Hans L Zetterberg

The Rational Humanitarians

Events in one country have sometimes signaled what is in store for others many years in the future. The establishment of independence and democracy in the United States, for example, foreshadowed by hundred years or more what was to come to the continent of Europe and to other European colonies. In searching for today for the land of tomorrow, attention has sometimes focused on the Nordic countries, and on Sweden in particular. There, by a combination of circumstances much as the case of the United States — including a measure of isolation from major wars, relative prosperity, and high literacy — social structures emerged that seem to be in the cards for other developed countries.
  During the Great Depression, Marquis Childs argued in Sweden — The Middle Way^¹ that the synthesis between capitalism and socialism which Sweden had achieved was in the mainstream of history. The same trends were thought to be present in other countries; in Sweden, however, they had not only been developing for a longer period of time, but the circumstances there were particularly favorable to their growth. The trends were not necessarily measured in simple statistics of wealth, production, and welfare but rather represented both new ways for basic cultural values to be realized and new arrangements between man and his fellowman and between public roles and private pursuits — in short, a new social order. Willy Brandt and Bruno Kreisky, who had spent the years of the Second World War in Scandinavia, brought the Swedish model to the Continent, not to copy it uncritically but to hold it up for inspiration. The Swedes, for their part, began to believe that they were indeed a mod-