Action Without Contention? Contextualizing Social Movements in 1980s Sweden

Abstract

The early 1980s in Western Europe were characterized by a massive wave of, at times militant, protest. In this context, Sweden looked like the odd one out because confrontations remained a marginal phenomenon. Could this be explained by the Swedish political system, which was characterized by moderation, dialogue and negotiation? This paper argues that asking what made Sweden different risks disconnecting Swedish protest experiences from the rest of Europe. Instead, researchers should ask how and why the image of mass contention and militancy, became a norm that informed the expectations of 1980s activists, authorities and the media. The argument is not that researchers should discard the norm of mass contentious action and instead focus on ‘what really happened’. Rather, the norm itself should be approached as a historical category, one that deeply influenced (views of) the 1980s protest wave—both then and now. Asking such questions can help clarify the relation between contention, subversion and social movement power.

Introduction

The start of the 1980s saw a wave of massive protests hitting Western Europe; against the closure of industrial plants, against the installation of mid-range nuclear missiles, against urban decline and housing shortage, and finally against homegrown racism and the foreign South African Apartheid regime. A number of these protests gave way to massive riots, as British miners confronted heavy-duty police, urban youths in France and Britain revolted against marginalization and discrimination, and squatters rioted in the metropolises of the Netherlands, West Germany, Switzerland and Denmark.¹

In this context, Sweden looked like the odd one out. According to Jämte and Sörbom, ‘confrontations remained a marginal phenomenon in Sweden, at least until the end of the decade’.² Although protests in Sweden took massive form, the situation remained relatively calm and interactions between protesters and the authorities were characterized by tolerance, dialogue and negotiation. On the one hand, this could be seen as proof of a healthy and well-functioning democracy, or at least of conditioned cooperation with social movements.³ But on the other hand, the seeming lack of strife and escalation raised suspicion and irritation, leaving some to wonder: ‘Why did it not happen here?’.⁴

A possible explanation for the ‘lack’ of militant contention may lie in the particularity of the Swedish political system, which was characterized by institutionalized and mutually beneficial relations between employers’ and employees’ associations, an extensive network of social welfare provisions and a polity that was open to dialogue and negotiation with extra-parliamentary actors. Peterson, Thörn and Wahlström argue that as the government ‘fostered close ties with some movement groups’, this ‘led to a political culture of consensus, cooperation, dialogue and compromise’.⁵ Jämte and Sörbom hold that, as a result, civil society actors ‘promoted consensus-based repertoires of action’.⁶ Only when this social democratic form of governance started to show cracks in the late 1980s, and protest movements ‘synchronized’ their tactics with activists abroad, did protest grow more militant and more similar to the rest of Scandinavia and continental Europe.

This paper argues that asking what made Sweden different risks disconnecting Swedish protest experiences from the rest of Europe, and that other questions may yield more insight into what was happening in 1980s Sweden, and more generally how images of protest were created, mediated and subsequently informed protest dynamics. To do so, this paper places the collected case studies in a broader European and urban context. It subsequently discusses the mediatization of the image of the militant squatter in Western Europe and Sweden, in order to reflect more generally on research into contention and social movements since the 1960s. Finally, it argues in favour of incorporating expectations and norms of subversive action into social movement research, as a basis for asking new questions and connecting Swedish and European protest experiences in the 1980s.

Between Swedish Particularities and European Similarities

This volume is the first to collect a series of in-depth case studies on social movements and contentious action in Sweden during the 1980s. Together, they provide an overview of what causes mobilized Swedish protesters, what forms their activism took, and to what extent these movements and action repertoires were particularly Swedish. What characterized these movements, and what stands out when we regard them in a broader, European, perspective?

To answer these questions, the Swedish Protest Database on which Jansson and Uba base their contribution can be taken as a starting point. The database reveals that the peace, antinuclear and environmentalist movement mobilized most people, as did protests against welfare reforms. These causes mobilized broad sections of the population, were embraced by significant sections of the elite and employed mostly peaceful repertoires. As such, they did not seem to be very disruptive and could be regarded as typical of the Swedish political system which focused on ‘cooperation, dialogue and compromise’, thus promoting ‘consensus-based repertoires of action’.

