European Document/Neutrality on the Rocks

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 25...

...Granted, Sweden has had less to work with...

...This is followed by an inquiry into the management practices of striptease bars...

...e ex, too, has been domesticated and 1.3 defused here...

...The boxers incline against it, the football players in favor...

...Ninety-five percent of its people are Lutheran, if they are anything...

...Like their ancestors—and unlike most of their neighbors—the Swedes look forward, not back, as unencumbered by their past as they are content with their present and future...

...from the era of the Vikings to its years as a great power in the seventeenth century, its greatest accomplishments were foreign, rather than domestic...

...they share a common language (or two, including English) and an intensely bourgeois set of social habits...

...and so on...

...There is little in the streets of Stockholm or Uppsala to suggest popular ferment over these (or any other) issues: no leaflets or propagandists, little graffiti, no anti-Americanism in word or deed...

...Modern Sweden takes a charmingly casual attitude toward all this...

...Yet despite the politeness with which they were received, and the interest of the Swedish audience in Soviet reform, talk turned, near the end, toward—well, submarines...

...This influx, too, has its dark side, and literally so...

...It is a testament to Swedish neutrality that Raoul Wallenberg—one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, and surely the greatest from Sweden—should become a perennial political embarrassment here...

...Occasionally one does spy that most universal of Western eyesores, the poster demanding disinvestment from South Africa...

...but its small size reduces it to gestures that are largely symbolic (such as its recent suggestion that Olof Palme was assassinated by Swedish puppets of the CIA...

...Perhaps the mismatch between domestic and foreign politics reflects the market here: with so little room for agitation at home, aspiring ideologues may be forced outward...

...Sweden does, of course, have a pro-Moscow Communist party with representation in the Parliament...

...Its causes are the familiar ones: anti-antiCommunism (sometimes pro-Communism, as in the case of Vietnam...

...Social differences, according to a native journalist, are absent even from the language itself, which only has regional, rather than class-based, variations...

...Nonetheless, the prowling about of what may or may not be Soviet submarines in what may or may not be Swedish waters has injected an uncomfortable dose of insecurity into a country that prides itself on being free of such foreign corrosives...

...Johan, it turns out, once purchased one of these marvels...

...Its aspirations for the world, to judge by voting records at the United Nations, place it somewhere in the neighborhood of, say, El Salvador...

...The Swedes have, to all appearances, built themselves a civil and comfortable place in this most uncivil and inhuman of environments...

...less than half of Sweden's votes are coincident with those of the United States...

...They tell me I can't drive it in Sweden, because the engine's too big...

...For the most part, though, the sexual atmosphere in Stockholm resembles that of a gigantic venereal clinic...

...Unlike much of Europe, the Swedes have no ideological agenda for their dead...

...Nor are they much interested in politics, the chief excuse for our visit...

...I n its foreign policy, meanwhile, Sweden has become a kind of overgrown Bertold Brecht, a middle-class bohemian with a bad case of radical chic...

...alas, the authorities brought his happiness to an early close...

...Tonight we are leaving the cold for one of Stockholm's cheaper establishments, where Johan and Peter, Swedish truckdrivers with a taste for German beer, have offered to buy us a drink...

...Without its anti-Western figleaf, Sweden might lose whatever claim to consistency that its political neutrality now possesses...

...Many historical sites are open for only a few hours a day, while others remain closed altogether until the summer months when tourism is at its peak...

...The natives have, in the words of one guidebook, "long since grown bored" with the flesh markets of Stockholm, which now cater, for the most part, to foreign tourists...

...Or perhaps there survives, within this diminutive population of eight million, some atavistic urge toward shaping the destinies of others...

...The bright pastels and stark lines of Swedish modernism may not travel well, but they look positively magical here against the pale landscape and dull winter sky...

...Perhaps mighty Finland will someday emerge as the culprit...

...As General Chevrov, head of the Red Army's office of "disarmament questions," put it to Moderate party leader Karl Bildt, "If you think there are Soviet subs in your waters, well—blow them up...

...one even learns that the administration under Olof Palme was enlarged to include a Liberty Department...

...the latter is marginally more disposed toward economic freedom, and marginally more suspicious of the Soviets, than the former...

...a half-liter in this imitation-English pub runs to 38 kronor, or $6.50 a glass...

...In Gamla Uppsala, an ancient site of pagan worship and sacrifice, we visit one of the Vikings' few domestic remains: their burial mounds...

...Sweden's success in neutralizing the volatile and effervescent has been made possible by a homogeneity that borders on the claustrophobic...

...It is not that Sweden lacks for debate...

...At the margins, such insularity would appear to be under strain...

...a Swede of Jewish descent tells of having been subjected to a new catcall meaning "blackhead," or brunette, intended for the non-Swedish population...

...The Soviets, of course, have a time-tested solution to the Swedes' problem...

...Prosperous Sweden faces a shortage of manual labor, a vacuum now being filled by an unaccustomed number of immigrants and guestworkers from parts south...

...They might conclude from such an explanation that the wealth of nations has little to do with demographic trends, or a vicious climate, or cultural impoverishment, or any of the other inhuman variables that Swedish foreign policy now deplores...

...or how an impoverished nation—some of whose people lived in holes in the ground in the beginning of this century—transformed itself into one of the most prosperous states on earth...

...But neglecting the meaning of Wallenberg is only one more distortion in a country that evenhandedly neglects its own...

...Cheap," of course, is a relative term in a country where Lutheran asceticism and social democracy conspire to keep the price of alcohol alarmingly high...

