Sweden is considering an emotional end to 200 years of neutrality
In the cemetery in Stockholm’s Adolf Fredrik’s church, Pierre Schori stands mercilessly at the grave of his former boss and friend Olof Palme.
As Swedish Prime Minister, Palme shaped his homeland’s Cold War identity as a superpower for human rights that was principally non-aligned and stubborn about nuclear disarmament.
If the legendary Social Democratic leader had not been shot dead in the vicinity of 1986, Sweden’s threatening decision to join NATO could very well have killed him.
– We give away our crown jewels: our influence and our position in the world, says Schori, a former assistant and caretaker in Olof Palme’s international center.
The Social Democrats have been trying to avoid this issue for years and now they have had to eat up some of their hard, clear positions.
The 83-year-old’s feeling of sadness is palpable. As early as next week, Sweden and neighboring Finland are expected to send an application letter to join NATO, the transatlantic defense alliance.
For Finland, it is a bold, sober and unsentimental move that ends decades of carefully calibrated neutrality. With a shrug of the shoulders, Finnish officials say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created a new security risk and forced them to strengthen their 1,300 km shared border as NATO’s new outer wall.
For Sweden, however, this encounter with reality is even greater: an abrupt and emotional end to a national narrative of peace, freedom of alliance and two centuries of neutrality, which dates back to the Napoleonic era.
Awake
If Russia’s attack on February 24 was the death knell for that dream, yesterday’s was the wake. At 11 o’clock in central Stockholm, 10 bitter politicians from all of Sweden’s political parties followed Foreign Minister Ann Linde into a gloomy news briefing.
The line of grief was clear: we have been safe in the past, but Sweden must change if we want to be safe in the future. Afterwards, Minister of Defense Peter Hultqvist said that Europe’s new situation requires new, uncomfortable thinking.
“From my perspective, Swedish military freedom of alliance was a way to balance and reduce the risk of conflict and tension,” he told The Irish Times. “The Russians have shown how brutal and cruel they are… And we must draw our own conclusions.”
Doing so will not be easy. Great opposition remains within his ruling Social Democrats, both against the proposed change and how it, as a party member in Stockholm said, has been “bulldozed through”.
All eyes are now on a party board meeting on Sunday, where regional leaders and party sections – for women, young people and Christians – will air their frustration and resistance. But high-ranking party figures are determined to put this historic political turnaround behind them quickly, long before the autumn elections.
“I’m simply not sure if we’re playing Putin’s game by joining NATO or staying out.”
Joining NATO leaves Sweden’s main opposition party, the Conservative-Liberal Moderates, with a stick less to beat the Social Democrats – not because they are complaining.
Long-term supporters of NATO membership, the Moderates’ foreign policy spokesman Hans Wallmark says that the challenge for his party now is to remain “good winners not bad winners”.
Although the Social Democrats back NATO membership on Sunday, he warns that it is not yet a given that they will all warm up to the idea.
“The Social Democrats have been trying to avoid this issue for years and now they have had to eat up some of their hard, clear positions,” he told The Irish Times. “For them, this is like converting from one religion to another. It deserves respect but it will take time.”
Growing nuclear risk
As the decision-making period approaches, about 40, mostly older, have gathered in central Stockholm to hear presentations on the fear of a growing nuclear risk, especially NATO’s first strike policy, which will also be Sweden’s.
“Given the role of NATO expansion in Russian threat perceptions, I do not believe that Swedish and Finnish membership of NATO is particularly useful in reducing tensions,” said Dr Tytti Erästö, senior researcher in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation at Sweden’s International Peace. Institute (Cyprus).
While the lively pace of the accession debate raises questions about democratic legitimacy, the security analyst Magnus Christiansson believes that it is less about the end of Swedish neutrality than the shattering of a stubborn myth.
Seemingly neutral for two centuries, Sweden cooperated with both sides, at different times, during World War II, while its Cold War neutrality was of the armed type, with close albeit discreet ties to NATO.
– There has always been pragmatism here in this issue, you can even say hypocrisy, says Professor Christiansson, associate professor of war science at the Swedish National Defense College.
Breakpoint
Unlike Finland, Sweden has no fresh, direct memory of war with Russia, so the invasion of Ukraine has pushed its pragmatism beyond the breaking point.
Two months ago, Sweden’s Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said that joining NATO would further destabilize the region. It was only after long meetings with Finnish officials that she and her officials realized that Stockholm had a choice: join Helsinki and apply for or take a chance in glorious security isolation. However, the heated neutrality debate has been so short that there is little debate about what type of NATO member Sweden wants to be.
“Bring your popcorn, we will have our NATO debate after our membership,” says Professor Christiansson. “As a first step, our defense headquarters will need to hang up maps that do not only cover Swedish territory.”
Political scientist Marie Demker agrees that Sweden’s NATO flirtation is not a long-term security decision but a short-term “morally defensible choice” after Helsinki’s decision tipped the Nordic norm away from freedom of alliance.
“Not applying for membership at the moment means a morally controversial choice because it is a distance from the norm and. . . a departure from common values, says Professor Demker at the University of Gothenburg. “Current conditions are not the best for foreign policy decision – making that can be assumed to meet our long-term national security interests.”
Sitting in Stockholm’s old town and watching the ministers leave Friday’s security report presentation, the locals are torn apart in a café on the country’s road ahead.
– Swedes do not think, they react, they are always afraid of not being part of the popular group, says Lina, a 26-year-old student. “I’m simply not sure if we’re playing Putin’s game by joining NATO or staying out.”
Illusion
For the 60s Nils, who claims to be cautious about joining NATO, Swedes could live under the illusion that they were free and neutral just because of the neighbors’ military position. February 24 changed all that, he thinks.
– This political theater is because Swedes have had such a long period of peace and struggle to see the world as it is, not how they wish it was, he says.
Schori does not like to linger when we walk past the sidewalk memorial that marks where Palme was shot down 36 years ago.
The prospect of what is to come – the death of Sweden’s non-aligned dream, something as noble for him as EU membership was for British survivors – awakens Schori at night.
“My wife is angry with me and says I’m obsessed,” he says. “I tell her: the world will not disappear over this, but it will be more dangerous.”