By Tommy Hansson
Sweden
February 21, 2009

Foreign Minister Carl Bildt is, by far, the most internationally well-known member of the present Swedish “alliance” government consisting of four non-socialist parties where Bildt´s own party, Moderata Samlingspartiet, is the largest and dominating force with Fredrik Reinfeldt as Prime Minister.

Most observers agree that Mr. Bildt, who was Prime Minister 1991-1994, is a competent and well-read Foreign Minister and also a skilled debater. He is, however, also known to be somewhat of a technocrat well versed in the machinery of politics but one that tends to forget that politics is about human beings. Thus, he has been criticized for a lack of sensitivity regarding human rights questions.

One such question, much debated in Sweden these days, concerns the Swedish citizen and journalist Dawit Isaac, who has been imprisoned in Eritrea for seven years because of his criticism of the authoritarian Eritrean regime. It is known that Dawit, of Eritrean origin and suffering from diabetes, has been the subject of harsh treatment by the Eritrean government and was recently taken to hospital for his health problems. While Mr. Bildt and the Swedish government maintains that their “silent diplomacy” in dealing with the Eritreans is the best and most efficient way to handle the Isaak matter, human rights activists as well as the Social Democrat opposition now urge the Swedish government to take a more activist stand in order to put pressure on the Eritreans.

The members of the pro-Israel community in Sweden, further, regularly criticize Bildt on the ground that he, according to them, lacks in sensitivity towards the Jewish state of Israel and its vital security-related needs. When he visited Israel and the Palestinian territories in 2008, for example, Bildt committed one of his rare gaffes when he compared the then Israeli opposition leader Benyamin Netanyahu to the terrorist Hamas regime in Gaza. Bildt´s comment drew harsh criticism from the Israeli foreign ministry, whose spokesman accused Bildt of being ignorant about the real situation in Israel and Palestine.

Who, then, is the real Carl Bildt? A skilled international diplomat or an unsensitive technocrat lacking in human empathy? In order to answer those questions we have, I believe, to study Bildt´s career in its entirety.

The best analysis of Carl Bildt´s political career so far is, in my opinion, the late Swedish journalist Lars Lundberg´s book “Bilder av Bildt” (Pictures of Bildt) published in 1994. Here Lundberg returns to Bildt´s youth and his time as a precocious student politician in the late sixties and early seventies and notes that Bildt, albeit being a Conservative, was quite pragmatic in his views and actions. In 1970, for example, Bildt wrote a communication for consideration to the Swedish United Students´ Union on behalf of the Stockholm Students´ Union concerning the matter of establishing a European youth fund. Bildt and his co-signer, union chairman Tomas Thiel, emphasized that it is of “the utmost importance that the fund is not designed in a way that excludes the East European States from its work…it is true that this implicates that one to a certain degree has to waive the demand that the operation shall be founded on those principles that is the base of the activity of The Council of Europe, but on the other hand it is difficult to imagine how the objective that is expressed in the regulation draft, to work for a ‘lasting peace in Europe’, may be realized if this is not taking place.”

This linguistic usage is typical of Bildt´s rather bureaucratic way of expressing himself. The bottom line is, in Lars Lundberg´s words, that “Bildt and the likewise Conservative Thiel has signed a document which claims that a lasting peace in Europe can be obtained only if one waives the democratic principles of The Council of Europe.” Carl Bildt, thus, was hardly a staunch anti-Communist during the Cold War years although he certainly favoured Western-style democracy and had a keen international interest, which led him to the conclusion that the traditional national state was obsolete. In his capacity as international secretary of the Stockholm Students´ Union Bildt, further, supported student funding for the Communist guerrilla movements FRELIMO in Mozambique and Viet Cong in South Vietnam. This must be regarded as a concession to the revolutionary atmosphere at the University of Stockholm at that time.

In another forum, the Conservative Free Moderate Students´ Association´s journal Svensk Linje, Mr. Bildt expressed some understanding for Eastern Germany (“DDR”) and the importance of not leaving this Communist state outside the European community in an article with the headline “DDR in Our Hearts”. Regarding Israel, Bildt and others maintained, in opposition to the Students´Association´s official policy, that the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 contradicted the “rights of the Palestinian Arabs” in the Middle East area.

Carl Bildt managed to take only one grade during his five years as a college student, no doubt due to his abundant political activities. After college he made a rapid political career, first as a regional politician and then as personal secretary of the then leader of Moderata Samlingspartiet, Gösta Bohman, whose daughter Bildt married in 1974 (he is now in his third marriage). After a career as a Member of Parliament and party leader Carl Bildt became Prime Minister in 1991, a post he held until 1994 when the Social Democrats returned to power in Stockholm. In 1995, Bildt was appointed the European Union´s so called High Representative with the task of monitoring the realization of the Dayton Peace Agreement regarding Bosnien-Hercegovina.

In 1997 Bildt returned to Sweden in order to lead his party towards the Swedish parliamentary elections the following year; the Social Democrats, however, won another victory and Bildt went on to undertake new international duties. 1999-2001 he functioned as U. N. Secretary General Kofi Annan´s special representative on the Balkan Peninsula. Before he was named Foreign Minister in Reinfeldt´s government in 2006, Carl Bildt made his living as a member of a number of Swedish and international boards and/or organizations, such as The Commission on Globalization, The Trilateral Commission, and the controversial Bilderberg Group. He was also active in the business world as a board-member of the controversial Swedish Lundin Oil Company, which made tricky businesses in Sudan where Christians were slaughtered en masse by the Islamist regime. As already mentioned, human rights issues have never been one of Bildt´s stronger points.

My answer to the two questions mentioned above is, that Mr. Carl Bildt in all probability is both a skilful diplomat/international politician (he doesn´t care too much for domestic matters) and a rather dry and unsensitive technocrat with an aloof and reserved personal style. In the latter respect, many observers have pointed out the similarities between him and the late (murdered), left-wing Prime Minister Olof Palme.