What are the 100 things that unequivocally define Swedish culture?
Flat-packed furniture from IKEA? Of course. “Pippi Longstocking”? Indeed. The touchstone films of Ingmar Bergman? Absolutely.
Abba and meatballs? Apparently not.
This week, the Swedish government published the country’s first Cultural Canon, a document that lists 100 artistic works and social, political and economic phenomena, that a panel of academics, authors and historians say have played a key role in shaping the country’s culture.
The idea of creating such a canon, a pet project of the right-wing Swedish Democrats, has divided the country’s cultural world. Supporters call it a simple attempt to foster civic pride and help newcomers integrate into society. But detractors, including an expert who left the committee, see it as an effort to create a narrow view of Swedish identity that excludes minorities or contemporary life.
Yet since its publication on Tuesday, debate in Sweden has focused less on the list’s political ramifications and more on what has — and hasn’t — made the cut.
Among the canon’s 100 entries are movies (Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal”), books (Astrid Lindgren’s “Pippi Longstocking”) and paintings (Hilma af Klint’s “Paintings for the Temple”), along with inventions (the ball bearing, the Nobel Prizes, paternity leave), key parts of Sweden’s economic history (ancient copper mines) and longstanding laws (including the separate taxation of spouses).
Björn Wiman, the culture editor for Dagens Nyheter newspaper, said in an interview that he had laughed upon first seeing the list. “I mean, there are paintings from the 17th century and poetry from the 16th century paired with modern phenomena like paternity leave,” he said. “It’s a bit ludicrous really.”
Notable omissions, he added, included the music of Abba. “I mean, it’s ridiculous not to have them on the list, right?” he said.
The document says that Abba did not make the list because the pop group’s “most lasting contributions” to Swedish culture came after 1975, the cutoff date for inclusion in the canon so as to highlight only things that have endured.
Abba declined an interview request.
The band’s exclusion is not the only aspect of the list to raise hackles. Leif Mannerström, a well-known chef, has criticized the absence of any culinary items, given Sweden’s contributions to global cuisine, including meatballs and herring. Observers have also raised eyebrows at the inclusion of the Swedish-made Saab Viggen fighter jet.
Kerstin Bergea, the president of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, an antiwar organization founded in 1883, said in an interview that the aircraft’s inclusion in a cultural canon “was something an authoritarian state would do” and not befitting of Sweden.
Sweden’s coalition government began the initiative in 2023 as part of an agreement to secure the Social Democrats’ support. Alexander Christiansson, the Social Democrats’ culture spokesman, said in an interview that he was happy with the final list, especially for highlighting inventions and laws that would not typically be found in a cultural canon.
“It shows how Sweden was built,” he said.
He argued that detractors who said the canon excluded minorities were talking “nonsense” and that the growth of multiculturalism had undermined Swedish culture.
Lars Trägårdh, the historian whom the government appointed to lead the project, said in an interview that the members of the expert team were kept “arms length” from the government — and even himself — so the choices for the 100 artworks and phenomena “weren’t tainted by politics.”
Several of the canon’s picks were laws instituted “way before there was even the idea of a right or left in politics,” he added.
Still, Wiman said that right-wing lawmakers’ trumpeting of the list showed that it was a political project. Debating what constitutes Sweden’s culture was important, he said, but it would be better to combine the initiative with “serious political ambition to raise culture and eduction spending.”
To compile the list, the project had two streams, with this canon decided by the academic panel, and then a people’s one, consisting of submissions to a website.
The website received over 9,500 submissions, many of them more reflective of contemporary tastes and a country in which about a fifth of the population was born abroad. Unlike the canon’s trumpeting of poetry, prose and Christian monuments, the public’s many suggestions included kebab pizza, rap songs and the Swedish Church of Satan.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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