Sweden joins NATO and says goodbye to more than two centuries of neutrality | World News – Business Standard

Sweden’s last war ended in 1814, and when the guns and cannons it aimed at Norway fell silent, the once warring power would not take up arms again.

For the next two centuries, Sweden embraced a policy of neutrality, refusing to take sides in wars or join a military alliance. It was an attitude that kept peace at home and helped turn the country into a prosperous welfare state and humanitarian superpower.

This remarkably long era of non-alignment is coming to an end as Sweden joins NATO. The ceremonial formalities are expected soon, after 18 months of delays as Turkey and Hungary held up ratification and sought concessions from other alliance members.

Sweden is now putting 200 years of neutrality and non-alignment behind us,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said after the Hungarian parliament gave its approval on Monday, clearing the final hurdle. “It’s a big step. We have to take that seriously. But it is also a very natural step that we take.

Sweden, like neighboring Finland, had long been excluded from NATO membership. That changed virtually overnight when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The attack sparked fears across Europe about Moscow’s revived imperial ambitions, which have grown as Russia gains momentum on the battlefield in Ukraine.

It’s the right path for us, said Jacob Frederiksen, a 24-year-old pilot who like many Swedes has embraced NATO membership amid the collapse of the post-World War II order that largely preserved peace for decades. kept. I think in this new era it is better to be part of an alliance than to be independent and neutral.

The invasion had a shock effect on Swedish political life,” says Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg. He analyzed opinion polls showing that support for NATO membership rose from 35% in 2021 to 64% after the invasion.

It was the largest and fastest change in opinion yet measured in Swedish political history, wrote Ekengren Oscarsson.

Still, new concerns arise from being part of an alliance amid rising tensions between Russia and the West.

Ulrika Eklund, a 55-year-old bank employee in Stockholm, said she feels insecure about her membership in NATO and the effect it will have on Sweden. But she understands why the step was taken now that so much is happening in the world and in Europe.

The country’s neutrality has its origins in the early 19th century, when Europe became embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars.

Although Sweden ended up on the winning side in the battle against the French warrior-emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, the loss of territorial possessions in Finland to Russia years earlier ended any illusions that Sweden would continue a role as a great power.

After conquering Norway, the policy was to stay out of the quarrels of the Great Powers and instead develop Sweden as a country. And we did that,” said Robert Dalsj, senior analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency.

The policy allowed Sweden to grow, Dalsj said, and put the country on the path to becoming a modern state after being one of the poorest and most backward countries in Europe in the early 19th century.

As Sweden adjusted to its new status, King Karl XIV John declared the country’s neutrality in 1834. In a letter to the courts of Britain and Russia, he urged respect for Sweden’s wish to stay out of their conflicts.

The text, preserved in the Swedish National Archives and considered the oldest document on Sweden’s neutrality, reads: We will request, as we do now, that we remain completely out of this struggle, and that Sweden and Norway, by remaining strictly neutral towards the warring parties, parties, can earn respect and appreciation of our system through our impartial behavior.

Sweden’s neutrality was gradually tested during the Second World War, when the country made concessions to Germany to stay out of the war.

The Second World War was a near-death experience for Sweden,” said Dalsj.

Many Swedes believed they were keeping peace because of their neutrality, he said, but in reality “we were flexible in our application of neutrality: early in the war we made concessions to the Germans and later in the war we made concessions to the Allies .

During the Cold War, when Sweden and Finland were buffer countries between NATO and the Warsaw Pact alliance, many Swedes and Finns believed that falling outside either bloc was the best way to ease tensions with Russia, its powerful eastern neighbor. the Baltic Sea region.

But that never meant a full embrace of pacifism. In the 1950s and 1960s, Sweden had the world’s fourth-largest air force and the ability to mobilize about 800,000 troops, including reservists, in the event of war, said Andreas Ohlsson, curator of the Swedish Military Museum.

Being neutral is not being naive. It’s basically a way of thinking that we have to be self-dependent when the war comes,” Ohlsson said.

As the years passed, the idea of ​​Sweden as a voice for peace and nuclear non-proliferation became the core of Swedish identity. Home to the Nobel Peace Prize institutions, it funded foreign aid programs, participated in peacekeeping missions abroad and relied on its neutral status to act as a mediator in regional conflicts around the world.

Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister in the 1970s, described Sweden as a moral superpower that should become active in situations where other countries, due to their foreign policies, were incapable of involvement.

Fear of Russia’s military power goes back centuries and lasted into the waning days of the Cold War. In 1981, a Soviet submarine ran aground in the Stockholm archipelago, close to the main Swedish naval base. Exciting days followed.

After the Cold War, fears subsided and Sweden cut back on defense spending. But in recent years, Sweden has invested more in its military and built contacts with NATO, participating in training with the alliance.

A major catalyst was Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

In 2017, Sweden introduced compulsory military service. The following year, a regiment was re-established on the strategically important Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, northwest of the Russian territory of Kaliningrad, after being disbanded in 2005.