INTRODUCTION
Scandinavia in the First World War
In December 1914, the kings of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden met in the city of Malmö on the south coast of Sweden to demonstrate Scandinavian unity and a common determination to remain neutral in the ongoing war. At that point, the fighting had not taken a decisive turn on the battlefield. In an indirect strategy, an adjunct to the conventional fighting, the belligerents embarked on trade war and blockade to besiege their enemies’ economy and society at large. This profoundly changed the character of the war. It also subjected the Scandinavian countries to relentless pressure.
When the war ended four years later, all three countries had indeed succeeded in staying out of the conflict. From that perspective, the ‘Meeting of the Three Kings in Malmö’ in 1914 and the follow-up meeting in the Norwegian capital Kristiania (present-day Oslo) in November 1917 would appear to have been important events. They were certainly perceived as such by contemporaries. In 1914, the Swedish weekly Hvar 8 dag commented on the Malmö meeting that at a time when the great European races—Slavs, Romans, and Teutons of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon descent—had engaged in a fierce struggle to protect their interests, the fact that some eleven million ‘Northern Teutons’ had formed a mighty block of their own must be attributed some importance.1
However, the interests of the three Scandinavian countries were not as uniform, nor was their unity as strong, as their governments wanted the world to believe. Throughout the war, this lack of common interest was carefully concealed. The kings’ meeting was in lieu of a closer military and diplomatic cooperation that would have undermined the neutrality of each Scandinavian country. The main objective for all the governments was to remain non-belligerent at almost any cost. This necessitated a policy of response and adjustment that time and again placed them in an awkward legal position, and on occasion left them neutral by the skin of their teeth.
Scandinavia 1914
The importance of the northern periphery
From the sixteenth century onwards, Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea area had played an important role in Europe as a source of strategic raw materials for the navies of the Western powers. With the coming of steam ships in the nineteenth century, the region gradually lost this role. Moreover, the Napoleonic Wars reduced Denmark and Sweden to minor European powers. Denmark’s military defeat by the German states in 1864, compounded by the inability of Sweden– Norway to come to Denmark’s assistance, further confirmed that image. In the period after 1871, this was generally acknowledged, and the great powers demonstrated a common interest in preserving Scandinavia as a low-tension region in Europe.
In 1905, when Sweden and Norway broke up from the loose political union that had united them since the Napoleonic Wars, Britain, Germany, and Russia resolutely intervened to secure a peaceful divorce. Afterwards, they took great pains to integrate independent Norway and its two Scandinavian neighbours into the European security system, first by negotiating the so-called Integrity Treaty with Norway in 1907, and then by laboriously negotiating the Baltic and North Sea treaties of 1908, in which all the great powers recognized the territorial status quo around the Baltic and the North Sea together with the bordering states.2 Norway was not invited to take part in the negotiations for the status quo treaties even though it was clearly a North Sea state.3
With a total population of around eleven million, the Scandinavian countries had few demographic resources to offer from a strategic perspective. The economic resources of the region were, nonetheless, substantial. All three countries were open economies, highly dependent on foreign trade. For all three the main trading partners were Britain and Germany, a fact that was to test Scandinavian diplomacy to the utmost during the war. Scandinavian exports were dominated by (processed) raw materials: meat and dairy products, fish, forestry products, and iron and other minerals. By 1914, the Scandinavian economy was still dominated by agriculture, but industrialization was in full swing, and some industries—such as Swedish engineering and the Norwegian chemical industries based on the tamed energy of the mountain rivers—were to a high degree export-oriented.
From an international perspective, another key Scandinavian resource was its merchant navies. Norway could boast the fourth largest in the world, but the Danish and Swedish merchant navies were also impressive. The Scandinavian merchant marines to a large extent served the trade regime that encompassed the British Empire. The political implications of this were especially profound in Norway due to the pivotal role played by the merchant navy in the Norwegian economy. The overall objective for the belligerents once they had embarked on the trade war was to gain control over Scandinavian economic assets, or deny the enemy free access to their export and shipping industry. In course of the war Denmark would lose some 249 ships (253,622 tonnes), Sweden 260 (272,577 tonnes), and Norway 831 (1,535,275 tonnes).
Although Sweden had been linked to the German commercial treaty system through bilateral agreements in 1906 and 1911, for Sweden Germany’s main economic importance was as an exporter to Sweden, whereas Britain was the dominant importer of Swedish products, and France stood for investment capital. Against this background, Swedish neutrality was difficult to avoid in 1914. Although there were strong pro-German sympathies among the Swedish royal family and in government, Knut Agathon Wallenberg, head of the country’s leading financial family, had been appointed foreign minister. This ensured that trade interests would always weigh heavily in Swedish diplomacy. Likewise, Norway and Denmark were dependent on trade with both Britain and Germany and were consequently subject to unrelenting pressure from both. While the Germans grudgingly accepted that Denmark would continue its large agricultural exports to Britain after the outbreak of war, it took all the diplomatic skills of the Danish foreign minister, Eric Scavenius, to convince the British to allow imports to Denmark notwithstanding the naval blockade. Norway faced a similar situation. However, the merchant marine made it far more vulnerable to the Entente Powers’ coercive measures than either Denmark or Sweden, since it to a large extent served the British. Moreover, the British controlled the sea lanes in the North Sea along with the supply of fuel, which both the Norwegian merchant and fishing fleets were totally dependent on.
Even if the great-power diplomats were interested in status quo and détente in Scandinavia in the years preceding the war, the military elites viewed the region somewhat differently. The reason was, of course, Scandinavia’s geographical position, with Denmark and Sweden controlling the Baltic approaches and Norway flanking the debouches to the North Atlantic. According to international law on neutrality, the Scandinavian countries were under an obligation to muster naval and military forces to survey and intercept in cases of infringement. In the event of war, the Royal Navy planned to enter the Baltic Sea to support their Russian allies, either by attacking German naval bases or by landing troops on the coast of Pomerania. Regardless of the fact that the increased size of battleships and the evolution of weapons such as mines and torpedoes had made the thought of sending a British fleet into the Baltic risky, such offensive plans gained increased weight when Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. Both in London and Berlin, naval planners therefore had to include scenarios for war in Scandinavia in their preparations. To operate in the Baltic Sea, the British would benefit from bases in Norway, Denmark, or even the south-west coast of Sweden, while the Germans in order to prevent them would need to control these areas before the British arrived. In addition, Russian military planners had to take into account the strong pro-German and Russophobic tendencies among Sweden’s elites and prepare for the possibility of it entering the war on Germany’s side.4
What matters here is that the Scandinavian countries escaped war with a much narrower margin than was generally realized in the immediate aftermath of 1918. This ensured that their former security policies would continue into the interwar period without much discussion. When Europe went to war again some twenty years later, plans and strategic calculations from last time—which for decision-makers in Berlin and London seemed only like yesterday—were taken out of the drawer and finally put to use. In retrospect, it seems clear that both Danish and Norwegian neutrality had been at considerable risk in 1917–18 as a consequence of the German submarine offensive and proposed British countermeasures. When a similar situation arose in the spring of 1940, Denmark and Norway were less lucky.5
All in all, in spite of their economic dependence on the belligerents, geography placed the Scandinavian countries in different positions: Denmark powerless in relation to neighbouring Germany; Norway in danger of being forced into a non-neutral status if its neutrality and territorial waters were subject to violations; and Sweden in a relatively easier position as the Scandinavian central power, not bordering the great powers. For a number of self-serving reasons, the great powers were not interested in dragging the Scandinavian countries into the war.
Scandinavian politics
Since Scandinavia is often regarded as being in the vanguard of democratic development, it is fair to ask in what way or to what extent domestic politics in the region influenced its ability to endure the burdens of war and to remain neutral. We will argue that the relative equilibrium and low tension that stemmed from the general democratization process of the nineteenth century left the Scandinavian countries both robust and resilient in the face of the strains of war. True, political instability, extreme radicalization, and social unrest buffeted these countries towards the end of the war as a result of the harsh living conditions suffered by ordinary people and the widespread disgust at war profiteering and the conspicuous consumption of the nouveaux riches. The most important question to ask, then, is why did the Scandinavian countries remain democratic and liberal in spite of the tremendous pressure they were under?
Norway gained full independence only in 1905. Nonetheless, the country came to serve as the Scandinavian role model in democratic politics. The Eidsvoll Constitution of 1814 was the first passed in Scandinavia to be based on liberal principles (the division of power and national sovereignty). Norway was, moreover, the first country to introduce what amounted to parliamentarianism in 1884, following a protracted and intense struggle between the Storting (the parliament) and the monarch. The full male franchise was introduced in 1898, thus doubling the size of the electorate overnight, and in 1913 Norwegian women were given the right to vote. Parliamentary politics were dominated by parties founded in the 1880s: first Høire (the Conservatives) and Venstre (the Liberal Party)—which by 1914 had a clear social–liberal profile—were the dominant parties up to the outbreak of war. The Labour Party, founded in 1887, was still struggling to establish itself as a national party. The breakthrough came when its first member of parliament was elected in 1912. Venstre was the leading party, having gained a clear majority in the Storting in the 1912 elections, and the party leader Gunnar Knudsen (1848–1928) was in a strong position as head of government when the war broke out.
Norway had gone through a period of relatively extensive rearmament in the decade preceding the dissolution of the union with Sweden. After 1905, however, the armed forces slipped down the list of political priorities. Only with the new army organization that was passed by the Storting in 1909 and the new building programme for the navy from 1912 were steps taken to prepare the armed forces for neutrality assignments and war. At the outbreak of war, the armed forces were well prepared for neutrality duties, but far less so for armed conflict.
