In September, the Swedish government released a national kulturkanon, or culture canon: a list of a hundred art works and accomplishments that define the nation. There were some expected items—a play by the nineteenth-century writer August Strindberg, a painting series by the abstract artist Hilma af Klint—but also a ski race called the Vasaloppet and the invention of paternity leave. Laws, churches, and IKEA were all anointed.

That the country which bestows Nobel Prizes should play this parlor game is no surprise. Less expected was how the Swedish Academy, which selects the Nobel in Literature each year, condemned the project. “Anyone who wishes to establish a canon is by definition seeking to make their own small, authoritative list, which requires instrumentalizing literature and using it ideologically,” the Academy’s secretary, Mats Malm, wrote. This opposition was part of a broader debate that has swept the country, amid the rise of a conservative government and a demographic transformation that has called into question the very idea of “Swedish culture.”

In the past twelve years, more than a million people have migrated to Sweden, a country of fewer than eleven million. A fifth of its residents are foreign-born, and a population that was for centuries mostly white and Lutheran has become far more diverse. After a period of relative openness to immigrants, and especially to asylum seekers, public opinion and policy have shifted. Immigrants are now regularly blamed for taking resources from the state, driving an increase in gang and gun violence, and contributing to the country’s high unemployment rate—around eight per cent, twice that of the United States.

As in America, nativist anxieties have accelerated a reactionary political movement. Partly because Sweden has a parliamentary system, this turn emerged not through an existing conservative party but through the rise of a new one: the Sweden Democrats. A good example of their platform is a recent resettlement proposal, which would pay the equivalent of around thirty-five thousand dollars to each immigrant adult who leaves Sweden. The kulturkanon—which the Sweden Democrats championed—can be seen as a softer product of the same mentality. We want you to leave, but if you stay you should read some Strindberg and watch the Vasaloppet.

Like Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and Rassemblement National in France, the Sweden Democrats started as a fringe operation, with neo-Nazi roots. Although they didn’t enter parliament until 2010, by 2022, the year of Sweden’s most recent election, they had twenty per cent of the vote. Sweden’s coalition of center-right parties had long refused to collaborate with the nativist upstarts, but this time they changed their tune. They accepted the Sweden Democrats’ support to form a government, and when the new coalition released its official platform, it included a mandate to create a canon. A five-person committee, led by the historian Lars Trägårdh, was appointed, and the committee then selected two groups of six experts: one for art, another for society. The average age of the experts was sixty-seven, and two-thirds of them were men. Swedes were invited to propose items through a web page, but the experts made the final decisions.

When the list was released in the fall, the selections seemed to confirm detractors’ fears. This vision of Sweden was antiquated, out-of-touch, and white. One feature came in for particular scorn: a requirement that all hundred works predate 1975. (Otherwise, the committee argued, they could not be said to have stood the test of time.) ABBA was thus excluded, causing many a dancing queen to clutch her boa. For the social anthropologist Marlen Eskander, the cutoff silently excised immigrant experiences and second-wave feminism from Swedish culture. Eskander had been part of the original canon committee, but quit a year into the work. “The entire project is characterized by distinct national Romantic overtones and excludes a third of the contemporary Swedish population,” she wrote.

These are, in some ways, old debates, but Sweden has revived them in a new moment and with a new frame. Long the purview of classrooms and anthologies, the canon is now of interest to the state itself. For the Sweden Democrats and their coalition, culture, like borders, merits strategic defense. This is not nineteenth-century nation-building, but twenty-first-century national crisis management.

Canons are by definition exclusionary. The word derives from the Greek kanon, for “rule,” or standard of excellence. It arrived in Old English through Latin and French, by which time its meaning had become ecclesiastical, referring to the set of Church laws judged to be authoritative. Its first secular use, as a term for major literary texts, dates to the eighteenth century, and that sense became gradually more pervasive as authority was divorced from scripture. Today, “canon” is also used in fantasy communities to denote those texts which properly belong to an imagined world. The seven Harry Potter books are canon; fan fiction that couples Hermione and Malfoy is not.

