Mighty. Glorious. Useless

In my previous post, I wrote about the crass ineptitude of leaders – in this case military leaders – who sent nearly quarter of a million young men to their deaths in the Gallipoli campaign. That figure, incidentally, only covers the men over whom they had authority. There were nearly 50,000 French casualties too. Meanwhile, the casualties on the Turkish side, for which the men who launched the landings were indirectly responsible, were even higher.

Since writing that post, I’ve been on a trip in the course of which I found myself with a couple of hours to spare in Stockholm. I took the opportunity to visit a museum dedicated by the Swedes to another monument to incompetence.

This is the Vasa museum. The Vasa was a magnificent, heavily armed battleship launched by the Swedish navy in 1628. Note that I wrote ‘magnificent’ but not ‘state-of-the-art’. The museum exhibit frequently repeats and heavily stresses the words ‘the power and the glory’. This ship was designed to express power and glory, specifically of the Swedish king of the time, Gustavus Adolphus.

I have a strange personal relationship to that monarch. When I was about ten, my history teacher spent some time teaching my class about the Thirty Years’ War. At the end, he held a kind of impromptu, verbal test in which he ran through the story again and would interrupt the narration every now and then to ask the class a question. You know, things like ‘who led the Austrian forces at that battle?’ or ‘which King issued that decree?’ Eager to please, I kept leaping in with the answer ‘Gustavus Adolphus’ and was wrong every time. It may have been that I just liked the name. Eventually, the teacher asked a question which he actually addressed, by name, to me.

‘Louis the thirteenth,’ I said.

He flung up his hands in despair.

‘No,’ he cried, ‘Gustavus Adolphus.’

Sweden’s policy of strict neutrality in foreign wars now has a three-century pedigree and has served the country well, judging by its prosperity. A lesson more warlike nations would do well to remember. Glory may be glorious but it puts no bread in anyone’s basket.

Back then, though, like Britain or the United States today, Sweden still hadn’t learned that lesson. Gustavus Adolphus wanted other nations, notably (just then) the contemptible Poles, under (horror of horrors) a Catholic King who (to make this worse) was also his cousin. His shiny new ship was just what he needed. It would dominate the Baltic and have that ghastly cousin Sigismund III of Poland-Lithuania quaking in his boots.

Looking down the length of the Vasa

To make the point all the more clearly, it had a particular magnificent sterncastle. That’s the bit at the back. Stepped decks, soaring upwards, full of splendour, adorned with statues carved from wood and brightly painted, the structure could also be used as a fighting platform for riflemen in close combat. Along with the ship’s main armament of 48 cannon, it must have given the ship a daunting presence.

Sadly, it also had bit of a minor drawback. Perhaps, as the event would prove, not that minor. The height of the sterncastle made the ship just a tad unstable.

Just a bit more than a tad, to be strictly truthful. Indeed, after its splendid launch, setting out to show the Poles and any friends they might have a thing or two, it managed to get just 1.4 kilometres down the channel towards the Baltic. There, in the words of the exhibition documentation, it ran into trouble when it first met a wind stronger than a slight breeze.

Not to sugarcoat it too much, it turned over. And promptly sank.

A fair bit of power. Lots of glory. But absolutely no use to anyone.

Ornate and elaborate:
nothing stern about the Vasa's stern

Well, that’s not quite true. It lay at the bottom of the harbour for nearly three and a half centuries, at which point the Swedes brought it back up to the surface and set about restoration work. The waters and silt at the bottom had clearly been kind to the ship, because – again according to the museum – 95% of the structure of the ship now on display is original.

There it stands ready to impress anyone with an hour or so to spare. Tall, graceful, a fine monument to power and glory. And a fair measure of futility.

Impress and amuse, perhaps, would be more accurate.

Ethnic oppression: it doesn't have to be like that

It’s a pity that, as Hegel pointed out, the only thing we learn from history is that no one learns anything from history.

