For most of my life, people have offered joyful shouts when I have presented either of my passports, or answered the question of where I come from. They have positive associations with my two home countries, Switzerland and Sweden, even if they confused them for each other.

I was born and raised in Switzerland. I have spent most of my adult life in Sweden. So, when I’m pressed to pick between them, I simply answer, “Choose whatever you want.”

That makes some sense, because my countries have some things in common. They are two of Europe’s—and the world’s—oldest and most advanced democracies. For a long time, they also were both neutral countries—but they weren’t neutral in the same way.

Both adhered to the core tenet of neutrality: for at least two centuries, neither engaged in wars. “This commonality sometimes made [the two countries] forget our big differences,” said Jacob Westberg, a professor of war studies and military history at the Swedish Defense University in Stockholm.

But the last few years have changed things for these countries, and for neutrality itself.

This Zeitenwende, or tipping point, began with Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022. That same year, Westberg published “How Small States Manage to Stay out of Wars: Explaining Sweden’s 200 Years of Peace,” in which he described the success story of both Sweden and Switzerland (along with other small countries) as neutral states.

But in 2023, he published a new book called Security Strategies: From Neutrality Policy to the Application for NATO Membership (currently only available in Swedish) that charts Sweden’s path to renouncing neutrality and joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an organization aligned with U.S. interests.

Sweden was prompted to make the epochal shift of stepping away from neutrality by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s threats against Europe. On March 7 of this year Sweden became a NATO member.

That means that Sweden is no longer a neutral country. (I repeat, for those who confuse the two, Sweden is no longer a neutral country. President Joe Biden mistakenly announced that “Switzerland” wanted to join NATO.)

So, my two countries are parting ways. Neutrality no more, says Stockholm, teaming up with Washington, while Bern clings to its successful formula—for now.

But this divergence isn’t a surprise because of the different visions of neutrality that Switzerland and Sweden have long held. This divergence stems from three big differences—those of history, practice, and geography.

First: History. Switzerland and Sweden both ended their warmongering at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, where “neutrality” for the first time entered international law. But the countries had distinct rationales for laying down their arms.

For centuries, Swedish monarchs had tried to defend their kingdom by engaging in foreign wars against their neighbors. They finally abandoned this strategy after losing Finland and being defeated by Russia in 1809.

Switzerland, meanwhile, was never an imperial power. After it lost its final battle abroad just over the border in northern Italy in 1515, the states of the old Swiss confederation spent centuries engaged in searching for balance domestically.

This internal scrutiny ended at that same Congress of Vienna. That was when Tsar Alexander I of Russia proposed that Switzerland, which at that time was a federation of 22 states, become a neutral country. Together they later funded modern “Switzerland” with a central government, an army, and its own currency. It’s been that way ever since.

Second: Practice. Over the centuries, Switzerland and Sweden developed very different forms of military neutrality. In the Swiss case, according to former president and foreign minister Ignazio Cassis, neutrality was based on the Hague Principles, which include “no participation in wars; international cooperation but no membership in any military alliance; no provision of troops or weapons to warring parties and no granting of transition rights.”

This comprehensive approach to neutrality kept Switzerland not only out of military alliances but also outside international organizations. Switzerland only joined the United Nations in 2002, and only by referendum. Switzerland is still not a member of the European Union.

Where the Swiss approach is sometimes called “integral,” Sweden’s version of neutrality involves what’s termed the “differential approach.” Sweden might foreswear wars, but it had a very active foreign policy. Sweden was a founding member of the United Nations in 1946 and joined the European Union in 1994, after a vote of the people.

Third: Geography. Look at any map, and you’ll see few reasons to confuse my two home countries.

Switzerland occupies a tiny landlocked area of approximately 41,000 square kilometers in the heart of continental Europe. This is bigger than Maryland but smaller than West Virginia. It is encircled by friendly democracies, of which all but one—the micro-state of Liechtenstein—belongs to the European Union.

Sweden has more territory to defend, and less friendly neighbors—specifically, Russia. Located in the far north of Europe, the country expands over an area of more than 450,000 square kilometers, making it slightly larger than California. It shares a maritime border, the Baltic Sea, with Russia, which maintains large military bases in Baltiysk (in the exclave of Kaliningrad) and outside St. Petersburg. In addition, the main Swedish island of Gotland is surrounded by international waters that are used by Russian military vehicles.

All these factors have given the two countries different tipping points on neutrality.

After Russia’s full-scale attack against its neighbor Ukraine on February 22, 2022, then-Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson initially rejected calls for a change to its neutral position.

“If Sweden were to choose to send in an application to join NATO in the current situation, it would further destabilize this area of Europe and increase tensions,” she told me and other reporters on March 8, 2022.

But just a few weeks later, her declaration was replaced by the announcement—in a historic press briefing held together with then-Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin—that both Nordic countries would apply for full NATO membership at the same time.

(That the formerly neutral Finland was accepted much earlier to NATO than Sweden is a story for another time, also based on history, practice, and geography).

As Sweden applied to NATO, and as Switzerland continued on its neutrality track, I started feeling new tension between my countries. On television, Swedish commentator Edward af Sillén expressed profound annoyance at the Swiss decision to make the anti-war song “Watergun” its official 2023 entry to the Eurovision Song Contest.  Then in late 2023, the Swedish tourist board started a global campaign intended to make the world understand that Sweden is not Switzerland.  Of course, with Sweden having joined NATO in March, any confusion about which of my two home countries is which should be over. At least for the time being.

The post Why Sweden Stopped Pretending to Be Switzerland appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Growing up, few things loomed quite as large as a trip to the buffet. I say the buffet because the chafing dishes all blur together—part and parcel of one great, endless table; a physical manifestation of the infinite scroll before the infinite scroll had even been invented. To call it a meal would feel disingenuous; nothing short of “trip” captured the feeling of the experience, which stretched time and space and stomachs.

I’ve been thinking about buffets lately because, if you haven’t heard, they are back. The pandemic is far from over, but the health restrictions that turned restaurants and grocery stores away from self-serve buffets and salad bars have been lifted. And rather than the death for buffets that so many predicted in 2020 and 2021, the all-you-can-eat model has returned—modified somewhat, revamped with social distancing measures, but present all the same.

What is it about the buffet that keeps us coming back for seconds (and thirds, and fourths)?

The modern American buffet owes a debt to the smorgasbord, Scandinavia’s bread-and-butter table. The spread, which emerged in the 16th century, has its roots in the more formal brännvinsbord tradition, a spirits table that was served at banquets. Scandinavian immigrants brought the “smorgy” tradition with them to the U.S. in the late 1800s (the term smorgasbord reportedly first appearing in American print in 1893), where it merged with other fledgling forms of the buffet here. Historian Jan Whitaker has mapped the concept’s early history, from the “supper clubs” of the colonial era to the “free lunches” of the 1800s—spreads of food put out by drinking taverns to boost sales of accompanying alcohol. These became “buffets or cafés,” where, for a nominal fee, businessmen could secure prepared food without hassle.

Temperance movement teetotalers tried to scuttle these early buffets, but the model re-emerged, adapting to the times. During the Great Depression, for instance, the all-you-can-eat format was used as a gimmick to get people back in restaurants. The hope was that by creating a set price for an unlimited quantity of inexpensive food, people would be more incentivized to dine out. Even etiquette maven Emily Post helped promote this style of dining, with a calculated 1933 endorsement of the newly invented buffet server, which housed boiling water in a dish’s base to ensure that food stayed hot.

But the buffet we know today wouldn’t be what it was without Las Vegas. As the story goes, El Rancho Vegas, the first casino resort on what would become the Vegas Strip, was trying to figure out how to keep visitors from leaving after the evening headliner finished their set. The answer was the Chuck Wagon (later renamed Buckaroo) buffet, which debuted in 1946 and charged $1 for “every possible variety of hot and cold entrées to appease the howling coyote in your innards.” It was a hit. Other casinos scrambled to match the midnight all-you-can-eat supper—and by the 1950s, the Vegas buffet concept wasn’t just for late-night patrons with the Dunes and the Last Frontier resorts introducing morning “hunt breakfasts,” which took the name of a brunch forerunner, often served with champagne, popular among the U.K. elite.

