Essay
The Laundry Room Republic
There is a special institution in Swedish apartment buildings called the tvättstuga, which is a communal laundry room that has likely caused more arguments between otherwise civilised neighbours than any political disagreement. Residents book a time, wash their clothes, clean the machines and leave before the next person’s appointment. The rules are usually displayed on a wall, sometimes accompanied by handwritten additions from residents who have become irritated enough to take matters into their own hands. Someone has failed to remove lint from the dryer, or someone else has used the washing machine outside their allotted hours. Occasionally, a note appears in a rather uncompromising language for the Swedish society.
It is an unremarkable arrangement, and perhaps for that reason a useful place to begin thinking about the Nordic countries. The shared laundry room depends upon an agreement that strangers can be trusted with something they do not individually own. It requires a certain willingness to be inconvenienced for the benefit of others, and an assumption that the inconveniences will eventually be returned in equal measure. There is a small bureaucracy governing its use, but nobody finds the existence of this bureaucracy very remarkable. What troubles people is the neighbour who doesn’t obey it.
Much has been written about the Nordic countries in matters of temperament. The Danes are said to be contented, the Finns resilient, the Swedes modest, the Norwegians outdoorsy and the Icelanders resourceful. Do not get me wrong; these descriptions have their attractions, especially for foreign publishers. They also give the impression that the political achievements of an entire region can be explained through national personality. As though one begins with hygge, proceeds through lagom and sisu, and arrives, apparently without much further effort, at a functioning welfare state.
I agree it would be convenient if social democracy could be purchased with a wool blanket and a set of tastefully mismatched ceramic mugs. The actual history is considerably less marketable.
The Nordic welfare states emerged from political conflict, industrialisation, labour organisation, economic growth and the gradual construction of public institutions. Their present arrangements differ, often substantially, but they share a history in which organised workers, employers and governments negotiated over the distribution of prosperity and the responsibilities of the state. The resulting settlements were not inevitable expressions of a northern character. Instead, they were political choices, contested and revised over generations, made by people whose disagreements were frequently bitter.
In Sweden, the language of the folkhemmet, or people’s home, offered a particularly powerful way of imagining society. The country would be a home in which citizens owed one another the consideration ordinarily expected within a family. It was an appealing metaphor, and one that helped frame the development of an extensive welfare state. Yet a household is also a place with rules, with expectations concerning behaviour and with certain assumptions about who belongs. The metaphor contains its own difficulty. Every home has an inside and an outside, and so, somebody must decide where the threshold lies.
The Nordic achievement is nevertheless substantial. A person who loses a job, has a child, becomes ill or grows old is, in principle, not expected to face the consequences entirely alone. The degree of support varies between countries and circumstances, but the assumption that such events concern society as well as the individual remains central to the region’s political culture. Public libraries, subsidised education, parental leave and healthcare may sound like the ordinary business of government to people who have grown up with them. Elsewhere, their provision can be uncertain, expensive or altogether absent.
The value of these institutions is sometimes best understood through the decisions they make possible. A parent can remain in employment because childcare exists, a student can pursue education without relying entirely on parental wealth, a worker may be able to leave an intolerable job without immediately losing access to healthcare. These freedoms are not always visible at first, but they do show up in the absence of certain fears, in the manageable character of an otherwise difficult Tuesday, or in a household budget that does not collapse after one unexpected event.
Perhaps the greatest success of the Nordic model is that many of its beneficiaries have ceased to regard these arrangements as exceptional. They have become ordinary enough to complain about.
But there is another side to this ordinariness, one less readily represented in the cheerful international literature on northern happiness. Societies in which people have strong expectations of public institutions often develop equally strong expectations of one another. The rules are not always written down, and those who have spent their lives learning them may scarcely be aware of their existence.
In parts of northern Europe, consideration can mean knowing when to leave somebody alone. Privacy is respected, unsolicited conversation is uncommon in certain settings, and public friendliness need not develop into private familiarity. None of these habits is objectionable in itself. In contrast, a society in which people are not required to perform intimacy for strangers would be appealing to most of the world. The trouble begins when local manners are treated as universal standards of good behaviour.
A newcomer may discover that the language can be learned more quickly than the social codes surrounding it. There are invitations that sound like invitations but are merely polite expressions of goodwill, or silences that mean something different depending on the setting, and forms of disagreement so carefully moderated that a person unfamiliar with them may not even recognize a disagreement has occurred. The person who speaks too loudly, asks too directly, visits too spontaneously or fails to observe an unstated convention can find themselves judged without ever being told the charge.
It would be wrong to suggest that all Nordic people behave alike. A resident of Reykjavík is not simply a Swedish person with a different passport, and Copenhagen has social habits that would hardly pass unnoticed in a small Finnish town. Yet across much of the region, there looks to be a persistent tension between the ideal of an inclusive public sphere and the private mechanisms through which belonging is negotiated. A person may be fully entitled to the services of the state while remaining indefinitely peripheral to the social life of the community.
This becomes especially significant in countries whose international reputations depend so heavily upon equality. Inequality is comparatively easy to recognise where it is openly defended. It is more difficult to discuss in a society that understands equality as one of its defining virtues. Racism, discrimination, inherited advantage and social exclusion do not disappear because the national vocabulary is somewhat hostile to them. Sometimes that vocabulary makes the problems harder to name. Criticism may be received as an accusation against the character of the country rather than an argument about its institutions.
