Margot Wallström: feminist foreign policy. Wikimedia / Frankie Fouganthin. Creative Commons.Earlier this month, Sweden’s social-democratic prime minister, Stefan Löfven, announced that the country would not be renewing its military co-operation agreement with Saudi Arabia. The English-speaking media were full of praise. Here was the feminist foreign policy which Margot Wallström, the foreign minister, had promised. “It’s always nice to have the Scandinavians around, to show us there’s a better way of doing things,” said the Guardian.
There were calls for other western governments to follow suit, leavened with scepticism that more ‘pragmatic’ administrations would ever exhibit Scandinavian levels of idealism. Was Stockholm, perhaps, a little naïve? Foreign Policy summed it up as “money versus principles”. The Guardian called it “a clash between Sweden’s progressive foreign policy and the harsh realities of the Middle East”.
The truth is that Sweden’s ‘progressive’ foreign policy is a decades-long study in äta kakan och ha den kvar—having your cake and eating it. The self-described ‘humanitarian superpower’ is, per capita, simultaneously the EU’s most generous humanitarian-aid donor and its biggest arms exporter.
