The birth of the enterprising soldier: governing military recruitment and retention in post-Cold War Sweden

ABSTRACT

The promise of becoming a normal or even ideal citizen of the nation-state has long been central to the politics of military recruitment and retention. However, what this promise has entailed, and how the image of the soldier has been constructed, varies across time and place. This article illustrates and historicizes the emergence of a distinct soldier image, closely associated with the neoliberal ideal of responsible, active, and entrepreneurial citizenship, in the context of Sweden. The paper adopts a genealogical approach and views ‘the enterprising soldier’ through the contemporary history of military reforms in post-Cold War Sweden. Central to these reforms was the move from universal conscription for men to a recruitment policy that gradually came to rely on voluntarism for all, a shift that culminated in the introduction of an all-volunteer force in 2010. To illustrate the significance and potential appeal of ‘the enterprising soldier’, the paper exemplifies how this image has been promoted and presupposed in three sites: (1) military recruitment materials, (2) military career planning schemes, and (3) military-private sector partnership programmes. Through this genealogical endeavour, this paper contributes new insights into how the image and promise of soldiering has transformed alongside neoliberal reforms of the armed forces.

KEYWORDS:

• Genealogy
• military recruitment
• neoliberalism
• soldier identity
• contemporary history
• The Swedish Armed Forces

Introduction

With what promises have young people been recruited and motivated to serve and sacrifice in military uniform? How have these promises transformed over time? These questions have long interested researchers across a variety of disciplines¹ – and they serve as the point of departure in this article.² More specifically, this paper explores how a distinct form of soldier image has emerged alongside vast changes in Swedish military recruitment policy and practice from the early 1990s and onwards. The article refers to this soldier image as ‘the enterprising soldier’.³ In the period covered by the article (1990 to 2018), Sweden’s all male, universal conscription system was reformed into a selective service system that relied on market mechanisms to produce will and motivation among young potential recruits, until it eventually was deactivated in 2010. Universalism (for men) was at that point replaced by voluntarism (for all) as the main rationality governing the politics of military recruitment and retention. Although the Swedish all-volunteer force turned out to be short-lived and conscription was reinstated from 2018, this reform period warrants attention precisely because of how it enabled the birth of a distinct soldier image, and thus a reinvigorated promise of ‘becoming’⁴ for young prospective recruits. This paper should thus be understood as an attempt to historicize and exemplify how a particular soldier image has emerged alongside comprehensive, market-based military personnel reforms. The aim of this genealogical endeavour is to shed new light on how promises and images of soldiering are produced, promoted, and presupposed in the politics of military recruitment and retention.

Before returning to the ways in which the image of the Swedish soldier has transformed, let me begin with some general remarks on how this article approaches military recruitment and retention as a form of ‘government’.⁵ States and military machineries have utilized a range of strategies to govern and mobilize populations in war preparations and deployments, spanning from universal conscription to professional, all-volunteer forces and many hybrid systems in between. Within countries employing universal conscription – a term often used to signify conscription for all men – military service has frequently been a trade-off for obtaining access to the rights and freedoms connected to citizenship, such as the right to vote.⁶ Moreover, it is well known that conscripted men refusing to serve the nation in arms have been imprisoned and lost other fundamental rights and freedoms.⁷ Yet, even in countries where citizens have been and/or continue to be obliged to serve in the military by law, the relationship between military service and citizenship has been, and remains, much more multifaceted. In motivating and mobilizing young people in war (preparations), laws positioning citizenship as a codified condition of military service have always coexisted with uncodified norms, ideas, and images associating soldiering – or military training – with becoming an ideal citizen of the nation.⁸ To use Foucauldian vocabulary,⁹ also in cases where the state relies on sovereign and judicial techniques forcing young men to enlist, the government of military recruitment and retention is also reliant on disciplinary techniques that render ‘soldier’ a desired subject position through its association with normal and/or ideal citizen characteristics, be it through market techniques such as recruitment campaigns, or through popular culture. Military recruitment and retention policies and practices thus represent at once a restrictive form of government, that either threatens to imprison or at the very least submit individuals and populations to a particular understanding of normal and/or ideal citizenship, and a productive form of government, extending promises and possibilities of ‘becoming’ to the one identifying and identified as a ‘soldier’.

What these ideal characteristics associated with soldier identity consist of, however, change across time and place. In order to shed light on, contextualize, and de-naturalize what can be fruitfully understood as a novel form of soldier image central to the government of military recruitment and retention in 21^st century Sweden, this paper adopts a genealogical approach, attempting to write a ‘history of the present’.¹⁰ More specifically, the paper draws on Foucauldian scholarship to situate the emergence of ‘the enterprising soldier’ within a broader neoliberal problematization and critique of the 20^th century welfare state, detectable in several political debates and sectors in Sweden since the 1990s.¹¹ Laying bare the market knowledge, rationalities, and techniques that were proposed as a solution to the alleged bureaucratic, intrusive and inefficient welfare state in this period is crucial if we are to understand how ‘the enterprising soldier’ could emerge in 21st century Sweden – that is, its ‘condition of possibility’¹² – but also how it could appear appealing to young Swedish citizens of the 2010s.

In what follows, I draw on previous works by historians to discuss different images of the 20^th century soldier in relation to Sweden’s all-male conscription policy. Thereafter, I discuss the reform period beginning in the early 1990s, drawing on primary digitalized sources, particularly government bills and reports, as well as parliamentary debates and reports. Next, the article offers examples of how ‘the enterprising soldier’ – an image closely associated with the neoliberal ideal of active, responsible, and productive citizenship – has been produced, promoted, and presupposed in three different sites: (1) recruitment materials and commercials, (2) career planning and development schemes, and (3) military-private sector partnership programmes. This analysis builds on primary data generated from digital sources, as well as from the collection of printed ephemera at the National Library of Sweden.¹³ Finally, the article demonstrates how the post-Cold War reform period, with its intensification of market mechanisms in the government of military recruitment and retention, should be understood as enabling the birth of ‘the enterprising soldier’, as well as how this particular soldier image and promise signifies both continuity and change.

While knowledge about how military marketing produces images of the Swedish soldier, the SAF and indeed ‘Sweden’ have been discussed in International Relations and Military Studies journals,¹⁴ and while military career development schemes and training programmes have been analysed by organizational and working life scholars,¹⁵ this article contributes new insights by bringing together and historicizing images of the Swedish soldier in contemporary politics of recruitment and retention. This historicisation is crucial if we are to understand how the birth of an entrepreneurial Swedish soldier was made possible, but also its continued appeal and potential effects entering the 2020s, as Sweden moves towards a new era of conscription. This study contributes such insights while also introducing original empirical material from archival research. Moreover, while the emergence of an ‘active’, ‘responsible’, and/or ‘enterprising’ citizen ideal has been discussed by scholars studying the marketization and privatization of other public services in Sweden, such as education, health care, elder care, and child care,¹⁶ the military institution has often been absent in these discussions.¹⁷ As such, by centring images of the Swedish soldier, this study also contributes new insights to broader discussions about neoliberal public sector governance and citizenship ideals in the post-Cold War era. Together, these contributions shed new light on the contemporary history of both civil-military relations and public management in Sweden.

