Around 1900, Swedish political and ideological debate was about… Sweden: defence, unions, voting rights, the forest, workers’ and women’s rights. The international political issues that dominated foreign coverage before the First World War – the Boer War, the Balkan question, alliance systems and German rearmament – did not divide opinion to any significant extent back home. The only non-local issue to ruffle Swedes a bit was Finland’s agony under the Russification decree. However, Finland was not a controversial issue. There were – as yet – no Swedes with a passion for Russian power politics.

Yet as early as the First World War, the Swedish debate on opinions had become more continental. Germanness, Francophilia and Anglophilia were emphasised and given concrete applications. Expressions of bitterness and distrust between the supporters of the Central Powers and Entente Alliance were strikingly shrill and belligerent, a forewarning of the divide that would later break open between America haters and their critics.

After the war, the world beyond Sweden exerted an ever greater impact in the country’s debates. To some extent, this was because many of Sweden’s most exasperating issues could be struck from the agenda as a result of political compromises, but mainly because Swedish men of letters had begun to travel like never before, by train, plane and automobile. The hot topic for most opinion-mongers was the Treaties of Trianon and Versailles: Were they fair, and had they provided Europe with the stability their advertisers had promised?

Many of those who had taken the most narrow-minded positions during the First World War, like Fredrik Böök and Sven Hedin, now had a more obliging line of policy for their messages. The peace treaties drawn up in these castles in the air were not just cruelly unfair, with an amputated Hungary being the most flagrant illustration. They also failed to fulfil their purpose and paved the way for more bad news. The healing power of the nation as a concept was a vision rather than a method, and there was an embarrassing irony that this recipe for high-minded peaceful coexistence had a racist president from the American South, Woodrow Wilson, as its godfather.

Another area subject to discussion was Mussolini’s new Italy. The country was especially exciting since it was thought to represent an alternative to the Swedish model taking shape at that time. Sweden was being transformed through compromises between capital, labour and politicians. In Italy, those involved were subjugated with the same whip, without discussion or negotiation, and the results were in many people’s eyes a success. Our leading Italy authority and habitué, Anders Österling, maintained an ironic distance from the infantile cult of violence of Italian modernism, but was reluctantly impressed by the showpieces of Fascism: clean streets and punctual trains.

Later on, the collapses of the German and Spanish republics were followed with great interest. Yet events beyond Europe were still not relevant to any great extent. Japanese atrocities in China were mentioned in brief telegrams but never triggered any show of solidarity. However, after 1945, to an increasing degree, Swedish ideologues and opinion-makers began to clash on foreign territory. The United States and Soviet Union were geopolitical poles, and they soon became moral ones as well: to show one’s colours was to express one’s view on the power play between these Great Powers and their diametrically opposed systems. During Sweden’s “third position debate”, a large number of the country’s poets – but few others – insisted that the US and USSR were birds of a feather.

After Stalin’s death in 1953 and Senator Joe McCarthy’s inquisitions in the US, the market was ripe for the message of a “third position”. Stalin’s genocide and terror were certainly known about and documented in the West. (In the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter’s archives, there are numerous thick folders with articles about the slave labour camps as early as the late 1940s.) But facts in the case were conjured away or denied by this coterie of writers. The Swede Ragnar Rudfalk, who survived the gulag and wrote a book about it, was branded a liar. The government, in its aim not to draw Soviet attacks unnecessarily, carried out a foreign policy that was essentially an application of this third position. Swedes in general were not as ambivalent about the Communist terror regime in the east. Hearts bled for the Czechs in 1948 and the Hungarians in 1956 but lasting engagement requires a minimum of hope, and protests against Soviet hegemony seemed futile, like combating an ice age with Greek choruses.