...Nevertheless, one high-ranking official complained during our visit that ritual inquiries into Wallenberg's fate are foreclosing all hopes for progress in Soviet-Swedish relations...

...Swedish welfarism, like Sweden itself, appears to be an affair of the middle class...

...In private conversation, of course, it is common to call the creatures "submarines...

...it can be found, for example, in the Stockholm city museum, whose modern section includes a sobering vignette of birth control devices and photos depicting sex education...

...Even the Norse sagas, those cornerstones of the recorded Scandinavian past, were largely codified and preserved elsewhere—in Iceland, by descendants of Celtic slaves whom the Norsemen left in their wake...

...Sweden's social tranquility is further confirmed by the nation's approach to its past...

...One official report cites thirty such incursions in the last half of 1987 alone...

...The irony ofits foreign policy is that Sweden does have a story to tell the world, though not the one its politicians choose to tell...

...A week after the conference, Sweden observed its annual remembrance of Raoul Wallenberg, the nativeson who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews and then disappeared into the Soviet Gulag forever...

...One percent of Sweden's national income goes to foreign aid, including aid to the Communists in Nicaragua and El Salvador...

...They could, if they wanted, explain how a warlike people on the fringes of European culture built an oasis of civilization in the icy dunes...

...The pursuit of outward expansion has left a minimum of historic glories at home...

...the sun scarcely gets over the horizon all day, and it disappears for good around three in the afternoon...

...It is just that the debate is civil, a disagreement over the arrangements of the day rather than a wholesale struggle over first principles...

...pro-transferring wealth to the antagonists and sometimes the enemies of the United States...

...On one show, our narrator interviews famous athletes on the pros and cons of sex during training...

...there are lively discussions afoot, for example, about trimming the welfare state, about present levels of taxation, about reforming the bureaucracy, and so on...

...At the moment, as if out of courtesy, official Sweden demurs...

...the doorways awash in dull red light...

...Still, it is not the cost that exercises Johan and Peter...

...Its chosen second tongue is that of the greatest Western power, and its military planning—according to a high-ranking official of the Swedish air force—anticipates advances from the East alone...

...No, it is the talk of American cars—especially old cars, those mythical beasts of the V-8 engine, the big back seat, the 120 miles, not kilometers, per hour...

...The government, too, reflects this trend...

...To be sure, the nation does not ignore its own assistance in the unrobing of the Western world...

...Meanwhile, there remains that touchy business of the submarines...

...Even the Swedish government has fallen into the habit, though it refuses to conjecture Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt is a fellow at the National Interest and a former member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff publicly about whose submarines they may be...

...Or perhaps it will be Norway, that self-confessed non-neutral neighbor...

...Nor is this position merely rhetorical...

...After all, by any other standard—history, culture, prosperity—Sweden lies squarely in the Western camp...

...There are no religious divisions to make a battleground of social policy here, and no ethnic or other minorities large enough to reward aspiring demagogues...

...Stockholm is nevertheless magnificent, a glittering tableau of icy waterways, immaculate streets, and stone palaces from across the centuries...

...Then there is the late-night, English-language television channel which sounds the way the Marquis de Sade might have if he had spent his life in the Brookings Institution...

...The two largest newspapersDagans Nyhet and Svenska Dagbladet—represent shades of difference that are barely discernible to American eyes...

...They might even add that prosperity is altogether prosaic, depending as it does on the efforts of individual men and women in a stable political setting...

...If the irony of that coincidence disturbed the Swedish weighing of glasnost it was scarcely apparent to the tourist...

...In the halls of the government itself, meanwhile, Wallenberg has become something of an annoyance—ironically, at a time when the Soviets themselves seem to be hinting that they will someday give a more honest account of the case...

...The Swedish government is having less luck with certain other mythical beasts these days, particularly those big gray ones that are rumored to be coursing through the country's neutral waters...

...They have done it through industry, acumen, and the uninterrupted pursuit of wealth—a pursuit made possible, incidentally, by the decidedly non-neutral character of most of their Western trading partners...

...Of course, one can't expect to hear these things, because Sweden is a neutral state...

...Uppsala —site of Sweden's major university—appears to be as calm and clean as a Swiss train station...

...In any event, the most immediate end served by Sweden's anti-Western posturing is of the crassly political sort...

...A s any Swede will tell you, the political spectrum here is much narrower than most foreigners would suppose...

...For the most part, though, such ugliness appears as an aberration in a society that is otherwise at peace...

...Over the past few years, an intellectual movement toward a more open economy, combined with the present torpor of the left, has served to moderate the political atmosphere still further...

...the average recipient would seem to have a job, a house or apartment, and a generous span of vacation time...

...There is no getting around it—not even for the Soviets who participated in a conference on glasnost and perestroika hosted by Dagens Nyheters...

...Now and then, in touring Stockholm, one sees glimmerings of a less sanitized world: the (English24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 language) flyers offering admission to private clubs...

...Meanwhile, watch where you swim...

...Their contingent was prestigious, including the editor of Pravda and an assortment of political and economic heavyweights...

...antinuclear weapons (Sweden is a nonnuclear state...

...Similarly, in the largest bookstores of Stockholm and in the neighboring university town of Uppsala, it is something of a feat to find information in English (Sweden's compulsory second language) on the most seminal moments of Swedish history—including such recent phenomena as the invention of state banking, the adoption of political neutrality in the early 1800s, and other foundations of the modern state...