Where Olof Palme Left Off

A student travels to Stockholm in search of ways to meet the global goals of eliminating poverty, protecting the planet, and creating a more just society.

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The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in 2015 to be achieved by 2030, are described as “a bold commitment to finish what we started.” The seventeen goals include eliminating poverty and hunger, taking action to curb climate change, and advancing international cooperation.

As a twenty-two-year-old American student beginning my master’s studies in international development in Paris this fall, I am among countless young people who are ready to “finish what we started.” Those of us who strive to complete this mission, however, would do well to study the people who started the valiant struggle to secure the basic human rights that today’s SDGs set out to achieve. In my opinion, there is no better role model in this field than the late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.

With the last bit of funding from a Morehead-Cain Scholarship during my undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I spent the summer in Stockholm, studying Palme’s life, trying to answer a single question: How would Palme approach today’s development challenges? I had the privilege of digging through dusty archival records, interviewing people who had known him, and walking the streets that he had walked. In doing so, I found more than just inspiration—by better understanding Palme’s life and work, I found some answers.

Born in 1927, Palme became prime minister of Sweden at the age of forty-two, as the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. He served for nearly eleven years, from 1969 to 1976 and 1982 to 1986. He became arguably the most enigmatic and controversial political figure in Sweden’s history. To his supporters, Palme was a tireless defender of workers, a peacekeeper committed to removing the nuclear threat, and a humanitarian devoted to global development. In conservative circles, however, Palme was seen as a radical and traitor to upper-class society. On February 28, 1986, he was assassinated while walking home from a movie theater with his wife, Lisbeth. While the assassination remains officially unsolved, Swedish police believe they know who committed the crime—a man who died in 2000—although the motive is still unknown.

Across the developing world, and specifically in Southern Africa, Palme had been the moral conscience of the international community. He was often the lone head of state supporting liberation movements throughout front-line countries in Southern Africa. While then-President Ronald Reagan was conducting “constructive engagement,” calling for stronger economic ties with the apartheid regime in South Africa, Palme was directing aid to the African National Congress (ANC) in exile, which then-ANC President Oliver Tambo later said “was absolutely decisive for the organization’s existence,” according to Tor Sellström’s book Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa: Volume II: Solidarity and Assistance 1970-1994. Palme recognized that political liberation was inextricably linked to the economic liberation of the poorest among these oppressed societies, and he was in discussions with Tambo to create a post-apartheid South Africa fund to support the later-established independent Reconstruction and Development Program.

Most viscerally, though, I came to understand Palme’s impact on the African continent from an unsigned condolence note I found in the Swedish Labor Movement’s Archives and Library, written in the immediate aftermath of Palme’s assassination. “You understood how to fight for us,” the note said. “Thank you, from Africa.”

The African continent—and Southern Africa in particular—looks very different now than it did at the time of Palme’s murder. There have been great improvements in standards of living, and the minority white regime that ruled South Africa has now been relegated to the dustbin of history. We cannot, however, make the mistake of considering the struggle to be over. Some of the issues still facing the region would have been all too familiar to Palme. The full economic liberation he longed to see has yet to occur. Today, six of the ten countries with the highest Gini coefficients—a measure of poverty and inequality—are located in Southern Africa, and South Africa tops the list. And while many Southern African nations have social services in place that were not present in Palme’s era, issues of funding and accessibility impede their effectiveness.

My research question of how Palme would approach the challenges of development in modern Africa is a complex one to answer. Luckily, I had the privilege of talking to the person probably best suited to do so: Joakim Palme, an expert in development issues and the former board chair of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. He also happens to be Olof Palme’s eldest son.

Joakim Palme’s immediate response to my question about how his father would have approached development today was a subtle laugh, seemingly at the impossibly large scope of the question. He answered with just a few words and, for the most part, didn’t provide me with specific policies. “I think [Olof Palme] had a few basic ideas back in the fifties, and he pursued them, quite consistently . . . .He would have particularly liked the Sustainable Development Goals,” Joakim Palme said.

The profundity of his answer offered me a fresh perspective on the archival records I had spent the summer exploring. Suddenly, I was seeing these core beliefs showing up over and over, in Palme’s speeches, interviews, and writings. I realized that they are just as applicable to the issues of today as they were back then. Among them is the conviction that with solidarity, “there exists no ‘they and we,’ only ‘us.’ ” It is the stance that, while small countries may not have the same leverage on the international stage as the superpowers, they have an “obligation to participate in international opinion formation.” It is the belief in speaking up when others won’t.