This rise in buffet culture ballooned beyond Vegas, in chains like Sizzler and among mom and pop Chinese restaurants (the first Chinese buffet dates at least as far back as an advert for Chang’s Restaurant posted in the 1949 Los Angeles Evening Citizen News). My dad, for one, swears by Shakey’s bunch of lunch buffet. He describes the wonderment he felt sitting down for the first time in the 1970s to unlimited quantities of pizza, garlic bread, chicken. To him, the appeal wasn’t just about the value—though the value, he emphasizes, was incredible—nor was it the quality (which was good!). It was about the freedom—almost anyone could afford to sit down in Shakey’s and eat like a king.

It was this sense of awe that he passed down to me as a kid in the ‘90s, just as buffet culture in the U.S. arguably hit its peak. Searching my memories of this moment (to date it, this is the time when the term “Super Buffet” hit the collective American vocabulary), they almost feel as if they’re pulled out of that scene in Mad Men where the Draper family picnics in the park and just leaves all of their containers behind them on the grass on the way out. Just as littering wasn’t recognized as a global problem before the 1970s, I never questioned at the time the post-Cold War exuberance and hyper-consumption that Peak Buffet exemplified. I just remember the thrill of going back for plate after plate of food. This was the cheap abundance the era seemingly promised.

But like so much of that decade, the price tag was there, even if I wasn’t willing to see it yet. The food waste the buffet engenders can be nothing short of shameful—one 2017 report found that just over half of food put out in hotel breakfast buffets is actually consumed. And then there are the health concerns (one food safety trade publication charmingly dubbed it the “all-you-can-eat illness”), which had curtailed the buffet’s ubiquity even before COVID hit.

But the buffet can evolve. Take the position of Food Unfolded, a European Union-funded platform for reconsidering the future of food. It proposes we can rethink the buffet coming out of COVID in a way that makes a path for them to serve sustainable and fairly produced food and minimize waste and germs.

The potential to recreate itself in better ways, after all, is in the buffet’s very DNA. Its earliest iteration, feasting, is a tradition that dates back centuries, in foodways around the world. Cultures have long used such all-you-can-eat affairs to promote feelings of fraternity, to repurpose leftovers, and even as a source of culinary innovation, as the need to differentiate dishes demands new ways of mixing ingredients.

I admit it: I miss the buffet. With COVID cases back on the rise, I won’t be returning to one anytime soon. But I look forward to the day I’ll be back to fill my plate once again. Because a truth about the buffet is that it keeps you wanting more.

It makes me think back to my family’s favorite buffet story, which takes place, fittingly, just a few miles off the Las Vegas Strip at Sam’s Town’s now-shuttered “Great Buffet.” As we were nearing the end of the night, a family friend opened her purse, placed a napkin over its contents, and scooped a serving of trifle—a dessert with thin layers of cake soaked in sherry or wine, fruit, and cream—straight inside. I remember the jiggle as it settled before she carefully closed the bag around it.

When she caught us, seasoned buffet veterans, staring, she looked at the purse, looked again at us, and said, “In case I get hungry later.”

The post The Buffet Is Dead. Long Live the Buffet! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m both a Swedish and an American citizen, and I know there is much America can learn from Sweden. It’s not a socialist country, but it does offer its residents universal healthcare, free university, paid parental leave, subsidized childcare, and more. In many ways, Sweden is a model of sustainability, egalitarianism, and environmentalism. Much of this has to do with its conception of lagom.

Lagom represents a way of life for many Swedes, a deep sense that there is something inherently wrong with excess; an ingrained worldview that balance and equilibrium are not only desirable, but that they are the keys to sustainability and living in harmony with nature.

It’s hard for Americans to understand—Americans who are so focused on constant motion, continual growth, and extreme consumerism. We always seem to want “more” of everything.

I’m a local elected official in Beverly Hills, and I see the American lack of lagom in the urban supremacism in the United States—an axis of developers, corporations, speculators, and politicians, which demands constant growth and metastasis in megalopolises like Los Angeles. Invoking purported solutions to deal with everything from homelessness, reduced productivity, climate change, housing unaffordability, and stagnant economic growth to racial equity, urban supremacists call for forced density, the elimination of single-family neighborhoods, centralized Sacramento-driven urban planning, gutting CEQA and the further commodification of housing. In the process, they pursue a new Manifest Destiny, in which a limited number of “winner” megalopolises are destined to redeem the U.S. by concentrating and controlling its economy, its social, educational, and cultural institutions, and its spectrum of lifestyle choices. These urbanists say they are progressive, or environmentalists—but they are so in a very American, and very different, way than the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who admonishes us, “We are in the beginning of mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

“Inga träd växer till himlen” is a Swedish proverb; its literal translation is “No trees grow to the sky.” The proverb suggests that there are natural and obvious limits to growth. It also communicates the sense that arrogance, too, has limits. Americans should take note.

Among the consequences of Sweden’s embrace of lagom are urban planning policies which promote economic balance and geographic equity. Policies like glesbygdspolitik (“rural area policy”) and regionalutvecklingspolitik (“regional development policy”) consciously aim to create livable, viable, and thriving communities throughout the country—rather than depopulating rural areas and smaller towns and cities. Not everyone in Sweden should live in Stockholm, Gothenburg, or Malmö. Not everyone in Sweden wants to. Not everyone in Sweden has to.

“Hela landet ska leva!” is another great phrase. It means, “The whole country should live!” as well as “The whole country should thrive!” and is so uncontroversial in Sweden that it has the broad support of all the major political parties, from the hard left to the hard right to the Green Party as well. Governmental policies in Sweden supporting decentralization, including locating governmental agencies in smaller cities, are all part of ensuring that there are opportunities throughout the country, not just in the larger cities.

Recognizing the individuality and strength of diverse communities, rather than boiling everything down to economics or looking for ways to maximize productivity and profits, is the hallmark and essence of urban humanism. While the term itself is not Swedish, I use it to describe an idealized version of Swedish urban philosophy, which also encompasses the Swedish notion of folkhemmet, or “the people’s home,” in which communities are like a version of a large family. Urban humanism respects the individual, while at the same time embracing collective responsibility, particularly towards the most vulnerable. Urban humanism is community-based; urban humanism is inclusive; urban humanism is lagom.

And while Sweden itself seems to enjoy a fairly good reputation in the U.S., an antilagom, anti-community, anti-communitarian bent seems to infuse our mainstream media. Take the New York Times, which allows a host of op-ed writers and its housing reporter to extol growing megalopolises, and specifically the Bay Area, as beacons of opportunity—decrying the “rising cost of being near it” as if there were no alternative. Or listen to those in the YIMBY, or Yes in My Backyard movement, who dream of eternal growth that might take the Bay Area from seven million to more than 40 million residents, or four times the population of Sweden. One proponent writes:

The goal is to live in one of the most job rich, opportunity rich, high productivity areas in the world. We don’t care if it’s called ‘San Francisco’ or if it’s filled with 2 story bungalows built in the 1950s. In fact, we’d prefer it not be filled with 2 story bungalows, because if instead it was filled with 5 story apartment buildings, more of us could live here and have jobs here, and have opportunities here that we don’t have access to in the towns we were born in.

If [S]ilicon [V]alley moved to Detroit, we would happily move there. It’s not the name, it’s the jobs.

Understanding, as Thunberg has suggested, that models of eternal economic growth are not sustainable, even San Francisco, the second-densest urban area in the U.S., recognized that there should be limits to commercial growth. And so, in 2019, its voters passed Proposition E, which in theory limited the development of further office space until the city’s affordable housing goals had been met. California state senator Scott Wiener, who advocates for anti-lagom growth policies, was none too pleased by this. On Feb. 10, 2019, months before the election, he tweeted:

There’s a new argument in Silicon Valley & San Francisco (eg Prop E) that the solution to our housing shortage isn’t to build more homes but rather to kill the economy by pushing away jobs & banning new office space.

By this logic, being willing to limit commercial growth is to “kill the economy.”

How very un-Swedish.

It would be better to step back and re-examine American logic. Many of the problems that America’s urbanists want to “solve” with exponential growth are a direct result of this phenomenon of “concentration of opportunity,” or overconcentration of people and businesses in certain areas. This account of urbanism entails a kind of feeding frenzy of development, in which regions try to address problems created by growth with even more growth.

However, when overconcentration leads to problems, it makes sense to start thinking about de-concentration. That’s the essence of lagom. In other words, we should seek economic balance and geographic equity through sharing opportunity with other cities and regions throughout the state and country. I have had the experience of suggesting to YIMBY urbanists and Sacramento politicians that we adopt policies to steer economic development and jobs to struggling small and mid-sized cities in California—“What about Bakersfield? What about Fresno, Stockton, Modesto, San Bernardino, and Visalia?”—and receiving a shrug in response: “Nobody wants to live there.”

