– I’ve resurrected my Swedish heritage (…). An identity reawakened in me, and I expressed it in a way that my family, my mother or my grandmother had never done. Mum is proud, mum is of course with me on this. Grandma is a bit more ambivalent. She has spent her entire life being a good farmer’s wife in the (…) inland in northern Sweden so it sits a little harder inside. – And there she suppressed her Swedish origin, or?

– It could be said to have started with her parents, but my grandmother has come to the point where she has said: “yes but we are Swedes.”

– What a triumph! – Yes, it was actually there, but it was buried deep inside. (…)

– How were you regarded when you came out?

– I think there is a huge fear, that you will not be accepted. (…)

– What to do?

– Still more work. Even more are daring to go out and say: “but I’m Swedish. (…) I have absorbed so much of my heritage that I feel like I’m Swedish.”

The above conversation was broadcast on Swedish radio on November 24, 2010, on the cultural radio programme K1. Although the interviewees were not asked any critical questions by the host, there was no protest against the programme from either opinion-formers or listeners. Is it the case, then, that on primetime in P1 pure patriots can be let loose without any reaction? Is this the consequence of the social climate that, last autumn, resulted in the Sweden Democrats being elected into parliament? Well, it’s probably not that bad. The conversation, as recounted here, has been manipulated. The words ”Sami” and ”Lapp” have been replaced with the words ”Swedish” and ”Swede”. Nevertheless the conversation brought forth an idea of the importance of affirming and preserving an ethnic identity that is not linked to external factors such as cultural practices and geographical location but rather – it seems actually – genes. In response to the reporter’s question ”What to do? [for more people to ’come out’ as Sami],” the complete answer was: ”Even more work. Even more are daring to go out and say: “but I’m Sami. I’m Sami, though I have never been to a Renskillning, I’m Sami, though I do not speak Sami, and I have no idea how my family’s gáktis looks, but I’m still Sami. I have absorbed so much of my heritage so I feel I am Sami.”

Although the interviewed grandmother had apparently acclimatised to a non-Sami life, so much so that she could not even remember that she had a Sami origin, the grandmother perceived her true identity as Sami. It is difficult to see any other reason for this besides genetic. How is it that no one reacts, when some people assert their need to affirm their ethnic identity, while it Is condemned – and seen as a national duty to eradicate – when it occurs in groups with a different ethnic background?

Basically it is, I think, about how we in the second half of the 1900s have become used to evaluating different cultures, cultural expressions and cultural developments. It comes from a complex hierarchical system based on the degree to which different social systems and groups of people are deemed to have been either oppressed or oppressive. According to this assessment model, there is reason to be critical of cultural expression that has historically been grouped into the ‘oppressive’ category. While the reverse is true for cultural expression that can be linked to groups that historically have been victims of oppression.

Although it is perfectly commendable to recreate marginalised cultural expression among groups that have been oppressed historically, one can still ask whether this sort of hierarchical system affirms or hinders fruitful exchanges between different cultural spheres. Personally, I believe that it is time to leave this kind of historical ballast behind us. This is because this kind of cultural-isolationist attitude, which characterises many of the nationalist movements rising across Europe, is as counterproductive as ever.

The question is whether we are dealing with two branches in one tree. Even the Sweden Democrats’ rhetoric is constructed around the importance of protecting a threatened minority culture, and about the need to reconstruct a lost cultural identity: but there’s also the idea that a person born into a particular culture is destined to, if not to forever be imprisoned within their own cultural boundaries, then at least to feel such an affinity with the culture, that its absence tends to give rise to profound problems, at the individual as well as the societal level.