In Denmark things were more complicated. Here politics had been dominated by a constitutional struggle for almost fifty years. After defeat in the Schleswig War of 1864, the Danish Constitution of 1849 had been revised in order to secure a privileged position for the elites. The liberals and their social-democratic allies originally fought for a return to the more democratic 1849 Constitution, but later added the introduction of universal suffrage for both men and women to their agenda. The constitutional struggle had its ebbs and flows. In the mid 1880s, it brought Denmark to the brink of civil war, while the 1890s and 1900s were characterized by compromises between conservatives and moderate liberals. One of the key dividing issues in Danish politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was defence policy. The conservatives wanted to base Danish neutrality on a strong defence, while the radical wing of the liberals fundamentally questioned the value of anything beyond merely symbolic military forces. In 1909 the issue was settled in a compromise backed by Conservatives and Moderate Liberals but opposed by the radicals who in 1905 had broken away from the Liberal Party and established the new Radikale Venstre (Social Liberal Party). When this party was asked to form government under the leadership of Carl Th. Zahle in 1913, the King explicitly demanded that the new government should accept the defence policy of the 1909 compromise. The Social Liberals accepted this, as their key goal was to secure the passing of a new constitution that had been negotiated for several years by the main parties. In 1914, Danish politics was characterized by deeply entrenched divisions, but at the same time the more or less continuous negotiations on constitutional reform since 1909 also meant the key players knew one another very well. This might be part of the explanation why an informal Burgfrieden was easily established when war broke out.6
In Sweden, the issue of defence played a key role in the constitutional struggle between Left and Right during the years before the war. Things had come to a head in February 1914, when the Liberal government of Karl Staaff was forced to resign after King Gustav V had publicly sided with a protest march of 30,000 Conservative farmers demonstrating against the government’s defence policy. The Staaff government was prepared to spend money on armaments, but the central issue was not so much the level of defence spending as the question of parliamentary control over the military. Staaff had appointed civilian politicians as ministers of the army and navy and had appointed parliamentary defence committees to review both the costs and the organizational structure in a long-term perspective. The military were reduced from answering directly to the monarch to a role as expert advisers to democratically elected politicians. With the benefit of hindsight, these reforms signalled an important step towards Sweden’s political modernization, but was seen at the time by the Right as an assault on traditional practice, according to which the King was ‘Supreme War Lord’ and the only rightful authority for the officer corps. However, work in the ‘Staaff defence committees’ progressed surprisingly smoothly and led to increased mutual understanding between Left and Right, as well as between the political and military elites who quickly accepted their new respective roles. In the heated atmosphere of the times, however, those changes went quite unnoticed.7
For the Right, the fact that the issue was linked to defence and the nation’s survival assisted popular mass mobilization. Some historians have portrayed the famous Farmers’ March in February 1914 as a reactionary setback on Sweden’s road to modern democracy. It could be argued, however, that the opposite was closer to the truth: the fact that the Swedish Right took to the streets and organized a large-scale popular demonstration in the nation’s capital showed that it had finally embraced the symbols and rituals of mass democracy.
Although universal male suffrage for Andra kammaren (the Lower House) of the Riksdag (Parliament)—with exception for draft-dodgers, welfare recipients, tax evaders and other ‘disorderly people’—had been introduced in 1909, women still lacked the vote. Moreover, Första kammaren (the Upper House) was still elected by plutocratic municipal assemblies where major tax-payers could cast up to 40 votes. Therefore, Liberals and Social Democrats were still demanding the democratization of the Upper House, votes for women, and the firm establishment of parliamentary rule with the monarch reduced to a purely symbolic figurehead. In Sweden, as in many other European countries, the First World War would finally secure these reforms.
To solve the defence issue and rule the country until ordinary elections had been held, a caretaker government under the governor of the county of Uppsala, Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, was appointed after Staaff’s resignation. Hjalmar Hammarskjöld’s cabinet consisted of conservative high officials and businessmen who lacked political experience and parliamentary skills. Although the government had intended to resign after the elections, it was forced by the outbreak of war to stay on. All political parties rallied round Hammarskjöld and the policy of neutrality, and Social Democrats and Liberals accepted without protest the heavy increase in spending that the Hammarskjöld defence Bill entailed. Soon, however, politicians on both Right and Left came to see the Prime Minister as a tactless and arrogant man. That the Constitution of 1809 deprived the Riksdag of all control over foreign policy increased their distrust, especially since Hammarskjöld—who had had a distinguished career as an expert in international law—regarded himself as solely competent in the field and saw no reason to ask the Riksdag for advice. This did not strengthen his position as the nation’s leader in a time of crisis. The strong parliamentary opposition against the government weakened Sweden’s position in its dealings with the belligerents.8
All in all, the decision of the Scandinavian countries to declare themselves neutral was entirely uncontroversial throughout the war. Moreover, the domestic political climate in all three countries was such that other controversies were easily put aside in face of external threats. This situation prevailed until the cost of living rose dramatically. The ensuing social deterioration and the example of the Russian Revolution in 1917 led to a radicalization of the labour movement that was regarded as profoundly destabilizing.
Scandinavian foreign policies
Although the Scandinavian countries’ neutral status was not guaranteed by international treaties as was Belgium’s, Luxembourg’s, and Switzerland’s, the cornerstone of the security policy of all three Scandinavian countries was non-alignment in peace and neutrality in war. This is easily explained not only by their status as small states with minimal international clout, but also by the fact they were open economies with innumerable links to both the Entente Powers and the Triple Alliance. Moreover, they had all been active in promoting the development of international neutrality law in the period preceding the war, and they had a long-standing tradition of neutrality stretching back to the eighteenth century. It is, however, more meaningful to write about Scandinavian neutralities in the plural, since the policies of the three countries hinged on both specific geopolitical interests and historical experience. In Denmark and Sweden, security policies were to a high degree dictated by the fear of their great-power neighbours, Germany and Russia, while Norway was under the impression—rightly or wrongly—that it enjoyed effortless security in the shadow of the Royal Navy and its sheer remoteness from the continental theatre of war.
Swedish security policy had depended on France and Britain as counterweights to allegedly expansionist Russia since the Crimean War. This was laid down in the November Treaty of 1855 to which the Scandinavian dual monarchy, Britain, and France were signatories. In the decades after 1871, Sweden came to rely heavily on newly unified Germany instead. This tendency was reinforced by Sweden’s cultural orientation and dynastic ties (the Swedish Queen Victoria was the first cousin of Germany’s Emperor Wilhelm). Secret conversations between the Swedish and German Chiefs of Staff in Berlin in November 1910 marked a symbolic high-water mark. Discussions focused on Russia, but did not go very far, and no agreement was reached. Rather, fears grew among the Swedish security elite that Germany could drag Sweden into a great-power war. It was generally believed that British protection against Russia would come with fewer strings attached. Internationally, however, Sweden was perceived as ardently anti-Russian and therefore pro-German.9
Danish security policy was completely dominated by the German question. Only a few years after the devastating defeat against Germany in 1864, the Franco-Prussian War and the establishment of the German Empire in 1871 made it clear that Denmark could not hope to win back Schleswig. German unification and the steady rise of Germany as a great power convinced successive Danish governments that neutrality was the only option left to the country. True, there was a widespread perception that Germany was the hereditary enemy and Danish national identity continued to be centred on a core of anti-German notions, yet the inescapable fact remained that political and strategic realities dictated that Danish security policy had to be pro-German—or at least the government had to avoid provoking their mighty neighbour south of the border.10
The military importance of Denmark in a Europe-wide war would turn on the fact that access to the Baltic Sea could be controlled from Danish territory. As a declared neutral, Denmark, of course, was bound by the provisions of the Second Hague Convention of 1907. Naturally, this was acknowledged by both the military establishment and the government; and in the 1912 Royal Decree on Danish Neutrality, although belligerent warships were allowed innocent passage through Danish waters, they were forbidden the use of ports and territorial waters as bases. As the German navy would have no use for Danish bases, this was clearly directed against Britain. In actual fact, Denmark did very little to prepare the defence of Danish waters against such an infringement of neutrality, and Danish defence plans focused almost exclusively on Copenhagen.11
Norway was a newcomer on the international scene, and from the outset sought guarantees from the great powers for its independence. After relatively swift diplomatic recognition in the wake of the dissolution of the union with Sweden, a guarantee of its territorial integrity was given by the British, French, Germans, and Russians in the treaty of November 1907. The country immediately embarked on non-alignment and neutrality. It has been said that neutrality was an unwritten part of the Norwegian constitution. At the same time, Norwegian security policy was biased and not at all as virtuous as the pious official rhetoric would have it. The basic position was neutrality in war, but if the country were to be attacked there was a firm belief that Britain—from self-interest— would come to its assistance. There was a widespread notion that the country and its economic assets were well within the British sphere of influence and that it was therefore covered by an ‘implicit guarantee’.12 That is why defence issues did not loom large on the political agenda and why neutrality measures were regarded as far more important than preparations for war.
Scandinavianism – the unwelcome factor
Political Scandinavianism—the dream of a united Scandinavia that had been widespread, at least among the educated elites, from the 1840s—suffered an abrupt demise in the wake of the Danish–German war of 1864. Norwegian and Swedish promises (and Danish expectations) of support came to nothing, and rang hollow to those who supported Scandinavian assistance. This fact has tended to overshadow the fact that on a cultural level Scandinavianism lived on among groups and individuals who strove to promote the many links and similarities between the Scandinavian peoples and cultures. Scandinavianism even experienced an Indian summer from the late 1890s, when a number of Scandinavian or Nordic societies and associations were founded and a host of meetings, conferences, and exhibitions were arranged in order to develop Scandinavian cooperation in a variety of ways, but it was superseded by a long and deep Nordic winter after the dissolution of the Swedish–Norwegian Union in 1905.13 This was the case for civil society and government alike. Until at least 1911, the Norwegian government—and in particular the army—tended to regard Sweden as a likely military threat, although there were some signs of a reassessment among strategists. The winter chill of Swedish revanchism and haughtiness were clearly felt up to the outbreak of war in 1914. Consequently, there was little tradition of political cooperation between the three countries, with the notable exception of neutrality issues.
In diplomacy, foreign affairs, and defence, there was no such thing as altruistic Scandinavianism. Since neutrality in war was undisputed in all three countries, the governments simply had to take into account the fact that international law barred cooperative aspirations in this respect, or at least made them very unlikely. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden had gone as far as they could when they harmonized their neutrality regulations before they were communicated in December 1912, albeit in strict accordance with Section 13 of the Second Hague Convention concerning the ‘Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers in Naval War’. The Convention, of course, recognized no neutral blocs. The Scandinavian countries also agreed not to make any changes to the rules without consulting one another.14 When push came to shove, once war had broken out the lack of idealistic Scandinavianism became glaringly obvious except for the posturing of the kings and ministers in Malmö in December 1914. It strikes us that the Scandinavians, to borrow a phrase, were three nations separated by an almost common language. Merely raising the question of Scandinavian security cooperation was for obvious reasons exceedingly unwelcome when seen from the vantage point of government: it could jeopardize their legal status as neutrals. Even the suspicion of the great powers would be shattering.
The Norwegian government had learned a harsh lesson during the recent negotiations over the treaty signed in 1907 and the concomitant abrogation of the November Treaty of 1855. The first Norwegian objective in this drawn-out process was to secure a great-power guarantee of its permanent neutrality. The Storting had actually voted in favour of negotiating permanent neutrality status as early as 1902. This was definitely achievable, but in order to promote Scandinavian unity in times of war and mitigate Swedish reactions in the wake of the 1905 upheaval, the government wanted an escape clause written into the treaty—namely that it would be exempt from the neutrality regulations if one its Scandinavian neighbours were to be attacked. Both lack of diplomatic experience and a residual notion of Scandinavianism led the Norwegian government to put forward propositions that astonished the other parties by their lack of realism. The result was a treaty that guaranteed territorial integrity but not neutrality.