But is that really so? The cities that American urbanists dismiss are in some cases larger than Malmö, one of Sweden’s key commercial centers. Why do Big City snobs have difficulty comprehending that many people might be perfectly happy living in them and that place-making is what much of urbanism is all about?

Far from giving these cities and regions up for dead, depopulating them and rural America so that everyone is forced to move to metropolises, we should be looking to strengthen smaller cities’ abilities to provide vibrant, diverse, welcoming, and inclusive communities for their existing residents and for those who might seek a home there if opportunities were available.

Many Americans, I believe, would not only support Swedish-style policies to deconcentrate opportunity but also would welcome the added lifestyle choices that such policies would provide them: from villages, to small towns, to village- and small town-atmospheres within larger cities and regions. The COVID-19 pandemic might change the dynamic of where and how people want to live, as well as some people’s tolerance levels for the rat race.

Sweden, of course, opted for an open and less restrictive approach to COVID-19 which probably could not have been effective in many other countries with any degree of success. And because of the Swedish sense of balance and its pre-COVID philosophy of urban lagom, the post-COVID world in Sweden might not change so significantly. People are likely to stay in the communities where they are, picking up where they left off.

It’s very different in America, where many people left big, dense cities this past year. Will they ever come back? Social, sociological, and psychological effects of the pandemic may change our urban planning goals. It should be noted that the demand for homes in single-family neighborhoods (which urban supremacists want to outlaw) has increased significantly in the aftermath of the pandemic. Escaping urban density may also be an addition incentive for people to experience the joys of a more human-scale, small-town America, if we would only let them.

And, as another silver-lining from the pandemic, we now have more tools and proof-of-concept to let them. Remote work is a potential paradigm-shifter, and not just for corporations. Much of the business of the City of Beverly Hills, for example, including council and commission meetings, all continue to take place remotely. And if significantly more people can work remotely, then the typical American urbanist arguments about carbon emissions and global warming no longer justify increased density. Remote work can level the playing field for cities, areas, and regions that, for whatever reasons, have not been graced by the feudal largesse of Big Tech and other corporate oligarchies.

Of course, to take advantage of being able to work remotely, connectivity is extremely important. This is something Sweden already recognized, pre-COVID. The country is implementing a plan to provide one gigabit broadband to 98 percent of the country’s population by 2025. Similarly, the U.S. should focus its infrastructure spending on connecting the entire country through high-speed internet, and not just on building out urban public transportation networks with diminishing return. (Ridership sometimes decreases despite greater investments.)

This may seem like common sense, but in the U.S., it’s not. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, a champion of the megalopolis, writes:
Joblessness has become endemic in parts of the American heartland, but how many jobless people can afford to leave Youngstown, Ohio, where the median home price in 2019 was about $103,000 to go to San Jose, Calif., where the median price was $1.265 million?

When you dismiss Youngstown, Yakima, and York, you are mocking the notion of a lagom and more egalitarian society, and questioning the enduring idea of the civic cohesion and virtues of folkhemmet. Youngstown’s current population is around 65,000, down from a peak of some 167,000 in the ’60s. But the solution to Youngstown’s challenges is not to encourage the city’s population to move to the Bay Area. Instead of devising schemes about how to grow the Bay Area, we should focus on investing in economic opportunity for people in Youngstown, now rebranded as the “City of You” as part of its revitalization efforts.

True urbanism—vibrant, inclusive and humanitarian urbanism—understands that cities—of all sizes, stripes, colors and density levels—are places where we come together to form communities. They offer us a shared sense of place, a shared sense of belonging, and, perhaps most importantly, a shared sense of home.

Because of the speed of communication, cities today have the ability to be more dynamic than at any point in history. Cities that grew for purely commercial reasons based on geography—they were on a river, or near oil fields or coal mines, or near fertile farmlands or stone quarries or whatever—are now free to develop identities unfettered by physical (and often, consequently, economic) necessity. They can reclaim their rightful places within the fabric of a diverse nation in the real and virtual world, and they can take advantage of their physical surroundings without necessarily having to exploit them. Some people prefer the mountains, some the coast, some the prairie, and some the desert. Some people love the bustle of ultra-dense cityscapes like Manhattan, and others prefer more human-scale settings all the way down to isolated villages. All should be able to thrive in the kind of hometown they love.

As a Swede, I’m partial to Sweden. Yes, it is far from perfect: It faces challenges to its ideals, its welcoming policies towards migrants, and its robust support for its citizens, in part from the onslaught of globalization and American consumerist culture. But even in somewhat weakened form, the ideals of folkhemmet and lagom live. In many ways, Sweden still represents the contrast between corporatism and communitarianism, between spite and solidarity, between urban supremacism and urban humanism.

We would do well to learn from Sweden. We would do well to create our own folkhem in America and to learn to live the values of lagom. We would do well to help the entire country become a community of vibrant, dynamic, diverse, inclusive, and thriving communities.

Hela landet ska leva!

The post The Swedish Concept of ‘Lagom’ Could Tame America’s Urban Supremacism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But what exactly is feminist foreign policy, and how does it work? That’s a question New York Times reporter Alisha Haridasani Gupta found herself pausing on when she wrote about feminist foreign policy last summer—and one she posed to panelists at last night’s Zócalo/Scripps College event, “What Does a Feminist Foreign Policy Look Like?”

“The more we talk about this, and the more we open up the discussion, the more people will understand what it means,” said Haridasani Gupta, who served as moderator for the online discussion, and writes the Times’ gender newsletter, “In Her Words.”

The best way to start, said Melanne Verveer, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues and the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, is by considering what foreign policy does: “It advances the interest of our country, of our citizens; it advances democracy, human rights, international understanding; it’s about preventing conflicts and it’s about creating good relations with other nations.”

Recognizing that women make up half the world’s population, Verveer continued, feminist foreign policy puts “a gender lens or a gender perspective” on everything the State Department deals with, from economics to human rights issues—a lens that is necessary for meaningful diplomacy. “Women experience most circumstances differently and we have to factor in those differences if we’re going to have more effective foreign policy,” she said.

For Scripps College political economist Nancy Neiman, who studies global markets, her definition is less tied to traditional foreign policy goals. “I would move focus away from the interests of the nation, which is historically what foreign policy is about,” said Neiman, “and think about transnational issues—that the vulnerability of women in global markets is really a transnational issue, and it’s an intersectional issue; it’s about race, class and gender. I think those are the things that have to stay on the table, and the hope would be that more and more countries are interested in actually addressing these important issues.”

Diana Alarcón González, chief advisor and foreign affairs coordinator for Mexico City, meanwhile, considered it from the perspective of her own constituency of 9.2 million people, of which 52.8 percent are women. “Advocating for equal rights and defining our public policies around the issues of rights means making sure that more than 50 percent of people in our city have equal access to rights,” she said.

New America Foundation fellow Elmira Bayrasli spoke last—and welcomed the differing definitions that came before hers. “It isn’t just one thing,” she agreed.

Bayrasli, who is also co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted, an initiative that aims to increase the number of female voices in foreign policy, said she frames feminist foreign policy around “stability and progress.” While she’s met many people in Washington who have dismissed it “as a very kind of niche, a very cute little side issue that feminists like myself like to embrace,” she argued that feminist foreign policy speaks to the challenges of the world today, and how countries have to think beyond their own borders. “Now there are numerous global challenges that really require us to look at the outcomes, which are stability and progress, and fundamentally to me feminist foreign policy is about getting to that,” she said.

Looking at such outcomes, Haridasani Gupta asked the panelists for examples that show how a feminist lens can lead to progressive change on the world stage.

Verveer cited the role of women in the negotiations leading to Colombia’s peace agreement in 2016 after 50 years of civil war. “The women had put out proposal after proposal. Finally [they] gathered, in exasperation, in a summit, and came up with a bunch of recommendations at a time where there was a real serious effort to finally do this,” she said. Because of this, the issues that affected women throughout the conflict were considered, and there were recommendations in place in the peace agreement to address them. “For the first time ever,” Verveer added, “there was a gender subcommission that was part and parcel of the peace talks.”

On the flip side, the North American Free Trade Agreement offers a sobering example of what happens when feminist foreign policy isn’t considered, said Neiman, the professor of politics. “The story of Juárez is just a tragedy,” she said, referring to how the expansion of the maquila industry due to the 1994 trade pact led to a wave of migrants, particularly “young, Indigenous women, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable” to work in the expanding assembly plants in Juárez, where the homicide rate for women would increase by 600 percent between NAFTA’s passage and 2001. “We end up with a large number of disappeared and murdered women that is interconnected with the devaluation of young women’s lives,” said Neiman. All of this, she said, came out of a foreign trade policy that didn’t keep women’s interests in mind.