If we did, there’d be an invaluable lesson some 75 years old to be learned from Denmark. A lesson that badly needs to be learned again today. A lesson that would save a lot of people, particularly Muslims, a lot of pain, and a lot of other people, especially non-Muslims, a lot of shame.

Denmark was occupied by Nazi German forces in 1940. But the occupation began to fall apart long before the Second World War ended. As Hannah Arendt explains in Eichmann in Berlin, ‘when the Germans approached [the Danes] rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge [to be worn by all Jews, as in other Nazi controlled areas], they were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it…’.

The Danes hadn’t been especially kind to foreign Jews, many of them German, who sought refuge in their country. As elsewhere, the refugees weren’t granted work permits; they were tolerated but not necessarily helped. But when Nazi Germany began to ask for the German Jews to be deported to the Reich, the response was extraordinary. The Nazis had declared those Jews stateless, so ‘the Danes… explained to the German officials that because the stateless refugees were no longer German citizens, the Germans could not claim them without Danish assent. This was one of the few cases in which statelessness turned out to be an asset, although it was of course not the statelessness per se that saved the Jews but, on the contrary, the fact that the Danish government had decided to protect them’.

What was particularly strange was what happened in 1943. This was when the Nazis decided that the time had come to clear Denmark entirely of Jews, as they were attempting to clear country after county in their power. ‘What [Himmler, chief of the SS] did not reckon with was that – quite apart from Danish resistance – the German officials who had been living in the country for years were no longer the same’.

It was as though the spirit of resistance had rubbed off on the occupiers. ‘Not only did General von Hannecken, the military commander, refuse to put troops at the disposal of the Reich plenipotentiary, Dr Werner Best; the special S.S. units (Einsatzkommandos) employed in Denmark very frequently objected to “the measures they were ordered to carry out by the central agencies” – according to Best’s testimony at Nuremberg [the war crime trials after the fighting ended].’

Even Best became deeply unreliable, from the Nazi point of view. When police arrived from Germany to start rounding up the Jews for deportation, ‘Best told them that they were not permitted to break into apartments, because the Danish police might then interfere… Hence they could seize only those Jews who voluntarily opened their doors. They found exactly 477 people, out of a total of more than 7,800, at home and willing to let them in.”

Even these Jews were transferred to Theresienstadt, the concentration camp for privileged Jews where they received better treatment than most because the Danish government kept making a ‘fuss’ about them. Many of these Jews were elderly, so the fact that 48 of them died is probably not a particularly high proportion.

The fatal date for deportation was 1 October, but a few days earlier, the leaders of the Jewish community were told of the whole plan, probably on Best’s own orders. The community went into hiding, ‘which was very easy in Denmark, because… “all sections of the Danish people, from the King down to simple citizens,” stood ready to receive them.’

Danish Jews being taken to safety in Sweden

Sweden too, just 15 miles away, was prepared to take in the Jews and offer them asylum, ‘and this was done with the help of the Danish fishing fleet. The cost of transportation for people without means – about a hundred dollars per person – was paid largely by wealthy Danish citizens…’ About 50% of the costs were paid by the Jewish community, the other 50% out of contributions from non-Jews.

About half the Jewish population got safely to Sweden. The other half remained in hiding in Denmark and survived the war. Some 99% of Danish Jews made it.

What the Danes showed was an extraordinary – literally, it was strikingly out of the ordinary – willingness to resist injustice. By doing so, peacefully and without violence, they seem to have undermined the will even of some of their oppressors. What might have happened if Hitler hadn’t had his forces tied up fighting his losing war is hard to say: he might well have crushed the resistance. Even so, what matters is that the Danish government and people worked together to resist a terrible evil and, helped by circumstances, they succeeded.

Others outside Denmark also resisted. Bulgaria, for example, or many in France and Italy. But elsewhere the Nazis often found willing or even enthusiastic accomplices.

