NORDIC STATES: Mighty Fortress

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One-sixth of the population of Finland had fled from their homes last week, terrified lest a Russian invasion should follow up the still secret demands of Joseph Stalin. Peasants abandoned their farms along the Soviet frontier, the men joining the Finnish Army, the women and children plodding on foot to refugee camps in the interior. They had to walk because the Army was obliged to seize all horses and carts in the frontier districts for its service of supply. Most of the fleeing refugees left behind all their possessions, except what they could carry in a few bundles, but occasionally a strapping Finnish housewife could be seen panting down the road with her precious Singer Sewing Machine on her back.

From such a countryside not yet at war, but grimly preparing for the worst, did Finland’s gruff, humbly born, dark-bearded and deeply beloved President Kyosti Kallio last week depart. He left Helsinki by air for Stockholm to confer in desperate earnest with the three tall, umptigenarian Kings of Scandinavia, all markedly democratic, each a devout Lutheran and all keenly aware that the unleashed might of ruthless, un-Christian Bolsheviks and Nazis now menaces the peaceful Nordic States.

Nazi Hitler, many Scandinavians feared last week, may shortly begin trying to force Sweden, Denmark and Norway into vassalage to Germany by the same threatening tactics which Bolshevik Stalin has employed successfully in recent weeks to vassalize Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and is now trying on Finland. Red Russia, once she got a whip hand over the Finns, would be strategically placed to threaten Scandinavia, unless Germany exerted a counterthrust, and in Stockholm last week the talk was gloomy. Current were such wry cracks as, “We shall soon know whether we Swedes are Germans or Russians!”

“Open Wound.” Only the colors of the flags of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland are different, the design is the same—a cross on a plain field*—and wealthy Stockholm with her many lagoons, beauteous “Venice of the North,” was a brilliant forest of cross-flags last week as the President of Finland alighted at Bromma Airport with brisk, energetic Finnish Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko.

Waiting to greet them was Swedish King Gustaf V, but discreet silence on tense public occasions is the duty of a constitutional monarch, and His Majesty left it to Stockholm City Councilman Frederick Storm to tell Finland’s President what all Swedes were thinking: “If anything wrong should happen to one Scandinavian country it would be of the utmost importance to all of them. Any wound made on any nation in our group would always be an open wound for all.”

An hour later venerable King Gustaf V, 81, was at the Stockholm railway station and Swedish newshawks watched attentively to note how many kisses His Majesty would bestow on his fellow sovereigns Danish King Christian X, 69, and that monarch’s brother, Norwegian King Haakon VII, 67. In 1905 Norway abruptly broke away from union with Sweden, electing the Danish “Sailor Prince” Karl to become King of Norway as Haakon VII, and for many years afterward Swedish resentment over this remained keen. Thus in 1914, when Gustaf V asked the Scandinavian sovereigns to meet him at Malmo, Sweden, to adopt a common policy in the face of World War I, His Majesty was careful to buss the King of Norway on only one cheek and lightly, kissed the King of Denmark heartily on both cheeks. In the much greater emergency of World War II last week, Swedes were happy to see Gustaf V signal that Scandinavia is now united as never before by warmly kissing on both cheeks both Christian X and Haakon VII.

“Vår Gud är oss en väldig borg.” To conquer not only England but most of what is now the Baltic States was the bloody feat of Denmark in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries under her Hero-Kings, Cnut the Great and the Valdemars. In the 13th Century valorous Norwegians led by Haakon the Old seized Greenland, Iceland, the Orkneys, the Shetlands and the Hebrides.

During the Middle Ages Sweden was successively the terror of Russia and of Germany. The great Russian trading centre Novgorod was founded originally by Swedish corsairs; they pressed down the Dnepr River and into the Black Sea to trade with “Miklagarth the Golden” as they called Istanbul in their Sagas; and on Midsummer Eve, 1630 the greatest of Swedish kings, Gustavus Adolphus, “The Lion of the North,” launched an invasion that swept irresistibly across Germany.

Today, the might of Scandinavia has sadly withered. But last week powerful searchlights were turned on Stockholm’s famed modernistic Town Hall and the massive Royal Palace as over 100,000 took their stand along the twinkling waterways and King Gustaf led his guests, after a State banquet, into the Royal Church. Solemnly the Archbishop of Sweden, Dr. Erling Eidem, prayed that the Scandinavian kings and President Kallio may receive “strength to wage the struggle against the forces of evil presently rampant in the world!”

Later in the evening Lutheran massed choirs and Swedish patriotic organizations carrying over 700 banners—among them the red flag of Swedish labor, which is Socialist—approached the Royal Palace chanting solemnly, then began to shout “Kallio! Kallio!” Dr. Kallio, often considered dour, suddenly appeared with tears of emotion in his eyes, escorted onto a Palace balcony by the Three Kings and amid deafening cheers the four men linked arms, stood solemnly while the crowd sang the national anthems of their countries and ended with that grand old Lutheran fighting hymn “Vår Gud är oss en väldig borg” (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God). In the enthusiastic crush 17 people fainted.