Audience members from the YouTube chatroom also contributed to the conversation. One asked what holds the U.S. State Department back from joining the countries that have already formally announced feminist foreign policies: “Is it just fear of the word?”

“Certainly, the word has something to do with it,” Verveer answered. Feminism has “been over time a loaded word in the United States, and detractors have tried to put all kinds of interpretations on it. But I don’t want to say we don’t have a feminist foreign policy. I think that’s a misapprehension.”

The U.S. may not be up there with Sweden, which first coined the term, she said, but it has made “vast efforts” to integrate issues that impact women into its foreign policy since the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women, which took place in Beijing in 1995.

In Canada, Haridasani Gupta noted, every budget now goes through gender analysis. Did the panelists have any concrete examples of ways governments can commit to feminist foreign policy?

In Mexico City, González offered, officials are ensuring women are at the policy table. “The chief of government, our mayor, just returned a proposal” from a technical committee, she said, because the group had only “two women [among] ten men at the table, and for her, it was not acceptable.”

There is much more feminist foreign policy can do for the world, the panelists agreed.

“Women always have to prove something is going to work when meanwhile there’s abundant evidence of things that aren’t working” in today’s world, Bayrasli said: democracy declining, strongmen on the rise, tensions simmering, and a pandemic killing millions. “Clearly there needs to be a reassessment to how we’re approaching foreign policy now.”

Feminist foreign policy could be a possible solution to the challenges of today, because, she said, it offers “a modern lens to the modern world.”

The post Feminist Foreign Policy Can Offer a ‘Modern Lens to a Modern World’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Sound like a lot? It’s one small part of Sweden’s extensive “Vision Zero” project, an initiative begun in the late 1990s to eliminate all deaths and serious injuries from traffic accidents. Coordinated across multiple government agencies, Vision Zero ambitiously prioritizes the safety of residents from preventable tragedies. And while it’s paying off—the clear trend is decreasing deaths and injuries—we’re not at zero yet. In 2009, 358 people died in traffic accidents in Sweden; in 2019, that number was 221. (By comparison, the U.S. states Georgia and North Carolina, which—like Sweden—have a population of approximately 10 million, had more than 1,500 and 1,400 traffic deaths, respectively, in 2018.)

As an American immigrant in Sweden, I find this focus on safety admirable, even utopic. Similar examples of Swedish regulatory cultures around safety abound. Every new private home is required to have a locked medicine cabinet. Employers pay for protective glasses for workers suffering from too much screentime. Alcohol is highly taxed and only available at the federal store known in Swedish as “the System.” And hitting closer to my own crunchy, homesick-for-Whole-Foods-Market tastes: Only whole flax seeds are sold in Sweden (even though our bodies can’t take in their beneficial nutrients that way). Alas! The crushed ones carry a tiny risk of cyanide poisoning.

In Swedish society, the precautionary principle reigns: When we lack evidence for the safety of a given issue, we proceed with caution to protect the public from harm. This bedrock principle informs all of the safety regulations above, and more—especially when it comes to health care. Sometimes infuriatingly so, doctors here are cautious in prescribing everything from hydrocortisone to antibiotics, and unless there is clear evidence a treatment will not cause you harm, you will have a hard time finding a Swedish doctor who will prescribe it.

Soon after our family moved here for work in 2015, I fell in love with the sensible, progressive attitude of most Swedish governmental policies, gladly shedding my distrust of institutions. A chronic worrier about immigration matters (among other paperwork stressors), I adopted the comforting, if naïve, mantra: “If it’s wrong, Sweden will find a way to make it right.”

All of which is why, when the novel coronavirus began to break into the news cycle early in 2020, I watched the Swedish response with curiosity. Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room on February 28, a small, professionally printed (and impeccably designed) cardboard table tent informed me that the overall risk level for an outbreak in Sweden was “relatively low.” I felt soothed by this news. Sweden was taking care of it. The authorities had said so. And they had time to make table tents!

Just 12 days later, the first person died of COVID-19 in Sweden. The infection rate, here as elsewhere, climbed steeply. At the end of March, one month after the table tent, Sweden reported 4,834 people had documented cases of COVID-19; by the close of April, that number had jumped to 21,602 cases. (It’s worth noting that Sweden did not offer widespread testing until late June; in the spring, only those admitted to the hospital were offered COVID-19 tests, so these numbers are likely an undercount.) In the fall, following six weeks of population dispersal into the Swedish countryside, case numbers dropped significantly. Starting in September, about two weeks after school resumed, cases appear to be climbing again—albeit slowly, while intensive care beds occupancy and deaths are way down compared with the spring.

Sweden’s pandemic approach has garnered outsized attention in the English-speaking press considering its relatively small population of 10 million. I watched with incredulity as tiny Social Democrat-ruled Sweden was celebrated at home by Trump supporters who urged, “Be like Sweden!” Meanwhile, on the left, our high death rate became a cautionary tale for the dangers of “herd immunity.” When a community achieves herd immunity through prior infection or vaccination, vulnerable individuals (even the unvaccinated) gain protection because the disease can’t find new hosts and thus can’t spread as easily. Explained in this way, herd immunity sounds quite Swedish: Collectively, we can protect the members of our “herd” unable to protect themselves. (Yet interestingly, Sweden does not mandate vaccinations for newborns, relying on parents to make that decision for their children. Compliance is reliably around 97 percent.)

Officially, Sweden never adopted a herd immunity strategy, although several of its policies seem to have it in mind, at least as a side effect. Sweden in fact chose a mitigation strategy: The Public Health Agency (FHM) aimed not to stop the virus but to control its spread so that the health care system, especially intensive care beds, would not be overwhelmed. In the beginning, this mitigation strategy—aka “flatten the curve”—was the goal of many nations, but as we learned more about the dangers of surviving COVID-19 (including sustained damage to the heart, lungs, and kidneys), and more about its transmission, many nations similar to Sweden (such as its neighbors, Denmark, Norway, and Finland) shifted course to a “crush the curve” strategy of “test, trace, and isolate.” FHM, however, persisted in emphasizing mitigation measures (wash your hands, keep your distance, stay home if you’re sick), avoiding panic, and protecting our most vulnerable, those who are over 70 years old and/or those with risk factors that exacerbate COVID-19.

But at the time I write this, Sweden has one of the highest death tolls per capita in the world: 57.3 deaths per 100,000 residents, just under the United States’ 57.39. By comparison, in Italy, ground zero for the European pandemic, that number is 58.77; in Norway, a more comparable nation to Sweden in terms of demography, that number is 4.97. Perhaps more alarming is Sweden’s high case fatality rate (6.9 percent), more than double that of the United States. Some of the most vulnerable in Sweden—those in nursing homes—were not protected under the mitigation strategy. In fact, of the 5,731 people killed by COVID-19 in Sweden, 5,137 were older than 70, and 2,855 of those deaths were people over age 85.

Reports have emerged in Swedish media of family members being informed their loved ones were being placed in palliative end-of-life care instead of being treated for COVID-19 in the hospital. According to the National Board of Health and Welfare, a mere 17 percent of Swedish elders in care homes were provided hospitalization, and public documents show that instead of attempting to fight the virus, the National Board of Health and Welfare advised health care workers to treat these patients with anti-anxiety medications as well as morphine and other opioids. As I watched this failure of compassion and infection containment in real time, I became saddened. Then enraged, then disillusioned by my adopted country, or my idea of it. I asked Swedish friends, “Would your reaction to these deaths be different if it were children who suffered disproportionately instead of elders?”

Their silence was informative. And the policies around education followed suit: Schools remained open for the under-16s throughout the pandemic. FHM has also advised parents to send children to school even if someone in the household has a confirmed case of COVID-19, so long as they are symptom-free. At first, FHM reasoned, and most Swedish media agreed, that if the children stayed home, we’d suffer from lack of personnel in essential services, particularly in health care. (Never mind the extensive child-care system in place for school breaks designed just to meet this purpose). But recently, leaked emails between state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell and other high-level public health advisors belie this public position. On March 14, Tegnell wrote, “One point in favor of keeping the schools open is to reach herd immunity faster.”

Yet these leaked emails, and the assumptions they make about the more vulnerable relatives and school staff to whom children could transmit the virus, barely made a splash with the stoic Swedish public.

