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PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION NUMBERS

The most chameleon-coloured word in the Swedish language is ‘personnummer’ (personal identification numbers). It invisibly adapts to its surroundings. Most Swedes can say their own number in their sleep. In fact, they mumble them several times a day — so plain, so common, and so anonymous, and yet so profoundly significant.

If anyone came up with the idea of writing a book about the year of 1947, the introduction then of personal identification numbers in Sweden ought to be included as a time marker. On the other hand, there was such a long-standing centralising tendency behind them that the actual introduction didn’t represent a sudden change of national mood, but simply a natural consequence of how Swedish society was organised according to the wishes of a few powerful men.

The structure of the Swedish state is the result of the relentless warfare conducted by King Gustav II Adolf combined with the organising skills and orderly mind of his chancellor Axel Oxenstierna. Both were phenomena born out of the rule of old Gustav Vasa, often named the father of modern Sweden. He did something unusual in the sixteenth-century Europe of small principalities and feudal lords: he centralised power.

While other contemporary rulers left the managing of their provinces to local lords, Gustav Vasa placed loyal bailiffs all around the country to take charge of law and order. The bailiffs became intermediaries between the nation’s inhabitants and the king himself and thus gave Gustav Vasa full control of communication with his people. (Today he would have used Twitter.)

The bailiffs’ main task was to mobilise support for the rule of Gustav Vasa while keeping an eye on his political opponents. In addition, they provided him with direct information about the kingdom’s resources in the form of buildings, livestock, and mills, all of it conveniently taxable. In other words, the availability of levers for controlling the population, economy, and trade increased. Three times the peasants rebelled against the king’s excessive controls and high taxes. Each time he pushed them back using brutal methods and tightened his grip on the Swedish population even more. Once Gustav Vasa introduced hereditary succession to the throne, his sons would continue his way of ruling, and so would his grandson, King Gustav II Adolf. It is the latter who appointed the Lord High Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna in 1612, at a time when the condition of the kingdom could be described as a medieval mess. There was a lot to be done, and luckily the Lord High Chancellor Oxenstierna had forty-two years in this post to do it.

Sweden without Axel Oxenstierna would have been another country, hard to imagine. He established order in the justice system as well as in the postal system. He suggested that every city should have a bank. He persuaded Gustav II Adolf to donate a fortune to Uppsala University, with seventeen new professors as a result; he contributed his own resources in order to establish several schools; and so on. His main driving force was King Gustav II Adolf’s seemingly endless need for soldiers and cash. Thirty years of warfare tends to empty the vaults.

Once a year, all men over fifteen years of age were required to stand in rows outside the village church in order for the bailiffs to inspect them. One out of ten was then sent to be a soldier. It didn’t take long for people to realise that half of them would be dead within a year due to diseases like typhus, so they failed to appear for inspection. This had to be taken care of and Lord High Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna was the man to do it.

He turned to the parishes and checked the books where the members of the congregation were recorded in connection with baptism and burial, and thus he knew all he needed to keep track of every fifteen-year-old male in Sweden.

One thing led to another. The King needed soldiers and the soldiers needed pay. In order for that to happen, taxes had to be increased. In order to collect them, one needed bailiffs, and in order to increase their number, one had to build schools to educate them in their profession. In connection with these schools, new cities appeared: a nation in the making.

The Lord High Chancellor Oxenstierna went on to create a hierarchical state apparatus where lower levels reported to higher. Controls were introduced to increase the quality of management through example, correction, and instruction. Matters were to be dealt with expertly and without delay — ideals that are still enshrined in today’s regulations and policies.

The expanding control of the population mounted up to the point in 1947 when all residents received a number consisting of nine numbers: the individual’s birth date plus a three-digit number. Twenty years later, a check digit was added for security reasons.

Today, a Swede cannot be born, educated, marry, divorce, become ill, or die without a personal identification number. It has become such a casual act to declare one’s individual set of digits, even to collect bonus points in connection with purchases in department stores, that many simply say them loud and clear in any given situation. Most of Sweden’s inhabitants are entered by their numbers in hundreds of registers of various kinds, and every government and municipal activity is based on the use of the residents’ personal identification numbers. It’s almost an equation of Orwellian design: a centralised state plus digitisation plus a growing private market of health care and similar services, turns the personal identification number into a key that opens every aspect of a human life.

In many countries, also within the EU, residents are obliged to carry identity documents — they must always be able to prove who they are. In Sweden there is no such law. And this is where a specific Swedish paradox appears: the citizen is free from this obligation if she can prove that she is a Swedish citizen, which is done by providing a valid identity document or revealing her personal identification number.