By: Sanna Mustonen
Lagom: not too little, not to much. Just right.
Westernized countries such as Sweden are often referred to as drinking countries because alcohol is legal but most importantly it’s due to the fact that it’s a part of social norms and that the majority of all of “us” adults use alcohol time to time. Therefore, the idea to experiment with alcohol between teenage moving to grown up life is very common to seek social acceptance.
In this blog post I am going to discuss how a membership in the European union have negatively affected alcohol attitudes and policies in Scandinavia. I will particularly focus on how it has affected my home country Sweden, that might be easier to recognize for you guys as the only country where every single household own a IKEA furniture. Sweden joined the European Union on January 1, 1995. Within the membership package different regulations has been made. Around Europe alcohol is available to teenager through purchase and pubs. However, in Norway and Sweden laws are way stricter. The legal drinking age on pubs is 18 years old and in order to purchase alcohol you have to be 21 years old.
Earlier today I came across a buzzfeed discussing, 20 things to know before moving to Sweden where number 15 states: “While you can purchase alcoholic drinks in restaurants and bars, if you want to take a sip from the bottle in the privacy of your own home, you’ve got only one legal option of buying stronger alcohol, and that’s from one of the roughly 400 state-run liquor stores” (Sweden, 2014). So in order to purchase alcohol in Sweden you need to go to a store called “systembolaget” which is essentially a liquor store owned and operated by the government. Systembolaget’s opening hours are limited to the weekdays. But recently Systembolaget offers a few hours of alcohol shopping on Saturdays. With a membership in the European Union, Sweden has been forced to raise the travel allowances for alcohol being brought into the country. Therefore, it is obviously impossible to keep prices high when the combined effect of cheap important and smuggling lead to a drop in domestic sales.
The entry into Europe has certainly had an effect on Swedes. For example, National policies have been eroded. Sweden had to abandon low traveller’s allowances and gradually adopt the considerably higher European levels (Örnberg & Cisneros, 2010)
Both Sweden and Norway (not a member of the EU, but entered into an agreement with the EEA in 1994) was forced to dissolve its monopoly on important,export,wholesale and production of alcoholic beverages, and also to allow alcopops to be sold in ordinary grocery stores. Indirect influences arise from the travellers import quotas within the EU. These features together, puts a constant pressure on the relatively high prices in the Nordic EU countries and forcing them to be reduced in order to stimulate border trade(Nordlund,2007).
The main effect is that from 1994 to 2004, drinking has increased by 31 % in Sweden. However, here I am going to be somewhat reasonable because we can’t just blame the membership in the EU for this. What we can blame the membership for is the changes of alcohol avaibilty. For example, the sale of Alco pops has doubled compared to when it was only sold in “systembolaget”, and of course it will when you can just walk into a normal grocery store and buy it. This has lead to large increase in the number of monopoly shop during the first years of this century. Most importantly, the biggest effect of the membership is that home made alcohol has been decreasing while illegal alcohol has increased within Scandinavia, basically due to the new regulations of the how much alcohol you are allowed to bring in to a country. This makes it beneficial for people to drive down to middle Europe to buy cheap alcohol and bring it in to the Scandinavia where they make profit but prices they sell it for is still way lower than the state-owned liquor stores. The sum of this is of course that it becomes easier for teenagers to get a hold of alcohol, because if they are willing to pay for the imported alcohol they are most likely to get it. The importers will assumingly not care about the their costumers age. They simply just want to make money.
What I think come to the main issue here is that we can expect to see a large increase in alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harm. Which is partly due to EU regulations, and is that what we want? Isn’t that why countries like Sweden and Norway established these regulations of monopolized contribution of alcohol in the first place. Does EU really have interest in national identities and core values? No, and I think this proves that a membership in the EU is not endorsing a countries national identity and doesn’t it seem kind of boring if we all are just going to end up being exactly alike and what will happened with the Swedes idea of ‘just right’ – not too much and not too little – the way of thinking in Sweden? Will that be able to exist in the future, that is something I am wondering about.
20 things to know before moving to Sweden: https://sweden.se/society/20-things-to-know-before-moving-to-sweden
Glossary:
Systembolaget: A state-owned store in Sweden that sells(the only one) alchol beverages with a alchol percentage of 4.7 % and over.
Lagom: not too little,not too much. Just right.
References:
Nordlund, S. (2007). The influence of EU on alcohol policy in a non-EU country. Journal Of Substance Use,12(6), 405-418. doi:10.1080/14659890701262205
Örnberg, J. (2010). Sweden, the EU and the alcohol traveller’s allowances. Contemporary Drug Problems,37(1), 3-38.