Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Síða 99

SWEDISH TRADE POLICY IN WARTME*)
By G. Hdgglöf,
of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
THE outbreak of war in September 1939 did not by any
means put an end to the boom in Swedish foreign trade.
On the contrary, our imports and exports continued to
develop satisfactorily up to April 1940. On the other hand,
Sweden’s trade policy was confronted by new problems im-
mediately on the outbreak of the war. It became necessary to
develop a system of neutral foreign trade, and this was on the
whole an entirely new problem, as Sweden could only to a com-
paratively small extent be guided by the experiences gained dur-
ing the last war. In 1914 Sweden could still with some justice
uphold, as a matter of principle, the contention that even in war-
time foreign trade was the affair of private, individual citizens.
Already during the last war, however, it had been necessary
to modify this principle a good deal; and to have maintained the
same attitude in 1939 would have been to ignore the experiences
of more than two decades. Neutral trade policy in 1939 had to
take its stand on the principle that the Government, the State,
is reponsible for the export and import trade. And in conformity
with this, export and import embargoes were imposed immediate-
ly after the outbreak of war, which later on came to form the
basis of our policy of wartime trade agreements. In this sphere
too there is a marked contrast to the last war. True to its then
principle of regarding foreign trade as a private matter, the
Swedish Government did not at that time enter upon negotiations
for trade agreements until a comparatively late stage of the war
had been reached. This time, negotiations were entered upon
practically as soon as war had broken out — and both in Berlin
and London. Germany on her part declared, already in Septem-
ber 1939, that a neutral state had not only the right, but also
an obligation, to keep up its normal trade to all parts even during
war time, and this principle subsequently came to underlie the
agreements with Great Britain and Germany which the Swedish
*) This article is a translation of a conference held by the author at
the Gothenburg Stock Exchange Society on the 7th May, 1941. The
statistical figures contained in the article have been brought up to the end
°f August, 1941.
Le Nord. 1941, 2-3 7