APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200090017-8
The famous Swedish sculptor Carl Milles has depicted the Swedish religious leader and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (left) and the hand of God lifting mankind toward heaven.
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churches is no more than 5% of those who identify with the faith. It may be argued that the Swedish Social Democrats can point to four decades of social development which, however impersonal, still reflect concern for the needs of each citizen. And event the austere, eminently secular bureaucracy wishes for some "Christian" instruction to be provided in the primary schools, although it may be given to 6-year-olds cheek by jowl with rather explicit sex education material.
Swedish social democracy has, over the long haul, seemed more grounded in Saint Simon's Le Christienisme nouveau than in Karl Marx's Das Kapital. Its present leadership's lapse into the more traditional European socialist stems from a fear of resting on past laurels, lest the party lose its narrow plurality in the general elections scheduled for September 1973. The party's formula for success that was adopted in 1968 entailed, in effect, further socialization at home and an active international peace-seeing role. In their search for ways to continue Sweden's dramatic modern progress, national leaders may be forced to reevaluate the long-term ramifications of "strict neutrality" in a rapidly shrinking world of ever more complex international ties and relationships. Economic imperatives usually require political movement. A challenge that would be consistent with the courageous flexibility that marked Social Democratic policy of past decades might be to attempt to lead a reluctant public opinion into acceptance of closer economic collaboration with the European Communities—seemingly in 1972 the sine qua non to continued prosperity and industrial growth.
Whatever course of action is decided upon under the stimulus of an impending election, small dynamic Sweden will be concerned primarily with maintaining its rapid pace of advancement and then, at lease over the short haul, with proselyting abroad its presumed higher order of morality. In the spring of 1972, Tage Erlander, Swedish social democracy's respected elder statesman, concluded "...it will continue to be a very hard fight to bring about this slightly more intelligent world. It always is. It always has been."
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200090017-8
