Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History ISSN: 0161-5440 (Print) 1940-1906 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vhim20 Post-WWI military disarmament and interwar fascism in Sweden Heléne Berg, Matz Dahlberg & Kåre Vernby To cite this article: Heléne Berg, Matz Dahlberg & Kåre Vernby (2019) Post-WWI military disarmament and interwar fascism in Sweden, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 52:1, 37-56, DOI: 10.1080/01615440.2018.1554462 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2018.1554462 © 2019 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Published online: 26 Jan 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 230 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vhim20 HISTORICAL METHODS 2018, VOL. 52, NO. 1, 37–56 https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2018.1554462 Post-WWI military disarmament and interwar fascism in Sweden Helene Berga, Matz Dahlbergb, and Kåre Vernbyc aDepartment of Economics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; bInstitute for Housing and Urban Research and Department of Economics at Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; cDepartment of Political Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden ABSTRACT KEYWORDS The emergence of anti-democratic movements is a central puzzle to social science. We study Democracy; Interwar a novel and rich historical dataset covering Swedish municipalities during the interwar years fascism; Disarmament; and find a strong link between the presence of a military garrison and the emergence of fas- Historical Data cist parties. We interpret these results as suggesting that fascist mobilization in Sweden was driven by discontent with the process of disarmament brought about by democratization. In contrast, poor economic conditions, as captured both by levels of and changes in the local poverty rate and tax base, do not explain the strong link between the fascists and military garrisons. We relate these results to influential theories of democratization. 1. Introduction More recent contributors have challenged the mod- ernization school, and instead theorized pro-democratic Learning why anti-democratic groups emerge and support using a rational actor framework (Boix 2003; become mobilized is an important task if we wish to Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). According to this newer understand past and contemporary struggles over dem- perspective, actors have “induced preferences over insti- ocracy. Much of our thinking on this issue is informed tutions, depending on how institutions map into by the events that took place in Europe during the inter- policies” as Acemoglu (2006, 376) puts it. And to study war years where, in some countries, fascism grew from this, we need to ask “(1) what type of equilibrium poli- being a small extremist subculture to a mass movement. cies and allocations emerge within different institutional We contribute to this literature by studying fascist mobil- frameworks and (2) the preferences of different individ- ization in Sweden during the 1920s and 1930s. To this uals and groups over these policies and allocations” end, we utilize novel and detailed historical data that (342). Consequently, the decision of whether to support have previously not been digitized, and which covers or oppose different institutional arrangements depends Swedish municipalities during the interwar years. on the policies caused by these institutions. Translated TheriseoffascismafterWorldWarI(WWI)isfre- to the issue of explaining fascism, this perspective urges quently linked to the economic hardships of the time. The us to look for groups who believed that their interests idea that there, in general, exists a link between economic were better served by the policies that would obtain hardship and anti-democratic mobilization goes back to under fascist, rather than democratic, institutions. the modernization school, which sees support for democ- These perspectives are very generally formulated, racy as a more or less automatic consequence of economic and we will therefore not be able to provide any development (Lipset 1959; Inglehart and Welzel 2009). clear-cut test of them. However, by drawing on histor- On this view, development reduces “the proportion of the ical sources and contributing a novel and large dataset population that is susceptible to anti-democratic parties covering the interwar years, we will propose an inter- and ideologies” (Muller 1995,967).Relatedly,somework pretation of the mobilization of fascism in Sweden in what might be called “crisis theory” has focused on that quite strongly supports the latter perspective. changes in, rather than the level of, economic develop- Organized fascism in Sweden never became a mass ment (de Bromhead, Eichengreen, and O’Rourke 2013; movement. Rather, it consisted of a relatively small see also Frey and Weck 1983;Kingetal.2008). strongly anti-democratic subculture, dominated by CONTACT Kåre Vernby [email protected] Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. ß 2019 The Author(s).Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 38 H. BERG ET AL. military officers.1 Scholars often stress the crucial role empirical strategy whereas the data are described in of the military in democratic transitions and work on the fourth part. In the fifth, we present our empirical the Swedish interwar years has argued that, within the results. In the sixth, finally, we set out our military establishment, the major disarmament that conclusions. took place was seen by many as a consequence of the democratization of Sweden, and, by the same group, 2. Historical Background as proof that the masses were not ready for this type of government (Nilsson 2000, 49). In fact, as we We begin this section with a brief description of the explain below, the issue of disarmament was intrinsic- political situation in Sweden during the 1910s to ally linked to the process of democratization. Previous 1930s, and especially of the intimate link between the historical work also argues that the fascist parties in issue of disarmament and democratization. Because the 1930s had their roots among military officers who our main hypothesis is that the emergence of fascist expressed discontent with the disarmament enacted in parties is largely explained by military factors and, in the 1920s (W€arenstam 1972, Hagtvet 1980). particular, by disarmament, we then devote a section Based on the aforementioned historical evidence, to the highly controversial Defense Act of 1925. the hypothesis we take to our data is the following: Finally, to close the section, we provide a background Fascist parties’ mobilization on the electoral arena is to the Nazi and fascist oriented parties that emerged largely explained by the military being threatened by at the time, which we argued were spurred by discon- the democratically induced disarmament. Our baseline tent with the 1925 Defense Act. results suggest that a municipality’s military past had important consequences for the emergence of a local 2.1. The democratization process and the issue of branch of the main fascist party. Put simply, most disarmament municipalities (69.4%) that had a military garrison prior to the disarmament in the 1920s also had a local During the 1910s, Sweden democratized. It was a branch of the fascist party Swedish Socialist Unity in period characterized by constitutional conflict over the 1930s, whereas the corresponding figure was the expansion of suffrage and the king’s power over extremely low (3.7%) for the municipalities that lacked government formation. The main policy issue of the such a military past. In contrast, the level of local day was national defense, an issue that was inextric- socio-economic and political conditions cannot, as ably linked to the ongoing constitutional conflicts. suggested by the modernization theory, explain the After the introduction of universal male suffrage in presence of fascist parties. And while we cannot rule 1909, which was accompanied by a transition from a out that, in accordance with crisis theory, economic majoritarian to a proportional electoral system to the deterioration also mattered, the relationship between lower house, the parliamentary strength of the Social the presence of garrisons and fascists mobilization Democrats doubled. As a consequence, the Liberals remains stable also when controlling for changes in were able to form a minority government supported the local poverty rate and tax base. by the Social Democrats, even if the latter party A more detailed analysis shows that: (1) the effect decided not to participate. Upon entering government, of having a military garrison prior to disarmament is the Liberals immediately started investigating the pos- not mediated by subsequent economic development; sibilities for cutbacks in national defense, and quickly (2) whether or not the garrison actually was shut made a number of symbolic decisions to make good down does not matter for the existence of a local on their