Like their Christian cousins, literary canons derive authority from institutions. In the first decades of the twentieth century, American colleges began to implement Great Books courses: surveys designed to introduce students to the touchstones of Western thought. Some of these programs, including Columbia’s famous “core curriculum,” had a surprising origin in the First World War. As part of the war effort, the government installed conscript units on campuses and required that the soldiers receive an alternative curriculum, including a class on “war issues.” This was not a crash course on military strategy but an introduction to literary and philosophical classics such as Plato’s Republic. The goal was to link American culture with its European antecedents—a heady way to justify shedding blood for another continent’s conflict. “This is a war of ideas,” one government report asserted, and conscripts needed “some understanding of the view of life and of society which they are called upon to defend.”

After the war, these programs were largely disbanded. But the Columbia faculty campaigned for their course’s preservation, and in 1919 the name changed to Western Civilization. In the thirties, other institutions, such as the University of Chicago and St. Johns College, developed similar curricula, and by mid-century “Western Civ” was a standard fixture of higher education. The Great War paved the way for Great Books.

But which books were great? In the seventies and eighties, core curricula were attacked for their Eurocentrism and exclusion of minority voices. Known today as the “canon wars,” these skirmishes were a prelude to the debates over diversity, equity, and inclusion that dominate higher education today. And, just like today, they triggered a backlash. In “The Closing of the American Mind,” from 1987, Allan Bloom synthesized the counter-argument, declaring the “Great Books approach” to be the “only serious solution” to the nihilism and relativism plaguing American society.

As Sweden’s canon debate attests, such rhetoric remains part of the global right-wing playbook. But Bloom’s legacy has had the unfortunate effect of making even more reasonable canon defenses look reactionary. Consider a modest point. The Great Books provide common objects—besides the state of dining-hall food—for all undergraduates to discuss. This may not solve teen-age nihilism, but it offers the chance to gain new perspective on that angst. Plus, there’s a social and federating function at play. As a colleague who attended the University of Chicago put it, “You could go to a frat party, and even there everyone would have something to say about Aristotle.” These works needed some minimum level of aesthetic value, he thought, but the most important thing was that they were shared.

The critic John Guillory made a version of this point in his book “Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation,” from 1993. Guillory believed that participants in the canon wars were asking the wrong questions. For him, debates about what should be on a syllabus reflected an anxiety that both literature and those who taught it were losing their relevance. “It is much easier to make the canon representative than the university,” he wrote, suggesting that progressives were fixated on a facile form of representation. Did it matter how much working-class poetry was taught, if the pupils were all élites? Cultural capital was changing currencies, but it remained vested with the same people. Professors had scaled up the political stakes of homework to the detriment of real social reform.

Because the Swedish canon is a state-funded initiative, capital is literal as well as cultural. The actual issue, some have argued, is not what the list includes but the Ministry of Culture’s decision to invest precious resources in the project. Why make a list, when the state could be supporting artists and organizations? (The initiative is estimated to have cost around eight hundred thousand dollars, with more than a million more allocated to disseminate the results.) It didn’t help that the Minister for Culture, Parisa Liljestrand, became a punch line just before the canon’s release. In August, she posted a video recommending that Swedes support their local bookstore. The sentiment was fine, but the delivery was absurd. “Books are such an incredibly important part of literature,” Liljestrand began, leading many to wonder what else she imagined was part of literature.

One of the main justifications for the kulturkanon was pedagogical—the idea that it would eventually structure curricula in Swedish schools. Across the Atlantic, it already has. I’ve been taking Swedish classes for a couple of years, and in September, on the first day of the semester, my instructor led a discussion of the canon. We consulted some news articles, looked up a few words, then began to debate.

My classmates weren’t big fans. Many American students have internalized the idea that such lists are constructed and ideological—not simply because the selections tend to be white and male, but because claims of aesthetic value tell you more about the people making the judgments than about the objects themselves. We were intrigued that the kulturkanon included works from the Sámi—an Indigenous people who live in northern Scandinavia, and whose long history of persecution has parallels with that of Native Americans. But we also sensed lip service. This was just the sort of thing that clever reactionaries do: make space for one minority to better silence others.