A renewed interest in the past, for cultural and historical continuity can thus be based on two entirely different lines. On the one hand, focusing on one’s own cultural sphere – nationally or on the basis of a different collective to which the individual is assumed to belong on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, class, and so on. From this perspective, the individual is perceived as destined to appreciate (and be developed by) cultural expressions that confirm and reinforce the collective identity that the individual has been given. Emphasis is placed here on the differences between the various cultural expressions. If one is perceived as ‘Swedish’, one is considered, consequently, to have the greatest exchange of art that distinguishes itself from other art by shaping the Swedish identity. If one chooses to see oneself as a ‘man’, one is considered to have benefited mainly from the literature that distinguishes itself by problematising the male identity. And the heterosexual is considered to prefer the music of heterosexual composers, whose musical language is perceived as essentially different from the music of composers with other sexual orientations.

Against this stands a cosmopolitan perspective, which sees cultural heritage as an international affair, in which are stressed the similarities rather than differences between different cultural expressions. Based on this approach, the cultural genealogies are not specified but rather open-ended, unexpected. This is confirmed by how cultural influence has often taken place historically. But before we look at this, it should be noted that such an international and cosmopolitan-oriented cultural conservatism in no way rules out an active conservation and exploitation of the local cultural history. But that is because, in purely logistical terms, it is more convenient for Swedes to care for Swedish art-, literature- and music history than, for example, Kenyans. The purpose of this care is for the cosmopolitan culture conservatives not to provide the Swedes with culture that confirms the group’s own cultural identity, but rather to contribute to the overall cultural soil out of which human civilisation grows. The cultural soil which, by virtue of being complex, multifaceted, and culture-bridging, is civilisation’s developmental engine (including humility, simplicity and broad-minded tolerance).

What is remarkable here is that while the former, identity-affirming vision of culture has gained an ever stronger grasp on contemporary life (which finds expression in the Left’s identity politics as in the left-right populist nationalism or extreme Islam), confirming the latter, cosmopolitan cultural conservatism, by studies of how cultural influence actually takes place in its more dynamic phases in modern times as well as in the past centuries or even millennia.

The U.S. music producer Arthur Baker, for example, told how he, in the late 1970s, wanted to form an opinion about what was then the brand new – and which the music industry had not yet exploited – hip-hop culture. Therefore he went to the streets of Harlem and found black youth on their tape recorders again and again repeating the rhythm from the German pop group Kraftwerk’s then popular Trans-Europe Express – which some years later was replaced on the tape recorders by the same group’s Numbers. To the sound of Kraftwerk’s music, they rapped and danced out what would become one of contemporary America’s most financially lucrative forms of music. Moreover, it was Trans-Europe Express and Numbers, which were combined when Afrika Bambaataa and Baker put out the paradigmatic dance single Planet Rock.

From the streets of New York, there is a connection to Detroit’s black musicians, who extrapolated the Kraftwerk sound to the world’s dance floors – a connection that is undeniably extraordinary. Especially if you consider the distance between the black United States and the cultural context in which Kraftwerk’s music took shape. Kraftwerk’s special sound grew out of the group’s conscious intention to portray a specific German or Central European experience, which is in many ways perceived as radically different from the U.S.. Kraftwerk’s frontman, Ralf Hütter, spoke in an interview from 1991, for example, about the loss that he experienced in the early 1970s after convincing portrayals of his and his generation’s contemporary experiences. As a consequence of the Germany’s wounds in the 1900s, most of his generation turned its back on German culture in favour of American-influenced forms of expression. Along with Kraftwerk’s ‘invisible’ fifth member, Emil Schult, Hütter chose to go in an entirely different direction, namely down into the German soil and back in their own nation’s history.

The roots of his own contemporary experience, Hütter could find mainly in the inter-war German culture, such as the Bauhaus movement and expressionist film. It was also in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, amongst other influences, that Kraftwerk found their foremost source of inspiration, but not, of course, in the sense of creating pastiches of German 1920-30s art. Instead, they drew upon contemporary German culture’s interest in the cross-fertilisation between art and technology. The goal was rather to revive 1920s art’s interest in technology into a new era’s mode of expression.

