Never again

And yet, as Gunnar pointed out less enthusiastically about whether social democracy in Europe is really experiencing a revival, Germany was far ahead of Sweden.

After World War II, when democracy returned to West Germany, the country passed a set of new laws in 1949 to ensure that it would never relive the disaster in the Third Reich. Hitler had come to power in a country with a very liberal constitution and used democratic freedoms to undermine and then dismantle democracy itself.

The new German constitution set in motion obstacles to radical, undemocratic tendencies by giving the Federal Republic powers to ban unconstitutional parties (which it used, first in 1952 to shut down the neo-Nazi Socialist National Party and then the German Communist Party four years later.)

The law can be distinguished from morality.

What became known as “defensive democracy” in Germany led to a European renaissance of natural law – the idea that people have inherent rights and that regulation and morality should be deeply linked. As such, several countries, including Norway, now agreed that the law must rest on inalienable rights – the same conviction that inspired the 1948 UN The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But not in Sweden. In my home country, SAP’s Social Democrats had, during their childhood, been fully committed to a concept of what is called “legal positivism” – the idea that what the law is must be distinguished from what the law should to be; in other words: the law can be separated from morality.

So Nazism, fascism and other ugly isms hardly appeared at all in the Swedish legal discourse during the decade that followed the war. In the eyes of my parents ‘and grandparents’ generations, there was no need: the country’s legal system had passed the test of the totalitarian era with flying colors, with broad support for the burgeoning welfare state that averted the threat of extremist ideologies.

From morality to pure mathematics

But fast-forward to today, and Sweden can no longer pass the test.

As the right-wing extremist Sweden Democrats have gone from 1% support to about 20% in the last two decades, SAP (along with all other mainstream parties) has not been able to formulate a credible response to the nationalist and xenophobic positions of a party with roots in Nazi ideology.

And it makes logical sense in our system: if the law is really amoral and democracy is only a matter of formulas, how do we dismiss demands for the expulsion of migrants, or the ominous claim of an “inherited Swedishness”, which is inherently undemocratic?

Of course, social democracy has shrunk for the same reasons in Germany as in Sweden and other Western democracies, where voters have seen their lives turned upside down by globalization, automation and recurring financial crashes that are exploited and distorted by xenophobic leaders. But Germany benefits from an arsenal of now 60-year-old constitutional tools to protect itself against extremist forces, while Sweden does not.

Alternative for the German (AfD) party was a “suspected case” of anti-democratic extremist activity.

Earlier this year the German TV company Deutsche Welle reported that the Saxon-Anhalt Constitutional Protection Agency would place the regional branch of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) under surveillance as a “suspected case” of anti-democratic extremist activity.

At the same time, the center-right opposition parties in Sweden have in recent years gone from refusing to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats to adopting them as a necessary partner on the road to parliamentary power.

For Gunnar, it is not possible to detach democratic values ​​from natural rights without the harmful consequences that Sweden (like others in the West) experiences today.

It is worth noting that while Swedish workers’ leaders such as Olof Palme, like his predecessors, all joined the legal positivism, they carried much of the humanist message in their characters, which prevented the ideology from being eroded. But today, as the shortcomings of legal positivism become increasingly clear, we know that these leaders were the exceptions that affirmed the rule: namely, that democracy needs more than votes to uphold it.