I like Belfast, but I wouldn’t call it nice.
Nice is elsewhere, like the Netherlands, which I’ve been thinking about regularly since 2019 when I got on a train at Schiphol and noticed how attractive the electricity pylons were.
Or Sweden, which has been on my mind on and off since 2002 when I was in Stockholm for a few days and I saw that the streets were clean, everyone looked awfully healthy, and the sandwiches in the cafés and bakeries had none of the creamy gloop that was everywhere in Ireland.
Only recently, though, did I discover there’s a whole literary subgenre for people like me, burdened with these kinds of wildly unscientific but hard-to-shake travel observations, and fascinated/jealous about how some other European countries have made themselves just so damn nice. Let’s call it Books About Nice Countries.
And as several Books About Nice Countries point out, most of us spend surprisingly little time thinking about these uneventful and well-functioning places, some of which are among the UK and Ireland’s nearest neighbours. Yet both historical connections, and the fact that Nether-switzer-nordic-land[1] soars high on all those quality of life league tables, should make us pay them more attention.
So what do the books tell us?
Politically, they seem to be on another planet. People trust their governments, politics is relatively boring and non-adversarial, and the state is seen as increasing rather than threatening people’s freedom and wellbeing. It provides lots of nice things for ordinary people.
Maybe it helps if you are rich, and bit lucky, as these places are. The Norwegians have oil, the Swedes have iron, Iceland has geothermal energy. But the people are talented too. The Swiss carved out their idyllic land in brutal terrain. The Dutch have been menaced by lots of water but used it to become world-leading seafarers and traders. The Dutch and Swiss especially appear to be natural entrepreneurs, making and selling items of quality. Yet all this wealth is much better spread than in Ireland and the UK.
This is a glaring feature of all these societies: a lack of class division.
Culturally, there are also similarities among them. They’re affluent but value modesty, a Lutheran/Calvinist thing maybe. [2] They’re socially liberal but enforce rigid social norms. Danish and Swiss dinner parties seem to have some pretty totalitarian etiquette. Anything goes in the Netherlands, unless you cross the road before the green light, in which case the police will chase you down.
This makes you wonder if it’s possible to have a nice country without at least a little suffocating conformism.
Another downside is that if you do have a nice country, you can’t enjoy aspiring to niceness – you have the stress of working out how to keep things nice. Deep divisions about whether immigration threatens their cherished liberalism and prosperity have appeared in all these places. Openness to outsiders varies. The process of becoming a Swiss citizen sounds such a nightmare, you wonder why anyone for go for it, which is presumably the idea.
I’m not sure if you can put a country in a book. I’d also love to know if all nations/languages produce books about what they think are nice countries, or if they come from a particularly British/Anglophone outlook. Or have I just imagined this genre into existence?
But nice countries certainly make for really nice books – escapist, educational, and so interesting[3]. Hopefully someone is out there wandering around a spotless town square or sitting on a ruthlessly punctual train, writing my next one.
[1]The countries I’m including here are pretty arbitrary – these are the ones that interest me. But no offence to the rest of the world.
[2] I’m not sure how this fits with some of these countries’ comfort with public nudity, in saunas and beaches etc. This cultural feature is surely one of the mysteries of the universe, which these books unfortunately don’t explain.
[3] A very long footnote about the books (and there are plenty more out there of course):
The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, by Michael Booth. The book visits Denmark (where the writer lives), Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden, to see if these places are as good as we think they are. He finds some contradictions and dark underbellies (conformity, xenophobia, alcoholism, and so on) but overall the myth mostly survives the book’s scrutiny.
The Nordic Theory of Everything by Anu Partanen. Written by a Finnish journalist who moved to the US, this isn’t a travel book but a comparison of politics and society in the two places. Finland isn’t perfect, but compared to the book’s bleak depiction of everyday life in the US, where raising a child, getting an education, and staying healthy, are luxuries, it pretty much is.
How Iceland Changed the World by Egill Bjarnason. A light-hearted history of Iceland’s interactions with rest of the world. The pleasure is in the interesting characters, meandering stories, and random connections, but the book also gives a sense of how this very egalitarian and literary society emerged.
Swiss Watching: Inside the Land of Milk and Honey, by Diccon Bewes. We get discussions of Swiss politics (nuts), the cheese and chocolate industries, those precision watches and trains, military neutrality, and the country’s all-important geography. Again, Switzerland comes away from the microscope looking as smartly dressed and dependable as it went in.
Why the Dutch are Different by Ben Coates. Another enjoyable mix of travelogue, history, and observation by a British ex-pat, covering everything from football to drugs to windmills. The material on the Catholic-Protestant divide is fascinating, especially when viewed from Ireland.
The Rhine is Coates’s follow-up, a travel book which follows the course of the river through mostly nice parts of very nice countries down to its source in Switzerland. We learn how what the Rhine allows you to do, and doesn’t allow you to do, has shaped European history from the Romans to the present.
David Mitchell 