Abstract
The last decades of the 20th century inaugurated a concerted rollback of the public sector across the globe, a wave that has not yet diminished. Numerous services were privatised in Great Britain (most notably British Rail) during the reign of Margaret Thatcher and John Majors, but more recent efforts at dismantling public services – at least in the United States and Europe – have not entailed the wholesale deregulation of popular industries but, rather, have been predicated upon the desirability of ‘choice’ over state monopolies. For example, charter schools in the United States (friskolor in Sweden) pitch themselves as both an alternative to, and also a remedy for, ‘failing’ public schools, promising to solve the ‘problems’ of public schools by introducing market-based competition. Where privatisation proponents previously condemned public ownership of goods and services as antithetical to the capitalist spirit, they now insist that the capitalist model can improve the public sector. The rhetoric has changed to accommodate a growing antipathy towards the billionaire class.
Mats Hallenberg’s volume, the title of which translates to The Struggle for the Common Good: Conflicts over Private and Public Services in Stockholm during 400 Years, offers a survey of how debates around certain public services have been framed by the political and financial leaders of Sweden’s capital city from about 1600–2000. It serves a companion volume to Magnus Linnarsson’s 2017 Problemet med vinster. Riksdagsdebatter om privat och offentlig drift under 400 år (The Problem with Profits: Parliamentary Debates on Private and Public Services during 400 Years). As Hallenberg notes, ‘Several functions which today are understood as public were a question for local governments long before they were attended to at the national level’ (p. 15, translation by the reviewer) – and, in fact, local conditions shape a public’s receptivity to particular messages.
The first of these public services Hallenberg examines is the system of tax collection in the 1600s. During this century, Sweden became more closely knit to the rest of Europe through trade and found itself in need of a regular and secure influx of cash money, a need resulting in the kingdom auctioning off to private entrepreneurs the right to collect taxes and tolls. Such a system, of course, led to tremendous abuse, and despite the aim of minimising costs, such privatisation ‘demanded investments in state control to appear acceptable in the eyes of the subjects’ (p. 51). Peasants saw such a system as disrupting their relationship – consisting of rights and responsibilities – to the king directly, and their protests in Stockholm proved ‘doubly dangerous because they challenged the city’s bourgeois government as well as the king’s claim to rule freely over the taxes of his subjects’ (p. 60).
Hallenberg’s next case study centres upon street lighting in the mid-1700s. Not only was Stockholm aiming to imitate ‘modern’ European cities, but local elites were increasingly worried about a ‘violent underclass’ operating under cover of darkness. However, royal initiatives regarding public street lighting were resisted by the middle class, who preferred a system whereby homeowners were responsible for lighting the portion of the street in front of their residences, and they even resisted attempts at a privatised system of street lighting, arguing that no entrepreneur should profit from a government mandate. ‘In the end’, writes Hallenberg, ‘Stockholm appears as an example of a city in which the dominant middle class successfully insisted upon its right to represent the public good’ (pp. 95–96). However, the following century’s debates over sanitation went in the other direction – in fact, Stockholm became the first city in the kingdom to transform its sanitary system into a public service. The growth of the city as an increasingly industrial centre challenged the traditional mandate of homeowners to keep clean their portions of the street and to empty latrines in the proper place. In response, the city attempted to engage private operators to transport waste away from the city, but ‘entrepreneurial shortcomings, combined with international developments regarding increased sanitary control, created a situation in which organizational reform appeared possible, even if it came with costs’ (p. 127). Much the same holds true for the development of public rail service in the early 20th century. With the explosive growth of Stockholm in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, city leaders tried to meet the increasing need of transportation with private operations, but this still necessitated some level of public investment: ‘Where private companies lacked interest in building new lines that did not give the desired profit, the municipality could satisfy itself with “a reasonable profit” and implement construction to less inhabited areas’ (p. 142). Eventually, with international models foremost in the mind, ‘the private interest in profit was regarded’ as ‘a hindrance to the planning of tomorrow’s railways’, as well as subverting the public good by its failure to serve all areas equally (p. 156).
The rhetoric surrounding the idea of the public good came full circle with regard to Hallenberg’s final case study – care for the elderly in the late 20th century, when service to ‘the consumer’ rather than to ‘the citizen’ stood as the very definition of the public good. ‘Freedom of choice’ became the rhetorical lynchpin for debates on elderly care, so much so that even the Social Democrats and Vänsterpariet ( ‘the Left Party’, or the former Swedish Communist Party) centred their own proposed policies around ‘choice’. The middle-class majority could even turn scandals about the care offered by independent companies to their advantage: ‘they insisted that privately managed operations were easier to govern because one could easily end the relationship due to breach of contract’ (p. 194). Rather than a collective, the ‘public good’ envisioned by such arrangements was that of autonomous individuals whose ‘freedom’ stood at the centre of public debates.
According to Hallenberg, if there is a lesson here, it is that ‘we ought to talk more about how we want to define the public interest’ (p. 234). We cannot avoid conflicts between individual desire and the public good, but a refusal to define terms can only exacerbate that conflict, for it threatens to make the various poles ontological rather than negotiable qualities – words like ‘freedom’ are allowed to stand for one particular set of values when they might otherwise be contested. At the local level, such values might be contested more readily, given the more immediate relevance of political action in the name of the public good, but this does not make the local a parochial setting, for as Hallenberg explicates throughout, the shift in how leaders and citizens in Stockholm interpreted ideas of the public good were heavily informed by developments on the world stage. In this present moment, when debates about the public good or the public interest tend to be sidelined, a work like Hallenberg’s has the potential to inspire scholars to excavate such shifts in rhetoric in other times and places, as well as inspire citizens to think critically about their own relationship to the political process.