Like the more powerful French and German governments, Stockholm opposed the Anglo-American assault on Iraq, calling for the continuation of the United Nations weapons “inspections” headed by former Swedish foreign minister Hans Blix. The withdrawal of the inspectors on the eve of the Anglo-American invasion meant that the Swedish rulers were effectively sidelined. The war also ended trade relations with Saddam Hussein’s regime, including those built up by Swedish companies before the UN sanctions were imposed at the start of the 1990s.

The Swedish government is thus not included in Washington’s “coalition of the willing”—those governments who joined the invading forces or have reinforced the Anglo-American occupation. Swedish companies are prohibited from bidding for major “reconstruction” contracts in Iraq.  
 
Transformation of the armed forces
Well before these events, spokespeople for the billionaire ruling families had launched a discussion on the transformation of the Swedish armed forces.

In December 1996 the parliament voted to move away from a military that had been organized to stave off an invasion from the east—that is, from the Soviet Union. The parliament is scheduled to vote on further steps along these lines at the end of this year. Discussions leading to that point have shown a broad consensus that the armed forces should be better prepared to take part in rapid military deployments around the globe.

Other questions have sparked more debate, however—including on how to carry out such a military policy with sharply limited resources, the kinds of alliances of benefit to the rulers of this small imperialist country, and the role of the armed forces within Sweden itself.

Although armed forces personnel have been cut by 70 percent in the last decade, the military budget is almost the same as in 1990.

In November the military commander in chief, Johan Hederstedt, was forced to resign after only three years in that position, following a campaign against him in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, which alleged the misuse of public funds, aiming its fire on abuse of the limousine service assigned to the military. More fundamental issues were likely involved, however. The chairman of the defense commission in parliament, Eskil Erlandsson of the Center Party, criticized Hederstedt for failing to carry through agreed-on changes to the armed forces.

In a February 17 article in the liberal daily Dagens Nyheter, former chief of intelligence and Hederstedt’s replacement as commander in chief, Håkan Syrén, declared that the most pressing task before the armed forces was to “increase its ability to contribute to international crises handling.”

One of Syrén’s proposals is to change the present enlistment at military headquarters to military training at the school level. Presently all young men are called up for enlistment, but fewer than 30 percent undergo training. At the annual “People and Defense” conference in January, Syrén said that all young men and women should go through a week of initial training at their high school. The ones most motivated, judged by their willingness to sign up for duty abroad, would then be offered a regular military training program.  
 
NATO or ‘Europe’
A debate among the different political parties is also under way on Stockholm’s stance toward NATO. The Swedish government remains outside the U.S.-dominated military alliance.

The liberal People’s Party is one bourgeois formation that wants to reverse this. “A purely EU defense for Europe is not in the interests of Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltic countries. Sweden thus… should work against such a development and maintain that NATO is the spine in the defense system of Europe. The most efficient way to do that is for Sweden to be a member of NATO,” said People’s Party Member of Parliament (MP) Carl Hamilton recently.

Leaders of the Moderate Party, including party chairman Fredrik Reinfeldt and MP Gunnar Hökmark, have also declared their support for NATO membership. By contrast, former party chairman and prime minister Carl Bildt wants increased Swedish collaboration within the European Union—the Berlin- and Paris-dominated European trade and currency bloc. Sweden, wrote Bildt in Dagens Nyheter, should take part “fully and wholly, without reservations and objections.”

Writing just before the mid-December conference in Brussels that was supposed to adopt a new EU constitution, Bildt predicted that “this weekend [Europe] will become a sharper force for peace and an actor in security politics.” Unfortunately for his argument, the conference collapsed in acrimonious division. The meeting did discuss a proposed EU military structure, part of an effort on the part of Berlin and Paris to establish a military pole independent of the U.S.-led NATO military alliance.

