Freenations

THE NEW EU SUPERSTATE - FROM A SWEDISH PERSPECTIVE

Mr Myrdal, who flew in from Sweden that morning, was introduced by Rodney Atkinson who referred to the fact that, uniquely, both his parents were Nobel prize winners. Mr Myrdal, a republican, social democrat and Swede has very decided views on the emergence of the European Union and his address gave a perspective from a 'small' country in which national sovereignty is cherished.

Jan Myrdal

Ladies and Gentlemen I'm going to talk mainly on three subjects - the first is on the role of the Nation - the tradition - the different traditions. Sweden and England are not the same, we are different but we have things in common. We are also, both of us, very different from Germany. Then I'll talk about the supra-national state and about the background of this German development.

For many people in Sweden The European Union is just about small nasty details - for instance, you know we love strawberries in Sweden and we have good strawberries, but if you look at the map you will see that Sweden is a long country running from north to south - our strawberries get better the further north you go. They also get smaller, they get small and very tasty because of the midnight sun - but these are illegal according to the EU standard because they are not big enough. So to be legal we have to eat large strawberries, Dutch or something, which don't taste nice.

These issues seem funny or strange, but there are others that are a bit more dangerous. In Sweden they managed to get the Parliament (the Members of Parliament didn't know what they were doing!) to pass a law which made all databases illegal. Bild - the chairman of the Swedish Conservative Party found out that his newsletter was illegal! So there is a big hullabaloo in Sweden just now - they have to change the law again. The funny thing is that they simply applied an EU directive, made it into Swedish Law and found out it was quite against our whole tradition.

That is rather serious, maybe you are going to discuss things more clearly before your Parliament makes these things into law - in Sweden there was no discussion, they just accepted it - unfortunately.

What is more serious though is that Sweden, as you might know, now and then is dragged into the European Court of Human Rights, and is found guilty of this or that transgression. Now this is very interesting because I think you know that Sweden is not a country where we torture people and even if there are campaigns on this or that (and I could talk at length on various campaigns) Sweden is not a country that transgresses against what we normally call human rights.

But, we have a different history compared to others, a different state structure, a different legal system. I would like to talk to you about these for a moment, because if you go to present day Sweden you will find that many things are decided against an historical framework that goes back a long way. Let me take a couple of examples so that you can understand what is so different from others - continental and maybe from yours.

We had the great fortune of winning the peasant wars of the 13th to 15th centuries. In continental Europe they did not win, you could say that the Swiss were in the same fortunate position and this of course changed the course of our history for very simple reasons. There was no serfdom, there were, of course, petty (poor) peasants - but the peasantry became an estate of the Realm, the 4th Estate, and had an influence that changed Swedish society. For instance during the long years when the Swedish and Danish Crowns fought over what is now south Sweden the peasants on both sides made what was called 'peasant peace'. They also signed 'Peasant Peace Accords' they were not taking part in this war - they left the struggle, that was not the usual thing in the rest of Europe, east or west. Even though they were very poor they had a certain freedom and a certain self-respect.

Other things that are considered national go far deeper than that, most Swedes are not conscious of being Swedish. You are born that way, you act that way, you live inside this framework and it's all very simple. There is no such thing as 'clans' in Sweden, you know, structures usually a man appearing and then going down generation after generation, because normally our family structure is agnatic and cognatic, it is bi-lateral. We are balanced between the maternal and paternal. This has large effects. There are no clan struggles, no vendetta can exist in such a society - I'm not saying it's ideal, I mean there are other problems - it also means in principle you find that any two Swedes are related, 'in the family' with this kind of structure it means that everybody becomes inter-related, they intermarry from all over Sweden and are related.

I was speaking at a big 'family' gathering just a couple of weeks ago - not in the English sense - my extended family on my maternal grandmother's grandfathers side. As I looked out at them, I noted that some are different colours, and that did not matter, because they all belong in this family structure. Why am I saying this - because we don't have anything approaching the German idea of 'blood'. According to the still valid German citizenship law you must be of German blood, which means that you might be from Kazakstan where your forebears lived during the time of Catherine the Great and you are still a German, where as you might be third generation born in Germany descendant from someone from Turkey or somewhere and you are still not German. This idea is totally foreign to us. (and of course to Britain - ed.)

