This began as a weekly letter to my Swedish readers at Friborna tankar, written in the middle of a national election campaign. I have rebuilt it for an English-speaking audience, which mostly means explaining what Swedes take for granted and cutting what only Swedes argue about. The argument itself travels.
The fence around your land stops nobody. A few planks and a gate will not hold back anyone who genuinely wants in. What the fence does is mark where yours ends and someone else’s begins. It works because we agree what that mark means, and because there is a state behind it willing to punish the man who ignores it. Take away the agreement and the courts and you have a piece of wood lying in the grass.
Where it does work, it restricts other people’s freedom of movement. And that same restriction is the only reason you can build and plant inside it without a stronger man helping himself to the land tomorrow. The limit and the possibility are the same thing.
That is how I understand the state. It exists to make us free, and it does so by putting up a small number of clear fences, defending them, and then leaving us alone inside them. Real freedom does not appear in the absence of boundaries. It appears when the boundaries are few, known and enforced.
Two extremes stand in the way of that arrangement. The first holds that almost any constraint on the individual is a violation, and that freedom is maximised when each man does exactly as he pleases. This works beautifully for as long as everyone else is decent. But with nobody defending property, your land is yours only until somebody stronger decides otherwise, and with nobody enforcing contracts, trade becomes a question of who can bring more men.
The second extreme treats the state as the answer to every problem. Every abuse requires a new rule. Every accident a new agency. Every injustice a new benefit. Every regrettable human behaviour a new action plan. What remains at the end is a man safely upholstered by the state who cannot put up a shed on his own land without asking permission.
I want clear boundaries and a great deal of freedom inside them.
The freeholder and the entrepreneur are the two figures I have in mind, and the first needs a word of explanation because English does not quite have it. The Swedish is odalbonde. The odal means land held outright rather than held from a lord, and Sweden was never organised around the tenancy and obligation that shaped most of the continental countryside. The freeholding peasantry sat in the old Swedish parliament as an estate of its own, alongside the nobility, the clergy and the burghers. The nearest English word is yeoman, and it carries roughly the right smell.
The entrepreneur has never held a plough, and pairing him with an old Nordic idea about land may look like a stretch. It is not. The farmer has to know that the field he works is still his tomorrow. The entrepreneur has to know that the rules of his trade will not be rewritten because a minister needs to look decisive before the next poll. Both are asking the state for the same thing, which is to be left in possession of what they have made. Property and predictability, and then the right to make their own decisions and live with the consequences.
That is a considerably more interesting freedom than the one on offer from consumer society. Choosing between fifty kinds of toothpaste is not freedom worth the name. Buying a piece of land and building something on it is. Starting a business, raising a family, making something that outlasts you.
I call it the freedom to cultivate. I mean cultivation in a wider sense than potatoes and carrots.
But nobody arrives from nowhere. The freedom to cultivate does not mean every man for himself. I have never had much time for the hyper-individualism in which the self always comes before the group and every obligation to others counts as a trespass on personal autonomy. We are not born as free-standing individuals onto a blank board. We are born into a family, a language, a people and a history, and obligations come with them. The parent owes them to the child, the grown child to his ageing parents, the living generation to those not yet born.
None of this stands opposed to freedom. It is the precondition for it. A society of people who can take responsibility for themselves and for each other needs less state. Where the family works, the agency does not have to step in. Where neighbours know each other, no municipal coordinator is required to manufacture social cohesion. A man who can carry responsibility can also be left alone.
There is a social dimension to the radical right that is almost always forgotten, and since the term does a lot of work in English-language commentary I should say what I mean by it. I mean a politics of rootedness, self-determination and inherited obligation, not a politics of grievance. Nobody gets left in the ditch. But care without demands is not care.
Life hands out blows. People fall ill, businesses fail, marriages break. A man can do everything right and still end up on his knees. A decent society puts out a hand at that point. We share our bread. We do not offer a permanent teat.
Community produces rights and duties in the same breath. If I am willing to help you when you are down, I am also entitled to demand that you try to get up. If we are all to contribute when one of us needs it, we cannot accept anyone making parasitism a career. The principle works the same way in a family as it does among friends. I help you because you are one of us, and precisely for that reason I can make demands of you.
A people needs freedom too. If a man needs the freedom to shape his own life, the argument holds one level up. Here I should be careful with the translation. The Swedish folk sits closer to the German Volk than to the English the people. It means a historical community with a language and a shared heritage, not simply whoever happens to be resident in a territory this decade.
Such a community needs the freedom to develop at its own pace and to keep its language and its institutions. The freedom to decide who may settle inside its borders. The freedom to say no.
Why self-determination should be obvious at the level of the individual and suspect the moment we say folk is something I have never understood. You decide who comes into your house. An association decides what it will busy itself with. A family carries a particular responsibility for its own children. Raise the same principle to the national level and a great many people start shifting in their seats.
National sovereignty is the same principle. The Swedish people should be free from foreign rule, and we should be able to develop without having to compete with foreign peoples inside our own territory. That requires borders. The fence again. Not because everything outside it is wicked, but because something has to be ours before we can take responsibility for it.
This freedom has poor representatives in parliament. For anyone on the radical right, the vote is therefore usually a choice of the least bad option: which alternative leaves me the largest fragment of freedom to shape my own life and my own society?
Vote anyway. It costs me a walk to the polling station and it would be foolish to give up the small influence that genuinely exists there. But do not deceive yourself about what you are doing.
Sweden votes in September. Your country votes whenever it votes, and the ritual is the same everywhere. For a few weeks we behave as though the future of the nation is settled. The parties announce that this is the most important election in a generation. Politicians warn of the catastrophe that arrives if the other side wins. Activists mobilise. Relatives fall out on Facebook. Then comes the Monday after, and almost your entire life is still ahead of you.
Do not mistake the ballot paper for power.
The genuinely interesting choices are made daily. Where we live. How we raise our children. Who we spend time with and which relationships we tend. Where we shop and which businesses we keep alive. When we start an association or a meeting place, help the neighbour instead of waiting for the council, teach our children what the school has forgotten or deliberately dropped, build something that needs nobody’s permission to exist.
Such acts are easy to underrate, because no one stands in a television studio counting them on election night. But a society consists of precisely this in the end. Families, businesses, associations, friendships and networks. People who know each other, trust each other and can do things together. That is where real power starts.
When this campaign is over, thousands of Swedes will therefore carry on with the work in the quiet. We meet, we work, we build. We raise our children into capable people. We start businesses and make places for people to gather. We lay the next stone in a foundation meant to stand whatever colour of tie is worn in the cabinet office this term.
That work produces no election-night parties, and no opinion poll tells us we are ahead by 1.7 points. It is real nonetheless.
And when the winners have finished celebrating, the losers have posted their angry threads and the journalists have started speculating about the next poll, the considerably more important question remains.
What are you building?
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