The boycott against South Africa’s racist regime was the first broad project involving Swedish public opinion in favour of non-Europeans. The struggle against apartheid was never a controversial issue in Sweden; both Herbert Tingsten at DN and the Swedish Liberal party were in general agreement with the Social Democrats. During the Vietnam War, debate in Sweden raged even more fiercely. The course of the war, with its terrorist bombings and burned civilians, went in the left’s favour in moral terms, and those pleading the American cause were silenced. Geostrategically, the war was far from being a black-and-white matter, but it was impossible to defend the way the war was fought.

The increasingly emboldened international involvement of Swedes was in part an attempt to level a growing imbalance, which came to light in the 1960s. On the one hand, we had a society in which the most blatant injustices were being overcome. Situations that really aroused feelings – talented people who could not afford to study, violence against striking workers and poor people with no healthcare – were on the decline. On the other hand, once we got our own house in order, we eagerly groped for new objects for our moral concern. We were no longer living in a glass house; our progress at home gave legitimacy to our strict moral judgement of the rest of the world, in foreign eyes as well. In large parts of Africa and Latin America, Sweden became the model. To put it crassly, we were no longer self-sufficient when it came to drama and ideological set pieces. We had to start importing them.

The Cold War froze reality in Europe, but a great deal was happening elsewhere. The hopefulness of Africa’s new states had not yet dissipated; major events with right-left implications were taking place in Asia after the US defeat and death of Mao. The 1970s were the heyday of foreign coverage. Our newspapers were wealthier than ever and expanded coverage to every part of the globe. Many a youth was more deeply involved in the future of Cuba, Palestine and South Africa than that of Sweden.

This kind of involvement, when carried out in good faith, is admirable. A person who takes time, money and risks to help others, and whose conscience is not limited locally, makes a better world. The intentions of Swedes who renounced South African marmalade – it was the best and the cheapest – were pure. But as we lost our ideological battles abroad, the country’s parties and movements were soon mixing ethics and a concern with prestige and tactics. Our sympathy sometimes turned out to be simply a pose or an attempt to disguise a taking of ideological sides.

Latin America is a classic example of this. Latin America was our first big continent for the media and for debate. It was the only part of the world whose language, faith and modern history is accessible to Europeans without requiring background studies. Latin America’s ideological terrain was also reminiscent of Europe’s; there was a right and a left, advocates of free trade and protectionists, US haters and US friends. And things were happening there. If the Cold War put Europe on ice, it set Latin America on fire, for better or worse. The Cuban Revolution of 1956–59 was the first time that things really caught fire.

Latin America was a comfortable setting for much of what Swedes needed to act out. In Sweden, the distinctions between high and low, rich and poor, good and evil had lost some of their clarity. The Cuban Revolution, like the Spanish Republic and the Russian Revolution, was a middle-class project. Almost everyone who put their life on the line against the dictator Batista was a passionate democrat. Frank Tannenbaum, the utopian Socialist and Latin American expert, understood early on that Fidel Castro was not a genuine freedom fighter but yet another in a long line of caudillos.

His dismal predictions were quickly realised. Eight months after the revolutionary leaders captured Havana, the most popular of them, Camilo Cienfuegos (dead in an airplane accident that was never cleared up) and Huber Matos (20 years in prison for treason) were out of the game. There were very few Marxists in Castro’s inner circle. His brother Raúl was one of them. But Communism became Castro’s lifeline, the only acceptable explanation for elections failing to take place and Cuba’s shameless position as a Soviet client. (Six billion dollars a year, the greatest sum of financial aid in the history of the world and the bulk of the Soviet Union’s dollar reserves was what Cuba cost its new benefactor.)

Castro’s sudden conversion to Marxism would turn out to be a stroke of genius, which paved the way into the Kremlin’s bank vault and the hearts of European radicals. Educated Europeans would have turned their nose up at yet another conventional Caribbean dictator, but the term “revolutionary” befuddled many, and Castro, who murdered his comrades, locked up poets and laid the fertile countryside to waste with his mad decrees, was able to profit from Swedish naïveté for decades.

