Sweden’s 2017–18 UNSC Formula: Mobilizing the MFA’s Competitive Advantages, Highlighting Africa, and Boosting the E10

ABSTRACT

This article examines Sweden’s successful 2016 bid to serve at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and shows that the subsequent 2017–18 tenure relied on a formula with three key elements. One was to mobilize the competitive advantages of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), and a second to systematically highlight Africa-related priorities. A third element was to boost the standing of the E10 category of members in day-to-day diplomatic practice. After securing a plurality of votes in the General Assembly, Swedish diplomats went to work with a unique constellation of concurrently serving likeminded countries, generally receptive to Stockholm’s priorities. The formula appears to have contributed to a solid performance in 2017–2018. That said, the UNSC is not conducive to individual E10 members having a lasting impact on its institutional memory.

KEYWORDS:

• UNSC
• Sweden
• diplomacy
• elected members
• Africa

Introduction

In 2017–18, Sweden served as an elected member state at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for the fourth time. During the roughly seventy-five years that have passed since the UN was established and Sweden joined, this Nordic country has been seated, quite regularly, at the horseshoe-shaped table once every twenty years. From the vantage point of Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), this is beneficial in terms of introducing a new generation of diplomats and civil servants working in the sphere of foreign, security and defense policy to the practical realities of international relations and, so doing while being mentored by a handful of seasoned officials from the previous generation. Especially for a country that continuously is fully engaged with diplomacy in the European Union (EU), it is arguably useful to actively participate, albeit temporarily, in a global institutional body where great power rivalry is played out in ways that interlink with regional and national levels of policymaking.

Ahead of the 2017–18 tenure, the Swedish government articulated a number of political goals, most elaborately in the campaign messages preceding the June 2016 vote in the UN General Assembly and in the official platform announced in the fall of that year. A significant number of these goals can be interpreted as related to Sweden’s ambition to garner the support of the ‘African constituency’ in the General Assembly ahead of the mid-2016 vote, but also as an attempt to forge a solid partnership with likeminded elected member states serving concurrently at the UNSC.¹ Since Africa makes up more than half of the official agenda items of the UNSC, permanent and elected member states alike need to articulate their respective stances toward the problems facing this vast and increasingly important continent.²

Against the backdrop of growing geopolitical rivalry among permanent five (P5) member states and the leverage inherent in the veto rights of each of them, however, the Swedish government needed broad backing from the UN General Assembly not only to get elected but to help bolster the relative standing of elected members. In that effort, Stockholm seemingly hoped to mitigate the Council’s neglect of its duties pertaining to international peace and security.³ More specifically, Swedish officials employed a wide range of diplomatic practices and routines related to message synchronization and process sequencing—that will be detailed below—by which to achieve national objectives while catering to longstanding needs of the UN and African nations.

Drawing on a comprehensive study of MFA documentation from Sweden’s 2017–18 Council membership and interviews with some of the key officials involved, their New York peers and outside observers, this article addresses two questions: first, what was the formula that got Sweden elected and then propelled the MFA to make its mark during the two-year tenure? Second, how did the Swedish government balance its national objectives against the interests and needs of key stakeholders at the UN and major diplomatic powers? An overarching issue, primarily examined through a conceptual lens, concerns how elected members exercise influence through diplomatic practices and routines featured already at the campaign stage, and then fully deployed in the Council.

Following a brief presentation of relevant theory and methodology underpinning the research, the analysis consists of four sections. The first section focuses on the preparatory phase leading up to Sweden assuming an elected seat at the UNSC, including the campaign that helped the country win the necessary votes against two European rivals: Italy and the Netherlands. The second section consists of an account of the main national objectives pursued by Stockholm and a brief evaluation of how they guided diplomacy in the ever-changing context that is the UNSC. The third section highlights the ‘exemplary manner’ in which Sweden sought to conduct itself on the Council, as a longstanding proponent of enhanced transparency, accountability and consistency, as well as an advocate of a more cohesive and assertive E10 in their dealings with the P5. The fourth and final section deals with some of the details of the craft of UN diplomacy, to which Swedish diplomats paid considerable attention. The article ends by restating the key findings and their implications for how E10 countries may exercise influence during a two-year term as non-permanent members. Yet, few elected member states leave more than a fleeting impression on the UNSC as an institution and the article ends by suggesting that Sweden is no exception from this rule.

