What Sweden is, not

The kulturkanon is a sideshow in Sweden’s culture wars.

There’s a scene in Karl-Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle where he describes pushing a stroller through a Swedish town, only for Japanese tourists to gaze at him, fascinated by this living example of the Swedish paternal leave policy. « A bunch of Japanese tourists stopped across the street and pointed at me, like I was leading a circus parade or something », he wrote. « They pointed their fingers. There goes the Scandinavian man! Watch and tell your grandchildren about this incredible sight! » For many years, international journalists travelled to Sweden to report on this exotic phenomenon, the Swedish stroller dad, beacon of progressive values and gender equality. This, if anything, is what Sweden used to be known for internationally. It was known, too, for both political pragmatism and a genuine humanitarianism. Today is another story.

As of September 2025, Sweden has an official, government-approved kulturkanon: a « cultural canon ». What is such a thing for, and what should be in it? Great Swedish works of art, sure. What about pieces of legislation? Things like eighteen months of parental leave would seem less obviously canonizable, and yet there they are. Can a canon capture the Swedish soul? The current nationalist government set these questions in motion but has struggled to answer them. What is Sweden supposed to be?

Once the most social democratic country in Europe, and then, in the 1990s, the most neoliberal one, Sweden now aims to become the most nationalist one. In the second half of the twentieth century, Sweden’s generous welfare state made it the gold standard for economic equality. In the book Capital & Ideology, the French economist Thomas Piketty used Sweden in the 1980s as the most successful example of a country that achieved a working model for economic equality without sacrificing social freedoms or economic growth. Over the next three decades, Sweden dramatically embraced deregulation and privatization.¹ One of the most equal countries in Europe became one of the most unequal. According to the World Bank, Sweden’s Gini number (a measurement of economic inequality) rose from 23 in 1981 to 31,6 in 2022, similar to the UK and Italy.