Cuba was the first time that Western involvement in the Third World went totally awry. Depictions in the European press of Cuba’s transformation into a Soviet beneficiary were remarkably feeble. If collectivisation had yielded some dividend that could be offset by the democratic deficit, it would have been easier to understand the success of exporting the revolution. But Cuba’s industry and agriculture, which were far from being the most backward, were laid to waste in just a few years.

Russian money did not go towards development but towards guns and butter. There is still a widespread misconception that Cuban Communism introduced literacy and public healthcare in Cuba. (Literacy was 79 per cent before the revolution, and Cuba’s healthcare was unique – more advanced and more democratic than any other country in Latin America.) Another myth that Castro succeeded in drumming in far afield was that Cuba had been subject to a blockade. Despite the US embargo, which has had a number of exemptions and restrictions since 2000, Cuba has been drowning in opportunities for foreign aid, loans and trade. They have been outside the world of trade not because they were closed out but because they could not offer any marketable goods.

When Castro was revealed as a tyrant and darkness descended on Cuba, only a few admirers grasped the consequences. The Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the darlings of the regime, protested. So did Carlos Lacerda, Brazil’s most brilliant journalist, and the Chilean diplomat Jorge Edwards. They paid a heavy price for their principles. But most continued their guard of honour, with Gabriel García Marquez leading the way.

Those who relinquished all criticism of revolutionary Cuba were either cynics, who knew what was going on and could live with it, or dyed-in-the-wool believers, who dismissed any criticism as enemy propaganda. The intellectuals’ crisis of loyalty over Cuba set off a celebrated debate in the magazine Encounter between Vargas Llosa and Günther Grass, when the Peruvian accused the German and his fellow Europeans of reverse racism: they were always ready to prescribe violence and dictatorship for people in the Third World, a cure they would have revolted against on their own turf.

The same psychological patterns are repeated today. A number of Latin American countries are balancing their budgets, accumulating capital, generating trade surpluses and building schools. However, the joy in the West over progress on the continent has been surprisingly restrained in recent years. If Latin America has ended up close to our hearts out of sympathy rather than because of ideology, then we should be a little happier about its progress. Swedish news consumers know less about the matter than Swedish savers, who have had record returns on their Latin American portfolios. Corrupt, violent and Fascist-tinged leaders, like the Kirchner clan in Argentina or Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, are persecuting the press and ruining their economies, but are often portrayed as progressives by Swedish commentators. It has been said that Kirchner’s and Chávez’s anti-American rhetoric is a hit with European radicals.

I believe there is another factor that is just as crucial to their appeal: their failure. “Dependency theory”, which maintained that Third World countries would never be able to pull themselves up through trade with wealthy countries, was a linchpin in the left’s involvement with the Third World. But since 1985, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Columbia, Israel, China, India, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and many other former developing countries have abandoned protectionist state populism and have profited through global trade. It is becoming increasingly difficult to adhere to the idea of a curse on the Third World as postulated in dependency theory. (Dependency theory was already being dashed to pieces in the 1950s by the Nobel laureate Arthur Lewis, a great – Social Democratic – genius who, not surprisingly, is completely unknown in either Sweden or Latin America.)

But the Kirchners and Hugo Chávez have failed according to the old recipe. They have wasted abundant import revenues – some one hundred million dollars a day in Chávez’s case – using the money to import food and subsidise consumption. What better proof is there that Latin America is still in fetters! Both the Kirchner family and Hugo Chávez hammer on with their message that the US and imperialism are to blame for their failure. The truth is not readily available to concerned Swedes. And in the Latin American countries that have made a macroeconomic recovery, there are masses of people living in squalor, violence and blatant injustice. A correspondent can, without resorting to lies, produce authentic reports that confirm our conventional view of Latin America as a failed continent.

One of the battles we lost on foreign fields is over historical materialism, the idea that the allocation of raw materials and the means of production are the engine of political development. The left’s grand narrative for the Third World was predicated on the US, with a small clique of capitalists in tow, acting on foreign soil for materialist purposes, in order to devour and grab for themselves. Many individual companies and entrepreneurs were certainly motivated by a desire for profit, but this description was inaccurate. Washington’s policy in Latin America was not determined by the demand for raw materials, but by the Cold War.

