Suchergebnisse

"This study focuses on two Swedish politicians, Nils Flyg and Sven Olov Lindholm. During the interwar era, they were both leaders of various Swedish political parties; in the case of Flyg the Swedish Communist Party, and later on the Socialist Party; in the case of Lindholm the National Socialist Worker's Party (later renamed Swedish Socialist Unity). Both men were, in other words, influential politicians located at the outer edges of the ideological landscape.
During the span of their lifetimes, however, Flyg as well as Lindholm made remarkable ideological transitions. From the end of the thirties and onwards, the former communist leader Flyg successively embraced German Nazism. Lindholm on the other hand stepped down from his leadership after the war, and became a left-wing political activist who did not hesitate to identify himself as a communist. Superficially, this is strikingly symmetric: The communist leader becomes a Nazi, and the Nazi leader becomes a communist.
The aim of the study is to analyze the ideological links and tensions between Nazism and communism using these parallel biographies as a point of entrance. Inspired by political theorist Michael Freeden and his conceptual approach, and using a variety of sources, two core clusters of political concepts are identified and compared. It is shown that there are great similarities between Flyg and Lindholm when it comes to the role of anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and the aspiration to idealize the Soviet Union or Germany as model states for workers. There are also, however, a number of differences, especially when it comes to views on modernity and materialism. In the final chapter, Flyg and Lindholm are compared to other European renegades. Here, the ambition is to identify common traits in the conversions. It is argued that the ideological antagonisms, the anti-positions, are crucial to this kind of generic renegadism."

In the past eighty years, the Swedish university and higher education sector has undergone major changes. The conditions for conducting higher education and research have fundamentally changed. Universities and colleges have evolved from narrow elite institutions to educating large sections of the population and have increasingly attracted the interest of politics. They are located throughout the country and have gradually been assigned greater and greater resources and responsibilities. The majority of publicly funded research is currently conducted at the country's universities. At the same time, the sector's development has been characterized by considerable continuity. It is impossible to understand the structure of today's Swedish higher education landscape without taking into account the background and historical development of the universities and colleges. This report deals with developments in the period 1940–2020. The starting point is the state's reforms in higher education and research. It is both about broad, overarching reforms that affected large parts of the activities at universities and colleges in one context and about the continuous adaptation of regulations and systems. The purpose is to draw an overview of the development of the modern Swedish university. The report is primarily aimed at people working at universities and authorities, but also at politicians and people from the interested public who want to know more about the background to today's university and college system and why it looks the way it does. The report has been prepared by the University Chancellor's Office, as part of the mission to follow developments in Swedish higher education and research. The University Chancellor's Office also annually publishes up-to-date statistics on the Swedish university and a large number of reports on various themes.