Nationalism & Identity

Forewarned

The Swedes are an enterprising, fair-minded people who suffer from a mild case of megalomania. For example, they think it entirely appropriate that the cartographer Mercator magnanimously drew Sweden roughly the size of India. They object to being lumped in with other Scandinavians, aas if they had no identity of their own.

From a Swedish perspective the differences between the Nordic countries are stark. Denmark is horizontal, Norway is vertical, Iceland is melting, Finland is labyrinthian, and Sweden is stunningly pastoral.

There is also the language difference. Every Finnish sentence starts in falsetto and ends in baritone. Norwegian sounds like Finnish intoned backwards, but is actually a provincial Swedish dialect. The Danes with their diphthongs and glottal stops sound as if they are caught between swallowing and spitting out a very hot potato. Only the Swedish language has evolved from grunted Icelandic gobbledygook to become the familiar and beloved singsong sounds of the Swedish Chef in The Muppet Show. Swedes find colliding consonants tricky. A modern Professor Higgins might offer the following challenge to a Swedish Eliza Doolittle: "Say after me – the Japanese jackass cheated on the Chinese chick" and be rewarded with "The Yapanese yackass sheeted on the Shinese shick."

The contrasts in national culture and character are equally glaring. The Norwegians are simple, plain-spoken folk, the Danes cheerful and fun-loving. The Finns are a taciturn lot whose mosquito bites occasionally make them holler and gyrate in what the guide books mistakenly call folk dancing. The Swedes have combined all these qualities and taken them to new heights by finding humour in plain talk, replacing silence with small talk, and eliminating body language altogether.

Swedes are always surprised to discover that foreigners do not keep a framed map of Sweden above their beds. They are amazed to encounter people who think the capital of Sweden is Oslo, or that Sweden is the home of Swatch. Such manifestations of ignorance can only be combated with a concerted campaign of enlightenment which is why they never tire of lecturing others about Sweden.

There is hardly anything in any other country with which the Swedes do not compare themselves and their country favourably, be it the length of an argument, the breadth of a generalisation or the height of an audacity. To add credibility, comparisons are usually given a thin patina of self-deprecation but this fails to conceal their underlying national pride.

Patriotism

The Swedes sniff at public manifestations of patriotism, conveniently forgetting that the blue and yellow Swedish flag is everywhere to be seen – at the top of garden flagpoles, on postcards, on birthday cakes, on the branches of Christmas trees. The colours of the flag are echoed on candles and napkins, on bottle labels and biscuit tins, even on Swedish company logos.