Lena Berggren

Swedish Fascism — Why Bother?:

Traditionally, Swedish interwar fascism has been perceived as a mishmash of ridiculous NSDAP-lookalikes and Hitler-wannabes constantly fighting each other, never gaining any influence over Swedish politics, and failing spectacularly. The failure of Swedish fascism on a large scale is indisputable, but the idea that it simply attempted to copy the NSDAP can be called into question, as can the assumption of its insignificance in Swedish interwar history. The purpose of this article is not only to discuss what we know about Swedish interwar fascism and why it failed, but also to try to put it, and the study of it, in a new light; in short, to argue that we should bother about it, because of its ideological kinship with more successful varieties of interwar fascism. In 1980, Bernt Hagtvet published an article on interwar Swedish fascism in the voluminous anthology Who Were the Fascists? This article, the first scholarly account of Swedish fascism in English, was mostly based on a book written in Swedish by Eric Wärenstam in 1970. Both Wärenstam’s book and Hagtvet’s article follow a rather traditional pattern, where the focus is on the organization and support of different fascist groups, rather than on how fascist ideology expressed itself in a Swedish context. More than twenty years have now elapsed since Hagtvet’s article appeared and more than thirty since Wärenstam’s survey was written, and one would expect a great deal of new and illuminating research to have been carried out into Swedish fascism since. Unfortunately, this is not the case. With one exception, the 1980s can be

Intellectual Fascism : Per Engdahl and the Formation of 'New-Swedish Socialism'

The focus of this article is the ideological formation of so called ‘New-Swedish Socialism’, an indigenous form of fascist thought formulated by the Swedish ideologue Per Engdahl (1909–1994) in the ...