Dearest Hopes. In 1914 the Malmö Conference of the Three Kings agreed that Scandinavia would try to keep out of World War I while trading to beat the band with all belligerents. Last week in Stockholm it was already clear that World War II is not going to be any picnic for neutrals, but faces them at the outset with grim threats to their independence. Getting right down to cases, Finnish Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko asked Swedish Foreign Minister Rickard J. Sandier, Danish Foreign Minister Peter Munch and Norwegian Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht what concrete assistance, if any, their countries were prepared to offer Finland in resisting the demands of Soviet Russia.

While the sympathetic Scandinavian press continued to refer to Finland as “The Belgium of the North,” the Three Kings and their Foreign Ministers reputedly advised President Kallio in secret: 1) to hand over to the Soviet Union certain small islands, near Leningrad; 2) to refuse to concede to the Soviet Union control of the large Aland Islands near Stockholm; 3) to resist Soviet pressure to enter a military alliance which would make Finland the vassal of Russia. This appeared to be the line taken when Finnish Foreign Minister Dr. Juho Paasikivi went back to Moscow this week for more talks about the “friendship pact.” Meantime, however, the Finns prudently prepared to vote $95,000,000 in war credits.

So far as could be learned at Stockholm, Finland was promised no armed support in case she has to fight, but the Three Kings joined with President Kallio in an earnest and hopeful 25-minute broadcast from Stockholm.

Haakon VII of Norway thanked Sweden’s Gustaf for calling the Stockholm parley, declared: “The cooperation and friendship of our States should be a model for the world.”

Christian X of Denmark, speaking also for Iceland of which he is separately King: “The loyal cooperation of the Nordic States gives hope for the future.”

Gusfaf V of Sweden keynoted: “We consider it one of our most vital rights that each of our countries remain wholly independent, and follow the neutrality policies accepted by all the northern states.

“My dearest hope is that the northern nations may be able to contribute to the restoration of peace and smooth out the difficulties of the warring states.”

President Kallio: “Peaceful Finland is trusting that God and Justice will defend her independence.”

“Bulwark of Democracy.” Whatever the fate of Finland, Scandinavia proper remained a prosperous, progressive and almost defenseless “Bulwark of Democracy,” much better worth defending than were Austria, Czecho-Slovakia or Poland.

With German U-boats now sinking a Scandinavian freighter every few days in the North Sea, the angry question was being asked by Norwegians, Swedes and Danes, “Where is the British Navy? Is it leaving us to the mercy of Germany, or what?”

In the spring of this year Adolf Hitler “invited” all three Scandinavian States to sign bilateral non-aggression pacts with the Reich. Norway and Sweden promptly refused, saying this would infringe their “strictly neutral” status, but Neighbor Denmark felt obliged to sign, and this marked the first minor break in the Neutral Front of the Nordic Bloc. Whether or not the Führer can use it as an opening wedge, Scandinavia was becoming war-jittery, Stockholm citizens were building air-raid shelters, and Norway, Sweden and Denmark were reported on the point of placing orders in the U. S. for war planes.

Dynasty by Adoption. The history of Sweden in the 81 years since King Gustaf’s birth is just about the best possible argument for constitutional monarchy. The Royal House, as lineage goes in Europe, is extremely young. His Majesty is only the great-grandson of its founder Jean Bernadotte, soldier of fortune, the son of a French petit bourgeois of Pau who played his own hand as a soldier-politician until Napoleon came along and outdid him. Alive to the main chance, Bernadotte was glad for a job as one of Napoleon’s generals. His military exploits were negligible, but he was a good politician and his wife was the sister of Joseph Bonaparte’s wife. With these advantages, the Emperor made him a marshal and later Prince of Ponte Corvo.

Bernadotte served for a time as the Governor of captured Hanover in Germany and buttered up influential Swedish officers taken prisoner during Napoleon’s campaigns in the North. In 1810 the weakness of Sweden, together with the sudden death of the Swedish Crown Prince, emboldened a Stockholm Court clique to propose that one of Napoleon’s marshals be sounded out as to whether he would accept election as heir to the Swedish throne.

Bernadotte went through the motions of asking Napoleon, who exclaimed “Preposterous! Absurd!”, but a few months later the Emperor made the best of it, approved the deal. So the Swedish people elected Bernadotte their Crown Prince, and Swedish King Karl XIII adopted the Frenchman as his son under the name Prince Karl Johan. In the eight years which ensued before Sweden’s old King died, the Crown Prince consolidated his position, became one of Sweden’s popular figures, and this priceless asset the House of Bernadotte de Ponte Corvo has skilfully conserved for more than 100 years under five bourgeois and uniformly popular kings: Karl XIV, his only son Oscar I, his eldest son Karl XV who left no male heir, and his brother Oscar II, father of the present Gustaf V.

