It used to be Sweden. People love Sweden. Here is a land of good public service and great welfare. Here is a culture without Anglo-American neurosis about sex. Mention a statistic – female labor force participation – and Sweden scores well. Abroad, it’s not like war. But affairs like diplomacy and soft power, which achieve different results for the global public. Such as? Look, don’t be awkward.
Then Sweden lost its hello. Foreign progressives are learning that public services are open to perversions such as private provision and consumer choice. The Tories (booo) look to Göran Persson’s time as finance minister and head of government as a model for spending cuts in the UK. Bad Sweden. Sweden apostates.
And then it became Germany. People love Germany. This is an economy that works for the technical and not just the academic. Here there is a fair distribution of wealth throughout the region. And quiet politics: industrialists talk to ministers who talk to union bosses. With less historical practices than Britain or France, the country took in large numbers of non-white migrants.
Then Germany lost its halo. It shilly-shallied over Ukraine. Strategic judgments – Russian gas as input, China as market – are reduced. The western world’s secular beatification of Angela Merkel is a flurry. In 2020, there is a book called Why Germany Is Doing Better: Notes from a Country of Adults. Oh, my friend.
And so the moral crown has passed to . . . where? There is, for the first time in a politically conscious life, a vacancy for the role of paragon nation. At dinner parties from Los Feliz to Georgetown to Hackney, people have disappeared. Which country should we toast in a way that we don’t know and half understand? Which country should be compared to our country?
From what I can tell, the criteria of the paragon nation is as follows. It cannot have nuclear weapons or a permanent seat on the Security Council. (They should manifest liberal democracy. To get dirty hands defending it is below-stairs.) Can not have parcels from extra-European colonies. (You can’t praise a nation and cancel it all at the same time.) Can’t limit immigration. (Otherwise, Japan will come in with a shout.)
Which leaves us with, what? Australia? It seems to balance the market and the country in a sensible way. Although the liberal Brits sometimes suspect it is an unreconstructed attitude in the race, I feel more invisible than most of the European continent. Politicians are rancorous but, in the end, conscientious. Last year, during a meeting with some of them, I heard them worry about the debt-to-GDP ratio that most western countries have to eliminate their parents, Logan’s Run-gaya, to get down to.
But no. Paragone can’t speak English. Too familiar. It is of no value to a snob to honor a nation except to give it the praise of the world and the city. On that score, New Zealand, Canada and other Anglophones are also out.
Where else? Denmark? Misgivings about immigration have smudged some of the liberal luster it once had. Switzerland? Neutrality, an elegant word for shirking, now has a geopolitical stigma. Singapore? Freedom House is still down as “partially free”. Norway? The resource gains are huge. This, then, is the last offer. Uruguay. It has a large middle class, a long-standing welfare state and the moral benefit of the apparent benefit of a small country next to a big one. The paragon of the Global South – because no one knows who lives there – will be the 21st century, too. aware.
However, despite gifting European football’s elite striker after elite striker, Uruguay are struggling for profile. Montevideo is very far from the opinion-making class in the upper Atlantic. (Informants in the field tell me they don’t have Kooples.) You have to be a political hipster, reading the Economist cover-to-cover, to follow Uruguay. The paragon nation actually captures the midwit, get-heard-from-Trevor-Noah demographic.
I lost. Fallen angels in northern Europe are hard to replace. Maybe the world empire that is FT readers has a better answer. That, or Sweden is back in fashion.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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