Among their musical influences are, for similar reasons, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s music, but equally important was probably the pop band The Beach Boys. Kraftwerk’s second frontman, Florian Schneider, has spoken of how The Beach Boys could show, just by listening to their music, what it was like to live on the U.S.’ west coast during the 1960s and 70s. The formulation sheds light on Kraftwerk’s own efforts in a non-descriptive way to identify and portray a specific German experience. It may be the feeling of waking up in a boring tower block in one of the Ruhr region’s satellite towns. It may be the trip through the rain-soaked landscape of the autobahn. Working at a high-tech laboratory at Siemens. Or to cross the continent of Europe by train. And so on.

That the youth of African-American neighbourhoods felt a connection to a music produced with the express purpose of representing a specifically German experience, is a relationship that is worth pondering for all those who in recent decades have argued that one supposedly oppressed community after another in our Western society – women, workers, immigrants, non-Christian religionists, young people and so on – would have no or at least an extremely small exchange of culture with that which was created by those who created most of the culture that has so far endured in the West: white European men of middle age who perhaps even lived in the eras before the Middle Ages. And that – conversely – the members of the various kinds of groups have the greatest exchange, that they develop optimally as human beings and recognise the best in the culture that is born of their own collective. Female students are assumed to have the need to read books by female authors. Lesbian students are implicitly expected to require that their specific experiences are portrayed in art and culture. While Muslim women are presumed to be interested primarily in culture that reflects the Muslim woman’s life. Which precludes any idea of establishing a common canon, which could accommodate the most artistically pure, most existentially relevant, and aesthetically sensitive works created in the world.

But when you have reasoned this way at university, as newspaper and magazine editors, at primary and secondary schools, at the publishing houses and museums, one has at the same time aside from that cultural dedication is basically about something entirely different than to have one’s own views confirmed, if anything radically different than to recognise the problems, which at this particular time exist within the group or collective with which one currently and strongly identifies. The question is whether or not the dedication of fine literature, film, visual arts and other forms of cultural expression is ultimately the absolute opposite of seeing their own problems in contemporary focus. When culture and education play their most vital function, it is perhaps more about bringing one face-to-face with something previously unknown. One gets insights into other, stranger ways of thinking, into unexpected explanatory models. In short, one is confronted with the deviant and different.

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And what most radically violates the routine order is not necessarily dependent on factors such as gender, ethnicity and class. The significantly greater travel time barriers between individuals. As a middle-aged man in Sweden in 2011, it is probably many times easier as a parent, Swedish and politically radical, to recognise oneself in Moa Martinson’s novels than in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; easier to identify with the main characters in the stories of Elfriede Jelinek or Toni Morrison than those in Virgil’s The Aeneid. That is not to say, of course, that the barriers are insurmountable for today’s radical middle-aged men and women to read Chaucer and Virgil. As Kwame Anthony Appiah points out in his book Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers, it is more reasonable to perceive it as we are affected by art and culture despite our differences than through identification. We can understand and appreciate art that is not ours, but we can only fully understand ‘our’ art, he says, if we cease to think of it as ‘ours’ and begin to understand it as art: ”My people, humans, built the Great Wall of China, the Sistine Chapel, The Chrysler Building. These works were created by beings like me – with professional skills and imagination.”

Brian Boyd is on the same track when, in an essay from 2006, he points out how Albrecht Dürer when he, in the 1520s he came into contact with Mexican artwork, commented that he had never seen anything that touched him so strongly. And when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, about 300 years later, read Japanese fiction he also noted that ”these people think and feel just like us.” The Japanese audience has no problem taking on Shakespeare and Beethoven. Just as Englishmen or Germans have no problem to appreciate Japanese woodblock prints from the Edo period (or indeed contemporary butodans and manga series). Handicraft workers in the Maori culture and in New Guinea have incorporated Western instruments and techniques as simply as Gauguin renewed French – and thus indirectly Swedish – painting, through their borrowings from Polynesian cultures.

