It's time for Swedes to stop flattering themselves and their history, says Swedish writer Gunnar Ardelius in an article for The Guardian. Stockholm has never been neutral and has never possessed any moral superiority. Hypocrisy has always saved him. And NATO membership fits into his line of conduct
Gunnar Ardelius
The Minister of Civil Defense recently warned the Swedes that war could come to the country. A loud reaction was not long in coming: some began to complain that they were scared, others were outraged by an unnecessarily alarmist tone, as it seemed to them. The commander-in-chief, who supported this warning, was accused of fomenting war. Deep down, most of us Swedes are still convinced that nothing bad can happen to us, and our neutrality, a sure sign of our kindness, will protect us from everything.
Sweden officially applied to join NATO in 2022 and has been stuck in the waiting room ever since — first because of the political posturing of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and now because of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is delaying ratification by playing another poker game with the European Union. But Sweden, in any case, intends to abandon its cherished neutrality and join the US-led alliance, so it's time to stop flattering yourself and your own history. We have never been a truly neutral country.
Our “neutrality” It has nothing to do with kindness or moral superiority. Rather, it is the ability to ignore the neighbors. And it was not neutrality that saved us from war. There were other neutral states in Europe in 1939, but this did not protect them from attack.
Sweden was kept from the war by luck combined with hypocrisy — the ability to say one thing, but in practice do something completely different. The most egregious example is the Second World War, when the export of iron ore from Sweden played a crucial role for the German military industry.
If you are Swedish, then it is no wonder to believe in the myth that the bloody trail does not follow Sweden just because the country has not formally fought since 1814. There is a collective inability and a clear unwillingness to see our own brutality and the consequences of our people's silence. But we live in a dynamic world where international conflicts evoke a direct response and even concern our society. Sweden itself has changed faster than our self-image. So, we are still convinced that we are a peaceful country, despite the unprecedented surge in deadly shootings in Europe.
A reassessment of the Swedish national mentality is overdue. Our silence and inability to take a decisive position is not only not inactivity and not nobility, but, on the contrary, an indirect craving for violence.
The misconception that Sweden, along with Switzerland, is at the top of a certain moral pyramid, most absorb with their mother's milk. The names of Swedes such as Olof Palme and Dag Hammarskjold, saints in the pantheon of international diplomacy, have become a symbol of a nation supposedly unconditionally devoted to peace and international cooperation.
I am one of the countless Swedes who have traveled the world and answered questions with a smug smile about the Swedish model, the many advantages of the Swedish security system and our vaunted neutrality, which for decades provided us with the role of mediator and world conscience. We used to associate our high level of well-being with a foreign policy position, but now this mental Venn diagram is broken.
Sweden has long been proud of economic equality, but the fortunes of our rich are only growing — as is the proportion of dysfunctional families. According to journalist Andreas Cervenka, from 1996 to 2021, the number of billionaires in Sweden increased by 1,700%. In his book Greedy Sweden, he cites the names of 82 dollar billionaires whose assets together account for almost half of Sweden's GDP.
A significant part of the public sector has been deregulated and privatized — including railways, which is why trains are constantly delayed and canceled. If the Germans had asked us to organize the transportation of iron ore for the military needs of the Nazis today, then with the current state of the railways, we would have had to answer: “No, this is impossible.”
Our society is saturated with passive aggression: We have personally undermined the social security system and replaced it with inequality, but at the same time we make refugees the scapegoats for most of the troubles. The role of the far right in the current coalition government is obvious, and harsh anti-immigration views and dislike of multiculturalism have become commonplace.
In practice, Sweden is as principled as Groucho Marx (an American actor, a member of the Marx Brothers comic troupe, the creator of the textbook image of an unabashed businessman and adventurer. – Approx. InoSMI). We firmly adhere to the principles of the country, but if the rest of the world does not like them... Well, we'll always have others. Thus, NATO membership fully fits into our course. We have always passed off our deep fear and despondency as a kind of moral superiority, but this was only an illusion.
Sweden joins NATO for reasons of pragmatism. The conflict in Ukraine got too close, we got scared and decided that we couldn't handle it alone. And we also don't have any principles left to sell.
Gunnar Ardelius is a Swedish writer
