Spanish flu helped create Sweden's modern welfare state
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Had they written this 30 years ago this would certainly have been true, Sweden as a nation had heeded Baden Powell's motto "Be Prepared". A large part of this preparation was realised through the unusual but effective way the country had organised its defence which was integrated into most parts of society. The system was called 'Totalförsvaret' (literally 'the total defence') and integrated armed forces, civilian institutions and parts of industry into an organisational structure which was designed to be resistant against the loss of one or more of its arms. There were large stockpiles of material and supplies scattered around the country, these included amongst other 50 mobile field hospitals with 2100 respirators, fully equipped operating theatres, etc. The country had stockpiled food supplies which could last for a maximum of 2 years.
But... nearly all of this was disbanded, given away, thrown away, sold off or demolished in the years after the demise of the Soviet Union. The field hospitals went to the Baltic states, the respirators (new, unused) were given away or thrashed. The food supplies are gone, Sweden has gone from 2 years of supplies to about 16 days, i.e. whatever is in the distributor's warehouses and on the road at the moment.
Before the 90's Sweden had access to about 3600 respirators, now the number seems to be around 520 - seems to be because the "government" has decided this number is critical to the nation's security and as such is not published. The country has the lowest number of hospital beds per capita in the OECD after Portugal.
Maybe SARS2 will help to rebuild this part of the Swedish state? Time will tell.
The defense was truly remarkably in depth and at all levels prepared to continue operations without a remaining chain of command. A Soviet invading force would have of course "won" within weeks, but not before suffering huge losses thanks to always-at-the-ready 200 state of the art fighter bombers using highways all over the country for runways, with a ground crew of only 5 per plane, and a handful of the worlds best (for littoral waters) submarines.
When the coastal artillery would be neutralized, presumably with nukes or speznas, the mobile artillery would retreat inland. The cities were assumed to be nuked, but a large fraction of the city population had underground shelter.
Even with Air and Naval forces depleted, the real struggle for a would be invader would only begin. There were weapons and food stored all over the countryside, and the communicated doctrine was "if you hear about a surrender from anyone, even the prime minister, it's false news. Keep fighting until the country is liberated."
It would have been like Afghanistan, except the insurgents would have had access to better weapons.
All of this had the purpose of deterring the Soviet command from full on ground invasion. Perhaps only nuke the larger cities, destroy some strategic assets and kill the government. In a WW3 scenario, that would have been a win for Sweden.
1980: 50 980 new conscripts trained
1986: 45 572
1990: 41 349
2000: 16 658
2005: 10 169
2008: 6 804
2010: conscription paused
https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/sv/information-och-fakta/var-h...
We are way past it and back to where 50k conscripts should be trained a year again, but I guess everyone is used to lower taxes etc nowadays.
Conscription into the Swedish army was reinstated a few years ago, conscripts are now being called upon to help managing the SARS2 crisis. Depending on how the country emerges from the crisis there might be a chance of rebuilding part of the total defence system starting with the civil defence aspects.
The point being that even at the height of the cold war, the threat was massively overblown, largely because of lack of understanding of how the other side was thinking.
The threat of Russia today is much smaller - for all of Russia's threats to some countries, it is contained to a threat against countries with Russian minorities, and there's no realistic scenario where Russia is suicidal enough to attack an EU country.
And this kind of preparedness was a massive economic drain. Now one can certainly argue that some of the civil defense in terms of field hospitals etc. ought to have been kept up, for a tiny fraction of the cost, and that would be a separate issue.
I grew up in Norway during the cold war, with similar levels of preparedness; air raid siren tests on a regular basis, bomb shelter at our school etc.. The assumption that there was a real threat of invasion was there until Gorbachev, basically, and then it evaporated as the increasing openness and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union showed that the threat assessments throughout the cold war had been completely wrong, and vast amounts of resources that could have gone to e.g. better healthcare had basically been thrown away.
EDIT: This is from Reagans memoirs (taken from [1]), regarding his realisation of the Soviet view of the US:
"Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did...During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike...Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us."
Likewise the West kept posturing on the basis of a belief that the Soviet Union might well decide to attack. The regular air raid siren tests in Norway were not for fun. The regular NATO exercises were not for fun. There was a genuine fear. Only, as it turns out both sides were certain the only party that would be evil enough to strike first was the other side.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83#American_reacti...
Nobody wanted to start a great war, but at least during a couple of incidents things came to close to start by accident. And once started, war takes on a life of its own.
