eller ja, norden, men här struntar vi i grannländerna och fokuserar på sverige:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/scandinavian-miracle-brutal-truth-denmark-norway-sweden

"Anything I say about the Swedes will pale in comparison to their own
excoriating self-image. A few years ago, the Swedish Institute of Public
Opinion Research asked young Swedes to describe their compatriots. The
top eight adjectives they chose were: envious, stiff, industrious,
nature loving, quiet, honest, dishonest, xenophobic.

I met with
Åke Daun, Sweden's most venerable ethnologist. "Swedes seem not to 'feel
as strongly' as certain other people", Daun writes in his excellent
book, Swedish Mentality. "Swedish women try to moan as little as
possible during childbirth and they often ask, when it is all over,
whether they screamed very much. They are very pleased to be told they
did not." Apparently, crying at funerals is frowned upon and "remembered
long afterwards". The Swedes are, he says, "highly adept at insulating
themselves from each other". They will do anything to avoid sharing a
lift with a stranger, as I found out during a day-long experiment
behaving as un-Swedishly as possible in Stockholm.

Effectively a
one-party state – albeit supported by a couple of shadowy industrialist
families – for much of the 20th century, "neutral" Sweden (one of the world largest arms exporters)
continues to thrive economically thanks to its distinctive brand of
totalitarian modernism, which curbs freedoms, suppresses dissent in the
name of consensus, and seems hell-bent on severing the bonds between
wife and husband, children and parents, and elderly on their children.
Think of it as the China of the north.

Youth unemployment is higher than the UK's and higher than the EU average;
integration is an ongoing challenge; and as with Norway and Denmark,
the Swedish right is on the rise. A spokesman for the Sweden Democrats
(currently at an all-time high of close to 10% in the polls)
insisted to me that immigrants were "more prone to violence". I pointed
out that Sweden was one of the most bloodthirsty nations on earth for
much of the last millennium. I was told we'd run out of time.

Ask
the Finns and they will tell you that Swedish ultra-feminism has
emasculated their men, but they will struggle to drown their sorrows.
Their state-run alcohol monopoly stores, the dreaded Systembolaget, were
described by Susan Sontag as "part funeral parlour, part back-room
abortionist"."