The Swedish Exception

Abstract

In the years after the First World War, democratic revisionists waged a war for the soul and the future of the international socialist movement. Confronted with an exhausted orthodox Marxism and a rising radical right, the sharpest revisionists developed a new strategy for the left based on state control of the market and communitarian appeals. Although these insurgents gained followers in countries across Europe, they were unable to capture control of any major socialist party on the continent. Only in Scandinavia – and particularly in Sweden – did socialists embrace the new course wholeheartedly. And it was thus only in Sweden that socialists were able to outmaneuver the radical right and cement a stable majority coalition, escaping the collapse of the left and democracy that occurred elsewhere in Europe. The key to understanding the Swedish SAP's remarkable success in the interwar years lies in the triumph of democratic revisionism several decades earlier. Democratic Revisionism in Sweden From its inception, the SAP's view of Marxism was flexible and undogmatic, a stance facilitated by the party's peripheral position in the international socialist movement and by the long-term leadership of Hjalmar Branting (the SAP's leader from its founding in 1889 to his death in 1925). Branting was a democratic revisionist through and through, and, having started his career in liberal circles, his views were shaped by his continuing relationship with them; this not only allowed for extensive cooperation between socialists and liberals, but also manifested itself in Branting's conviction that socialism was the next logical step toward liberalism's completion.