In practical terms, how would Palme have approached the modern debate over private investment versus official assistance in development work? In 2020, for example, only six United Nations member countries reached an agreed-upon benchmark of 0.7 percent of gross national product (GNP) being earmarked for official development assistance. The United States donated just 0.17 percent of its GNP and has never come close to reaching 0.7 percent. In recent years, we have instead shifted our focus to the private sector through the initiative. An increased private-sector presence is a positive development; Palme had observed that “there is a lot to criticize about free trade, but there is no better system.” Yet he couched this by noting that “economic growth does not automatically benefit everyone,” as “private profit motives” would not look to benefit the country as a whole. “The economic and social structure of the countries is crucial,” he argued, and then built Swedish aid policy around this basic truth.

Today, as then, the private sector cannot function as a replacement for official development assistance. The two serve different purposes. The private sector is not incentivized to solve the structural gaps in social service programs in Southern Africa. After all, corporations did not commit to SDG 3, which includes the implementation of universal health care. The United States and the rest of the global community did. Countries launching such programs deserve, and are entitled to, our support. Official development assistance can help the growth and investment spurred by the private sector to reach all aspects of society. To achieve the SDGs, we must partner private investment with increased aid from governments, rather than simply choosing one or the other.

If Olof Palme didn’t give up back then, we have no right to give up today.

But what about the general lack of faith in multilateral action? Nationalist attitudes have served to undermine international institutions, and many have lost hope in these institutions due to a perceived lack of effectiveness. This isn’t new; Palme faced the same issues. For his efforts to assist the Southern African region, the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet gave him the derisive nickname “the honorary African”—which Palme took as a compliment. Two years before his assassination, Contra magazine, a Swedish publication that supported the white minority regimes of Southern Africa, ran an issue with Palme on the cover, with a target on his face. Palme never wavered; his last speech fittingly closed with a line advocating for international cooperation: “If the world decides to abolish apartheid, apartheid will disappear.”

This is not to say that he was never frustrated by the lethargy of multilateral action, especially on the issue of Southern Africa. While he argued that “free people are more important than free movement of capital,” the neoliberal establishment led by the United States thwarted sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime that Palme had pushed for at the international level. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dismissed Palme as a “gadfly” (although Kissinger also later eulogized him as a “gentle and caring man” following Palme’s murder).

The gadfly eventually spurred multilateral action. At the domestic level, Palme’s Social Democrats first introduced legislation to divest from South Africa in 1976. Sweden then became the first country to ban new investments in South Africa in 1979, when a broad coalition in the Riksdag, Sweden’s legislature, passed sanctions, even though Palme was by that time in the opposition. Palme was back in power in 1982, and by 1985, Sweden had adopted even tougher sanctions. He did not allow the United Nations’ inaction to be an excuse for Swedish inaction.

Internationally, Palme launched what his close assistant Pierre Schori called “an unparalleled offensive” aimed at spurring collective sanctions against South Africa by relentlessly pressuring other nations in the court of public opinion to join Sweden, according to Sellström. Over time, more countries passed sanctions, culminating in the United States joining the effort in 1986, when the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly overrode Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Apartheid Act, which levied sanctions against South Africa. A few years after his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela said there was “no doubt” that the global economic sanctions had helped to bring about the collapse of the apartheid system.

With Palme’s tireless work for solidarity with the people of Southern Africa, Sweden overcame the seemingly immovable opposition of the superpowers to work toward liberation through multilateral action. If Palme didn’t give up back then, we have no right to give up today. The ability to shape international opinion is still possible, and in the context of achieving the SDGs, it is necessary to pressure the global coalition that is committed to these goals into action.

There is so much at stake in achieving the SDGs. They are not just abstract policies; they are central in determining the quality of life for millions of people. The United States has the resources and power on the international stage to galvanize real change. We cannot, however, as we have been wont to do in our history, impose systems on other countries in the name of achieving these goals. As Joakim Palme told me, “Aid is about support.”

The United States and its international partners have the capability to provide support through our resources, know-how, and aid to help countless people in developing countries secure their rights as human beings to live without poverty, with health care, and in peace. This is what we committed to when we signed the SDGs in 2015.

As I walked the streets of Stockholm for the last time, on sidewalks Palme once strode down, I thought about him when he was my age. At the time, he was in the United States hitchhiking across the country with $300 in his pocket, studying the trade union movement, which he later would say was influential in his lifelong fight for solidarity. I thought of a young Palme, and then myself, two twenty-two-year-olds wandering a foreign land searching for the causes to which they would dedicate their lives. I ended this particular journey committed to a career of fighting for solidarity. There is no better way for me to do this than by pushing forward in conjunction with other like-minded people around the world, to actually achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. I am ready to do my part to finish the work.