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CREATURES OF DICTATORSHIP

‘Politics is to aim for something’, Olof Palme said, and he lived up to his words. Now and then a strong wave of Palme nostalgia sweeps over the public debate in Sweden. People seem to long for leaders who talk about ideals, change, and utopia, who strive to leave an indelible impression on the world.

He criticised the United States. He criticised the Soviet Union. He married a Czech woman in the late 1940s to help her out of a life under Communist oppression. Early on, he became one of the Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander’s ‘boys’ — a young, well-placed, centrist man in power. But when he became Sweden’s prime minister, he chose to focus on international matters. Was the folkhem, the people’s home, furnished and complete by then? Did it bore him?

The late 1960s was a remarkable and agitating time. Above all, Vietnam became a place where the Cold War appeared in its most deadly and violent form, creating great human suffering as the superpowers fought each other by proxy.

Vietnamese communists and nationalists had fought alongside each other in order to get the French colonisers to leave. But then the country was divided. North Vietnam became a communist state while South Vietnam became a market economy supported by the United States. But within South Vietnam lurked the communist guerilla movement Viet Cong, encouraged by North Vietnam to fight the South Vietnamese government. An election was planned for the people of Vietnam to decide on their future political method of reign, but the South Vietnamese leadership broke the agreement out of fear of a communist power takeover. With the superpowers meddling, the country was brought to war: North Vietnam supported the Viet Cong, and was itself supported by China and the Soviet Union, who sent weapons, advisors, and military equipment. South Vietnam, on the other hand, received weapons, soldiers, and advisors from the United States and support from South Korea, Australia, and Thailand.

No one could go unaffected by the Vietnam War. It reached people all over the world through massive television footage and intensive news reporting, and the war became a major issue in the left-wing movement that made itself heard in the west. Also in Sweden.

There, the Social Democratic government of Tage Erlander was concerned the war would generate support at the polls for the Swedish Communists and thereby threaten a Social Democratic victory in the forthcoming parliamentary elections. One had to capture this ‘youth revolt’ and channel it. The solution was Olof Palme.

By taking part in an anti-war demonstration in Stockholm in 1968, Palme became an internationally renowned name overnight, not so much for what he said but because he walked side by side with Nguyen Tho Chan, the North Vietnamese ambassador to the Soviet Union. Palme’s action aroused strong criticism from the United States, but that particular criticism was considered vital by the Social Democrats, who had indeed aspired to it in order to prevent voters from turning to the Swedish Communist Party.

The strategy worked: the Social Democrats won the election in 1968 with a total of 50.1 per cent of the votes. Its foreign policy was considered to be the key to the success, especially the party’s strong position concerning Vietnam. In January 1969, Sweden was the first country in the world to recognise North Vietnam as an independent state. In October of the same year, Olof Palme was elected new party leader. He also became Sweden’s prime minister.

The war in Vietnam officially came to end in 1975. Approximately 1.3 million people had died. Of these, 444,000 were Vietnamese soldiers and 282,000 were soldiers of other nationalities. The rest — 627,000 people — were Vietnamese civilians: children, women, and men.

That same year, Olof Palme created another significant diplomatic crisis when he attacked the leadership of Czechoslovakia, where the Communist regime imprisoned and persecuted socialists:

The Interior Minister held a meeting the other day with the Chief of Police and Intelligence, stating that the authorities should do everything to expose and purge reactionary groups and individuals, and at the right time and without compromise stop their activities. Thus speak the creatures of dictatorship.*

[* Olof Palme’s speech on 20 April 1975 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypDRfGmvLm8]

Several of Palme’s heavily ideological and sharp statements have left traces that still reverberate in Sweden. Under his leadership there was a major change in Swedish foreign policy, with Palme’s condemnation of the US in Vietnam the starting point.

Up until then, Swedish foreign policy had been characterised by a policy of restraint. In the UN General Assembly, Sweden’s votes rarely differed from the other Western states’. In the general international debate, Sweden’s voice was not heard more than others. As a country ‘free of alliances’, Sweden instead became a buffer state between the two major power blocks. All that changed with Palme, with his political aims and visions.

He spoke about the ‘Third World’ — the poor countries that neither belonged to the communist block nor the western world — and argued that Sweden had a moral responsibility towards the people there. Economic and social injustice must be eradicated worldwide. Unless the rich world took responsibility, poverty and injustice would cause the third world to explode into conflict and suffering. The right to self-determination was another central idea of Palme’s; he described nationalism and nationalist aspirations as a ‘storm wave’ that would wash out the colonisers.

These were the years when the basic ideals of Swedish international aid were developed, and Palme’s ideas were highly influential in the process. The aid should have the purpose of improving living conditions for poor people worldwide through economic growth, economic and social equality, economic and political independence, as well as increased democracy. Interestingly enough, Olof Palme created a built-in contradiction in his support of North Vietnam, a country that wasn’t in the least democratic. In that case, he prioritised the issue of independence, something that proved to be a pattern. In the choice between combating colonialism and promoting democracy, Palme’s preference was usually not the democratic one. From his point of view, colonialism was the main enemy, and Swedish foreign policy under Palme’s command defended the right to self-determination of small states. Not surprisingly, he is the Swedish politician who has by far the most streets and squares in the world named after him.

Sweden got the nickname ‘the darling of the third world’ and its foreign policy displayed plenty of moral confidence. At the very heart of it was the idea of it being a fundamental human obligation to extend a helping hand to the ones in need, as well as the belief that Sweden ought to show moral leadership. In Palme’s own words, from 1968:

Our face towards the world must be characterised by the same solidarity with the poor and oppressed that was the driving force when the workers’ movement was formed in the old, poor Sweden, and guided our efforts to transform Swedish society on the basis of equality and righteousness.

Since then, it has been a well-founded Swedish position that Sweden is — and should be — a country that takes the lead in addressing the moral dilemmas of the world. The 1996 Declaration of Foreign Affairs states that Sweden should be a leader in world aid and humanitarian efforts. Furthermore, Sweden sees itself as a leading player within the UN and in contributing to peace and security throughout the world. The commitment to disarmament and the fight against weapons of mass destruction also remains a constant. And with membership of the EU, Sweden gradually began to emerge as a leading player in the eastward enlargement of the Union and in efforts to strengthen the EU’s crisis management and peace promotion capabilities.

When the conservative alliance of four parties won the Swedish election in 2010, they all desired to uphold a political identity based on being a nation that exerted moral leadership in the world. Their 2013 Foreign Declaration actually stated that ‘Sweden is a humanitarian superpower’. And that flattering self-portrait remains untouched and unmodified to this day.