At the same time, these movements did not seem to differ very much from related movements in Europe. In West Germany and the Netherlands, too, the peace movement enjoyed broad support, including sections of the establishment, remained largely peaceful and was only disruptive to a certain extent.⁷ There, too, welfare-related protests tended to remain firmly within the bounds of ‘classic’ labour/trade union mobilization and activism. And just like in Sweden, West-German and Dutch authorities prided themselves on their politics of tolerance, dialogue and consensus culture.⁸

A second question raised by these case studies regards the definition of contentious politics. While most case studies build on the conceptual framework of contentious politics, which focuses on non-establishment actors who employ disruptive repertoires to subvert political routines, the exact contents of contentious politics are at times questioned. Jansson and Uba, for example, include ‘quiet verbal protests’ such as letter writing, public statements in newspapers and petitions in their overview of welfare activism. Such public statements reveal important aspects of the debate and political struggle over the future of the welfare state, but if such statements are included, this raises questions about how we define contentious action, and where we place the boundary between contentious and ‘normal’ politics.

Empirically, it is interesting that while the abovementioned movements mobilized most people, more radical movements and subcultures with relatively small mobilizing potential (i.e. anarchism, squatting and punk) seem to attract proportionately the most attention from scholars. Of the seven case studies that make up this volume, three focus on anarchism, squatting and punk. Perhaps it was squatting’s radical, subcultural and spectacular nature that made it seem like a quintessentially ‘1980s’ phenomenon. Images of militant squatters abroad helped to boost this image. Thus, even when it mobilized relatively few, it garnered a great deal of attention, both then and now.

Especially when it comes to squatting, the tension between Swedish particularity and European similarity comes to the fore. While Lundström focuses on Swedish anarchism, a comparison with other countries reveals how similar the Swedish movement of the 1980s was to that of its Scandinavian and European counterparts. There, too, the movement was revitalized by the rise of punk and embraced direct action repertoires.⁹ The case of the social-cultural centre Winter Palace in Malmö, which oscillated between toleration from and cooperation with local authorities, is in a similar way reminiscent of how small West-German town and city governments in the 1980s dealt with (demands for) self-managed youth centres. There, too, authorities often responded pragmatically and tolerated and/or supported such centres.¹⁰ Even so, the studies in this volume tend to emphasize how Swedish squatting was ‘less’ than in the rest of Europe: of lesser size, less militant and less radical. Thus, Egefur remarks that confrontations between squatters and police occurred in 1980s Malmö, ‘but nowhere near as many as was standard by similar groups in cities such as Copenhagen and Amsterdam’, while Polanska states that Swedish squatters set themselves apart because they ‘deliberately avoided violence and often described themselves as peaceful and orderly’.

But would it be fair to compare relatively moderate squatter actions in Sweden with some of the most militant squatter conflicts from other European countries? When one compares squatter actions in the Swedish cities Jönköping, Lund or Landskrona to squatter actions in European cities of a similar size such as Hilden (West-Germany) or Leiden (Netherlands) during the 1980s, it becomes clear that they developed in a very similar way. There, too, squatters remained mostly peaceful and faced authorities invested in deescalating squatter conflicts. It should not be forgotten that violent escalations of squatter conflicts in the ‘black triangle’ of 1980s militant squatting (i.e. Amsterdam, West-Berlin and Copenhagen), although spectacular and at times influential, remained exceptional even there.¹¹ In short, when placing such case studies on a measuring line running from Swedish particularity to European similarity, the needle may slant to latter, even though Swedish self-descriptions tend to emphasize the former. How can this be explained?

