it freed individuals from the necessities of collective action. Children born after the Second World War could reap the fruits of what had been planted by older generations, as the welfare state provided the safety that allowed for a more expansive individualism.
It may well be that the disappearance of clear, concrete political goals led to the impression that very little was left to be achieved in terms of social policy. Gone were the visionary days of the 1960s, when a highly capable government built millions of new apartment units over a ten-year period, reshaping the Swedish economy. After building its welfare state, the country found itself at a crossroads with no direction home. From then on, politicians would improvise, becoming more reactive than proactive. Social Democracy, viewing itself as the only viable incarnation of the state and its good intentions, lost two elections in 1976 and 1991. Upon regaining power, it discovered that it had moved to the center of the political field, accepting more liberal, and sometimes neoliberal, answers to questions posed by the voters.
The predilection for “projects” grew out of the realization that all was not well in the welfare state, which had expanded from the 1950s and into the 1970s. Drugs and otherwise bleak conditions in the new tenement suburbs were first seen as mostly temporary; they were unfortunate deviations from the straight line of progress. As such, they could be addressed with short-term efforts to find jobs and decent spare‑time pursuits. As worries continued to grow, however, the government began looking for more and more local initiatives which could be turned into quick-fix projects.
The nascent project industry began to resemble Sweden’s expansive foreign aid program, a source of national pride. But this idealism soon collided with both real-world inertia and unpredictability. Much like foreign aid, the domestic projects often promised more than they could deliver. They relied on the willingness of the local community to cooperate in changing their living conditions, but neither the ideas nor the project workers seemed sufficiently grounded in practical realities. Increasingly, there has also been a shift from earlier, more traditional social projects organized around delivering a concrete outcome to far-reaching attempts to influence the views and attitudes of people. The logic seems to be that if you can’t change the conditions, you can at least try to change the way they are perceived. Arguments have become more emotional, less analytical.
It could be argued, too, that the project model, with its fluidity and lack of clear, measurable goals has been well suited to the postmodern age. Faced with real-world uncertainties, ranging from declining school performance to violent crime, sociologists and understaffed social agencies retreat into a universe of abstractions. Here is a mechanism for relieving citizens of their own responsibilities, framing them within a victim culture which ultimately makes elusive any prospect of change.
The Project Industry in Practice: Image over Substance
These efforts are reactions to social problems that are spinning out of control. But these projects have a way of defining the issues, of imposing an analytical structure favorable to the values and self-identity of government institutions and sympathetic organizations which receive the project grants. The project industry has also fostered a new species of “entrepreneur” who specializes in filling out applications or registering associations. Projects nowadays appear as their own ends. They have become a world of their own, a bubble economy financed by charity and government largesse.
A significant segment of the national economy now involves all sorts of projects in different fields, from wind power to forestry to pedagogy to gender equality. More and more, people are employed in projects instead of long-term jobs. Few politicians propose ideas that would require involvement beyond the next election. Swedish society, like others, has adapted to a lifestyle that is more flexible and often more vulnerable than that promised by the old welfare state system.
Projects fit into ever-changing processes where image and visibility are more important than actual results. The political language from the earlier era of social engineering is replaced by buzzwords such as inclusion, cohesiveness, and identity. Once a country that set out to build a national home for everyone within a reasonably equal society—“The People’s Home,” in the words of wartime prime minister Per Albin Hansson—Sweden has since lost its ability to achieve that goal, and has lowered its expectations.
Children with physical or intellectual disabilities have encountered a series of projects that seem intended to cover up a lack of more permanent efforts to improve their well-being. Poorly financed associations, engaged in everything from teaching golf to playing water sports, have made great efforts to work with children who tend to be socially isolated. But again, they cannot replace the security needed as their projects only last a year or two.
A current Malmö project, Amanah, tasked with the laudable goal of reducing prejudice between different religious groups, is also typical of this approach. Here, a rabbi and an imam meet for friendly dialogue and visit schools with financial support from local and national institutions. The effects of such meetings are nearly impossible to measure, though media is invited to publish positive stories about the project’s animating idea while rarely following up on any actual results. Anti-Semitism has been a frequently reported issue in Malmö, but as the many projects to counter hateful attitudes have come and gone, the Jewish population has shrunk considerably, with many of the relatives of families who came here in 1945 as refugees moving to other towns or countries. Leading local politicians have been unwilling to speak openly about the identity of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activity and the link to the Israel-Palestine conflict, leaving Jews with a sense of being on their own, alone, in a society that often takes the moral high ground on the international scene.
