DE-PARADISING NORDIC HISTORY AND THE WELFARE STATE

Since the turn of the millennium, a number of historical, cultural and sociological investigations have participated in a systematic critique of Nordic history. This has included the nations’ colonial histories, their welfare projects, and the systems and discourses that organise contemporary Nordic societies. Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin show, in the Introduction to Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena (2013), how the Nordic nations were active partners in early colonial enterprises such as the transatlantic slave trade and the colonisation of North America, India and Africa. Special attention is also given to how the nations that make up contemporary Scandinavia colonised the northern territory referred to as Sampi and inhabited by the indigenous Saami. Kristin Loftsdóttir and Lars Jensen's collection Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities (2012) discusses the function of racist discourse and the centrality of whiteness both during the colonial era and in the present postcolonial moment. In Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region (2009), Keskinen and others observe that while the Nordic nations may have perceived themselves as ‘outsiders in relation to colonial power relations’, they are still ‘marked, both culturally and economically, by colonial relations’ (Keskinen et al. 2009, 1). In addition, Witoszek and Trädgårdh argue, in Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden (2002), that while Germany and Sweden certainly took different paths in the 1920 and 1930s, powerful actors within the Nordic nations aided the invention of eugenics and the construction of racist ideologies, as well as the rise of Fascism and Nazism in the twentieth century. Thus, Sweden cannot be said to inhabit the position of ‘the moral summit of the western world’ (Witoszek and Trädgårdh 2002, 2) as has sometimes been claimed.

The image of Sweden as existing outside the destructive historical and ideological mechanisms of the West is also being dismantled in critically acclaimed literature such as Mattias Hagberg's Rekviem för en Vanskapt (2012), Ola Larsmo's Swede Hollow (2016) and Torbjörn Flygt's Underdog (2001), and in Scandinavian arthouse cinema such as Amanda Kernell's Sami Blood (Sameblod, 2016), Lukas Moodysson's Lilja 4 Ever (2002) and Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor (Sånger från andra våningen 2000).