‘Time of Turmoil’: Sweden, Undeclared Emergencies, and the Experience of Crisis and Transformation in and around the First World War

During the First World War, Sweden faced a fundamental crisis, indeed a series of crises threatening the country’s external security and societal stability. At the turn of the century, the Swedish polity belonged to one of the most distinctly conservative, traditionalist political systems in Europe, revolving around a monarch barely contained by a constitution and a government somewhat derived from parliament. At the end of the war, this polity had transformed into a politically and culturally democratised monarchy, in which universal suffrage had been adopted, and parliament had successfully established itself as the central constitutional force. Not only in international politics but also in the domestic arena, Sweden after 1918 appeared very much like a “neutral victor”.

The article relates this transformative process of reform to the adaptability of Swedish political culture and the country’s institutional apparatus. Instead of concentrating power in the government through the formal establishment of a state of exception, the latter was effectively practised in all but name. This was possible because of two peculiarities of Swedish politics and society: firstly, a minimal political consensus, occasionally stretched to the limit, between the ideologically antagonistic forces of the political landscape. Secondly, the neutralisation of delicate questions by outsourcing them from the immediate political arena to government or parliamentary committees and to an ever-growing administrative system. The article contends that Swedish responses to the challenges and crises of the First World War are to be seen as precursors of an administratively based, effectively ‘supra-legal’ state of exception, or in other words: governance by consensus and committee.