Theory and Methodology

Three sets of literature have informed this research. First, there is literature on diplomacy and diplomatic craftsmanship of a generic nature.⁴ Some of the most widely appreciated contributions to this literature were written by diplomatic practitioners, typically after retirement. The ‘practice turn’ of the past decade or so nevertheless opened up the field to a wider range of scholars with a particular eye for everyday routines, skills, habits and sociocultural patterns.⁵ A second relevant literature is concerned with multilateral diplomacy as conducted within international organizations and the United Nations in particular. The UN and its Security Council is a deeply entrenched institutional framework, producing an almost ritualized form of multilateral diplomacy with numerous idiosyncratic elements.⁶ Third, there is a small but rapidly growing literature covering the E10 subset of UNSC member states, often generated in conjunction with preparations by MFA staff to compete for and/or serve in this body as elected members.⁷ Apart from examining Sweden’s fourth term on the Council as a single case study, it is primarily to the latter that this article seeks to make a contribution, not least by closely linking the work of diplomats during the campaign and the ensuing two-year tenure at the UNSC.⁸

A focus on diplomatic craftsmanship is most prominently featured in the first of the three sets of literature mentioned above. Emphasizing UNSC ‘working methods’ enshrined in the Provisional Rules and day-to-day practices of diplomats means paying particular attention to the ways in which business is conducted within the Council, rather than to the substance of those activities, in the vein of the so-called ‘practice turn’ in the study of diplomacy. The two latter of the four sections that make up the analysis in this article are thus primarily devoted to such activities.

Although the research constitutes a single case study in terms of its basic research design, Sweden’s ‘peers’ within the Western Europe and Others Group (WEOG)—from within which two elected members hold rotating seats—are treated loosely as ‘reference cases’ in as far as they competed for a seat and served between 2015 and 2020. It is to this constellation of countries that most interlocutors referred in interviews with the author, conducted on or off the record,⁹ and it is predominantly their policies and actions that are featured in MFA documentation examining specific courses of action and relevant best practices.

When it comes to the strategies and tactical choices of Swedish diplomats during Sweden’s campaign and subsequent UNSC tenure, the article relies on forty-six interviews carried out in 2020, alongside findings from the examination of some 1,200 documents at the MFA’s archive in Stockholm. It is by reexamining these materials, utilized for a comprehensive evaluation solicited by the Swedish parliament in 2019,¹⁰ that certain key elements—not least ‘the Africa dimension’ of Sweden’s diplomatic activities at the UNSC prior to and during the country’s tenure, becomes visible.¹¹ Each of those elements, arguably, were indispensable for Sweden’s successful 2016 bid and its achievements as a non-permanent member in 2017–18.

Preparing While Campaigning

Equipped with the legacy of having served three times before, it was relatively easy for Stockholm to roll out a campaign for one of the two elected member seats in 2017–18 allotted to the WEOG, for the purpose of achieving ‘equitable geographic distribution’ in accordance with the UN Charter. At the helm of the MFA in the mid-2010s was the Minister of Foreign Affairs and former Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Margot Wallström. At her side, Wallström had State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Annika Söder, an experienced diplomat with considerable knowledge of international politics and development issues and a vast personal network spanning from NGOs to government officials and political leaders. In other key positions at the MFA were senior diplomats with significant UN experience in the fields of international law, sanction regimes, development assistance. At the MFA there was also widespread competence on the security challenges facing the Horn of Africa, West Africa and the Maghreb region, to mention some of the most pressing items on the UNSC agenda in the mid-2010s, in no small measure via twenty-two Swedish embassies and a number of development assistance offices throughout the African continent.

The campaign proper was organized by a mere handful of MFA officials, who operated under the guidance of State Secretary Söder with ties to the centre-left cabinet.¹² At an early stage, reportedly in October 2014, they began working through a vast range of substantive UN policy issues. As a decision was taken to set up the so-called work streams, the tempo was ramped up and a close dialogue ensued between the ‘two legs’ of the organization for the purposes of pursuing UNSC membership, namely the MFA in Stockholm and Sweden’s Permanent Representation New York.¹³

As of November 2015, rudimentary planning for the campaign among a handful of MFA officials were channelled into four work streams with detailed timelines and discreet budgets:

• an administrative work stream, charged with personnel issues;

• a legal work stream, chiefly devoted to sanctions; and

• a ‘policy substance’ work stream.

