To refer to Sweden as a good example of care and welfare reforms has been common among many US scholars all through the 1990s until today. In this article, the author tries to understand why the Swedish pandemic strategy during 2020–21 was met with surprise and confusion, most visible in the US where the political divide between for‐or‐against lockdown, that is, for or against free access to public spaces, made the right‐wing refer to Sweden in positive terms. In Sweden it was the extreme right‐wing party, the Swedish Democrats (founded by neo‐Nazis), that expressed an explicit belief in complete lockdowns, while in the United States it was the Democrats and the liberal left.
As nation after nation restricted their citizens’ movements, closed schools, and called in the military police to patrol the streets, checking the legitimacy of anyone straying from home, Sweden did nothing when COVID-19 hit the world in the beginning of 2020. That is at least the image reproduced in international media, as foreign journalists and politicians tried to describe the Swedish pandemic strategy. We did nothing. The beacon of light and rationality that the rest of the world—not least leftist sociologists and philosophers—usually looked to for guidance chose the same path as the “deplorable” Trumpians of the United States: no lockdowns, no face masks, no regulations. How was this possible? Did our health agency knowingly sacrifice the elderly to save the economy? Let thousands of people catch the virus just to reach herd immunity? Without anyone reacting or protesting? Had Sweden stopped caring?
Let's turn this around: how did Swedes look at the rest of the world when governments of neighboring democracies implemented legal restrictions hitherto found only in totalitarian states? These regulations were undertaken in the name of caring, but the speed at which they were implemented scared many. How could such laws be passed so quickly in neighboring democracies? Some Swedes did think it necessary to do the same in Sweden: the right-wing extremist party (Sweden Democrats, a former Nazi party), with about 18 percent of the votes in the 2018 general election, was the loudest, calling for lockdowns, mandatory face masks, and the immediate overriding of the Public Health Agency's recommended strategy as well as the national constitution (Grundlagarna). That, too, was scary.
Here is what international media and politicians might not have known about the Swedish strategy: it was based in the national constitution, and no minister or government was in a position to change that. There are two reasons for this:
1. The constitutional right to free movement.1 Any restriction of movement in public spaces would have been unconstitutional according to chapter 2, §8, but because of its close similarity to chapter 2, §15 (allemansrätten: an age-old common rule that gives everyone the “freedom with responsibility” to trespass private land and hence the possibility to access all natural areas in the country), it is also likely that a restriction would have been conceived as not only a severe intrusion on private life but also as extremely “un-Swedish.”2
2. Ministerial rule is illegal. Ministerial rule is common in Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and most other nations in the world (Finland being the other exception). To allow a minister to decide the actions of a governmental agency is hence not possible. In principle this ensures that the expertise of the agency is considered when a specific action is needed rather than letting the decision be part of a political tactic. It was ministerial rule that enabled the quick change in most other nations. In Sweden, the Public Health Agency's board were automatically appointed as lead strategists in the role of scientific experts, from which they advised parliament (not an individual minister) on appropriate actions. No minister or party was able to take any measures on their own. All restrictions and recommendations were instead presented in daily broadcasted press conferences, and both the government and the opposition expressed their support for the agency (with the Sweden Democrats being the exception).
In the end, only recommendations were possible, not legal restrictions.3 No one would be fined or jailed if breaking a recommendation. This, of course, may look like “doing nothing,” if all that counts is legal force, and it required that the agency had to rely heavily on people's will to follow the recommendations. The already well-known motto regarding allemansrätten—“freedom with responsibility”—became useful as a familiar call for collective solidarity.
That motto might not have been enough, though; something more was most likely needed. I believe this “something” appeared with an involuntary summoning of a specter, caused by an initial exposure of a hitherto hidden neoliberal fiasco.
