Sweden’s conservative government abandons ‘feminist’ foreign policy

In a sign of changing priorities, Sweden’s new Foreign Minister has dropped his centre-left predecessor’s ‘feminist’ foreign policy and will focus on NATO.

Sweden’s new Minister of Foreign Affairs Tobias Billstrom says ‘equality between men and women is a central value for both Sweden and this government, but no, we won’t pursue a feminist foreign policy’. Picture: AFP

Sweden will abandon its signature “feminist” foreign policy to pursue its national interests more assertively, the country’s new top diplomat has said.

For eight years successive centre-left governments have put gender equality and women’s rights at the centre of their approach to international relations, reinventing the notion of Sweden as a “moral superpower”.

This has involved lobbying for measures to promote girls’ education, encouraging more women into the workforce and positions of influence and tackling violence against girls and women.

Since the idea was pioneered in 2014 by Margot Wallstrom, the former foreign affairs minister, it has caught on across the Western world. It gained particular traction in Germany, where Annalena Baerbock, the Foreign Minister, is drawing up an explicitly feminist strategy for diplomacy.

The new right-wing ruling coalition in Sweden, which relies on the hard-right Sweden Democrats for its parliamentary majority, said it would concentrate instead on “promoting Swedish interests in every domain”. It has already removed the feminist foreign policy mission statement from the Government’s website.

“Equality between men and women is a central value for both Sweden and this government, but no, we won’t pursue a feminist foreign policy,” Tobias Billstrom, the newly appointed Foreign Minister, told Aftonbladet.

“The label hasn’t served its purpose and above all it has obscured the fact that Swedish foreign policy must be based on the question of what Sweden’s values and interests are,” he said.

Sweden's former foreign minister Ann Linde. Picture: AFP

What the shift will mean in practice remains to be seen.

Ann Linde, Mr Billstrom’s predecessor, was an enthusiastic proponent of feminist diplomacy, combining it with other liberal causes.

However, critics dismissed the philosophy as platitudinous and ill-suited to an era of great-power rivalry, noting that Sweden had exported weapons to authoritarian regimes and introduced a tough asylum policy.

Swedish traditions of neutrality and avoiding armed conflicts have been diluted: it sent troops to a French-led military task force in Mali, delivered missiles to Ukraine and applied to join NATO.

Mr Billstrom said his main priorities would be NATO accession and European and Nordic-Baltic co-operation.

The Times