It should be clearly stated before we continue that the soldier image primarily discussed here by no means represents the only image of the soldier produced, promoted, and presupposed by Swedish political and military officials, or within contemporary politics of military recruitment and retention. Conflicting images and ideas of who the soldier is and ought to be are undoubtedly promoted in sites such as field training as well as among soldiers themselves. Yet, the image discussed herein is one that frequently emerged as a proposed solution to the problem of recruitment and retention, which received much attention from political and military officials in the post-Cold War era of voluntarism. This image of the soldier deserves scholarly attention and problematization because it provides an answer to the question with what promise are young people recruited and motivated to serve and sacrifice in military uniform that partly challenges promises dominant in the 1900s, and still taken-for-granted in much scholarship. But also because it poses important questions about whom the military machinery in 21^st century Sweden serves, and to what effects.

All-male conscription and images of the 20^th-century Swedish soldier

Until the early 1990s, when a major reform period of the Swedish conscription system began, Sweden had employed all-male universal conscription for almost a century.¹⁸ The system implied that, with few exceptions, all young men were obliged to conduct basic military training and were thereafter assigned a wartime post in the defence machinery.¹⁹ In the early Cold War period – when Sweden’s ‘neutral’ defence strategy purportedly necessitated a large and even ‘total’ territorial defence²⁰ – around 50.000 young men were drafted for military service every year, and around 800.000 men could be mobilized if necessary.²¹ At this time, only around 3% of the population available for service received exception warrants.²² While Swedish men were obliged to serve in the military defence, women could opt to enlist, either by joining a voluntary defence organization such as the Swedish Lotta Corps [Svenska Lottakåren] or – from the 1980s when legal obstacles for women’s military service were lifted – by conducting basic military training alongside conscripted men.²³

All-male universal conscription has often been rationalized through the notion of a democratic citizen-soldier who is obliged to serve and sacrifice for his nation in exchange for access to political and economic rights and freedoms.²⁴ In her discussion of the relationship between citizenship and conscription in Sweden, economic historian Fia Sundevall refers to a slogan used by socialists in the early 1900s in their claims on suffrage: ‘one man, one rifle, one vote’. Sundevall concludes that the association between political citizenship and conscription became so successful that it ended up excluding men who had not conducted military service from the right to vote when a new voting bill was passed in 1909.²⁵ In addition, refusal to serve in the military was criminalized and punishable with imprisonment, thus directly infringing on the freedom of male citizens.²⁶

That a large proportion of men conduct military training was deemed important not only because it was considered necessary in order to maintain the total defence of Sweden and deter a foreign invasion, but also for a range of social, economic, and political reasons. All-male universal conscription was seen as a way to democratize an institution previously dominated by social elites, thus ensuring that the armed forces belonged to, and were controlled by, ‘the people’.²⁷ Moreover, the armed forces were broadly viewed as an educational and fostering institution through which individuals became part of, and as soldiers came to symbolize, a unified national collective.²⁸ Military service was rationalized as a process of ‘growing up’ via a strict disciplinary regime that not only included drills on how to kill and master the body in the face of physical constraints and dangers, but also educational programmes and cleaning rituals.²⁹ In other words, conscription in Sweden was not only understood as forming good soldiers, but also normal and idealized male citizens.

That military service ‘makes men out of boys’ is, however, a narrative familiar in many national contexts.³⁰ The citizen-soldier and conscript are thus highly gendered identities, closely linked to the promise of citizenship and masculinity. This does not mean that only one form of masculine military identity has existed – or that military training always has moulded male citizens into the same shape. Scholars have written at length about the instability and contradictions at the heart of military identity,³¹ as well as about variations and hierarchies of masculinity both within and between armed forces.³² There are no comprehensive studies of how the image of the Swedish conscript was constructed, gendered, and promoted to the Swedish population in the 1900s, but the explorations that do exist suggest that this image indeed transformed throughout the century.

Historian Pontus Rudberg has for instance studied soldier manuals and handbooks from the early 1900s and showed how conscripts were taught the importance of godliness, truthfulness, sobriety, cleanliness, (sexual) morality, discipline, self-restraint as well as loyalty towards, and submission to, God, Homeland, and King.³³ Also Sundevall, who has studied how policymakers and social commentators sought to use conscription for non-military purposes in the early 20^th century, refers to the importance of instilling in conscripts a temperance ideal and the dangers of alcohol consumption.³⁴ These ideals promoted to and associated with soldiers in basic training as well as in political debates clearly reflected broader understandings of what it meant to be a normal and valued Swedish citizen in the first half of the 20^th century.³⁵ These ideals were racialized and often attributed characteristics deemed particular to the white, Swedish nation. In soldier handbooks, the Swedish nation was frequently described as the result of heroic wars and battles made possible by superior ‘racial qualities’.³⁶ The early 20^th-century soldier was thus both promoted as a symbol – and the ultimate guarantor – of idealized white masculinity.

During WWII, the Swedish state and its defence institutions produced and supported the production of short propaganda films which – when not only aired in front of mobilized conscripts but also in movie theatres – partly appears to have altered the popular image of the conscript, bringing it closer to the image promoted to soldiers in the ranks. While films in the early 1900s had portrayed the conscript as a figure whose docility and subordination appeared both futile and humorous, the conscript now emerging on the movie screen was a national hero – an adventurous professional with the bravery to sacrifice himself for the Homeland.³⁷

Some of the qualities and characteristics linked to the Swedish soldier in the first half of the 1900s seemed to lose their appeal, or at least shift connotations, after WWII and the fall of the Nazi regime in Germany, while others remained closely associated with the soldier. Media historian Lina Sturfelt, studying images and ideas surrounding conscription in Cold War Sweden via the Army’s magazine Army News [Arménytt], describes how the conscript was associated with qualities such as discipline, willpower, bravery, strength, toughness, comradeship, loyalty, virtue, devotion to duty and, not least, the willingness to sacrifice himself for the collective.³⁸ In Cold War Sweden, this collective identity was – in contrast to the construction of a collective identity by reference to past wars and battles – strikingly future-oriented and centred on ideas about a free, modern, and progressive welfare state, referred to as The people’s home [Folkhemmet]. Sturfelt writes,

When passing through the gates of the regiment, the conscript did not only leave his boyhood behind, but he also left his private home and family to enter into the national family of Folkhemmet. From now on, he was supposed to suppress his individual needs and wishes in favour of the common good.³⁹

Although the conscript’s service of and submission to God, Homeland, and King was replaced by The people’s home in the Cold War era, the image of the ideal man, soldier, and citizen was still closely associated with duty, docility, and self-sacrifice – or with the suppression of an individual identity in favour of a collective one. It is not surprising then that military service often has been described as a ‘great equaliser’. In historian Fredrik Eriksson’s study of how Swedish conscripts of the early Cold War period remember physical training in the military, men from different class backgrounds recall putting on the same uniform and facing the same challenges for the purpose of serving the national collective, as a collective.⁴⁰

That the ultimate quality of the ideal, male soldier and citizen in 20^th-century Sweden was his willingness to merge with, and sacrifice himself for, the good of the collective did not mean that military service was promoted as purely a sacrifice – or as negative for the individual. According to Rudberg, soldier handbooks in the 1940s appear to have shifted from demanding the complete submission of conscripts to instilling in conscripts a will to – as well as an understanding of the benefits of – ‘submitting oneself to the common good’, although we know little about what such benefits might have entailed.⁴¹ In contrast, historian Anders Ahlbäck shows how soldier magazines in the 1930s Finland detailed the benefits of military service not only for the state, but also for the individual conscript, for instance by promising occupational success and increased social status.⁴² Such promises are, as we shall see, central in the government of military recruitment and retention also in early 21^st century Sweden.