All in all, the question of Scandinavianism did not fall within the remit of the governments as long as they were bound by their status as neutrals. Nonetheless, the issue resurfaced time and again during and immediately after war, and to an even greater extent as the 1930s wore on and the neighbouring great powers turned into totalitarian systems.
Thinking about war and peace
Every state—that is the harsh lesson of history—must be prepared for the test that war can pose to its power and ability to survive. When war stalks the land with its destructive, but also in many ways creative and regenerating, power, right yields to might.15
This quote is taken from the Norwegian army strategy textbook and indicates that the world view of Scandinavian officers was not much different from that of their Continental counterparts. Similar expressions of militarism and social Darwinism emanated from relatively small groups of radical nationalists. Apart from these sections of the population, it is safe to say that Scandinavian statesmen and public opinion shared a world view which differed significantly from the bellicism that was so prevalent in European societies before the First World War. There was a strong belief in the efficacy of international law as a force for moderation and conflict resolution. A close-knit elite of politicians, diplomats, international jurists, and other academics was convinced that international law was so well established as to ensure that neutrality would remain a viable option for their countries even in the event of a major war between the alliance blocs of Europe.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the liberal peace movement grew increasingly influential in the Scandinavian countries. Its most important contribution was to interpret neutrality as a morally superior position to that of military alliances and to promote the claim that neutrality furthered peace in international relations.16 Idealism and national interests dovetailed neatly in this interpretation, which has remained a distinctive feature of Scandinavian political culture to this day. There was widespread parliamentary support for the arbitration movement and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and the Nobel Peace Prize provided a pulpit from which the Scandinavian view of the world could be expounded.
The labour movement did in fact provide an effective example of what could be achieved when socialist internationalism remained true to its principles. It argued forcefully for a peaceful dissolution of the union of Norway and Sweden and threatened a general strike to back up its demands. Norway became one of very few examples of a nation-state not born in war. The socialist peace movement was also voluble in its criticism of arms expenditure and nationalist militarism, but this only found a wider echo when the war demonstrated their terrible consequences.
The most important result of this understanding of international politics was an unshakeable commitment to neutrality that was so widespread as to go unquestioned, and a firm belief among the political class that neutrality was a viable option. Even when total war had demonstrated that this was not the case, the belief remained that Scandinavia should and could stay aloof from great-power conflicts.
Scandinavian war experiences
Responses to the outbreak of war
By declaring themselves neutral in accordance with international law on 3–4 August, and by mobilizing the armed forces to protect their legal status, the Scandinavian governments demonstrated that they firmly believed that they could remain detached from the evolving conflict. Only an insignificant minority of public opinion was outspokenly in favour of siding with one or other of the belligerents. The declarations of neutrality were issued almost as a matter of course and remained by and large undisputed throughout the war. This position, however easy to reach, proved to be all but plain sailing when the governments were forced to handle a myriad of day-to-day issues that threatened their status. After all, the neutrality declarations were prepared and issued in the firm conviction that none of the three had a stake in the conflicts of interest that precipitated hostilities. Moreover, none of the Scandinavian countries was at that point prepared for the vulnerability of their foreign trade and the protracted and troublesome interruption of supplies that the war was to bring. At the outset, belligerents and neutrals alike believed that the war would last no more than a few months.
The Danish answer to the Augusterlebnis—the supposedly popular jubilation in Germany at the outbreak of war—was primarily one of nervousness: according to contemporary reports, many were worried that the hostilities would spill over into Denmark. For the government, the immediate task in the final days of July was twofold: it was imperative to mobilize the armed forces for neutrality duties, while they had to convince Germany that Denmark had no ambitions to join Germany’s enemies. Although the Social Liberal government was highly sceptical of the utility of an armed neutrality guard (the secretary of defence, Peter Munch, was even close to being an outright anti-militarist), the government followed the advice of the military leaders and started mobilization on 1 August. Danish diplomats worked to assure the Germans of Denmark’s ability to shore up its neutrality, but verbal assurances did not suffice. On 5 August Germany demanded that Denmark lay minefields in the Belts in order to establish strict control over traffic to the Baltic Sea. This was clearly directed against Britain, and, furthermore, in 1912 Denmark had promised the British not to take such a measure. However, after lengthy discussions that included the leaders of the opposition parties, the armed forces and the King, the government gave in to German demands.17
In Sweden the navy, the wartime garrison of certain fortresses, and older reservists in the local defence forces along the northeastern border and in coastal areas were mobilized on 2–3 August. Also, the yearly call-up of reservists for refresher training was issued a few weeks earlier than scheduled. Certain statements that had been made by the German Emperor to the Swedish King in 1913 gave reason to fear a German ultimatum at the outbreak of a general European war, demanding that Sweden join the Central Powers. The Swedish declaration of neutrality on 3 August was therefore followed by a joint declaration of Swedish–Norwegian neutrality, issued in Christiania on 8 August. In spite of this, rumours that Sweden intended to enter the war were still rife the next day and led the commander of the Russian Baltic Fleet, Admiral Nicolai Essen, to prepare to sail for the island of Gotland to demand that the Swedish naval forces he expected to find there should stay in port for the duration of the war. Only at the last moment was Essen’s operation called off.18
Essen’s suspicions were in part aroused by the fact that Swedish public opinion distinguished itself among the European neutrals by frequent displays of strongly pro-German sentiments. Since German social democracy was a model for the Swedish labour movement, German sympathizers could be found on the political Left as well as the Right. In 1915, three leading members of the Social Democratic Party were expelled for having advocated Sweden’s entry into the war on Germany’s side together with a group of Conservative Germanophiles.19
Apart from traditional Russophobia, dynastic bonds, and Sweden’s long-standing cultural and commercial ties, the strong pro-German bias had to do with how the leading international news agencies had carved up the world market between them around 1870. Scandinavia had been allotted to the German-based agency Wolff, and during the first weeks of the war the Swedish press came to rely heavily on German news reports. Through informal, friendly talks, the Swedish foreign ministry did what it could to influence the press towards a more neutral stance. In comparison with the Second World War, when no fewer than thirty-five newspapers were convicted in court cases connected to Sweden’s relations with foreign powers, communication between the government and the press during the First World War was more relaxed. In 1914–18, there were only six such libel convictions, most of which concerned propaganda pamphlets produced by the belligerents and not domestic newspapers.20
Norway found itself on the horns of a dilemma in the summer of 1914. By and large, the country was politically and militarily wholly unprepared for war. The armed forces had not been to war or fired a shot in anger since 1814. Neither the defence leadership nor the political authorities had any experience of dealing with international crises. However, they firmly believed that international law and institutions provided them with the tools and framework to stay out of the conflict and to allow international shipping and vital foreign trade to continue unhindered. Historical precedent gave some reason for such an assumption. But it was to prove unfounded as the war progressed.
Geography and economic ties put Norway close to the line of fire from the outset of the war, and made up the inescapable and unwelcoming circumstances under which the government was forced to operate. As early as 8 August some thirty ships of the Royal Navy steamed into Norwegian territorial waters off Stad on the west coast. They were searching for German naval vessels and were undoubtedly in breach of international law.21 The Norwegian navy intercepted immediately, and the government was left to handle the incident diplomatically. The first lesson learned by the government was simple and brutal: to invoke the full letter of international law could actually cause tensions to escalate and work against national interests; at worst, Norway might become engaged in an armed conflict with Britain. The government therefore decided that the infringements should be regarded as incidental and not as a pretext for constant pressure on Norwegian neutrality. The handling of the incident established a pattern for the rest of the war, namely that every infringement was to be treated as sui generis. In this respect the situation was different in Denmark and Sweden. On the one hand, all three countries could benefit from uninterrupted trade with the belligerents in accordance with international neutrality law, albeit more easily in Denmark and Sweden. On the other, their stance could be construed as a hypocritical cover for blatant profiteering, in a war in which majority opinion became progressively more sympathetic to the cause of Britain and France.
From 1916 onwards, the three Scandinavian foreign ministries even coordinated their efforts to impose censorship, suppressing news telegrams that threatened to undermine the neutrality of any Scandinavian country or contained sensitive information about their military measures or ship movements in their territorial waters.22 New laws to that effect were passed by the parliaments. All in all, none of the Scandinavian governments at any time wavered in their determination to stay out of the war and to muddle through each passing crisis as best they could.
Neutrality and the role of the armed forces
According to the Hague Convention, there was no doubt whatsoever that countries claiming neutral status were obliged to keep their territorial waters under surveillance so that they could intercept in cases of violation. If not, they would put their neutral rights at risk. Consequently, all the Scandinavian countries mobilized their neutrality guards, albeit to varying degrees. This was not overly controversial. However, the extent of the neutrality guard and whether it should involve a substantial part of all the services and also be prepared for escalation to war were much more contentious issues. The reason was that the costs of keeping up a protracted military engagement with the capacity to counter deliberate violations would become exceedingly burdensome when added to the deteriorating economic and social conditions caused by the war.
The Danish navy was heavily engaged in mining the Belts from August 1914. For the rest of the war, laying, maintaining, and guarding the minefields was the navy’s most important assignment. It was also engaged in clearing drifting mines in order to protect ship movements, the fisheries, and coastal communities. Altogether the navy destroyed some 10,000 mines during the war. The Danish army had a much less eventful time. In 1914, 47,000 men were mobilized to guard Danish neutrality. The bulk of them were positioned close to Copenhagen since it was realized that it would be impossible to defend most of Denmark from attack by a major military power.
