Northern Lights

….but we’re is still pleased it has a dark side

I left Sweden in the 1980s when the self satisfaction started to get on my nerves.
There is a joke circulating in Brussels: a typical EU seminar of 27 experts, all exchanging ideas, except the Swedish delegate who sits, arms crossed, quietly. “Why don’t you make a contribution?” jokes her Italian neighbour. “Okay, well, why don’t you just do what we do,” says the Swedish delegate.
It took me a long time to accept that there was a sound basis for that smugness, but now I do.
One can have a lot of visual impressions of Sweden – distinctly unobese men and women sitting under parasols in old town squares, Pippi Long-stocking and her monkey, Stockholm stranded in ice and snow, King Carl Gustaf walking down the Nobel inscribed carpet, the deer in Lapland, the tanned youth sunbathing on the bare rocks of the western archipelago, the fashion models who appear to have a sideline in Olympic medals.

But here are the numbers: according the Economist Intelligence Unit, Sweden ranks in first place among 167 countries in democratic values. In the World Economic Forum gender gap study, Sweden is the most egalitarian country in the world. It nearly tops the UN index on development. Sweden has the world’s third most competitive economy and the world’s highest per capita spending on Research and development. It has the world’s lowest infant mortality rate and the second best environmental performance. And so it goes on.
Sweden is also the world’s top arms exporter, per capita, along with Israel, the grit in the oyster, as it may have contributed to the death of one prime minister and certainly destroyed the career of another.


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HOW MANY countries with a population of under ten million produce one, let alone two, famous car manufacturers?
Nul points if you guessed Belgium or Switzerland. (with which Sweden is often confused. Totally understandable given the fact both countries have crosses in their flags, and are neutral.) Volvo and Saab work in close collaboration with legislators in parliament and the bureaucrats of the Swedish national roads administration (NRA), lead the way for Sweden in two areas in the automotive world: traffic safety, and alternative fuels.
. The country already has the lowest traffic mortality rates, but the government is committed to its zero vision of no road deaths at all.
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Three years ago I was tooling around the northern town of Borlange (seat of the NRA) in a modified Volvo with a rather irritating woman’s voice telling me when I exceeded the speed limit for that kind of road, detected by automatic sensors. The gas pedal vibrated uncomfortably. It was easier just to keep to the speed limit; overtaking was, of course, impossible,
Before I started the car I was asked to breathe into a plastic mouthpiece attached by a coiled lead to an apparatus in the dashboard. This was an alcolock. Had I had any ethanol in my breath, the car would not have started. It was hard work.One impact assessment produced by the Dutch transport ministry laconically noted that alcolocks were not to be recommended to asthmatics. By the time the light showed green, my heart was pounding from exertion.
These bits of prototype technology were quite crude, but since the company which invented the modern seatbelt has made commercially available several safety enhancing modifications; they include lane departure warning, autobrakes (if you’re too close to the car in front), and driver alert control, which uses sensors and cameras to determine if the vehicle is driven in a controlled way: 50 pc of accidents are due to driver distractedness; when erratic control is indicated, a coffee cup signal lights up: a hint, I was informed recently by Anders Eugensson, a Volvo traffic analyst, to take a break.
[[[It is not known whether any of these safety measures will be available on entrepreneur Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spacecraft, which will begin commercial space flights in 2010 from the Laplandic space centre at Kiruna. For, $200,000 passengers will be launched into the aurora borealis and through to the edges of space at 115km above earth, where people will be able to enjoy six minutes of weightlessness – provided they take their seatbelts off, of course]]]
Volvo’s innovations do nothing to dispel Swedes’ image as serious and, well, sober, but Volvo’s designers sometimes flaunt their more light-hearted side: it assembled an all woman design team to make a concept car that women actually want. After consulting Volvo’s workforce, the all-female team led by designer Eva-Lisa Andersson (picture) produced a car that parks automatically, has an engine that automatically books an appointment at garage when needed – in fact the bonnet cannot be opened by non-professionals. It has changeable seat covers, cinema type rear seats, and gull wing remotely operated doors, to avoid the problem of shopping bags on the rainy pavement. The one thing it doesn’t seem to have is a system that prevents women from being overcharged at the aforementioned garages, although, as the world’s most egalitarian country, this probably happens less in Sweden than elsewhere.

