Für eine bessere Bev lkerungsqualit t“: Ein Vergleich bev lkerungspolitischer Konzepte in Schweden 1920–1940

Having founded the rasbiologiska institutet in Uppsala under the leadership of Herman Lundborg in the 1920s, Sweden took over a leading roll in eugenic discourse. Lundborg’s concept of population policy aimed at measuring the racial value of the Swedish population and to reduce the number of “inferior population elements”. Only a couple of years later, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal assessed the decline in the Swedish birthrate to be a “population crisis”, thus turning the once volkish-conservatively coloured discourse on population policy into a part of social democratic agitation. In spite of obvious ideological and political differences between the concepts of Lundborg and the Myrdals, some continuity in the premises of their argumentation can be pointed out. In both cases the argument of “population quality” justifies the subordination of individual interests and needs to the collective of the race or the folkhemmet (the people’s home) respectively.