6. The Secession of Norway from Sweden

Rosa Luxemburg takes precisely this example and argues about it as follows:

“The latest event in the history of federative relations, the secession of Norway from Sweden — hastily seized upon in its day by the social-patriotic Polish press (see the Cracow Naprzód) as a welcome manifestation of the strength and progressiveness of the striving for separation into states — at once turned into a striking proof that federalism, and the separation into states that follows from it, are by no means an expression of progressiveness or democracy. After the so-called Norwegian ‘revolution’, which consisted in deposing the Swedish king and removing him from Norway, the Norwegians calmly elected themselves another king, having formally rejected by a popular vote the proposal to establish a republic. What superficial admirers of every kind of national movement and of every semblance of independence proclaimed a ‘revolution’ was simply a manifestation of peasant and petty-bourgeois particularism, of the wish to have, for their own money, a king ‘of their own’ instead of one imposed by the Swedish aristocracy; it was therefore a movement that had absolutely nothing in common with revolution. At the same time this story of the breaking of the Swedish–Norwegian union proved once again to what extent, in this case too, the federation that had existed until then was merely the expression of purely dynastic interests, and therefore a form of monarchism and reaction” (Przegląd).

That is literally all that Rosa Luxemburg says on this point!! And, it must be admitted, it would be hard to reveal the helplessness of one’s position more vividly than Rosa Luxemburg has done in this example.

The question was, and is, whether Social-Democrats in a multinational state need a programme that recognises the right to self-determination, or to secession.

What, then, does the example of Norway, chosen by Rosa Luxemburg herself, tell us on this question?

Our author twists and wriggles, makes witticisms and fulminates against Naprzód, but does not answer the question!! Rosa Luxemburg talks about anything you like so as not to say a single word on the substance of the question!!

No doubt the Norwegian petty bourgeois, in wishing to have their own king for their own money and in voting down the proposal to establish a republic, displayed very bad philistine qualities. No doubt Naprzód, if it failed to notice this, displayed equally bad and equally philistine qualities.

But what has all this to do with it??

After all, the question was the right of nations to self-determination and the attitude of the socialist proletariat to this right! Why then does Rosa Luxemburg not answer the question, instead of beating about the bush?

They say that to a mouse there is no beast more terrible than the cat. To Rosa Luxemburg, evidently, there is no beast more terrible than the “Fraki”. “Fraki” is the colloquial name for the “Polish Socialist Party”, the so-called Revolutionary Faction, and the little Cracow paper Naprzód shares the ideas of this “Faction”. Rosa Luxemburg’s struggle against the nationalism of this “Faction” has so blinded our author that everything except Naprzód vanishes from her field of vision.

If Naprzód says “yes”, Rosa Luxemburg considers it her sacred duty immediately to proclaim “no”, without in the least reflecting that by this method she reveals, not her independence of Naprzód, but, on the contrary, her amusing dependence on the “Fraki”, her inability to look at things from a standpoint a little deeper and broader than that of the Cracow ant-heap. Naprzód is, of course, a very bad and by no means Marxist organ; but that must not prevent us from analysing the example of Norway on its merits, once we have chosen it.

To analyse this example in a Marxist way, we must dwell, not on the bad qualities of the terribly frightful “Fraki”, but, first, on the concrete historical features of the secession of Norway from Sweden and, second, on what the tasks of the proletariat of both countries were in connection with this secession.

Norway is bound to Sweden by geographical, economic and linguistic ties no less close than those binding many non-Great-Russian Slav nations to the Great Russians. But the union of Norway with Sweden was not a voluntary one, so that Rosa Luxemburg speaks of “federation” quite pointlessly, simply because she does not know what to say. Norway was handed over to Sweden by the monarchs during the Napoleonic wars, against the will of the Norwegians, and the Swedes had to send troops into Norway to subdue it.

After that, for many long decades, in spite of the very wide autonomy Norway enjoyed (its own Diet, and so on), friction between Norway and Sweden never ceased, and the Norwegians strove with all their might to throw off the yoke of the Swedish aristocracy. In August 1905 they at last threw it off: the Norwegian Diet resolved that the Swedish king had ceased to be king of Norway, and the referendum held afterwards, a vote of the Norwegian people, gave an overwhelming majority (about 200,000 votes against a few hundred) for complete secession from Sweden. The Swedes, after some hesitation, reconciled themselves to the fact of secession.

This example shows us on what basis cases of the secession of nations are possible, and actually occur, under present-day economic and political relations, and what form secession sometimes takes in conditions of political freedom and democracy.

No Social-Democrat, unless he is prepared to declare that questions of political freedom and democracy are a matter of indifference to him (in which case he would of course cease to be a Social-Democrat), can deny that this example in practice proves that class-conscious workers are obliged to conduct systematic propaganda and preparation so that possible conflicts over the secession of nations should be settled only in the way they were settled in 1905 between Norway and Sweden, and not “in the Russian way”. This is precisely what is expressed by the programme demand for the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination. And Rosa Luxemburg had to try to talk her way out of a fact so unpleasant for her theory by means of fierce attacks on the philistinism of the Norwegian philistines and on the Cracow Naprzód; for she understood perfectly well to what extent this historical fact irrevocably refutes her phrases that the right of nations to self-determination is a “utopia”, that it is like the right “to eat off gold plates”, and so on. Such phrases merely express a wretchedly self-satisfied, opportunist belief in the immutability of the present relation of forces between the nationalities of Eastern Europe.

