What we find when studying Sweden as a nation-state prior to WWII is that racial discrimination—as understood by the ICERD and DDPA—was fundamental to it and that Sweden was socially, culturally, politically, legally, and economically organized around race. This seems true both of how Sweden constituted itself at the national level and in international relations. It would seem that pre-WWII Sweden and its place in the world was shaped by the many distinctions, exclusions, restrictions, and preferences between Europeans and non-Europeans—with respect to what we today would recognize as human dignity and rights—that were practised and amassed during the nearly half a millennium long era of colonialism beginning in the late fifteenth century. These colonial era distinctions between Europeans and non-Europeans were based on “race” in the sense that they at a minimum were based on notions of the geographical locations, origins, and physical appearances of peoples—typically coupled with notions of differences in culture, mores, and character. The term race itself, though, and the categorization of humanity into distinct biological types with innate mental and cultural characteristics were not established in Europe until in the eighteenth century (e.g., Hannaford 1996). And even after that, one should carefully examine if and how beliefs in innate mental and cultural qualities played a role in practices of discrimination on the grounds of “race” and not assume that they all were based on, depended on, or involved such beliefs.
On a global scale, Sweden was part of, contributed to, and benefited from the shaping of the world of the colonial era around race. This included views and attitudes regarding the superiority to the rest of the world of white Europeans and European civilization; the dismissal and suppression of non-European and indigenous peoples and cultures as heathen, primitive, and undeveloped; the appropriation by Europeans, to their material benefit, of the human and natural resources of non-Europeans; being white as a condition for equal dignity and rights; and the systematic (national and international) subjugation of people of colour and indigenous people to a second class status.
To understand the pre-WWII formation of Swedish nationhood—i.e., the identity of Sweden as a nation and Swedish people as Swedes—it is helpful to distinguish race from ethnicity. The pre-WWII formation of Swedish nationhood was not merely based on notions of ethnicity—for example, that distinguished ethnic Swedes from ethnic Finns, Danes, and Norwegians—but also on notions of race which placed Swedes in a larger European community distinguished from non-Europeans. The pre-WWII Swedish discourse of being part of a European community was primarily based on notions of belonging to an interrelated culture or civilization more broadly—with, say, Christian beliefs and traditions; an intellectual history going back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans; having a share in the high culture and Arts of Europe; being part of transnational scholarly conversations; sharing and exchanging technologies, goods, and services; having similar forms of governance; being part of a European system of sovereign states; and more. However, in line with European discourses around culture, origin, and difference that developed during an age of global exploration and colonization—in Sweden too, ideas of cultural, ethnic, and national character intermingled with ideas of physical, innate, and geographic differences between Europeans and non-Europeans. What ensued was a pre-WWII narrative around Swedish nationhood where the deepest fault-line of cultural and national identity was not ethnicity per se—after all, this separated Swedes from other Europeans—but race (cf., e.g., McEachrane and Faye 2001; Mills 1997, 2017; Keskinen et al. 2009; Loftisdóttir and Jensen 2012; Naum and Nordin 2013; Fur 2013; Weiss 2013, 2015, 2016).
From the eighteenth century until around WWII, it became increasingly common in Sweden to conceive of humanity as divided into racial groups with distinct geographical origins and physical and psychological characteristics. In his magnum opus of modern biological taxonomy Systema Naturae—which went through ten editions between 1735 and 1758 and soon became the standard at all universities in Europe—Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) classified Homo sapiens into continentally distinct white (Homo Europaeus), yellow (Homo Asiaticus), red (Homo Americanus), and black (Homo Africanus) varieties with different psychological and cultural characteristics (Eze 1997; Jackson and Weidman 2004, p. 16). Although Linnaeus himself did not use the term race, his continental white-yellow-red-black classification became a point of contention for Comte de Buffon (1707–1708), who did use the term race in the seminal Histoire Naturelle (1749), and was also recognized by pioneering anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), as a novel contribution to the development of racial classification (Jackson and Weidman 2004, pp. 17–18; Hannaford 1996, p. 204).
