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.