THE PEOPLES’ HOME

There is no way of understanding the core of the Swedish self-image without understanding the word ‘folkhem’, which literally translates as ‘peoples’ home’. Its origins lie in a kind of self-help establishment in Germany, the ‘Volksheim’, established in the growing industrial cities around the turn of the twentieth century. There, workers could read books and newspapers, listen to lectures, and eat a bowl of soup.

How come the ‘folkhem’ became the prime symbol for Sweden in the twentieth century? Can the concept be defined — or is it conveniently unprecise, possible to fill with whatever meaning one considers suitable? Whatever the case, the word itself and the underlying, albeit diffuse, idea is strongly associated with the social democratic vision that shaped Sweden into a welfare state.

It was a bumpy road. In the years preceding the First World War, when nationalism swept over Europe like a malign fever, the Social Democrats talked about the shared goals of the workers of the world and ended all their meetings by singing ‘The Internationale’. The conservatives took every chance to accuse them of being un-patriotic — un-Swedish — and even pacifistic. Such grave allegations had to be fought, and somewhere in the process the concept of ‘folkhem’ appeared as an answer to the problem.

The Swedish leader of the Social Democratic party and future prime minister, Per Albin Hansson, had mentioned the ‘folkhem’ now and then during the 1920s, but it was during a speech in Parliament in 1928 that the concept surfaced, was criticised by the opposition, and then debated in the press — in short, became politics.

The word ‘folk’ originates from the German word for people, ‘volk’, which trended during the Nazi era in slogans like Volk ohne raum (A people without room) or Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One people, one country, one leader) — not to mention the Volkswagen.

But ‘the people’ was not a social democratic concept — on the contrary. If one speaks of people, one does not speak about class or of economic and social diversity. The word ‘folk’ hides the traditional leftish analysis under a nationalistic fog. But Per Albin Hansson was a clever man. He introduced the ‘folkhem’ concept in order to gain ground from the nationalistic conservative and anti-democratic parts of society. He wanted to build a home for the Swedish people, a folk-home:

A home is based on a sense of togetherness and belonging. The good home does not know any privilege or disadvantage, no favourites or stepchildren. There, one does not look down upon the other, nor is one trying to profit from the other, the strong do not seek to oppress the weak and plunder them. In the good home there is equality, consideration, cooperation, helpfulness. Applied to the folkhem, this would mean breaking the social and economic barriers that now separate citizens from each other and divide them into privileged and underprivileged, into ruling and ruled, wealthy and impoverished, robber and robbed.

Per Albin Hansson simply took the concept of the national right and filled it with leftist substance. The merger becomes a vitally important factor in the victory of the Social Democrats in their first election in 1932.

While Hitler was taking power in Germany the following year, the Swedish Prime Minister was able to integrate the central Nazi concept of nationalism into a Social Democrat theory of equality:

Democracy and the peoples’ community are the words of today. They are often understood as opposites, but in order to make any sense they must mean the same. A democracy of today strives to realise the people’s feelings of national solidarity, and an actual peoples’ community can only appear when there exist equal rights, opportunities, and obligations for all.

He launched a series of measures in order to deal with unemployment and was heavily criticised because he chose to cooperate with one of the conservative parties in doing so. But the Swedish Social Democrats wanted to learn their German lesson. The recent victory of the Nazis had clearly shown that by far the most dangerous threat to democracy was a high rate of unemployment. The passivity of German social democracy, its inability to deal with the unemployment problem: this was considered one of the main reasons for Hitler’s success.

Observing German Social Democrats standing helpless before the overwhelming success of the Nazi Party, Per Albin Hansson appropriated the nationalistic weapon and turned it into a social democratic tool: the idea of Sweden as a peoples’ community. Social justice was one main component. Another was promoting the idea of a mythical people with a common soul of sorts as a way of unifying a new society based on material welfare and in need of emotional ties between people living there.

The German Social Democrats had left the idea of the nation untouched, free to be exploited by the anti-democrats. Per Albin Hansson was not about to make the same mistake. The Swedish people must be made aware that there was nothing that the Nazis in Germany could achieve with dictatorship that the Social Democrats could not achieve in Sweden with democracy. It worked. Per Albin Hansson’s rhetorical coup laid the foundation for something unique in the world’s political history: forty-four unbroken years of social democratic government, between the 1930s and the 1970s.