The Perfect Storm of Melancholic Solidarity
This brings me to the next thing I believe is relevant to know about Sweden. It is today one of the most neoliberal states in the world, but with a specific welfare state twist: privately owned schools and health care centers, as well as elderly homes, are financed with public means but allowed to withdraw profit. To create an artificial sense of market-based competition, public schools and care centers of all kinds are not allowed to receive more money than the privately owned and are hence forced to “play the market” too. This has had deep impacts on the Swedish welfare model over the last few decades, with drastic cuts in the public funding of health care and education, alongside an equally severe deterioration in the rights of workers and work environments where gig-economy and part-time positions dominate the health care sector (Skyrman et al. 2023). This is especially true in the Stockholm region (run by right-wing parties), where all public care centers have been forced to make severe cuts and implement “lean production” to “compete” with the private ones.
The number of deaths with and of COVID-19 was indeed high at the beginning of the pandemic compared to Norway and Denmark; it turned out that elderly care centers were the problem where the proportion of deaths were much higher in Sweden and especially in the Stockholm region.4 This received intense media attention in the spring of 2020 when the maladministration was exposed and scrutinized, and a government inspection was initiated and carried out almost immediately by the Health and Social Care Inspectorate (IVO).5
It became clear that because of severe financial cuts to the public health sector, only the very sick and fragile are today offered elderly care in Sweden. This meant that a higher proportion of already very weak people were placed where the virus was more likely to spread. Because of a “fragmented organisation due to a large number of actors with unclear responsibilities, a lack of common information technology systems and no standard electronic health records” combined with fewer personnel working according to “new public management” (NPM) logics—that is, shared turns, time management, and a high staff turnover, where the hygienic recommendations were either impossible to follow or not prioritized—the death toll rose to alarming levels (Ludvigsson 2022: 21). Norway especially had quite different circumstances on this specific issue and hence a lower number of deaths.6 However, all Nordic countries were in the end quite similar in that they chose a mitigating strategy rather than to suppress the COVID-19 virus.
What was uncovered was the acute lack of contingency planning and storage of emergency supplies. During these initial months, the gradual downsizing of national crisis preparedness, including emergency hospital beds, respirators, and medication, that had been going on behind closed doors since the 1990s was now exposed in broad daylight, revealing the neoliberal dependency on individual resilience rather than state-sponsored (i.e., costly) general preparedness. In other words, the effects of neoliberal austerity and lean production that had dominated Swedish health care for decades were now made visible in the most horrifying way. People were shocked and outraged. But this rage and shock was never formulated in those terms; nowhere were the words austerity, neoliberalism, or NPM mentioned; a loss was sensed but the actual lost object was not made explicit. The result was a melancholic reaction in which the incorporation of the lost object turned out to be exactly what the pandemic strategy needed.
The neoliberal incapacity to handle the crisis was met with a literal re-action, a resurrection of lost symbols and imagery in which “the Swedish model” was accentuated simultaneously on many levels. Early twentieth-century nostalgic metaphors of folkhemmet (people's home) and landsfadern (nation's father) were revived in the media, especially social media, alongside revised images from the so-called stand-by period (beredskapstiden) during World War II, which alluded to the military propaganda that portrayed hygiene as a civic duty.
The image of Chief Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell as a landsfader was widely distributed, and others—especially memes—celebrated Tegnell as a gråsosse (grey social democrat, usually a derogatory slur condemning inflexible bureaucracy but symptomatically reclaimed during the pandemic): incorruptible, trustworthy, low-key, non-complacent, pedagogical, and reassuring, a kind of welfare state relic resurrected to save us. He explicitly said that his main concern was “the people” (folket) and that the pandemic required a holistic approach that focused on public health (folkhälsan) in general, not “just” the COVID-19 virus, and that the aim was a strategy that emphasized long-term sustainability. As the international (and some national) criticism became evident, he also received a more heroic role as the defender of “the Swedish way,” which was associated both with reason (förnuft/sans) and the (supposedly) Swedish virtue of being lagom (neither too much nor too little). Once again it seemed Sweden was a representative of “the third way.”
