Why northern Swedes feel ignored and underappreciated

The summer we moved to Umeå, my husband and I drove down to Stockholm for a wedding, where I found myself chatting with a young, hip-looking Swede who seemed worldly and culturally aware. But when I told this person where I was making my new home, he guffawed: “you moved from Canada to Sweden and you went to UMEÅ? Why?!”

As a newcomer to Sweden, I was shocked by the insulting response, especially since it turned out that the person in question, a Stockholmer, had never even visited my new hometown. But my husband and his family, who all hail from the northern provinces of Västerbotten and Norrbotten, were not surprised.

For them, as for many here in the large Swedish north, it was standard fare for people from the capital to dismiss and disregard Norrland.

“More Swedes have been to the Canary Islands than north of Dalälven,” they told me, with wry smiles.

While it seems impossible to find out if this is true (although the Canary Islands part tracks), the point is that to Swedish northerners it feels true; it encapsulates the truth of their lifelong experiences feeling ignored or forgotten by the power centres farther south.

I tried the Dalälven line out the other day on a random group of Umebor (residents of Umeå) and they all laughed and nodded, saying “säkert” (true, absolutely).

But just because northern Swedes can be good-humoured about southern prejudice doesn’t mean it doesn’t bother them. Behind the jokes there are some very material resentments, and a complicated history.

Colonial history

Norrland is the largest, and the least populated, of Sweden’s three historical divisions (landsdelar—the other two are Svealand and Götaland); it’s also the most recently incorporated into the Kingdom of Sweden.

Since ‘recent’ in this case means the middle ages, the north and the south of Sweden have still been together for quite a while. Nevertheless, it’s about half as long as other parts of the country, and shorter when you consider that it was particularly from the 19th century onwards that the Swedish state became a more active presence in the north—developing (or imposing, depending on your point of view) industrial production and attempting to colonize the indigenous Sámi peoples’ land, culture, and language.

Since this colonial history is a lot more recent and, many would argue, ongoing, it remains fairly fresh in the cultural memory of many northern families, and creates a certain atmosphere of, at its best, northern solidarity, that can be felt by residents of northern Sweden no matter their background.

Resources

An awful lot of Sweden’s resource wealth and energy comes from the major industries here in the north, particularly iron ore mining and hydroelectric power from the älvar (major mountain rivers), but the revenue from the resources extracted in the north heads straight to the national coffers—housed, of course, in Stockholm.

So when there are political debates about re-distributing state resources to the less populated northern regions and municipalities, from the southern perspective, small areas of Norrland are getting ‘handouts’ from Stockholm, but from the northern perspective, all the revenue from northern natural resources shouldn’t have gone south in the first place.

For example, the hydroelectric power plant on the Luleå river in Jokkmokk municipality in Norrbotten is the largest in Sweden, providing a crucial portion of the country’s energy supply, but the municipality sees very little of that wealth and receives very little respect or recognition for it from the wealthier urban centres farther south.

The overall feeling of many people in the north about being overlooked by the south was summed up to me recently by a local resident, “they just don’t realize how much we give them.”

Distance

Population centres are more spread out the farther north in Sweden one gets, so travel naturally takes longer.

However, distance is relative—not in an absolute sense, of course, but in how far away a place feels; living in Toronto for much of my life, I’d think nothing of a 45-minute metro trip to meet up with friends at a bar after work, but after two terms living in Oxford, where the local pub was one corner and a narrow alley away, a bar meetup twelve minutes from my college was usually way too far to bother with.

I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon at play in the varying senses of distance here in Sweden. Living in Umeå, for example, usually means going to or through Stockholm a few times a year, whether for work, specialized administrative services, or as a necessary transit point in order to get pretty much anywhere outside of the country.

After just a year and a half as an Umebo, the trip to Stockholm already seems like no big deal to me; there’s a direct high-speed train that takes me to Stockholm Central in six hours (I’m partial to the 6a.m.-noon service) and the planes, leaving multiple times a day, usually take barely an hour.

Yet for Stockholmers, making the same trip the other way around usually seems impossibly far.

I’ve heard this from my own friends in Stockholm, as well as from friends and family in Umeå who share stories about being in meetings with their colleagues in Stockholm who say, if the prospect of having the next conference in Umeå comes up, “but it’s so far!”

If the northern resident then points out that it is, in fact, exactly the same distance which they themselves have just travelled to get to Stockholm, the reply is often, “Yes, but you know what we mean.”

Yes, the northerner might think, unfortunately, I do.