Secession by Consent. In the single lifetime of His Majesty, who was born in 1858, the Swedish people have increased from fewer than 4,000,000 to over 6,200,000—almost as many people as live in London or New York City. The Swedes have devoted their whole toil and savings during this period to peace and social progress, eschewing the waste of war. As a child, Gustaf V was sent to a Stockholm private school and his then reigning uncle, King Karl XV, was engaged at this time in shepherding a gradual constitutional change, whereby effective political power in Sweden later passed safely from the Crown—which had enjoyed autocratic sway—into the hands of the elected Parliament and responsible Ministers.

Prince Gustaf served as a young man in the Swedish Army, began to step out, travel and see the world when as Crown Prince in 1878 he paid his first visit to England. There, so far as Sweden was concerned, he “discovered tennis,” proceeded to popularize the game in Scandinavia. No mere athlete, however, the Crown Prince buckled down during these years to problems of State. Of these the most pressing was the growing discontent of Norway under the Swedish Crown and there were plenty of Swedes with an Abraham Lincoln mentality who preferred civil war to permitting secession. On this issue the Crown Prince firmly took the stand he has maintained all his life, an enlightened attitude of calm neutrality (he has been 81 years a neutral) in which the prestige of the Crown was thrown on the side of letting the Norwegian people choose by peaceful ballot to go their own way in 1905.

Two years later Gustaf V came to the Throne, but refused to be crowned and Sweden was spared the expense of a Coronation. On State occasions the crown rests on a settee beside the Throne. Most historians agree that the 32 years of His Majesty’s reign constitute the period of “Modern Sweden.” In 1909 a severe financial crisis was followed by a general strike in Sweden, but this stopped just short of revolution and since then the people have increasingly been Kingsmen.

People v. Politics. The Swedish people, as understanding Gustaf V likes to emphasize, have a national talent for what has been called “mass individualism.” In the early years of his reign Swedes got the idea that Capital with its trusts and combines was milking the People with artificially high prices, but the Swedish reaction to this was not to set up Labor as a counter-demagogue. Instead, taking its famed Middle Way, Swedish consumers banded together in the Kingdom’s now widely known cooperatives. These in effect yardstick the food prices that can be charged in Sweden, for their members number about one-third of the population, and the Swedish cooperatives now operate the largest bakeries, canning plants and many other agencies for producing consumer goods.

In the great timber, pulp, ore and shipping industries Swedish capital, while not operating under laissez-faire conditions, is given a fairly free swing to charge what the traffic—mostly foreign—will bear. Last year Swedish exporters of forest products and iron and steel did a $300,230,880 business, keeping the foreign trade balance weighted toward Sweden.

The Social Democrats are the dominant party in Sweden, as all over Scandinavia, but today Sweden’s humbly born, self-educated Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson, no towering figure of social dynamism, takes life and politics just about as easily as does King Gustaf, with whom he frequently sits up into the small hours at the Royal Palace playing bridge.

“Devastating Consequences!” In international politics, Sweden has no wish nor much chance to make a grand slam. Her wealth and her small but efficiently equipped Army make her a national leader in the so-called Oslo Group (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands, Finland, Belgium-Luxembourg Trade Union) which overlaps the so-called Northern Neutrals (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland). These groups pursue a ceaseless European activity for lowered customs barriers, mobilization of Europe’s remaining moral forces against aggression, and until lately they were the energetic champions of the League of Nations, now admittedly defunct.

Since King Gustaf has reached such a great age, many of the burdens of the Crown are now borne by big-boned, vigorous Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf, who has been acting as Regent every winter while His Majesty vacations on the Riviera, sipping champagne with attractive French mondaines and finding that at tennis almost everyone who plays with him, from Mile Suzanne Lenglen to the current Swedish champion, Tarsten Fronfors, has an understandable tendency to lose games and sets to this grand old royal democrat they like so much.

If modern war were only a little more like sport, Tennist Gustaf and his sterling Swedes would sleep easier of nights. Last month the Riksdag at Stockholm voted a belated 46,000,000 for defense measures and King Gustaf in his Speech from the Throne bravely sounded this realistic note:

“Swedish men and women, chosen representatives of the Swedish people! … A war has broken out, the scope and effects of which cannot be estimated. Immeasurable is the misfortune of those people who are drawn into this war. Devastating consequences are to be expected also for others.”

How devastating the consequences of War II may be for the Nordic States no man can foresee. But with their democratic friends embattled far down the North Sea, and their totalitarian neighbors creeping across and along the Baltic, tears and tennis, trees and testimonials may well be not enough to save them. Against one Adolf Hitler, perhaps not even a Gustavus Adolphus would suffice.

* Sweden: yellow cross, blue field. Denmark: white on red. Norway: white & blue cross on red ground. Finland: blue on white.