Introduction

Sweden's self-declared neutrality had to pass three tests in the period 1945–52. In this chapter I will examine the credibility of Swedish neutrality in the light of three important trials during the first six years of the Cold War: the Credit and Trade Agreement with the Soviet Union; participation in the Marshall Plan; and, finally, how Sweden dealt with the American embargo policy against the Soviet Union and its satellites.

The question of how neutral Sweden was during the Cold War cannot be answered for a simple reason: neutrality only applies to a (formal) state of war and a cold war is not a war in the sense of international law. Legally there is little confusion about the rights and duties of neutral states in times of war: they were laid down in 1907 at the Convention on Land and Sea Warfare in The Hague and have never been fundamentally changed. But there are, on the other hand, no rules of international law governing how a neutral state should behave in times of peace. So any scholar wishing to test the neutrality of Stockholm in the period after 1945 should look at the Swedish policy as though it was (or pretend that it was) carried out against the background of a situation of international war. In order to analyse Swedish politics in the Cold War we should theoretically assume that a war was being fought and judge Swedish political behaviour in that light.