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 He might have guessed, then, that the view of Sweden as Tillsammans/Together writ large is just as outdated as believing in the Britain of Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill.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.)

Last Wednesday I attended a half-day conference in StockholmAt Rival. on public diplomacy, nation branding, and Sweden’s image abroad. Speakers included Olle Wästberg, head of the Swedish InstituteHe was previously Consul General for Sweden in New York, where I once met him at a party at Anna L.’s loft., Leif Pagrotsky, Sweden’s minister for education, research and culture, Mark Leonard, the mind behind Tony Blair’s successful Cool Brittania rebranding campaign, and Simon Anholt, the authority most often on tap when countries decide to talk brandingIt is Anholt who was behind the recent survey that picked Sweden as the country with the world’s most powerful brand (albeit from a limited menu of 11 countries). He also said he “sort of doubts it” Sweden will top the next survey, which comes out quarterly, as it will include 25 countries, including strong competitiors Canada, New Zealand, Switzerand and Australia..

If you speak Swedish, then you can read Bloggforumer Jonas Morian’s account. He zooms in on the most surprising part of the event: Pagrotsky ripped into Svenskt Näringsliv, a pro-business interest group, for willingly sabotaging Sweden’s image abroad in order to score political points at home against the ruling Social Democrats. The example he proffered is an interview he gave the FT extolling Sweden as a desirable place to invest, only to have a Svenskt Näringsliv member write a letter to the editor contradicting the minister.

This was not the only debate of this kind that erupted during the past week. June 6 saw the publication of a letter in a Latvian daily on the occassion of Sweden’s national day, apologising for the Swedish government’s support of a recent trade union blockade of a Latvian construction firm operating in Sweden. The letter was signed by 50 Swedes of a liberal persuasion. This prompted Hans Karlsson, the Swedish minister for employment, to demand an apology for the apology from those in the oppostion parties who had signed it.

All this raises a great many interesting questions in the context of public diplomacy and nation branding. Suddenly we’re no longer just discussing what Sweden’s image abroad is, but also about who owns this image, whose responsibility it is to maintain it, and whether there is a patriotic duty for Swedish citizens to present a unified face before foreigners when it comes to this image.

But first, what precisely is public diplomacy? Leonard defined it as “to understand, inform, influence and build relationships with civil society abroad in order to create a positive environment for the fulfillment of (Swedish) political and economic objectives.” This might sound like propaganda tout court, but in fact it is meant to convey a more honest, cooperative approach to making other people like you, in the same way that Robert Scoble blogging for Microsoft is meant to make us like the company, especially because he sometimes concedes a point or takes up your cause with Bill. It’s all rather just a clever implementation of Joseph Nye’s notion of soft power, and it works for me.

The other thing to take home from Leonard’s speech is that these days, governments only have marginal control over a country’s image abroad; Embassies have relatively little impact on a foreign public’s perceptions. Instead, it is foreign correspondents covering local US news who inform most Europeans about the goings-on there. It’s Swedish tourists just being themselves in Greece who shape perceptions of Sweden there. It’s foreign students in Italy deciding that the country is a political basket case. All this is rather obvious, really.

The decentralized way in which a country’s image is contructed in the minds of foreigners constrains those who would deign to tweak it. If the branding exercise begins to strain credibility, then it becomes propaganda, which in these days eventually means a PR backlash.

Anholt argued in his talk that nation branding at its core is about articulating a common identity — and this begins with the stories citizens tell each other about who they are. It’s a bit marketingese, but I can buy into that. In which case, if Swedes agree on what these common stories are, then the task of branding Sweden abroad is made much easier.

But what if Swedes do not agree on which stories are common to all? Or what if they believe that some of these stories are nothing to be proud of? What if Pagrotsky’s story to the FT is not the consensus view held by Swedes, but one of several competing narratives about what Sweden really is?

I think the situation is somewhat analogous to what’s been happening in the US. It used to be the case that Americans left partisan bickering at home when travelling abroad. Overseas, Americans would rally around the flag and support their president, regardless of whether he was Republican or Democrat, because flag and president were symbols of the country that transcended partisanship — they formed part of the narrative that all Americans could agree on.

This pact has frayed before, notably during the Vietnam war, and it has frayed again post-9/11, as exemplified by the Dixie Chicks in the runup to the second Iraq war: They told Europeans they were ashamed President Bush was from Texas because they felt “the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world.”

If one is a patriot, when is it alright to break rank and criticize government policy abroad? Never? In that case, the Dixie Chicks were wrong, as was Svenskt Näringsliv and the 50 Swedish liberals. (Not to mention Alexander Solzhenitsyn.)

A more workable answer is that, if you are a patriotI keep on adding “if you are a patriot” as a qualifier, as I myself am not a patriot of any stripe., it is alright to take the partisan battle abroad if you feel your government is attempting to recast its ideological underpinnings as your country’s national brand.

To American liberals I’ve talked to, Bush’s endorsement of neo-con foreign policy prescriptions after 9/11 seemed to amount to that. When their domestic opposition to the war in Iraq led to their patriotism being questioned, these suspicions were bolstered.

In Sweden, the stakes are not nearly as high, but we have a similar situation: In the case of the letter to the FT, the author seems to feel that the image of Sweden being promoted abroad — as a business-friendly place to invest — is belied by actual government policy. In the case of the apology to the Latvians, the authors seem to be saying that the ruling Social Democrat’s regulatory approach to the labor market — “ordning och reda” — used to prevent Latvians from competing in Sweden, is not in fact a core Swedish value, but rather a Social Democratic ideology whose effect abroad is harming the image the Baltic states have of Sweden as the example to emulate. The letter of apology to the Latvians, then, becomes an attempt to redress the balance of the impressions that form the image of Sweden in the minds of Latvians.

If it is the government that owns the Swedish brand, then these letters certainly are unpatriotic attempts at interfering with affairs of state, and Pagrotsky and Karlsson are right. But if the brand is owned by the people, then a government policy with effects abroad that strays too far from common values should be expected to lead to letters like these.