But that belief was driven on both sides by an underlying belief on both sides that they were the good guys and the other side were cartoonish villains.
Neither side questioned the belief that the other side were war mongerers with a crazy willingness to sacrifice to expand, and both sides saw proxy wars as evidence of that while they saw their own involvement as protecting themselves by building alliances and creating buffers.
We see this up to and including Reagan describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", only to then get reality thrown in the face by the Soviet response to Able Archer 83 in particular (and I generally have little respect for Reagan, but he does deserve credit for actually coming to that understanding and acting on it in what was one of the biggest foreign policy about faces in modern history).
It was understandable, though, in that both sides had seen the nazis, and both sides saw the nazis as a model for the other side - the Soviets seeing the nazis as not fundamentally different from capitalist imperialists, and the West seeing the Soviets as not fundamentally different from nazi authoritarianism.
But it was nevertheless in retrospect terrifyingly flawed. It stands as one of the biggest foreign policy fuck-ups in human history that the world for half a century was shaped by the two biggest blocks fundamentally misjudging the intentions and motivations of the other side, despite the vast amount of "intelligence" both sides believed they had about each other.
It makes me terrified to think about, because of the implications it has for what stupid mistakes we're probably still perpetuating when we try to infer the motivations of the major powers.
And there is some indication that Sweden actually had a slightly more nuanced perspective. Olof Palme wanted a nuclear free zone in the Baltic Sea.
This was seen in NATO as a conceit to the Soviets, and maybe the other way around in Soviet command.
The Soviet Union and the U.S. did engage each other in a series of proxy wars. This is not all that surprising: the economic systems of their respective empires were incompatible with that of the other, and in ways that thr existence of one inherently made the other unstable.
In particular, the existence of a rich, relatively-free-market Western Europe, especially West Germany, was absolutely a threat to the Eastern Block: it showed how lousy and untenable the Soviet economic policy was. There was steady movement of people from East to West (prompting the Soviets to build the Iron Curtain lest East Germany find itself with population zero, and to prevent their scientist from publishing in international conferences lest they all defect) and a stream of superior products going from West to East, which made this common knowledge among the population. This made Western Europe a grave, existential threat to the leadership of the Eastern Block. Even if the U.S. had not tried to curtail Soviet expansion elsewhere, this would have made NATO a threat in the sense that it prevented them from solving this problem by ravaging Western Europe using their military might. Such a resolution of the issue would have hurt the U.S., since the Eastern economic system was incomoatible with theirs, and the Atlantic trade was seen as essential for American prosperity. Needless to say, it made sense for them to double down on NATO.
The educated population of the Eastern block understood, and we fully expected the Warsaw Pact to be the one to strike first.
Was the threat assessment of the communist leadership correct? I'd say it was spot on: as society became more open, and as the East started having to rely on CoCom-list products that they couldn't manufacture themselves, itbecame common knowledge that the Eastern economix models have failed, the theatrics became untenable, and eventually the leaders of the Eastern block were deposed, just as they predicted.
Growing up in Hungary does not give you some magic insight into the views of the Soviet leadership; it's simply irrelevant to the question.
We know from the actual people involved that the Soviet leadership believed a US first strike was not just possible, but likely, and that they had no intentions of being the ones to start a war but were intent to finish it. Just like we know Reagan and many other Western leaders genuinely feared a Soviet first strike and had no intentions of being the ones to start a war but were intent to finish it. Just like we know that people like Reagan were shocked when they realized that the other side was thinking exactly the same way as they were, because both sides - unsurprisingly - were the heroes in their own stories rather than the cartoon villains they both saw the other side as.
This is well documented. It took two years of rapprochement between Reagan and Gorbachev before they started trusting that the other side was not just looking for an upper hand to allow them to attack. Even then Reagan held back on going as far in arms reduction as Gorbachev (who motivated more strongly by the economic devastation trying to keep up militarily with the US caused) was prepared to. It took that much because both sides thought they were doing what was necessary to defend themselves, rather than prepare to attack.
> The Soviet Union and the U.S. did engage each other in a series of proxy wars. This is not all that surprising: the economic systems of their respective empires were incompatible with that of the other, and in ways that thr existence of one inherently made the other unstable.
It's not surprising, and not relevant to the question of whether or not either side was prepared to fight an open war over Europe. The proxy wars were about establishing buffers and alliances out of fear of the other side attacking; exactly out of a fear of open war with the other side. Unfortunately for everyone, both sides saw the other side engaging in this and saw it as evidence of expansionism rather than of fear.
