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Cold war Sweden
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| History of Sweden |
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This article covers the History of Sweden from the end of World War II to the late 1980s.
Contents |
Sweden emerged unharmed by World War II. The Swedish non-alignment policy officially remained - Sweden rejected NATO membership but joined the United Nations and later EFTA. Tage Erlander (s) was Prime Minister from 1946 to 1969 - a period of exceptional economic and social prosperity, and generally low unemployment, but the housing situation posed problems as more and more people moved to the cities. Housing shortage there induced miljonprogrammet (the million program) - a national wave of suburban development with the aim of creating a million homes from 1965 to 1974. This period saw the beginning of large-scale immigration to a country that used to be one of the more ethnically homogeneous in the world. The first phase of immigration consisted of workers from southern Europe, who were actively wooed over by campaigns of advertisement and recruitment in their home countries, for instance Italy & Austria. In the 1970s and 1980s many refugees with families arrived from e.g. Chile, Kurdistan, Vietnam & Somalia, some of them with refugee status, others on the immigration quota. At the same time, the economy was entering less powerfully prosperous times: while Sweden continues to be a thoroughly industrialized nation with many businesses of cutting-edge innovation, especially in telephonics, energy management, chemicals, pharmaceutics & food industry, this growth both in production and complication is not generating a great amount of much new employment in Sweden anymore, and therefore did not swallow the generations who have grown up since 1980.
On September 3, 1967, Sweden was the last country in continental Europe to introduce right-hand traffic. This was done on Dagen H, in spite of the negative result of a referendum in 1955.
From the mid-sixties there was a strong wave of radical leftism in Sweden, surfacing in sometimes heavily publicized events like the Båstad riots and the occupation of the student union building at Stockholm University - though never into actual fatalities in street fighting or domestic political terror acts like those in Western Germany and Italy in these years.
Solidarity and awareness became watchwords, at first in literary and student circles and in the socialist/syndicalist underground (and in time within many strata of society), then also in the media and the government. By the early seventies, people and government, led by Prime Minister Olof Palme (s), rose in protest against oppression and war in countries as distant as South Africa and Vietnam (at the end of 1972, Palme famously indicted the American shock bombings of Hanoi and compared them to Nazi war crimes such as the destructions of Lidice and Oradour; the USA responded by calling home her ambassador)[citation needed]. The Swedish support for the ANC in and outside of South Africa and FNL and the Hanoi government in the Vietnam war were steady not only in words, popular support and help to enter the diplomatic arena, but also in economic (though not military) state subsidies. After Vietnam was reunited in 1975, for instance, Sweden supported the construction of a modern pulp plant at Bai Bang.
In 1973, journalists Jan Guillou and Peter Bratt exposed Informationsbyrån, a secret military intelligence register of communists and other people regarded as dangerous to national security; while the existence of such a thing, and in particular of its implied links to the (s) party structure, was fiercely denied, the question continues to surface in a number of political scandals over the years, until it became the subject of serious historical discussion, a few state-issued retrospective white papers and political recant. Although some details are a bit hazy, this "internal spying" outside of the ordinary state intelligence services, is now considered an established fact.
The constitution was changed several times during this decade. In 1971 the Riksdag became unicameral. In 1974 the monarch lost all constitutional rights.
The 1970s and '80s saw a rise in environmentalism - the ambiguous result of a referendum in 1980 advised government to phase out Swedish nuclear power by the year of 2010. The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 caused considerable radioactive fallout over Sweden. With only the Barsebäck nuclear power plant permanently closed, and ten out of twelve reactors still running (as of 2007), no one regards this schedule as realistic, and in the 2006 elections the liberal (fp) and the (m) party supported not only reversing the decision but building a few fresh nuclear plants. The Green Party was founded in 1981, entered the Riksdag in 1988 and supported Göran Persson's Social Democratic government from 1998 to 2006.
The 1976 parliamentary elections brought a liberal/right-wing coalition to power after almost half a century of social democrat leadership, and Mr Palme gave way to Thorbjörn Fälldin (of the Centre Party, a former farmers/landowners party which had incorporated social liberal ideas as well as the burgeoning environmental debate). Over the next six years, four governments ruled and fell, composed by all or some of the parties that had won in 1976, and the questions of energy and of battling the economic recession came to the fore like never before. The fourth liberal government in these years, again with Fälldin at the helm, seemed somewhat baffled by these problems and had neither the support of a firm majority in the parliament, nor a clear mandate from the non-socialist part of the Swedish electorate. Predictably, it came under fire both from the Social democrat/unions side and from the (m) party, now heading in an increasingly Friedman-inspired and market liberal direction, and it was defeated in the elections of 1982, with Mr. Palme returning to the PM's seat.
During the 1980s there were several incidents of foreign, probably Soviet, submarines violating the Swedish territorial borders. In late 1981 the Soviet submarine U 137 ran ashore inside a restricted zone off the Karlskrona naval base, and became headline news. Though the particular fact was kept secret at the time, nuclear activity, probably from missile warheads was detected on board and reported to PM Fälldin while the vessel was still stuck in the firth. The incident marked a turning-point both in Soviet-Swedish relations and in the discussion in Sweden about defence, the Soviet Union and ultimately the place of Sweden in the arena of the Cold War (see article on Baltic submarine intrusions and submarine hunting in the 1980s.
On February 28, 1986, Prime Minister Olof Palme was murdered as he was walking the streets of Stockholm with his wife. The crime came as an awful shock to most Swedes and is sometimes referred to as a national trauma - an event by which Sweden "lost her innocence”, especially since the assassin remains unidentified to this day (though some would regard the murder as "solved from a police point of view"; the main suspect Christer Pettersson was sentenced but later acquitted). Palme was replaced by his deputy Ingvar Carlsson.
Cultural influence from the United Kingdom and the United States has been obvious since the war. Imported and indigenous subcultures rose, with the rockabilly-inspired raggare and anarchist progg cultures as notable examples. (Before the world wars, Swedish culture was more inspired by Germany). Swedish film and music achieved international fame with names like Ingmar Bergman, Sven Nykvist, Lasse Hallström, Birgit Nilsson, ABBA, Entombed, The Cardigans and Roxette. Currently, Sweden is the only non-English-speaking country in the world with a net export of music. Most Swedes are today proficient in English, a great deal of Swedish-produced popular music has originally English lyrics, and English language branding is very common.
The sexual revolution, together with sexual content in mass media (notably films 491 and I am curious (yellow), together with the broad entry of women in many lanes of professional life (including the priesthood) in the 1960s and 1970s provoked a moralist counter-movement including the Christian Democratic party, but this trend has had scant political success. While the label "Swedish sin" is no longer quite appropriate, the acceptance and lack of ingrained shame in the face of sexuality is still a striking facet of Swedish attitudes.
Radio and television early became widespread in Sweden, but government struggled to keep the monopoly of licence-funded Sveriges television until the late 1980s, as satellite and cable TV became popular, and the commercial channel TV4 Sweden was permitted to broadcast terrestrially.
See also culture of Sweden.
Sweden has produced many world famous athletes during this period, among them boxer Ingemar Johansson, alpine skier Ingemar Stenmark, tennis players Björn Borg and Stefan Edberg, ice hockey players Börje Salming, Kent Nilsson, and football player Glenn Hysén. Sweden has hosted several high-profile sports events, for instance equestrian events of the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 1958 FIFA World Cup.