Self-Help in a Tradition of Popular Movements - the Swedish Link Movement

Abstract

The first Link Society was set up in 1945 in response to the intensive development of institutional care in Sweden. The Society was based on the working-class ideology of self-help as opposed to social engineering: the argument was that the only people who really understood alcohol abuse and who could resolve the problems of alcohol abuse were alcoholics themselves, not the scientists behind the social engineering or the temperance people. At the time that it was being formed the Link movement was very much influenced by the so-called Oxford group movement. As the movement's ideology took shape in subsequent years, the AA movement was a major influence. The Link movement's seven-point programme closely follows the AA's Twelve Steps, but the spiritual element has been replaced by the kind of profane solidarity that is typical of Swedish popular movements. The Link movement has thus extended the principle of solidarity from classical popular movements to a category of individual deviance.

Primarily for reasons that had to do with securing adequate funding, the Link Society decided from the outset to follow the same principles of organization as govern Swedish associations in general: it has formal criteria for membership and the right to vote, detailed rules for decision-making and it adheres firmly to the majority rule for internal democracy. As a consequence of this the movement has undergone several organizational conflicts and breakups. Today, the movement is divided into several rival organizations, but it seems that all of them have remained viable. Over the years half of the associations involved in the Link movement have become more and more bureaucratic and evolved into interest organizations that are now incorporated into the political decision-making apparatus. The other half of the movement has opted to remain independent of the state, underlining its role as a self-help group with relatively loose organizational structures of grassroots democracy.