> The educated population of the Eastern block understood, and we fully expected the Warsaw Pact to be the one to strike first.
And yet that expectation shows that the population equally failed to understand the Soviet leaderships motivations.
Up until the early years of Stalin, the idea of Soviet expansionism might have held some validity; even perhaps a decade or so after "Socialism in One Country" became policy in 1925 there might have been reason to fear that it was a temporary change to regroup. But not beyond that. Even Soviet involvement in Eastern Europe was about creating a buffer to account for Soviet fear of the West.
You're accounting for it by seeing yourself as part of an expansionist empire. But you were not. You were outsiders; convenient pawns creating a buffer for a terrified leadership with a bunker mentality that saw the Soviet Union itself as what mattered.
No, not really. My claims are not based on my "credentials" as someone who grew up in the Eastern Block, just as yours aren't based on growing up in Norway during the cold war.
> We know from the actual people involved that the Soviet leadership believed a US first strike was not just possible, but likely, and that they had no intentions of being the ones to start a war but were intent to finish it.
This is indeed well-studied. We know from the documents and testimonies released by actual people involved with the Warsaw Pact armies (e.g. Gen. Szucs [3], who was head of Hungarian military intelligence between 1957 and 1989), as well as from documents leaked from Voroshilov Academy, what the actual Soviet battle plans were and what they assumed. There's extensive Hungarian literature on Soviet war plans during the sixties, seventies and beyond (in the off-chance that whoever sees this can read Hungarian, some good starting points on the subject are article [1] and book [2]).
Apart from this direct evidence, we have plenty of indirect evidence of Soviet intentions. Just an example: the known Soviet war plans never consider Austria's neutrality (Vienna being a major target of Hungarian forces), but all of them assume that NATO forces would not be present there when the war breaks out. This does not make sense unless they assume a WP first strike: Soviet intelligence plans are known to have considered NATO forces violating Austria's territory to be the most reliable predictor of an imminent NATO first strike.
> It's not surprising, and not relevant to the question of whether or not either side was prepared to fight an open war over Europe.
The proxy wars were part of the general political situation: there is no reason to dismiss them as irrelevant to the question of war in Europe.
Again, the destabilizing effects of an affluent market-liberal Western Europe on the Soviet Union are well-understood, and outlined in my previous comment. Subjugating WE was a natural geopolitical goal for the Soviet Union, and one we have overwhelming evidence they actively pursued.
> even perhaps a decade or so after "Socialism in One Country" became policy in 1925 there might have been reason to fear that it was a temporary change to regroup
Interesting. You conveniently forget about that part when Stalin conspired with the Nazis to get rid of the buffer zone between their respective empires and greatly expand their respective territories.
> convenient pawns creating a buffer for a terrified leadership with a bunker mentality that saw the Soviet Union itself as what mattered.
Portraying the Soviet Union as a victim of Imperialist aggression, playing the "help, we're being surrounded" card, etc. has always been a staple of the Soviet (and now modern Russian) propaganda playbook (as outlined in [4], an actual textbook in used in the legal successor to the Soviet Union's Voroshilov Academy) intended to prevent the world's public opinion from uniting against them.
The SU maintained an extensive spy network all across Europe and the U.S. (remember that time when they stole the secrets of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and then did it again with the thermonuclear weapons program?); they knew U.S. society and understood American geopolitcal goals really well. One would have to be extremely gullible to think that the Cold War was a misunderstanding on their part. It's not just contrary to evidence, but would not be realistic at all even if we had good evidence for it (which we don't): sorta how you wouldn't conclude that the Sun exploded just because one detector said so [5].
---
As an aside, let me note that "heroes in their own stories seeing the other as cartoon villains" is an incredibly poor model of states and governments; states tend not to make that kind of mistake [6] (I encourage you to try to come up with a clear-cut example of such heroes-and-villains thinking from before the 20th century; as emotional impact dulls, and people can analyze situations with detachment, they realize that there are no such examples).
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[1] M. Horvath: OTKA-49465 Final Report. http://real.mtak.hu/1979/1/49465_ZJ1.pdf, 2009
[2] V. Kovacs: Hungary in the shadow of Nuclear War. ISBN 9789633276587, Zrinyi Kiado Budapest, 2016.
[3] F. Szucs: A nemzetközi helyzet általános jellemzése, a NATO fegyveres erok fejlesztésének helyzete és tendenciái. Honvédelem, vol. 6, 1982.
