"...such divergence was certainly not contemporaneously intuitive; few if any people would have regarded Denmark as the most liberal Scandinavian state in the mid-to-late 19th century, what with the more immediate influence of German and Austrian reactionary politics and its own bitterness over the Battle of Copenhagen still sitting like an open wound five decades on, and the failure of Scandinavism as an ideology was oft laid at Denmark's own feet, particularly by Norwegian expatriate liberals who traced the failure of their own attempted revolution and war of independence in 1905 to the crisis over Schleswig forty years prior.
But Denmark had, at least in practice, the most fully "responsible" parliament in the Nordic countries, where since 1901 the crown had not meddled openly in parliamentary affairs and had (often begrudgingly, admittedly) accepted governments as they were constituted by elections. The incumbent government in the spring of 1914 was thus that of Carl Theodor Zahle, a radical social liberal inspired by progressive reforms in America [1] who after forming a majority government backed by the Social Democrats the previous year was committed to delivering for the first time in Europe universal womanhood suffrage. That is not to say that women could not vote at all elsewhere in Europe - Finland, of all places, extended similar, stricter property and literacy qualifications on the franchise to unmarried women as they did to men - but to subject all women, married or not, to the same franchise as men without qualifications was beyond radical. King Christian X, nobody's idea of a liberal, was nonetheless pragmatic and acquiesced to the passage of the law; the de facto Parliamentarianism in place since the Deuntzer Cabinet under his grandfather persisted, and with that Denmark was the first country in the world to extend unqualified suffrage to women, a sea-change as major as the end of authoritarian monarchy thirteen years earlier and in many ways a bookend to the Revolutions of 1912, one of the few to be fully successful.
By contrast, the late winter of 1914 in Sweden had a very different tone, one in which the monarchy reasserted its considerable prerogatives once again. As described in Chapter VIII, the War of 1905 had essentially extinguished left-liberalism in both halves of the Union and left both countries' parliaments as contests between right-liberals, nationalists of both the right and center, and traditional agrarian and aristocratic conservatives as they jockeyed against one another but also collaborated amongst themselves to keep social democrats out of power, particularly in wealthier, more industrialized Sweden where the Social Democrats' youth league was so radical and determined to foment an outright Marxist revolution the incumbent, electoralist party leadership had been forced to eject them, a split that had badly effected both halves of the Swedish left.
Beyond mere politics, Sweden-Norway's brief civil war nearly a decade prior had wrecked the Union's finances. Already one of the most rural parts of Western Europe, protectionist politics and high levels of borrowing from British and French banks also made Sweden-Norway one of the world's great debtor states, and in late 1913 a small recession in Europe sparked by the shock of the Americas plunging into a hemisphere-wide orgy of violence in the Great American War had had an outsized impact, particularly on trade-dependent Norway. Unemployment spiked, emigration to the United States accelerated - where fresh bodies were needed in factories for war production [2] - and food riots erupted in Christiana and Gothenburg. Several major banks failed and overinflated property values in tony neighborhoods of Stockholm, particularly Ostermalm, collapsed. [3]
In other words, the tinder was dry for an eruption of tensions in Sweden, both socially and politically, and the Courtyard Crisis of 1914 should be viewed in that context. Suffragist Karl Staaff, a pragmatic liberal, had formed the most recent government and immediately come under fire from his enemies on both right and left, and in the wake of the severe economic crisis roiling Sweden - and with the Norwegian issue long thought to be settled - urged his government to pass massive defense cuts, most prominently cancelling the F-type battleship that was on order. This was met with an outburst of nationalist fervor, with conservatives led by the explorer [4] Sven Hedin helping organize a massive protest march of members of the Farmers League from across the country to Stockholm.
In Gustaf V Adolf, they had a sympathetic ear. The King did not dislike Staaff quite as much as many in the elite did - ashtrays in the likeness of the Prime Minister were not uncommon in right-wing Stockholm - but was always impressionable when the quite conservative circle of advisors around him flattered him. It did not help matters that Staaff's previous tenure in the immediate months as a caretaker after the war had left much to be desired, with the young King regarding him as having been too lenient on the Norwegian rebels whom he held responsible for assassinating his father, or at least creating the atmosphere that led to the murder of Crown Prince Gustaf. [5] Implications that Staaff's cuts could lead to another Norwegian revolt - especially as the Norwegian Storting had not submitted similar budget cuts for royal asset to the Joint Council of Defense - thus found fertile ground at Stockholm Palace. Despite many conservatives, such as the influential former Prime Minister Arvid Lindman, advising against the King addressing the protestors, Gustaf nonetheless made his way out to the palace courtyard on February 8 and addressed the crowd of over thirty thousand, announcing effectively that he agreed with their stance on defense cuts and encouraged them to "make their voices heard." [6] Many of these protestors afterwards marched to the Riksdag, chanting against Staaff and demanding the full funding of the defense budget.
Staaff, who had not been consulted on the speech ahead of time, angrily denounced the King for interfering in politics and accused him of dispatching a mob to intimidate parliament; the King responded icily that he would not be "denied his right to communicate with the Swedish people." Sweden was, officially, in a constitutional crisis, and Staaff subsequently resigned and before the end of 1914 went into exile in Britain. A caretaker government under Hjalmar Hammarskjold was appointed full of conservative civil servants, and in the elections held that July, the conservative and right-liberal coalition won a majority, contingent on some amelioration of Sweden's longstanding protectionist policies.
The Courtyard Crisis was, in many ways, the inflection point of Swedish politics in the 20th century. Staaff's folding in the crisis denied Swedish liberalism one of its most important founders, and the left-liberal wing of the Liberal Party would not lead a government until the peaceful constitutional revolutions of the 1970s. Swedish parliamentarianism had, in theory, survived, but a parliamentary clique of right-wing and center-right parties ranging from agrarians to nationalists to the aristocratic elite would control the Riksdag without interruption through 1972, using a combination of a complex proportional representation system, a restricted franchise (universal suffrage for men and women would not be instituted for decades to come), and an appointed upper house of Parliament dominated by the nobility with a larger role than Britain's House of Lords. The King's gambit had, in other words, worked - the constitutional crisis provoked had seen his opponents wilt, and his position as a powerful voice and influence in Swedish politics had gone challenged but seen that challenge off..."
- Path of Darkness: Europe's Illiberal Hour
[1] I hope everyone appreciates the irony of stolid, old-fashioned and conservative Scandinavia looking to the progressive, vibrant United States as a model
[2] More on this later
[3] Granted I'm putting my thumb on the scale a bit by making things more extreme, but it is important to emphasize just what a backwater most of Scandinavia was even up to the 1950s. Sweden was basically the last country in Western Europe to urbanize, just for starters. This is a long-winded way of saying that OTL, quite honestly from an economic and sociopolitical perspective, probably represents something of a best case scenario for all of Scandinavia, and this TL will explore what a shittier, poorer, less dynamic and more socially backwards Scandinavia up to the present day might look like
[4] Scandinavian politics in the 1910s and 1920s was basically just a contest to see which right-wing polar explorer to accumulate the most power behind the scenes
[5] Remember - this Gustaf V Adolf is OTL's Gustaf VI Adolf, crowned 43 years early with his grandfather Oscar II's death
[6] Real event, and the fallout is similar.