Swedish Strategic Culture after 1945
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836705049732 |
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| Author | Gunnar Åselius |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Swedish Strategic Culture after 19451
GUNNAR ÅSELIUS
ABSTRACT
This article examines the evolution of Swedish strategic culture during
the twentieth century and up to the present.Although Sweden is the only
Scandinavian country that has stayed out of war since the age of
Napoleon, it still has proud military traditions stemming from Sweden’s
age of empire (1561–1721) and from the Cold War period,when this non-
aligned country became partly self-sufficient in modern military tech-
nology, producing its own fighter-jets, tanks and submarines, even
planning to acquire nuclear weapons in the 1950s. On paper, Sweden
maintained an impressive number of armed forces (850,000 men after
mobilization), although at the end of the Cold War their equipment and
training left much to be desired. Only around the year 2000 did this huge
Cold War defence complex begin to be dismantled. In line with the
Swedish administrative-political culture (which is often traced back to
the seventeenth-century statesman Axel Oxenstierna), the military
enjoyed a high degree of autonomy compared with most other Western
countries.This made it possible for the Army,the most influential of the
services, to preserve its size rather than modernize gradually. Also, like
other sectors of Swedish society,national defence was adopted by well-
organized popular movements with corporatist traits, movements such
as voluntary defence organizations with hundreds of thousands of mem-
bers and by defence industry.Sweden was the first country in the world
to abolish the system of professional NCOs in the 1980s,creating a uni-
fied corps of enlisted officers.The tension between the ideals of popular
defence and broad democratic participation – hailed in Swedish society
at large – and the demands of military professionalism, and Sweden’s
national self-image as an advanced industrial country,increased towards
the end of the Cold War. Only after the end of the Cold War did academ-
ization of officers’ training, the adoption of an official military doctrine
and advanced thinking about network-centric warfare bring about
much-needed modernization of the Swedish armed forces.Today,how-
ever, the mental gap is wide between the military elite on the one hand
— which sees international operations as the primary mission in the
future — and public opinion and large segments of the officers’ corps,on
the other, which still consider defence as defending national territory.
Keywords:conscription; strategic culture; Swedish defence; Swedish his-
tory after 1945; Swedish officers’ corps; Sweden and the Cold War
Prior to World War I, when Swedish conservative intellectuals were strug-
gling to define Swedish national character and heritage, their country’s past
Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies Association
Vol.40(1): 25–44. Copyright ©2005 NISA www.ps.au.dk/NISA
Sage Publications www.sagepublications.com
0010-8367. DOI: 10.1177/0010836705049732
as a European great power in the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies played an important role (Björck, 1946; Elvander, 1961).The alleged
unity between king and people in the glorious ‘age of greatness’ contrasted
with the dangerous ‘party spirit’ of the then contemporary parliamentarian
democracy, and some of the key points in the conservative foreign policy
agenda could be justified through references to the past, namely that
Sweden should be the leading power in Scandinavia and that Russia was
the natural enemy and Lutheran Prussia the natural ally.Also, the Swedish
officers’ corps saw the victories of the heroic warrior-kings Gustavus
Adolphus (1611–32), Charles X (1654–60) and Charles XII (1697–1718) as
a great source of pride and professional self-confidence (Torbacke, 1983;
Oredsson, 1992; Åselius, 1994).
However, the political force that came to shape Swedish society during
most of the twentieth century — the Social Democratic Workers’ Party
(SAP) — had little backing among conservative intellectuals and the offi-
cers’ corps. SAP resented traditional nationalism and did its best to launch
an alternative, less martial,model for Swedish national identity. In the SAP
version of Swedish history, the heroes were the ordinary people and the
main theme was the people’s struggle for freedom, bread and justice.The
decisive movement of that struggle had come late, only with the advent of
the labour movement. If there was any room at all for kings in this story,
they were bureaucratic revolutionaries like Gustav Vasa (1523–60) or
Charles XI (1672–97), whose ideas on state taxation and centralized gov-
ernment were similar to SAP’s own (Zander, 2001; Lindeborg, 2001; cf.
Larsson, 2002: 357).
At the same time, SAP would not have dominated Swedish politics for so
many decades had elements of historical continuity been totally absent
from the party’s image. For instance, the ideological appeal of the Swedish
welfare state partly rested on the spiritual heritage of Lutheranism, as well
as on the egalitarian tradition inherited from Swedish peasant society. In
1928, SAP leader Per Albin Hansson also managed to present as his own
idea an originally conservative concept of the state as the ‘People’s Home’
(folkhemmet). In this way he immunized much of the anti-socialist agitation
of his opponents and made possible a successful coalition government with
the Agrarian Party (Schüllerqvist, 1992).
In the field of foreign and defence policy,SAP displayed a similar talent
for selective continuity after World War II.Although the Social Democrats
were alien to worship of Sweden’s great-power past, they still refused to see
Sweden as an ordinary member of the international community.After all,
Sweden was a model welfare society, and, along with Switzerland, alone
among European countries to have enjoyed undisturbed peace since the
Napoleonic Wars. It could be argued that Sweden’s impartial position
between East and West, her manifest solidarity with the Third World and
the country’s active stance on human rights deserved respect from the rest
of the world (Bjereld, 1992; Lödén,1999).
Moreover, this ambition to be a ‘moral great-power’ (Nilsson, 1991) and
remain non-aligned in the Cold War demanded a high degree of military
self-reliance. Sweden therefore maintained domestic production of techn-
26 COOPERATION AND CONFLICT 40(1)
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