I wish  the same spirit of resistance was flourishing in Britain today, where Islamophobia seems to be still growing, and parties even feel the need to compromise with it, for electoral reasons. I wish we could find it in France where harsh Islamophobic laws have been adopted. I wish we could find it in some of Europe’s new ‘democracies’ in the centre and east of the continent, where brutally anti-immigrant forces seem to be in control, notably in Hungary. I wish it was burning as strongly even in Denmark and Sweden were xenophobic parties wield far more influence than is healthy.

Whenever we hear someone denouncing immigrants, such as refugees from Libya or Syria or other Middle Eastern and African countries, let’s remember the case of Denmark in World War 2. Let’s remember how shameful the collaborators in many countries seem today. Let’s recall how admirable the resisting Danes.

Then maybe we’ll find the will to resist the xenophobes of our times and stand, as the Danes then did, shoulder to shoulder with the vulnerable and the persecuted.

Still, if we did that, we’d be in danger of learning a lesson from history.

Don't do as the Swedes do

When in Rome, I'm frequently told, do as the Romans do.

I've never fully understood why. I mean, I don't change character just because I change city. I actually like letting cars out of side turnings and not trying to overtake them on the inside in narrow city streets. As with quite a lot of received wisdom, the notion that we should do as the Romans do just leaves me asking, "why?"

This turns into something even stronger if someone tells me that when in Sweden, I should do as the Swedes do.

Especially when if the thing they want me to do is to sit in a sauna and then rush out and plunge into a frozen lake. That word "why?" suddenly strikes me as even more apposite than usual. Though even more than "why", other words spring to mind such as "masochism" and "downright insanity".

Hellasgården. Attractive enough.
Viewed from a distance. Not as a good place for a swim

I mean, don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against a sauna. I quite like the heat, the sense of pores opening and all sorts of stresses flowing out. The heat I'm fine with. It's the freezing cold of the water with the ice floating on it that sends shivers up my spine. Metaphorically and literally, though in my case mostly metaphorically, since I go a long way out of my way, as a general rule, not to get into a position where it could happen literally.

That policy, wise and prudent in my view, was challenged this week. At a meeting with three colleagues in Stockholm, one of them came up with the bright idea of using a free moment between a meeting and dinner, to sample the delights (I use the word "delights" here in a loose sense, you understand) of the Hellasgården sauna and lake outside the city.

I didn't respond at first. It was perfectly obvious that the idea was so manifestly barmy that one or both of the other two would quickly put paid to it.

Talk about being hoist on my own petard.

Having failed to express my polite refusal of the lunacy, I found myself cornered by the oddly enthusiastic acceptance of the suggestion by the other two colleagues. I made my point of view clear but was merely declared officially "chicken" for my pains. I suppose that if insanity is equated with courage, that makes some sense. In any case, I was painted into a corner and saw little choice: three of us were in favour of the sauna and icy dip; I could hardly hold out alone against such a majority.

Well, the sauna was fine. The kind of deep warmth that goes through to the bones. A fine cleansing experience.

Then we stepped outside. There was a knife-edged wind off the lake which would have made sweaters and fleece-lined jackets appropriate, and swimming costumes little short of unbelievable, but I barely noticed it. All my senses would take in was the thin strip of liquid water at the shoreline, beyond which there was ice. A coating to the water which was an attractive sight but an unappealing prospect.

We were getting into that? Really?

Well, my colleagues did. Right up to their shoulder. Right up to the top their heads even, for two of them. I went in to just above my knees, and not for long at that. I admired their courage. They mocked my timidity. I was perfectly happy to admire others, and their mockery meant nothing compared to the relief of getting out of that (barely) molten ice.

In any case, one of the advantages of reaching my advanced age, is that I no longer feel any need to prove anything to anyone. Not even to my colleagues. And least of all to myself.