Let us go further. In the question of the self-determination of nations, as in every other question, what interests us first and foremost is the self-determination of the proletariat within nations. Rosa Luxemburg modestly evaded this question too, sensing how unpleasant for her “theory” it would be to examine it on the example of Norway that she herself had chosen.

What was, and what should have been, the position of the Norwegian and Swedish proletariat in the conflict over secession? The class-conscious workers of Norway would, of course, have voted for a republic after secession, and if there were socialists who voted otherwise, this only proves how much dull, philistine opportunism there sometimes is in European socialism. There can be no two opinions about this, and we touch on the point only because Rosa Luxemburg tries to obscure the essence of the matter by talking off the subject. On the question of secession, we do not know whether the Norwegian socialist programme obliged the Norwegian Social-Democrats to hold one definite opinion. Let us assume that it did not, that the Norwegian socialists left open the question of how far the autonomy of Norway was sufficient for a free class struggle and how far the endless friction and conflicts with the Swedish aristocracy hampered the freedom of economic life. But it is indisputable that the Norwegian proletariat had to go against this aristocracy and for Norwegian peasant democracy (with all the philistine limitations of the latter).

And the Swedish proletariat? It is well known that the Swedish landlords, abetted by the Swedish clergy, preached war against Norway; and since Norway is much weaker than Sweden, since it had already experienced a Swedish invasion, and since the Swedish aristocracy carries very great weight in its own country, this preaching was a very serious threat. One can be sure that the Swedish Kokoshkins long and zealously corrupted the Swedish masses with appeals to “handle with care” the “elastic formulas of the political self-determination of nations”, with lurid pictures of the dangers of the “break-up of the state”, and with assurances that “popular freedom” was compatible with the foundations of the Swedish aristocracy. There cannot be the slightest doubt that Swedish Social-Democracy would have betrayed the cause of socialism and the cause of democracy if it had not fought with all its might both against the landlord ideology and policy and against the “Kokoshkin” ideology and policy, if it had not upheld, besides the equality of nations in general (which the Kokoshkins also recognise), the right of nations to self-determination, the freedom of Norway to secede.

The close union of the Norwegian and Swedish workers, their complete comradely class solidarity, gained from this recognition by the Swedish workers of the right of the Norwegians to secede. For the Norwegian workers became convinced that the Swedish workers were not infected with Swedish nationalism, that brotherhood with the Norwegian proletarians stood higher for them than the privileges of the Swedish bourgeoisie and aristocracy. The destruction of the ties imposed on Norway by the European monarchs and the Swedish aristocrats strengthened the ties between the Norwegian and Swedish workers. The Swedish workers proved that through all the vicissitudes of bourgeois politics (and on the basis of bourgeois relations a revival of the forcible subjection of the Norwegians to the Swedes is quite possible!) they would be able to preserve and defend the complete equality and class solidarity of the workers of both nations in the struggle against both the Swedish and the Norwegian bourgeoisie.

This shows, incidentally, how groundless and even frivolous are the attempts sometimes made by the “Fraki” to “use” our disagreements with Rosa Luxemburg against Polish Social-Democracy. The “Fraki” are not a proletarian, not a socialist, but a petty-bourgeois nationalist party, something like Polish Socialist-Revolutionaries. There never has been, and never could be, any question of unity between the Russian Social-Democrats and this party. On the contrary, no Russian Social-Democrat has ever “repented” of the rapprochement and union with the Polish Social-Democrats. To Polish Social-Democracy belongs the enormous historical merit of having created, for the first time, a truly Marxist, truly proletarian party in Poland, a country thoroughly imbued with nationalist strivings and passions. But this merit of the Polish Social-Democrats is a great merit not because Rosa Luxemburg has talked a lot of nonsense against Clause 9 of the Russian Marxist programme, but in spite of that sad circumstance.

For the Polish Social-Democrats the “right to self-determination” is not, of course, of such great importance as it is for the Russians. It is quite understandable that the struggle against the nationalism-blinded petty bourgeoisie of Poland compelled the Polish Social-Democrats to “bend the stick” with particular (perhaps sometimes a little excessive) zeal. No Russian Marxist has ever thought of blaming the Polish Social-Democrats for being against the secession of Poland. These Social-Democrats err only when they try, like Rosa Luxemburg, to deny the necessity of recognising the right to self-determination in the programme of the Russian Marxists.

This in essence means transferring relations that are understandable from the standpoint of the Cracow horizon to the scale of all the peoples and nations of Russia, including the Great Russians. It means being “Polish nationalists inside out”, and not Russian, not international Social-Democrats.

For international Social-Democracy stands precisely for the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination. We shall now pass on to this.