It seems to me that the problem with this is that it takes many of the Swedes’ underlying characteristics, particularly their love of being alone and isolated, and really lets them run with it. Thus, today in Sweden most students live by themselves; Swedes have the highest divorce rate in the world (although some might look upon this as a positive,

Finnish nouns have no gender, and, in fact, people have no gender—the word for “he” and “she” is the same, the masculine hän. A Finnish friend tells me that, increasingly, the Finns are just using “it” to refer to everything:

(it hardly helps that the Swedish company insists on naming its least dignified products—doormats, and so forth—after Danish towns).

Finland’s climate and topography must clearly have played a part in forming the Finnish character, but it also seems likely that the Finns’ taciturnity is in some way connected to their homogeneity.

Perhaps more apt than likening the Swedes to frogs would be to say that they were the most diligent of worker bees, happy to toil for the good of the hive. But what made the Swedes such perfect subjects for benign totalitarianism? Historically, several factors paved the way: the alleged Viking egalitarianism; Lutheranism, with its emphasis on colle

for much of the twentieth century Sweden was effectively a one-party state, the party being the Social Democrats.

The Swedes consider themselves far too modern to indulge in this kind of public dressing up; besides, they have never been occupied, so have no such yoke-shrugging to celebrate. Their “National Day” on June 6 is, by comparison, a contrived and halfhearted event being tied up with their break from the Kalmar Union in the sixteenth century. From what

One Norwegian conceded to me that May 17 was really not much more than “a kind of ‘fuck you’ to the Swedes

“Finns distrust verbosity. If you speak for more than four or five minutes at a time, they begin to wonder what you are trying to hide,