Historical circumstances are important, you all know about English history and how it has shaped present day England. So take an example, speaking about the Germans, why are Germans disliked in Sweden? I mean they are, now and then you can read about it. Austrians are not, Swiss are not, Germans are more disliked in Sweden than they were in Denmark. The reason is buried in history it was Albrecht of Mecklenburg, who unfortunately became King of Sweden in 1364 and reigned until 1389. He did something which left it's mark on Sweden. He brought along German 'robber-barons'; they reigned by violence - the most horrible experience that the Swedish peasantry ever had. This also explains why in 1720, when Friedrich of Hessen Kassel married into the Swedish Royal House and became heir to the throne, the Swedish Peasant estate declared on 29th Feb 1720 that they would not accept him unless he promised not to bring in 'German Masters'. You see I am not talking about prejudices against other nations - but something that goes very deep - a prejudice against Masters from other places.

Being a nation is very important to us as you can see from these examples. Your examples are different; your national profile is different but all very valid. Some people from the government are trying to combat the Swedish resistance to this integration (of Europe) by saying that the very idea of a nation is reactionary - fascist or something - they have gone so far as to declare the Swedish flag reactionary. But in Sweden, we are a rural people with small cottages all over the country, you will see the Swedish flag flying everywhere. They can be communists, social democrats, liberals or conservatives they have the Swedish flag, it's very natural. If you say from the extremely neo-liberal point of view that this is ugly you get a very strange conflict in the country. Some headmasters, also liberal in this sense, in the south of Sweden, said that the pupils were not allowed to sing the national anthem. You might say that the national anthem is old fashioned but most Swedes strongly favour it - or at least they feel strongly in favour when they are forbidden to sing it because they are told it is chauvinistic.

Anything that will hurt us is extremely dangerous. In the 1930's when I was a child, my parents were in the Social Democratic Party and I met the leaders. There was a big discussion about taking back the Swedish flag from the Nazi groups who had tried to monopolise the flag. So from the '30s onward on the 1st of May parade it was always the Swedish flag and then the red Party flag. If you go to Norway you will see this even more clearly - the national flag is the flag of for people, and the people in Sweden, not like the Germans ... you know the German extreme right 'occupy' words like people, popular movement, for instance a word like 'volklig' you can't translate into German because that would be 'volklisch' which sounds Hitlerite. I want to underline this because there is a difference here, because this (flag) was not taken over by the Germans.

If I were to go to dinner with the King - I mean I go to dinner with other heads of state so of course I also go to dinner with my own king - even if I am, in principle in favour of a republic, I could go dressed in Uniform if I were an officer - I am not an officer, I could go in high dress if I was an academic - I am not an academic in that sense, and so I go in the national dress of my village which is quite acceptable. If I were to do that in Germany I would be branded as a fascist but in Sweden it is accepted, it is part of the 'roots'.

Sweden has a foreign policy that we have to be careful about. It is different from yours, it must be because your political situation is different, Ever since the 15th Century or even earlier - the 13th, we have been living in a situation where we have had a great power the east, in the south and in the west - the power in the west could change, it has changed during recent times, it was Holland, or England or the United States, on the Continent it could be Germany it could be France, on the east it was and is Russia. The object of every Swedish government was to try to save this rather small country in this situation.

For some time during the 17th and 18th centuries we played a large part in European politics. We were paid by Richelieu - we were pawns of Richelieu in his struggle against the German Empire. We didn't win much of it.. Fortunately for us after the horrible defeat during the Napoleonic Wars with Russia when the eastern part (remember Sweden and Norway did not exist, it was one unit with three languages) that was taken away. But we had the great fortune to have the cynical old revolutionary turned monarch, Gustave XIV as Monarch. He had tattooed 'Death to the Kings' on his arm, and changed the policy totally. He made friends with Russia and took Sweden out of European politics. In 1833/34 when you and Russia were close to war he made a declaration of neutrality which I think is still valid for us. Since then Sweden has not been heroic - not in any way heroic, leaning here or there according to the pressures.

