SWEDEN MAY THINK OF ITSELF as the self-evident centre of the universe, but, to the outside world, it may seem a geographically distant and politically rather uninteresting place. The exception would be for those who cherish its solid image as an early laboratory for the cradle-to-grave political model known as the welfare state. But there is a risk that even they will find Sweden something of a disappointment these days.In some circles in Sweden there is still considerable fondness for the elaborate state interventionism once perfected by the welfare state. Those nostalgic sentiments are now creating a stubborn resistance to the changes that are needed to improve the old, expensive, and not very efficient system. Sweden is still governed by the same Social Democratic party that has been in power for most of the time since 1932, but the Social Democrats have had to leave a great deal of their former ideological rigour behind in the last few years. Only rather brief periods of non-socialist government have interrupted the Social Democratic grip on power. The four-party coalition, headed from 1991 to 1994 by Carl Bildt, the first Conservative prime minister since 1930, was undoubtedly the most important of these non-socialist governments. The administrations that governed the country between 1976 and 1984 were certainly less successful - and politically less courageous.In spite of an ambitious programme for change, the coalition did not win re-election in 1994. But the Bildt government left behind a distinct mark, particularly evident in its attempts to restructure the welfare system, in the privatization of state-owned companies, and in the field of foreign and security policy. When the Social Democrats returned to power in 1994, they confronted a less compliant electorate than in earlier decades when the socialist agenda seemed to infiltrate every single aspect of society.Sweden is no longer an isolated outpost, happily wandering its own, third way of compromises between East and West, between the market and a planned economy. In part, this change is a result of heavy international influences, but, to some extent, it is also a heritage left by three intensive years of non-socialist government in the early 1990s, which modernized the country and brought it closer to Europe. After an extensive campaign, led by the non-socialists for the 'Europeanization' of all levels of Swedish society, the country joined the European Union (EU) in 1995 after a slim majority voted 'yes' in the referendum on membership. By then, the Social Democrats had once again returned to government.Today, Sweden is a much more ordinary European country than it was only a decade or two ago. The art of compromise may still be the number one sport in the country, with the rule of consensus governing decision- making at all levels of society. Yet the problems tormenting Sweden today are not strikingly different from those that its neighbours on the continent, or its friends across the Atlantic, are forced to confront; nor are the solutions arrived at very different from those chosen by the rest of the Western world.Homogeneity can, for example, no longer be considered the Swedish middle name. After various waves of immigration, the latest of which brought substantial numbers of Muslim refugees from the Balkans and Somalia, all Swedes are no longer tall, blond, and blue-eyed. Next to the Svenssons, the Anderssons, and the Nilssons - for centuries the most common last names in the country - more exotic sounding names now appear in the phone directories.But homogeneity is also gone in many other ways that were once characteristic of the Swedish lifestyle. The idea that there is only one way to get things done and only one vehicle that can be relied upon to do it - the state - has been quite successfully challenged during the last decade.Gone are the days when there was only one of everything; when there was monopoly television, state-controlled, with only one TV channel, reluctantly complemented in 1969 by another state channel; when only the state or the county councils were trusted with the delicate task of running a medical clinic; when all schools were public, and the idea that parents could decide for themselves how and where their children would be educated was either unheard of or rapidly discarded at the official level. …