'Junk history' and Swedish neutrality

The historian Stephen Kotkin of Stanford’s Hoover Institution has penned an important new essay on the phenomenon of “junk history”: reductionist or plainly wrong interpretations of historical events that have little or no basis in empirical reality but are nevertheless “marshaled in policy debates as justification for action, up to launching wars.” The emblematic example, which has recently been used by advocates for the war with Iran, is the failure of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to truly ensure “peace in our time” at Munich in 1938. As Kotkin once put it, “It turns out not everything is Munich. It turns out Munich wasn’t even Munich when you get down into the nitty-gritty details.”Another example of junk history is what many otherwise well-informed American observers think they know about Sweden’s conduct during World War II and the Cold War. Aaron MacLean summarized this view well during a recent discussion I had with him on the School of War podcast. “I just associate (Swedish foreign policy) with neutrality,” Maclean said, framing the approach as an “attempt at splendid isolation from the affairs of the continent.” This neutrality, he continued, brought “some success, by the way, in terms of preserving Swedish life and fortune through a very, very violent couple of centuries in Europe.”Many Swedes believe this, too. Indeed, the push for Sweden to join NATO and start talking tough on Russia arguably stems in part from a sense of guilt over a perceived moral transgression: the belief that Sweden’s foreign and security policies accommodated Nazi Germany during World War II and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Yet, as it turns out, Munich is not Munich in this case either.Historians have shown that Sweden’s support for other Nordic countries and the Allies shaped its policies during World War II to a far greater extent than the relatively limited concessions it made to Germany during the desperate early years of the war when Sweden faced its greatest peril and needed breathing space in which to build up its military. As Kent Zetterberg put it in a Swedish study of the period, “Sweden was anything but a German satellite or a country of eugenicists, Nazis, and political collaborators.” Rather, as John Gilmour explains in his book Sweden, the Swastika and Stalin: The Swedish Experience in the Second World War,” it was a country that “felt so threatened militarily that it was forced to concede transit rights to Germany, and so isolated economically that it had to trade with Germany to survive and defend itself as a neutral until the Allied successes enabled it to withdraw from these concessions and join the other democracies in celebrating victory over the Nazis.”Thus, Sweden was neutral during World War II by necessity, not creed. To declare, in 1939–40, that Sweden was “standing up” to Hitler would almost certainly have ended in an invasion and the possible liquidation of the Swedish nation. Even so, Sweden’s actions were not solely dictated by self-interest: the country, for example, saved Danish Jews, provided Finland with arms and volunteer troops in the fight against the Soviets, and trained Danish and Norwegian “police troops” to take control of their respective countries following the collapse of German occupation.The wartime experience established a strategic culture centered on the national interest and Sweden’s survival that persisted throughout the Cold War. Having decided against NATO membership in 1949, largely out of consideration for neighboring Finland, Sweden had to manage its geographical proximity to the Soviet Union in some other way. The “Sonderweg” it chose was to project an image of itself as a country that rejected the Cold War binary while secretly cooperating closely with NATO powers — a form of flexible non-alignment. In the event of major conflict between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, Sweden would almost certainly not have remained neutral but would have declared its support for the Western alliance to which it had de facto always belonged. During World War II, Sweden had lacked the military strength and thus the freedom to make such a choice.The junk version of this history (not to mention the history of other smaller European states’ World War II and post-war experiences) makes it difficult to make astute strategic decisions. Instead of pursuing their own national interests while being as helpful to like-minded countries as possible, these smaller states are expected — and indeed expect of themselves — to make black-and-white moral pronouncements under the tutelage of larger powers, at the expense of the cognitive agility that kept Sweden out of World War II and, during the Cold War, reduced the risk of a unilateral military attack on the country.In the context of the war in Ukraine, this makes it harder to advocate a more realist and restrained policy, as such an approach risks being seen as a return to the perceived foreign-policy failings of the past. Yet the dead hand of junk history not only limits the judgment of states involved in the current conflict, but also that of some of their critics, who draw on similarly simplistic interpretations of the past.Foreign-policy debates would benefit from a greater degree of historical humility, in the spirit of what the Swedish diplomat Sven Grafström wrote in 1940, before reaffirming his anti-Nazi convictions: “It is easy for a little shit like me, without any vestige of responsibility, to conduct a discussion on how Sweden’s policy ought to be formulated correctly.”