This article takes a close look at how the United States used the funding of scientific research in Sweden as a hegemonic and propaganda tool in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that non-aligned Sweden functioned just as much as a node in the international science network set up by the Americans after the Second World War as did the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. These funds were awarded mainly to an elite network of prominent Swedish scientists. The article sheds interesting light on the controversies of such funding in Sweden during the cold war and adds important knowledge about Swedish-American relations during the cold war. The article argues that this Swedish scientific elite co-produced US hegemony in Sweden by actively seeking out American military funding and by making use of it. It also argues that US funding was intended to portray the United States as an altruistic patron of science in the world and thus serve American propagandistic purposes as well.
This article deals with the relations between perhaps Sweden's most influential publicist during the Cold War, the professor of political science and editor-in-chief of Sweden's largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter 1946-1959, Herbert Tingsten, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a CIA-sponsored organisation gathering the elite of the world's non-communist leftist intellectuals, Congress for Cultural Freedom and its Swedish sub-branch called 'Svenska kommitten for kulturens frihet' (SKfKF). Tingsten was a professor of political science at University of Stockholm from 1935 to 1946 and then editor-in-chief of Sweden's largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter from 1946 to 1959. It argues that parts of Tingsten's work both as an opinion maker and as a scholar was part of a symbiotic relationship with the CCF and the SKfKF. Tingsten was the foremost propagator for the 'end of ideology' thesis in Sweden and the article argues that this campaign was inspired by the CCF's advancement of this idea in the 1950s and 1960s. Tingsten was personally acquainted with several CCF intellectuals and he visited several of the CCF's conferences. The article also makes the case that Tingsten helped the CCF and the SKfKF's causes and furthered their agendas in a number of ways during his time as editor-in-chief of DN. For example, Tingsten allowed the SKfKF to use DN as a platform for presenting its ideas and programmes to a broader public. The article thus shows how the CCF network of intellectuals influenced opinion making in non-aligned Sweden.