In the second world war, with access to oil supplies cut off, Swedes pioneered the use of wood gas in their cars: the raw material was everywhere, since the country is 60 percent forest. These days though, Nicholas Gustafsson, Volvo’s alternative fuels expert tells me, the more common way of avoiding oil dependence is ethanol, where Sweden is the European leader, partly due to government’s passing of a law that required every petrol station in the country to provide ethanol pumps. The government also granted tax concessions, an exemption on the Stockholm congestion charge and a taxpayer funded cashback grant for individuals who stumped up for the slightly dearer ethanol-compatible cars.
There are more than 1,500 ethanol filling stations in Sweden (the UK has about 20), more than the rest of Europe put together, but most cars are sold as flexi-fuel models, which means they can run on either petrol or ethanol in any concentration: so if the tank is half full of ethanol and the owners fills up with petrol, the car’s system will adjust to the new 50-50 mix. Ethanol produces 60 percent less carbon dioxide than petrol. At a Chatham house conference I attended a few months ago it was made very clear to me that ethanol was a happy medium, since biogas and hydrogen cell fuel vehicles that produced less CO2 were currently more expensive. Financial incentives aside, Swedes do also benefit from a strong sene of national team spirit, and the desire to do the best thing – or better than the English anyway, with whom the Swedes compare themselves as much as the Scots, but with better success.

Although Swedes are a nation of proudly self conscious early adopters possessed of a government that pushes innovation in many ways, it would be a mistake to think of Swedes as pliable collectivists.
The country has an almost unparalleled tradition of individual innovators and inventors: the zip fastener, the ball bearing, the propeller, the refrigerator and the pacemaker are a few examples. It was the Swede Niklas Zennstrom who invented Skype, the technology that allows free calls worldwide via the internet. .I have heard the reasons put down to the long, lonely winters when people had nothing else to but think.
But the most famous inventor of modern times is arguably Hakan Lans, 60, recently named the best European inventor in the last 20 years, who invented the computer mouse, computer colour graphics and – above all – a revolutionary system of air navigation. .
Using GPS positioning, the system allows planes with the equipment installed to see the height, speed, location and direction of all other planes in the sky; currently they fly virtually blind, on verbal instructions from ground control
Lans’s system is truly revolutionary: it will reduce delays due to the current necessity of large flight distance separation and ground control error responsible for at least two bug runway accidents in the last few years – but it also comes up against huge vested interests. It also makes planes independent of centralised control, which no government in this post-911 era likes.
So while Lans’s computer navigation system is now the compulsory worldwide standard for ships, it has yet to be implemented in aviation outside Sweden and Russia, despite its evident superiority over the current technology.
If being a small country helps in being an early adopter of technology ,,the flipside is that small countries have, alas, less clout on the world stage when faced with the vested interests of larger powers.

Another disadvantage of being a small country is that any indigenous defence industry is extremely reliant on exports. Add this to neutrality and a purportedly ethical arms export policy and Sweden’s arms manufacturers face a double challenge.
Sweden, amazing though it may seem given the country’s image, is the world’s first or second biggest arms exporter per capita. Sweden after all gave the world the Nobel peace prize. But the country’s engineering culture and the self sufficiency imposed by neutrality has produced fine armaments across the whole range.
But here the dark side of Sweden is manifest, through a history of falsified expert certificates which specified end user destinations that were safe countries but which everyone knew were exported onwards to warring or oppressive regimes: it is well known the government looks through its fingers on this.
In addition, Swedish arms firms have made a small reputation for themselves as champion bribers. The most notorious case was in the 1980s, when Sweden’s Bofors company won to many’s surprise an export order for 410 howitzers to India, ahead of a favoured French rival, Sofma.

Rajiv Gandhi, the newly elected and youthful Indian prime minister, had specifically and very publicly announced that no bribes must be paid on this deal, since he had been elected on Kennedyesque Mr Clean ticket. But bribes there were all the same, allegedly ending up in Gandhi’s own pocket. He was turfed out at the next election. For many years, the word Bofors entered the lexicon and became a synonym in India for everything rotten and stinking, as in “Hey, this mango tastes of Bofors.”..
And Rajiv might not have been the only political victim. A book recently published to good reviews in Sweden argues that Olof Palme was killed by Swedish military types with a stake in the bribes deal going through. Palme was rather an idealistic chap and the book builds up a convincing case that he was about to stop the deal happening. In the event, the contract was signed without problems two weeks after his assassination.

The Bofors scandal had huge reverberations not only in India but also in Sweden, yet Swedish arms firms continue the practice
Gripen International, which produces a small, relatively cheap, but advanced jetfighter has recently been revealed to have bribed the leaders of the Czech republic and Hungary to secure a deal over the heads of rivals such as the Lockheed F-16. The
To be fair, bribes are nothing new in the arms industry, but this tells us something new and, to me, oddly attractive about Sweden, which in most respects behaves like the perfect teacher’s pet in the global classroom of nation states. If you throw in the political assassinations – Anna Lindh, the foreign minister, was killed a few years ago – it builds up something of a picture of Sweden’s darker side.
In the brochures you have Swedish girls smiling and wearing bicycle helmets, cycling through forests. But when I went to Sweden a few years ago to investigate the Palme murder, I saw a different country: a fog and snow bound Stockholm where you could imagine every Volvo garlanding exhaust fumes was following you; where you met shady military types and fervent anti communist businessmen. I rather liked that. A place which only faces you with its bright side is dead, like the moon. (Which was photographed by astronauts using Swedish Hasselblad cameras.)