Thesis--Stockholm. / Summary in English. Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 312-323).

This essay deals with Swedish neutrality- and ideology discourse during the early cold war years, when a group of Swedish left-wing intellectuals advocated a third position (den tredje ståndpunkten); a rejection of both sides in the cold war. This third position is, within the premises of this essay, partly regarded as a piece in a larger ideological puzzle, in which a middle point or a third way between capitalism and socialism was sought during the twentieth century. In the early Cold War context, the third ideological alternative also came to be defined in geopolitical terms; as a middle way between the US and the Soviet Union. The Swedish third position was never a complete political program or distinctly defined political movement. It reflects many different aspects of the early Cold War reality in a Swedish context: the feeling of homelessness among the political left after the outcome of the Soviet communistic experiment; post-World War two pessimism and exhaustion; the immense fear of an atomic war; the ideological conflict over Swedish national identity; the construction of the cold war dichotomy and the resistance to this hegemonic construction. The proponents of the third position advocated continued neutrality with an idealistic and pacifistic approach, as a way to prolonged world peace. They also saw the US and the USSR as equally aggressive, power-driven, and according to a few of them, equally unfree and undemocratic. They did not totally reject the idea of a ‘communist threat’, but rather did put this threat side by side with the ‘capitalist threat’. They thus went far beyond the official Swedish neutral policy, which was much more aligned towards the west, and according to which the neutral country could very well sympathise with the west or aid one side in an international conflict, as long as it remained non-belligerent, even though this policy sometimes called for a complicated balancing act for the neutral Swedish state.