Good humour and relations were quickly re-established in the evening, which was spent in a traditional Swedish restaurant, all wood panelling and mouldings with curious and intriguing paintings scattered around. Again, I avoided the truly traditional dishes - such as reindeer - though my colleague from Oslo went for it. Once more, I saw no reason to do as the Swedes might do, especially as the duck dish looked excellent - and was delicious when I got to eat it.

Now that was the way I wanted to spend my time in Sweden. Not as a Swede. But as myself, enjoying some of the best that Sweden offers.

When in Rome, do as you feel. As long as you avoid offending anyone, you'll be fine. And you can avoid frostbite too.

Postscript. The Stockholm city hall has a glorious room where the Nobel Prize banquet, attended by 1400 people, is held. It's called the Blue Room. Which is curious when you visit it since there's nothing blue about it. It turns out that this is down to the fact that the architect changed his mind about painting it blue but by that time the name had been adopted and it stuck. 

The Blue Room. Glorious. Just not blue.

This is splendidly English. In Oxford, there are two streets, known as North Parade and South Parade respectively. Paradoxically, though perhaps unsurprisingly for England, South Parade is to the north of North Parade. There's a lovely explanation of this based on where the opposing sides paraded their troops during the siege of Oxford in the Civil War, but it seems highly unlikely to be true. The real explanation is uncertain and much duller, so I'm not going to repeat it here. 

But it does feel like the same kind of phenomenon as the naming of the Blue Room in Stockholm. I can't help thnking that the Swedes have shown a wonderfully English way of doing things. 

So, when in Sweden, I feel entirely justified in doing as the English do.

Celebrating the first anniversary of Britain's latest foot-shooting incident

It was fun being in Sweden at the beginning of this week. Friday was going to be a big day there: the midsummer celebration when everyone eats, drinks and makes merry. Those with the energy, the legs and the sense of rhythm will even go dancing around something like a maypole. An entertaining tradition.

Swedish midsummer dance. They have something to celebrate

In Britain, the same Friday represented something completely different. It’s the first anniversary of the latest occasion when Brits indulged their enthusiasm for another, equally longstanding but far less entertaining tradition: shooting themselves in the foot. That’s as in going all intransigent over the American colonies and losing them, deciding that the best thing to do with soldiers in world War One was charge them at machine guns (OK, I know we weren’t alone in indulging that particular folly) or, more recently, invading Iraq. There are plenty more examples.

The anniversary we’re celebrating today is for the decision that people like the Swedes are just too foreign for us and the best thing we could do is separate from them, by leaving the European Union. It’s becoming clear each passing day how bad that decision was. Many passing days, though: one of the great delusions of the debate over Brexit was the shortsighted view of the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, that even to vote to leave the EU would precipitate disaster.

It was always difficult with Cameron to know whether he was primarily clueless or mostly lazy. Personally, I’ve always wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and regard him as indolent, but I don’t disrespect the view of others who, less generously, see him as plain incompetent. He has, incidentally, had a worthy successor: I can’t quite work out whether Theresa May is completely out of her depth, or just completely out of touch with humanity.

The Cameron line that merely to vote for Brexit would be catastrophic was always nonsense. It was a shortcut to avoid having to explain the more complex truth of what Brexit would mean and, like so many shortcuts, it took us to the wrong place. The reality is that, like most economic phenomena, the effects of Brexit will take a long time to work their way through the system.

The quickest was the loss in value of the pound. At the time earnest Brexiters assured me that this would have no impact on inflation, since retailers would absorb the increase in prices. Sadly, inflation has gone ticking upwards, month by month, gradually but inexorably.

There was a lot of talk of how the EU needed Britain more than Britain needed the EU, and we would therefore have the whiphand in negotiations. But now that negotiations have finally started, itr’s Britain that’s making concessions.

The first concerned the principle that all matters would be negotiated as a package, so that, say, payments to the EU would be agreed at the same time as a trade deal for Britain. Now the sums to be paid will be discussed first and separately.