From universalism to voluntarism: market mechanisms as a condition of possibility for the enterprising soldier

When the Cold War ended and the bipolar world order appeared to dissolve, so did eventually the rationale behind the Swedish total defence. Beginning in the 1990s, a long line of government bills downsized the territorial defence of Sweden and redirected the SAF towards expeditionary operations abroad, under UN, EU, and NATO flags.⁴³ At this point in time, reorganizing and ‘modernizing’ the SAF, and at the same time drafting large shares of the male population for basic military training, appeared increasingly unsustainable.⁴⁴ Not only was this a costly combination, the SAF also required a lower number of conscripts to staff the shrinking territorial defence, resulting in more conscripts than available wartime postings. In addition, conscripts could not be used to staff the new organization as they could not be forcibly sent on missions abroad. These changes appeared to undermine the long-held rationale in Swedish military recruitment policy, which established that there was an added social, economic, and political value to universal service for men, beyond military effectiveness.⁴⁵ Instead, a different set of government rationalities began to emerge in political debates and became institutionalized when a new total defence duty legislation came into effect in 1995. More specifically, when establishing that it was the demands of the military defence that were to decide the number of conscripts drafted for basic military training every year, the new legislation appeared to embrace a market-based rationality.⁴⁶

As the SAF required a lower number of conscripts then available in each cohort, the authorities were soon faced with the intricate question of who to draft and not to draft for service. The answer provided by the Government was that the draft authority⁴⁷ should make will and motivation to conduct military training and serve in the SAF drafting criteria.⁴⁸ This passage from a 2001 defence bill clearly illustrates the reasoning behind the shift from all-male universality to voluntarism, and its implications for the question of who to draft:

The person best suited for a position shall be drafted. A person is rarely best suited if he or she does not find that the training for which they reserve a part of their life can be considered relevant for the armed forces or for the individual. It is against this background that the Government rejects a system of conscription that drafts young individuals for military service without there being a need to do so. It is also for this reason that the individual’s motivation to serve will be given greater attention in the drafting process. In order for this system to function, improvements to the conscript’s conditions before, during, and after basic military training are needed. Those who commit a part of their lives to be conscripts should experience that they take with them an asset into life after basic training.⁴⁹

To make motivation among young people a drafting criterion would, according to the Government, both make the new draft system appear more just and provide a motivated recruitment base from which to attract volunteers for officer positions and missions abroad.⁵⁰

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Government also began to embrace a market-based view of the young citizen, for instance when suggesting that ‘motivation […] does not just emerge by itself’⁵¹ but must be sparked through active recruitment measures and a revamped military ‘offer’.⁵² During this period, the SAF came under increasing pressure from the Government to present military service and careers as ‘attractive’ for the individual – frequently referred to as ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ – and the SAF was regularly referred to as a ‘brand’ to be boosted and marketed.⁵³ Knowledge about business management and brand-building dominant in the private sphere thus appeared to influence and alter how military recruitment and retention were governed in this period. As we will see in the following sections, private actors in the form of PR, career coaching, and staffing companies also became an essential part of how the SAF attempted to govern (potential) recruits. This process through which the SAF became exposed to competition over labour and began actively recruiting and retaining – not only officers – but also soldiers/conscripts to basic military training, through the use of market knowledge and techniques, can arguably be understood as a marketization of soldier recruitment. Marketization not only appeared as the solution to the problem of the increasingly costly and partial (and thus potentially unfair) drafting of young men, but also to the problem of gender inequality in the officer rank, and government bills throughout the 1990s emphasized the importance of actively recruiting more women (who could not be conscripted) to basic training.⁵⁴

It should be noted that the marketization of soldier recruitment took shape alongside the privatization of other military or security functions⁵⁵ as well as alongside the introduction of neoliberal, market-based programmes and reforms in other public sectors. Education, health care, elder care, and child care were public services that also became increasingly governed by and through market knowledge, rationalities, and techniques when outsourced and exposed to different degrees of competition, from the 1990s and onwards. The ideal citizen produced, promoted, and presupposed through these reforms was an active, responsible, and calculating individual who – according to neoliberal logics – contributes to streamline the public sector by choosing between competing providers and services.⁵⁶ I will return to this citizen ideal below.

How then was the SAF expected to present basic military training as attractive to a diverse pool of potential conscripts, and thus entice young men and women to choose a military rather than a civilian education and, potentially, career? The question about what to offer and indeed promise voluntary military recruits when a decreasing share of the population is needed for service has been posed in many societies. In the Anglo-Saxon countries – where efforts to recruit voluntary, professional soldiers have been intensified alongside efforts to demobilize and privatize public welfare services – the answer to this question has often been generous military welfare programmes, including access to subsidized healthcare and higher education. Scholars have refed to this promise as ‘welfare for warfare’.⁵⁷ Access to welfare services has often been combined with the promise of masculinity, though in reinvigorated forms.⁵⁸

In Sweden, publicly accessible health care and education, as well as the Government’s strong emphasis on recruiting more women, arguably limited both of these options.⁵⁹ Instead, military officials began to stress the importance of widening the image of the soldier, beyond the hypermasculine infantryman, in order to recruit and retain voluntary personnel.⁶⁰ Although certainly appealing to some young individuals, the association between soldiering and masculinity was also deemed excluding and discouraging for many so-called ‘non-traditional recruits’ who not only were needed to fill the ranks, but also to answer the political call to become an attractive and modern employer for all.⁶¹ Moreover, although the Government’s answer to the question of how to attract voluntary recruits was partly material, suggesting increased financial compensation and better conditions for those who served,⁶² I suggest that the primary technology of government employed by the armed forces to recruit and retain voluntary soldiers in the post-Cold War era was the disciplinary promise of acquiring characteristics associated with ideal citizenship. Yet, in the 1990s and 2000s, ideal citizenship was no longer connected to docility, self-sacrifice, and the fulfilment of duties to a national collective, but rather to the individual’s willingness and capacity to take responsibility for, invest in, and optimize ‘the self’ as a brand or enterprise, to prevail in the competitive market called life. By making autonomous, active, and calculated choices (in contrast to simply being dutiful and obeying laws, orders and superiors), this ideal citizen could be imagined as a productive force in (rather than a burden to) neoliberal society.⁶³ As I will go on to argue, it is this particular citizenship promise that political and military officials increasingly have come to associate with soldiering.