For homework, we each put together a short presentation on one canon entry. Choices ranged from the Falun copper mine, which once furnished half of Europe’s copper, to the poet Edith Södergran, one of the first women to publish a modernist art manifesto. We learned so much that we decided to repeat the exercise. This time, I read that work we’d suspected of being tokenized, Johan Turi’s “An Account of the Sámi,” from 1910, and was astounded. Turi’s is the first secular book by a Sámi in a Sámi language, and he writes with ethnographic precision about reindeer herding and marriage rituals. But I was most drawn to his trenchant critique of how Swedes and Norwegians had introduced alcohol—and alcoholism—into Sámi society as a way to exert economic control. Turi explains how these “settlers” would trade their distilled liquor for reindeer, then turn around and pay the Sámi to tend the animals they had once owned. “And some Sámi have grown so drunk that they have gone through all their reindeer in this way,” Turi laments, “and they have been left with no herd of their own.”

I began to wonder whether we had been too critical of the kulturkanon. A list that looked restrictive to Swedes was incredibly useful for someone trying to learn the language and culture. The leftist Swedish journalist Maciej Zaremba made a similar point, accusing his fellow-progressives of an ironically provincial mind-set. Zaremba, who immigrated to Sweden from Poland as a teen-ager, in 1969, noted that those who had grown up in Sweden couldn’t see the value of such a project to foreigners. “I would have been grateful if in 1969 someone had laid this canon on my lap,” he wrote. What he wanted was not recognition but exposure to something new: “I already have a grasp of my own experiences. It is Sweden’s that I want.”

After two rounds of presentations, a classmate suggested a new direction: we would each discuss something that should have been chosen for the canon. The next week, pop music finally received its due. One student pointed out that ABBA’s “Waterloo” won Eurovision in 1974, and thus met the fifty-year requirement. Another insisted that, though the d.j. Avicii would need to wait a few more decades to qualify, his beats surely merited a place. A third swerved into politics, arguing that the Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander, whose record-holding tenure spanned from 1946 to 1969, deserved a spot for leading the country’s enormous welfare expansion. Even our teacher joined in, making a case for sill (herring), most famous in its inlagd (pickled) form. She noted that the canon didn’t include any of Sweden’s memorable foods, from meatballs and cinnamon buns to the less internationally renowned banana-curry pizza.

But the more we quibbled, the less we worried about the project itself. “I rather like the canon,” our teacher observed after the presentation on Avicii. “When the list was first released, I was skeptical. But not anymore.” It didn’t seem like a coincidence that this change of heart came while we were arguing against the selections. One of the best things about canons—about any such list—is that they cry out for dissent. They trigger immediate claims of justice and injustice, initiate fevered discussion with our friends and family. Then, as others reveal their divergent opinions, knee-jerk reaction turns to reflection, and we must establish principles to explain our selections. Why, exactly, do you think Avicii’s song “Levels” is the banger of the century? Canons offer occasions to question our own tastes as much as those of the tastemakers.

There’s a difference, however, between a universal canon, like that touted in a Great Books program, and a national one like Sweden’s. The former aspires to global, or at least hemispheric, coverage, while the latter is inevitably a little blinkered. It risks replicating the national bias it’s supposed to represent. The flip side is that it gives you access to material you won’t find in your bookstore or on most college syllabi. Swedish is a “minor” language, and few American colleges offer it. At my institution, it—along with other Scandinavian languages—will be phased out in the next two years. This context is helpful to keep in mind when we reflexively disparage cultural nationalism. Nationalism looks rather different when we see it as a rare bulwark against the dominance of English, as a source of linguistic diversity. One of the joys of learning a minor language is falling in love with the periphery.