The fourth work stream, simply called ‘preparations,’ was established but kept inactive until after the GA election in late June 2016. The latter represented measures that were to be implemented immediately after Sweden had secured its elected member seat. Still, it was clear to the more seasoned diplomats that campaigning also implied preparing in a number of important ways, such as elaborating policy messages that would resonate with a big enough coalition of UN member states and pave the way for subsequent initiatives at the Council. As already alluded to, in these preparations the wide political-diplomatic network established during the campaign subsequently served Swedish diplomacy well in 2017–18.¹⁴

While the campaign to join the UNSC as an elected member was led out of Stockholm, Sweden’s success in gaining the required two-third of votes in the General Assembly—134 against 125 for the Netherlands and 113 for Italy—in no small measure relied on diplomatic activities on the African continent and especially in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Besides being a powerful African country that promotes economic integration through the Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD), Ethiopia provides a central diplomatic hub in that it hosts the African Union (AU) Headquarters. It was above all in Addis Ababa that Swedish diplomats referred to their future stance at the Council as representing ‘the fourth African,’ a slogan on which they campaigned to attract the attention of government officials affiliated with the AU or with individual diplomatic missions.¹⁵

In order to bring the area expertise represented by diplomatic representations and aid offices on the African continent into top-level deliberations at the MFA, temporary organizational and legal arrangements helped flatten the hierarchy during Sweden’s UNSC membership. The usual, four levels of MFA decision-making were thus condensed into merely two, a central level and a unit level with day-to-day issues being coordinated rather than delegated so as to speed up intra-MFA processes.¹⁶ As will be illustrated below, the refocusing of much of the work at the MFA to prioritize UNSC affairs in 2017–18 served to stimulate unusually close collaboration between senior and junior staff and did much, according to numerous accounts, to incentivize high-quality performance among staff continuously involved in refining Swedish policy positions.¹⁷

Following the successful General Assembly vote on the June 28, it was arranged for the so-called ‘reinforcers’ (förstärkare) to promptly travel to the New York mission ahead of the September 2016 high-level meetings held annually in conjunction with the opening of a new session of that same body. After a short vacation for the MFA staff heavily involved in executing the campaign, it was often the same individuals who had to gear up for serving in the Council and getting up to speed with all items listed on the official UNSC agenda.¹⁸

As had been done in 1997–98 in Stockholm, the MFA created a comprehensive database of files setting out basic facts alongside Swedish interests and positions with regard to all items on the UNSC agenda. These so-called ‘baseline memos’ were authored by staff members with so-called ‘geographic’ and/or legal expertise and therefore helped synchronize the MFA’s knowledge of current UN affairs. The memos also created conditions for diplomats to be quick on their feet in the case of event-driven developments at the Council during Sweden’s two-year tenure.¹⁹

Additionally, in the fall of 2016, Sweden was among the first countries to benefit from the General Assembly vote being scheduled three months earlier than previously, effectively doubling the period available for practical preparations. Many MFA staff members commented that this innovation at the Council was of considerable value to countries competing for seats, as they had time to benefit from budget and personnel reinforcements from their respective governments and ready themselves for serving on the Council. This was especially true for diplomats serving at the Permanent Representation in New York. As of October 2016, the Swedish mission went as far as to arrange and carry out full-scale ‘dry runs’ after the country had gained entry into the UNSC as observers. These ‘dry runs’ included detailed instructions for the Permanent Representatives as to what they would argue with regard to each specific Council agenda item.²⁰

National Priorities Versus Diplomatic Realities

If you can’t carry Africa, it won’t work. […] you can’t get in!²¹

There are many indications in the MFA documentation from Sweden’s 2017–18 UNSC membership suggesting that Africa loomed large in the minds of most diplomats from the outset. It was well known from Sweden’s 1997–98 tenure that most items on the Council agenda were Africa-related, that more than a quarter of the votes in the UN General Assembly that had to be secured were African, and that a number of the largest missions and programmes of the UN were hosted by African nations. But it was also understood that Sweden, for a relatively small country in Europe’s northern periphery, had a deep history of trade and religious and charitable activities on the continent, followed by decades of ambitious development assistance and aid programmes and political support of independence and anti-apartheid movements. Especially the latter were typically spearheaded by Swedish centre-left parties.