All Tegnell had to do was to ask everyone—for the sake of public health—to keep their distance and wash their hands. And so we did. This will to oblige was officially attributed to the documented Swedish trust in authorities, usually seen as an effect of the lack of ministerial rule and the long, stable governance of social democracy during the twentieth century. The imagery of Tegnell as a hibernated gråsosse was hence not coincidental. He was placed in stark contrast to other nations’ politicians, who were seen as populists reacting in fear of losing votes and with no scientific data to back up their far-reaching intrusions into the fabric of democracy.
So almost all the historical values of folkhemmet were put into play, even (and especially) the pejorative and outmoded ones: jantelagen,7landsfadern, allemansrätten, solidaritet, lagom. In the absence of an actual welfare state, Swedes seemed to have handled the now too obvious loss of welfare by incorporating its core values, a kind of melancholic self-regulation that suited the proposed governmental strategy perfectly: in the name of collective welfare, hands were washed and distances kept.8
The Distant Swede and Melancholic Care
Some measures, however, were not taken, most notably the use of face masks, while lockdowns took place only on a lesser scale. Though mandatory (and always provided) in hospitals and on airplanes, face masks were voluntary on public transport and in public spaces. Instead, emphasis was on keeping a distance—even when wearing a face mask.
Face masks nonetheless became a dividing issue, along three lines: the extreme right-wing called for mandatory face masks early on; younger people influenced by the US left wing started wearing nonmedical masks later in the pandemic; and the Public Health Agency argued for medical face masks only when distance was not possible and then only if handled properly. Tegnell even expressed concern that putting our faith solely in face masks could increase the risk of transmission, since distancing and proper mask usage were more important than their simple presence. Most of the population went with Tegnell's recommendations.9
Distance keeping was much more easily turned into a national virtue than the face mask. It was quickly reinforced as a primordial Swedish trait, with jokes about the insufficiency of even two meters between Swedes: “Two meters! Do we have to be that close to each other!”
Here another national symbol emerged: the detached Swede, isolated from others both emotionally and physically. Again, an ambiguous stereotype was embraced, usually alluding to involuntary isolation, Weltschmerz (world pain), and high suicide rates, but now put to work to reinforce endurance and independence. The possible contradiction between communitarian solidarity and isolation was hidden by the emphatic nationalism of Swedish melancholia: showing care by being distant became an enjoyable and irresistible sacrifice.
So the classic melancholic traits of loyalty, responsibility, and solitude proved extremely useful during the pandemic. Loyalty is easily mistaken for solidarity, a sense of responsibility for selflessness, and solitude for heroic sacrifice. Or are they, in a melancholic context, the same thing?
The Specter of No Longer or Not Yet?
But what kind of melancholic are we dealing with here? The post-pandemic relation to the “specter of the welfare state,” summoned under pandemic conditions, has not led to any major societal changes: there are still more cuts in the public health sector, still queues to both basic and specialized health care (especially surgery), and a right-wing government won the post-pandemic election and seems to do whatever it can to forcibly impose a private health insurance system as a final blow to the remaining part of the welfare state.
The loss of the welfare state seems to go unacknowledged, while we act as if its end is unstoppable and all we can do is “be realistic” and keep whatever few remainders we are given. If the individual incorporation of the loss of those past values was helpful when the immediate need for collective solidarity was called on during the pandemic, it is now perhaps rather a hindrance to a much-needed acknowledgment of the actual slow death of the welfare state. Even more so when it seems that the ghost was quickly dispensed of: Russia invaded Ukraine; right-wing parties entered an alliance with the former Nazi party to gain a majority in parliament; and, by pure fear mongering, membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was touted as the one solution to all our problems, ending the more than century-old neutrality of the “third way” nation of Sweden. The ghost was gone, the moment lost.
Perhaps, then, we are dealing with a leftist melancholy, one that must be overcome to end our dependency on the incorporated loss, to finally be able to mourn, so that action and a will to change can take its place (Brown 1999).