From at least the first half of the seventeenth century to the infamous Berlin Conference 1884–1885, Sweden too participated in the European scramble for overseas colonies (Nováky 1990; Nilsson 2013). Like other European countries, Sweden had fleets of chartered African, East Indian, and West Indian Companies. In 1650, the short-lived but prosperous Swedish Africa Company (1649–1663) established a minor trading colony at Cabo Corso in present-day Ghana, where fort Carolusburg (later renamed Cape Coast Castle by the English) was built by enslaved Africans (Nováky 1990). Besides gold, ivory, sugar, and other products, the Company traded in enslaved Africans (ibid). For centuries, plantation sugar was imported to Sweden with refineries being built in Stockholm and Gothenburg in the second half of the seventeenth century. In 1738, Swedes consumed 450 tons of sugar per year which alone required the labor of some 500 enslaved adults, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, Swedish sugar consumption alone required the labor of at least 15,000 enslaved adults annually—approximately the same number of people living in quite large Swedish cities at that time such as Malmö or Norrköping. Enslaved persons were also involved in producing other major colonial imports to Sweden during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, coffee and cotton products. During the eighteenth century, Swedish herring from the Gothenburg county was exported to plantations in the Americas. Around the same time, Sweden’s largest export, iron, played a major role in the transatlantic and colonial plantation economies to produce voyage iron, guns, shackles, chains, hoes, and machetes. As late as 1922, according to a report from the Swedish Ministry of Agriculture, “colonial goods” (kolonialvaror) such as coffee, spices, and cotton materials were among the most common wholesale goods in the country (Naum and Nordin 2013, ch 4 and 13; Evans and Rydén 2007; Rönnbäck 2007; Müller 2004; Government of Sweden 2008a, p. 95; Government of Sweden 1922, p. 14).
Another example of Sweden’s involvement in the international racial ordering of the colonial era is its small overseas colony in the Caribbean, the island of St Barthélemy, which it held for nearly a century 1784–1878. Until Sweden signed the act at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and promised not to participate in any new importation of enslaved Africans—Gustavia was a significant free port in the Caribbean for ships with enslaved Africans in addition to ships with other colonial merchandise such as tobacco, sugar, coffee, and rum (Pålsson 2016, pp. 61, 65–66, 224–5; Kern 2004). In June 1787 alone, 159 ships arrived and 160 ships left the island, out of 1033 and 1082 ships, respectively, for that year (Pålsson 2016, p. 61). Around 1804–1805, Gustavia was among the most prominent “slave ports” in the Caribbean with approximately 20 ships with an entire cargo of enslaved Africans, out of altogether 1800 vessels, entering annually (Pålsson 2016, p. 62; Weiss 2016, p. 138). As a free trade zone under a militarily neutral Swedish flag, the island became a (semi-)cosmopolitan, multinational, multiethnic, and multireligious haven for white entrepreneurs from across Europe, North America, and other islands in the Caribbean. According to Le Code de lois de la Martinique [The Code of Laws of Martinique]—which was applied on St Barthélemy and based on the French Code Noir—race determined rights. White people on the island enjoyed equal basic rights and freedoms and could become, if they were not already, naturalized Swedish subjects. “Free colored”—who in a less governmentally controlled free port like Gustavia had more opportunities than in most other places in the Caribbean—could in principle become Swedish citizens too, but—be they “negroes” or “mulattoes” with the same colour as white Europeans—not enjoy equal rights. For example, though they had some rights such as the right to own some forms of business, land, and other property, they initially had no voting rights under the Swedish flag. However, after a petition campaign in 1821, and the Swedish authorities wanting to avoid long term anything like the Haitian revolution, the free coloured received severely limited voting rights. They were also due flagellation if assaulting white persons and relegated to segregated housing quarters. Enslaved persons had no rights, were by law the private property of their owners, and subjected to such practices as being punished with death, hot iron torture or 150 lashes and the loss of an ear if they tried to escape (Weiss 2013, 2016, pp. 175–180; Pålsson 2016, pp. 68–9, 78–83, 2017, pp. 323–4; Wilson 2010).
Ideas such as that Sweden as a nation was part of a superior European civilization, that this superiority was due to innate qualities of its people, and that white ethnic Swedes had the right to colonize, dominate, and discriminate against “uncivilized” or less “civilized” peoples—have not least been prominent in Sweden’s relationship to its own indigenous peoples, the Saami, and their lands in the northern parts of Scandinavia, Sápmi (e.g., Lundmark 2002, 2008). Although the inferiorizing and colonization of the Saami and Sápmi had been going on for centuries, it was accentuated during the nineteenth century. From then, it was characteristic of political and public discourse in Sweden to assume that white ethnic Swedes were at a “higher,” more developed, stage of civilization and Saami peoples at a “lower,” more primitive, stage. In the parliamentary discourse of nineteenth-century Sweden, it was often assumed that although it was natural that the Saami—whether they were nomadic or permanent residents, hunting, fishing, reindeer herding or trading for a living—should give way to state power, settlers, agriculture, and a higher civilization and one day would die out, it was a duty to protect them against this for as long as possible. Toward the end of the century, it also became popular to assume that the cultural differences between majority Swedes and the Saami were due to race, and in the beginning of the twentieth century, a racially, culturally, and occupationally segregating “Lapps shall be Lapps”-politics was in effect (Lundmark 2002, pp. 12–14, 31–43, 63–65). According to this politics, the exposure of the Saami to civilization through education, residential housing, and other means should be limited as they by nature were unfit for it. The state was also to actively retain their nomadic reindeer herding lifestyle—which their diverse lifestyles now were reduced to—in mountain areas that were unsuited for agriculture and foresting. It was not until the 1930s and 1940s, with growing doubts about the future of reindeer herding and when overt references to race fell into disrepute, that this politics of segregation slowly began to change (Lundmark 2002, pp. 67–121, 147–150, 158–159; Lundmark 2008, pp. 180–184, 208–213).