The second concession was on the fate of EU citizens resident in Britain. Theresa May is proposing that anyone who has lived here for five years will be granted the right to remain.

Don’t get me wrong. I welcome any move towards guaranteeing EU citizens’ rights. Indeed, I agree with the EU that Britain must go further. In the end, Britain will make further concessions because, contrary to Brexiter illusion, we are not in the driving seat.

That will disappoint the large numbers of Brexiters whose real motivation was that they simply didn’t like foreigners. They wanted to reduce immigration.

That’s a growing problem. The numbers of Central and Eastern European seasonal workers who come to pick British fruit and vegetables are seriously down. Some of our crops will rot in the fields. Why aren’t they coming? Britain is increasingly perceived as xenophobic, even racist. And indeed racist rhetoric was inflamed by the Brexit vote and, with terrorism adding fuel to the fire, hate crimes are on the rise. Besides, the falling pound makes it less interesting financially to work here.

Now this is how I expected Brexit to go. Not an explosion of disaster but a slow decline as departure from the trading bloc on our doorstep starts to strangle our economy. The knot is slowly tightening, and we haven’t even left the EU yet.

The Danish Finance Minister, Kristian Jensen, got it right. There are small nations, like Denmark, that know they’re small. And then there are small nations that haven’t realised yet. Too many Brits think the country is still a global player.

They’re in for an unpleasant shock. They think the US will come to our rescue? Hey, the US needs rescuing itself, with a President who makes foreign policy pronouncements only to see them contradicted by his own State Department.

They think Brexit will give them control back? It will give control over their lives back to the kind of government – Cameron’s – that got us into this mess and the kind – May’s – that seems intent on making it worse.

They think that left to our own devices we can attain a new prosperity? As Emmanuel Macron pointed out, it was Britain that was most intent on pursuing a brutal model of “liberal” economics. That means de-regulation for the super-wealthy, and erosion of wages for everyone else. Just what Brexit will deliver, continuing the seven years of Tory rule we’ve already had.

No, Britain isn’t destined to become a lion renewed, roaring on the world stage. Instead it’s chosen to be a classic third-world economy: a low-tax, low-pay, low-service marginalised economy. Self-shot in the foot, we stumble into the destiny to which May is leading us.

Ah, well. I’ll raise a glass tonight to my friends in Sweden. At least they’ll be having a good time, with something cheerful to celebrate.

The noir in the next field's darker

Nurtured as we have been for some years on the TV genre known as ‘Nordic Noir’, no Englishman could be blamed for feeling a slight tingle at the idea of visiting one of the Nordic countries. Dangerous places, it would appear. Why, there’s even an apparently pleasant little market town called Ystad down in the south of Sweden where for a long time there was a new serial killer at work every week for a great deal of the year.

You understand that I’m not talking about a mere murder a week. No, I mean a series of murders a week.

Fortunately, they were blessed with a local police detective of almost superhuman ability, Kurt Wallander, who week after week identified the perpetrator and arrested him, often in spectacular fashion. Oddly, for a small seaside town, there always seemed to be a camera crew standing by to record the event. Not that I’m complaining: how would we have been able to enjoy it if they hadn’t been there?

One of the obstacles to Wallander’s success was, as so often in TV views of police work, his own hierarchy which never seemed to believe in him. Of course, I sympathised with him, but I have to admit that I can’t help wondering whether his superiors didn’t have a bit of a case: after all, just how useful is it to solve this week’s serial killings if it doesn’t deter next week’s?

Wallander: gets it solved but can’t stop it happening again

Still, I shouldn’t be too harsh. Swedish detective work is clearly recognised as outstanding even in other nations. Why, the Metropolitan Police in London seems to have appointed a Swede, John River, as a Detective Inspector, and ensured his doings (rather ghostly doings, considering the state of animation of his partner) are faithfully recorded in the aptly named River.