I do, however, want to emphasize the willful welcoming of the ghost, the feelings of loyalty to this specter and the use of retrofuturist symbols during the pandemic. This ghost, which for a short period turned us all into (self-)righteous socialists, might have been a specter of lost futures rather than the past, as presented and defined by Mark Fisher (2014: 24): “The kind of melancholia I'm talking about, by contrast, consists not in giving up on desire but in refusing to yield. It consists, that is to say, in the refusal to adjust to what current conditions call ‘reality’—even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time.” At times it did feel like Sweden was the outcast of the world, misunderstood and hated, for (yet again) presenting a “third way”: neither laissez-faire nor totalitarian. The main pandemic-specific legal regulation concerned work: the deduction of pay for the first day of sick leave was temporarily removed. People not working in the health care sector, meanwhile, discovered a healthier approach to work. The hyper-flexible, overworked neoliberal ideal was gone, and both private and public companies and agencies were able to adjust without much ado. For those whose professions were deemed “nonessential to society,” another kind of work life was suddenly possible, though we had been told for decades that it was not.
The Benjaminian “retrofuturist monads” brought to life were not necessarily the most positive parts of the past welfare state. The low-key civil service expertise and the willingness to comply for the sake of the greater good were, however, not only negative stereotypes but also the opposite of entrepreneurial ego-rationality and epistemological crisis that define late modernity. These “remainders” could not be assimilated into the culture industry or by neoliberal power (Fisher 2009, 2014). They therefore must continue to dwell in us, producing a libido that remains attached to what has been lost. As Fisher points out, via Jacques Derrida, that which is lost is not necessarily the past but other possible futures. The future promised by the welfare state has for decades been foreclosed, vanished, deemed impossible and hopelessly outdated. But the pandemic required exactly those values so scorned by the neoliberal ideology, and for a while the lost future was sensed, within reach, almost there.
This remainder is actualizable as politics, or as Fisher (2014: 53) writes, “When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.”
Notes
It is, however, possible to regulate and even forbid certain general meetings in case of epidemics, a regulation that was implemented during the pandemic.
Demography plays an important part here, of course. To restrict about ten million humans in an area the size of California where only about three million live in one of the few large cities, would be pointless.
These recommendations were to wash hands regularly, keep distance, avoid nonessential travel, and work from home if possible.
90 percent of those that died of, or with, COVID-19 in Sweden the first five months were over seventy years old, and of these about 76 percent received elderly care; among those over eighty-five years old, the percentage was even higher.
For a summary and commentary of the report from a medical perspective, see Ludvigsson 2022.
There are other explanations for these differences too, concerning both demographic differences and time when the virus entered the countries (and how), as well as differences in 2019’s flu-season mortality rates. Also, the Swedish Public Health Agency counted everyone who died of, and with, COVID-19, while most other nations counted only those that died of the virus. In the end, looking to national mortality rates in general was agreed on as the only way to compare nations, and between January 2020 and December 2022 Sweden had one of the lowest excess all-cause mortality rates in Europe (thirty-seventh out of forty-two countries, just next to Denmark and Norway), with a peak in the first wave, but considerably lower for the second and third compared to all the other Nordic countries and Europe (Björkman et al. 2023).
The Law of Jante is a code of conduct originating in fiction and now used colloquially in the Scandinavian countries to denote a social attitude of disapproval toward expressions of individuality and personal success, such as, “You are not to think you're anyone special, or that you're better than us.”
Not all, of course, since not everyone had this melancholic relation to the welfare state; some immigrant communities had a higher level of mortality. The younger generation, too, seemed more “immune” to the melancholic inflection. This was of course very tragic and shows how a welfare specter is helpful only for some, while an actual functioning welfare state would have been helpful for all.
In repeated polls during the pandemic by Kantar SIFO, 80 to 90 percent stated they followed the recommendations (Kantar SIFO 2020–22).