As time passed and the danger of Denmark being involved in the war seemed increasingly unlikely, a power struggle between the military leadership and the secretary of defence followed. Whereas the officers wanted to maintain the mobilized force, Peter Munch found it both useless and too expensive to continue with the force level from the early phase of the war. Furthermore, discipline in the units was a growing problem as many of the conscripts found the task of defending the capital against a seemingly non-existent enemy pointless. In the end, the number of conscripts was reduced by about half. For the military leaders this bitter pill was sweetened by the construction of a series of fortifications on the perimeter of Copenhagen.23
In Sweden, the Army Bill which the Hammarskjöld government put forward in 1914 meant that the army doubled its organization from six to twelve divisions. However, there was not enough equipment for such a large force and many of the more than 200,000 conscripts who had been listed in the mobilization tables would have lacked basic equipment if they had been called up. Moreover, as there were few visible threats to the country, the Swedish army never kept more than 13,000 men under arms at any one time during the war (conscripts in basic training are excluded from that number). This can be compared with the Second World War, when there was an almost constant fear of invasion. During that conflict, the number of mobilized conscripts never sank below 25,000, and at times even rose above 300,000. In the summer of 1918, as the fighting culminated on the Western Front in France, the Swedish army kept fewer than 2,000 men in preparedness.24
Instead, the main burden of defending Swedish integrity fell on the navy. The navy also played an instrumental role during the Civil War in Finland in early 1918, evacuating Swedish citizens from the town of Pori (Björneborg) on the west coast of Finland and civilians from the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands (in all, some 2,785 people were evacuated to Swedish territory). Finally, the navy transported the Swedish expeditionary force that in February temporarily occupied the Åland Islands.25
In Norway, the government believed that the country was in a somewhat more vulnerable position than its neighbours. The navy was put on alert a few days before the outbreak of war. At that time, fortunately, a substantial part of the armed forces were on summer manoeuvres and new recruits were going through their basic training period. The navy was then ordered on 29 July to be prepared for neutrality duties, and on 2 August the order was issued by the government. On 5 August the bulk of the mobilization plan was carried through. In addition to a number of hired civilian patrol boats and an elaborate surveillance and warning system that used civilian telecommunications facilities and information gathered by lighthouse keepers, the customs service, local police, harbour authorities, and pilots, the navy proper was mustered along vulnerable sections of the coast. The maritime system was on full alert for the duration of the war while the army and coastal artillery were far less prepared.
At first glance a total Norwegian naval mobilization might appear somewhat drastic. However, it was a reflection of the dominant threat perception among politicians and the defence leadership at the time, and was regarded as an inescapable commitment under international law. The territorial waters of the south-west coast were widely assumed to present a challenge in a war between the leading sea power, Britain, and the leading land power, Germany. Moreover, Norwegian authorities rightly assumed that the great powers had a common interest in keeping the country neutral, although the government dreaded that the belligerents might infringe on Norwegian neutral rights if they suspected that the adversary was not respecting its neutrality. That called for the presence of a vigilant neutrality guard.
The government regarded it as paramount to mobilize the neutrality guard to its full extent at the outbreak of war. That would signal its intentions, will, and capacity to any violator of its neutrality. Hopefully it would also have a deterrent effect. It was regarded as more expedient to reduce the neutrality guard eventually rather than to step it up in the course of a crisis. The crux of the set-up was to combine naval and an array of civilian resources for surveillance, information gathering, and interception. The neutrality guard was not only made up of sailors. A substantial part of the coastal artillery (defending the major towns) and army units tasked with protecting the forts from land-based assaults were also mobilized. The laying of controlled minefields at the inlets and in the inner leads was also a vital part of the defensive measures. By and large, the neutrality guard proved to be surprisingly effective throughout the war. In addition to intercepting a vast number of infringements by the belligerents, it was also engaged in convoying, escorting, salvage operations, and mine clearing. It was nonetheless the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the diplomats who had to tackle the abundance of delicate neutrality issues and thus stood in the line of fire.
There seems to have been a certain discrepancy among the Scandinavian countries as to the imperative of mustering the armed neutrality guard. That was probably due to the differences in the assumed vulnerability and exposure of the countries. In Norway, the armed neutrality guard appears to have been most highly valued, while in Denmark and Sweden the armed forces’ state of preparedness was far more controversial since wide swathes of public opinion did not regard it as necessary.
The interventionist state
The First World War led to a tremendous increase in the expenditure of the governments of both belligerent and non-belligerent countries. This in turn necessitated strict governmental controls over both domestic economies and foreign trade in order to prevent grave imbalances in the economy. New economic and planning models and institutions were developed, as were alternatives to classical laissezfaire economics and dogmatic free trade. The outbreak of the war thus signalled potentially overwhelming challenges. Initially, no one knew whether the major powers would submit the Scandinavian countries to the relentless logic of economic warfare, or whether they would accept that the Scandinavian countries could continue their pre-war trade patterns roughly within the limits of neutrality law. In the autumn of 1914, Sweden found its two main export commodities—iron ore and timber—listed as contraband by the British and the Germans respectively. However, the fact that both belligerents wanted to continue their own imports from Sweden made them tolerate the fact that Sweden traded with the enemy as well.
In order to escape sanctions and involvement in the trade war, the Danish Rigsdag (Parliament) authorized the government to ban the export of essential commodities immediately after the outbreak of war. It was imperative to secure supplies for the population, but also to signal that Denmark would not become an entrepôt through which imports from, say, Britain could be re-exported to Germany. Although trade agreements with the warring powers were negotiated by business representatives who had to issue guarantees against re-exports to enemy countries, these guarantees were from the beginning underpinned by Danish legislation and thus the government. This strategy succeeded, and Denmark was able to keep up its trade with both Britain and Germany for the first three years of the war, although the pressure from the great powers demonstrated repeatedly that this trade regime would only continue as long as the great powers felt that it was in their own best interests.26
In Norway, the problems of foreign trade were solved through a series of agreements between business organizations and Norway’s trading partners. These agreements were from the start negotiated with the full understanding of the authorities, and in reality were underwritten by the government. This came into the open in 1916, when the prohibition of re-exports, which were a crucial part of these agreements, was written into law.
For all three Scandinavian countries the situation deteriorated dramatically when the US launched a trade embargo against neutral powers in the summer of 1917, an initiative that was soon copied by Great Britain. An important response to this challenge was a much stronger focus on intra-Scandinavian trade: thus the Scandinavian share of Danish imports rose from 6 to 30 per cent from 1916 to 1918, and the rise in the share of exports was even more dramatic—from 6 to 39 per cent.27 Denmark and Sweden were able to alleviate the worst consequences of the Allied embargo by expanding trade with Germany, but the strain on the economy was massive. In the course of 1917, Swedish imports fell to less than 50 per cent of pre-war levels while food prices rose some 40 per cent. For Norway the situation was even more precarious as the country was dependent on imported food, primarily grain. After difficult negotiations, the US in April 1918 reopened for exports to Norway on the condition that Norway limit its exports to the Central Powers. Sweden and Denmark reached similar agreements with the US in May and September 1918. The agreements clearly demonstrated that it was virtually impossible for small countries such as the Scandinavian ones to uphold an unbiased neutrality. The logics of geography and the asymmetry in the power bases of Britain (and its allies) and Norway inevitably left Norway in the position of a ‘neutral ally’, to quote the title of Olav Riste’s 1965 study of Norwegian relations with the belligerent powers.28 Denmark’s neutrality for the same reasons had to be pro-German, and same went for Sweden, although, as will be enlarged on later, geopolitical necessity was far from the only factor pushing Swedish neutrality in a decidedly pro-German direction.
It was not only in foreign trade that the hand of the state became very visible during the war. A few days after the outbreak of war, the Danish Rigsdag passed emergency legislation that gave government the power to regulate prices and more generally intervene in the market to ensure the supply of food and other essential goods for the population. The government quickly set up a regulatory system, assisted by an ‘Extraordinary Commission’ with representatives of key political and economic interests. During the war this commission mushroomed into about forty sub-commissions and boards, not to mention local commissions in all local authorities that oversaw the development of a thoroughly regulated economy, controlled by the state in close collaboration with the major economic interest organizations. Within this framework, maximum prices of essential goods were introduced, the distribution of raw materials regulated, housing rents controlled, and the state also became a buyer of key imports such as wheat. Norway and Sweden saw a similar development, with laws passed that gave the government the right to deal more or less freely with certain kinds of privately owned goods and commodities, as well a growing number of government commissions and boards, incorporating representatives from the most important political and economic interest groups, that regulated the allocation of resources and controlled prices.29
All in all, notwithstanding their non-belligerent status, the vulnerability of neutrality, and the economic strains put on Scandinavia, the war saw the breakthrough of strong central government with broad responsibilities for economic planning and welfare for its citizens.
Social relations in wartime
In spite of increasing state regulation and the relative prosperity of certain sectors, broad sections of society suffered a decline in living standards. Inflation and the shortage of consumer goods—in combination with the conspicuous consumption of the nouveaux riches—caused widespread poverty and political unrest. The radicalization of the labour movement was especially pronounced in Norway, but Denmark and Sweden also saw a schism between reformist and revolutionary factions. In hindsight, these were probably the salient features of wartime Scandinavia, and they anticipated the political controversies in all three countries in the interwar years. The profound social divisions had a long-term impact that was only overcome after the Second World War.
Government regulation could neither prevent shortages nor inflation. Prices rose steadily throughout the war. In Denmark the cost of living almost doubled from 1914 to 1918. In Norway and Sweden the situation was even worse, and prices rose by up to 140 per cent and 250 per cent respectively. Black markets flourished and as the war wore on basic foodstuffs became not only expensive but also scarce. Government regulations and the shortage of fodder made it irresistibly tempting for many farmers to slaughter their livestock and sell the meat illegally rather than to accept the official maximum prices. In response, the governments imposed rationing of essential foods: in Denmark, first bread, then sugar and pork from the beginning of 1917; in Sweden, sugar in 1916, bread, flour, meat and milk in 1917, and even potatoes in 1918. The Norwegian government followed suit from January 1918 after massive demonstrations against the ‘dear times’. The demonstrations were organized by the trade unions, whose members not only suffered from shortages but also witnessed the growing social divide at close quarters. ‘The sailors are drowning, the people are starving, capital reaps the profits’ was one of the slogans at a Kristiania (Oslo) demonstration in the summer of 1917.30
The slogan dramatized reality, but for workers and large sections of the middle class the war represented at best a period of austerity, whereas agriculture, fisheries, industry, mining, and shipping were well placed to profit from the unlimited demands of the conflict. Farmers routinely complained about government regulations and fixed prices. At the same time many of them made huge profits, not at least on the black market. In Norway, the war is also to a large extent remembered for the reckless speculation, profiteering, and lavish lifestyles in a boom era of jobbery. Contemporary sources such as newspapers, fiction, and satirical magazines carry numerous tales of the conspicuous consumption of the upper classes, especially the nouveaux riches.31 The Danish word for war profiteer was ‘goulash baron’, a play on the fortunes made out of low-quality processed food sold to the Central Powers. However, the goose that really laid golden eggs during the war years was shipping. Shipping rates soared, as did profits and company values on the stock exchange.