It may be that elementary school-aged children face a relatively low risk of serious health consequences from COVID-19. But since we don’t know the long-term effects the virus has on young people, and we also don’t know their role in spreading the disease to the adults in their lives, shouldn’t the precautionary principle apply?

Apparently not: Parents who in good conscience wished to protect their children or themselves by educating them at home were not only denied that opportunity, but they were also in some cases threatened with reports to social services for neglect for violating the skolplikt requirement. Literally the “duty to school,” skolplikt prohibits homeschooling and mandates education of all school-aged children. Like much Swedish public policy, it’s meant to provide a common standard for education and health, regardless of socioeconomic status. Skolplikt is there for the greater good of children, and thus, for the whole of Swedish society.

But during the pandemic, exactly whose greater good is Sweden considering?

COVID-19 is serving as a magnifying glass of our societies’ vulnerabilities. And what is magnified in Sweden is that this question of the greater good requires constant focus, revision, and holistic framing in the face of new challenges.

In the face of a deadly virus with unknown long-term consequences, why didn’t caution reign here? Where was and is the Swedish regulatory state in this question of safety? (For this virus is surely more deadly than crushed flaxseeds, and even more deadly than traffic accidents.) In a country where the good of the many often supersedes the rights of the few, why are Swedes content with a policy that instead puts so many burdens on individuals, particularly the most vulnerable? And, most disturbingly, why do so many accept, without question, the government’s policy to allow an unknown virus to spread freely through our shared society?

Even after five years in Sweden, I can only begin to speculate on answers to these questions. I know I’m not alone: Thousands of Swedes are members of secret Facebook groups advocating for changes to the Swedish strategy, and more than 7,000 have signed a Change.org petition asking the World Health Organization to intervene in Sweden’s relaxed policies.

My own love affair with this nation has finally encountered its first real conflict. As Sweden’s National Day approached in June, I looked for speeches acknowledging the thousands of lives lost or for Swedish flags at half-mast. Finding none of these, I grieved privately for the souls lost. I grieved for the soul of a nation lost. I grieved for the Sweden, or the idea of Sweden, that I had proudly embraced: of a nation that cares, equally, for all.

The post A Letter From Sweden, Which Deems Flax Seeds More Dangerous Than the Pandemic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Located on a remote island in the North Atlantic, the village of just 100 people had closed its schools the week before; restaurants and hotels never reopened after the new year holiday season. And now my last glimmer of hope for a hot coffee this morning—the “Bakeriet på Å”—had closed.

As the Northern European Correspondent for the Swiss Broadcasting Company, I must rove around a reporting area that extends from the far north of Greenland to the very south of Lithuania. Å, which is as tiny as its name, sits close to the geographic center of my beat. This is a friendly and open part of the world, where you cross borders without thinking about them. People here in the Arctic Circle exhibit unusually closeness and cohesion, and ever since my visit to the far north as a teenager in the 1980s, my trips to the lands and seas near the North Pole have always felt like homecomings.

But this time, I reach Å on the same morning that the central government announces an immediate lockdown of Norway to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It is a startling announcement that sends me scrambling to come to terms with what it means for an open region to shut down—and to find a way home before it’s too late.

In Å, the snow is falling heavily, and I don’t catch a glimpse of anyone stirring through the contracted curtains that cover the windows of Å’s picturesque and colorful houses. My requests to interview some local fishermen go unanswered. I can’t blame them. Overnight the government in the capital Oslo—more than 1300 kilometers southward—has declared all foreign visitors to be undesirable persons. I am officially a threat to public health.

I wanted to talk with fishermen because the economic backbone of the Lofoten archipelago is fishing. In spite of the islands’ position—at the same latitude as Northern Alaska—temperatures seldom go below zero Celsius (32 F). The reason for this has a name: the Gulf Stream. Early in the year, this relatively warm Atlantic current drives gigantic schools of fish into the Bay between the Lofoten chain of 80 islands and the mainland of northwestern Norway. For the fishermen of Å and dozens of other villages and towns in the archipelago, it is possible to catch enough cod and pollock in these few months to secure a full year’s income. It is why the islanders call the fishery “our treasure chest in the sea.”

Unable to talk with the fishermen, I make my way through thick snow towards a small factory, where I might find someone to interview. But all the doors I try remain closed. On the car radio, I hear the sober voice of a Norwegian radio announcer read a long list of measures decided by the national government: “By Monday morning at 8 a.m. all our national borders will be closed,” the announcer says, adding that after it will be “guarded by the military.”

Remi Solberg, the mayor of the outer Lofoten archipelago, whom I had met for an interview just a few hours before the shutdown, punctuated the national regulation with a mayoral decree: “All visitors from outside the Lofoten islands are immediately banned and must be quarantined for 14 days.”

That left me just 36 hours to escape, or face two weeks of quarantine. And escape would require reaching the mountainous border station between Norway and Sweden, my country of residence.

In normal times, it’s easy to leave the archipelago. Here is where the iconic E10—the European highway connecting the Baltic Sea in Luleå (Sweden) with the Atlantic Ocean in Norway—ends dramatically on a cliff falling into the sea. Seventy years of European peace have made borders an afterthought as we freely traveled to the most remote parts of the continent. But this time, the odds are against me.

Going through a checklist of possible transportation options, I quickly realize that I need to be both innovative and lucky. Harsh winter storms have closed the highway and many of the very narrow roads across the islands. There are no trains that will go where I need. And the few propeller plane connections onto the mainland were either grounded because of the storm, or fully booked weeks ago.

Most of the time, crowds are the concern—National Geographic has ranked the Lofoten among the world’s most beautiful islands, and since 2010, a crush of tourists has confounded residents. “Last year we got 1 million visitors, that’s too much for our pristine archipelago,” said Mayor Solberg.

Still, while overtourism is an issue for the Lofoten, the bigger threat, for decades, has involved oil. Norwegians depend on royalties they received for their country’s oil production, and there have been longstanding plans to extend oil production fields into the far north. Young ecologists and senior fishermen have fought bitterly, and sometimes together, against such a move, which could threaten both the natural beauty and the lucrative fishing business.

Not long before I arrived, the local nature lovers and fishermen had triumphed when the conservative government in Oslo agreed to table its search for oil outside Lofoten.

This decision was touted as preserving a fishing tradition that goes back at least 6,000 years. And in the era of the COVID pandemic, that experience suddenly paid dividends. A few years ago, when the virus spoken about locally was the one savaging the local salmon, the fishing industry set up a comprehensive infrastructure to test fish for viruses. Now, that infrastructure is serving local hospitals where a large number of humans are now being tested for the coronavirus.

I wanted to learn more about what the remote islands can teach us in this strange time, but I knew I needed to get home. A local Norwegian journalist generously agrees to drive me across several of the Lofoten Islands, connected by bridges and tunnels, to the small harbor city of Stamsund. There, the last ferry boat is supposed to depart for Tromsø, on the mainland, in the evening.

In Stamsund, I find myself the last man around, sitting totally alone in the cozy lobby of the Live Lofoten Hotel, which the lockdown has emptied of all visitors. And I am also the only traveler to board the MS Polarlys on its 18-hour crossing to Tromsø. It is a truly gloomy feeling to be on one of the last overnight rides. The ferry company Hurtigruten was founded in 1893, and it normally connects more than 30 Norwegian ports. Now, because of the virus, only two boats are running. And I am on the final one.

Tromsø, northern Norway’s biggest city with more than 70,000 inhabitants, is sometimes called the “Paris of the North” because of the great density of bars, restaurants, and coffee shops. But now, when I arrive there is nobody to be seen.

I make my way through empty streets to the bus station, where one of the last long-distance buses to the Norwegian town of Narvik is about to depart. The bus driver does not even bother to sell tickets—he does not want to risk interacting with passengers. I board and we leave Tromsø according to schedule for a four-hour trip, during which we see—and overtake—many military vehicles on their way to various border posts. Older residents of this part of Norway still tell stories about a time in the beginning of the Second World War when fierce battles were fought around the Lofoten island between the Nazi occupants and the British naval fleet. Now the fact that the military is out again means that the circulation of daily life is stopping.

The bus reaches Narvik, but that still does not get me to Sweden. Narvik is considered a border town, but that’s just because it’s the town closest to the border, and it has a harbor. In fact, it’s still 50 kilometers from the soon-to-be-closed Swedish border. The only way for me to get to the border now is to catch a ride up a mountain road that has been closed for days because of heavy snow.

