Sweden’s false neutrality could not survive Putin’s Ukraine war | Opinion
Is there life after the empire? I thought about the question last week at the Engelsberg seminar, a gathering of academics, journalists and decision-makers in a disused ironworks two hours drive from Stockholm. Sweden once controlled vast stretches of northern Europe. It then contented itself, after a series of military defeats, with a more modest existence as a small neutral power with a sound welfare state.
Judging by the quantity and quality of champagne consumed on Engelsberg, life after the empire can be quite sweet – as long as some other superpower can prevent your world from collapsing. For generations, a nominally neutral Sweden could only flourish by quietly, albeit unmistakably, adapting to the American empire. Today, the country’s aspirations for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization make this adjustment clear.
Sweden was once a powerful empire. In the 17th century, it was the leading Protestant power in continental Europe. After the Thirty Years’ War, it controlled large parts of Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea region, as well as territories deprived of the Holy Roman Empire.
The decline came only decades later. A catastrophic defeat at the hands of Peter the Great – which the Russian ruler President Vladimir Putin now imitates – in the battle of Poltava in 1709 set in motion a long imperial cut that eventually left Sweden as it is today. During the 20th century, Sweden was often seen – and saw itself – as the main neutral state, one that put out the world wars and the Cold War in order to instead manage its own garden.
It has been a pretty nice existence. Sweden has the world’s 20th highest income per capita. It combines a robust capitalist economy with generous social welfare regulations. The country is known for high levels of social capital and domestic cohesion, which enabled a remarkably light hand to deal with the covid-19 pandemic, where daily life continued largely as usual. Corruption and crime are low, although the latter is increasing.
Sweden has done very well, even though it is no longer a great power. Maybe that’s why most Swedes do not seem to miss the old empire very much.
Yet Sweden’s history is not quite as simple as it may seem. Neutrality can be very profitable: the country upset the British during World War II by selling critical goods to both sides. Yet that neutrality could also be uncertain, as when the government felt compelled to allow German troops to cross Swedish territory on its way to attack the Soviet Union.
And that attitude could hardly have saved Sweden if Nazi Germany had won the war and established its rule over Europe. Adolf Hitler, who had little regard for the rights of smaller states, would not have left the country alone one minute longer than he saw fit. The Swedish balancing act was only possible as long as the most aggressive, brutal states did not gain a majority of power.
Sweden quietly acknowledged just as much during the Cold War, when it was neutral in theory but never in practice. The country developed a deep intelligence cooperation with the United States and NATO; it allowed western forces to use Swedish facilities in silence and developed a high degree of interoperability with them. Sweden is even said to enjoy loose security guarantees – an “invisible alliance”, as a journalist later put it – from Washington and NATO.
A vulnerable Sweden would have faced existential danger in a world where the Soviet Union was on the rise, so Stockholm reconciled, albeit informally, with American hegemony.
Today, Sweden is abandoning the last traces of neutrality in its application (together with Finland) to join NATO. But as officials in Stockholm told me, the reason why Sweden can so easily be quickly tracked for membership – provided a diplomatic dispute with Turkey is resolved – is that it has been such a close cousin to the alliance for several years. The move into NATO may be a bold step away from Sweden’s self-image as a neutral power, but it is a small step given the longer-term realities of cooperation with the alliance.
Sweden is supplying real military power, from its high-quality air combat and underwater warfare to its important strategic geography in the Baltic Sea. And the country has good, specific reasons to take this step. The Ministry of Defense is concerned about Russian design on strategically located Gotland, as well as ongoing Russian encroachment on Swedish waters, airspace and cyberspace.
These fears have, of course, been reinforced by the invasion of Ukraine, which shows that a country without formal security guarantees is not guaranteed anything – and that the stability of the international system that enabled Sweden to thrive is no longer ensured.
Sweden’s NATO offer thus represents an open recognition of something its leaders have long understood: Small and medium-sized countries can only succeed in a world where the balance of power is maintained by those who would protect their freedom rather than those who would destroy it. The Swedish empire is long gone. Fortunately for Sweden, the American Empire is not.
Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, co-author, most recently on “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China.”
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