Moreover, the Swedish police are continuously reorganized; officers are shuffled around between regular beats and temporary projects, sometimes in an attempt to reach out to local communities after periods of withdrawal into vehicles and offices. Because of a lack of officers, private security firms have been hired for city projects and to supervise public spaces. As is the case with social work and hospital care, the paperwork has sometimes proved overwhelming, and projects have become an end run around bureaucratic obstacles, all to do the job police were employed to do in the first place.
Projects play a prominent role in the penal system, too. Young offenders have gone through training programs to prevent them from becoming hardened criminals. In one case, groups of teenage delinquents were sent to the Mediterranean and the Caribbean—earning the ridicule of some in the media—to work on sailing ships in order to learn discipline and cooperation. In Stockholm and Gothenburg, gang members were employed to patrol streets and subway platforms. This attempt at modifying their behavior was suspended when it was discovered that several individuals had continued their criminal activities, despite being attired in official project jackets.
The Big City Venture was a major project more than twenty years ago, initiated by the Swedish Parliament, hoping to find ideas for jobs for the long-term unemployed in euphemistically named “vulnerable areas” with high dependence on welfare benefits. Many similar programs would follow. In one of several evaluations of the Big City Venture, researchers hired by the city of Malmö concluded that “turning around social and ethnic segregation were important goals, but it is now safe to say that in this respect the situation has not improved as a result of the project.” Despite the investment of several billions in the Big City Venture between 1999 and 2004, twenty years later, government, city, and private employees spend their working hours dealing with the same grim prospects for the future.
Repeated failures to achieve more positive results have been blamed on the general conditions in troubled neighborhoods. But claims of declining services and disappearing resources, a form of institutionalized discrimination, are not entirely truthful. For instance, schools in purportedly “neglected” areas in Stockholm and Malmö receive twice the public allowance per pupil as their counterparts in middle-class neighborhoods. Projects add to the everyday transfer of resources from one part of town to another.
One of the neighborhoods in Malmö defined by the police as “vulnerable” is Seved, a relatively compact area that is a ten-minute bike ride away from the city center. It would take a doctoral dissertation to find out how much has been spent on social projects that have come and gone in Seved from the mid-1970s onwards: Urban, Neighborhood Boost, Seved Forum, Seved Venture, Hermes Project, Welfare for Everyone, Turning Seved, Neighborhood Program. . . . Not until local businesses and landlords joined forces to begin renovating some of the shabby properties in the area did anything actually improve in the material world. Social conditions, however, remain bleak.
The many billions of tax dollars absorbed by the project industry have come from various sources: the national government, regional boards, city councils, public authorities, EU funds, the Swedish Inheritance Fund, and the Swedish Postcode Lottery. Additional contributions include those from corporations, unions, private foundations, media outlets, and municipal housing companies.
The Inheritance Fund, for example, invests substantial amounts annually in youth projects, often directed at groups with disabilities or immigrant backgrounds. The fund is built on wealth gathered from deceased individuals without lawful heirs. Its administrators travel the country on a regular basis, searching for new groups and organizations worthy of project grants. One could hardly write a more ironic twist—the Swedes who die without heirs or descendants have their estates absorbed into the project industry’s financial black hole.
One NGO, Spiritus Mundi, convinced politicians that it was a terrific idea to send Swedish school children to Saudi Arabia on an exchange program to learn tolerance for other cultures. Money poured in from many sources. The Swedish Inheritance Fund gave Spiritus Mundi $1.6 million for the project Our Lives, intended to deradicalize 150 youngsters targeted by Islamists. The local city council contributed another $500,000. In the end, no results were shown. They didn’t find a single person to convert to “democracy.” The city council sued the association for repayment, a case which is yet to be resolved.