Finally, although the shift from universalism for men to voluntarism for all came gradually during the 1990s and early 2000s, it was the Government’s 2009 decision to deactivate conscription in peacetime that eventually made the SAF fully reliant on voluntary, professional soldiers, recruited in competition with other employers in the labour market.⁶⁴ I suggest that this gradual marketization of soldier recruitment and retention constituted a condition of possibility for the birth of the enterprising soldier. In what follows, I will show how the image of the enterprising soldier frequently was presented as a solution to the problem of recruiting and retaining voluntary personnel during the period between 2010 and 2018, when conscription was deactivated. This will be done through three subsections, each discussing one important site in which the enterprising soldier has been promoted to both prospective and serving soldiers.

The enterprising soldier in recruitment materials

When the all-volunteer force came into effect, the SAF followed the example of other professional forces and spent considerable resources on surveying the market for labour.⁶⁵ Military officials were tasked with gathering knowledge on the behaviours and desires of young Swedish citizens and additional market research on how young individuals live, identify, communicate, consume, and relate to the SAF was outsourced to private companies. In a strategic document from 2014, the SAF summarizes research on their primary ‘target group’ and states, as one of their main findings, that their ‘loyalty towards employers is based on personal development’.⁶⁶ The document continues:

Continuous personal development is the key to retaining young employees. This means that it is ever more important for employers to have an attractive, almost tailored, offer for the individual employee. […] Personal development is about “me” – about developing as a person – rather than about the development of the company or organisation. Employers can therefore not expect that their employees shall commit to the development of the organisation without getting something in return.⁶⁷

The citizen imagined by the SAF in this quote is clearly someone driven by individual aspirations, rather than collective obligations. This idea of what motivates young Swedish citizens in the early 21^st century is reflected in recruitment materials and campaigns in both social and traditional media. In a pamphlet headlined ‘Hard and Soft: What you will receive when serving in the Armed Forces’, the potential recruit is promised the opportunity to ‘tailor-make your own position’⁶⁸ in the SAF and a pamphlet titled ‘1000 Opportunities: What you can become when serving in the Armed Forces’ asks the reader ‘who are you’ and continues by stating ‘It is your persona, your abilities, and your interests that determine what you can do in the Armed Forces’.⁶⁹

But what exactly did young Swedes of the late 2010s demand ‘in return’ for their enlistments? What ‘assets’ were they looking to take with them into civilian life? When the SAF answered these questions in recruitment materials, the promise to prospective recruits has often been a better position in the labour market. This can be exemplified by a recruitment pamphlet launched in 2011, declaring that, when enlisting with the SAF,

you receive experiences useful throughout the rest of your life. You will be trained to solve difficult challenges in limited time and to collaborate with others. You get to shoulder an important responsibility and become a master in orderliness and organisation. Basic Military Training is the start of a life journey where you will increase your self-perception and grow as a person. Most importantly, you will learn how to become a team player and positively contribute to a group. Which employer would say no to that?⁷⁰

This is an illustrative example. In many recruitment campaigns launched by the SAF after the all-volunteer force was instituted in 2010, basic military training was promoted as a way to improve one’s CV and gain skills and characteristics transferable to, and desired by, the civilian labour market.⁷¹ In these examples, the potential recruit is encouraged to view and value the self through the eyes of a future employer – and the promise of soldiering appears, first and foremost, to be employability.

This answer is not unexpected. A large body of literature on neoliberal forms of government has argued that the ideal neoliberal citizen is characterized by a tendency as well as an expectation to view wage labour as a route towards self-fulfilment. Sociologists Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose have referred to the neoliberal subject as ‘the enterprising self’⁷² and philosopher Pierre Dardot has, together with sociologist Christian Laval, use the term ‘entrepreneurial man’ .⁷³ For this citizen subject, the line between employee and employer appears blurred,⁷⁴ and so does the ‘the boundary between work and leisure’,⁷⁵ as explicitly stated in the SAF target group analysis cited above. The promise of employability is therefore a big one, and should not only be understood as the promise of getting a job post-military service and avoiding becoming a burden to neoliberal society, but more broadly as a promise of achieving social status by taking responsibility for and optimizing the self as professional and, thus, person. The promise of personal development through soldiering as (full or part-time) wage labour is reoccurring in SAF recruitment materials, manifested in statements such as ‘the SAF is a modern employer at the forefront in terms of offering benefits and possibilities for personal development’.⁷⁶

Consequently, in the recruitment materials discussed above, we can see the image of an entreprising soldier emerging. It is precisely because this imagined soldier – in contrast to the 20^th century Swedish conscript – not has been forced, but chosen, to enlist, that s/he can be imagined as entrepreneurial, an active individual who takes responsibility for and invests in the self, understood as an enterprise in the competitive market that constitutes both working life and social life. As we will see below, this connection between the personal and the professional is reproduced and promoted also to serving soldiers, beyond the initial recruitment effort.

The enterprising soldier in military career planning schemes

As part of their efforts to become an attractive employer capable of recruiting and retaining voluntary and motivated soldiers, the SAF also launched a range of development and training opportunities for personnel, communicated under the umbrella term ‘Comprehensive Career Planning’ [Sammanhållen karriärplanering]. In their evaluation of the term and its implementation, working life scholars Gunnar Gillberg et al write that:

The tools available as part of Comprehensive Career Planning have been developed by the SAF as part of their ambition to retain and train personnel, as well as to increase the SAF’s attractiveness as an employer, in a time where staffing […] has been challenging as a result of new assignments entrusted on the SAF, which in turn has resulted in many early drop-outs [among soldiers].⁷⁷

One of these tools is a ‘Life and Career Development Programme’ [Livs- och karriärutveckling] with the dual aim of ‘supporting the development of employees and ensuring the SAF’s access to competence’.⁷⁸ The programme has been developed by the SAF in collaboration with private consulting firms.⁷⁹ An employee undertaking the programme meets with a certified career coach eighth to ten times over a period of four to six months, going through a seven-step programme with the aim of identifying future career plans – be it inside or outside of the SAF – and an action plan to get there. These ambitions are identified through a process where employees learn how to identify their strengths and weaknesses, as well as how they ended up in their current positions, both personal and professional: ‘Was it by accident or choice?’ and ‘Can a pattern be identified?’⁸⁰ A pamphlet introducing career development to SAF employees presents the programme in the following way:

The career development programme enables you to stay one step ahead – to set out a direction – by creating a clear image of your dream job and your abilities. The person who simply “goes with the flow” and does not take initiative on their own might experience the ever-changing labour market as unsafe and unstable. However, employees who stay one step ahead experience greater safety, challenges, and joy.⁸¹

In answering the question whom the programme is for, the pamphlet stipulates ‘people who want to take responsibility for their own development and are motivated to invest their own time’, specifically pointing to people who ‘need to increase their self-esteem and perhaps market themselves’.⁸²

The career development programme was first introduced to officers in 2003 but extended to soldiers in 2012, when the SAF had to intensify its efforts to recruit and retain voluntary personnel for all roles within the organization. At this time, the SAF experienced problems with soldiers who chose to terminate their short-term (maximum eight year) contracts ahead of time and career planning became a way to not only retain the soldiers for the full contract length, but also to redirect them towards part-time, reservist positions when the contract ended.