Sweden’s relatively low levels of urbanization, and their influence on protest behaviour, may provide new insights. In 2018, Statistics Sweden stated that while 87% of the population lived in ‘urban areas’, this term referred to the country’s ‘largest cities, as well as small areas with just over 200 inhabitants’.¹² In reality, only 32% lived in cities of 100,000 people or more, while the rest lived in smaller cities and towns. In the 1980s, these numbers were even lower. Recently, Schmidt-Lauber has stated that most Europeans live in such mid-sized towns and cities, and that they represent ‘a specific type of urbanity’, which is characterized by ‘a far greater degree of overview/manageability, more direct communication and binding ties, and a smaller sense of openness and anonymity’.¹³ This significantly influences protest behaviour. According to Schmidt-Lauber, however, Middletown protests are not simply smaller, more moderate or less radical, but rather take on a specific form. Squatter actions, for instance, are ‘not to be interpreted as import or copy from metropolitan squatter scenes, but were shaped by their specific Middletown context’.¹⁴ If we subsequently take into account that Middletown authorities often pride themselves on their moderation, inclination towards consensus and their ability to pacify and negotiate conflicts,¹⁵ one can start to see clear overlaps with the self-image of the Swedish national polity. One could speculate that Swedish protests were equally influenced by the urban contexts in which they unfolded, as they were by the Swedish polity’s particular character. If one, finally, goes a step further and acknowledges that the majority of Europeans live in a Middletown setting, the Swedish case studies may not so much be particular but could resonate with the experiences of a large part of Europe’s current population.

Negotiating Mediatized Images of Protest

The sudden surge of large-scale confrontations in Western Europe shocked authorities and the media, especially because the late 1970s had been considered a time of de-politicization, in which especially youths had become politically disengaged. Now, militant youths were suddenly at the forefront of massive societal conflicts.¹⁶ The sudden outburst of activism, or the media attention that militant protest generated, was, however, not the only reasons that these images of rioting protesters gained so much traction. These images also fitted the narratives of various political actors. It provided leverage to protesters; fueled academic analyses of the democratic deficit; provided conservatives with arguments to push their law and order agenda; and reinforced the progressives’ criticism of government repression.¹⁷

The majority of protests in the early 1980s remained peaceful, but the image of rioting protesters became a pivotal aspect of protest politics in this era, because the riots were mediatized and subsequently integrated in the narratives of various political actors. The squatters movement, which was particularly militant in this era, illustrates the various ways in which activists and authorities adapted the imagery to their political needs.

Amsterdam squatters invoked the image to bolster their militant reputation and strengthen their negotiating position, stating that the alternative to legalization would be riots. Thus, an Amsterdam squatter graffiti stated that stones thrown at the police were ‘attempts to speak in the only language they [the authorities] understand’, adding: ‘We have much more to say!’¹⁸ The practice and narrative inspired others, including an elderly couple of 68 and 70 years living in Emmen, a city of 3,000 inhabitants some 180 kilometres from Amsterdam. The couple had seen squatter riots on tv and decided to follow suit, occupying a house and stating: ‘They will only be able to evict us with force.’ Apparently, the couple was willing to disregard the large differences between their situation and that of the Amsterdam squatters, and nevertheless used the image of squatter riots as a negotiation tactics in their conflict with the town’s authorities.¹⁹

Authorities, too, responded to the image, albeit in different ways. In 1985, the mayor of Leiden, fifty kilometres from Amsterdam, prided himself on the fact that, due to his supposed political skills, no squatter riots had occurred in his city.²⁰ He comfortably overlooked the fact that Amsterdam counted thousands of squatters and Leiden only dozens. Nevertheless, the small Leiden squatter community tried to pressure the authorities to better protect them against aggressive real-estate speculators, stating that otherwise ‘Amsterdam situations’ might occur, thus referring to squatter riots.²¹ The mayor of Hilden, a small town in West Germany, on the other hand, had a group of squatters forcefully evicted, claiming that ‘riot-seeking squatters’ from Frankfurt and West Berlin had joined the local group.²²

Squatters in different cities developed various ways of engaging with mediatic images of militant protest. Leiden squatters, for instance, used newspaper interviews to distance themselves from militant Amsterdam squatters in an attempt to improve their peaceful report with the city’s authorities.²³ Activists in other cities, however, wished nothing more than to emulate the Amsterdam squatters’ militancy. In 1980, Hamburg activists invited squatters from Amsterdam and Zurich to their city and excitedly announced that: ‘The rioters are coming!’²⁴ When the meeting failed to turn into a successful political action, they called on other Hamburg activists to ‘not continuously look to Zurich and Amsterdam but pick up the resistance against the state in Hamburg and create Zurich-Amsterdam-situations here’.²⁵ Engaging with mediatic images of militant squatters could thus both empower and disempower activists.

