Rather Mammon than God
The Swedish welfare state’s model of education and social care has, in its social democratic ideological base, displaced market solutions as well as voluntary communities’, the civil society’s, solutions. According to this ideological position, market solutions within social care would lead to the so-called ‘end users’ (preschoolers, school children, patients, the elderly and others) receiving poorer service, as the profit motive would ensure such an outcome.
It was assumed that the person who ran a business in order to make money would deliver services of lower quality in order to increase their profits. Olof Palme’s 1984 polemical statement against SAF (the Swedish Employers’ Confederation), at SAF’s own congress, about the perils of private alternatives in childcare, captures the essence of this ideologically motivated position:
“With regard to the social care of children, it is their best interests that should be at the forefront […] I have studied how it is, for example, in the United States […] It is run as a major, nationwide business, which is surely the same as SAF. Day care centres are extremely centralised, standardised, and are called ‘Kentucky Fried Children’ by some. The results for children are bad, as they take second place.”
Opposition to solutions within the civil society framework has not been as pronounced, but has yielded a similar result. Not least because the ban on private alternatives involved state meanness towards alternatives, operators of care services were not businesses, but instead non-profit organisations, cooperatives or other voluntary associations. The history of the welfare state’s growth has, for social democracy, focused on freeing the individual from what has been considered the degrading ties to family or community, and instead tie the individual to an impartial and neutral public bureaucracy.
The bourgeois-liberal opposition to this model came to be formulated as a clear alternative centred on private market solutions. Social Democratic political opposition was gradually broken down by the abolition of the Lex Pysslingen (from 1984) in 1992. Thereafter followed things such as: free choice of school; the abolition of the prohibition on private employment agencies; advertising-funded radio and television; more liberal telecommunications legislation; the right of disabled people to choose assistance services and other assistance from private providers; the abolition of Stopplagen in 2007, which made it easier for councils to transfer the operation of hospitals to private actors; deductions for household services; the law on the freedom of choice in the healthcare sector (LOV); childcare vouchers; and an obligation for counties to apply the system of choice in primary care.
This process is characterised by the fact that when the public ownership and public operation were pushed back, market solutions took over and expanded. Civil society, the voluntary communities, never arose as an alternative to public monopolies; for example, there was no significant number of schools run by large charitable foundations that were already engaged in supporting research or researchers in higher education. Neither did we see players like the Church of Sweden or other religious communities as alternatives to private, for-profit companies in social care or education. We got no new large hospitals run by non-profit organisations such as foundations, professional associations, religious congregations, which we often see in other countries.
How is it that when the state was forced back, the freed space was filled primarily by private companies? How was it that the various civil society actors did not get, or did not take a larger space, when we know from experience that healthcare, social care and education are areas where civil society in other countries is strong?
Some interacting explanations may be relevant here. The expansion of public sector power into the social care sector has historically pushed back civil society, but the government in Sweden has not, to the same degree, pushed back private sector participants from the economy’s other sectors – industry, private service sector and other business areas. When liberalisation, in turn, pushed back the public monopoly in the social care sector, private players found it easier to fill the void created because they had been in place (and could, quite simply, move capital from one sector to another). One lesson of this is that civil society, once it has been pushed out, needs a longer period to return.
Within the Swedish middle class, the interest in civil society’s voluntary communities was weak, because many of the middle class’ ideological positions against the Social Democratic monopoly of power came to be formed during both the planned-economy debate of the 1940s, and during the löntagarfondsstriden (the employees’ fund struggle) of the 1980s, and thus came to be only about free market conditions. When the wave of liberalisation began in Sweden in the early 1990s, there were not really any developed ideas about whether civil society could come back within the care sector, when public operators were made to retreat. Nor was there any discussion about what political decisions could look like (if they could even be conceived in that way) that facilitated civil society organisations entering the social care sector. Furthermore we saw, and see, some liberal elements of bourgeois civil society, like all forms of human activity, which are based on voluntary collaboration, outside the state’s coercive power. According to this approach, private players in the market sphere, within the framework of the free association under law, are thus also part of civil society. Hans Zetterberg’s distinction between the three spheres and their various virtues and values ??had not been reflected in political practice or had not led to any concrete political positions that differed from the market, on the one hand, and civil society on the other.
Finally, within both Swedish bourgeois and social democratic political worldviews, there is a modernist scepticism that many of civil society’s voluntary collaborations are done with traditional overtones – i.e., that the voluntary collaborations that bring people together are based on traditional human communities such as the family or cultural, ethnic or religious identities. One can see it clearly in the pronounced scepticism of leading bourgeois politicians regarding denominational schools, home schooling or religiously motivated charity, but which is also usually accompanied by similar statements by leading Social Democrats.
