Sweden long rejected militarism, even offering government funding to peace movements. Yet since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the political mood has changed abruptly, with a witch hunt launched against activists who oppose the country’s embrace of NATO.
At the Museum of Work in Norrköping, a hundred miles south of Stockholm, an exhibition on Swedish Cartoonists’ Protest Against NATO offers a satirical take on the one-sided debate that greeted Sweden’s rapid accession to the military alliance.
The NATO-critical exhibition occupies an entire museum floor, where large windows overlook the dramatic falls of Motala Stream. This river system links the city to Sweden’s second-largest lake, Vättern. Conversely, Sweden’s official entrance into NATO on March 7, 2024, leads nowhere — except toward surging militarization and a political narrative dominated by Cold War assumptions.
The exhibition’s illustrations, produced by some of Sweden’s most famous artists and cartoonists, signal antiwar messages, calls for neutrality, and longing for the return of Sweden’s official nonalignment policy — which had been Sweden’s official foreign policy line since the 1800s. They point to a sudden U-turn in Sweden’s political attitude toward defense measures and to the importing of simplistic analyses of conflicts where NATO has already chosen its allies.
Maria, a sociology professor at a prominent Swedish university, has traveled a long way to catch the exhibition. She describes the visit as a kind of pilgrimage to come to terms with Sweden’s entrance into NATO. Maria — not her real name — sighs: “The whole process was absurd; it lacked any kind of democratic basis. For her, “the way Sweden entered NATO might as well have happened in a dictatorship, like Russia or Turkey.”
She halts and laughs in front of a blown-up cartoon depicting Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan riding a donkey, while Sweden’s right-wing prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, rides behind him. The power balance illuminates the compromises that the Swedish government made to Turkish demands, in exchange for allowing Sweden to enter NATO. These included deporting several Kurds who had been residing in Sweden due to political repression in their homeland; handing Turkish agencies access to Swedish counterintelligence data; and canceling any official support to Kurdish-led resistance movements in current and former ISIS strongholds.
Saboteurs?
Along with such political power plays during Sweden’s application process — with Turkey and Hungary as the final NATO members to accept its candidacy — the peace movement also came under scrutiny. Voices for peace, nonalignment, and nonaggression were criticized for sabotaging the NATO membership process by organizing peace marches and questioning NATO’s credentials as a “peacemaking alliance.”
Kerstin Bergeå, president of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (SPAS), one of the world’s oldest peace organizations, labeled Sweden’s NATO membership “a historic misstep” and lamented a debate that allowed “little space for critical voices.” “We are worried,” she added, that Sweden’s “historic voice for peace will go silent.”
NATO’s official narrative, rooted in the notion that rearmament will bring stability and peace, has become an accepted truth since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Western media — including Swedish outlets — have become one-sided, military-oriented, and ever-eager to dismiss peaceful solutions to the Russia–Ukraine war. Throughout Sweden’s NATO membership process, the peace movement has seen its political influence shrink. Even in economic terms, state funds earmarked for the civic community — including peace organizations — have been redirected toward Sweden’s increased defense budget. “It’s getting harder to be open about your peace activity these days,” Mattias, a thirty-year-old peace activist, tells me.
This pleasant spring evening, a handful of experienced peace campaigners get together at an activist café in central Stockholm. They sit down with takeout coffees and printed documents about the war in Ukraine, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the “NATO-fication of Sweden.” There’s a slight echo in the room. Words about peace, disarmament, and nonalignment policy bounce around before being swallowed by silence.
“Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, there’s been enormous pressure piled on the peace movement, not just in Sweden but all over Europe,” laments Mattias. “It was clear from the start that the Swedish government had waited for an opportunity to really kick-start its NATO entrance process — very much like the neocons in the [George W.] Bush administration used 9/11 to launch its ‘war on terror’ policy. It was very calculated — and sneaky.”