Prime Minister Göran Persson of the ruling Social Democratic party has so far straddled the fence between these imperialist military alliances. In a January 30 debate in parliament, he appeared to support the status quo in defending “freedom of alliance”—another name for Swedish so-called neutrality and non-membership of NATO. At the same time he called for both far-reaching collaboration with other EU countries and “a strong transatlantic link” with Washington.

The Swedish armed forces are presently participating in several UN missions or interventions by the Organization for Safety and Security in Europe, some of them led by NATO. Sweden has more than 500 soldiers in Kosova as part of the NATO occupation forces. Some 35 are in Afghanistan as well. That number will increase to 100 with more troops slated to join the NATO intervention there this spring. Together with Finland, this new group will constitute a Provisional Regional Team, being sent out into the countryside where, according to Svenska Dagbladet, “security needs to be improved.”

The government will also send 230 soldiers from its recently established international deployment battalion on “peace enforcement” to Liberia in February.

While being vague on future military alliances, the Swedish prime minister is more outspoken on dealing with so-called terrorist threats and “criminals.” In the biannual debate among party leaders in parliament on January 21, Persson proposed that 3 billion Swedish krona—the amount that would allegedly be saved from the military budget under one option now under consideration—be used to “fight internal threats like criminality and terrorism” (1 krona = US$0.14).

Persson has a different emphasis from Syrén and other military representatives, who argue that the armed forces should have a larger role in combating domestic “terrorist threats.” By contrast, the prime minister pointedly calls for more spending on cops, courts, and prisons.

In an interview with Svenska Dagbladet that same day, Syrén complained about the lack of laws and guidelines for cooperation between the police and military against “terrorist” threats, despite proposals for closer collaboration from a commission established after the Sept. 11, 2001, events in the United States. He noted that police had asked air force officers to patrol the air space during the memorial meeting for former foreign minister Anna Lindh in September last year. The air force had turned away two airplanes and one helicopter, Syrén said. But, if the aircraft had refused to follow their command, he protested, the air force pilots had no authorization to open fire.  
 
Afghanistan: ‘first feminist war’
Leaders of the Liberal Youth League, the youth organization of the People’s Party, have presented one of the clearest proposals so far for the military transformation under discussion. In an article in the January 21 Göteborgsposten, league chairperson Fredrik Malm and vice chair Nina Larsson, a lieutenant presently on duty in Kosova, put forward the slogan: “Dismantle the freedom of alliance and introduce a professional army.”

Malm and Larsson advocated membership in NATO and argued against a separate European defense headquarters. They defended the 2001 U.S.-led war against Afghanistan as the “first feminist war” and asserted that the Swedish armed forces have a progressive role to play in promoting equality around the world.

Ali Esbati, chairperson of the Young Left, the youth organization of the Left Party, which was formerly the Communist Party, embraced the same nationalist framework in taking issue with these proposals a week later. Their line, he argued in the same newspaper, would result in a narrow, elitist army that under U.S. leadership would take part in the global oppression of the people in the third world. He also spoke for a change, however: he is for the draft to be extended to women. “In a democracy both men and women should have the same rights and the same duties. Anything else is not acceptable,” he wrote.  
 
‘Not a single öre…’
“Both these views are in deep contrast to the position of the Communist League, which is in the traditions of the Marxist movement,” said Catharina Tirsén, speaking for the Communist League at a Militant Labor Forum on January 23. The forum addressed the end of the oft-touted “Swedish model” of a relatively wide-ranging social wage and official neutrality in foreign policy.

“We are against one single man or woman, one single öre (cent) going to the military,” said Tirsén. Such a stance, she said, was “completely in the spirit of the Swedish working class in 1905, who extended their solidarity and support to their class brothers and sisters in Norway as they fought for independence from Stockholm. The Swedish bourgeoisie had to give up on their plans of going to war against Norway to maintain their dominance in face of that working-class opposition.”

Working people in Sweden have nothing in common with the military ambitions of the Swedish bourgeoisie, Tirsén emphasized. Instead, she added, the working class needs its own military and foreign policy.  
 
 
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