Globalisation and Education Show the Way

The American economics professor Tyler Cowen, in his influential study Creative Destruction (2002), gives several examples of similar phenomena: how the increased trade and mobility between countries and continents is revitalising local culture. As a consequence of that which constitutes the theme of this issue of Axess, namely the development of Europe and the EU, questions are raised about protectionism and openness. Those who advocate protectionism – whether critics of immigration or left populists – often paint a threatening picture of a world where cultural differences become blurred. Against this background, it may be of interest to consider the causes of some of the more extensive attacks on the unique Swedish culture in the post-war period: the devastation of Swedish city centres during the 1960s and 1970s. Or the developments that marked the Swedish school system during the same period, with the similar result of consigning specifically Swedish heritage to the dustbin of history. How big an influence did immigration or international capital have over this development? Almost none. The changes were made possible and were carried out during the long, social democratic, post-war era – an era that many Swedish groups critical of immigration, and left wing commentators, highlight as ideal. These changes were motivated also by a number of (more or less oppressed) people who felt uncomfortable with Swedish cultural heritage. They were considered to have difficulty in acquiring the ‘culturally alien’ in the same problematic way that the Buddha statuette on Helgö illustrates. It is presumed that they experienced the Swedish heritage in music, literature, architecture and visual arts as non-inclusive or even repulsive. This is because it mirrored the old days of power patriarchy, upper class, European dream worlds and undemocratic values.

Cowen argues that the free flow of cultural influences that occur as a consequence of migration and trafficking should be viewed from two perspectives with respect to the issue of cultural uniformity: On one hand, the past decades’ changing range of music, film and literature, or stores to shop in and restaurants to eat at, made the differences between cities in different parts of the world much smaller. On the other hand, it has led to the uniformity of individual towns being significantly decreased. But non-protectionist policies with as much trade exchange and mobility as possible have also proved fruitful for the emergence of a high-quality local culture. It is not surprising that the cultural flourishing in Spain during the 1500s – with artists such as Velázquez and writers such as Cervantes – coincided with the opening of trade routes across the Atlantic and Pacific. It is also a bit of a coincidence that Spain’s loss of naval supremacy to the Dutch in the first half of the 1600s coincided with the Dutch golden age of culture, with painters such as Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals.

Trade between countries and continents in conjunction with economic abundance created the ability to either engage in the arts or to create a market for art, which yielded high-quality culture. Similarly, it is no coincidence that the centuries-old cultural decline in Europe’s history with respect to the visual arts, architecture and literature – from the Roman Empire’s collapse in the 400s to the early Middle Ages, around the year 1100 – took place concurrently with a decline in trade, while the emergence of cities such as Venice as trading metropolises in the 1200s, provided the basis for Venetian art’s heyday during the Renaissance, with a plethora of masters like Titian, Tintoretto and Bellini. But do the above examples show that one can be complacent and assume that opposition to protectionism automatically leads to a revitalisation of indigenous culture? The problem with Cowen’s reasoning is that he ignores that which makes high-quality art such as the Dutch art that grew during the 1600s and what, in its place, gave rise to Swedish House Mafia. In both cases, it is about cultural expressions that are consequences of a globalised economy. But while Vermeer’s art arose in a social culture that looked back on a centuries-old history with respect to its accumulated knowledge, and which emphasised the differences between major art and ephemeral art, the Swedish House Mafia is a consequence of a cultural and educational view of exactly the opposite kind.