When the Administrative Court of Appeal in Gothenburg set aside an earlier judgment from an administrative court, and admitted that a Jewish family could home-school its children, the school commissioner in Stockholm, Lotta Edholm from the Liberal Party, said this on his blog on October 22, 2012 with the following headline: ”The Administrative Court’s ruling on homeschooling risks terrible consequences.”
The number of children who are home-schooled in Sweden is almost 250, and this number is expected to decline as a result of the government, in mid-2011, adding additional barriers to homeschooling. One of the reasons for the government’s decision was that it looked with disapproval on the increase in homeschooled children from nearly 100 in 2006. In Finland, where homeschooling, on the basis of a law on compulsory education, is a good alternative to regular education, homeschooling is reported to include 400-600 children.
From this perspective, school commissioner Edholm’s disproportionate reaction to the judgment in Gothenburg is significant. Edholm’s article begins with her guessing the reasons why parents want to engage in homeschooling: ”Presumably this is about parents who, at all costs, want to keep their children away from the open society and who under no circumstances will be favourable to schooling in a school with children that do not belong to the same religious group.” Edholm continues in her regret: ”How powerless we local politicians are facing parents who, despite penalties, continue to isolate their children at home”, and stresses that it is ”extremely serious” that ”this isolation instead be sanctioned”. She ends by telling how she ”abhors the trapped-life stories to which we condemn these children”.
Beyond the fringe phenomenon of homeschooling, free school-choice has also been a focus of unwillingness on the part of the political blocs to recognise the positive role of the institutions of civil society when public monopolies are pushed back. The main target has been denominational private schools, even when they are based on cultural and religious communities that often coincide, such as the Jewish Hillelskolan, which is run by a ”non-profit Jewish association with the purpose of conducting formal Jewish education in Stockholm” (quotation from the Hillel website).
The Social Democrats’ spokesman on school issues, Mikael Damberg, in an interview on 5 September, 2011 in the online magazine Faith and Politics (formerly Brotherhood), asserted that the development of free schools on denominational grounds was hampering scientific achievements: ”Taxpayer-funded schools in Sweden should build their teaching on research and proven experience. With religious schools, there is a risk that one will divide students according to religious beliefs. It is a dangerous development.”
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Denominational schools could become a recruitment centre for future suicide bombers and terrorists, said the Liberal Party’s Nyamko Sabuni in an article in Expressen (29/8 2005), the year before she became minister of integration in Reinfeldt’s first government (and later equality minister in the second): ”I also feel concern that Muslim schools risk becoming a natural recruitment centre for future suicide bombers. In the fight against terrorism, therefore, it is important to question these schools. Today, there are indeed terrorists who profess Islam, but we are no strangers to Christian or Jewish terrorists, either.”
Ultimately, the question is about parents’ versus children’s freedom, Sabuni emphasises, and she seems to suggest that because many children face harm from within the family, state pressure on individuals may be preferable.
One argument could be that parents always know what is best for their children. However, this can be questioned in light of all the statistics showing the extent of child abuse within the family. International conventions create a situation where there is a high-risk that the power that previously rested with the state has now been transferred to groups; where individuals were previously confronted by state power, they are now exposed to a cacophony of social pressures and quasi-moralistic extortion of the groups to which they belong, which may be ethnic, cultural or religious – each seeking to deprive the individual of the right to make their own moral choice. The difference is that the pressure from the group does not take place in an equally balanced situation, as in the case of government power.
The kinds of manifestations of voluntary cooperation within civil society, such as homeschooling or denominational schools on cultural and religious grounds, stand for challenging the secular and modernist narrative in Sweden that religion, or ethnic or national identity are chimeras that belong to the past (‘elves and trolls’ – something to which the liberal discourse often appeals). They are also difficult to relate to politically, because they necessarily have uniform goals in a public context (equal treatment, democratic principles) or are controlled by a single market principle (profit maximisation). The goals are instead often self-defined and diverse – the preservation of their cultural, ethnic, religious or linguistic identity, a common humanity on the basis of strong religious beliefs, a goal of mission and conversion, and so on.
For large numbers of both social democrats and the bourgeoisie alike, mammon becomes easier to comprehend than God (whether one fights against or affirms the idea of profit). When the government monopoly over healthcare, education and social care was pushed back, a secular, cosmopolitan and modernist bourgeoisie has chosen mammon over God.
Författare och företagare.