But I am fortunate. As the bus approaches Narvik, I check the Norwegian Road Administration app, and—Eureka!—the road has just reopened, at least for now. I manage to convince the local taxi company to send me a car to pick me up and drive me across the border, where concrete elements stand ready to block the crossing just a few hours later.

While the whole of Norway is entering into COVID-19 hibernation, Sweden tries to keep up a more ordinary path, asking people to keep distance without going into full lockdown. On the way, the taxi driver, whose name is Pernille, talks of the spring that lies ahead. She will have time to enjoy it. “This is my last assignment before I am laid off tomorrow,” she tells me.

The post A Letter From the Norwegian Village of Å, Where COVID Lockdown Forces a Dramatic Escape appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Neutrality might be the answer.

I was born and raised in one neutral country, Switzerland. As an adult, I moved to and became a citizen of another neutral country, Sweden. I have experienced what it means to live in societies developed on peaceful and stable ground.

In 2017 my first home country, Switzerland, celebrated the 500th anniversary of its last military action abroad. In Sweden, more than 200 years have passed since the Swedish army was engaged in foreign war (at that time, an occupation of neighboring Norway).

In both my home countries, neutrality has thus stood the test of time and reinforced the democratic nature of the governments. Which is why neutrality deserves more attention, especially in small and vulnerable democracies around the world.

The planet is already moving in that direction. The primary international tactic for most countries is no longer archaic military violence, but engagement in smart public diplomacy based on international law.

A more diplomatic and law-based world fits the notion of neutrality, which means that a country does not join any military alliance or engage with other countries as a belligerent.

Historically there have been as many forms of neutrality as there have been countries to declare it. And yes, there have been some cases, as in Austria after World War II, when a country was obliged by foreign powers to become a neutral state.

In the Swiss case, the concept of neutrality goes back to the Second Peace Treaty of Paris in 1815, which allowed Switzerland to become a self-governing territory. But at that time, Switzerland was just a loose network of independent states. It took another 33 years—and, in fact, a civil war between the various states of the country—to establish the current federal, democratic state by referendum in 1848.

That state was explicitly neutral. And this direct engagement of Swiss citizens in state affairs—via votes in referendums and citizen’s initiatives— has served to enforce neutrality. When people get to make decisions, they often choose peace, stability—and neutrality.

The Swiss have, however, retained an army. Indeed, for many decades, it was said that Switzerland was an army. This reflected a triumphant megalomania in the country after it had kept itself out of two disastrous world wars that consumed its neighbors. But later in the 20th century, Switzerland reduced what had been one of the biggest and most expensive armies—a “protection force for neutrality”—in the world.

Neutrality is not static. It requires constant development and fine-tuning. The Swiss have long debated and changed exactly how their neutrality works. But the debate is always open; the Swiss consensus is that neutrality is a security issue, and security issues should not be left to a small circle within government or parliament, at least in a democracy.

One very long debate involved Swiss membership in the United Nations. Supporters of neutrality for decades argued that such a membership, which could imply participation in military operations abroad, would not be compatible with being a neutral country. In 1986, two-thirds of Swiss voters said no to UN membership. But voters narrowly approved the same measure in 2002, making Switzerland the first country to join the global organization by referendum.

My other home country has made a similar connection between democracy and neutrality. Sweden has debated whether to join NATO—as some politicians from national right-wing parties are demanding—but that would require a popular vote.

Sweden’s neutrality dates back to the Napoleonic wars, when the Nordic kingdom lost more than one-third of its territory. Since 1812, Sweden has not initiated any armed combats and has declared itself a non-aligned and neutral country. In contrast to Switzerland, this policy has never been enshrined in international treaties and Sweden has always understood its neutrality to be proactive, which has allowed it to be involved in peacekeeping efforts around the world. It also has joined the European Union and forged agreements (though not membership) with NATO.

The Swiss and Swedish examples show the different options and limits of neutrality. The stricter Swiss neutrality limits the international options of the country, but its stand is more credible than Sweden’s more pragmatic approach. At the same time, Sweden can react more flexibly to changing security challenges.

Taking these risks and benefits into consideration, when I think about the links between peace, stability, democracy and neutrality, I wonder about the power that neutrality might hold for a place under threat, like Taiwan.

Taiwan is a country of 23 million, adjacent to a larger nation of 1.3 billion, which maintains the right to invade its smaller neighbor whenever it chooses. What kind of protection does such a place need?

Taiwan has built up its military forces and weaponry, and it has made alliances with the United States and as many other countries as it can. The goal has been to counter the threat with defense.

But the Chinese threats continue—indeed, they have recently increased. So the more important piece of security might involve the example Taiwan presents to the world.

Taiwan democratized three decades ago, and it has sought to make its democracy more participatory over the years. I have visited some 15 times to observe elections and referendums, and work to enhance the country’s system of direct democracy, which is now considered a global model.

Using that democracy to embrace neutrality formally has been discussed, and the idea has a couple of virtues. First, it would reinforce Taiwan’s democracy by setting a policy in line with the views of its people, and making it clear that no government could simply go to war.

It also might provide real security, and broadcast to the world that Taiwan is devoted to peace. Again, Switzerland and Sweden are good illustrations of how such a proactive policy of democracy and non-aggression can deter invasion (Switzerland’s ability to stay out of the world wars being the prime example), while also creating a globally recognized brand for the country. If China invaded an officially neutral Taiwan, it would be threatening and attacking an open, democratic, and peaceful country—a difficult position for its autocratic government to defend.

Of course, there is no single or simple solution for the complicated security situation in East Asia. But a Taiwanese move to neutrality would project self-confidence, and a message that should impress the world. It also would allow Taiwan to focus more on its internal development, including making greater advances in its democracy. The country’s cities, in particular, are seeking more sovereignty and control from a national government that has long centralized power, in part by arguing that a strong national authority is needed for security reasons.

Neutrality, in combination with democracy, is not a guarantee of a country’s eternal life. But history suggests it is better insurance than the most sophisticated weapons systems.

The post Why Taiwan Would Be Better Off Neutral appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For many years Sweden’s relative calm has disguised the fact that we are exporters of terrorism. More than 300 Swedish residents have traveled to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria—a high rate for a country of less than 10 million. But now that terror has struck mercilessly here at home, it clearly shows that even our country is a target for the terrorists.

Neither Sweden nor any other open state can ever protect itself fully against terrorism. When terrorism strikes everyday lives—on sidewalks, in markets, inside a subway car, on a pedestrian street, as in Stockholm—it is meant not merely to kill but to spread fear and disruption. So it has been gratifying to see the thoughtfulness and solidarity that people in Sweden have shown each day since the attack. Under the hashtag #openstockholm on social media, people offered their homes to those who needed somewhere to sleep, or offered their cars to those who needed help with transportation as parts of the city shut down.

The attack has fueled the debate in Sweden about how we can prevent terrorism and extremism here, a subject that is the focus of my own journalistic work. In comparison with other countries, Sweden has been late to tackle the problem and remains in an introductory phase. The public debate is sometimes very intense about which approach, hard or soft, is the best way to go. Should we, for instance, help those who want to leave the extremist networks with psychological support, or just imprison them and drop the keys?

Among those who traveled from Sweden to the Islamic State, a great preponderance arrived in this country as young children and were raised here. They often are from low-income families and have been convicted of minor crimes. Most of them have grown up in segregated suburbs, where there are networks of Islamic radicals who seek to convert young people to extremist beliefs. Over many years, much of the society has been ignorant and naïve about this problem, failing to better integrate these suburbs and reach young people, or confront the radicals. To the contrary, some associations governed by Islamic radicals have received grants for their work.

The April 7 truck attack was not our first brush with domestic Islamic terrorism. In 2010, in nearly the same place in Stockholm as the April 7 attack, 29-year-old Taimour Abdulwahab detonated a suicide bomb while standing amid holiday shoppers on Drottninggatan. Because of technical problems with the bomb, he failed to kill anyone but himself.

What we know so far about the most recent attack is that 39-year-old Rakhmat Akilov from Uzbekistan was arrested on suspicion of driving the truck that mowed down and killed four people and injured many more. He has recognized the crime and, according to the police, he had shown sympathies for the Islamic state on his Facebook page. In many particulars, the attack fits a pattern we have seen over the past year in several European cities—including Nice, Berlin, and Paris—as the Islamic State has called upon its supporters in the West to use simple means (knives, guns, and vehicles) to attack the enemy.

