Sweden's history: an empire that stopped fighting and stayed stopped

How the kingdom of Sweden was assembled

The first traces of human life in Sweden date from about 9000 BCE and were found at Segebro outside Malmö. A food-gathering culture with flint tools, the bow and the fishing spear is documented in the peat at Ageröd in Skåne from about 6500 BCE, and tribes practising agriculture and cattle raising appear from about 2500 BCE. The first written description of the people came from outside: Tacitus, in the Germania of 98 CE, called the Svear powerful in men, weapons and fleets.

Unification took several centuries and left almost no documents behind. At the end of the Viking era in the eleventh century the country was still a loose federation of provinces, whose chieftains from time to time proclaimed themselves rulers of all Sweden while in practice each governed one province. The Svear were centred on Uppland around Uppsala and the Götar farmed Östergötland and Västergötland. The oldest document that treats Sweden as a united and independent kingdom is a papal decree of 1164 making it a diocese with its own archbishop at Uppsala.

Christianity took two and a half centuries to establish. The Frankish monk Ansgar was allowed to preach and set up a church at Birka in 830 and made little impression, a second Frankish missionary was forced to flee, and an archbishop of Hamburg tried again in the 930s with no more success. Olof Skötkonung, who proclaimed himself ruler of all Sweden, was baptised at Skara about the year 1000, and the pagan temple at Uppsala stood until the end of the eleventh century.

Two features of the medieval kingdom outlasted it. Feudalism never developed, so the peasantry remained a class of free farmers; slavery and serfdom were abolished by a decree of Magnus Eriksson in 1335, and Sweden was the only country in Europe where peasants sat in the Diet as a fourth estate beside the nobility, the clergy and the burghers. The other was demographic. The Black Death arrived in 1349 and killed roughly a third of the population within two years, and the population took until the early nineteenth century to regain the level it had held in 1348. In 1397 Margaret I of Denmark drew Sweden, Norway and Denmark into the Kalmar Union.

Why Gustav Vasa broke with Denmark and Rome

The union came apart over an execution. In 1520 Christian II of Denmark took Stockholm by force, had himself crowned hereditary monarch in breach of his promises to the council, and had 82 noblemen and clergy of the Sture party executed for heresy. Responsibility for the Stockholm Bloodbath has been argued over by Swedish and Danish historians ever since, and the large part played by the archbishop Gustav Trolle is now generally accepted.

One nobleman taken to Denmark as a hostage the year before had escaped. Gustav Vasa reached Dalarna after the executions, raised a rebellion there, was chosen regent in August 1521, and was elected king by a meeting of the estates in June 1523. Sweden dates its national day to 6 June for that election, and the Kalmar Union ended with it.

What followed was a transfer of property no later Swedish government has attempted. Through acts passed by the Diet at Västerås in 1527, Gustav Vasa confiscated the entire property of the Roman Catholic Church, which then held 21% of Sweden's land against the crown's 6%. By his death in 1560 the crown held about 60% of Swedish soil directly. A hereditary monarchy was established in 1544, and the Uppsala Synod of 1593 settled the Lutheran confession definitively after his Catholic grandson Sigismund had tried to reverse it.

The second break was commercial. Lübeck had financed the rebellion and been repaid with a monopoly of Swedish foreign trade and a large debt. Gustav Vasa gave military support to Denmark in a war against Lübeck, the Hanseatic army was beaten in 1535, and a truce in 1536 cancelled the debt and abolished the Hanseatic privileges. Swedish merchants could now trade beyond the Baltic on their own account.

How the Baltic empire was won and lost

The great power century rested on an army the country could not obviously afford. Gustav II Adolf, who came to the throne at sixteen and ruled from 1611 to 1632, organised a standing army whose infantry was conscripted from the peasantry and trained by officers living among them; only the cavalry and the navy were professional. The field artillery was mobile, the central administration was professionalised and confirmed by the constitution of 1634, and Swedish copper and iron went into the firearms. The Baltic this machine was aimed at supplied Europe with grain, iron, copper, timber, tar, hemp and furs. Sweden in the seventeenth century had scarcely more than a million inhabitants.

Territory arrived treaty by treaty, and left the same way.

The Thirty Years' War is where the empire was made. Gustav Adolf landed in northern Germany in 1630, concluded a treaty with France in 1631, and destroyed the imperial army under Tilly at Breitenfeld in the same year. He was killed at Lützen on 6 November 1632 in a battle his own side won on points. A generation later Charles X Gustav marched an army across the frozen Belts and took Skåne, Halland, Blekinge and Bohuslän at Roskilde in February 1658, which is where Sweden's present southern and western boundaries come from.

