Through the Eyes of the Germanic North: The International Geography of Swedish Parliamentary Debate, 1887–1914

Swedish neutrality became a defining feature of the country’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century foreign policy, even if it was not necessarily impartial. The country had strong cultural ties to Germany, and a consistent minority lobbied for a more explicit formulation of an alliance. This article argues that German locations and place names dominated the geographic outlook of Swedish parliamentarians and that a previously neglected aspect of Sweden’s German predisposition was Germany’s outsized role in Swedish mental maps. The study analyzes international locations and place names referenced within Swedish parliamentary debate to understand how politicians related to the country’s surroundings and what geography was deemed relevant to political consideration. The textual and conceptual analysis is made possible by an initial quantitative orientation of the data, through Named Entity Recognition, but is predominantly based on qualitative, contextual close readings. The findings show that particularly northern German place names and geography dominated Sweden’s mental maps, both in terms of absolute frequency and the number of different place names. The fact that Sweden internationalized politically ‘via’ northern Germany is valuable for understanding the uneven nature of prewar globalization and the pre-history of Sweden’s First World War experience.