Another tool available under the headline Comprehensive Career Planning is training in so-called ‘personal marketing’. This training programme started off as a three-year project with the aim of teaching all employees ‘to better communicate their competence, both through speaking and writing’.⁸³ The project has subsequently been integrated into basic military training and is mandatory for all recruits. In explaining the rationale behind offering training in personal marketing in an interview published on the SAF webpage, a Recruiting Official states: ‘we do this to take responsibility for the recruits, because they have spent a year of their lives here, we should help them plan for the future’.⁸⁴ The article continues by stating that the recruits are taught how to write a resume, underlining that basic military training ‘is very good to have on a CV. It shows that the person can take responsibility and handle stress’.⁸⁵ The article also makes it clear that a continued engagement with the SAF is one potential career path, and the training is used to inform recruits about possibilities within the organization as well as to inspire to make those choices.⁸⁶

Yet another key strategy available as part of the Comprehensive Career Planning concept is the individual ‘development dialogue’ between soldiers and their superiors. A pamphlet, informing both soldiers and officers about new routines for the dialogue, poses the question ‘Is this for you?’ on the front page and answers it:

Yes, it is for all of us! You are unique; your organisation is unique. Regardless of your position with the armed forces, you have a responsibility to uphold the public’s trust. Starting now, you are also entrusted to be part of a necessary development. This development will be crucial if we are to meet challenges ahead. […] It is the clear ambition of the SAF that we, through development dialogues […], shall meet one another around issues concerning common assignments and personal development. You are a part of the SAF, and it is crucial that you be able to grow here. The SAF needs people who feel responsible for both themselves and others. Certainly not everyone can imagine taking on such a responsibility.⁸⁷

This folder clearly illustrates how the image of an enterprising soldier not only is promoted to potential soldiers in recruitment materials, but also to soldiers serving within the organization, as part of their training and everyday routines. Exactly what skills the soldier supposedly has earned through training and service is only vaguely articulated. The emphasis appears instead to be on the soldier as an active (in contrast to a passive and docile) individual. Soldiers are taught the importance of taking responsibility for their professional selves by both optimizing their contribution to the SAF and planning for their future careers. By managing and optimizing their positions in the labour market, instead of falling victims to its unpredictable changes and demands, enlisted soldiers can stay competitive and ‘one step ahead’. It is also by taking responsibility for and investing in their professional selves that soldiers are imagined as achieving personal growth and ‘joy’.

Consequently, through these career planning and development schemes, the image of an enterprising soldier re-emerges. Again, it is because soldiers, at this point in time, could be portrayed as making active and calculated decisions to remain in the armed forces or take up new positions somewhere else, in contrast to being forcibly mobilized, that this enterprising image is upheld. In these examples, the soldier is taught to behave like an active, responsible, and productive citizen and the link between soldiering and ideal neoliberal citizenship is reproduced.

The enterprising soldier in military-private sector partnership programmes

Yet another way in which the SAF has sought to recruit and retain soldiers by becoming an attractive employer is to better care for and ‘recognise’ former soldiers or veterans, particularly those who have returned from missions abroad. This ambition, set out by a 2010 defence bill, has taken many different forms, including the introduction of a Veteran’s Day, a veteran monument and new veteran medals.⁸⁸ Yet, in addition to these more traditional forms of war memorialization, the SAF has made continuous efforts to promote the soldier transitioning from military life as a unique asset to civilian employers.⁸⁹ The Swedish term ‘civilt meritvärde’ – a term used to talk about how military training and service generate skills transferable to, and valued by, the civilian labour market – has been central to these efforts. Since the principle of all-male universality was abandoned and the SAF was forced to actively recruit, motivate, and compensate conscripts and, thereafter, recruits, a long line of government bills and reports have highlighted the importance of identifying and promoting the transferable skills of soldiering.⁹⁰ The SAF has taken on this assignment by, among other things, creating partnerships with other public authorities as well as private-sector employers and staffing companies.

In a campaign from 2018 titled ‘Become one of us, get one of us’, the SAF explains the ‘added-value’ of hiring former or part-time soldiers.⁹¹ A partnership with the SAF is promoted in the following terms:

When you are about to hire, you look for employees who are different from everyone else. Someone who cares more, who is always on time and as engaged in sorting store-room boxes as in the joint success of the team. People with a background or part-time engagement in the SAF have all that – the decisiveness, the ability to cooperate, the sense of responsibility, and the eye for the bigger picture. A partnership with the SAF means that you can access better employees whilst at the same time contributing to defend that which makes Sweden, Sweden.⁹²

Via both a pamphlet and the SAF webpage, the campaign addresses the added-value of hiring soldiers by both stipulating how the hire reflects well on the company – the business gets associated with high-quality personnel as well as with Corporate Social Responsibility for its contribution to the ‘defence of Sweden’ – and stressing the characteristics particular to the soldier.⁹³ According to the campaign, the soldier has ‘better self-knowledge’, a ‘healthier body and a stronger psyche’, a ‘go-ahead spirit’ – here defined as the ability to take initiative and solve problems – ‘tools to handle stress and pressure’, a ‘well-developed ability to cooperate’, a ‘risk sensibility’ – defined as ‘attentiveness towards risks within a project and an instinctive tendency to minimise them’ – and finally an ‘understanding for the importance of leadership’.⁹⁴ These characteristics are echoed in a similar SAF pamphlet with the aim of promoting military-private sector collaborations. It describes the SAF employee as an individual that has gained ‘personal growth’, ‘an inner compass’, ‘fitness’, ‘structure and orderliness’, as well as abilities to ‘deliver under pressure’ and to collaborate with and lead others.⁹⁵

Through the initiatives exemplified above, the (former) soldier is yet again promoted as particularly employable and competitive in the civilian labour market. The promotion of military training as generative of transferable skills has the dual purpose of both retaining soldiers in part and short-term contracts – it is meant to help part-time soldiers find an additional civilian employer as well as to ensure short-term soldiers that opportunities await them when their contracts end – and recruit new soldiers by making the military ‘offer’ more attractive. These market-based techniques illustrate how the government of military recruitment and retention in early 21^st century Sweden not only entailed the promotion of attractive soldier images to young individuals, but also to other public and private actors.

Consequently, by positioning the former soldier (or veteran) as particularly employable and competitive – and by emphasizing characteristics such as active problem-solving, responsibility, and personal growth – the soldier is reproduced as entrepreneurial; an embodiment of the ideal neoliberal citizen.

