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Per Wirtén’s new book, “Europe, constantly this Europe”, is in the bookstores. Already in childhood, a seed sprouted in him. Grandmother and grandfather lived for a time in the narrow service home at the back of the Fogelstads mission house, where the Fogelstads group met. Her grandmother was a devoted admirer of one of them, Elin Wägner.
– Elin Wägner has been a name mentioned as a child and adults spoke. As soon as we passed Fogelstad some memory was mentioned. It is a place that existed in my life and that activated my imagination. When I finally read the classic biography of Elin Wägners by Ulla Isaksson and Erik Hjalmar Linder, I got even more involved. You have no imagination unless you are fascinated by the love story he had for a few years in the 1920s with a German nationalist who was involved in a spectacular political assassination while feminist and pacifist. That’s where it started for me.
Per Wirtén began to read and did not stop. Digging through the archives, he was increasingly surprised, especially since parts of our history are barely told.
Impressive acting power
He notes that the optimistic power of the Fogelstads group was staggering. In just two years, in the 1920s, they formed a national political organization, a women’s education business, and a newspaper, Tidevarvet. However, society was extremely patriarchal today. He has reflected on how these women managed to achieve all of this.
– They created a group of experts, perhaps the first from Sweden. They could, because they were both strongly convinced and with political experience. Through the fight for the right to vote and the fight for women’s rights in working life, they learned the political game. They were not powerless, they came from bourgeois environments with money, the importance of this should not be underestimated. And what they did was incredible, that they managed to create a school where women could come and that worked until the 50s, a great project! The Fogelstads group came up with ideas, educated people, and sat in Parliament.
But it did not last, but finally the project ended in the sand. Per Wirtén does not feel that he has found the answer to the question of why.
– But one explanation may be that they were a very small group that kept everything under control, so power is lost.
Revolutionary critics of the system
But of the Fogelstad women, it is Elin Wägner who plays the leading role in the next book. He highlights his keenness and action and his recurring conflict in wanting to belong to organized contexts and to be free on his own terms. Elin Wägner was a dark but revolutionary critique of the system, he summarizes.
But Per Wirtén is not a moderate fanatic at the same time. He believes, among other things, that his feminist analysis of the cruelty of male society was incomplete and that there could be a gap between what he saw and what he wrote, which may later seem outdated, even morally reactionary. And the word justice also shines with its absence. Still, he wanted to write the book. Why?
– Because Elin Wägner struggled with problems that we are still struggling with today. I write about the 1920s when she traveled a lot, discovered the European problem and was part of a women’s peace movement. These are thoughts that feel very modern. Elin Wägner is an unusually interesting intellectual. Especially since she was an internationalist and I think the idea of internationalism at the moment is very important. Following the crown, growing conservatism will be promoted, there is a great risk that isolationist values will conquer the center of the political field.
Internationalism is needed
At the same time, Corona teaches that society needs to be less reliant on transportation, to cope with everything from food supplies to the production of health care materials, and the climate also requires less transportation. But Per Wirtén does not see it hindering the development of internationalism.
– It is climatically intelligent to be an internationalist. We can only manage the climate crisis together. International decision making is necessary for joint decisions and we need international institutions, such as the EU and the United Nations.
Many people hope that the crown crisis can lead to a better and stronger world, but Per Wirtén finds it difficult to share optimism.
– A world lit after the crown, of course I want it! Crises change things in depth, we know that. On September 11, the fall of the wall, the Second World War … But the common of the new ideas that have emerged is that they have been prepared before the crises. Where are the prepared left ideas that could be realized now? Unfortunately, I don’t see it. The climate problem is being raised and ideas about basic income are being raised, but I don’t see the social political forces that can take them into account. These ideas bring together extremist groups that can get 4-5 percent in the general election. In fact, I am deeply pessimistic, for the first time in my life. And so it is still my job as a writer and intellectual, to see opportunities, possible avenues for ideas, like Pickety for the future: wealth tax, tax on financial transactions at the supranational level …
An EU in crisis
But he maintains the belief in the EU as a necessary cooperation for internationalism, despite pointing out that the EU is a crisis organization, which is not manifesting itself at this time, when Germany does not want to pay for the crown crisis at European level, and has the support of wealthier countries than Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. The solution, says Per Wirtén, is democratization. To transfer the power of the Council to Parliament.
– As long as we have the order that the heads of government decide, nothing will happen. Rich countries keep their privileges. The EU is in a deep crisis, the risk is very high that the EU will lose even more legitimacy in the poorest countries, but the EU will not collapse. Brexit did not make it possible and it will not happen now.
What can come out of the EU crisis?
– Perhaps Hungary will be excluded, I hope so! But we already see that the EU budget will grow, up to two percent of the countries’ GDP, instead of one percent, which is an unexpected consequence of the crown. Disaster will strengthen common power, which is good! The problem is that democracy is lacking. But a broader EU budget can be used for major regional policy and to combat mass unemployment. It is left-wing politics, and that the Left Party in Sweden is against the EU obtaining a bigger budget is a scandal, they represent the doctrine of austerity, which is right-wing politics.
