#swedengate reflected the curious individualism and collectivism of the welfare state

The #Swedengate thing has a fair bit of attention on Twitter. It started with someone posting on Reddit (and this subsequently screenshotted on Twitter) about how, as a child, they were not offered dinner when playing at their Swedish friend's place. This was then confirmed as a Swedish (and, to some degree, a general Nordic) custom by others. Much bewilderment and condemnation of the Swedish culture as a child-starving horror show has followed, by other Europeans as well as non-Europeans.

I recognize some of this from my own Finnish childhood, I do not recollect ever being offered dinner when at one of my friend's place or vice versa or asking for it. Now, there is some confusion about the specific nature of "dinner". Even if there is no dinner, it is not like there is no food offered to guests *at all*, when people visit each other, there is going to be snacks or cake or whatever, even copious amounts of it. Perhaps the Swedes are different?

It is obvious that at other places of the world, if there was a child of some other family playing at your place, they will get invited for dinner with the family as a matter of course. Clearly there is some difference. Of course, it varies a great deal - indeed, after commenting on this elsewhere, I received many people saying that their own Nordic families have not followed this custom – and non-Nordics saying that their families did not certainly offer food to strange kids. So, of course, what follows will be just amateur sociology.

In the end, I think that as far as there is a custom here, it goes back to one of the strongest, yet often conscious, norms of Nordic life: it is shameful for an adult individual to be dependent on another individual, and it is shameful to make another adult individual dependent on you.

This norm leads to the peculiar Nordic way of how individualism meeting collectivism. Of course, the “individualism” part of this is obvious, one can fundamentally obviously see how this norm creates a society that requires personal strength from individuals (and families). However, the collectivism aspect is that the same norm is a major building block of the welfare state. It is not OK to depend on another *individual* or make them dependent on you… but impersonal institutions are a whole another thing!

Everyone needs a helping hand at times, and it is completely different, in this thinking, if the helping hand is provided by a community that you are a part of and contribute to, not a specific person. In the old times, the community would of course usually be your local village/town, or parish (often the same thing), and later strong societies were created around trade unions, which used to function in a manner not unlike a guild in the pre-welfare-state times, with extensive networks of mutual services, ranging from mutual funds to sports to newspapers and such.

Nowadays, the welfare state, usually conceptualized as an entire nation forming a similar community, serves the same role. The expectation that many people have regarding the welfare state is precisely that there is a social contract; when you can work and at your prime, you work hard, and in exchange the state provides the “safety net” for the times when you cannot do this. Of course, this is hardly the only reason for welfare state - a topic which I’ve written more about here.

Now, I specifically mentioned “adults” here, and obviously children need adults to sustain them, and there is nothing wrong with it. However, the idea is then that it is specifically a family’s job to sustain their child. This then creates the second-order effects that are noted here; the other family feels uncomfortable giving a dinner to the child, since it might make the child’s parents feel like the other family is making them moochers. Likewise, the child themselves might refuse dinner, if offered – if they have already internalized the unconscious social norms behind all this.

Once one realizes that this is the norm, it is easy to see why certain other things separating the Nordic countries from others exist. For instance, when people go to bars, they buy their own drinks; buying rounds is rare, unless there is a special event (or you are drunk enough for norms to not matter). People on dates buy their own meals. Tipping is almost non-existent. Domestic services are not utilized as much as they could be cleaning companies put up little notices on their home pages that you do not need to clean up before the cleaning person comes in.

Adult children leave their parents’ homes as soon as they can after adulthood, and the adults practically push them out the nest, from their part. It is also one of the reasons why feminism made such fast headway in the North – Nordic feminism has always been very much a movement oriented around getting women to work so they do not have to be dependent on their husbands and other men. And so on.

Of course, put it this way and, even if one sees the logic behind all those things, not feeding a neighbor’s child when they’re playing at your place *still* sounds like total moon logic, when put that way. What I’ve described here is hardly the only reason a family might have for not offering a child a meal, and certainly not usually the conscious one – common reasons I’ve seen have included the idea that the child might have allergies, that the giving a child a dinner at a neighbor’s place would mean their parent has cooked dinner for nothing, and so on.

And, of course, as stated before, one of the chief points is that these sorts of customs are not universal in societies; many people in Nordic countries have expressed astonishment about this custom they have never encountered, and particularly the Danes have been insistent that they should not be confused with Swedes. Especially younger people have claimed ignorance of this sort of behavior.

Thus, these habits are on their way out. Other reasons would be the general “Europeanization” of Nordic cultures, as the EU has a habit of slowly grinding away the edges of all national cultures towards an undefined, bland and gray “European” ideal). Immigration also probably plays a role, my feeling from Twitter comments is that it is immigrant-background Swedes who feel the most strongly the tradition does not exist or that they have not encountered it.