If things were so awful in Ystad, you can imagine how much worse they must be in the capital, Stockholm. It seems that this city is the hunting ground of an absolutely weird woman you really don’t want to cross. She’ll hack your computer and your phone, find out where you are, track you down and exact harsh, not to say bloodthirsty, revenge for any offence you may have caused her.

You can imagine how careful I was in Stockholm when I was there myself last week. I tried to work out whether any woman I saw might have a dragon tattoo on her shoulder but, hey, it was winter time and everyone was wearing coats, so how could I have known? For safety’s sake, I just kept out of the way of any of them.

I didn’t really feel safe until I got to the meeting for which I’d flown to this bleak and forbidding capital (which, to be fair, turned out to be neither). It was with a group of librarians, and it’s hard to imagine a less threatening profession (even if Professor Plum did get scragged in a library with a candlestick).

There’s that moment at the start of a meeting which pretty much decides whether it’s going to be a success or not. It’s when people are taking off their coats and getting out their notepads, deciding whether they want tea or coffee and whether they want a biscuit with it or not, and above all making small talk.

It struck me that I might start by mentioning how keen an admirer I am of the Nordic Noir genre. So I told them that I had enjoyed Broen/Bron, the series whose double name reflects its mixed Swedish/Danish origins. They all looked at me blankly, until the penny dropped with one of them.

“Oh, you mean The Bridge?” she said. It may not have helped that I had called the series ‘Broen’, or possibly ‘Bron’ (my pronunciation is far from reliable), which may have been the wrong language, or possibly neither. Anyway, The Bridge was indeed what I meant. They told me they’d liked it, but without the slightest trace of enthusiasm, like someone drinking your home-made wine who has decided not to offend you.

Warmth improved when one of them said, “I liked The Killing”, which they all seemed to have done. So had I, but I hadn’t mentioned it since it’s Danish rather than Swedish.

Then she added a comment which really surprised me. “I watched the American version too. And it was much better.”

What? The remake was better than the original? What world was I living in?

Finally, the truly astonishing revelation came out.

“I’m watching Line of Duty now,” another one of the librarians told me.

Now they were all enthusiastic.

“Oh, yes,” said another, “that’s a really great programme. We’re on season 3 now. It’s great.”

Line of Duty? That’s an English police series. I enjoyed it too. But it had none of the exotic content, the originality, the innovative viewpoint of Nordic Noir.

But then I suppose Nordic isn’t exotic to Nordics.

Or could it be that my first impression was right? That those Nordic series are only Noir to us? That to people on the ground they’re just a rather pedestrian description of everyday life?

The importance of knowing when not to say ‘now’

Sitting here in Southern Spain, my mind turned the other day – as whose wouldn't? – to the question of the separation of Norway from Sweden.  Fortunately, I had with me a book on Scandinavian history – as who doesn’t? – so I was able to satisfy my curiosity.

Funny story, actually. If only for what it shows of how much more effective deviousness and bad faith are in achieving great change, than mere heroism, war or even simple straight dealing.

Norway spent centuries and centuries under the rule of Denmark. But the Danes chose the wrong side in the Napoleonic Wars, so after Waterloo they got Norway taken away from them. Poor old Norwegians, though: no sooner could they begin to dream of running their own affairs, than they were handed over to the Swedes or, at least, to the Swedish king. He happened to be French and a former of Marshal of Napoleon’s, which is quite funny when you think about, since his side had just been beaten. Twice actually - once in 1814, but in the following year Napoleon forced the match into extra time, and got beaten again.

Still being handed over to a king was better than being handed over to a country. The king agreed to let the existing Norwegian institutions continue, in particular the parliament, which Norwegians called the ‘Storting’, which translates roughly as the ‘Great Thing’. 

That's a little curious from the British point of view, as the only great thing about parliament for most Brits is when it’s in recess and the politicians all go off on holiday. As it happens, I don’t agree with them because I find it good for my soul to get in the daily burst of moral indignation that parliament provides.

