Commentary in Godmorgon världen, Swedish Radio P1, 25.9.2022

IN DEFENCE OF THE WEST

The afternoon when Queen Elizabeth died, I was in London, and the next morning I went to the rapidly burgeoning sea of flowers at the gates of Buckingham Palace to pay my respects. The electronic billboards on buses, in tube stations and in public places, had overnight changed to a black-framed portrait of the Queen, the whole city seemed to have slowed down a little, and you couldn’t escape the feeling that something big had happened.

More than two weeks later, after a state funeral attended by virtually all the world's leaders, with some telling exceptions, I am beginning to understand what made me, a Swedish citizen on a temporary visit to London, join the queues in front of the palace.

Throughout my life, Queen Elizabeth has, for better or worse, been a symbol of what is commonly known as the West, and the moment when she passed away after seventy years on the throne happened to coincide with the moment when a Russian autocrat, with the threat of nuclear weapons, is launching an unprovoked war of aggression that is ultimately and explicitly directed against this Western world.

We have certainly heard a great deal about the faults and shortcomings of the West these days, not least from Vladimir Putin and the Russian state propaganda, but also from an increasingly authoritarian and aggressive China, which, with the willing support of all kinds of authoritarian regimes and movements, wants to see a weakening of the liberal and democratic values and ideals with which the concept of the West has come to be associated in our time.

Of course, the West has also come to be associated with other things.

When Queen Elizabeth took office as head of state, Britain was still a colonial empire, and if you want to judge the West by its colonial history, there are plenty of accusations to be made. And if you want to judge the West for all the evil that has happened there, and is still happening, there is no end to it.

But there is also no end to the West’s ability to reflect on its own evils, on its shortcomings and weaknesses, and to criticise, reform and reinvent itself.

The capacity for self-reflection, self-examination and self-criticism is for me a central part of the Western tradition and history.

After all, Queen Elizabeth in time also became the symbol of a West coming to terms with its colonial heritage and to some extent trying to atone for its sins.

I too can see the weaknesses and failings, and most often the hypocrisy, of what Putin now hatefully calls the West, and Xi Jinping too for that matter, but I can also see that the world order in which we have lived since the end of the Second World War, and which is largely based on Western ideas and ideals, and which for better or worse - a great deal of worse it has to be said - has had the United States of America as its ultimate guarantor, is well worth defending against the world order for which Vladimir Putin has gone to war, and for which Xi Jinping seems to be gearing up, and which, judging by what they are now saying and doing, they both want to base on the principle that might is right and the strongest wins, and that the mighty and strong have the right to rule over the poor and weak.

The risk of moving towards such a world is not diminished by the fact that the United States of America may well be taken over by forces that share Putin's and Xi Jinping's views on both the ideas and ideals of the West and on liberal democracy.

A year after Hitler's rise to power, the Swedish writer and Nobel Prize winner Pär Lagerkvist stood on the cliff of Acropolis in Athens, “the holy mountain of the West”, as he called it, and looked out on a West in the process of “denying itself “.

“The West has given rise to a concept of freedom of a different nature and meaning than anywhere else,” Pär Lagerkvist wrote in The Clenched Fist, 1934.

And that's probably how I see it too.

And that is probably why, on that early Friday morning in London, I had the impulse to pay my personal respects to a figure who had come to symbolise for me an era in which that concept of freedom was allowed to shape the world.