How to have your cake and eat it too: Sweden, regional awkwardness, and the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR)

ABSTRACT

Our study draws on an investigation of Sweden’s participation in the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR) to ask what it can reveal regarding how ‘awkward’ states in regional integration – those regularly considered by their partners to be beyond the regional mainstream – can secure their preferences nonetheless. We test the independent variables of ‘awkwardness’, by focusing on the ongoing work of officials charged with making the EUSBSR work in practice. We thereby seek to add to existing macro-level analyses of Sweden’s place and position in the European Union that tend to focus on ‘big picture’ matters. Our findings suggest that Swedish actors working within the various agencies and institutions associated with the EUSBSR have been able to offset their country’s perceived awkwardness by developing a reputation for everyday effectiveness and reliability. This leads us to the tentative conclusion that under certain conditions awkward states can offset this status, and, in the words of the everyday metaphor, have their cake and eat it too.

KEYWORDS:

• Sweden
• awkward states
• European integration
• EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. European integration is not limited to the construction of the EU. Rather, it consists of a matrix of institutions and processes, some of which are limited by geography or policy area, in which the EU is but the most comprehensive organization, and is itself variegated rather than uniform (Leruth and Lord 2015).

2. We are grateful to the reviewer for the suggestion that our work could link to the literature on soft power, and agree that this could be fruitful – perhaps especially regarding the relationship between paradiplomacy/substate diplomacy and the international reputation of a nation-state. However, space precludes such a discussion here.

3. Thirty-one persons were identified to be working with Swedish representatives, 7 out of the 31 agreed to answer the questionnaire. The interviewees came from a range of member states (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Denmark) and 11 declined to participate as they had not, they felt, been working within the area or with Swedish representatives long enough to be able to answer our questions.

4. We sent questionnaires to 31 officials from ‘other’ states working in the Swedish priority areas of the EUSBSR. Despite polite chasing of responses and assurances of confidentiality, as well as offers of telephone or face-to-face interviews, we received only seven responses. Even given the small target group, this rate of response means we are necessarily circumspect about our findings. Our respondents may be a self-selecting subgroup of people who felt secure in responding because they had nothing negative to report. The information they supplied does, however, tally with existing firsthand accounts of what it is like to represent an ‘awkward’ state in EU politics and policy-making (Wall 2008), and with a recent extensively-researched monograph on the related issue of how EU countries manage the political costs of opting out from certain policies (Adler-Nissen 2014).

5. Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2014) intriguingly shows how officials from ‘awkward’ member states of the EU can manage this status successfully, but also how they can suffer a certain stigma as a result of their country’s stance. Her book focuses on Danish and British actors, but frequently makes explicit reference to Swedish equivalents.

6. Political elites, at all levels of Swedish politics, can successfully use the EU as a means to reshape long-standing political debates and overcome established logjams in the national political system, as has been shown regarding the regionalization of the country (Warleigh-Lack and Stegmann Mccallion 2012). However, the political costs of an overt pro-EU stance in an issue area that is sensitive in public opinion remain high; this may be part of the reason why the office of the Prime Minister has consolidated and increased its hold over Swedish EU politics and policy (Larsson and Bäck 2008, 249–51).

7. The answer to this question is outside the remit of this article; however, it is intriguing that one of our respondents specifically mentions as a Swedish priority the insistence on multilevel governance and on the role of subnational authorities in the implementation processes.

8. The following cornerstones are relevant to the Baltic Sea Strategy: first, Sweden should participate actively internationally in the global environment she finds herself in; second, a Swedish foreign policy goal is to intensify the Baltic Sea collaborations; and third, Sweden’s military aim was to be alliance-neutral especially in the event of war in our close neighborhood. Indeed, the Swedish overall objective was declared to be an all-European security community (Regeringsförklaringen (Declaration of Government) 1997).

9. Because we obtained few responses to our questionnaire, we present our findings later by drawing on an overall analysis of the results.

10. Intriguingly, here too the reasoning was informed by day-to-day experience. Danish officials were considered to lack clarity and consistency in the objectives they were seeking, or being expected to seek; Russian officials were considered to suffer from information and buy-in deficits, since Moscow was not involved in the negotiation of the EUSBSR but takes part in its actual implementation.

11. For instance, can Mexico use policy convergence and implementation to ‘do a Sweden’ in the context of NAFTA? What about Brazil in Mercosur or Burma/Myanmar in ASEAN?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Malin Stegmann McCallion

Malin Stegmann McCallion is Reader in Political Science at Karlstad University, Sweden. She has published in Journal of Political Science Education, Journal of European Integration, Regional Studies, and Regional and Federal Studies. Her research interests are multilevel governance, regionalization, substate diplomacy, and Europeanization processes.

Alex Brianson

Alex Brianson (formerly Warleigh-Lack) was Professor of European Politics and Jean Monnet Chair in Comparative Regional Integration Studies at the University of Surrey (UK) until August 2015. He was Chair of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies 2006–2009, and has also held chairs at Brunel University and the University of Limerick. He has published widely in his research interests of European political integration, comparative regional integration, and integration theory.