From the left, criticism from the EU indicates that the free movement of capital is Paragraph 1A of the Treaty Portal: is it possible to avoid these criticisms?
– Yes, because the portal section also says about social rights and full employment. The EU is not carved in stone.
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When it was thought, in 1929, to form a Customs Union for free trade and open borders with “federal ties” between countries, Elin Wägner was in Geneva, supervising the great UN meeting for the Tidewarvet magazine.
He described Aristide Briand’s and the French government’s proposal for a united Europe as “a first test.” In his book, Per Wirtén sums up his thoughts: “It can’t be helped if you think I’m a little crazy, but I have to say that I think the time has come for European states to unite economically, politically, socially and above all financially “
After all, we know that the EU was finally formed, however much it wanted to. And at that moment he gives Elin Wägner the right, the formation of the EC and from the EU has been good for Europe.
– But not how it developed and looks. The EU lacks a fully democratic structure. The European Parliament must become the nucleus of politics, so we can talk about a European idea. The distributive and social aspirations that I and many others, perhaps most of all Europeans, want to characterize the Union will never happen without democratization. The problem is not supranational legislation, but the lack of supranational democracy. The EU is a political institution, and these are important. Can change.
Serious for injustice
Just because she was an internationalist, Elin Wägner was a controversial icon of the opposition women’s movement of her time. Per Wirtén explains that she belonged to a generation of feminists shaped by the First World War, who became attached to her pacifist ideas when World War II came.
– World War I was a completely meaningless war, neither side was good. It made it easier to be a radical pacifist, as she was. The pacifism he defended was not only personal, rejecting weapons, it was about building supranational institutions of peace and reconciliation, working for total disarmament. Then came World War II, which was an attempt to stop barbarism, but she stuck to her pacifist principles when others thought about it. I do not agree with his views in the 1930s. It is developing in an anti-modern direction, launched the international one, advocated for the small community, the people in the forest. In that idea is isolation, which is difficult for me. She changed her view of feminism, wrote mother instead of woman, became a biologist. Here I am very critical. But you have to see both sides of Elin Wägner. She is not an icon, she is a minefield. It is impossible to agree with everything, but it is disturbing to read it reflecting on where, as a true intellectual, he fought with his world.
For example, Per Wirtén believes that it is a scandal that Elin Wägner’s “Alarm Clock” is a practically unread classic of the political idea.
– It is a fantastic book, although it is largely unsuccessful and sometimes indiscriminate, but it is still one of the few books that attacks society in general.
He thinks everyone should read it; for his determination and his seriousness for the injustices of the world.
– She formed a coherent idea of her place in the world. If you try to find a vision of life, sometimes you are wrong, but the seriousness and the drive are admirable. I still believe in the links between masculinity, militarism, and nationalism that he formulated.
Elin Wägner perceived gender struggle as equally motivating for the development of society as Marxists viewed class struggle. She is right?
– yes I think so. In history and now we see that there is a gender power system, like a racial order, that gives rise to conflicts. There is economic and social inequality … What we are fighting is that the schemes coincide and become complicated, which can make orientation difficult. There is no dominant battle that decides everything else.
Breaking down the standards
Suggestion was a recurring and important word in Wägner’s attempt to explain how generally accepted norms and attitudes could work in the hunt, even in the detainees’ own conscience. Today, the same phenomenon is generally described as the power of discourses and Per Wirtén urges that idea be kept alive.
– Nationalism is an example of suggestion or the power of today’s discourses. It has become the golden cage to which everyone runs away when frightened, especially at the time of the coronation. Nationalism is partly irrational, but it is a force of real suggestion. We live in a host of suggestions, affecting what we believe to be right and wrong, what creates the state.
The Fogelstads group advocated not only for internationalism and pacifism, but also for human liberation. They tried to break abusive norms in society, especially in the sexual field.
In Fogelstad, several of the women were lesbian or perhaps bisexual. Of course, there was nothing they talked about openly. Homosexuality not only violated the norm, it was still prohibited and could lead to prosecution, but the expression of the women of Fogelstad was generally what we would call today queer.
– They did not fight that fight, it was impossible, but they were the forerunners of it, through how they lived their lives, and that is enough.
Per Wirtén describes photographs in which Honorine Hermelin resembles a boy with her exceptionally short hair and where Ada Nilsson poses in a white shirt and bow tie in the same arrogant and elusive masculine style that the powerful editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter, Herbert Tingsten.
– When looking at the images of how they look, they must have been perceived as provocative.
That they paved the way for a queer liberation, Per Wirtén says we should thank them for that. But that is not enough:
– I especially want to thank you for changing your eyes on the world, seeing it from the perspective of the oppressed, seeing a world that is much bigger. I would like to thank all the oppressed groups for changing their eyes, because there is a world that we do not always see. But you can learn to see, and that discovery is liberating. It leads to points of view that are revolutionary, and it is democracy that frees the opportunity to develop an alternative view.
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