Ideas and individuals often follow the same pattern: they are tested, sometimes lose their lustre, disappear for periods, but return when time makes them relevant again. Today, as geopolitical unrest combines with the clear emergence of new right-wing currents across Europe and beyond, our contemporary era increasingly resembles the era in which Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) was active. There are, therefore, good reasons to return to the Swedish founder of geopolitics and his views on conservative politics and international relations.

Kjellén was a distinguished academic, politician, and prolific publicist. He wielded significant metapolitical influence, especially in continental political science.

Despite this influence, he faded from public memory. Much of this was due to his Germanophilia^[1], a common feature of Swedish academia at the time. It also did not help that he discussed topics such as ‘great power morality’ and nations’ need for ‘expansion’. Even though his reasoning fundamentally differed from the ideology that emerged in Germany after his death, posterity came to read him through the prism of Nazism. However, there is no evidence that Kjellén was a Nazi or antisemite, not least since he died in 1922.^[2]

Kjellén’s Conservatism

Swedish politics is hard to imagine without Kjellén. He coined Folkhemmet (People’s Home) and advocated a nationally unifying socialism, later reminiscent of Spengler’s Prussian socialism.^[3] Kjellén called himself a nationalist—a term that once spanned the whole spectrum. He also remained distinctly value-conservative.

This mix is clear in his defence of both the sovereign nation-state and the monarchy. He sought the ‘royal vein’ in Swedish politics, which, like the ‘deep channel’ in a river, followed a winding path between dangerous right- and left-wing shores.^[4]​

His conservative worldview aligns with some aspects of today’s national-conservative currents. For example, he strongly criticized the heritage of the Enlightenment and liberalism, which he believed had degenerated. In their place, he formulated the ‘ideas of 1914’, contrasting them with the ‘ideas of 1789’, in which liberté was replaced by order, égalité by justice, and fraternité by an emphasis on national cohesion.^[5]

However, despite the importance of his conservative thought, the aspect of Kjellén’s work that became most influential across the continent was not his conservatism but his geopolitical theory. For this reason, he is called the Swedish father of Geopolitik.^[6]

The State as an Organism

In The State as a Life-Form (1916), Kjellén presents the state as more than a legal entity: it acts as a judge, a coercive power, an entrepreneur, an educator, a diplomat, and a warrior. As he put it: ‘The state must itself bear witness to its essence through its conduct.’^[7]

The state is not just a loose collection of geopolitics, ethnopolitics, economic policy, sociopolitics, and regime politics, but rather a living organism whose parts are bound together by a common will and force. Organisms are born, grow, and die, and so do states. Thus, we can speak of, for example, Mother Svea and Uncle Sam. Therefore, the loss of territory cannot be equated with the loss of possessions, but with an operation where the loss is not only the body part but also its vitality.^[8]

Political scientist Ola Thunander classifies Kjellén’s view of geopolitics as the ‘German–Swedish’ perspective. It contrasts with the ‘Anglo–Saxon’ counterpart, which was allowed to shape the Cold War worldview with its greater focus on states as permanent constellations with constant interests. To modern ears, the Anglo–Saxon view seems outdated, and the German–Swedish one increasingly relevant—since a nation’s actions, especially in turbulent times, depend on many factors, including domestic conditions.^[9]

Nations’ Domestic Needs: Views on Boers and Norwegians

If the struggle for national survival is a foundational principle for Kjellén, and if great powers are seen as following their own moral and legal orders, a central question arises: how did he view his own homeland and the claims and futures of other small countries?

A key to the answer lies in his outspoken support for the Boers in South Africa, even before the Boer War. Kjellén was fascinated by the Boers’ way of life: a conservative, earthy peasant people whose society embodied a ‘Kinder, Küche und Kirche’ mentality.^[10] They succeeded in uniting a spiritual (religious) and material (productive) culture in a way that Western cultures increasingly failed to do at the time.^[11]

Vitality and national sentiment were, in Kjellén’s thinking, crucial for the nation-state’s survival as an organism. This is also why he opposed the dissolution of the Swedish–Norwegian union in 1905. He was convinced that Swedish honour and national spirit would be weakened by separation. Following the debate over Norway’s future, he saw in Norwegian uncompromisingness the kind of national sentiment he believed Sweden itself lacked as it entered the new century. Without such vitality, he warned, the coming years risked being ‘the last in our independent history.’^[12]

‘A nation’s actions, especially in turbulent times, depend on many factors, including domestic conditions’

And indeed, there was something to his apprehension. In the decades that followed, the Swedish monarchy’s political influence was dismantled—which historically had been synonymous with Sweden’s great power era’s expansionist will—at the expense of democracy. Nearly a century after Kjellén’s warnings, Sweden joined the European Union, and over 120 years later, the 200-year neutrality policy was abandoned through NATO membership.

A European Confederation?

Although Kjellén was a nationalist, he was not blind to the demands of realpolitik. He clearly distinguished between the nation-state as an ideal form and the limitations of practical politics. Small states cannot defend themselves alone against expansive great powers, so it could be both power-politically and economically necessary to form larger state blocs to meet ‘geography’s demands.’^[13]

This reasoning echoes today’s arguments for small states’ membership in the EU and NATO, which we see crystallized: alone, one is vulnerable when the neighbour is a great power. But such alliances were, according to Kjellén, never risk-free.