At the Swedish MFA, issues such as the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan or Guinea-Bissau and the work of the AU were considered ‘owned’ by the Africa Unit, and the area expertise is said to have been respected throughout the period. The fact that the ‘baseline memos’ had been authored by the land and area experts at the geographic desks typically qualified the same individuals as drafters of Swedish positions or, at a minimum, natural points of contact in that work. The ‘geographers’ and other MFA experts could rely on strong support from the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and her staff throughout Sweden’s tenure. State Secretary Söder not only had considerable experience in African affairs but was charged with continuous communications with the key governments on the continent as well as with Russia, China, the P3, Iran and the Nordic-Baltic Group of Eight. Söder noted that critical to Sweden’s two-year Council membership were the permanent representations and embassies in New York, Brussels, Beirut, Tel Aviv/Jerusalem, Addis Ababa and the five P5 capitals. For the MFA’s Africa Unit, Pretoria, Nairobi, Khartoum, Kinshasa and Djouba were also frequently consulted.

A sign that Africa-related issues were at the forefront of Sweden’s planning and preparation efforts is the overlap between the core themes of Sweden’s official platform for the Council membership, on the one hand,²² and recent work by the AU and its Peace and Security Council, on the other. Notably, the ‘five strategic priorities,’ articulated in the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) Roadmap for 2016–2020,²³ coincide with the core of Sweden’s more extensive list. If one adds, to APSA’s five strategic priorities adopted in the mid-2010s, the main issues with which the AU Peace and Security Council was preoccupied in the early 2020s, the overlap is greater in that it widens the agenda to environmental degradation, climate change, gender issues and children and armed conflict.²⁴

It is nevertheless hardly surprising that there would be some discrepancies between the politically progressive views of a Swedish centre-left government and those of numerous African counterparts. As to the latter, non-traditional values on the rights of LGBTQ persons, for instance, would not have gained much sympathy if prominent as a campaign theme. As to the former, progressive themes and issues represented a way for the cabinet in Stockholm to reaffirm relations with likeminded governments,²⁵ as well as with international civil society organizations that value Sweden’s stance on gender equality (e g, Human Rights Watch), the rights of children (e g, Save the Children), the environment (e g, Greenpeace), and so forth.

Advancing the debate on several of the latter issues were obvious priorities for the Swedish government at the Council, and they also resonated with many international civil servants in the UN Secretariat. Perhaps predictably, more immediate, tangible achievements ‘on the ground’ in Africa were far fewer. According to the MFA’s Head of the UN Affairs Unit, Efraim Gomez,²⁶ the specific Africa-related problems on which notable success could be demonstrated were the following four:

• a tighter UN-AU partnership, manifested through the joint communique adopted at the July 2018 summit;

• a more substantive, deepened Council debate on the Democratic Republic of Congo;

• significant progress on diplomacy in West Africa and the Sahel; plus

• successfully putting an end to the mission to Liberia.

At the same time, there was at least one failure among the objectives that the MFA’s senior management had formulated for itself, namely securing UN financing for AU missions. This was expressly acknowledged by State Secretary Söder, who personally appears to have been invested in this goal during Sweden’s two-year tenure.²⁷

Still, at the top of APSA’s priorities in 2016–20 was conflict prevention, which coincided with another key objective of Sweden’s two most recent UNSC memberships, in 1997–98 and in 2017–18.²⁸ Apart from supporting the renewed push for preventive diplomacy and other early measures by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Sweden specifically tried to draw attention to the problems emerging in Cameroon and the Horn of Africa, largely ignored by the P5.²⁹ This indifference did not stop Sweden from insisting that conflict prevention ought to be taken much more seriously at the UNSC. In 2015–16 New Zealand had initiated ‘situational awareness’ briefings on upcoming problems but similarly faced opposition from permanent members.³⁰

By comparison to New Zealand, which had less than a handful of embassies in Africa in 2015–16, it was already noted above that Sweden continually entertains a much wider presence on the continent. The diplomatic presence through twenty-plus embassies alone meant that Sweden could be less reliant on the UN Secretariat, as well as on the P5, for information and intelligence as the basis of elaborating its foreign policy.³¹ This did not always make things easier for Swedish diplomats. In fact, on African and non-African issues alike they frequently experienced a clash between national priorities and the sobering realities of great power rivalry, political indifference, or both. Except for close cooperation with France on Children in Armed Conflict (CAC) and with the UK on counterterrorism,³² Sweden throughout the two-year period worked more closely with other EU countries or with the African caucus than with the P5. Italy and the Netherlands, which decided to share a non-permanent seat after being defeated by Sweden in mid-2016, were among the primary partners. But so was, more surprisingly, Kuwait on the Syria file and the broader Middle East.

