I’m not done yet blogging the branding of Sweden. A couple more points.You can read the first part here.

What was interesting about both Mark Leonard and Simon Anholt is that in their talks on country branding and public diplomacy last week they both publicly professed a belief in the reality of the “welfare utopia” view of Sweden. Perhaps they were just trying to flatter their audience, but it felt like — the expert marketers that they are — they’d been drinking a little bit too much of their own Kool-Aid.

This was surprising, given Leonard’s point that brand images often lag reality. His job with the Cool Brittania campaign had been to update Britain’s long-held reputation for frumpiness with something far more dynamic and accurate. He might have guessed, then, that the view of Sweden as Tillsammans/Together writ large is just as outdated as believing in the Britain of Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill. That Sweden continues to be branded thus even today is a testament to how well the country played the role of Europe’s cold war escape fantasy. My own somewhat Macchiavellian take on this has been to let this sleeping dog lie — it’s an inaccurate but largely positive brand in the minds of most foreigners, so reap the benefits while you can.

To engage in further metaphor abuse, if you were to wake the dog — you might not like its bark. Modern Sweden, from what I can tell, no longer musters vast majorities in favor of third ways or “Swedish” models. The ruling social democrats and assorted left-leaning allies have trailed in the polls ever since I’ve been here (a coincidence), and the odds are in favor of the next government leaning right-of-center.

As if on cue, pro-business group Svenskt Näringsliv this week revealed that it is contributing money (€54,000) in support of the Latvian construction company’s case before a European Court, challenging a Swedish court’s ruling that a Swedish union blockade last year against the Latvians was legal. To translate from the DN article,

Regeringen anser att stödet är en krigsförklaring mot den svenska modellen, och näringsminister Thomas Östros har ifrågasatt om de statliga bolagen kan vara kvar som medlemmar i Svenskt Näringsliv.The government says that the support is a declaration of war against the Swedish model, and economics minister Thomas Östros questioned whether state-owned companies can remain members of Svenskt Näringsliv.

This excerpt is quite revealing — the government does not call it a declaration of war against the Social Democratic model, but against the Swedish model. That’s recasting party ideology as the national brand, and I don’t think that in today’s 50-50 Sweden you can get away with that anymore.

You could argue that there are two dominant narratives/brands in circulation describing Sweden, and their ownership is the cause for a bit of a tussle. One brand is the traditional image of Sweden as a national home (folkhemmet), where no Swede is left behind, and it is claimed by the Social Democrats without objection from Swedish liberals, who regard the folkhem as an outmoded notion in an age of globalization.

The other brand is that of innovative, high-tech entrepreneurial Sweden, and is claimed by the members of Svenskt Näringsliv, but also by the Social Democrats. Just to spell it out: Did high-tech Sweden arise because of low income inequality and unionized labor, or despite high taxes and a welfare system that warps the incentive to work? How much of the credit for Sweden’s world-beating productivityOlle Wästberg proposes a novel (to me) explanation for this in his latest newsletter: The reason productivity is high despite low labor participation rates is precisely because the least productive workers are the ones most likely be let go/drop out, so the average productivity of those remaining rises:
 
“Svensk produktivitet har nu under femton år legat bland de högsta i världen. Ett trendbrott skedde kring 1990. Ekonomerna frågar sig vad som hänt, och sambanden kring produktivitetsförändringar är erkänt svåra att analysera.
 
Det är främst inom tillverkningsindustrin som produktiviteten ökat, något mindre i tjänstesektorn.
 
Jag tror att en delförklaring är att den ekonomiska krisen 1989-95 slog ut de mindre produktiva ur arbetslivet: lågutbildade, funktionshindrade, alkoholproblematiker miste i hög utsträckning sina jobb. De höga arbetskraftskostnaderna har gjort arbetsgivarna allt mer noggranna med vilka de anställer. De anställda som är kvar har kunnat hålla en mycket hög produktionstakt, samtidigt som de haft kunskap att hantera en allt mer komplicerad produktionsteknik.
 
Här har vi andra sidan av höga sjukskrivnings- och förtidspensioneringstal.” goes to Social Democratic policies, and how much to the entrepreneurs and innovators who try to accommodate these policies? Whose version of events, played out before a gallery of international opinion, is correct?

The answer, of course, is both, though with plenty of room for debate about when and how much each component has contributed. But what I think is clearly not plausible is the notion that the Social Democrats should have some sort of monopoly over the Swedish brand abroad.

(Me, I think that Swedish companies do well despite the high taxes and an overly generous welfare system. But that’s not the point of this post.)