Since the social and economic history of wartime Scandinavia is still under-researched, it is difficult to go beyond impressionistic pictures. Nonetheless, the overall social trend is underpinned by some sombre statistics. The Danish case is illustrative. While real income either stagnated or fell by 10–12 per cent for pensioners, and white- and blue-collar workers, it rose by 39 per cent for the self-employed. The trend is even more striking if we look more closely at the statistics: real income for bankers rose by 62 per cent, for industrialists by 67 per cent and for self-employed in the transportation sector—that is, primarily in shipping—by 79 per cent.32
It is easy to document that the authorities were well aware of the social problems and the potential political repercussions of the widening gap between rich and poor. This was the background for social policies aimed at alleviating the rising cost of living for the working classes as well as the often precarious job situation. In part, such policies were financed by increased taxes, especially for the well-off—for example, through taxes on ‘extraordinary incomes’ such as war profits. Denmark was the first country to introduce such taxation in 1915.33 By means of such measures the Danish government was successful in defusing most left-wing criticism. In Norway, the government acted more slowly and hesitantly, and clearly under pressure from protests and demonstrations, thus helping to create the conditions for the radicalization of large parts of the labour movement from 1918.
In Sweden, social and political protests to a high degree fused during 1917, leading to victory for the Social Democrats and the Liberals in the general election and to important democratic political reforms in 1918. The Conservative Swartz government also had to handle growing domestic unrest as the Allied blockade caused food riots in several Swedish cities. Nervousness grew as soldiers protested against insufficient rations in the barracks. In addition, the political Left organized demonstrations demanding a democratization of municipal suffrage which would change the composition of the Riksdag’s upper house. In May 1917, the Social Democratic Party split into a reformist and a revolutionary wing; the latter would develop into the Swedish Communist Party after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia that same autumn.34
A similar party split, less dramatic but historically equally important, took place at the other end of the political spectrum in 1917, when an independent Farmer’s Party (eventually to develop into the centrist-liberal Swedish Centre Party) broke away from the Swedish Right. The new party was formed from the rank and file of the Swedish conservative movement (who in 1914 had participated in the Farmer’s March against the Staaff government), in opposition to those urban, bourgeois industrialists and aristocratic officials who had dominated the Swedish Conservative Party since its foundation in 1904. Clearly, the tensions between town and country fomented by the war contributed to this divide, which during the rest of the twentieth century would weaken the alternative to social democracy in Swedish politics.35
In the historiography of the First World War, gender relations have been a central issue since the 1970s. While it is clear that gender roles underwent great changes during the war, when millions of men went to war whilst women had to take up new responsibilities within the family and on the labour market, the degree to which these developments had a long-term impact is more open to question. Did the war further female political rights and emancipation in a broader sense, as Arthur Marwick provocatively argued in a series of books from the late 1960s onwards? Or did war actually cement traditional gender roles and patriarchy, as many feminist historians have argued? As only relatively few men were mobilized during the war in Scandinavia, the impact of the war years on gender relations was relatively slight. In Sweden, preparations were made to include women in the mobilization for total war through voluntary women’s organizations for military medical and veterinary services (see, for example, Anne Hedén’s contribution to this volume). The government commissions for Unemployment and National Economizing also identified roles for women as replacement workers for men who had been called up, or sewing uniforms for local defence forces. However, it has been argued, in the plans for national mobilization women were assigned tasks that would not threaten the established gender division of labour.36
The Nordic countries were at the forefront of equal rights for women before the outbreak of war. Women had been enfranchised in municipal elections in the Scandinavian countries long before the war. Finland adopted universal female suffrage in 1906 (the first country to do so) and Norway followed suit in 1913. Danish women were given the right to vote in 1915, while universal suffrage was introduced in Sweden only in 1919. While the timing of the democratic reforms in Sweden from 1917 was clearly linked to the pressure of the war on Swedish society, the link between female suffrage and wartime in Denmark was purely accidental. That female suffrage would be part of a constitutional reform was clear before August 1914, and the outbreak of war delayed the vote for women by a few years as the new Danish constitution of 1915 was put on hold until the end of hostilities.
Most interpretations of social change during the war have approached the subject from the perspective of the (inexorable) ‘rise of the labour movement’. However, focusing on the political protests of organized labour makes it difficult to evaluate the overall economic and social impact of the war. Industrial workers no doubt felt the pressure of inflation, but their trade unions could also force employers to concede compensatory wage rises. Pensioners, public employees, and others on fixed incomes were not so lucky, but the déclassement of the lower middle class has not received much attention from historians.
It is also difficult to evaluate the overall economic impact of the war. Disruptions to supplies and international trade had a serious impact on open economies dependent on exporting goods and services, and certain sectors were obviously depressed. But on the other hand, the belligerents’ insatiable demand for raw materials, foodstuffs, and shipping opened up extremely profitable opportunities which shipowners, mining companies, industry, and agriculture were quick to exploit. Norsk Hydro had no qualms about exporting explosive components to the munitions industries on both sides; Allied pressure soon cut off the German market, but almost one-third of France’s consumption of nitrates throughout the war was imported from Norway.37 That greed overruled concern for the national interest was also evident in the Danish courts, which had to deal with hundreds of cases where individuals and firms tried to circumvent the ban on re-exports to Germany.38
Given the present state of research, it is only possible to indicate general conclusions about the social impact of the war. The bulk of the income generated in sectors that profited from the war seems to have found its way into the pockets of the owners—with the probable exceptions of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. Workers in these sectors benefited to a certain extent, but one group—seamen—bore the heaviest burden of any profession as a result of German submarine warfare and Allied mines (some 2,000 Norwegian, 700 Swedish, and 650 Danish sailors were lost at sea). Workers in many industries suffered a decline in purchasing power, but also benefited from the economic stimulus of vastly increased government spending. Many groups dependent on fixed incomes were impoverished. The net result was a widening social divide—the very visible presence of a few rich and many poor— which goes a long way in explaining the bitter political divisions of the interwar years.
Diverging neutralities
Given the different economies and foreign relations of the Scandinavian countries, it is unsurprising that they embarked on different practices to uphold their neutrality in spite of the official facade of close cooperation. They were in a situation without much room for manoeuvre or to demonstrate pious ideals. The international law on neutrality was not so rigid as to escape interpretation. None of the Scandinavian countries intended to invoke the full letter of the law, but rather set out to employ it to serve their commercial, diplomatic, and political interests all at the same time. Consequently, there was no such thing as a common Scandinavian war policy. This put the foreign ministries on the front line throughout the war.
Rhetorically, Sweden under Hjalmar Hammarskjöld had the highest profile among the European neutrals. When the three Scandinavian countries in November 1914 protested to Britain, France, and Germany over disturbances in their trade caused by the war, Hammarskjöld drafted the text, according to which the great powers should be grateful to the Scandinavian neutrals who had struggled to preserve international law and unselfishly defended the principles of civilization in the hour of darkness.39
Like Denmark, Norway often came under heavy pressure in trade negotiations, especially from Britain, which could cut the country off from global markets. In January 1917, the British threatened to stop coal exports to Norway and thus left the Norwegian government with no other alternative than to comply with British wishes.40
In spite of governmental grandstanding, Swedish foreign policy was far from neutral. In August 1914, the foreign minister, Wallenberg, had secretly promised the government in Berlin that Swedish neutrality would observe a ‘benevolent’ attitude towards Germany, possibly driven by fears of an ultimatum to join the war on Germany’s side. This benevolence included the black out of Swedish lighthouses and the laying of mines in the Sound (directed against British submarines in the Baltic Sea), a transit ban on military equipment across Swedish territory (directed against French and British exports to Russia), as well as the secret transmission of diplomatic cables to German missions overseas through the Swedish consular service. In addition, Swedish diplomats tried to convince Italy and Romania not to enter the war on the side of Germany’s enemies. None of these measures was probably very important to the German war effort as a whole, but later they would become a burden on Sweden’s relations with the victors.
Swedish meat exports saw a ninefold increase in the autumn of 1914, especially to Germany. The Germans also imported large quantities of horses from Sweden for their army, and in 1915 secretly agreed to tolerate continued Swedish timber exports to Britain provided the Swedish government guaranteed that the horse trade would continue. During 1916, however, the food shortages began to be felt in Sweden due to the British blockade. Britain refused to let goods through without guarantees that they would not be re-exported from Sweden to Germany. Hammarskjöld refused as this would mean Sweden committing an un-neutral act by participating in British economic warfare. In response, the British prevented Swedish ships from leaving their home ports. However, Sweden had an advantage in its geographic location, which meant that the country was also the quickest link between the Western powers and their Russian ally. Hammarskjöld therefore countered British punitive measures with punitive measures against Allied transports to Russia on Swedish railways.41
Hammarskjöld’s handling of the conflict with Britain created tensions within the government, especially between the prime minister and the more pragmatic foreign minister Wallenberg. In early 1917, when the Riksdag had turned down a government plea for more money for the armed forces, the Hammarskjöld government finally resigned. Hammarskjöld’s successor as prime minister, Carl Swartz, belonged to the moderate Conservatives and could not pretend to be an unpartisan official.
America’s entry into the war in the spring of 1917 weakened the position of all neutral countries, including the Scandinavians. All of a sudden, neutral rights and the neutral zone no longer had a great-power defender. What finally doomed the Conservative Swartz government was US foreign minister Edward Lansing’s revelation of the so-called Luxburg telegram in September 1917. Although Lansing’s main intention was to embarrass Germany, Sweden was likewise mortified when it was revealed that the Luxburg telegram and thousands of other German diplomatic cables had been transmitted with the help of the formally neutral Swedish Foreign Ministry. Swartz suffered a shattering defeat in the ongoing general election and had to resign.
The new Liberal–Social Democratic government under Nils Edén began negotiating with the Allies. The first trade agreement in May 1917 merely provided a temporary relief. The second treaty, which was concluded in May 1918, saw Sweden finally agree to offer guarantees against re-exports to Germany and put Swedish shipping abroad at the disposal of the Western powers. The major problem in Sweden’s relations with the Allies had then been removed. In spite of the trade treaty with the Allies in May 1918, Sweden’s pro-German orientation remained—at least in a regional Baltic context. The Liberal–Social Democrat government silently blessed Germany’s intervention in the Finnish Civil War and signed a secret treaty with Berlin after the Red defeat, according to which Germany would demolish the Russian fortifications in the Åland Islands provided Sweden would accept Germany’s position as the dominant power in the Baltic region in future.42
As already mentioned, Norway’s position towards Britain was similar to Sweden’s relations with Germany. There was almost no leeway, since geography and trade dependence left the Norwegian government with no possibility of sanctions against Britain. On the contrary, a British blockade or stop in exports of coal and oil would have had an immediate and devastating effect on the Norwegian economy. Norway constituted a special case since it became de facto part of the Allied war effort; first when it allowed Western weapons transits to Russia in the far north from 1916, and then in 1918 in the wake of the laying of the American–British mine barrage across the North Sea. In order to deny Germany innocent passage in protected Norwegian territorial waters (as was offered by international law) the Norwegian government continued the mine barrage in the inner leads and thus became part of the Allied blockade of Germany. But at that time Germany was so occupied by events in other operational theatres that little attention was given to this issue.