What the cases above show, is that the image of squatter militancy gained so much traction because various actors incorporated it into their politics. While some activists tried to live up to the norm, and felt that actions had ‘failed’ when they did not muster enough muscle to confront authorities, others dismissed the image altogether. But even non-violent squatters had to relate to the image and state explicitly that they were ‘different’. Squatters in Sweden during the early 1980s, for example explicitly presented themselves as non-confrontational and non-violent.²⁶ To signal their non-militant approach, squatters in the city of Haga thus dubbed themselves ‘Husnallarna’, which could be translated as either ‘Teddy bears in the house’ or as ‘Those who steal houses’.²⁷

As the idea settled that ‘real’ squatter actions were militant and that non-militant squatter actions had either ‘failed’ or did not count as real squatter actions, militancy became a norm that influenced media-reporting, the actions of protesters and authorities, and academic research into this movement.²⁸ It has been a core concept behind the often-proclaimed ‘death’ of the squatter movement, but also of research into squatting in Sweden. For although squatting did happen in this Scandinavian country, riots did not occur during the 1980s, leaving researchers to ask why this was the case.

Contention: From Subversion to ‘Normal’ Politics?

In the history of squatting, militancy became a norm that influenced squatters, their contemporaries and subsequent researchers. The result was a biased perspective that led activists to wonder if they were militant enough, while research focused mainly on militant metropolitan squatters at the cost of paying less attention to non-violent squatters, non-metropolitan squatters, or—to a lesser extent—the niches and subcultures that the squatters spawned and facilitated. Similar biases, however, can be identified in social movement research more generally.

Overall, social movement scholarship aims to explain when and why people join forces to challenge authorities and the status quo, and what dynamics are set in motion when they do so.²⁹ Although the definition of a social movement is contested, one authoritative reading holds that they are collective non-institutionalized actors—incorporating individuals, groups and non-governmental organizations—that engage in contentious action to make claims towards those in power. Contentious actions, finally, are defined as actions that subvert political routines, for example by striking, marching, occupying public places, blocking traffic, etc. But is a march or an occupation still contentious if it does not significantly subvert routines? Could contention perhaps be a norm in social movement activism and research, not dissimilar from the norm of squatter militancy? And if so, how should researchers deal with social movements’ non-contentious behavior? This question may well lie at the heart of interpreting social movement activism in Sweden. For it is generally acknowledged that although protests in Sweden mobilized many, they upset few.

In 1998, David Meyer and Sydney Tarrow contrasted the student and youth rebellions of the 1960s with the social movement activism of the 1990s.³⁰ According to them, the students of the 1960s had been political outcasts with no regular access to power who took refuge to subversive action to make their voices heard. In the 1990s, on the other hand, social movements had become institutionalized and actions such as marching and picketing had lost their subversive potential. Had social movements become a part of ‘normal’ politics, Meyer and Tarrow asked?³¹

Meyer and Tarrow’s partially polemical question illustrates how the norm of subversive or contentious activism has influenced the image of the rebellious 1960s and subsequent research. Contention is traditionally defined as what social movements do: they contend power. However, those in power do not always feel contended by social movement activism, and, more generally, not every action that aims to subvert political routines, succeeds in doing so. Social movements mobilize and demobilize, and oscillate between contention and pacification/institutionalization. Research, however, has often focused on one side of social movement development; namely mobilization, contention and escalation. Most protests in Western Europe during the 1960s and after were, however, peaceful and often seen as non-subversive. This was especially the case in smaller towns, where the distance between protesters and authorities was small.³² But in large cities, too, authorities soon found peaceful ways to interact with protesters, often after brief but intense periods during which they had struggled to find the right balance between repression and negotiation.³³ If research on the 1960s, however, focuses on mobilization, contention and escalation, a paradoxical situation emerges: the majority of social movement (non-subversive) activism is either overlooked, neglected or disregarded as ‘not real activism’.