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During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the American marines regrouped in a number of Caribbean countries, often at the prompting of America’s colonialist consumer corporations. But the interventions in Guatemala in 1953, Cuba in 1961, the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Chile in 1970 were all ideologically motivated. The US fear of Communism took precedence over every other concern. When the country was forced to choose between trade in raw materials and fighting Communists, they always chose the latter. The Christian Democrats in Chile were ossified protectionists in the 1960s, as were the Brazilian generals who took power in 1964, but the US did not hesitate to support them. With the end of the Cold War, so too the end of US involvement in the domestic affairs of these countries.

Latin America was my interest as a student, but I wound up most often in Jerusalem, where I tried to churn out articles for the Swedish media. At the beginning, it was not at all easy. Jerusalem, which journalists and diplomats nowadays dream about, had low status. Being stationed in Cairo or Beirut was much more prestigious. And far into the 1970s, freelance writers in Latin America had an advantage over those in the Middle East.

The drawback of the Middle East as an ideological playing field was that it was harder to include the US in the equation there than in Latin America. It was sometimes said that Israel was the US bridgehead in the region, that it was keeping watch over US oil interests. But that was sheer desperation. The US would never have allowed Israel to make war in its name, especially not against America’s oil suppliers. Quite the opposite: without the US, Israeli extremists would have colonised the West Bank far earlier, and the peace accords of 1979 (Egypt), 1993 (the PLO) and 1994 (Jordan) would have taken much longer.

The record for maintaining a home-grown ideological straightjacket on a multifaceted reality was broken during the civil war in Lebanon in 1975–90. This hodgepodge of battling clans, which changed loyalties and sponsors with impunity, was reduced in the Swedish papers to something very convenient: an ideological struggle between “Christian right-wing forces” and “Islamic left-wing forces”. No one can understand what was written in these Swedish reports about Lebanon at the time unless they understand Sweden. In Sweden in 1975, the left’s triumphal procession through the country’s editorial offices was in full swing. “Left” was a code word for “good”, just as “right” was a code word for “evil”. Christianity was not dead as a doornail as it is in Swedish society today, and it was still slightly progressive to give it a scolding. Islam was also a religion, but accompanied by a couple of – unsubstantiated – associations (pro-PLO, anti-US), it was made into something far less offensive than Christianity.

In the Lebanese war of reality, the most radical leftist forces were Christian. The most right-wing combatants were Shiite. The emblematic “right-wing force”, the Maronite Falangists, which later formed an alliance with Israel, was called the Lebanese Social Democratic Party in Arabic. The “leftist Muslim” leadership was teeming with prominent Christians. The labels used in the Swedish news made it completely futile to depict the changing course of events with any credibility. (I criticised this use of language in an op-ed piece. That same week, a well-meaning temporary hire at DN’s foreign desk changed the term I chose in a text about Lebanon to “Christian right-wing forces”!)

In Lebanon today, there is not the faintest glimpse of either Christian right-wing forces or Muslim left-wing forces. Just as in the past, the Lebanese gang up on foreign intruders as best they can, without any orthodoxy of a right-left model – at present, every secular group regardless of their faith (including secular Shiites) – against an Islamic Hezbollah. Nowadays, democrats in the Middle East are less and less anti-American while antidemocrats there are more and more anti-American. A small number of “Islam experts” and Swedes who romanticise violence – and who are nonetheless frequently heard – depict the terrorists and women-haters of the Arab world as some sort of Social Democrats.

The democrats and secularists of the Arab world, who often act at risk of their lives in the terror regimes of Egypt, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, are met with less interest and encouragement in the Swedish media. The explanation, as always, is to be found in our mental universe, not theirs. What Swedes who romanticise violence and revolution look for in Hamas and Hezbollah is something they have lost in Sweden, not the Orient.