THE EXAMPLE OF SWEDEN

I’d like to spend a little time now on another interesting case: Sweden, which is today generally considered an extremely egalitarian country. Yet this was not how things stood at the beginning of the twentieth century. All the countries in Europe were extremely inegalitarian, with Sweden intermediate on the spectrum between France and the United Kingdom. But in Sweden’s case, the inequality had a very specific structure. With France and the United Kingdom, their colonial empires played a large role: colonial assets, holdings that resided in other parts of the world, were important parts of very large fortunes. This was much less the case in Sweden, obviously, where other factors relating to the political system were the primary contributors to a high degree of inequality.

From 1865 to 1910, Sweden had a particularly sophisticated system for qualifying voters on the basis of property ownership and tax status. Property-qualified voting persisted right up till World War I, whereas other countries, including the United Kingdom, had expanded voting rights during the nineteenth century. In Sweden, only the richest 20 percent of men could vote. Yet the system was even more restrictive, because an elector from those richest 20 percent might be entitled to anywhere from one to a hundred votes, according to his degree of wealth. The richer you were, the greater voice you had. Better yet, while there was a ceiling of one hundred votes for general elections, there was no ceiling at all for municipal elections! Consequently, Sweden had several dozen townships where a single voter cast more than 50 percent of the vote, making him a dictator with total democratic legitimacy. The country’s prime minister, in fact, was almost always an aristocrat with more than 50 percent of the votes in his district.

Corporations and legal entities also had the right to vote in local elections until World War I, in proportion to the amount of capital they invested in a community and their income level. This is a privilege that today’s multinational corporations would very much like to have. They sometimes find a way to achieve a similar result, but the fact they don’t quite dare ask for it signals that an important change has occurred.

That Sweden retained a political system of this kind right up till World War I shows the inventiveness that human societies employ—and their dominant groups specifically—to structure the system of rights so as to preserve their own power. But it also illustrates the absence of any national or cultural determinism when it comes to inequality levels, because the country would soon be utterly transformed.

At the start of the twentieth century, Sweden was whipsawed between its political system, which privileged property ownership, and a working class that for a range of historical and religious reasons was highly literate compared to the working classes of other European countries. The Swedish labor unions and the young Social Democratic Party played on the strong general conviction that property owners had pushed their advantage too far and a new balance needed to be struck. A powerful tide of social and political pressure brought about universal suffrage in 1920. The Social Democratic Party was subsequently elected to power in 1932 and stayed at the helm almost continuously until the 1990s.

Since then, things have gotten more complicated, and Sweden is much less in the forefront in its tax policy, partly because of the international community’s refusal to join in real cooperation, and the country is also much less in the forefront on moving beyond capitalism. But from 1930 to 1980, the Social Democrats put the state’s resources toward a political program that differed radically from what had gone before. They used the records that had made it possible to measure income and property not to allocate the right to vote according to wealth but to impose a progressive tax, with the goal of funding access to education and healthcare. The measures that the Social Democrats enacted, while not perfect, were a far cry from those of earlier periods. It brought about a level of equality greater than anything seen elsewhere, and it happened in the space of a few decades, more or less peacefully, but in response to a strong groundswell of social and political pressure.

Sweden’s example is interesting, because it shows that a country is never inegalitarian or egalitarian by nature. Everything depends on who controls the government and to what end. The historical trajectory we see here undercuts any and all determinism.