The April 7 attack on Swedish soil may renew a debate about Sweden’s own experiences with terrorism. In recent years, the country has discussed how to stop people from Sweden who seek to plan and commit attacks elsewhere. Three people sit in jail for having been on the verge of staging a massacre of journalists at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in Copenhagen in 2011. Two others from Sweden, Mohamed Belkaid and Osama Krayem, were part of the terrorist cell that was behind the attacks in Paris in 2015 and Brussels in 2016.

And, as mentioned previously, about 300 people have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq with about half of them returning home to Sweden. Though these returnees may pose a risk, the debate in Sweden in the weeks before the attack was over how to deal with them. In Sweden the law allows you to be a member of a terrorist organization if you do not participate in an attack or in war crimes. But that poses questions. What is the best approach to handling people who may be a risk, but are not breaking the law? How can local authorities obtain information from security officials about Islamic State returnees who may pose a threat, given the secrecy that surrounds terrorism and security investigation? And how does one conclusively prove what people may have done when they were in the Islamic state?

These are not entirely new questions. Sweden has a history of harboring members of different terrorist organizations from other parts of the world; our commitments to fundamental laws of expression and assembly have made it possible for such organization members to engage in various forms of support for terrorist activities. In the 1990s, Sweden was home to cells linked to the Algerian group GIA (Groupe Islamique Arme), which spread propaganda and collected money here. Many of the Swedish members of the GIA traveled to Afghanistan to attend Al Qaeda training camps, and several residents of Sweden were suspected of involvement in various terrorist attacks in other countries.

Some of these Swedish citizens later reached high positions in international terrorist networks. Among them was Mohamed Moummou, who became one of the top leaders of al-Qaida in Iraq, before he blew himself up during a firefight with the U.S. military in 2008. There also have been strong ties between militants of the Somali terror organization al-Shabaab and sympathizers in Sweden. Several senior leaders of the organization previously had operations in Sweden, among them Fuad Shangole and Abdulkadir Mumin. These bands helped several young Swedish Muslims join al-Shabaab in the mid-to-late 2000s.

Sweden is hardly the only European country with small but active Islamist terrorist networks. And the pattern here is similar, with these networks concentrated in a few segregated suburban areas outside the major cities. But confronting the problem has been a bigger challenge here. In some cases, law enforcement authorities have sought convictions for terrorism financing, but have usually failed. There has been major skepticism of, and resistance to, the labeling of “terror cases” in Sweden, among some politicians, commentators, journalists, and human rights groups. Sweden has failed to examine thoroughly the ideological environment that produces extremism, which has resulted in underestimating the extent of radicalization. The attitude has been that such problems don’t exist here, and that allegations against people are merely the product of racism and Islamophobia.

The attitude has changed somewhat since 2014, when the Islamic State expanded in Syria and Iraq. Media coverage and conversation have begun to focus on people in the country who support and sympathize with terrorism.

But with Sweden seen as more exporter than importer of terrorism, for many the talk of an attack here felt hypothetical. That changed earlier this month when the war came to our streets. The discussion of how to deal with the continuing threat should dominate debate in Sweden for a long time to come.

The post Is Terrorism Sweden’s New Export? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Economic inequality has always been with us, and when you observe a dramatic market compression you can always link it to a disastrous event. These events come in four flavors: intense popular military mobilization, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. These are very severe episodes that hold true across history. It is very hard, if not impossible, to find any episode of major equalization that is not linked to one of these four types of events.

Just as in many other developed countries at the time, external shocks—in the form of war and the Great Depression—acted as critical catalysts for Sweden’s redistributive fiscal reform and the eventual expansion of the welfare state.

Although Sweden is located at the margins of the European continent, it is adjacent to the major powers involved in both world wars: Germany, Great Britain, and Russia. In World War I, conservative Swedish elites sided with Germany and raked in large profits while food shortages caused by the Entente naval blockade and labor unrest rocked the country. Hunger marches near the end of the war triggered heavy-handed police responses.

Sweden, a nonbelligerent, largely missed out on the World War I surge in top taxation, and continued to lag behind Europe’s liberal democracies until the next war. Military mass mobilization, progressive graduation of tax rates, and the targeting of elite wealth on top of income constituted the three main ingredients of fiscal leveling. Popular discontent paved the way for the country’s first Liberal-Social Democrat coalition government, which started to take tentative steps in a more progressive direction under the growing shadow of the Russian Revolution not far from Sweden’s shores. Once the war had ended, overseas markets collapsed and industrial overcapacity ushered in financial crisis and unemployment. The wealthy, deeply enmeshed in these businesses, suffered disproportionately.

During World War II, when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, Sweden was completely surrounded by the Nazis and their allies. Once the Nazi war machine had shifted into high gear, as a leading Social Democrat politician in 1940 put it, the Swedes found themselves “living in front of the muzzle of a loaded cannon.” The country was exposed to both German and Allied pressure. At one point Germany threatened to bomb Swedish cities unless granted transit concessions. Later in the war, Germany drew up a contingency plan for an invasion in the event of an Allied incursion into Sweden.

The Swedes had to put virtually everything on a war footing to stand a chance of defending themselves against an invasion. They experienced full mobilization—there was no actual fighting, but they mobilized a very large share of their population. They had to create military industries virtually out of nothing overnight. This crisis transformed what had been a right-wing military force into a people’s army based on mass conscription and volunteerism. Some 400,000 men served out of a population of 6.3 million, and of those, 50,000 soldiers were invalided as the result of injuries, accidents, and harsh service conditions. Strict rationing among the civilian population served as a crucial means of leveling class differences. Shared military and civilian service helped overcome existing distrust and fostered teamwork and mutual dependency.

As John Gilmour puts it in his landmark study of wartime Sweden, the country “experienced significant social, political, and economic disruption as a result of wartime conditions and emerged in 1945 as an altered society in attitude and aspiration.” The country “gained social benefits from war without suffering the same loss of life and property as the belligerents and occupied nations.”

All these things together produced an effect quite similar to what happened in countries that endured actual fighting. People were more willing to go along with it because of the perceived existential threat. This shows that societies did not have to experience this mass violence firsthand. It was enough if it happened next door and there was a serious risk of getting involved, and everyone had to prepare for this.

Sweden’s eightfold military build-up during World War II dramatically boosted income tax rates for top earners and corporations. Whereas fiscal responses to the Great Depression had remained modest, the tax reform of 1939 greatly raised top rates and created a temporary defense tax that became highly progressive only for the highest earners and that was further sharpened in 1940 and 1942. In addition, the statutory corporate tax rate rose to 40 percent. The strengthening of military capacity was the official rationale for all these measures. Thanks to the threat of war, in a telling departure from the fractious politics of the 1920s and 1930s, these reforms were passed with little debate or controversy as an almost unanimous political decision.

In this sense, Sweden did experience a major war mobilization effect that was conducive to the subsequent expansion of the welfare state. In the longer term, the war years left their mark on popular beliefs: The vision of Sweden as a small country that had been saved by a coalition government and societal consensus contributed to the formation of the ideal of a solidaristic society sustained by a redistributive welfare state.

Postwar policy was grounded in the wartime footing of the tax system and the shared war experience of the general population. In 1944, as the war was drawing to a close, the Social Democrats, together with the Trade Union Confederation, developed a policy program meant to equalize income and wealth by means of progressive taxation. This was part of the Social Democrats’ commitment to ensure that, as the Post-War Program put it, “the majority is liberated from dependence upon a few owners of capital, and the social order based on economic classes is replaced by a community of citizens cooperating on the basis of freedom and equality.”

After the war had ended, this program carried the day. The people had sacrificed during the war, and now expected something in return. The shared experience of the war years was the crucial catalyst for the blossoming of the Swedish welfare state.

But this may now, in fact, be changing. The offer of generous welfare for anyone who shows up in Sweden ended last spring when the country restored border controls between Sweden and Denmark for the first time in decades. And this was merely the latest step. Following a severe fiscal crisis in the early 1990s, the government had long been cutting back on welfare provisions and promoted privatization of public services. Thanks to these measures and the impact of globalization and technological change, income inequality before taxes and transfers has been rising for decades.

Sweden’s future, just like that of many other European countries with aging populations, depends on continuing immigration, in no small part from Africa and the Middle East. As Swedish society becomes more and more ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse, the social consensus on redistribution faces growing pressure. Europe has already shed much of its progressive postwar culture, and we must wonder how well Swedish egalitarianism will stand the test of time.

The post How Deprivation and the Threat of Violence Made Sweden Equal appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“What?” I answered cautiously.