In the decades immediately prior to WWII, typical colonial era racial views of white superiority and non-white inferiority were prevalent in Sweden and actively promoted by the state. For instance, pre-WWII school books—and also post-WWII school books, though less explicitly—routinely referred to “lower” and “higher” races, “us” when describing the European conquest of Africa, Africans as savages without history, Europeans as bringing the blessings of civilization to humanity, Europe as the epitome of historical evolution, and the rest of humanity as on lower stages of development (Palmberg 2009, pp. 37–38). Before the war, it was commonplace in Swedish culture at large to portray Africans in overt racial stereotypes as at a lower stage of human development, primitive, childlike, and ridiculous (McEachrane 2001; Fornäs 2004; Palmberg 2009). Census classifications during the interwar period were racially motivated to demographically distinguish ethnic Swedes from “foreign races” such as Lapps, Finns, gypsies, and Jews (Rogers and Nelson 2003, pp. 61–79). The Swedish Aliens Act of 1927 stated that the purity of the Nordic race had “a value which can hardly be exaggerated,” that it was essential to control the immigration of people “not suited to become a part of Sweden’s population,” and after 1938, the Swedish Immigration Office saw it fit to mark the passport of Jewish refugees with a “J” stamp, referred to them as “non-Aryans” and argued against a proposed law to liberalize the definition of a political refugee on the grounds that Swedes are unused to numerous foreigners in their midst and are inclined to be disturbed by them (Nordlund 2000, pp. 178–179; Kvist 2000).
Pre-WWII, the “racial hygiene” of the nation was a theme in Swedish politics. In 1921, the Swedish Parliament voted for the establishment of a state institute for race biology and eugenics. The institute studied the race biology of the population and promoted its conservation and improvement through sterilization and other eugenics programs. Its first two major publications were The Racial Characteristics of the Swedish Nation (1926), for an international scientific audience, and a pop-scientific version in Swedish that was well received by the public and press, Svensk raskunskap (Swedish race knowledge, 1927). These books showcased a survey of the height, skull shape, eye, hair, and skin color of about 50,000 persons, replete with illustrations and descriptions of the racial makeup of Sweden according to categories that were popular at the time. Majority ethnic Swedes were described as a superior Nordic race, minority Finns belonged to an inferior East Baltic/Slavic stock, the minority Saami’s in the North were the most inferior of white Europeans, whereas the Roma people in the country belonged to another inferior race altogether (Blomqvist 2017; Schall 2012; Kjellman 2013; Hyatt 1997). In an article from 1928 in the journal The Eugenics Review, the first Director of the institute, Herman Lundborg, made the case that the “eugenical view-point must be given due regard, as we cannot afford to throw away the extremely valuable asset of good human stock” (Lundborg 1928, p. 291). “The good racial qualities which we have inherited through the generosity of Nature, have nowhere failed to evidence themselves,” he writes lauding the colonial expansion of Europe, the “Swede, as well as the member of the other Scandinavian nations, is everywhere a welcome stranger. He becomes the pioneer, and as a rule, lays the foundation of a solid, organized state” (ibid).
During the 1930s and 1940s, when most Swedish eugenics was performed, its discourse shifted from a racial to a social-productive categorization of groups—such as the mentally defective, epileptics, and “travelers” (Tattare)—that should be sterilized for the genetic well-being of the nation. A new generation of medical and biological researchers questioned the previous messages spread by Swedish eugenics. Among them were Gunnar Dahlberg (1893–1956), who in 1935 succeeded a then retired Herman Lundborg at what now was called the Swedish State Institute of Human Genetics and Race Biology. Dahlberg’s view on race, as expressed in a 1942 journal article “An Analysis of the Conception of Race and a New Method of Distinguishing Races,” was more moderate than his predecessor’s as he did not believe in discrete racial types as Lundborg had and doubted that there was any substantial racial difference between majority ethnic Swedes and Saami people, although he did not doubt that white Europeans and black Africans belonged to different races. Dahlberg contributed to the first two UNESCO statements on race—by commenting on a draft of the first and co-drafting the second—and also contributed to the UNESCO campaign against racism in the 1950s. After the revelations of the horrifying atrocities of the Nazi regime in the mid-1940s, Sweden dismissed any similarities between Swedish eugenics and German race doctrines. Eugenic sterilization reached its climax in Sweden during the period 1943–1949 (Tydén 2002, 2010, pp. 367, 371–372; Spektorowski and Ireni-Saban 2011; Dahlberg 1942).