Activism, Diplomacy and Swedish–German Relations during the First World War

The main hypothesis of this article contends that unofficial, informal, private, or alternative variants of diplomacy are by no means a recent phenomenon, but rather belong to the key, indeed constitutive elements of traditional aristocracy- and court-based diplomacy. In order to illustrate the continued effect of unofficial or semi-official diplomatic networks on the perception and making of policy I use the example of the relations between neutral Sweden and the German Empire during the First World War. It is here, enabled by the neutral abstention of Sweden from the conflict, that politics and diplomacy most effectively preserved their function and even enhanced their significance, while increasingly obscuring the delineation between the official and the unofficial, almost to the point of rendering such distinctions useless.