Preface to The Nordic Countries: From War to Cold War, 1944–1951

Abstract

This article is based on the preface to the DBPO volume. It describes some of the background to the events which are illustrated by the documents included in the volume. The end of the Second World War brought hopes of building a new society in Europe. These documents reveal the nature of Foreign Office concerns about the range of problems, both multilateral and bilateral, which still remained to be resolved in the Nordic area, and describe the evolution of policies to deal with them. In particular, they describe the means by which Britain attempted to encourage Scandinavian countries away from their support for neutrality and, by enlisting American support, began the process which led to the signature of the Atlantic Treaty in 1949.

Keywords:

• Great Britain
• United States
• Denmark
• Finland
• Iceland
• Norway
• Sweden
• Cold War
• NATO
• IRD
• foreign policy
• security
• trade

Notes

1 Gathorne-Hardy, ‘Preface’, vii.

2 Terminology presents problems when dealing with the Nordic region, and we may not have been entirely consistent in resolving them. ‘The Nordic countries’, denoting the four Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – together with Finland was not a term commonly used at the time; its appearance in this volume is therefore mainly confined to the title and to editorial material. ‘Scandinavia’ is often used in the documents to denote only the three continental Scandinavian countries (i.e. excluding Iceland), but sometimes to describe the Nordic region more generally, while ‘the Scandinavian peninsula’ refers to Norway and Sweden alone.

3 Documents on the negotiations for the US loan agreement are printed in DBPO, series I, vol. III.

4 Although Eden did not report Molotov's demands to Churchill until January 1945, his diary showed that Lie did consult him privately on 24 November (Avon papers, University of Birmingham, AP 20/1/24).

5 Collier despatch of 21 March 1946, FO 371/56284, N/4710/219/30.

6 Moscow telegram No. 970, 10 March 1946, FO 371/56107, N3249/62/15.

7 Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was Commander in Chief of the British Army of the Rhine and the British member of the Allied Control Council.

8 C. E. Steel had recommended refusal of a Danish government proposal to send a Danish subject to Flensburg to take over the job of General Secretary of the Danish minority movement in South Schleswig. When this telegram, and a further one in which he recommended refusal of Møller's request to visit Flensburg, were shown to Eden, he minuted to Cadogan ‘Doesn't Steel seem rather anti-Dane in these telegrams?’

9 Record of a meeting between Warner and Reventlow, 24 January 1947, FO 371/65854, N895/121/15.

10 Rose despatch to Bevin of 7 June 1947, FO 371/65854, N6980/121/15.

11 Reventlow's memoirs offer a personal perspective on UK–Danish relations in this period: Reventlow, I dansk tjeneste, 177–226.

12 Letter to Warner, 4 July 1946, FO 371/56109, N8829/63/15.

13 Minute of 23 June 1945, FO 371/48042, N7135/1106/42.

14 Despatch of 30 March 1948, FO 371/71451, N4021/637/63.

15 Further details of UK–US discussions on bases in Iceland in 1945–1946 are contained in DBPO, series I, vol. III, nos. 48, 90, 102–3, 127, 135; and series I, vol. IV, nos. 15, 23, 69.

16 The important telegrams and despatches sent by Frank Roberts from Moscow in March 1946 are printed in DBPO, series I, vol. VI, nos. 77, 79–80, 82–7.

17 No evidence has yet been found to demonstrate that these concerns were well founded. Korobochkin, ‘Soviet Policy towards Finland and Norway 1947–49’, 202, concludes, on the basis of research in Russian Foreign Ministry archives, that this was a false alarm and that the available Soviet sources give no indication that the idea of proposing such a treaty was ever contemplated. Some clues to the sources of Norwegian alarm are given in documents printed in Holtsmark, Norge og Sovietunionen. One is a telegram of 7 March from the Norwegian ambassador in Helsinki, H. C. Berg, reporting a conversation with a Russian contact who had told him about a non-aggression pact which had been proposed by the then Norwegian Prime Minister in 1930 (p. 415). The contact had remarked that the negotiations had come to nothing because the Norwegian government fell and the Russian Ambassador was posted elsewhere. The source of Berg's information is thought by the editor to have been Aleksandra Kollontay, the Soviet Ambassador to Sweden, who had been posted there from Oslo in 1930. Another is a telegram of 7 March from the Norwegian Minister in Warsaw A. Danielsen, which reported information from a diplomatic colleague who had quoted a well-informed source, close to the Polish government, as saying that after Finland it would be the turn of Norway (p. 416). Although Danielsen did not name his colleague, it is believed by the editor to have been C. A. H. Westring, the Swedish Minister in Warsaw.

18 DBPO, series I, vol. VI, no. 88.

19 FO Tel. No. 64 to Oslo of 29 January 1948, FO 371/71485, N1336/34/30.