Vad var en borggårdskrisen
The crisis has been seen as the culmination of the struggle between the pro-King conservatives and the pro-parliamentary forces. It was rooted in differing views on how much money should be spent on defense - Gustaf V advocated higher funding than the government. World War I broke out in July , six months after the Courtyard Speech, and united the parties on the defense issue.
In , universal and equal suffrage for men was introduced in the elections to the Andra kammaren [ 1 ] The Second Chamber of Parliament , significantly increasing the number of eligible voters to 1 million. This was a development that conservative political forces saw as threatening and wanted to stop. In , the liberal Karl Staaff formed a liberal government with the support of the Social Democrats , not least because new groups of voters with liberal and social democratic sympathies were given the opportunity to vote.
Borggårdskrisen 1914 – Sveriges politiska ödesstund
The differences between the right and the left were already very great, and with the election of Staaff as prime minister, the differences deepened further. A major issue that the Liberals had pushed in their election program was to reduce defense spending. In , more than half of the state budget was spent on defense, [ 2 ] compared to 5. With the Liberal election victory, the construction of the boats was stopped, which led to strong criticism from conservative quarters.
The conservative reaction included right-wing politicians, the conservative newspapers, the military, the church and nationalist commentators. The Ungkyrkorörelsen "Young Church Movement" and the Conservatives each started their own private armored boat collection. Sven Hedin 's book Ett varningsord "A word of warning" was published in in a million copies.
Borggårdskrisen 1914 – Sveriges politiska ödesstund 6
The book warned of Russia and described the horrors of an imaginary Russian occupation. The pro-King arguments followed the pattern of aggressive nationalism that was a common European phenomenon at the time. Down in Europe, the zeitgeist helped lower the threshold for the outbreak of violence in Micaela Edhager had argued that courtyard crisis also reflected a confrontation between two different ideas of how Sweden's poltical system should be arranged, a monarchial one vs a parliamentary system.
On December 21, , Staaff relented and, against the background of increasing international tension, advocated in a speech the expansion of the navy and investments in the army.
On the same day, there was a call for a peasant march in support of defense. The King more or less distanced himself from the Staaff government, while at the same time asserting the personal power of the King, and thus the right to act as supreme commander. Contemporaries suspected that the speech had been written by Verner von Heidenstam , but this was not correct see below.
The speech stated that the King demanded the right to dictate to the assembly what should be decided on matters of importance to him. He had spoken of "my army" and "my navy". Nor had he allowed the prime minister to read the speech in advance. The Social Democrats responded within a few days with a so-called workers' rally, with some 50, participants, in support of the Liberal government, under the slogan "The will of the people alone shall decide in the land of Sweden!
The King's Courtyard Speech could constitute a restriction of the power given to the government, which prompted the Prime Minister to ask him a number of questions shortly afterwards: [ 5 ]. The answers were not satisfactory to the Government. Staaff then presented the King with a proposal for a royal statement that involved a retreat. In addition, Staaff demanded that in future the King should inform the Prime Minister or the minister responsible in advance when the King made statements on political issues.
Finally, the government threatened to resign unless the King could "graciously grant these wishes". These exchanges of correspondence between the King and Staaff were of course not public.
Försvarsstriden och Borggårdskrisen 1914
However, the King responded publicly, referring to Staaff's proposals, which he considered impertinent, and declaring that he could not agree to this arrangement "as I do not wish to relinquish the right to communicate freely with the people of Sweden" - a response that brought the constitutional conflict to a head and showed that the King had no intention of giving in.
The leaders of the Liberal Party in the Riksdag expressed their almost universal solidarity with the minister and issued a manifesto stating that the political struggle had now become about "one of the foundations of all democratic politics; it concerns the self-government of the Swedish people". The Conservative Party leadership, on the other hand, focused its manifesto primarily on the threatening foreign policy situation, which had led other peoples to "submit to the greatest personal and economic sacrifices in order to increase still further their defensive power".
The manifesto continued: "Our people, faced with the gravity of the world situation, have no time to dwell on fruitless but grueling constitutional battles. The life of the realm demands that the question of our defense be settled now, without delay and in a coherent manner.