Finally, it should be noted that the diverging neutralities of the Scandinavian countries did not leave them at odds with one another in any real sense; instead, it was their relations with the belligerents that differed.
The Scandinavian front
Except for the émigrés in many parts of the world, Scandinavian participation in the war was essentially an issue limited to Denmark and Sweden. In Sweden there was widespread sympathy for the Finns, and many signed up to form the Swedish Finland Brigade to support Finnish independence and the Whites against the Reds in the civil war that broke out in January 1918. The Norwegian government did what it could to prevent its citizens from signing up for service in other countries, thus underscoring the sense of detachment from the Baltic region that permeated Norwegian foreign policy at the time, even though there was widespread public sympathy for the Finns.
In Denmark many people felt that the war was very close to home, since some 26,000 men from the Danish-German minority in Schleswig were mobilized in the German armed forces. The Schleswigers were mostly of peasant stock, and the majority were enrolled in the army in locally recruited regiments which fought on all the major fronts during the war. Public interest in their war experiences was great in Denmark. Both during and after the war numerous collections of letters, memoirs, and novels were published, often explicitly framing their war experience as especially meaningless since they were not fighting for their own country. However, it is not this nationally framed experience that is the dominant feature of this body of literature; instead, it is striking how closely the war experience of the Danish-oriented Schleswigers resembles what we encounter in the narratives left us by for instance British, French, and German soldiers.
A few Danes also chose to join up as volunteers, primarily in the armed forces of the Entente Powers. While we do not have comprehensive data on the volunteers, it is telling that one historian has managed to find only 147 Danes serving in France, of whom only 93 served in combat units while the rest served as nurses and doctors and the like. Even though the Danes serving on the Entente side were few and far between, their experiences generated interest in Denmark in the form of published letters and memoirs. Thus the only well-known Danish memoir of the war is by Thomas Dinesen (the brother of Karen Blixen) who served in the Canadian army—and enjoyed himself thoroughly. During 1918–19, a number of Danish volunteers joined the fight against the Bolsheviks in the Baltic. The largest group to be organized was the Dansk-Baltisk Auxiliær Corps, which went on to fight in Latvia, Estonia, and Russia. The number of volunteers was about 200—a far cry from the 2,000 that the organizers had hoped for—and their exploits evoked no lasting response in Danish collective memory.43
Few Swedes had any direct experience of the large-scale, industrial attrition that was the warfare waged in 1914–18. One notable exception was Elow Nilson, who served with the French Foreign Legion and was killed at Verdun in 1916, and whose letters from the front were published posthumously. Otherwise, most Swedish war volunteers served on the German side (on the Eastern Front against Russia, like the famous cavalry officer Count Gilbert Hamilton), and above all on the White side in the Finnish Civil War. Some of the approximately 1,000 Swedes who volunteered to fight with the Whites against the Reds in Finland in the spring of 1918 served as staff officers in General Mannerheim’s headquarters. The overwhelming majority, however, served in the so-called Swedish Brigade.44
The participation of Norwegian citizens was almost negligible— that is, if the numerous sailors in the merchant marine are exempted. True, some officers volunteered for the Western powers such as the retired colonel and jingoist Henrik Angell in France and Major Tryggve Gran in the Royal Flying Corps. The bulk of those who took part in the fighting were emigrants of Norwegian extraction from America or sailors dwelling in belligerent countries such as Australia and New Zealand. Officially, the Norwegian government did not allow officers, NCOs, or privates enrolled in the armed forces to seek foreign service. The vast majority of personnel in the Norwegian army and navy were conscripts and reservists aged 18 to 44 years, and even though they only served for short periods during their initial training and subsequent exercises, or when they attended military schools and academies, nonetheless they were in the mobilization lists for the army or the navy and were thus barred from service in other countries until they were dismissed.
Notwithstanding the extensive losses of sailors and tonnage, and far smaller losses on land, the Scandinavian countries emerged from the war with exceedingly small human and material costs compared to the belligerents. Nonetheless, the war had a profound impact on Scandinavian societies and their post-war development—more or less along the lines of other European countries. In some ways the war became an avenue of continued internationalization.
The long-term consequences of the War in Scandinavia
Scandinavia and the peace settlements
The pressing question for the Scandinavian countries during the peace negotiations was their future relations with the victors and the nascent League of Nations, which all three eventually joined in 1920. Moreover, the long-standing questions of Denmark’s border with Germany in Schleswig, Sweden’s position on the status of the contested Åland Islands, and the Norwegian quest for sovereignty over the Spitsbergen Archipelago in the Arctic were also a part of the wider peace settlement. Finally, all countries were to some extent still engaged in the ongoing crisis in the recently independent Baltic States and Finland. For obvious reasons, the Scandinavians were not invited when peace talks opened in Paris on 18 January 1919. However, in March President Woodrow Wilson summoned fourteen neutral states—among them Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—to take part in an informal conference in preparation for the establishment of the League of Nations.45
In some quarters of Norwegian politics there was a determination to benefit from the peace settlement, prompted by claims for reparations for the excessive war losses of the merchant marine. After floating such quixotic ideas as taking over territories in north-western Russia or possibly a German African colony as compensation, the Norwegian government settled on the far more trivial questions of membership of the League and of gaining sovereignty over the Spitsbergen Archipelago, which at the time was still terra nullius. Norway’s cordial relations with Britain and the valuable services it had offered the Entente Powers made the negotiating climate favourable, and the gambit of claiming Spitsbergen turned out to be successful: a treaty to that effect was signed in 1920, and after a drawn-out ratification process it went into effect from 1925. True, the Treaty gave all the signatories equal rights to exploit the archipelago’s resources, but it was nonetheless for nationalistic reasons regarded as a diplomatic triumph in Norway.46 The process leading up to membership of the League of Nations, meanwhile, was more chaotic by far.
Influential circles in the Storting wished to combine membership of the League of Nations with neutrality in war as a fallback position.47 That turned out to be unattainable since the League’s draft Covenant was based on collective security which, in turn, was incompatible with neutrality. The former neutrals were invited to present their opinion of the proposed arrangement in March 1919, but they had no real influence on the formation of the League of Nations. Wilson insisted that the Covenant should be a part of the peace treaties that were negotiated in Paris, and its formulations were therefore determined by the talks between the Allies and associated powers. Neither the neutrals nor the defeated took part in these talks. The Covenant was communicated to them on 28 April 1919, and there was no doubt that the League still recognized war as a legal measure, albeit within the limits laid down in international law.
Article 8 of the Covenant recognized ‘that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations’. This was broadly uncontroversial in Scandinavia, even though there would be a debate over what the ‘lowest point consistent’ meant in real terms.48 The military leadership was clearly the most reluctant in Norway because in their view the country would lose the freedom to choose its own enemies, and, moreover, the structure of the army and the navy would have to be adjusted to new assignments. Both politicians and officers dreaded the prospect of being dragged into conflicts in which the country had no stake. Nonetheless, the Storting passed the Bill on membership of the League with a comfortable majority. True, the country did not join enthusiastically, but there was no viable, neutral alternative. In passing the Bill, 100 MPs voted in favour and 20 against. The only party that was categorically against membership was Labour, with its 16 MPs. They held that the League was a victors’ cabal that would embark on an anti-socialist policy to overthrow the Soviet regime. In their view only socialism would secure the peace. In Denmark, the socialist members of the Rigsdag voiced no similar criticism and voted in favour of Danish membership of the League. The parliamentary vote in January 1920 was unanimous, but behind this common front lurked a scepticism about the League that nearly matched the Norwegians’.49
Norwegian politics was also characterized by severe friction between the socialist and non-socialist blocs throughout the interwar years. The socialist parties were steadily gathering strength after 1918. After a passing flirtation with the Comintern, the Labour Party left it in 1923. The Norwegian labour movement was split into a revolutionary and a reformist faction. The revolutionary faction became the Communist Party and never exercised any real influence except within the labour movement. The reformists, however, strengthened their position in the Storting and formed a government (based on an agreement with the Agrarian Party) in March 1935, thus inaugurating the heyday of social democracy that was only to come to an end in the 1960s.
Sweden’s involvement in the peace settlement after the war turned on its dispute with Finland over the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands, situated closer to Stockholm than to the Finnish mainland and therefore deemed strategically important. In February 1918, after the outbreak of civil war in newly independent Finland, some 7,000 Ålanders presented an address to King Gustav V, asking to become a part of Sweden again. Shortly afterwards, Swedish warships arrived and landed troops on the islands to prevent the civil war in mainland Finland from spreading. Swedish troops negotiated an armistice between the Whites, the Reds, and the Russian garrison in the islands, and started to disarm them. Only after a month, when a German expeditionary force had landed, did the Swedish troops evacuate. The Swedish intervention had been dictated by the honest wish to protect the civilian population, but there had also been more opportunistic motives. If the Åland Islands could be annexed in a coming peace settlement, the strategic situation of the Swedish capital would be considerably improved.