[4] A. Dugin: Foundations of Geopolitics. 1997.
[6] J. C. Scott: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. ISBN 978-0-30007016-3, Yale University Press, 1998
It didn't care much back then either, except that Sweden was completely surrounded by NATO on one side, and the Soviet realm on the other. To get to Norway in time you'd have to go through Sweden. To control the Baltic Sea you would have to take the island of Gotland, or at least make sure the other side is denied Gotland.
Our defence was just to avoid being caught between a rock and hard place. The idea of not joining NATO was that standing outside of it, we had at least a slim chance of avoid being dragged into the bulk of the NATO - Soviet theatre of war. AS NATO members we would have been hit by default.
How can any of this be hard to understand? Especially against the backdrop of World War 2 being in living memory, and that being neutral worked then. Just barely and from luck, bravery and evil in an even mix, but it did work.
It's not in the strategic interest of Sweden even today to let Russia play divide and conquer. NordStream is such an attempt by Russia to divide Europe, and Sweden has protested, weakly. Russia does not care, of course. Nobody expected it will.
This hollowing out seems to be true across much of the US and Western world. Once the threat of the Soviet Union was removed, the US lost it’s ability to defend it’s own society with equivalent state power. While the slashing and privatization of essential services was lauded by both parties, it seems that this might turn out to have been extreme shortsightedness.
Funny thing is, some people call this lean market-based optimization "efficient".
Nature happens to have a different definition. If you can only survive and operate at peak capacity during regular conditions, and are destroyed during a crisis, there's nothing efficient about that.
Our government was extremely slow to act and didn't shut down anything which let the COVID-19 virus spread rapidly in Sweden and now we have an uncontrolled spread with no testing except for the groups at risk.
The article is basically clickbait, Sweden has one of the lowest amounts of hospital beds and respirators per capita in EU.
We have much fewer ICU-spots than Italy, lower hospital beds etc so we will certainly have a worse time than Italy if we cannot contain the spread somewhat.
The government still hasn't imposed a lot of restrictions compared to other countries. If this is good or bad, will be determined in the future.
Their healthcare system is now the 2nd worst in the EU. Social problems are rising right and left.
WHAT? Now I haven't been to every European country, probably around 30% of them, would be my guess. But literally the country with the best healthcare system of them all, that I've visited a hospital in, have been Sweden.
You got any numbers to backup this claim? Spain, Italy and Greece clearly have a worse healthcare system, and those are just three examples I can think of quickly. Surely lots of countries in eastern europe has it worse than Sweden.
One source showing the opposite of what you're saying:
> Sweden is ranked third by the Commonwealth Fund, with a high proportion of doctors, above-average healthcare spending, and relatively low prescriptions of drugs.
From https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/09/which-countr... which is using Commonwealth Fund as it's source.
I am Italian and I live in Sweden. I am happy my family is in Italy right now.
Spain has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, usually ranked by the WHO within the top 10 while Sweden's was within top 30.
Both Spain and Sweden seems to be about equal if you average the rankings in that list. So surely if Spain has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, Sweden is pretty equal, then Sweden is nowhere near being the "2nd worst in the EU" when it comes to healthcare.
Behind is only Germany, Finland, Denmark, Slovenia, Poland. Ok, last time I've looked they were 2nd worst, now 6th.
Italy and Spain do have much better systems, by far. World Top 5. Even Greece is much better.
the UK system is public, one of the best in the world. the US system is private and one of the best in the world.
> Their healthcare system is now the 2nd worst in the EU.
you haven't been around the EU a lot right? i come from a 3rd world EU country and I can assure you Sweden is in the top EU countries.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/best-healthcare-...
But which one? The US and the UK healthcare systems are polar opposites. US is entirely privatised with many gaps in coverage, and it's the most expensive healthcare system in the world. The UK (despite its general conservativeness) has an entirely socialised system that's the cheapest in Europe.
But yes, Sweden handled this ineptly. People were coming home from hot spots in Italy - they were not tested, not told to self quarantine, anything. That's just plain stupid and slow, there's no excuse for that.
Parents who otherwise would be working at hospitals or other important features of a society. But there has been a lot of other options that just passed as you mention.
Since it is a pandemic, the spread of the virus is inevitable. If we would quarantine whole cities too early, or take other measures too early, it would just hurt us economically and push the problem forward. It's all about all about timing now and flattening the curve, which we have under control at the moment.