While Stockholm seemed reluctant to wholly accept the diplomatic inflexibility of permanent members on many issues, it had to be careful about which fights to pick in order not to alienate any of the major powers at the Council. In the end, Swedish diplomats may be said to have slightly breached the ‘comfort zone’ of each of the non-European permanent members regarding at least one important agenda item: Russia with regard to Syria; China on Myanmar; and the United States on Yemen. Probing the patience of powerful permanent members was probably possible in part due to unusually close collaboration among EU countries on the Council, but also because of weak cohesion among the so-called P3 representing ‘the West’ in 2017–18. On all three ‘uncomfortable’ matters other, likeminded, elected members also spoke up in favour of greater involvement on the part of the UNSC.

The first such attempt to bend the will of a P5 country took place in the spring of 2017, when Swedish diplomats worked especially hard to reinvigorate the E10 on the Syria war after the chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheykhun. Swedish diplomats coordinated closely with Japan and Egypt in 2017, and with Kuwait in 2018, to expand the access to humanitarian assistance and alleviate the plight of Syria’s civilian population. With the Russian Federation siding overtly with the regime of Bashir al-Assad, Swedish diplomats challenged the position of Moscow.³³ The Russians refused to budge, at which point the E10 submitted their own text for the Council’s consideration. Even though that resolution—condemning the use of chemical weapons and taking strong action—ultimately was blocked by Moscow, the elected members took a clear stand with Sweden at the centre of this effort. In subsequent deliberations, the Russian diplomats became more open to resolutions demanding access to humanitarian aid.³⁴

The second such attempt was when Stockholm pushed for the UNSC to address the crackdown and ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya minority in the Rakhine province of Myanmar, a situation that had worsened considerably in late 2016 and early 2017. Here Sweden and likeminded countries seeking to dissuade the military leadership of Myanmar from evicting hundreds of thousands of this community to Bangladesh and other neighbouring countries went up against the ambitions of China to manage security relations in its immediate proximity, but stopped short of demanding a vote on a draft resolution to try and ‘shame’ Beijing.

The third time Swedish diplomats probed the patience of a major P5 country in 2017–18 concerned the war in Yemen, with extensive Saudi Arabia involvement and at least tacit acceptance by a Saudi-friendly United States. Having spent many months demonstrating a will to improve the humanitarian situation in Syria, in 2018 Swedish diplomats turned their attention to the increasingly dire situation in Yemen. The war had already been in progress since late 2014, with Saudi Arabia openly intervening on the side of the former government led by Adrabbuh Mansur Hadi against the Houthi rebels, the latter endorsed by Iran.

An opportunity to engage in conflict diplomacy on Yemen presented itself in part because of Sweden’s ambassador Petter Semneby’s personal competence and contacts in the country and the Arab world more broadly.³⁵ In late 2018, the Swedish MFA was able to, with strong backing from the UN Secretariat and Martin Griffiths as the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy, convene the first round of peace talks with parties from both sides present. In this case, it was clear that Saudi Arabia was opposed to the diplomatic overtures attempted by Swedish diplomats, while the US government quietly was watching from the sidelines.

Out of these three instances of Swedish assertiveness, it would appear that the latter may potentially be the most impactful over time, in the sense that a peace process was initiated that did not exist prior to Sweden’s attempt to bring the parties together for the first set of talks. Only time will tell whether the results can generate a more sustainable process toward peace. At any rate, all three instances demonstrate that Sweden sought to ‘boost’ the E10 and utilize, to the fullest extent possible, the existing political opportunities and the working methods available to its diplomatic staff. They also reflect Stockholm’s frequent use of a humanitarian law angle through which to bring likeminded elected members along.³⁶

An ‘Exemplary’ E10 Member

The high ambitions that the Swedish MFA set for itself as a Council member come through in accounts of the daily meeting devoted to the UNSC, chaired by the State Secretary or the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Up to 45 people participated in the ‘UN quarter’ (of an hour) meeting (FN-kvarten), including all MFA heads of unit. Geographical, legal and ‘technical’ competence was inserted continuously during the ‘UN quarter’ with regard to matters such as disarmament, sanctions, nuclear weapons, counterterrorism, and the allotted fifteen minutes rarely sufficed.³⁷

The final editing of instructions passed on to the Permanent Representatives in New York thus took place under the joint and direct scrutiny of experts and the two levels of management in one sitting. This demonstrated to the entire MFA staff that the UNSC membership was of supreme significance and helped synchronize policy and messaging.³⁸ The strength of Sweden’s performance, in the view of Vaverka, came from a ‘mobilized organization’ coupled with an extensive ‘field presence’ to back it up, not least in Africa and the Middle East.³⁹ That field presence is said to have provided the mission with ‘an edge’ at the Council.⁴⁰

As already alluded to, relative to many other European countries Sweden was ascribed a high level of competence on African issues in particular. In interviews, this competence was acknowledged by civil society organizations and representatives of the UN Secretariat, for instance in the sanctions committees, as well as by diplomats of peer countries. One example mentioned by several interlocutors in New York was the practice of holding extensive consultations with embassies in Stockholm as well as in advance of the annual UN-AU summit in July 2018, which took place under Swedish leadership as UNSC president.