Anyway, the Storting continued to operate and tension between the two countries grew through most of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the Swedish kings tried to muscle in on Norwegian affairs and extend their authority, while the Storting pushed back, trying to preserve and even extend its prerogatives. 

Something similar happened between England and Scotland, which also continued as two nations sharing a monarch long before they merged into a single state. In the British instance, however, the Scots eventually got absorbed, possibly because the English were wilier than the Swedes, but more likely because they could muster a lot more fire power than the Scots and had shown down the ages that they were more than prepared to use it.

At the turn of the century, a new conflict broke out between Sweden and Norway over a question that they would prove unable to resolve. And here’s where it becomes funny: it wasn’t one of those great questions that shake continents, of freedom and slavery, of the rights of subjects and the prerogatives of kings, of privilege and oppression. No, it was a matter of utter triviality.

And that’s not unusual. The American colonists’ break with the mother country was triggered by the price of tea. The First World War was precipitated by the assassination of an Austrian Grand Duke. The iron curtain collapsed over a PR blunder, when a press officer who didn’t know when the Berlin Wall was due to open, announced ‘well, now, I suppose’.

In Norway’s case it was over the demand to have separate consular representation from the Swedes. Not even separate ambassadors – just separate consuls. The two nations couldn’t agree the terms of the arrangement and the quarrel festered for years.

Things came to a head when a character called Christian Michelsen won a majority in the Storting. He precipitated matters by pushing through a measure to set up separate consulates without royal authority. Obviously the king wasn’t going for that, so he vetoed the legislation. Michelsen’s government resigned en bloc.

Now here it all comes down to a single word. Since Michelsen controlled the Storting, without him the king couldn’t appoint a government which would command a majority. He declared himself unable to form a government now.

Michelsen reported to the Storting that the king was no longer able to form a government at all, neatly failing to mention the word ‘now’. The picture Michelsen therefore painted was one of the king washing his hands of Norwegian affairs for good, so the Union was in effect over.

Christian Michelsen:
understood the need for discretion, even over a single word

That made it pretty much a done deal, apart from a bit of shouting. There were some stirring speeches, war funds voted in Sweden, troops moved around a bit. But not a shot was fired and good sense eventually prevailed. In 1905, Norway became independent.

This seems a perfect parable for so many human affairs, doesn’t it? A trivial matter precipitates great change. A noble goal is achieved by underhand means. But the Scandinavians settled the business without loss of life – for that at least they deserve admiration. 

And, as we bomb the Libyans into democracy, perhaps a little envy.

National decline? Could be a lot better than the alternative

It’s a curious fact that’s not well known outside Sweden that one of its Kings spent time as a prisoner of the Turks.

Is this just something you might find useful in a pub quiz? Bear with me: it’s more relevant to our lives than you might imagine.

I was born into a nation in decline, in so far as power on the world scene defines what a nation is really about. As a child I admired stamps with the Queen’s head on them, marked ‘Gold Coast’, but overprinted ‘Ghana’. That’s how recent the loss of Britain’s dominance in Africa was. Our atlases at school, a little out of date as all good school atlases always are, still showed great tracts of the world in pink to identify them as British possessions.

As a student I heard the radical politician Tony Benn qualify England as the last colony of the British Empire. Unusually for Benn, he was spot on in that judgement: we lived in England as though we were the core of an Empire though the imperial dream was all but over. Dreams can often be nightmares, and in those days we had one more to go through, a colonial war as vicious and cruel as those we fought, in my lifetime, in Malaya, Kenya, Aden or Cyprus: the low-intensity but heartbreakingly drawn out conflict in Northern Ireland.

England stopped being the last imperial possession only in 1997 with the formation of its first post-colonial government, made up predominantly of people with no direct connection with the Second World War, the final great combat into which Britain led its Empire. It was no coincidence that it was this government that brought peace to Northern Ireland, a legacy for which Tony Blair would have been admired for generations and of which he could have been justly proud, had he not rather spoiled it by launching into a new military adventure in the Middle East.