The enterprising soldier: continuity and change

The sections above have all illustrated how the SAF has produced and presupposed the image of an enterprising soldier in recruitment materials, career planning and development schemes, as well as in the promotion of military-private sector partnership programmes, since the all-volunteer force was implemented in 2010. Because the image of the enterprising soldier is promoted under a banner of voluntarism, it is easy to forget that this promotion always already represents a form of disciplinary power, or government. As stated initially, the government of military recruitment and retention rely on forms of disciplinary power that not only restricts, prohibits, and forces individuals in a myriad of ways, but also produces soldier images that individuals can identify with, seek to become, and rely on to claim rights, resources, or respect.

Specifically, I suggest that the examples discussed above should be understood as efforts by the SAF to recruit and retain young individuals to/in military positions by reproducing neoliberal claims of what it means to be an ideal citizen, and at the same time offering soldiering as a way to reach such ideals. Understood in this way, the association between the soldier and ideal forms of citizenship represents a continuation of the forms of disciplinary power/government that (together with sovereign and judicial techniques) also contributed to recruit and retain soldiers in times of universal conscription. Arguably, what has changed compared to the 20^th century examples discussed above is the very promise of military service promoted to potential and serving soldiers. Put differently, the soldier image against which the citizen is encouraged to compare ‘the self’ and aspire to become has taken on a somewhat different form; the form of the enterprising soldier.

This article has suggested that the transition from all-male universal conscription to a streamlined military organization composed by voluntary men and women recruited and retained in competition with other employers in the labour market should be understood as a condition of possibility for this soldier image. When a large proportion of men no longer were expected and compelled to conduct military training starting in the mid-1990s, the image of the Swedish soldier was no longer necessarily and implicitly linked to masculinity, docility, self-sacrifice, as well as the service of, submission to and submersion in, a collective entity, be it the Homeland or The people’s home. To be sure, this does not mean that these characteristics and attributes have ceased to be promoted and instilled in soldiers through field training practices.⁹⁶ Nor does it mean that these characteristics have ceased to enchant young people and play a role in the decision to serve and potentially sacrifice in military uniform.

What this article has showed, however, is that such characteristics – associated with the ideal soldier and citizen in 20^th century Sweden – no longer were posited as the chief political solutions to the problem of recruitment and retention in the era of voluntarism following the deactivation of conscription. As the primary rationality governing military recruitment and retention shifted from universalism for men to voluntarism for all, these characteristics no longer constituted the official promise of military service. Instead, the Government’s emphasis on individual will and motivation as well as the SAF’s adaptation of market techniques have enabled the promotion of soldiering as an entrepreneurial activity for the few; an investment in the self that makes individuals appear competitive and productive and, as such, even joyful and self-fulfilled.

Some of the qualities that constituted the idea of the enterprising soldier in the material discussed above (such as employability/occupational success) might also have been implicitly (or, as in the Finnish case, explicitly) promoted to conscripts in order to legitimize compulsory military service already in the 1900s. However, because conscription at that point was universal for men, such ‘soldier characteristics’ were arguably at the same time constructed as normal or to--be-expected adult, male, citzien characteristics. In contrast, for the enterprising soldier, military service emerges as a way to distinguish oneself from others in the same age group – a way to ‘get ahead’. For the enterprising soldier, military service is not a great equalizer – it is a competitive advantage.

In the promise of becoming an enterprising soldier, the main dividing practice that discipline and direct the behaviours of young individuals is not that between ‘the masculine’ and ‘the feminine’, ‘the normal’ and ‘the devious’ – it is not that between those who selflessly serve the collective and those who selfishly act upon their own desire to refuse – but rather that between the active, responsible, competitive, and enterprising soldier, and the passive civilian ‘other’. Perhaps it might even be argued that the shift from all-male universality to voluntarism have allowed for military training and service to be promoted as ways to maintain and optimize – rather than suppress – one’s individuality and personality, at the expense of normality and uniformity. That way, the profession of arms and, with it, the potential of killing and dying for the nation, can emerge as an appealing life and career path also to young people in the early 21^st century Swedish ‘enterprise culture’.⁹⁷

Conclusion

This article has discussed how the image of a Swedish soldier has been produced, promoted, and presupposed through politics of military recruitment and retention in post-Cold War Sweden. It has suggested that a seemingly novel form of soldier image – partly distinguished from 20^th century images of the male conscript – has emerged alongside the SAF’s efforts to actively recruit and retain voluntary soldiers, from the mid 1990s and onwards. This soldier image – the enterprising soldier – was characterized by its association with neoliberal citizen ideals, which became prevalent in Swedish public sector governance during this period.

Furthermore, this article has illustrated how the image of an enterprising soldier has been produced in recruitment materials, career planning and development schemes, as well as in military-private sector partnership programmes launched by the SAF since the all-volunteer force came into effect in 2010. In all of these sites, military service – which in 20^th-century Sweden was closely associated with the service of, submission to, and submersion in, a national collective – was instead promoted as first and foremost an investment in the self. Soldiering was imagined as a way to take responsibility for one’s professional life by choosing to enlist with the SAF and in the process gain skills that make the individual employable and attractive on the civilian labour market. To enlist with the SAF and become employable not only seemed to protect the individual from appearing as a burden to society. The close association between professional and personal development in neoliberal society also enabled the SAF to promote military enlistment and training as a route to happiness, self-fulfilment, and social status. The enterprising soldier is thus envisioned as both a protector of, and a productive force within, post-Cold War Swedish society. It is an ideal citizen who serves the nation by serving and optimizing the self, as both a professional and a person.

This article has suggested that the emergence of an enterprising soldier image in the politics of recruitment and retention represents both continuity and change. Whereas the discursive coupling between soldiering and ideal forms of citizenship represents a form of disciplinary power that was central to the recruitment and retention of conscripts in the 1900s, and therefore should be understood as signifying continuity, the article has also suggested that the particular promise associated with ‘becoming’ an enterprising soldier partly should be distinguished from the docile, self-sacrificing citizen soldier ideal of the 1900s, therefore constituting change. I have suggested that this transformed soldier image and promise was made possible by a gradual marketization of the recruitment and retention of soldiers in Sweden from the 1990s.

Consequently, by historicizing the emergence of an enterprising soldier image in Sweden – and by illustrating its prevalence in the politics of military recruitment and retention in the 2010s – this paper has contributed new insights into how the promise of soldiering has transformed alongside neoliberal, market-based public sector reforms. Given that the military institution and the soldier often have been absent in academic research on neoliberal governance in Sweden, these results not only contribute to our understanding of the contemporary history of civil-military relations in Sweden, but also to broader discussions of the emergence, contemporary history, and potential effects of neoliberal public management. Further research is needed in order to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between military personnel policy and practise, on the one hand, and images and promises of soldiering, on the other, in different historical eras and national contexts.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Fia Sundevall, Joakim Berndtsson, Lotta Victor Tillberg, and Peter Tillberg, as well as all participants of the March 2020 edition of the Critical Military and Security Studies Workshop for Early Career Scholars in Sweden, for their invaluable and generous comments on earlier versions of this paper. The author would also like to recognise the contribution of two anonymous reviewers, whose careful reading greatly helped to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Sanna Strand was supported in her research by the Modern Military Profession project at the Institute for Management of Innovation and Technology (Swedish Armed Forces grant no. AT9225360) and by the Swedish Research Council (grant no. Vetenskapsrådet 2020- 00755).