Moreover, the norm of subversive or contentious activism raises new questions for the study of Swedish social movements in a European or even global context. Protesters in 1980s Sweden mobilized on a large scale, for a variety of causes, and engaged in social movement actions such as marches, pickets and occupations.³⁴ Mirroring Swedish protest activism with an image of mass militant protest can easily lead to a perspective that sees Swedish protest as ‘less’ subversive than others and a highlighting of reasons ‘why it did not happen here’. Finding answers to this question can subsequently lead to an over-emphasis of the things that make the Swedish polity ‘different’. In trying to explain why most protest in Sweden during the 1980s remained peaceful, scholars have pointed out that Sweden had a more extensive system of welfare measures, thus enabling it to ‘outspend’ the economic crisis. Extensive, state-led housing construction precluded a housing crisis, while issues such as nuclear energy and missiles were pacified by a government that dismissed both.³⁵ The most influence, however, is accorded to the Swedish political system, which was characterized by close interactions between the government and civil society actors, who thus had regular access to those in power.

A potential risk in this line of reasoning, however, lies in the fact that the norm of mass contentious activism did not represent the majority of protest experiences in 1980s continental Europe either. Most protests, even when they mobilized thousands, remained peaceful and were not seen as subversive by the authorities. Furthermore, a focus on Swedish consensus culture may lead one to overlook that welfare measures and political consensus were also central to many other Western European polities. Corporatist industrial relations in combination with an openness towards extra-parliamentary pressure groups were referred to as a ‘typical Dutch’ trait (the poldermodel) by politicians and scholars,³⁶ and was at the same time referred to as the ‘characteristic’ Modell Deutschland by political actors and scholars in West Germany. In both cases, consensus was deemed as defining of the two post-war political systems. The large-scale squatter riots of the early 1980s in the Netherlands are often seen as an exception in a polity that was characterized by tolerance and negotiation with protesters and civil society actors. The ‘Swedish model’ of pacifying social strife through dialogue and negotiation may be less particular than is often assumed.³⁷ Moving beyond the norm of mass contentious action, then, may create opportunities for acknowledging the similarities between Swedish and European protest cultures and, more generally, political developments during the 1980s.

Old Cases Leading to New Questions

The case being made here is not that researchers should discard the norm of mass contentious action altogether and instead focus on ‘what really happened’. Rather, the norm itself should be approached as a historical subject, one that deeply influenced (views of) the 1980s protest wave—both then and now. As the above shows, activists struggled with the norm of rebellious, contentious actions already in the 1960s, choosing either to discard it, to try and live up to it or find other ways of dealing with it. The same happened during the 1980s, both in Sweden and in other countries. Acknowledging this opens up social movement research to an often-overlooked question: How activists negotiated mediatic images and norms of mass contentious protests with their own often much more modest activist experiences. Moreover, the issue did not only influence individual activists and inner movement dynamics, but was also a part of movement politics. The image of mass contention, or even militancy, informed the expectations of fellow-activists, authorities and media. It forced all of them to respond and deal with these expectations, and they did so in different ways. The cases from the history of 1980s squatting show how mediatic images, norms and expectations became part of real-life historical developments, and offer one way in which they can be researched.

