The civil defence minister recently issued Swedes with the warning that “there could be war in Sweden”. The reactions were swift and loud: many people said they felt scared, others protested about the needlessly alarmist tone. The military commander-in-chief, who backed up the warning, was accused of being a warmonger. Deep down, most of us Swedes are still convinced that nothing bad can happen to us and that our neutrality, a synonym for our goodness, will protect us.
Sweden formally applied to join Nato in 2022 and has been stuck in the US-led alliance’s waiting room first by the political grandstanding of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and now by Viktor Orbán, who is holding up ratification as part of another poker game within the EU. But as Sweden prepares to abandon its cherished neutrality to join the alliance, it is time we stopped flattering ourselves and our history. We have never been a neutral country.
