This research project will focus on the political community that operated in Stockholm on behalf of the established political system in Denmark. It will investigate how this group of people managed to construct and maintain the movement of ideas, people and knowledge between Copenhagen, Stockholm and London. Several members of this community had close links to the Danish Social Democratic party and coordinated their efforts with the Swedish Social Democrats. However, the community was politically diverse and included people with looser formal or informal ties to different political circles in Denmark.
So far, actors’ memoirs as well as scholarship have mostly focused on these expats as part of the resistance and as contributors to the Allied war effort. As a consequence, existing scholarship has toned down or even overlooked the pointed efforts made by members of the Stockholm community, often under the guise of resistance, to work for a particular political post-war political order that did not align with the aims of the more radical fractions of the resistance movement.
This project wants to place these activities at the center of attention and explore the ideological, cultural and emotional vocabularies and practices that tied the political community in Stockholm together and carried its relations with politicians in Denmark, with Swedish Social Democrats and with the competing political exile environment in London.
Associate Professor, PhD, Niels Wium Olesen is an expert on Danish and European history after 1870. His research has been focused on political history – where politics is broadly understood as a social phenomenon that is also defined by culture, economy, and structural changes in society. He has a particular interest in how political legitimacy is created through political processes and actions. For 30 years he has published on the history of the Second World War.
