Introduction: National Peace and Neutrality

Abstract

The history of Swedish peace and neutrality has traditionally been told as a national story beginning with Jean Baptiste, the French general who was elected king at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and broke with Sweden’s belligerent past. He brought peace to the country and initiated a tradition of durable neutrality that still lasts. From him the story continues to the abortive nineteenth-century Scandinavianism and the successful navigation between the Scylla and Charybdis of pro-Germanism and the Russian menace in the two World Wars. It blossoms fully with Per Albin Hansson, social democratic Prime Minister of the People’s Home, who steered his country with a firm hand through a dark age. In the Cold War, the story goes on, Swedish neutrality policy laid the ground for détente in Northern Europe, eased Finland’s position and culminated when the late Olof Palme carried the Swedish peace message out in the world.