On several of the issues to which Swedish diplomats devoted considerable attention and share of their overall efforts at the Council, the desire to be perceived as an advocate of regional, national and local interests on the African continent was noted in New York as well. To mention a further example: The accomplishment in organizing visits on the ground to both Libya and Mali by the sanctions committees led by Swedish Permanent Representative Skoog was widely noted. Although chairmanships of neither sanctions committee had been actively pursued by Stockholm at the outset, once assumed the goal was to discharge those assignments diligently and make a ‘difference on the ground’.⁴¹ That being said, some African diplomats felt Sweden ultimately gravitated toward its EU peers when facing stark choices between diplomatic approaches, such as on the South Sudan issue.⁴²

On other matters, Stockholm strived to contribute to the smooth operation of the UNSC, in part by improving the atmosphere among the Permanent Representatives and in part by utilizing best practices and broadening the Council’s engagement with the wider UN membership, civil society organizations and the media. The spring 2018 retreat at the Backåkra estate in southern Sweden, which once belonged to UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld (1953–61), was a unique departure from the annual Greentree retreat in upstate New York and jointly organized by Sweden and the Secretary-General’s office. At the Backåkra estate, Swedish diplomats strongly supported Guterres’s commitment to preventive diplomacy and showcased Sweden’s deep history with the UN as represented by the legacy of Hammarskjöld.⁴³ With regard to the smooth operation of Council routines and practices, Swedish diplomats had by that time already spent a full year trying to implement the working methods proposals of the Accountability, Transparency and Accountability (ACT) caucus at the UN, of which Sweden is a founding member.

The most obvious opportunity to improve working methods, routines and practices drawn from the ACT platform was as president of the UNSC, in January 2017 and July 2018. During both months Swedish diplomats sought to be helpful to Council staff members, for instance by keeping other member states in the loop through continuous coordination between senior diplomats. Early heads-up were provided to the political coordinators, who operate as the master time managers in most missions, so as to maximize the number of hours available for preparations of policy positions when event-driven diplomacy is required. Another ambitious practice in line with the transparency principle promoted by the ACT group was to generate some tangible output from each informal meeting, at a minimum via so-called ‘press elements’ uttered by the Council president.⁴⁴ Press elements are in a sense less than a Presidential Statement that gets recorded as an official document on behalf of Council members, yet more than a simple briefing by the Council president in the stakeout area outside the Consultation Room, in so far as a few key phrases have been agreed in advance.

It appears these efforts were helpful to UNSC staff and generated a level of goodwill, at least among E10 country representatives.⁴⁵ The European caucus could also recognize the well-orchestrated style of fast-paced diplomacy from the EU context. In fact, the Swedish MFA drew extensively on experiences from the Common Foreign and Security Policy (the ‘CFSP model’) when it comes to synchronizing processes and messaging ahead of presenting an elaborate policy position. The CFSP model was especially used to integrate geographic units into the MFA’s work on thematic and horizontal issues at the Council.⁴⁶

The CFSP model was nevertheless adjusted to the UNSC in a few important respects. One was to be more flexible in shifting between open and closed Council meetings, which differs from how the corresponding diplomacy operates in Europe. In New York it is essential to find ways to optimize the combination of open and closed Council meetings, or else you may end up with statements rather than results. ⁴⁷ Not seldom those statements will be polarizing and thus push an agreement further away instead of contributing to the bridging of differences.

As indicated, as a Council member Sweden wanted to be “a top student, well-prepared, assuming responsibility”.⁴⁸ Apart from the careful and systematic preparations already mentioned, the MFA held internal courses on UN affairs, for instance on Council procedures and sanctions regimes in the six months that preceded the UNSC membership. The MFA’s Human Resources Department was requested to identify the most qualified candidates to send to New York, and then to secure their release from other engagements so that they would be available. When it came to the head of mission, improvisation became necessary due to the untimely death of Permanent Representative Mårten Grunditz, in January 2015. Grunditz was replaced by Sweden’s Ambassador to Djakarta, Indonesia, Olof Skoog, who had been a junior diplomat posted to the UN during the 1997–98 UNSC membership and thus had the necessary experience.