Notes on contributors

Sanna Strand

Sanna Strand is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Economic History and International Relations, Stockholm University. Strand holds as PhD in Peace and Development research form School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg (2019) and she is currently working on a post-doc project on the reimagination of military conscription in Europe after 2010. Strands research focuses broadly on intersections between war, military power and recruitment, neoliberal governmentality and soldier identity in post-Cold War Sweden.

Notes

1. See e.g. historian Raeburn, “Politics, Networks and Community: Recruitment for the International Brigades Reassessed”; and sociologist Sasson-Levy, “Individual Bodies, Collective State Interests.”

2. This article builds on and further develops arguments forwarded in the author’s PhD thesis titled (Re)Inventing the Armed Forces: A Governmentality Analysis of Swedish Military Marketing and Outreach in an Era of Voluntarism (University of Gothenburg, 2019), particularly on its previously unpublished cloak chapters.

3. This concept was first used in Strand and Berndtsson, “Recruiting the ‘Enterprising Soldier’: Military Recruitment Discourses in Sweden and the United Kingdom.”

4. For a longer discussion on soldier identity as a ‘becoming’, rather than a ‘being’, see Sløk-Andersen, The Becoming of Good Soldiers: An Ethnographic Exploration of Gender and Other Obstacles in the Military Borderland.

5. Drawing on Foucauldian inspired governmentality research, the article does not reduce ‘government’ to measures taken by a Government, with capital G, but includes practices and programmes employed by a range of actors – in our case the state and the armed forces, but also e.g. PR companies – which contribute to ‘conduct the conduct’ of young citizens, conscript and/or recruits by ascribing meaning to and thus ‘structur[ing] the field of possible action’ upon the military institution. See Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, 22. Military recruitment and retention, as a form of government, is dependent on and reproductive of a variety of shifting knowledge, rationalities, and technologies/techniques which in turn promote and presuppose different identities (or, in our case, images of the citizen and soldier subject) to the population. Ibid, 33, 266–7.

6. Avant, “From Mercenary to Citizen Armies: Explaining Change in the Practice of War”; for suffrage, see Sundevall, Det sista manliga yrkesmonopolet: Genus och militärt arbete i Sverige 1865–1989.

7. For Sweden, see Granström, ‘Värnpliktsvägran: En rättshistorisk studie av samvetsfrihetens gränser i den rättspolitiska debatten 1898–1925’; and Ekerholm, ‘Plikt och undantag: Vapenfrilagstiftningen och det manliga medborgarskapet i Sverige 1965–1978’; see also e.g. Conway, Masculinities, Militarization and the End Conscription Campaign: War Resistance in Apartheid South Africa.

8. See e.g. Eichler, Militarizing Men: Gender, Conscription, and War and Post-Soviet Russia.

9. Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.

10. Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 31.

11. See e.g. Blomqvist, “The Choice Revolution: Privatization of Swedish Welfare Services in the 1990s”; Rönnberg et al., När förvaltning blir business: Marknadiseringens utmaningar för demokratin och välfärdsstaten; and Dahlstedt, “The Politics of Activation: Technologies of Mobilizing ‘Multiethnic Suburbs’ in Sweden.”

12. Foucault, “Politics and the Study of Discourse,” 69.

13. The main bulk of the data was collected within a larger project on the branding of the SAF spanning 2015–2019 (see note 2). It consists of marketing and recruitment strategies that the researcher has come across while interviewing SAF officials as well as digital print screens and photographs of recruitment and military-private sector partnership campaigns accessed via both the SAF webpage and via street signs. Campaigns that have been overlooked by the researchers when accessible online, or materials such as brochures from training programmes targeting enlisted soldiers, have been accessed via the collection of printed ephemera at the National Library of Sweden, folders ‘Försvarsmakten allmänt 2011–2020’ [SAF general, 2011–2020].

14. See e.g. Strand and Berndtsson, “Recruiting the ‘Enterprising Soldier’”; Strand and Kehl, ‘“A Country to Fall in Love with/in”: Gender and Sexuality in Swedish Armed Forces’ Marketing Campaigns’; for military recruitment in Norway, see Svendsen, ‘Beautiful Soldiers Depicting a Gender-Inclusive Army.’

15. See e.g. Ydén, “‘Kriget’ och karriärsystemet: Försvarsmaktens organiserande i fred”; and Gillberg et al., “Institutionella logiker och målkonflikter vid införande av nya riktlinjer för personalutveckling.”

16. See note 11 above.

17. For exceptions on Sweden see Strand and Berndtsson, “Recruiting the ‘Enterprising Soldier’”; Deverell and Wagnsson, “Marknadiseringen av försvarsmaktens kommunikation. Ett strategiskt maktmedel i en tid av förändring”; and on Denmark see Norheim-Martinsen, “New Sources of Military Change – Armed Forces as Normal Organizations.”

18. Although conscription was implemented gradually over the 19th century and historians disagree over what date marked its beginning, 1901 marks the year when competing systems of recruitment (mainly Indelningsverket) were abandoned and a new law on conscription was implemented; a law which was in place until 1995. See Leander, “Enduring Conscription: Vagueness and Värnplikt in Sweden” for more on this debate.

19. Tånneryd, “Inskrivningsväsendet under 100 år.”

20. For more on ‘total defence’, see Larsson, “Swedish Total Defence and the Emergence of Societal Security”; for ‘neturality’ and the Swedish ‘defence dilemma’, see Petersson, “Sweden and the Scandinavian Defence Dilemma.”

21. Kronberg, “Den svenska värnpliktens historia,” 41–42.

22. Ibid.

23. Sundevall, Det sista manliga yrkesmonopolet.

24. Avant, “From Mercenary to Citizen Armies.”

25. Sundevall, Det sista manliga yrkesmonopolet, 51.

26. See note 7 above.

27. Leander, “Enduring Conscription.”

28. Borell, “Disciplinära strategier: En historiesociologisk studie av det professionella militärdisciplinära tankesättet, 1901–1978”; Rudberg, “Armén måste blifva an skola för hela folket: Krigsmaktens fostrande ambitioner och praktiker 1901–1950”; see also Joenniemi, “Introduction: Unpacking Conscription.”

29. Sundevall, “Military Education for Non-Military Purposes: Economic and Social Governing Projects Targeting Conscripts in Early Twentieth-Century Sweden”; see also Foucault, Discipline & Punish.

30. See e.g. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity; Sasson-Levy, “Individual Bodies, Collective State Interests”; Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Conscription, Military Service and Civil Society in Modern Germany; Ahlbäck, Manhood and the Making of the Military : Conscription, Military Service and Masculinity in Finland, 1917–39; and Conway, Masculinities, Militarization and the End Conscription Campaign.