Immigration and the Project Industry
The latest boom for the project industry has been in issue areas surrounding immigration. Concerns about the failed integration of immigrants have been at the heart of the political debate for a long time in Sweden. Once more homogeneous than most European nations, Sweden has issued well over two million permanent residence permits since the turn of the millennium. Now a country of eleven million, Sweden opened its borders to 163,000 asylum seekers during the migration crisis of 2015 alone. This was the year of mass flight from the war in Syria, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel famously declared “Wir schaffen das” (“we’re going to make it”), as one million people from the east and the south poured into Europe. “My Europe does not build walls,” promised Sweden’s then prime minister Stefan Löfven at a rally in Stockholm in September that same year. Two months later, new legislation was introduced, aimed at regulating entries at the national borders.
The projects related to integration efforts have been so numerous, and involved such vast human and economic resources, that the country itself has sometimes been described as one giant integration project. And integration, leading politicians have reminded the public, is everybody’s responsibility; it’s not assimilation. Unfortunately, social cleavages have widened despite the costly interventions, thus providing new arguments for yet another round of projects.
In 1975, a unanimous vote in the Parliament promised immigrants that they were free to decide how much “Swedishness” they would like to incorporate into their personal, daily lives, and citizens born in other countries were encouraged to start ethnic and religious clubs and associations. More resources were allocated to mother-tongue classes. The vote was surely an act of general benevolence, but it was also the starting point of a new kind of institutionalized separation of “them” from “us.” At the time, few voices were heard trying to analyze the impact of multiculturalism as a response to changing demography.
But this focus on religion and ethnicity was quickly internalized and promoted by the developing project industry. Among the many current government agencies handling project applications, the Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs (snbya) plays an important role combining social concerns with an emphasis on ethnic minorities and democratic values. If the earlier projects dealt primarily with job creation and youth delinquency, the attention has gradually turned to cultural concerns around immigration and the prevention of negative attitudes in the general public.
Over the past five-year period, the snbya supplied youth organizations around the country with over $100 million in grants to combat racism and discrimination. Reading through last year’s list of applications, one might be forgiven for getting the impression that Sweden is one of the world’s most intolerant countries. Emerging from the heap of paperwork is the image of a country inhabited by wronged groups and individuals. A great many of these organizations also claim that they will cease to exist without support from government coffers.
How are these funds put to use? Awesome People, a club from Örebro, ambitiously promises that its project will lead to “reduced racism, improved psychic health, heightened sense of safety, diminished social rifts, and a stronger feeling of belonging.” Individual Human Aid in Lund proposes “an anti-racist program for certification of anti-racist workplaces,” and Civil Rights Defenders in Stockholm hopes to “strengthen 20 individuals in their work against racism and other forms of intolerance.” The Tamam group, also in Lund, wants to map “racist structures in club activities.”
There’s a long list of ethnic organizations stressing key words such as integration, anti-racism, and understanding, without which no application is complete. Several culture clubs dot their descriptions with references to norm criticism, safe spaces, and intersectional processes. The aim of Flamman in Malmö is to “create a separatist forum for young girls who identify themselves as Muslims.”
Those who seek arguments for expanding the project economy only have to turn to the government. In its action plan against segregation, titled Sweden Holding Together (2020), then Green minister for gender equality Åsa Lindhagen wrote that the country had been transformed from one of the most equal nations in the world to one where inequality rises faster than in most European countries. Thus, in the words of the very government presiding over this sea change, Sweden has become a worse place to live. Despite the large amounts of money spent on disseminating what has in effect become an official and rarely contested ideology—anti-racism and anti-discrimination—ministers and national authorities agree that the situation has gone from positively good to pretty bad.
It therefore comes as no surprise that one of the main proposals in the Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs report Young Today 2021 is a larger snbya budget in order to increase “efforts to strengthen democracy.” The logic is simple and clear: swelling problems demand more resources. And in the absence of simple answers, flood the system with nongovernmental projects, employing project managers and soaking up millions in chasing vaguely defined objectives. The managers of the project industry have made clear where their priorities lie.
Girls’ Schools Abroad, Honor Culture at Home
Several years ago, a new phrase entered the Swedish lexicon: “project fatigue.” Tenants in socially troubled neighborhoods expressed their frustration with three-year projects that came and went, with seemingly small effect—besides, of course, providing salaries and résumé padding for an itinerant cadre of outside do-gooders.