Devil in the Details

Attention to detail was nevertheless warranted not only in terms of preparations, adaptation of organizational processes and assembling the best possible team to represent Sweden in New York. The crafting of a coherent, solid and persuasive stance on each of the high-priority issues that the Swedish government had pledged to promote at the UNSC had to be followed up by consistent calibration of the overall message and the minutiae of draft resolutions, involving ‘geographers,’ lawyers and senior diplomats with a sense of what is possible to achieve at a particular Council meeting. In particular, perseverance was needed to make substantive progress on the highly prioritized them of Women, Peace and Security (WPS). According to Gomez, the Head of the UN Affairs Unit and one of the first senior diplomats at the MFA to begin preparing for Sweden’s Council membership, work on this issue had stalled despite considerable efforts in the past. Gomez emphasized Spain’s uphill struggle to integrate WPS issues into long-term UN planning in 2015–16,⁴⁹ reportedly in part due to resistance among African elected members. When coupled with the Swedish government’s self-proclaimed ‘feminist foreign policy’ of which minister Wallström was a credible proponent, Swedish diplomats were able to win the reputation of authentic, fierce advocates of the WPS agenda and thus make more progress in terms of embedding it in resolutions renewing the mandate of specific UN missions.⁵⁰

Similarly painstaking, patient work was needed on the issue of climate change, which faced resistance from some of the same quarters as WPS. Whereas only a few African Council members have considered the issue a top priority, the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment 2014 draft strategy on climate change noted that “Africa is the most vulnerable continent to climate variability and change.”⁵¹ In terms of breaking down mental barriers among those who say that the UNSC is an unsuitable venue for addressing environmental problems, Sweden managed to organize the third-ever debate on climate change. More importantly, some say, was the insertion of an explicit reference to climate change as the cause of the complex challenges affecting the security situation in the Tchad Lake Basin region, the result of cooperation among several UN organizations and an intense dialogue with local communities. In no small measure, it seems, Sweden’s regional development programme run out of Addis Ababa facilitated arriving at said resolution.⁵²

Comprehensive preparations proved critical both in terms of achieving progress on horizontal and thematic issues and having the right skillset to exert influence on event-driven diplomacy in the Council. Together with Sweden’s diplomatic representations and development assistance offices throughout the continent, the MFA’s Africa Unit was brought into the continuous coordination process in 2017–18. This made Swedish diplomacy agile when, for instance, the UNSC under the Swedish presidency in January 2017 steered the negotiations toward easing the friction between the outgoing and incoming presidents of Gambia. This was the first tangible contribution made by Sweden in the new capacity as Council president and elected member.

Resolving the tense situation in the Gambia appears to have depended on nimbly navigating P5 sensitivities and E10 concerns while communicating with both sides of the dispute and representatives of the Economic Organization of West African States (ECOWAS). The presence of Senegal, Gambia’s most important neighbour, on the Council was another major factor in paving the way for UNSC resolution 2377, adopted on 19 January, on ‘Peace Consolidation in West Africa.’⁵³ More broadly on the agenda item ‘Peace consolidation in West Africa,’ there was a three-fold uptick in formal Council meetings in 2016–2017 compared to 2014–2015. Both foreign minister Wallström and Permanent Representative Skoog made visits to the Sahel and to Mali, where MINUSMA included a Swedish military contingent since October 2014,⁵⁴ not least to strengthen the work of Dakar-based UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel.

The agility of Swedish diplomats was underpinned by close interagency cooperation between the Office of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Defense. The latter actively contributed both in terms of providing highly skilled military advisors to strengthen Sweden’s participation in the UN bodies demanding expertise on peacekeeping, peacebuilding, disarmament and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. For instance, Sweden worked to improve the quality of the annual report from the C34 committee, in that it included demands on technological modernization, higher military effectiveness, and gender equality in future UN military missions.⁵⁵ Swedish military advisors also made a more pointed contribution toward raising the level of real-time intelligence that placed Sweden closer to the level of knowledge of P5 countries. A secure connection for high-grade military intelligence was temporarily installed in New York, for the purpose of providing timely and precise information to senior diplomats.⁵⁶Another contribution can be said to lie in the nexus between the WPS thematic and that of military diplomacy. In 2017–18 Deputy Military Advisor Capt. Ann-Charlotte Lyman initiated a network of female military and police officers associated with the UN Headquarters. In a second iteration, this network evolved from a national Swedish initiative into a joint Nordic project.⁵⁷

Discussion of Findings

As shown in the previous sections, the formula elaborated by the Swedish government and the MFA relied on three key elements: utilizing Sweden’s competitive edge in terms of a diplomatic capacity to synchronize messaging and process sequencing; forging a policy agenda that highlighted Africa-related issues and sensibilities; emphasizing and boosting the elected members as a category of Council members, in order to take initiatives and advance issues on which permanent members do not see eye to eye.