Sweden long embodied neutrality and nonalignment. An isolated nation in the far north that, along with Switzerland, avoided being dragged into two world wars while being hailed as a champion of justice, peace, and solidarity in the developing world, and governed by politicians who openly condemned Spain’s fascist regime and the United States’ warfare in Vietnam. Reality, however, never walked in tandem with the illusion that Sweden long cultivated, with its self-image serving as a distorted lens on its own realpolitik.
Cold War Assumptions
When Sweden formally joined NATO, at a flag ceremony outside the alliance’s Brussels headquarters, it marked the end of two centuries of official neutrality. It also built on a preexisting reality: the poorly kept secret that Sweden has been an ally to NATO ever since the early Cold War when Western forces first gained access to Swedish airspace and naval facilities to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union.
After the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, when NATO expanded despite promises made to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Sweden stepped up its official collaboration with the North Atlantic Alliance through various treaties and military collaboration exercises. Swedish military personnel served under NATO command in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s and in Afghanistan in the 2000s, while Saab’s multirole fighter aircraft JAS 39 Gripen bombed Libya in 2011 as part of NATO’s operations against Muammar Gaddafi.
In Sweden itself, NATO has participated in numerous military exercises — among them “Loyal Arrow” in 2008, situated around a fabricated scenario where a fictitious nation, “Lapistan” (instead of Lapland, in northern Sweden, where indigenous Sami peoples live on reindeer-herding), saw its natural resources confiscated by foreign powers — while the Swedish arms industry has remained one of the biggest in the world (the third-largest per capita).
In other words, the ground was prepared for Sweden to come out as an official NATO member. Its formal entry has seen a surge in militarization ventures, and some 200,000 Swedes have become shareholders in the arms industry in the wake of NATO entry. This industry is riding high on the feverish weapons production race to arm the Ukrainian resistance against Russian invasion and to cope with NATO member states’ 5 percent defense-spending commitment. The obviously lucrative spinoffs of Sweden’s militarization process have also paved the way for big-money arms deals regarding JAS 39 Gripen, about to be sold in large quantities to Peru, Colombia, and the Czech Republic.
Peace Activists
In one sense, joining NATO has politically strangled the Swedish peace movement by redirecting state funds to the military, leading to lost jobs within peace organizations. Yet it has also seen double the number of people join Sweden’s various peace movements since the NATO membership process started back in 2022.
This underlines the lack of consensus regarding the ongoing “NATO-fication” of Swedish society. Nor should there be one, says Olga Karach, a Belarusian democracy and peace activist residing in exile in Lithuania. She warns the Swedish public that indifference toward the ongoing militarization and pro-NATO media narratives that dominate public debate will come back to haunt its democratic structures. For her, a pro-NATO narrative is, in the end, merely the other side of the same coin as authoritarianism elsewhere: “The end result is all the same — propaganda.”
Invited to address an event hosted by the SPAS earlier this year, Karach used the repressive propaganda model in Russia and Belarus as an example. “In war, there’s only the present,” she says. “There’s no past or tomorrow — and war is like a drug. A drug that simplifies things, where war becomes the solution to everything.”
In Sweden, militarization has become a political religion, according to journalist Dan Jönsson, author of Political Wilderness, a study of Sweden’s NATO membership process. He contextualizes the security reforms in Sweden and finds a pattern where all governments since the mid-2010s have echoed the policy line trickled down from Washington or Brussels.
“In 2014, when the government led by the Social Democrats acknowledged Palestine as an independent state, that was the last time Sweden showed any kind of foreign political independence,” Jönsson tells me. “It might as well have been the last, given that NATO membership states unity. It all boils down to the dislocation of perspectives — from the civil to the military.”
Faltering Loyalties
The attacks on the peace movement haven’t merely banished non-militarist perspectives from public debate, they have also led to a desperate fight for place, positioning, and influence within the movement. On email forums and social media channels, prominent long-standing peace activists have been quarreling over Sweden’s muffled voice in the global arena, over the possibility of uniting the peace movement under a single umbrella, and — above all — over the war in Ukraine.