Edén’s Liberal–Social Democratic coalition government took Sweden into the League of Nations in January 1920. The Conservatives and Leftist Socialists protested, as they considered the League to be a tool to force the Treaty of Versailles upon Germany and Soviet Russia. The Liberals and Social Democrats were firm believers in the Wilsonian world order, but also saw the League as an ally in securing Åland for Sweden, especially since the Ålanders had organized a referendum in which 96 per cent of voters supported the idea of joining Sweden. However, in May 1921 the League found in favour of Finland, although a few months later the demilitarization and political and cultural autonomy of the islands were secured through an international treaty.50
In the case of Denmark, it can be argued that the most important consequence of the war was that it paved the way for the unification of Northern Schleswig with Denmark and thus allowed the Danish-oriented population to ‘return home’, to use the language of the time. Although the Rigsdag in October 1918 had decided that it only wanted a border revision based strictly on the criteria of nationality, the results of the 1920 plebiscites, which demonstrated a strong German majority in Central Schleswig (including the main city of Flensburg), were a disappointment to many Danish nationalists, and hopes for an alternative, more southerly border was one of the main factors that led King Christian X to sack the Zahle government in the spring of 1920. However, the dominant feeling was one of jubilation, and in the following years the ‘Reunification’ (as the process is normally called in Denmark) came to be seen as a key event that represented the final fulfilment of a Danish nation-state. It soon completely overshadowed the much more complex experience of the war years in the imagined community of the Danes.51
To a high degree Danish historiography has followed suit. Interest in the war years has been limited, and interpretations of Danish history in a longer perspective have tended to see the war as a parenthesis that was soon overcome. It is also true that the most striking features of the war years were soon rolled back. The neutrality guard was dismantled as early as in March 1919; in 1919–20 the vast majority of the economic regulations that had been introduced were dropped; and in January 1921, the key regulatory body, the Extraordinary Commission, was dissolved; and while the harsh restrictions on exports to Germany set down in the Danish trade agreement with the US in September 1918 remained in place, trade with the Allied countries was liberalized in April 1919. Yet this picture of the war years as a parenthesis must be nuanced. As a consequence of the regulated economy, interest groups gained a stronger say. The membership of trade unions almost trebled—an essential precondition for the victories they secured for their members in the wake of the war (in the shape of substantial wage increases and the introduction of the eight-hour working day), although fear of the radicalization of the working classes inspired by revolutionary upheavals elsewhere probably also explains why the employers chose to give in to many of the demands.52 The key roles played by industrialists, shipowners, and the wholesale traders’ organization secured them a much stronger position within their trades, and consequently a stronger position vis-à-vis other interests. It is telling that agricultural interests who strongly felt that they had to bear an unfairly large part of the regulatory burden, in 1919 finally managed to join forces in Landsbrugsrådet, the Agricultural Council that quickly grew into one of the strongest interest groups in the country, and remained so for the rest of the twentieth century.53
In politics, Denmark’s Social Liberal government became the target of ever-growing criticism soon after the armistice. Liberals felt the winding up of regulations was proceeding too slowly and complained about ‘state socialism’, while Conservatives (and quite a few Liberals as well) were highly critical of the government’s policy on the Schleswig question. The fall of the government in 1920 led to a brief constitutional crisis, but the ensuing elections demonstrated that the Social Liberals had lost almost half of their popular support, and the party never regained its pre-war strength. However, the politics of wartime left an important legacy in cementing a strong alliance between the Social Liberals and the Social Democrats. This alliance was to dominate Danish politics until the early 1960s and its main achievement was the construction of the Danish welfare state. The combination of regulation, control, and social policy initiatives launched during the war can be seen, in a longer historical perspective, as crucial groundwork for this political project.
Scandinavian internationalism and imminent isolationism
The membership of the League of Nations can very well be termed ‘internationalism’, but it was nonetheless only a part of Scandinavian liaison with the outside world, and it came to an end in the latter part of the 1930s as a result of the deterioration in international relations. Since the nineteenth century, internationalism was commonly understood as a movement that encouraged arms control, and political and economic cooperation between countries. Its advocates maintained that this would prevent armed conflict and promote growth in a variety of ways. At the outbreak of the First World War, internationalism could look back on a fairly successful history. Some 450 international organizations had come into being, ranging from practical bodies such as the Telegraphic Union (1865) and the Universal Postal Union (1874) to the Institute of International Law (1873) and the International Red Cross (1863). The most important political organization was probably the Inter-Parliamentary Union (1886), of which the Norwegian Christian Lange was the secretary general from 1909 to 1933. The interwar years produced a number of international arms control agreements for the first time. In different ways, all these organizations encouraged multilateralism and cooperation in areas not covered by traditional diplomacy.
The dominant position of the League in the 1920s was a result of the lack of a power balance between the traditional great powers. When Germany and the Soviet Union regained their strength and set out to challenge the states system the League gradually lost its authority and became increasingly marginalized. In the words of Mark Mazower, ‘diplomacy flowed around Geneva rather than through it, and a rival ideological vision of a European order emerged in Berlin.’54 The five years leading up to Hitler’s Machtübernahme witnessed a few French efforts to stabilize Europe through the League. First, the useless Briand–Kellogg Pact (1928) which set out to forbid war. Then came Briand’s grandiose proposals for European unity (1929 and 1930)—equally futile. Finally, there was the failure of the disarmament conference in Geneva in 1932. After that, internationalism at its most lofty was clearly in decline. When Germany marched out of the League in 1933, the whole idea of liberal universalism came under savage attack and left the League increasingly paralysed.55
In 1937, E. H. Carr remarked that if ‘European democracy binds its living body to the putrefying corps of the 1919 settlement then it will merely be committing a particularly unpleasant form of suicide.’56 At that time the ‘Oslo states’, as the Northern neutrals were known in the 1930s, must have reasoned along the same lines.57 The Italian attack on Abyssinia in 1935 and the German remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 brought about a fundamental shift in their focus from economic to national security issues. The coordinated efforts to slacken the League’s sanctions regime was regarded as crucial by all the governments, since it would be almost impossible to do this on an individual, national basis. The Oslo states wanted to see a revival of the pre-League stance of non-alignment and neutrality. The question was discussed for the first time in Copenhagen in April 1936. There was a follow-up conference in Geneva in June that resulted in a joint declaration on 1 July, which stated that since the initial preconditions for their membership in the League no longer existed, they would not regard themselves as unreservedly bound by the Covenant. This was declared officially in a communiqué in 1938 and marked a definite break with the idea of collective security under the League. France and Great Britain ardently opposed this policy, which they considered to be pusillanimous.
Seen from outside the region, therefore, the Scandinavian countries looked to be floundering. On the one hand they were in the forefront in propagating internationalism, arbitration treaties, and disarmament. They had been widely regarded as a neutral bloc during the war. Moreover, for other peoples they came across as a relatively homogenous cultural entity, in overall agreement on important domestic and foreign policy issues. In retrospect, people outside Scandinavia were likely to ask why this did not translate into a closer cooperation in foreign policy and defence? Given that they shared liberal values and had similar views on international affairs, why were they unable to promote their interests jointly in order to increase their clout?
The consequences of war provoked abhorrence in both society and in politics. The establishment of an international order and institutions to hinder a new war, and not to prepare for another, became the salient issue. The Scandinavian countries can be said to have drawn selective lessons from their experience of the war— surprisingly similar ones, despite the fact that their policies had diverged. Perhaps most difficult to explain is the widespread refusal to recognize that neutrality had effectively collapsed in a total war. The difficulties Scandinavian diplomacy faced from the outset in getting the British to respect their rights as neutrals should have made this obvious, and it became an undeniable fact in 1917, when Germany declared unrestricted U-boat warfare and the US entered the war. One explanation for why the Scandinavian countries resolutely ignored the obvious is that they all remained formally neutral throughout the war.
Collective security, reinforced by fiscal constraints and economic depression, resulted in a reduction in military spending compared with both the pre-war arms build-up and the neutrality guard that had been maintained during the war. This was the case in all the Scandinavian countries, while newly independent Finland, with its troubled relations with Russia, was bent on establishing the armed forces necessary to defend the country. The Norwegian armed forces were gradually reduced in size and preparedness: conscription was retained, but at 72 days for the infantry it provided the shortest period of military training in Europe. Naval construction came to a halt in 1929. From then until 1936 the Navy only commissioned three coastguard vessels and an ocean-going minelayer. Moreover, except for coastguard and constabulary duties, no ships were kept ready for active service in the winter months until 1937. Exercises for all services, except for recruits’ elementary training in summer, almost ground to a halt in the early 1920s and were not revived until the late 1930s. In Sweden, the unstable parliamentary situation allowed the military to fight a protracted delaying action until 1925, when the army’s fighting strength was reduced from 12 to 4 divisions, the service time for conscripts radically shortened to 150 days, and a large portion of each year’s intake automatically exempted from basic training. The cumulative effect of underfunding made it more difficult for the Scandinavian countries to muster the military means to maintain a protracted state of neutrality when they sought to return to it in the late 1930s.
Sweden’s traumatic experience of domestic strife at a time of international crisis led to constitutional reform after the war, which institutionalized the Riksdag’s control of foreign policy, with the creation in 1919 of Utrikesnämnden, the permanent committee on foreign relations. Moreover, when the Second World War broke out in 1939, a broad, four-party coalition government was formed, which in spite of much internal tension kept up an unwavering front of national unity throughout the conflict. This time, Sweden also demonstrated a more pragmatic attitude towards international law in its dealings with the belligerents than in 1914–17. Moreover, the demands for public consensus on foreign and security policy were to live on throughout the Cold War. Thus, it could be argued, Hjalmar Hammarskjöld’s government would cast its shadow over Swedish politics for the rest of the twentieth century.
In the eyes of the Danish political establishment, the war represented a successful exercise in Danish diplomatic skills. The Social Liberal Peter Munch, the dominant voice in foreign policy debates (and Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1929–1940), was a keen internationalist; however, Danish security policy in the interwar years followed the path Munch had outlined before 1914, with a combination of neutrality and limited military expenditure with a strong domestic commitment to democratic institutions. By the late 1930s, his Social Democratic coalition partners, led by the prime minister, Thorvald Stauning, grew increasingly worried by the threat posed by Nazi Germany, but the Munch security policy regime was not seriously challenged before 1940.
In the Norwegian case, the lack of interest, or competence, in national security among politicians up to the late 1930s contributed to the ignorance of the broader population. Foreign policy and defence were the preserve of a handful of politicians, diplomats, and military leaders. Few politicians took a keen interest in the military dimensions of security policy or the military obligations laid down in international neutrality law. These obligations were to a large extent dismissed, or at least downplayed, by many politicians and intellectuals; widely discussed in the press, such matters completely eluded the tiny foreign policy elite. It should also be added that the debate was not overly subtle, since it was basically about the size of the defence budget. The overall result was that a number of unspoken assumptions were seldom challenged. It was taken for granted that Norway, and perhaps also Scandinavia, could remain aloof from future great-power conflicts as long as they complied with international neutrality law. The corollary—that a neutral stance had to be backed up by sufficient military means to make it effective and to comply with the Hague rules—was seldom presented as a stark choice, and the changes brought about in international politics by totalitarian ideologies, rearmament, and technology did not seem to alter threat perceptions much. Put bluntly, public opinion trusted in collective security to deter aggression; when that failed it trusted in traditional neutrality as a fallback that would not necessarily require increased defence spending; and if all else failed, it trusted that the Royal Navy’s command of the sea and Britain’s self-interest would prevent any other powers from attacking Norway.