In the 1869 work “Culture and Anarchy,” the critic Matthew Arnold famously defined culture as “the best that has been thought and said.” He would have found the phrase “culture canon” redundant. Arnold’s exclusion of what we now call “low culture” has made him a latter-day punching bag, an easy mascot for academic élitism. But his detractors don’t always give him enough credit. He was far from parochial, arguing that “every critic should try and possess one great literature, at least, besides his own; and the more unlike his own, the better.” Indeed, he urged readers to fight against their bias by giving “particular heed” to any work that “while significant and fruitful in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him.” Arnold’s own criticism often focussed on expanding horizons and recovering unknown authors, from the moralist Joseph Joubert to the diarist Eugénie de Guérin. “Though it is by no means true that from what is new to us there is most to be learnt, it is yet indisputably true that from what is new to us we in general learn most,” he wrote in an essay on Joubert. In highlighting the lost and the marginal, Arnold anticipated the canon wars.

When it came time for my class presentation on what should have been in the canon, I opted for a novel, or rather a novel sequence: the “Stockholm Series” by Per Anders Fogelström, written in the nineteen-sixties. Comprising five books, the series takes place from 1860 to 1968 in Stockholm, and recounts the city’s transformation from poor and barely industrialized to a shining capital of the modern welfare state. Much of the action takes place on Stockholm’s southern island, Södermalm, which was once a working-class area but is now—in the pattern of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Berlin’s Kreuzberg—home to a high concentration of natural-wine bars. Fogelström’s novels provide a pre-history of that gentrification, as told through the perspectives of a few dozen Stockholmers who see their personal fortunes rise with those of the city.

The natural label for the Stockholm series would be “family saga,” but this is not quite right. Families in these books are rarely nuclear, or even biological. Food is so scarce and making rent so difficult that characters are perennially taking in lodgers who share beds and sleep in kitchens. Often these residents become domestic fixtures, companions more important than siblings who live across town. A stream of orphans and adoptions make parentage, too, a matter of circumstance. In one heartbreaking plot, a poor mother gives away her son, August, to the upper-class industrialists who employed her now deceased husband. The sacrifice relieves an economic burden and provides August with an education and, eventually, a small business empire.

If the series has a uniting theme, it is solidarity. Fogelström repeatedly asks what we owe to our families, our fellow-workers, and our nation. One powerful example concerns August’s sister, Emilie, the series’ moral heart and the closest thing it has to a protagonist. A small child in the first volume, Emilie lives until her late eighties, almost to the final pages. At the age of twelve, she begins folding boxes at a cosmetics factory, and after several decades of assiduous, menial work, she becomes a supervisor. Then the infamous General Strike of 1909 arrives, and more than three hundred thousand workers walk off the job. Should Emilie join? She still perceives herself as lower-class, and so does the reader, given the many family members her income must stretch to support. Yet she is technically in a management role. When she asks for advice, her brother-in-law responds, “It really depends on who you want to stand in solidarity with, with what you feel yourself to be.” In the end, she joins the strike and, upon returning to work, is demoted. Her identification remains with the class she came from, not the one she is moving toward.

In the final volume of the series, “City in the World,” Fogelström asks whether solidarity is possible not only with one’s own class or nation but with other nations as well. After a century of heavy emigration—mostly to America—postwar Sweden began to change from a port of departure to one of call. Both travel and settlement skyrocketed, bringing a wave of new residents to a long-homogenous Stockholm. Should the welfare state extend its embrace? Should Swedes? There are no easy answers to these questions, but Fogelström posed them in an early and perceptive fashion. The novels have sold millions of copies; reading the books in Stockholm last summer, I felt like every Swede I spoke to had also read them, or at least seen a film adaptation.

The Stockholm Series reminded me that one function of canons is to create solidarity. They claim that a culture, a nation, or a world has shared treasures, works that are worth remembering and protecting. Canon critique boils down to the claim that because those treasures have been ill-defined, the cohesion they generate will be, too. But what if we thought of these lists as invitations rather than threats—not as the hundred things you must know to be Swedish, but as a hundred new ways to see the country? What if we came to these lists looking not for ourselves but for precisely what we don’t already know? It’s not easy to have solidarity with the world. But learning other canons isn’t a bad way to start. ♦