Then it stopped. Denmark, Poland and Russia made a treaty against Sweden in 1699 and attacked in February 1700. Charles XII, on the throne at fifteen, beat the Russians at Narva, turned to Poland for four years, and gave Peter I the time to found St Petersburg and rebuild an army. The Swedish offensive into Russia was diverted by scorched earth into Ukraine and destroyed at Poltava in June 1709. Charles spent five years at Bender under Ottoman rule trying to talk the sultan into attacking Russia, returned in 1715, and was shot dead at the siege of Fredriksten on 30 November 1718 by a bullet whose origin, Norwegian or Swedish, has never been settled. The Peace of Nystad in 1721 gave up the Baltic provinces, part of Karelia and Vyborg. The war had cost about 200,000 men, some 150,000 of them from the area of present-day Sweden.

Why Sweden stopped fighting and never resumed

The defeat rearranged the constitution before it rearranged the borders. A parliamentary system was introduced in 1719, the Riksdag became an active parliament during the Age of Liberty that ran to 1772, and a law of 1766 established the principle of freedom of the press. Charles XII himself has never been settled either: early nineteenth-century writers largely followed Voltaire in praising him, while others have described him as a fanatic and a warmonger who neglected his base at home in pursuit of foreign adventure.

The territorial losses came in two instalments. Finland, part of the kingdom since the medieval crusades, was lost to Russia in a war fought from February 1808 to September 1809 and became a Grand Duchy under the tsar. In 1810 the Riksdag elected a French marshal, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, as heir to the throne. He took Sweden into the coalition against Napoleon, and the Treaty of Kiel of 14 January 1814 transferred Norway from Denmark to the Swedish king.

Norway declined to be transferred. It declared independence, adopted a constitution and chose its own king, and Sweden invaded on 27 July 1814 to enforce the treaty. After brief fighting the Convention of Moss established a personal union in which Norway kept its own institutions and Sweden controlled foreign affairs. That campaign is the last war Sweden has fought. The union lasted until 1905, when Norway rejected the king of Sweden and elected its own, and it too was dissolved without fighting.

The overseas holdings went in the same period and left little behind. New Sweden on the Delaware River was held from 1638, a Swedish Gold Coast was established in what is now Ghana from the 1630s, and Saint Barthélemy was bought from France in 1784 and sold back in 1878. The enslaved people on the island were freed by the Swedish government in 1847.

What Sweden did instead of fighting wars

Prosperity took most of a century to arrive. Sweden's population doubled between 1750 and 1850 on an almost entirely agricultural base while western Europe industrialised, and the surplus left the country. More than a million Swedes moved to the United States between 1850 and 1910, and during the 1880s over 1% of the population emigrated each year. Many came back, bringing an account of American industrial productivity that pushed modernisation along faster.

Industrialisation ran from about 1870 to 1914, on rural forges, sawmills and textile proto-industries at first. What grew up beside it was a set of mass organisations outside the state, the folkrörelser: trade unions, temperance societies, free religious congregations and a women's movement. Guild monopolies in trade and manufacturing were abolished, taxation and voting were reformed, national military service was introduced, and three party groupings emerged: Social Democrat, Liberal and Conservative.

The franchise was settled in two steps by governments of opposite colours. A Conservative government under Arvid Lindman carried a compromise in 1907 that granted a universal and equal franchise for the second chamber of the Riksdag, democratised the first, and introduced proportional representation for both. A Liberal and Social Democratic government under Nils Edén amended the constitution after the 1917 election to give women the vote and to extend the universal and equal franchise to the first chamber and to local elections. Britannica dates Swedish parliamentary democracy from 1917; the Riksdag's own account dates the arrival of democracy to the decisions taken between 1918 and 1922.

How neutrality was practised in both world wars

Sweden was neutral in the First World War and tilted the neutrality toward Germany at the start. It mined the Öresund to close it to Allied warships, allowed German use of Swedish facilities and of the Swedish cipher for messages to German embassies overseas, permitted volunteers to fight for the White Guards in the Finnish Civil War, and briefly occupied the Åland Islands jointly with German forces. The Allies answered by stopping a large share of Swedish trade, which from 1916 produced a severe food shortage at home. Hjalmar Hammarskjöld's government fell over it, and an agreement of May 1918 with Britain and the United States restored imports from the west in exchange for limits on exports to Germany and the use of much of the Swedish merchant fleet.

Åland was the first test of the new international order, and Sweden lost it. The islands were Swedish-speaking, a plebiscite after the Finnish Civil War found almost all the inhabitants in favour of joining Sweden, and the League of Nations, which Sweden had joined in 1920, awarded sovereignty to Finland in 1921 with guarantees of internal self-government and limits on fortification.

The Second World War is the contested part of the record. Sweden refused Hitler's offer of a non-aggression pact in the spring of 1939, declared itself neutral at the outbreak of war, and then declared itself a non-belligerent on Finland's side in the Winter War, sending materiel and a volunteer corps. It refused the Allies passage through its territory. After Germany occupied Denmark and Norway in 1940 it allowed German troops to transit to Norway, agreed in June 1941 under threat of reprisal to move a German division from Norway to Finland, and supplied Germany with iron ore and ball bearings. The transit agreement was revoked in 1943. In the same year Sweden helped move Denmark's Jews out of reach of deportation, and Raoul Wallenberg, secretary of the Swedish delegation sent to Hungary in 1944, saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews before disappearing in January 1945; he probably died in a Soviet prison in 1947.