Just like the norm of contentious activism, the concept of Swedish particularity can be approached as a historical subject in itself. Contributions to this volume illustrate how activists at the time felt that Sweden was ‘different’ and how this notion still affects contemporary research. In his discussion of Swedish peace activism, Öhman reconstructs how Swedish journalists and activists portrayed peace sentiments in Sweden as being more broadly supported by the population, governmental elites and mainstream media. This notion of difference even became part of the dynamics of Swedish peace activism, as activists and news regularly contrasted Sweden’s positive protest experiences with more gloomy reports on confrontations between movements and authorities abroad. Focusing on the interaction between activists and mainstream media, however, Öhman concurs that the Swedish situation was ‘distinct’. The reception of peace actions by the media was ‘overwhelmingly positive’, even resulting in a ‘convergence between movement and media news framing’. As an example of the proximity between movement and media, Öhman takes the example of Birgitta Nyblom, who was both an organizer for Women for Peace (Kvinnokamp för Fred) and a journalist for the liberal Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper, and was allowed to write as a journalist on the actions in which she herself was involved as an activist. In case studies of other movements of the 1980s, however, contributors observe more tensions between Swedish activists’ perceptions of difference and the historical realities of international convergence.

In her chapter on the Swedish environmentalist movement, for example, Quirico speaks of a ‘trope’ of Swedish cooperation between institutionalized environmentalist movements and a cooperative Swedish government. According to her, this trope already existed during the 1980s, affected movement-government interactions as well as current historical research, and has ‘obscured’ the more confrontational parts of Sweden’s environmental movement history and created an incomplete picture. Querico argues not so much to disregard these movement-government interactions, and she acknowledges that the Swedish government was receptive to environmentalist claims and one of the first to adopt comprehensive environmental protection laws. Rather, she states that taking into account moments of polarization and confrontation creates a better understanding of the ‘ambivalence’ of Swedish environmental activists towards the state, and leads to ‘a more nuanced understanding’ of Swedish environmentalism and its institutionalization. Her approach reveals that ‘direct action was far from being absent from the repertoire of Swedish environmentalism in the 1980s’. Such nuances are crucial for a proper contextualization of Swedish environmentalism in an international setting.

In his study of 1980s rent strikes and rent activism, Rolf also reflects on the question to what extent Sweden was different. To answer this question, he explicitly places Swedish experiences in an international and Middletown context, arguing that Swedish rent activism was part of an international protest wave and to an important extent took shape in places such as ‘Luleå, Mariestad, Växjö, Eskilstuna, Örebro and Lindesberg’. Rolf focuses on Sweden and acknowledges that the dominance of Swedish social democracy and its ‘ability to quench outbreaks of radicalisation and to assure the centralisation of social movement organisations’ heavily influenced Swedish protest experiences. Still, he also sees a number of important similarities. Rent activism in other European countries also mainly occurred in municipally-owned properties, were often organized by activists belonging to the New Left, who generally acted ‘outside the established tenant’s organisations’. Rolf does not discard Swedish particularity altogether, but contextualizes it by placing Swedish rent strikes in an international context.

The argument here is not that Sweden was not different, although probably less different than often assumed, but rather that the notion of being different was embraced (i.e. believed to be true) by historical actors and as a result became a mental force influencing concrete historical developments. Given that this happened in other countries as well, acknowledging this fact opens up opportunities to relate and compare similar self-describing notions in other Western European polities.

Such an argument raises questions on how to research and relate social movements, activism and contention. Manuel Castells has stated that social movement actions can be conceptualized as the tip of an iceberg; beneath the surface lie extensive social networks that can be activated and explain how, when and why people gather and rebel.³⁸ Charles Tilly, on the other hand, has argued that the act of making claims and contending power is central to social movements and social movement research.³⁹ His claim that movements contend power via repertoires, drawing from age-old cultural scripts, however, implicitly leaves the possibility open that an action will not be experienced as subversive (or, even, contentious) by those in power; they, after all, also know these scripts. Sidney Tarrow has responded to this by asking specifically when and how contention leads to power.⁴⁰

However, in all these approaches, the relation between social movements, activism and contention remains obscure. It leaves unexplained what social movement participants do when they do not contend power and why they do these things, considering that contending power is seemingly the central purpose of these movements. Possible answers lie in the networks referred to by Castells, in the subcultural character of these movements, or variations of Lenin’s claim that every strike action may open the door to revolution.⁴¹ But concrete empirical data linking these concepts are lacking. If 1980s Sweden provides a detailed case study of social movement activism with little or no contention, in the sense of subversive action disrupting political routines, it may serve to clarify both these concepts and their interrelation.