In most Western societies, Russia’s invasion of its neighbor has had a corrosive effect on left-wing activist spaces. A general critique of NATO may unite peace organizations and social movements, but opinions are sharply divided when it comes to Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. Mainstream Swedish media outlets are quick to use cherry-picked quotes to slander the whole peace movement as a homogeneous collective of “Putin apologists, “traitors,” and “useful idiots” incorporated into Russia’s propaganda machinery.
“When you look at it through a long-term lens, the political establishment has plenty of ammunition to continue to point to the peace movement as a community detached from reality that can’t tell black from white,” Elena, a peace activist based in northern Sweden, tells me. “We have certainly done our part in shooting ourselves in the foot by allowing blatant arguments coming from the Kremlin propaganda machinery to be intertwined with basic pacifistic stands and ideas — but we’ve also pointed to some really basic facts, one being that NATO doesn’t bring peace to Sweden; it merely integrates us into an eternal mode of war preparations.”
Elena works as a civil servant in a sector where sharp opinions regarding NATO and sharing anti-militarist posts on one’s private social media might lead to suspicion from superiors — and accusations of faltering loyalties. “It’s ironic,” she says, “this growing fear of having the ‘wrong ideas’ and being labeled ‘traitor’ and ‘Putin apologist’ based on one’s general NATO criticism. That was exactly the kind of political and social atmosphere that plagued the authoritarian societies in Latin America that I escaped from as a young student to seek a better life in neutral Sweden. Ever since NATO became our sole political North Star, the road leads to the same blind alley as in every fearful and anxious society that seeks shelter in the arms of a pumped-up machismo military apparatus.”
Obituary
In Norrköping, at the Museum of Work, a steady stream of visitors passes through the NATO exhibition. The next day, the exhibition is to be dismantled and replaced by something entirely different. Next to the exit door, a visiting child places his palm atop a glass case containing an “obituary.” It reads: “Our beloved Non-alliance Policy 1815–2024 has departed and left us in deep sorrow. Politics betrayed the Swedish people; we won’t forget. There will be no funeral — the non-alignment policy shall be resurrected.”
As things stand, the NATO-fication of Swedish society looks set to endure as a long-haul economic, armed, and political project, rarely challenged by mainstream media. Far from the corridors of power and influence, the Swedish peace movement, which sprang out of the labor and universal suffrage movement of the mid-1850s, seeks new paths to stay afloat and remain an integral part of public discourse. Without allotted state funds, numerous social organizations and peace networks have seen themselves evicted from offices and locales where grassroots peace work has been planned, discussed, and conducted for many years.
In central Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city, a local peace organization has started to dismantle an entire office. Rents are becoming too high; the movement doesn’t have any funds to keep the locale. Mikael, a veteran peace campaigner, laments not only Sweden’s NATO entry but even more so the public’s utter indifference to its social, economic, and political consequences.
“NATO’s demands on the Swedish economy request that we redirect funds from civic spheres to the military infrastructure,” he tells me. “But not only that — the entire militarization of society forces us to ask ourselves what kind of society we want. One where social movements and pacifist voices are evicted from the public sphere and entirely replaced by the military-industrial complex?”
Mikael pauses and looks over the lofty room where a Swedish peace movement has been present for many decades, at a lucrative address that the landlord — thanks to a recent political reform — can lease to “market rent rates,” which excludes organizations bereft of any form of state funds. “It seems to be the case that the public doesn’t care whether peace activists continue their work or if we just pack our bags and disappear into the night,” he adds. “The political establishment in Sweden these days just wants us all to shut up and support the militarization and trust the NATO narrative.”
Then Mikael fires a wry smile and concludes not merely his own but the entire Swedish peace movement’s position in today’s political makeover: “The truth about NATO and its failings to contribute to bringing peace and stability to the world has been evident ever since its birth — it’s all there to see for anyone who cares to study the organization’s history.”
Great Job Klas Lundström & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
