Stefan Jonsson: Culture policy needs serious investment

Culture policy has all but disappeared from Sweden’s election campaign, pushed aside by defence, health-care queues, crime, schools and promises of more money in people’s wallets. Stefan Jonsson calls that priority understandable, but regrettable.

His argument is that culture helps a society understand itself, interpret its past and imagine its future. Whether people read a book, scroll through TikTok or dance, cultural life shapes how they live together. A serious debate about conservative, socialist, nationalist, liberal, green or Social Democratic culture policy would expose fundamental differences over what kind of life Sweden should offer and what the country means.

Jonsson says political leaders should connect defence, health care and education to a broader cultural goal: producing citizens who think democratically, critically and empathetically, while retaining imagination. Without that foundation, he argues, it becomes harder to explain why society should defend equal access to schools and health care, or what kind of society those institutions serve.

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Through culture, a society understands itself, interprets its past and imagines its future.

He describes democracy as advancing along two connected lines. One removes the conditions that hold people down, including poverty, inequality, oppression, environmental destruction, crime and wars of invasion. The other allows people to play, create, remember, imagine and think beyond established limits. Political measures support the first line, while culture gives direction to the welfare work carried out along it.

The postwar development of modern cultural policy in Europe, Jonsson writes, aimed to prevent a return to fascism. Sweden’s 1974 cultural policy placed artistic and cultural activity within a democratic project that sought wider access to culture. Today, he says, renewed cultural investment could bring fresh energy to politics dominated by short-term blame and add substance to promises of freedom, welfare and community.

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Culture is therefore the core and precondition of welfare and democracy.