Notwithstanding the obvious virtues of the League of Nations, there is at least one aspect of it that has escaped a thorough debate in Scandinavian historiography, namely the fact that the League in the 1920s served British and French imperial interests. The Wilsonian principle of national self-determination was actually restricted to Europe, with the notable exception of Germany. Otherwise, the French and British empires expanded to informally comprise huge swathes of the earlier Ottoman Empire, thus reaching their fullest extensions.58 At the point when the League had become politically somewhat obsolete, sections of the Scandinavian body politic were embracing it wholeheartedly as a pious and altruistic institution unconstrained by national interests. This came to an end in 1938, when the Oslo states declared that they no longer regarded themselves bound by the Covenant’s sanctions regime and that they intended to return to neutrality. Internationalism was definitely abandoned as a new war drew closer.
Notes
1 Hvar 8 dag, 1915/14 (3 January 1915).
2 Olav Riste, Norway’s Foreign Relations: A History (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2001).
3 Tom Kristiansen, Mellom landmakter og sjømakter. Norges plass i britisk forsvars- og utenrikspolitikk 1905–1914 (diss.; University of Oslo, 1988); Folke Lindberg, Scandinavia in Great Power Politics, 1905–1908 (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1958); Pertti Luntinen, The Baltic Question 1903–1908 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeaakatemia, 1975).
4 Patrick Salmon, Scandinavia and the Great Powers, 1890–1940 (Cambridge: CUP, 1997).
5 Michael H. Clemmesen, Den lange vej mod 9. April. Historien om de fyrre år før den tyske operation mod Norge og Danmark i 1940 (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2010).
6 For an overview of Danish history in the years leading up to 1914, see, for example, Bo Lidegaard, A Short History of Denmark in the Twentieth Century (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009), 28–63.
7 Kent Zetterberg, Militärer och politiker: en studie i militär professionalisering, innovationsspridning och internationellt inflytande på de svenska försvarsberedningarna 1911–1914 (Stockholm: Militärhistoriska förlaget, 1988).
8 The standard work on the Hammarskjöld government is Wilhelm M. Carlgren, Ministären Hammarskjöld: Tillkomst—Söndring—Fall. Studier i svensk politik 1914–1917 (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1967).
9 Gunnar Åselius, ‘Storbritannien, Tyskland och den svenska neutraliteten 1880–1914: en omvärdering’, Historisk Tidskrift, vol. 114 (1994), 228–66.
10 See Claus Bjørn & Carsten Due-Nielsen, Fra helstat til nationalstat. Dansk udenrigspolitisk historie 1814–1914 (Copenhagen: Danmarks Nationalleksikon, 2003).
11 Michael Clemmesen, The Danish Armed Forces 1909–1918 (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Defence College, 2007).
12 Riste 2001.
13 Cf. Ruth Hemstad, Fra Indian Summer til nordisk vinter. Skandinavisk samarbeid, skandinavisme og unionsoppløsningen (Oslo: Akademisk Forlag, 2008).
14 Rolf Hobson & Tom Kristiansen, Norsk forsvarshistorie, iii: Total krig, nøytralitet og politisk splittelse, 1905–1940 (Bergen: Eide forlag, 2001), 60.
15 Gudmund Schnitler, Strategi (Kristiania: Grøndahl, 1914), 321, authors’ translation.
16 Ove Bring, Neutralitetens uppgång och fall—eller den gemensamma säkerhetens historia (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2008), 141–53.
17 Cf. Bjørn & Due-Nielsen 2003, 496–501.
18 Torsten Gihl, Den svenska utrikespolitikens historia, iv: 1914–1919 (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1951) remains the standard work on Swedish foreign policy during the First World War.
19 Inger Schubert, Schweden und das Deutsche Reich im Ersten Weltkrieg. Die Aktivistenbewegung 1914–1918 (Bonner Historische Forschungen; Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1981).
20 Nils Funcke, Tryckfriheten under tryck. Ordets män och statsmakterna (Stockholm: Carlssons, 1996), 37–38, 66.
21 Hobson & Kristiansen 2001, 113–114.
22 Svenbjörn Kilander, Censur och propaganda: svensk informationspolitik under 1900-talets första decennier (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1981), 95–100, 116–120.
23 Jens Ole Christensen, Michael H. Clemmesen & Ole L. Frantzen, Københavns Befæstning—til fædrelandets forsvar (Copenhagen: Gads forlag, 2012).
24 Arvid Cronenberg, ‘Första världskrigets lantmilitära beredskap’, in Johan Engström & Lars Ericson (eds.), Mellan björnen och örnen. Sverige och Östersjön under det första världskriget 1914–1918 (Acta Visbyensia, 9; Visby: Gotlands fornsal, 1994), 87–116.
25 Lars Wedin, ‘Kustflottan under första världskriget’, in Gustaf von Hofsten & Frank Rosenius (eds.), Kustflottan. De svenska sjöstridskrafterna under 1900-talet (Stockholm: Kungliga Örlogsmannasällskapet & Marinlitteraturföreningen, 2009).
26 See Tage Kaarsted, Great Britain and Denmark 1914–1920 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1979), 99–122; Kasper Elmquist Jørgensen, Studier i samspillet mellem stat og erhvervsliv i Danmark under 1. Verdenskrig (Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur, 2005), 192–213.
27 Statistisk Aarbog 1920.
28 Olav Riste, The Neutral Ally. Norway’s Relations with the Belligerent Powers in the First World War (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1965); Roald Berg, Norsk utenrikspolitikks historie, ii: Norge på egen hand, 1905–1920 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1995).
29 The best general work on the impact of the war in Scandinavia is still Eli F. Heckscher, Kurt Bergendal, Wilhelm Keilhau, Einar Cohn, and Thorsteinn Thorsteinsson, (eds.), Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland in the World War (Oxford: OUP, 1930).
30 The slogan can be seen in a photograph from the demonstration, reproduced in Christian A. R. Christensen, Fra verdenskrig til verdenskrig (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1961), 100.
31 See Bjarne Søndergaard Bendtsen, Mellem fronterne (Ph.D. thesis; Odense: University of Southern Denmark, 2011), 126–178.
32 See Jakob Lindberg, ‘Indtægtsforskydningen i Danmark 1908–1920’, Nationaløkonomisk Tidsskrift 59 (1921), 289–319.
33 Hans Christian Johansen, Dansk skattehistorie, vi: Indkomstskatter og offentlig vækst 1903–2005 (Copenhagen: Dansk Told- og Skatehistorisk Selskab, 2007), 31–38.
34 Carl Göran Andræ, Revolt eller reform: Sverige inför revolutionerna i Europa 1917–1918 (Stockholm: Carlssons, 1988).
35 Fredrik L. Eriksson, ‘Bondeförbundet och liberalism 1914–1935’, in Tomas Nilson & Martin Åberg (eds.), Parti eller rörelse: perspektiv på liberala organisationsstrategier 1880–1940 (Lund: Sekel, 2010), 91–121.
36 Madelene Lidestad, Uppbåd, uppgifter, undantag: Om genusarbetsdelning i Sverige under första världskriget (diss.; Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 2005).
37 Ketil Gjølme Andersen, Flaggskip i fremmed eie. Hydro 1905–1945 (Oslo: Pax, 2005), 164–75.
38 See Lindberg 1958.
39 Wilhelm M. Carlgren, ‘Svensk neutralitet 1914–1918 och 1939–1945’, Historisk tidskrift [Sweden] (1979), 381.
40 Tom Kristiansen, Sjøforsvaret i Krig og Fred. Langs kysten og på havet gjennom 200 år, ii: 1905–1960: Selvstendig og alliert i krig og fred (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2010), 239.
41 Wilhelm Carlgren, Neutraliät oder Allianz? Deutschlands Beziehungen zu Schweden in den Anfangsjahren des Ersten Weltkrieges (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1962) is still a central work on the foreign policy of the Hammarskjöld government.
42 The standard work on Swedish foreign policy during the latter part of the First World War is Steven Koblik, Sweden: the neutral victor Sweden and the Western powers 1917–1918: a study of Anglo-American–Swedish relations (Lund: Läromedelsförlagen, 1972); on the Åland question, see Göran Rystad, ‘Die deutsche Monroedoktrin der Ostsee: die Alandsfrage und die Entstehung des deutsch-schwedischen Geheimabkommens vom Mai 1918’, in Göran Rystad et al. (eds.), Probleme deutscher Zeitgeschichte (Lund Studies in International History: Lund: Läromedelsförlagen, 1971).
43 See Claus Bundgaard Christensen, Danskere på Vestfronten 1914–1918 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009); Bendtsen 2011; Niels Jensen, For Dannebrogs ære. Danske frivillige i Estland og Letlands frihedskampe 1919 (Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1998).
44 Elow Nilson, Svenska hjältar vid fronten: ur en stupads dagbok (Stockholm: Åhlén & Åkerlund, 1917); Lars Ericson [Wolke], Svenska frivilliga: militära uppdrag i utlandet under 1800- och 1900-talen (Lund: Historiska Media, 1996), 54–90, 184–190 covers Swedish volunteers in the East, including Finland, Estonia, and Russia in 1918–1920.
45 St.prp. [Storting Proposition, or parliamentary Bill] nr.33 1920, ‘Om Norges tilslutning til Folkenes Forbund’.
46 For a detailed account, see Roald Berg 1995.
47 Odd-Bjørn Fure, Mellomkrigstid. 1920–1940. Norsk utenrikspolitikks historie, iii (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1995).
48 For a more detailed account of Norwegian policy in 1919–20, see Hobson & Kristiansen 2001.
49 Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Fred og folkerett. Dansk internasjonalistisk udenrigspolitik 1889–1939 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculaneum, 2012), 117–174.
50 Göran Rystad, ‘The Åland question and the balance of power in the Baltic during the First World War’, in Göran Rystad, Klaus-Richard Böhme & Wilhelm M. Carlgren (eds.), In Quest of Trade and Security. The Baltic in Power Politics 1500–1990, ii: 1890–1990 (Stockholm: Probus, 1995), 50–105.
51 On the Schleswig question and its repercussions for Danish politics, see Troels Fink, Da Sønderjylland blev delt, 1918–20, 3 vols. (Aabenraa: Institut for Grænseregionsforskning, 1978–9).
52 Svend Aage Hansen & Inge Henriksen, Socialebrydninger. Dansk socialhistorie 1914–39 (2nd edn., Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1984), 92–103.
53 See Torben Hansgaard, Landbrugsrådets tilblivelse (Copenhagen: Landbohistorisk Selskab, 1976).
54 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1999), 65.
55 Ibid. 69.
56 Ibid.
57 The Oslo Agreement of 1930 between Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway was intended to alleviate the effects of the Great Depression; Finland joined the group in 1933. Until 1936, economic issues dominated proceedings. After that the coordination of their security policies was given priority. For a survey of the Oslo states, see Ger van Roon, Small states in Years of Depression: the Oslo Alliance 1930–1940 (Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorchum, 1989).
58 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace. The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: PUP, 2009), 23.