Is the Question of Surveillance Unsolvable?

Rarely have I felt so alone and so European as last year when I, along with some fellow students, discussed Edward Snowden’s revelations about the U.S. National Security Agency’s far-reaching and massive surveillance. Snowden had recently revealed that targets such as the German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone and the EU representative office in New York were monitored by the NSA. That it would lead to a minor diplomatic crisis was hardly a long shot.

Perhaps it was naive of me, but bearing in mind, among other considerations, that even Barack Obama criticized espionage against world leaders like Merkel, I had expected that mine was a view that would be shared by most Americans. How wrong I was. Around the table, I was almost alone in thinking that U.S. espionage against close allies is a problem. Mass surveillance of its own citizens is wrong, and clearer rules are needed. However, foreign nationals do not have the same rights as American nationals — the national interest must go first, was the reasoning.

Is it us in Sweden and other European countries who are naive, when we are roused to indignation over spying from one of our closest and most important partners in the world? Espionage between nations is nothing unusual, and in many situations, the assumption, quite simply, is that it is done. The opinion that monitoring of foreign leaders and citizens is not a problem when the national interest is furthered is shared by many, especially in conservative circles. For example: In a fire-and-brimstone editorial, the conservative Wall Street Journal (10/28/13) defended the NSA’s surveillance of Angela Merkel, arguing that former high-ranking members of the German administration had shown themselves in different ways to be strategic threats to U.S. interests. Republican Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has launched a similar defense.

National interest should naturally be an equally powerful driver of Sweden’s relations with other countries. The goal should be a continual exchange of intelligence information with the United States — which benefits us — and our citizens should be free from indiscriminate surveillance.

However, the question is whether this is possible. The four English-speaking countries which, along with the United States, agreed to not monitor each other have a long tradition of political and cultural community. Sweden’s relations with the United States can hardly be compared with those between the U.S. and the U.K., and it is still far from certain that the agreement between the U.S. and the four countries has been fully respected. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine that the United States would, entirely and in the long term, trust a country whose prime minister in the late 1960s would go on marches with the North Vietnamese ambassador and whose largest political party at the last election promised to let a post-communist party into office after winning the election.

Maybe it is all too clear, and so dreadful that the question is unsolvable for Swedes. American politicians will never be pressured by their constituents to stop monitoring Europeans; their own country’s interests are all that matters. Swedish politicians can promise all they want that they will safeguard Swedish citizens’ rights and interests in the international arena. However, the question remains, to what extent is that possible?