We never entered the different wars and this was with tremendous support of the people. I don't have to go through 19th century history. I can just point out that we never declared ourselves neutral, we never had a neutrality like the Belgium before 1914 or the Austrian, or (currently) the Swiss or the Vatican. We were without alliances in order to be able to lean this way or that as required.

During the first world war the Germans thought that Sweden would go along (with them) because we had been leaning towards Germany after the Franco-German war. To a certain extent we did, but not quite (absolutely) - parts of the upper circle were pro-German, many of us were against. And then at the battle of the Marne in 1914 the Swedish truly saw that German victory was not self evident, and we changed to a more neutral stance.

The same thing more or less happened during the second world war. Here I must say some words because many of you would say that Sweden was weak. Yes we were weak but how and why? Well like any government, Swedish or any other government of German occupied countries, willingly going to war is of course wrong. A small country does not willingly go to war. We were saved in the Russo-Finish War in the winter of 1939/1940. The Swedish papers gave the impression that we were going to enter the war - we were not! Even the King was afraid - he preferred to wait for peace. Some of the Generals wanted to make a coup d' etat - but they had orders, when they were told not to make a coup d' etat they didn't make a coup d' etat. They obeyed orders, they were very good Generals.

The Prime Minister, a very good Social Democrat, I knew him, he used to ride around on a horse, he saw to it that we kept (our neutrality). Then came, of course, the occupation of Norway and Denmark, why was Sweden not occupied? You probably know that at that time Russia and Germany had a Land Treaty and Molotov had said he didn't want any states in the Baltic Sea so we managed to keep out.

You could say that in June 1940 it looked as if Hitler was going to win. Many of you will have, in your hearts, seen this possibility. Then came the Battle of Britain etc. and you proved that you would not make peace, good, but even so up to winter 1941 of course the Swedish Government and leading circles in Sweden discussed how Sweden was going to survive in Europe if Hitler were victorious. If they had not discussed this, internally mind you, they would have been mad.

But from the moment of the first turning of the war really, in 1941, when the Blitzkrieg in Russia halted, they could see that it was not self-evident that Hitler would win and they could slowly change their policies. I am saying this very clearly because to tell you that the survival of a small country is not as Americans think, morally high. It's just a question of survival. To survive as best that you can. (The same can be said of a large country that is weak or politically bankrupt - ed.)

Unfortunately this policy from Charles XIV on has not continued. The present Government has, for reasons that I think are very weak, given up. I mean the Germans called us at the end of the War 'egotistical swine in smoking jackets'.

Now on the one hand we are united with Germany and on the other hand we have forgotten that Russia is very very weak now but it has been very very weak many times during these last 700 years, and Russia will always reappear. Under which government neither you or I nor anybody in Russia knows. But Russia inside a couple of decades will be a major power again and if Germany, Greater Germany, has bases on the Baltic sea and can keep Russia in then we will have war just as we did in the 13th Century, just as in the 18th Century, it's quite natural.

The foreign policy of Sweden should be to try to tell the Baltic states - 'you should keep your independence but you should not be used as pawns in this game'.

The European Union is driving a policy around the Baltic as destructive as the one Germany is driving in the Balkans, in the former Yugoslavia. The Germans don't seem to see these long range difficulties, and the Americans often do not see them either. As Mao said of the Americans it is 'the difference of a country having a history of 200 years to one with a history of 2,000 years'.

In Sweden we don't have 2,000 years but we have 1,000 years and I think that is enough to make one careful.

Over now to the next question. What is happening in Europe now is the development of a supra-national entity. And you see I can go back to the Soviet Union. I was there in 1965 travelling in Soviet Central Asia and I wrote a book about it, which means that I was immediately branded a CIA agent and all my books disappeared from all the eastern countries, because what I point out was that you had this racification but the fake national anthem. The only policy could have been false but oppressive but at least it explained that there was a Turkmen nation, an Uzbek nation, etc. etc. Now they had begun speaking of something strange called the Soviet National anthem, the Soviet nation.

That was an expression of the fact that you have got a nomenclature on top. What was this nomenclature? It spoke Russian as a lingua franca mainly, but the members of it could be Turkmen's, Estonians, Georgians, mainly Russians but also others. Now decision were made by this nomenclature in Moscow.