A case in point is the Somali cultural association Hidde Iyo Dhaqan in Malmö, based in a part of town with derelict apartment houses and kids running errands for older brothers on the criminal circuit. This organization’s work has been widely celebrated in the media. The Swedish king visited the organization, as have government officials from several EU countries, who came to admire the new project-sponsored vegetable gardens that sprung up in place of broken sidewalks.
But having relied solely on project revenues, the organization received no financial support from the city of Malmö, and eventually lost both its premises and its spirit. Some of the association’s youth projects have been more fruitful than others. Yet what they all have in common is a disappointing transience—instead of inspiring local people to take matters into their own hands, participants left when the money ran out and the luscious gardens withered and died.
The chairman of the group, a notable figure within the international Somali diaspora, would otherwise have been the perfect liaison for the city to hire on a permanent basis. Instead, he was forced to jump between temporary projects and fill the voids with unemployment compensation. In many ways, he is typical of a certain tribe of immigrant project workers without professional experience, caught up in the fragile world of the project industry instead of studying for a vocation. These individuals are shown to be disposable when the funds dry up and the ambitious managers move on.
There is a comparison to be drawn with Sweden’s foreign aid program. Sweden’s 1960s self-image of a modern nation oriented toward equality and fairness inspired ambitious foreign aid efforts. With the welfare state up and running, it was time to export social change to underdeveloped regions of the world. Wells were drilled, advisers were sent, and Swedish-funded schools for girls were built in troubled regions.
Admittedly, some of the funds disappeared into the pockets of local rulers, but support for both multilateral and unilateral aid has remained a political priority in Sweden. It has evolved into a major project system with its own cadres of permanent aid workers. As Sweden became an immigrant-destination country, a similar philosophy was applied to the multifaceted programs for the integration of foreigners—often arriving from the very countries where the Swedes had helped drill for water and support education for girls.
As huge numbers of people with very different understandings of culture and government arrived at the border, the Swedes’ picture of themselves began to change. Sweden’s self-image now combines hubris with self-effacement. Apparently, bringing developed civilization to the third world was one thing, but arguing that immigrants should adopt these values when settling in the rich world tends to be a harder case to make. Strangely enough, it seems easier to speak of women’s liberation on distant shores than in the segregated neighborhoods of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö, where honor culture and female subjugation have become pressing issues.
The Paradoxes of the Project Industry
The transformation of Sweden from a predictable welfare state to an unpredictable and more fragmented society has been remarkable. Trying to hold on to its self-image as a nation with a global, moral mission, the peaceful country has seen the stillness of its everyday life shattered by grenades and gunshots previously associated with unstable parts of the world. A nation divided by economy, culture, and values has emerged from a hitherto homogeneous homeland.
Several paradoxes are at play. Immigrants have been welcomed without any plan for their self-support. Families are sometimes better off living on welfare instead of work. Integration may be the name of the game, but project grants are sometimes given to religious or ethnic organizations that defy and counteract integration efforts. Meanwhile, criticism of reactionary or patriarchal social patterns among immigrant groups has frequently been deemed racist. The double standards—you are expected to tolerate intolerable conditions if they appear in another part of town—have fueled distrust in politics and the media.
Disguised as benevolence, an institutionalized us-and-them worldview has established itself. This is troubling on many levels. It encourages separatism while proponents of integration cannot understand why their good intentions are not fulfilled. The project philosophy is based on low expectations: immigrants are viewed as incapable of either providing for themselves or becoming assimilated Swedes, should they even want to.
Over the past four decades or so, enormous resources have poured into short-term projects that have replaced the long-term planning policies of the early welfare state. The project-industrial complex is fed by widespread worries over social problems yet simultaneously depends upon their persistence and growth. This industry has become something of a perpetuum mobile involving hundreds of thousands of people, both clients and their helpers.
Short-term projects at least offer the appearance that someone is trying—something, at least, is being done. On the other hand, usually very little is achieved. The Swedish welfare state has been replaced by this system of transitory projects, and the society of equal citizens replaced by a class of clients and their professional managers. Both classes rely on the system to never change, because change would mean the loss of jobs and benefits. It would also require a more open and honest discussion about the problems that constitute the foundation of the project industry.