I am proud of our government taking decisions based on the public health authority's recommendations which are based on science. Compared to some other countries who take decisions not based on science (e.g. Denmark closing it's borders at the time was not recommended by their public health authority).
I am of the very unpopular opinion that all people actually die, that quality of life is the only thing that trumps life, and that we have to bring these things into the equation at some level. Now some people read this and immediately think that I suggest that we do nothing and let everyone die, but no I just want us to consider all sides of the equation thoroughly.
Having said that, I grew up in Östersund and found the article fascinating and a good read.
One interesting thing is that now, a 100 years later, the tourism of the region once again brings a pandemic. Swedens largest ski resort Åre, an hour west of Östersund, has a bunch of Covid-19 cases that has spread through after ski parties (which has since stopped).
Some context to the article not relating to Covid-19:
Jämtland, the region where Östersund is located, is located in the geographic middle of Sweden, but is considered to be in the northern parts because the demographic of the country is heavily skewed south. In the west it borders Norway and in 1563–1677 it switched between being part of Denmark/Norway and Sweden 13(!) times. Perhaps as a result of this there is still a strong sense of regional identity. Among other things Jämtland is a "fake republic" with a "fake president" which gives a speech during the music festival once a year. This is just in good fun and the speech is mostly about peace, love and understanding, but hearing 15k people singing the regional anthem "Jämtlandssången" after the speech always gives me goosebumps.
Östersund has always been strategically important militarily, in semi-recent times because the Soviet Union would have to pass it to take Trondheim in Norway and the harbor there. The article mentions the airbase closing down, but there were other military units that were disbanded as well. The article touches on this mentioning the university, but another reason the town is still successful today is that it also supported newly unemployed military personel in starting companies. Since one of the units that were disbanded(/moved?) was the military technical school, the city managed to keep a bunch of people with higher education which might otherwise have relocated and now has a few tech-companies and a somewhat entrepreneurial spirit.
This is just some stream of consciousness stuff, while I live in Stockholm now I got excited "my city" was featured on HN. :)
It is a beautiful city and region with fantastic nature and a very long and fascinating history, definitely visit it if you have the opportunity!
I suspect they aren't linked. Societies have generally changed a lot in the past 100 years. Pre- and Post- WWI Europe are different beasts.
"As the epidemic raged in late August, when around 20 people were dying daily, the city’s bank director Carl Lignell withdrew funds from Stockholm without authorisation and requisitioned a school for use as a hospital (the city didn’t have one). "
..
"“What is interesting is that, after the epidemic, the state dropped investigations against Lignell and made tentative steps towards a cooperative approach to social reform. Issues such as poor nutrition and housing were on the political agenda,” says Hedlund. Anyone trying to date the inception of Sweden’s welfare state cannot overlook the events of autumn 1918."
You can argue about the causality but it's not clickbait in the sense that it interviews a local expert who is making a case that it was a significant factor.
Do you mean to suggest rich people are always hit as hard as poor people?
Social inequality does not make a pandemic to hit harder, for example the lack of rich people (reduced inequality) would not decrease the rate of infection of the rest of the population. A city with all poor people (low inequality) would probably be hit even harder, so the living conditions are a factor at amplifying the effect of a pandemic, inequality is not. Inequality in theory slightly reduces the hit if you assume the rich will better take care of themselves.
Not that I think the Netherlands is doing much better though. Overall I think it's very frustrating to see the extremely slow response in both Europe and the US after seeing multiple countries deal with the pandemic more or less successfully.
Sweden seem to be prioritizing the economy heavily.
Comparing the two responses is going to be interesting once this all blows over
It would be great if we could count on personal responsibility - in theory we should be able to go out and bike/hike without interacting with any people and avoid total imprisonment that way. But it doesn't look like that's working, people are still gathering and socializing quite a lot. Most people are just not aware of the urgency and don't fear for their own health, thereby discounting other people's health. Even this lack of personal fear is probably unjustified by now - by the time they'll get sick the hospital system will be overwhelmed.
This is really problematic. It looks like outliers know-it-all could be ruining it for the rest of us.
I wonder if governments could use a heavy hammer and broadcast 24/24 (or at random) footages from Italian hospitals.
I think the saw the bad PR UK got, and decided it's better to keep silent about it. Shady, but smart. They have to massage that Sweden image any way they can.
Yesterday prime minister gave a national speech. He didn’t say anything new, except “more lives of loved ones might be lost, and we should prepare and take responsibility to avoid that”. Nothing really new.
The association between the flu and that what happened 30-40 years later sounds a little bit like a click bait.