The state representative, whom I met on a gray February day in early 1990 at the Swedish consulate in Zurich, where I studied at that time, became louder: “What color does the toothbrush have?”

I was surprised and a little bit intimidated by this question and responded, whispering, “The color of my toothbrush?”

“No sir,” he screamed back, “the one of your girlfriend!”

I do not remember the ending of this uneven conversation with the immigration officer, with its misunderstanding fueled by our different ways of speaking German. But I did get my permit to move to Sweden that year, to live together with my partner, who later became my wife.

At that time, Sweden, the biggest Nordic country, was not known as a cosmopolitan island of happy diversity and open borders. It was Switzerland—the country of my birth—that proudly fostered a multi-lingual, multi-cultural population. Sweden’s economic and societal success story after the Second World War was based on homogeneity; a foreign policy of keeping its distance from the world; and a welfare state project firmly embedded in a nationalistic idea of Swedishness.

When I arrived there, this “Swedish model” was starting to win attention all the over the world. Sweden’s powerful exports of consumer goods (cars, washing machines, Ikea stores, and Abba songs) had gained it notice, and its welfare state was becoming a reference point for politicians around the world, who either embraced it as a model or railed against it as a socialist danger.

But after passing the toothbrush test and beginning a life in Sweden that continues to this day, a quarter century later, I have discovered that, as with other national narratives, the “Swedish model” only covered part of the story.

My arrival in the early 1990s coincided with national transition and crisis, and the beginning of profound changes in the Swedish model, although I didn’t realize it at the time. The country had been run by one political party, the Social Democrats, for decades, but the economy, and that establishment, teetered and fell. A minority conservative government took over, and state funding rates reached as high as 500 percent. In just two years between 1990 and 1992 unemployment rose from less than 2 percent to more than 10 percent. One casualty of the turmoil would be Sweden’s introverted and isolationist policies.

To get back to power, the Social Democrats dramatically changed their foreign policy, suddenly embracing European Union membership. The party maintained its strong resistance to immigration as well, but that slowly changed over the next decade, as Swedish public opinion shifted around the Balkan Wars and the country began to embrace more refugees. I was no refugee, but I was fortunate to arrive at a time of greater acceptance of immigrants.

That acceptance would grow because of the Swedish passion for modernity. Swedes love to adapt to new and modern ideas, especially when it comes to technology. (The first mobile phone was invented in Sweden in the 1950s.) But the Swedes also have been early adapters when it comes to social innovations; generous parental leaves were introduced here in the early 1970s. In the regular World Value Surveys, Sweden is today the most extreme outlier, maintaining the planet’s strongest commitments to secularism and to self-expression.

That later passion for self-expression struck me immediately, in part because it is such a contrast to the stereotype of Swedes as moderate, stoic, and boring. Living here, it quickly became clear to me that the Swedes were anything but stolid centrists. And for that I was grateful. For my entire time here, I’ve worked as a press and broadcast correspondent for media organizations in German-speaking Europe. And this zeitgeist-defining Nordic country has offered me an endless supply of interesting and often contrasting stories to share.

Indeed, Sweden, collectively, has turned out to be a drama queen, full of political turnabouts, conflicting legislative turns, and unexpected dark shadows behind the well-kept surface of a peaceful, balanced, and super-modern society with equal opportunities for everyone.

Swedes’ darkness, unpredictability, and multiple contradictions explain their country’s growing cultural soft power globally. They’ve provided raw material for some of the world’s bestselling crime authors, including Henning Mankell (Wallander), Camilla Läckberg (Hidden Child) and Stieg Larsson, whose The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest was the bestselling fiction work in the United States in 2010.

Those and other authors have built their plots on hidden aspects of the shining Swedish welfare state. The dramatic tension flows from a well-concealed fact: Even in a country that guarantees its citizens a good life from cradle to grave, chance and the vagaries of human nature can pull people into the nastiest predicaments.

The biggest story I’ve covered over the past 25 years is how the “Swedish model,” which is used as ubiquitously here as the “American dream,” has been stressed and reshaped. Fundamentally, the model has lost its administrative muscles. Sweden no longer goes its own way entirely. It is a political and administrative entity deeply embedded in the multi-level structure of the European Union. The once very paternalistic nation-state has been democratized, and decentralized, work I’ve been involved with as both journalist and activist. Sweden has introduced direct democracy for its citizens, and devolved powers by letting the local levels of government take over the school system.

In the middle of the last decade, the 2000s, Sweden made its acceptance of foreigners more explicit, and profound. It happened, in a predictably unpredictable Swedish way, through an abrupt political transition. After the Social Democrats jettisoned their restrictive immigration policy, and very soon thereafter lost the election to a center-right government majority, the new majority—in a way reminiscent of the center-right government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel—surprised backers and opponents by pursuing openness to the world itself. And so in Sweden it was the conservative prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who finally opened up the remote Nordic country to people from across the globe.

His goals were twofold. First, he sought to make the country more dynamically 21st-century, a policy broadly supported by his nation of modernity lovers. And second, as Sweden watched the growing number of wars along Europe’s southeastern borders produce the biggest migration wave since World War II, Reinfeldt urged his compatriots “to open our hearts.” And Swedes did just that, in their typically dramatic, even extreme way. In just one year more than 160,000 individuals—mainly from Syria—requested asylum in Sweden, 16 times the number of asylum seekers to the United States.

This influx kept giving me flashbacks to my own arrival. The dynamic was similar. Newcomers here are met with curiosity and interest about why they’d come to this cool and remote northern outskirt of Europe. Those who learn Swedish, as I did, receive considerable appreciation. But foreigners’ opinions about Sweden, and what might be done to make it better, don’t receive much consideration. For at least 10 years, I was not supposed to have any opinions at all.

The changes in the population have made Sweden’s political parties and elected bodies increasingly unrepresentative, with a strong bias in favor of the older, middle-class layers of society. These newcomers deserve more of a voice, because they have been crucial contributors to revitalization, especially in smaller towns. One nearby small city in the north, a village of just 300 people, increased its population by 700 in just a couple of years, via the arrival of migrants. Empty houses got new inhabitants, shut-down soccer clubs got many new players, and mothballed schools were reopened.

Nothing stays the same in Sweden for long, and so the country’s openness to newcomers produced a fierce backlash, ahead of that experienced in much of the rest of the Western world and evidenced by the surprises of Brexit and Trump. As a consequence, Reinfeldt eventually lost power in the autumn of 2014 to both his left and his right. On the left, the Social Democrats won back the government. On the far right, the “Sverigedemokraterna” (Sweden Democrats), a post-fascist political party, gained representation by connecting successfully with the minority of Swedes who opposed the changes and openness of the past 25 years.

This has created a double and contradictory turnabout in Swedish politics in the last two years. On one side you have a Social Democratic government (where also a few Green ministers got a seat but little say) that has returned to the restrictive immigration policy of the early 1990s, with strict border controls. Recently, when I returned home from a trip to Germany by train, crossing the border from Denmark, I had to show my passport three times.

On the other side you have the angry Sweden Democrats, who attempt to justify their racist and discriminatory stance toward all non-Western immigrants by blaming them for organized crime in the suburbs of the main cities like Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. Those places have obvious problems with riots and shootings, but they are a consequence of social neglect by national and local governments.

This split—between the globalist center, a newly isolationist left, and a far-right—makes it hard to know what the Swedish model is anymore. So when President Trump referred to Sweden as a model to avoid, at a campaign-style rally in Florida, everybody here debated which model he might be talking about. The answer seemed to come when the White House started quoting dubious sources and experts close to the Sweden Democrats, which also have started to call Stockholm the world capital of rape.

That claim doesn’t square with the facts. And while Sweden faces new stresses that put it at the frontlines of major arguments about integration and migration and welfare around the world, Trump’s claim of a Swedish downfall is, at the very least, premature.

Indeed, Sweden has been doing quite well, with a strong economic upturn. The OECD (an intergovernmental organization composed of mostly western democracies) offered a very positive assessment of Sweden in its 2017 report. And Swedish democracy remains among the world’s strongest. The Economist Intelligence Unit put Sweden into the top three of modern democracies this year, while the United States was downgraded from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy.

To learn from Sweden does not mean to avoid immigration from certain countries; Sweden has prospered as it accepts immigrants from Muslim-majority nations. But as a Swede, I would suggest that the world learn the virtues of moderation in the midst of great turmoil. Because, contrary to my adopted country’s reputation, Sweden’s difficulties and conflicts stem from its extreme shifts. The Swedish model today means holding on for dear life as your roller coaster of a country twists and turns.

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