Travelling in the Soviet Union I talked to the peasantry and they point out that too much water had been taken away from this canyon, so there was no water left for irrigation. I wrote about that too - the reason was, they told me, that all the decisions were taken centrally in Moscow. Not even on a republic level much less on a regional level where they could know what happened to the water. We all know what happened because of these decisions because of the horrible catastrophe. That is that their supra-national centralised decisions are inherently dangerous. But they are not only dangerous in the economic sense.

This supra-national European Identity that we are now getting with these top-level Eurocrats, and I don't need to name them, you all know them. They are organising themselves tremendous private profits! You know the nomenclature and the Eurocrates both rise above the normal law. Even the Euro-parliamentarians have just voted themselves pay that is higher than the Swedish Prime Minister, and taxes less than anybody, that is 10%! And they have voted themselves travel allowances that they don't have to account for. This seems to me very nomenclature and very much against what we all are used to in normal democracies.

There are two dangers here - one is centralisation, you take away decision making whether about databases or strawberries, from the ground, and make them central and the second is that you put this thick layer on top of everything. Of course they are useless, you know when you get a soup that is cooling off you get this fat layer on top that you can just take away - they are not useful. But underneath things are happening. What was happening in the Soviet Union at that time was the growth not only of a political opposition but the transforming of the political opposition into a chauvinistic rage.

You see that people beginning to slit each other's throats, you see the same thing in Yugoslavia, and in the long run I, of course, see the same thing happening in Europe. A fake Union. I am not talking about co-operation, I mean co-operation is something else, but this fake unity is making for a Yugoslav situation throughout Europe.

This brings me to the third stage of my speech. I am 71, I remember the war very well, I came back to Sweden with my parents from the United States in 1940. We went to the north of Iceland to Petsamo, we were running with war material for Finland at that time. But I remember a different aspect of the war than you. I remember the real Nazis. You of course, did not see the real Nazis in Great Britain at that time, you didn't meet them. You could listen to Lord Haw Haw on the radio, but I met them, I saw them, both the Germans and through my parents I got to know the people who were leading the different organisations. And you know the dangerous and horrible thing about the Nazis was that they were not the Nazis that you see in Hollywood films. Those Nazis existed, I mean Auschwitz existed, all this existed, we know it. We also knew it at that time. And there were some fringe groups, The Swedish National Socialist Party going around with boots and shouting but they were uninteresting.

The real Nazis were quite quite different. If you look at their propaganda, you can take the Illustrierte Zeitung, their Christmas editions during the war - we got beautiful papers about European culture and about culture, extremely beautiful - I still have them because there were good articles about Romanesque sculpture which interests me. But you should also, if you go to a library on the continent, you might even have it here, you should demand to see 'Signal'.

Signal was a German propaganda magazine specially to be spread abroad, printed all over Europe in different editions, and you should read that. I mean there was war reporting, but mainly the ideological line of it. Take for instance the 'European Unity' number 11 1944. Europe - this or that. Either the Europe that was to be founded by Germany and it's allies or the others. And that is an issue where they say how you win over the horrible leaders of this Europe split into small nation states. Now during the war the new Europe is appearing, the united Europe that is growing out of the common European roots. And even more - I can take a book that I have in my library, which I got at that time - 'For what are the workers of Europe fighting?' - that talked about how in this new Europe, Finland, Germany, Romania, Belgium and Italy and other countries of United Europe, from their struggle a new civilisation was being born.

'Both in the Bolshevik and American system the individual has no value, the individual means nothing in their mass systems, and here is the old cultured Europe co-operating to build a world where life is worth living even for those who do the manual labour.'

I am quoting here 'The human rights or the human dignity we demand back they say in an old workers song - the workers, in Germany and in large parts of other European countries, have got their human dignity back, that is why they fight as they do, they don't want to lose this human dignity.' I am quoting this because you must see that Nazis did not sound the way that they do in American films. This is the way they talked. You could say that they did not win. I mean they did not win the Swedish so called grey Social Democratic workers with this, but anyway it was propaganda. But the propaganda was not just on that level..

