That Sweden was the first State to express reluctance to include three Spanish languages in the EU has caused confusion in certain sectors of Catalonia: we have always wanted to be Scandinavian!
Even if the final result were the same, it would have been better to stop there in Malta, quintessence of Mediterranean Europe, with little social prestige among the independence movement, whose legitimate project contains “moral” habits that can be associated with the dazzling Scandinavia: people of order, early risers, tax payers, devotees of silence and radically democratic (I write the latter to look good although without knowing what exactly it means).
Aside from the fact that Sweden has five languages with official status – it is already known that human beings and peoples tend to envy – could it not be that we have remained anchored in an idyllic, almost beatific vision of Sweden and the Nordic countries? ? (Finland also joined the reluctance).
Sweden is, for example, the country where you have the highest chance of dying from a gunshot in Europe, a fact that purists attribute to immigration and drug mafias. And where one in five voters has voted for the extreme right, which supports the current Government.
The Kingdom of Sweden is a great nation, exemplary in some things, not much in others, only that one feels perplexed by the rapture it arouses in sectors of Catalonia, as illustrated by the anecdote that the Generalitat has in its organizational chart an entire Office of the Time Reform – it will not come from a beach bar! –, created to advance our schedules, dine earlier, rest – in this life – and distance ourselves from Mediterranean societies, with high noise pollution, and subject them to the Nordic model. And I thought I lived in the best and most civilized of the seas...
Some readers will say that admiration arises from Ibsen's theater, the absence of roles in the streets, the figure of Olof Palme or the myth of sexual freedom. I wish it were so! I'm afraid that's not it, friends, that's not it. Hence the sentimental disappointment.
