From empire to welfare model
Sweden was once a great power, its seventeenth-century empire ringing the Baltic, before it shrank back to the Scandinavian peninsula and, after 1814, embraced a neutrality it kept through both world wars. In the twentieth century the Social Democrats built the folkhemmet, the "people's home", a comprehensive welfare state funded by high taxes and underpinned by strong industry, from Volvo and Ericsson to IKEA and, later, Spotify.
That model made Sweden a byword for social democracy and consensus, though recent decades have brought immigration, gang violence and the rise of the hard-right Sweden Democrats, who now prop up the government of Ulf Kristersson. The most dramatic recent break with the past was strategic: after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Sweden abandoned two centuries of neutrality and joined NATO in 2024.
A brief foothold and a long solidarity
Sweden's direct colonial record in Africa is thin and best stated plainly. It briefly held the trading fort of Cabo Corso on the Gold Coast, in today's Ghana, in the 1650s before losing it, and it later ran a slave-trading colony on the Caribbean island of Saint-Barthélemy, so it was not wholly outside the Atlantic system. But it never built an African empire.
The deeper connection is modern and, on balance, more creditable. From the 1960s Sweden became one of the largest per-capita aid donors in the world and a vocal supporter of African liberation movements, funding the ANC, SWAPO and FRELIMO when much of the West would not. Olof Palme, the prime minister assassinated in 1986, was a leading global voice against apartheid. And it was over the Congo, in 1961, that the Swedish UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld died in a still-disputed plane crash while trying to broker peace, a death that tied Sweden's name permanently to the drama of African independence.
Design, industry and a colder politics
Sweden remains a wealthy, innovative economy with a global cultural footprint out of scale with its size, from crime fiction to pop music to furniture. But the open, consensual self-image has frayed: debates over integration and crime dominate politics, and the country that once prided itself on welcoming refugees has tightened its borders sharply. It keeps its own currency, the krona, and has stayed out of the euro by referendum.