Not to mention Picasso, whose revolution of 1900s Western painting had important origins in a visit to the Museum of Ethnography in the Trocadéro in Paris, in the spring of 1907. Despite a lack of understanding, and despite his nonexistent links to Africa, the museum’s African sculptures spoke directly to him. For Andre Malraux he described it as a revelation: ”Then I realised why I was a painter.” The result of the visit is clearly visible in perhaps his most famous work, The Girls of Avignon. This African-art-inspired departure from traditional Western painting would turn out to speak directly to the sophisticated and educated Western upper-class of the 1920s, who came to regard African magical objects such as Le Dernier Cri in interior design (which, in turn, got Picasso to mark their disgust and deny its African influences). This serves to illustrate that culture-specific art objects from one continent and age can speak directly to people in completely different cultures and contexts – and therefore be perceived as congenial and typical for a radically different era and world than that from which they emerged.

Similarly, one could reason about our need for tradition, for involvement in the historical context and experiences of connectedness with the past. I think there is an intrinsic value in the historical ties and connections to ancient traditions in a society, and their preservation to the fullest extent and in as many areas as possible, but that these ties also have something remarkably arbitrary about them. It’s easier – I imagine – for many Jämtlänning, that grew up in a suburb of Ostersund, to feel comfort and belonging in Venice than in the suburbs of Glasgow or in the Stockholm suburb of Husby. This, despite the fact that Husby reminds me more of Ostersund than Venice. History’s tracks create context. Contributions by generations of culturally creative people creates a sense of continuity and connectedness, and generates a certain kind of warmth. Art and architecture appear, just through their propensity to survive, as exemplary and inspiring. And thus they speak to us. In a completely different way than is the case with places, environments and cultures that nurture forgetfulness. Environments built with the express purpose of doing away with the past; cultures created in order to break with tradition. They remain silent, cold and inhospitable.

That is why it is necessary to safeguard the Swedish as well as Sami or English traditions. Not because people of Sami ancestry have some unique need arising from their particular Sami traditions, or because an Englishman would not be able to realise himself fully in a Gustavian-style apartment on the wharf in Stockholm or in Jokkmokk. But because historical ties are necessary for humanity at large: as points of orientation in a much broader context than the culture in which we happen to be born or brought up.

The problem in Swedish society, as in many other Western societies today, has largely to do with an unwillingness to see historical continuity and property in tradition as significant for us all. The post-war education system, its architecture, culture, and its view of art and literature was of course designed to combine efforts to break away from tradition – at least extending further away than the First World War. In this way, creating generations of rootless Europeans. Who, however, have now partially started to search for their historical roots and traditions. Quite often this is done using offensively worded and aggressively constructed notions of where their ethnic or national roots lie. These are beliefs that are largely built around differences and the demonisation and profiling of other groups and collectives (e.g. Bosnians, men, Swedes, Muslims, Westerners, Jews, and so on).

It is a natural, albeit in many ways destructive development, which paradoxically has its origins in the unrestrained affirmation of modernity, change and individual self-fulfilment that has been prevalent in the Western world since the Second World War. An affirmation that has created a vacuum which, in Swedish terms, and because of the depletion of the cultural tradition, cannot seem to be filled with anything other than Astrid Lindgren’s environments and Tomas Ledin’s summer songs.

In a not entirely unexpected way, this situation was reflected in the Swedish state television programmes celebrating New Year, 2011. Where you could hear Astrid Lindgren songs punctuated by Sarah Dawn Finders’ expressionless pop music, and African folk music. In this way, the Sweden Democrats, like the moderate cultural entrepreneurs and the University-marinated representatives of identity politics got their share. While the rest of us, we who are not multiculturalists, neo-liberal cultural relativists or Astrid Lindgren-nationalists, were left in no doubt how intricate the interplay is between media publicity and political expression. Which did not stop us from getting our fill – as always on SVT at least once a year, during its very last, quivering minutes.