“Why do Sweden’s Scandinavian and Baltic neighbours so often publicly claim that Swedes are so anxiously politically correct, or naive, or extreme, and that they think they know better than everyone else? Do Swedes really moralise more than others?”
This are questions that journalist Bengt Lindroth asks himself in his new book Vi som inte var med i kriget; om Sverige, Norden, Europa & coronan (2021) in which he also examines why the climate of opinion in Swedish and Nordic reality has been so polarised during the start of the 21st century, and why the public has become so quarrelsome. Why, in this corner of Europe, do we find it so difficult to behave in some modicum of harmony with the rest of the world? Why is nation-state egoism spreading, now also accentuated by the coronavirus crisis? And what are the challenges ahead for Nordic co-operation after the pandemic, with one of its cornerstones – cultural co-operation – facing serious budget cuts?
Bengt Lindroth discusses these and other current issues with his Finnish-Swedish colleague Yrsa Grüne-Luoma in a live stream from Nordic Culture Point in Helsinki.
Bengt Lindroth, born in 1942, is a freelance journalist having worked for many years as a correspondent for Sveriges Radio in Finland and the Nordic and Baltic countries, and as political editor for Expressen from 1985 to 1994.
Yrsa Grüne-Luoma is a freelance journalist specialising in foreign and security policy.