Swedish historiography settled for decades on what it called the small state realist reading: that co-operation with a vastly more powerful Germany was the price of survival, that concessions were limited and made only under serious threat, and that the neutrality was bent without being broken. That account passed over the Holocaust, and Swedes and others have argued since that Sweden could have done more against the German war effort. Both readings describe the same six years.

How the People's Home was built and paid for

Sweden was hit hard in the early years of the Great Depression, with rising unemployment and wage reductions that produced a series of harsh labour conflicts. The election of 1932 brought the Social Democrats to office under Per Albin Hansson with a programme of extensive public works and support for agriculture, made possible by an agreement with the Farmers' Party in 1933. Wages were back at their earlier level by 1936. The word attached to the programme was folkhemmet, the people's home: society understood as a household that looks after its members in unemployment, sickness and old age.

The party held office for 44 years, from 1932 to 1976, and the reforms themselves were mostly post-war. Between 1946 and 1950 the Riksdag passed laws on old-age pensions, child allowances, health insurance, rent allowances, schooling and the expansion of higher education and research, and a compulsory earnings-related pension for all employees was enacted in 1959 after a long fight over who would control the fund. The nationalisation of industry that stood in the party's post-war programme was left undone. What paid for the rest was an industrial plant that had come through the war intact, and which spent the following decades supplying the rebuilding of northern Europe.

The constitution followed the politics. The two-chamber Riksdag was replaced by a single chamber of 350 members in 1971, and a new Instrument of Government, adopted by the Riksdag on 6 March 1974, came into force on 1 January 1975. It cut the chamber to 349 seats to reduce the risk of tied votes, lowered the voting age to 18, and left the monarch with ceremonial functions and no formal political power.

What Cold War neutrality looked like privately

The doctrine was non-alignment in peacetime with a view to neutrality in wartime, and Sweden held to the public half of it consistently. It joined the United Nations in 1946 without relinquishing neutrality, proposed a Scandinavian defence alliance independent of the great powers during the Berlin crisis of 1948 and dropped the idea when Norway insisted on ties to the West, helped found the European Free Trade Association in 1959, and declined to apply to the European Economic Community on the grounds of neutrality. The Nordic Council, inaugurated in 1952, produced passport-free travel between the Nordic countries, a common labour market and coordinated social legislation.

Privately the arrangement was different. Swedish leaders kept close ties with the United States, Norway, Denmark, West Germany and other NATO governments. In the early 1960s American nuclear submarines carrying Polaris A-1 missiles patrolled off the Swedish west coast, a position that suited a retaliatory strike on Moscow, and the United States secretly gave Sweden a guarantee of military assistance against Soviet aggression. American help went into the Saab 37 Viggen, a strong Swedish air force being useful for keeping Soviet anti-submarine aircraft away from the launch area, and Swedish scientists at the Royal Institute of Technology worked on the targeting performance of the Polaris missiles in return.

The defence that neutrality required was large. Nearly every man reaching military age was conscripted until the end of the Cold War, and in the 1980s Sweden could gather up to a million service members. Regular conscription was discontinued on 1 July 2010 in favour of an all-volunteer force of about 60,000. Refresher training was reinstated on 11 December 2014 and basic military training on 2 March 2017, the first recruits entering in 2018 under a law that applies to women and men alike.

The active, independent foreign policy of those decades is associated above all with Olof Palme, who was shot dead in a Stockholm street on 28 February 1986 in a case that was never solved. After his death and the end of the Cold War, Swedish foreign policy took a more conventional shape.

Why the long abstention ended

The unwinding took thirty years. A property bubble, an international recession and a switch from anti-unemployment to anti-inflationary policy produced a fiscal crisis in the early 1990s in which Swedish output fell by around 5% and the central bank briefly raised its interest rate to 500% in 1992 to defend the currency. The government cut spending, privatised public services and applied to join the European Community, which neutrality had ruled out for thirty years. A referendum on 13 November 1994 approved membership with 52.3% in favour, Sweden joined on 1 January 1995, and the term policy of neutrality fell out of use. A referendum in 2003 rejected the euro, and the krona is still the currency.

Non-alignment outlasted neutrality and was practised loosely. Sweden joined NATO's Partnership for Peace in 1994, exercised with NATO forces, placed troops under NATO command in Afghanistan, took part in peacekeeping in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Cyprus, and helped enforce the United Nations no-fly zone over Libya.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 ended it. Sweden dropped the neutrality policy and applied for NATO membership alongside Finland, and after objections from Turkey and Hungary held up ratification for many months it became a full member on 7 March 2024, bringing the alliance to 32 countries. The Swedish government dates its relations with NATO to the Partnership for Peace of 1994. The campaign against Norway and the accession to NATO are two hundred and ten years apart.