Armed Neutrality
See also: Sweden during World War IIThe 1930s marked a new period when Sweden's long-standing policy of neutrality was severely tested on numerous occasions, most of which came from a strongly rejuvenated nationalistic Germany. Since the founding of the League of Nations in 1919 and up to the year 1935, Sweden had been a strong supporter of the League and most of Sweden's energy on the international stage had been put into its preservation.
As the collective security system of the League of Nations started to crack with the Abyssinia crisis, and the approach of World War II, Sweden could look back on 120 years of successful neutralist politics – with one singular exception: the backup force on Jutland during the First war of Schleswig. Sweden now pursued a policy of forging a block of neutralist countries in Northern Europe. Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland and the Baltic countries were all members of this club of neutral states. Of them, only Sweden would be fortunate enough to remain unattacked during World War II.
Opposition to this new policy of armed neutrality was weak in that all major parties, such as the Conservatives, Agrarians and Liberal People's Party, supported the government's position. On a regular basis, beginning in 1936, the Swedish government requested increases in its defense budget to strengthen its military preparedness as the international situation continued to worsen. The actual military budget from 1936 to 1939 increased many times over. In 1936, military spending was $37,000,000; 1937, $50,000,000; 1938, $58,575,000; and in 1939 it was at $322,325,000. After the war began, military spending peaked in 1942 at $527,575,000 in one year alone. With the increased need of an expanded military, Swedish industry was required to not only supply the increased demand for domestic products, exacerbated by the German blockade of the North Sea, but also had to meet an increased demand in military armaments for the Swedish government. Before the war, production of armaments did not exceed more than tens of millions of Swedish kronor, but during the war, production exceeded the cost of one billion Swedish kronor ($240,000,000).
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Famous quotes containing the words armed and/or neutrality:
“He could pause in his cross-examination, look at a man, projecting his face forward by degrees as he did so, in a manner which would crush any false witness who was not armed with triple courage at his breast,—and, alas! not unfrequently a witness who was not false.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us—which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)