IL 25 years Documentation - Henrik Berggren

 

I think Adolf invited me, not because I know very much about Independent Living, but because I am passionately interested in issues of welfare policies, individual rights and social movements. As a matter of fact I sort of have a small debt to pay to the Independent Living movement. As it happens, I also was in Berkeley in the 1980’s. I was in writer school and I was partly able to go through that because my wife worked as a personal assistant in Berkeley. So there you are.

 

I am the only media representative here as far as I understand it and I find that very regrettable. It is regrettable in one sense, because STIL for its 25 years anniversary certainly deserves attention. However, I think it is actually worse for the media which are not here because so much, that has been discussed in these interesting panels, touch upon really mainstream important issues in the public debate today. It has to do with freedom and personal autonomy, very simple concepts, the role of the state, of the market and the family. It touches upon existential issues. It has really been extremely interesting and there is no possible way for me to make a summary of what has been said here. I am just going to make one small reflection on today. It is going to seem a bit parochial, perhaps a bit Swedish, but I hope it has some kind of general meaning also.

 

If I bring you back to this morning when, Mr Lindgren from the government was here, he congratulated STIL on its 25 anniversary. He said that it was a “folkrörelse”, which translates into popular movement. However, this word “folkrörelse” has a sort of wider semantic connotation in Swedish. It sort of suggests all things good. It is grassroots. It is generally wonderful. On the other hand, during the panels today it has been made very clear, in very many different ways of how much the example of civil rights movements, of the legislation in the United States, of the Independent Living movement in the United States, has meant. As many has pointed out, there has been a contradiction between the traditional Nordic welfare model and the ideas that is brought forth of the Independent Living movement. I am not going to argue with that. I think that is very very correct but I think maybe Mr Lindgren was right in a way and that is if you take a long historical perspective. Being a historian, I tend to do that.

 

The point, I would like to make is that, before we got this modern corporate Scandinavian welfare state we had very vibrant, active popular movements in Scandinavia. Of course, in some ways they were a model for what were happening in maybe Britain but also United States, so what goes around comes around. I like to point out a few things about those popular movements. First of all, they were started by people who were disenfranchised. They were started by people who were not regarded as citizens. In fact they were started just because these people were not citizens but got together and established their own citizenship. They were not recognised. They did not have the right to vote. They were not considered full members of the society at that time in the 19th century. But in their own view they were citizens and they acted like citizens by coming together. That is the first similarity I would like to point out with the Independent Living movement.

 

Secondly, I would like to point out, that they were in fact fighting dependence and subordination. They were striving for autonomy. Now if you look at the popular movement of different kinds, from the temperance movement to the free-church movement to the workers movement, what you find is that in Scandinavia they are certainly very very concerned about one thing and that is their own empowerment. They do not want to be subordinated. They do not want charity. They do not want to become dependent, dependent on alcohol, dependent on unfair employers. They created community but not community for its own sake. This is one of the problems, with this whole “folkrörelse”-romanticism, that you sort of think that these people are naturally solidaric and want to stay together because they love the community. The fact is they were trying to better themselves and get better lives for themselves.

 

This is the second very important point which leads up to the third point that they were acting in self interest. Of course, there were solidarity involved but, the whole point of it was that, they were doing something that would benefit them, would empower them and give them more control over their own lives. The solidarity came in due to the fact that you had all these people who had the same predicament. They were all banded together in doing something about it. They were certainly not altruistic in that sense. They were self help movements. I do not know about other countries but this is very often forgotten in Sweden. People seem to demand as a fact that all the old popular movements were so wonderful but they forget these things about them.

 

The fourth similarity I will point out is that in relation to the market and the state. They used these things in the way they needed them. They could call for legislation. Obviously they had to get the vote to create change, constitutional change and political change. They also used the market. We talked about the cooperative movement earlier. That was something that was created as an alternative market employing people to deliver services of different kinds. Fifthly, I want to point out that, there was criticism of these movements because they were considered to be elites. The people who were leading them were considered to be an elite coming from below and actually not representative of the whole body of people, the whole population. There were all these other people out there who were almost abused or manipulated by the leaders of these popular movements. So again I am referring to these discussions about elitism in the Independent Living movement.

 

What I am trying to point out here is that, though of course there is no doubt about the important part of the American example, there are in Swedish/Scandinavian history actually earlier examples. So I think that Mr Lindgren was correct in calling Independent Living movement in Stockholm a “folkrörelse”, popular movement. The interesting thing about that, and why I think it should be more brought to the attention to the general public or the debate on politics today, is that what happened to these popular movements were that they became incorporated, they became part of the state, the stopped being active movements. The state moved in and you got what Susanne Berg made a very good description of, this negotiation of interest groups that goes on in this kind of welfare society. That is why they stagnated. That is part of the democracy problem today in society in general. I have had a lot to think about today from that perspective. What can we learn from the Independent Living movement? How can we discuss these questions of autonomy, of collective action, of the state and the market in ways that can inform other kinds of political questions today? That is were this becomes really interesting. I certainly wish the Independent Living movement all success and I certainly hope that it will help to spark a more general political debate about regenerating democracy.