There is a historical dimension to this defensiveness. The familiar picture of the Nordics as peaceful, humanitarian societies has never adequately accommodated the histories of the Sámi peoples across northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, or Denmark’s colonial relationship with Greenland. Policies directed at Indigenous communities included assimilation, the suppression of languages and efforts to subordinate existing ways of life to the priorities of the state. These histories are not obscure footnotes to the development of modern Nordic nations. They are part of the same national story, even when they complicate its preferred moral.
In recent decades, public discussion of these histories has become more prominent, and governments and institutions have undertaken various forms of acknowledgement and investigation. But recognition is not a single event after which a country can return to congratulating itself. Questions of land, language, political authority and historical responsibility remain matters of present concern.
I argue there is something revealing about the international tendency to discuss the Nordic countries as though they existed outside history. Their welfare arrangements are praised, their standards of living compared, their approaches to education and justice studied. The region becomes a kind of moral laboratory in which other countries hope to discover the correct proportions of taxation, personal freedom and public trust. Less attention is given to the circumstances that made these settlements possible, or to the ways prosperity has been distributed within and beyond national borders.
Norway’s petroleum wealth, for instance, gives it an economic position that cannot simply be reproduced in Finland. Iceland’s small population creates possibilities and vulnerabilities different from those of Sweden. Denmark’s relationship with Greenland presents political and historical questions of a different order from the ones usually raised in discussions of Scandinavian interior design. Even the expression the Nordic model risks making five distinct countries, together with their autonomous territories and Indigenous peoples, appear more uniform than they are.
The international admiration is not entirely misplaced. There are compelling reasons to study societies that have maintained relatively high levels of social trust while providing extensive public services. But the admiration has acquired an unfortunate tendency to turn results into personality traits. We are invited to believe that Nordic people enjoy a more equitable society because they are naturally modest, cooperative and sensible. The institutions fade from view, leaving only the virtues of the population.
This interpretation flatters the countries being described while offering very little practical help to anyone hoping to learn from them. A government elsewhere cannot legislate a national temperament, but it can make decisions about education, housing, labour rights, taxation and public expenditure. It can determine whether essential services will be regarded primarily as public responsibilities or individual purchases. These decisions are difficult, frequently unpopular and susceptible to reversal. They are also the actual substance of the Nordic example.
There is a further irony in the way the region has been sold abroad. The northern ideal has become a consumer aesthetic at precisely the moment when many of the institutions associated with it are under pressure. Housing affordability, changing labour markets, demographic ageing, regional disparities and arguments over migration have complicated the older political settlements. The language of solidarity remains powerful, but agreement about what solidarity requires is far from guaranteed. A Scandinavian apartment can be furnished to resemble the pages of an international design magazine while the young person living in it struggles with an expensive rental market. A country can be celebrated for social equality while its residents disagree fiercely about who deserves public support.
For visitors, these contradictions may come as a disappointment. For people who live in the region, they are simply politics.
This distinction matters because the Nordic countries have been made to carry an impossible burden in the imagination of the rest of the world. They are expected to demonstrate that modern prosperity can coexist with environmental responsibility, that individual freedom can survive extensive taxation, that social equality can be achieved without sacrificing economic productivity, and that people can remain contented through months of darkness. Every failure is consequently treated as evidence that the entire experiment was fraudulent, while every success is added to the growing catalogue of Nordic exceptionalism.
Neither response is particularly useful. The region is neither a political paradise nor a cautionary tale about the limits of collective life. It consists of societies whose institutions have produced important achievements and considerable contradictions, often at the same time. Their successes deserve attention precisely because they were made rather than inherited. Their failures deserve scrutiny for the same reason.
There is also a danger in assuming that the preservation of a good society requires the preservation of its familiar social composition. The historical Nordic welfare settlements were formed under conditions that have changed, and the question of how solidarity might operate among people of different backgrounds has become one of the region’s most consequential political challenges. A welfare state cannot remain a convincing expression of common responsibility if belonging to the community is imagined too narrowly. Nor can it function without some degree of public confidence that obligations are shared fairly. These are difficult questions, and their difficulty is not evidence that the original aspirations were foolish. It is evidence that those aspirations must be argued for under new circumstances.
The shared laundry room remains an instructive, if modest, example. Its existence suggests a certain confidence in collective arrangements. Its noticeboard reveals how quickly that confidence can be tested by ordinary human behaviour. Residents disagree because they have different habits, different expectations and occasionally a remarkable capacity for leaving their belongings in other people’s way. The rules help, although somebody must interpret them, enforce them and occasionally decide whether they need changing.
One could abolish the inconvenience by requiring every household to purchase its own machines. In some buildings, that is already the arrangement. There are perfectly good reasons why people might prefer it. But something would be lost in declaring that the only solution to the difficulty of sharing is to stop sharing altogether.
The Nordic countries have spent generations working out their own versions of this problem on a much larger scale. They have been unusually successful in certain respects, uneven in others, and never as free from conflict as their admirers might wish. Their experience suggests that collective provision can give people considerable room to live independent lives, provided enough people remain willing to sustain the arrangements on which that independence depends.
It is a more interesting achievement than the production of happy citizens, and a more demanding one. Happiness is a private condition, difficult to measure and impossible to guarantee. Maintaining a society in which strangers are willing to assume responsibility for one another is an ongoing public undertaking, subject to argument, exhaustion and occasional resentment.
There will always be somebody who leaves lint in the dryer. What we should be asking is whether the neighbours still consider the laundry room worth keeping.