Sweden long rejected militarism, even offering government funding to peace movements. Yet since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the political mood has changed abruptly, with a witch hunt launched against activists who oppose the country’s embrace of NATO.
At the Museum of Work in Norrköping, a hundred miles south of Stockholm, an exhibition on Swedish cartoonists’ protest against NATO offers a satirical take on the one-sided debate that greeted Sweden’s rapid accession to the military alliance.
The NATO-critical exhibition occupies an entire museum floor, where large windows overlook the dramatic falls of Motala Stream. This river system links the city to Sweden’s second-largest lake, Vättern. Conversely, Sweden’s official entrance into NATO on March 7, 2024, leads nowhere — except toward surging militarization and a political narrative dominated by Cold War assumptions.
The exhibition’s illustrations, produced by some of Sweden’s most famous artists and cartoonists, signal antiwar messages, calls for neutrality, and longing for the return of Sweden’s official nonalignment policy — which had been Sweden’s official foreign policy line since the 1800s. They point to a sudden U-turn in Sweden’s political attitude toward defense measures and to the importing of simplistic analyses of conflicts where NATO has already chosen its allies.
Maria, a sociology professor at a prominent Swedish university, has traveled a long way to catch the exhibition. She describes the visit as a kind of pilgrimage to come to terms with Sweden’s entrance into NATO. Maria — not her real name — sighs: “The whole process was absurd; it lacked any kind of democratic basis. For her, “the way Sweden entered NATO might as well have happened in a dictatorship,…
Auteur: Klas Lundström