Take another example, I was looking through my collection of 'Dags Posten', Dags Posten was the pro-Nazi culture daily on a higher level, you know, for the educated. Friday 5th March 1943 had a spread on page 5 'municipal self-government is strong in Germany', an interesting lecture in the Swedish German Society by Reichsleiter Feiler, and Reichsleiter Feiler was an Oberburgemeister in Munich and he was speaking of the German municipal system. And he was looking back that the self regulated municipalities are the cornerstone etc etc......and the citizens can influence it, you know the whole thing sounded very beautiful. You know, of course, another truth about Germany at that time, but this is also correct, this is the way they organised it - the only thing is that there were no elections. On the one hand these municipal bodies needed no sanction from above and to their service they had advisory bodies, so-called 'Ratsherren' to guarantee popular municipal things and after this was a supper and dance - see this is subsidiarity. I mean that the whole subsidiarity in concept. Of course you let them handle their affairs with certain advice. This is what they were talking about.

Honestly I have advised my friends in the Swedish Anti-EU Movement to really study what they were saying at that time. Not those who wrote in Der Sturmer, they existed but they were not of great importance. But to study exactly what the ruling Nazis were saying in their writings. Even Quisling, if you go to him - 17th May 1943 when he was talking about the necessity of a European Federation to develop this unity that the world has forced on us - it should develop further to a regular and free union of European nations with a Germanic bloc as the middle - a great continental league that maybe at a later stage can also take in the different peoples of Russia.

And this is the deeper meaning. They should be European countries, self determining European countries. And what did Dags Postern say at the National European League in Sweden in 1942? They were the pro-German Nazi Party, not a Nazi Party (I say this again) with whips and things like that but cultivated pro-German Party. Developing the idea that a necessary Swedish and Nordic goal is the work to have political, economic and cultural unity between the states of Europe founded on egality between the nations.

You see this is the rhetoric of that time and it is the same rhetoric as we hear today. I am not saying that in order to paint the swastika on Europe today but to show that there is a certain continuity and to look at this continuity.

You can of course go back to how Germany was founded. Unfortunately Germany (and Sweden played a part in this) was not allowed to develop as a national state as France, as Sweden or even as Russia was. We smashed it. We took part in the Richelieu policy of smashing it. So you got this delayed national development. In the 1848 revolution there was a possibility of a sort of normal democratic development. Instead we got the Bismarckian development and the Bismarckian steamroller going over the small German states rolling them into unity. A Wilhelminian unity. It was also very strong due to the heavy industry etc. But you must remember that there is a difference between the national states - French, your national state and the German. There was an unresolved conflict built into this Germany which also lead them to these extremely strange ideas of irredenta - all the German speakers of German blood the world over to be collected into this which we don't have with the Swedish speakers and which we shouldn't have.

And this was a driving force, you know, before the first world war the Balkan the Drang nach Osten and the many other conflicts leading up to the first world war. I would not accept that Germany was solely responsible for the first world war, that should be up for discussion. But this was the driving force. In Wilhelmine Germany, by the way, they had great freedoms, rather large liberties for many people. But out of this something was growing, and two things happened during the war in Germany. One was that German industry was organised, you must remember that the way the Soviet Union organised their industry under Lenin - that was the lesson of German industrial planning from the first world war.

Fortunately for us they were not able, during the Hitlerite period, to use their own plans, you had more war production than they had but that was another thing. The second thing that happened was a book by Fredreich Naumann called 'Mittel Europa'. He was the one who formulated the clear idea of a united Europe with Germany as the centre. He was no Nazi, he was what we call Christian Socialist, an ideologist, and he said it is a mechanical thing - we should break the economic chains keeping us apart and come together.

Germany ought to be leading it and the German language should be the common lingua franca, but we Germans must in many ways change our policies. The German must learn to handle the nationality questions better. He criticised the policy in Alsace Lorraine and Northern Schleswig and he was for subsidiarity - you must leave cultural freedom.

But of course Germany lost the first world war, but these ideas were Naumann's blueprint, I wonder if the book was ever published in England? I don't think so - it was published in Sweden and Finland, maybe you can find it somewhere, you should read it.

That continued between the wars, before Hitler in the same way as the German rearmament began, illegally, during the Weimar period. They also continued these plans. It continued during the Hitler period, not that Hitler had a real plan for Germany. Hitler was in many ways a strange politician, he didn't have very many plans, but the long term German plans for Europe have persisted to this day and are evident in the European Union.

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