As it waned over the decades, there was a constant refrain that Britain ‘punched above its weight’, an admission that its weight was no longer what it had been. The wealthiest nation in the world in the mid-nineteenth century was by the late twentieth an also-ran economically – well behind not just the United States but also Japan and Germany, the defeated powers of the Second World War, and even at different times behind France and Italy (the latter talked with great pride of ‘Il Sorpasso’, the overtaking – it was short lived but dramatic while it lasted).

The subject of decline is once again in the news. In part this reflects the success of the film The King’s Speech. The film is brilliantly written, directed and performed; it gives a powerful insight into life-distorting disability and the value of friendship in overcoming it. To enjoy it you have, however, to forget about certain uncomfortable historic facts over which the film draws a veil, such as George VI’s appalling attitude towards the Jews of Germany.

A great part of the film’s success in this country is down to nostalgia. To many people the film evokes a time of glory when things were better than they are today. They forget that for the few pukka sahibs on their elephants, or district commissioners determining the fate of thousands of African villagers from their folding tables under the baobab trees, or the white-suited gents in Raffles bar being treated with the deference due to Englishmen from mere natives, there were millions at home struggling with unemployment, thousands on the Jarrow hunger marches, millions more forced to give up their lives in two world wars to settle other and much wealthier men’s quarrels.

The price of national grandeur.

Which takes back to the Swedish King.

Charles XII reigned over Sweden when it was one of the Great Powers of Europe. To defend and extend his possessions, Charles waged wars in Poland, Germany and Russia. Against the Russian Tsar he fought his way all the way down to Poltava in modern day Ukraine, a hell of a sight closer to the Black Sea than to the Baltic, in a classic campaign of overseas imperial ambition.

It was massively overblown ambition. He was crushingly defeated and had to flee into exile in the Ottoman Empire, in modern-day Moldova. He was treated with respect and the Ottoman court subsidised his lavish lifestyle until his constant political intriguing and the conflict between his readiness to incur debts with local traders and his reluctance to pay them, led to serious trouble and soon he found himself in Constantinople under house arrest.

Get a map out. Locate Stockholm. Locate Istanbul. And wonder.

He got around, that Charles

Eventually he made it back to Sweden, crossing the continent on horseback in fifteen days, which was going some. He limited his further campaigns to giving the Norwegians a bad time, unsuccessfully on both attempts, the second of which cost him his life.

Now came the moment of key Swedish genius. The politicians met and took a decision that this whole imperial adventure had been a terrible waste of time, lives and treasure. The game simply wasn’t worth the candle. Sweden consciously chose to give it up for ever.

So they went through a process of decolonising themselves, just as we’re having to in Britain. And need to in France. Maybe even in Spain and Germany. And – dare I say it – will relatively soon be forced to in the United States too.

No doubt the Swedes had their moments of nostalgia as we did, with books, poems and paintings harking back to a mythical golden age where we have films. And why not? A little nostalgia isn’t a bad thing, as long as you don’t indulge in it too much or confuse it with anything that really matters.

Nostalgia for glory: the battle of Poltava imagined 17 years later

Above all Sweden concentrated on the slow process that would eventually make it what it is today, a society in which those who most need it are properly looked after, where religions coexist, where schools are equipped for teaching and hospitals for delivering care.

Funnily enough, we in Britain have moved that way too since the imperial pretensions eased, but we’ve got a long way to go yet. In the most brutal economic terms, Sweden has GDP per head of nearly $48,000, Britain some $36,000.

The lesson? Remember the glory of Charles XII. Make and enjoy films about him. But if you’re sensible, when you get out of the cinema, emulate his successors and not him. They understood that the important thing is to get a life.

Things are so much more fun when you do.