31. Belkin, Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire, 1898–2001.

32. Higate, Military Masculinities: Identity and the State; and Ahlbäck, Manhood and the Making of the Military.

33. Rudberg, “Armén måste blifva an skola för hela folket.”

34. Sundevall, “Military Education for Non-Military Purposes.”

35. Eriksson, “Krigsman skall frukta Gud och vara Konungen huld och trogen,” 220.

36. Ibid, 225.

37. Furhammar, “Värnplikten i svensk spelfilm”.

38. Sturfelt, “The Constantly Conscripted Citizen – The Swedish Army Narrative of Conscription during the Early Cold War.”

39. Ibid., 40.

40. Eriksson, “Kropp och värnplikt.”

41. Rudberg, “Armén måste blifva an skola för hela folket,” 87.

42. Ahlbäck, Manhood and the Making of the Military, 112–120.

43. Wagnsson, “A Security Community in the Making? Sweden and NATO Post-Libya.”

44. Lindberg, “Why Sweden Suspended Military Service: The Policy Process from 1990 to 2009.”

45. Ibid., 72–75. See also Ericson Wolke, Medborgare i vapen: Värnplikten i sverige under två sekel, 287–291; and Leander, “Enduring Conscription.”

46. Government of Sweden, Regeringens proposition 1994/95:6: Totalförsvarsplikt.

47. The draft authority (Pliktverket) changed its name to The Swedish Defence Recruitment Agency (Totalförsvartes rekryteringsmyndighet) in 2011, as Sweden deactivated conscription.

48. To abandon the principle of all-male universality was not an uncontroversial question. On the contrary, the late 1990s was a time of disagreement between the right-wing Moderate Party, responsible for introducing the new total defence legislation when in power between 1991 and 1994, and the Social Democratic Party, still embracing universalism for men. The disagreement became evident when Social Democrats regained power in 1994 and presented a defence bill clearly signalling a desire to regain a ‘democratic people’s defence’ where ‘as many people as possible’ serve in the defence of Sweden, see Government of Sweden, Regeringens proposition 1995/96: 12: Totalförsvar i förnyelse. That said, also the Social Democrats appeared to have left the principle of universalism behind by the time of the next defence resolution, adopted between 1999 and 2001.

49. Government of Sweden, Regeringens proposition 2001/02:11, Bättre villkor för totalförsvarspliktiga. Emphasis added. Citations of empirical material are translated from Swedish by the author.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. Försvarsmakten, “Årsredovisning 2010. Bilaga 2: Personalberättelse.”

53. Government of Sweden, Regeringens proposition 2004/05:5: Vårt framtida försvar; Government of Sweden, SOU 2009:63. Totalförsvarsplikt och frivillighet; Government of Sweden, Regeringens proposition 2009/10:160: Modern personalförsörjning för ett användbart försvar.

54. See e.g. Government of Sweden, Regeringens proposition 1995/96: 12: Totalförsvar i förnyelse.

55. Berndtsson, “Realizing the ‘market-state’? Military transformation and security outsourcing in Sweden.”

56. See note 11.

57. See e.g. MacLeavy and Peoples, “Workfare-Warfare: Neoliberalism, ‘Active’ Welfare and the New American Way of War”; and Cowen, “Welfare Warriors: Towards a Genealogy of the Soldier Citizen in Canada.”

58. Brown, Enlisting Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in U.S. Military Recruiting Advertising during the All-Volunteer Force.

59. The notion of ‘warfare for welfare’ would surely also have resonated in Sweden, especially in the Cold War period. Although Swedish conscripts were not motivated to serve in order to access welfare services (or other rights and freedoms) for themselves, the work of conscripts/soldiers as well as other defence industry professionals was often rationalized as safeguarding the Swedish welfare state, or ‘Folkhemmet’ see Sturfelt, “The Constantly Conscripted Citizen”; Leander, “Drafting Community”; Cronqvist, “Utrymning i Folkhemmet”; and Lundin, Stenlås, and Gribbe, Science for Welfare and Warfare: Technology and State Initiative in Cold War Sweden.

60. See e.g. SAF officials interviwed in Lundin, “Från slutna till Öppna – så har försvarsmakten utvecklat varumärket.”

61. Strand and Kehl, “A Country to Fall in Love with/in.”

62. Government of Sweden, Regeringens proposition 2001/02:11.

63. Rose, “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies”; and Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Societ; for studies on neoliberalism in Swedish public sector governance, see note 11.

64. Government of Sweden, Regeringens proposition 2009/10:160.

65. Bailey, “The Army in the Marketplace: Recruiting an All-Volunteer Force”; and Strand and Berndtsson, “Recruiting the ‘Enterprising Soldier.’”

66. Försvarsmakten, “Positionering av försvarsmakten som arbetsgivare – slutrapport,” 6.

67. Ibid.

68. Försvarsmakten, “Hårt och mjukt: vad du får när du tjänstgör i försvarsmakten.”

69. Försvarsmakten, “1000 möjligheter: vad du kan bli i försvarsmakten.”

70. Cited in Strand and Berndtsson, “Recruiting the ‘Enterprising Soldier.’”

71. Volt, “Försvarsmakten – Hur många skäl behöver du?”; and Strand and Berndtsson, “Recruiting the ‘Enterprising Soldier.’”

72. Miller and Rose., Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life, 193–95.

73. Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, 101.

74. Ibid., 260.

75. Försvarsmakten, “Positionering av försvarsmakten som arbetsgivare,” 7.

76. Försvarsmakten, “Hårt Och mjukt.”

77. Gillberg et al., “Institutionella logiker och målkonflikter vid införande av nya riktlinjer för personalutveckling,” 51.

78. Ibid.

79. Kadefors, Holmer, and Östebo, “RESA MED LOK: En utvärdering av livs- och karriärplanering vid försvarsmakten.”

80. Försvarsmakten, “Livs- och karriärplanering – för dig som vill utvecklas i arbetet!”

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid.

83. Government of Sweden, SOU 2014:73. Försvarsmakten i samhället, 330.

84. Försvarsmakten, “Rekryterna förbereder sig för tiden efter utbildningen.”

85. Ibid.

86. Ibid.

87. Försvarsmakten, “Berör det här dig?” Emphasis added.

88. See note 64 above.

89. Strand, “Inventing the Swedish (War) Veteran.”

90. Government of Sweden, SOU 2000:21: Slutbetänkande pliktutredningen; Government of Sweden, Regeringens proposition 2004/05:5: Vårt framtida försvar; Government of Sweden, Regeringens proposition 2011/12:115: Soldatanställningar i Försvarsmakten.

91. Försvarsmakten, “Bli en av oss, få en av oss. få engagerad personal och bidra till att försvara Sveriges frihet.”

92. Ibid.

93. Ibid.

94. Ibid.

95. Försvarsmakten, “Vill du behålla din personal? låt dem byta jobb imellanåt.”

96. Persson, “An Unintended Side Effect of Pepper Spray: Gender Trouble and ‘Repair Work’ in an Armed Forces Unit.”

97. Burchell, “Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self”, Economy and Society 22, no. 3 (1993): 267–282