Kjellén warned that protection from larger entities could come at the cost of the nation-state’s own ‘vitality’. Historically, supranational constructs had often failed to account for the relationship between state, nation, and people. A confederation must therefore not develop into a dominion that ‘strangles all independent life under the power of its culture.’^[14] If the nations’ vitality is stifled, the superordinate unit weakens as well. This idea resonates with current critiques of Europe’s move toward liberal homogenization at the expense of national plurality and sovereignty, as the continent’s global relevance diminishes.^[15]

‘Alone, one is vulnerable when the neighbour is a great power’

It is therefore interesting to note that others have picked up where Kjellén left off. One such is author Samuel P Huntington, who, in The Clash of Civilizations, stated, as Kjellén had 80 years earlier, that a major ‘cultural border’ runs between Russia and Europe right through western and eastern Ukraine.^[16] Kjellén already pointed out that the cultural division between Germanic and West Slavic Central Europe and East Slavic Russia could become the object of higher political organization: centralist dominions on one side and a Central European confederation under German leadership on the other.

Contours of this are beginning to emerge today. But for this to work for Europe’s part, it presupposed, according to Kjellén, that Germany chose its Habsburg, cosmopolitan heritage over the Prussian one, which he saw as marked by racial intolerance and lack of respect for folk individualism. Instead, Germany should draw inspiration from the Austrian state idea’s multinational ‘freedom system’.^[17] Interestingly, this might be how to interpret Chancellor Mertz’s new approach in his speech at the World Economic Forum, where he used the spotlight to call on European leaders to meet to ‘renovate’ the entire EU project—an echo of Kjellén’s idea of a state bloc.

In any case, in strictly geopolitical terms, it is not the EU that most resembles Kjellén’s confederation, but NATO—not the NATO we know today, but a future NATO where the US has cut the umbilical cord to its European allies. Interestingly, the same Mertz also speaks of Germany needing to take responsibility for Europe’s security and hints that it needs its own nuclear weapons.

Kjellén’s Ideas Today

In our time, we also see various national-conservative movements emerging in country after country. They are often called the new right, but it cannot be denied that their ideas closely resemble those of the Swedish Young Right that operated 100 years earlier. Similarly, views on geopolitics are changing as times become more unsettled.

Reading Kjellén provides a greater understanding of how these ideas can ‘fit together’, making it a sensible perspective. For this reason, he has returned to academia, much like Carl Schmitt’s and Martin Heidegger’s theories and writings have been taken out of the cold storage.

During the formative years of Swedish democracy, Kjellén influenced politics, academia, and public debate, sought after for his perspective on the forces shaping his era. His ideas remain critical for anyone seeking to understand recurring patterns in politics and geopolitics today.

^[1] Torbjörn Nilsson, Mellan arv och utopi: moderata vägval under hundra år, 1904–2004, Stockholm, 2004, pp. 133–134.

^[2] Ove Bring, ‘Geopolitikens återkomst och internationell rätt’, Kungl Krigsvetenskapsakademiens Tidskrift, No 1 Jan–Mar, 2025, p. 8.

^[3] Oswald Spengler first presented his concept of ‘Prussian Socialism’ in his 1920 book Preußentum und Sozialismus.

^[4] Rudolf Kjellén, Politiska Essayer, Vol 2, Stockholm, 1914, p. 215.

^[5] Nils Elvander, Harald Hjärne och konservatismen: konservativ idédebatt i Sverige 1865–1922, Uppsala University, 1961, Almqvist & Wiksell, pp. 320–324.

^[6] Rudolf Kjellén, ‘Studie öfver Sveriges politiska gränser’, Ymer, vol 19 (1899).

^[7]Rudolf Kjellén, Staten som lifsform, Hugo Gebers Förlag, 1916, p. 9.

^[8] Ibid, pp. 16 and 209.

^[9] Ola Thunander, ‘Diskurs, identitet och territorialitet: Kjelléns tankar om ett europeiskt förbund’, Edited by Bert Edström, Ragnar Björk, and Thomas Lundén, Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitiken och konservatismen, Hjalmarsson & Högberg, 2014, p. 216.

^[10] Jan Gunnar Rosenblad and Gundel Söderholm, ‘Nationalisten och Boerbeundraren’, Edited by Bert Edström, Ragnar Björk, and Thomas Lundén, Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitiken och konservatismen, Hjalmarsson & Högberg, 2014, pp. 244–46.

^[11] Rudolf Kjellén, Nationell samling: Politiska och etiska fragment, Hugo Gebers Förlag, Stockholm, p. 29.

^[12] Rudolf Kjellén, ‘Kraft och kultur:lärdomar från Sydafrika till Sverige’, Göteborgs Aftonblad, 5 Jan, 1900.

^[13] Rudolf Kjellén, Staten som lifsform, p. 67.

^[14] Rudolf Kjellén, Världskrigets politiska problem, Stockholm, 1915, p. 167.

^[15] Ola Thunander, ‘Diskurs, identitet och territorialitet: Kjelléns tankar om ett europeiskt förbund’, Edited by Bert Edström, Ragnar Björk, and Thomas Lundén, Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitiken och konservatismen, Hjalmarsson & Högberg, 2014, p. 215.

^[16] Samuel P Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order, p. 167.

^[17] Rudolf Kjellén, Världskrigets politiska problem, p. 171.

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