The Swedish case resonates with previous research in that it is one of utilizing the preparatory phase of the tenure in the Council proactively,⁵⁸ of balancing national objectives with regional interests,⁵⁹ of promoting more accountability, transparency and consistency at the UN,⁶⁰ and of honing the craft of diplomacy.⁶¹ Most enduring are probably the investments made in the MFA organization back home, in individual diplomats—especially early to mid-career officials—and in bilateral relations with individual countries that in some instances thrived during Sweden’s two years at the UNSC.

Africa was integral to Sweden’s successful candidacy and election. Africa not only featured in terms of the themes and issues on which Sweden campaigned, but the MFA could draw on its extensive network of diplomatic representations, development assistance and aid offices, as well as civil society and political contacts. The championing of African themes and issues were encapsulated in the slogan about Sweden as ‘the fourth African’ voice on the Council, the pledge ‘to speak with, and not merely about’ countries on the Council’s agenda, as well as a commitment to strengthening relations between the AU and the UN and the EU.

Judging by the response from most interlocutors in this regard, Sweden had accrued sufficient credibility and competence on African matters and could tap into that also when serving at the Council. In resorting to EU-style processes and coordinating closely with the European caucus on the Council, there are nonetheless indications that Swedish diplomats missed opportunities to engage their African counterparts to the degree they had pledged during the campaign.⁶²

With all these reputational and organizational resources at its disposal, Sweden was in a position to build credibility when it comes to helping to bolster the standing of E10 members as an independent constituency at the Council. This was in part achieved by demonstrating a will to put in an extra effort to help generate greater cohesion among elected members. It appears that the unusual UNSC constellation with several likeminded E10 members, and a propensity of the P5 to allow elected members to share ‘penholderships,’ for the most part worked in Sweden’s favour in 2017–18.

Existing working methods were exploited to induce the Council and P5 countries toward engagement on humanitarian challenges in particular, with Syria, Myanmar and Yemen being the most obvious examples. On these three matters, Stockholm pushed the envelope at the risk of temporarily damaging relations with Russia, China and the United States, respectively. From time to time, Sweden augmented its leverage as a non-permanent member by working closely with civil society actors, academics and media representatives to attract attention to pressing matters on the Council’s agenda.

At the end of the day, however, a much more modest assessment is in order when it comes to long-term impact. Indeed, Sweden’s performance at the Council is unlikely to leave a much broader legacy than that of an E10 country having influenced key phrases in a handful of Council resolutions related to UN missions, and furthermore helped entrench the WPS agenda, and perhaps climate change, in the mainstream of UN business. So, even after a considerable effort to help improve both the atmosphere, diplomatic practices and enhance the substantive impact of UN policymaking, aiming for a successful Council membership continues to be a somewhat ungrateful task. The reason is that, at the UN itself, only a small portion of a multiannual effort on the part of the MFA and other national institutions of an elected member typically lingers a few years down the road.⁶³

Conclusion

Besides the issue of long-term impact of elected members, how did Sweden employ diplomatic practices and routines to make a difference in 2017–2018? During its tenure, the Swedish government and the MFA clearly relied on elaborate preparations coupled to a massive campaign effort, careful intertwining of national objectives with diplomatic realities, diplomatic practices and routines that would be perceived as exemplary by peers, as well as close attention to detail on prioritized policy initiatives and issues. That being said, Swedish diplomats may very well have accomplished less if they had not been serving alongside likeminded non-permanent members or had been bolstered by numerous regular UN members who saw growing friction among the P5 and urged the E10 to become more active. The similarity in outlook and negotiating skillset between Swedish and other EU diplomats may also have been an enabling factor.

Even so, the legacy of the Swedish tenure is sobering in that a massive, largely successful, effort only impacts the UNSC marginally. While some of the substantive policy initiatives and outcomes might bear fruit over a long period, if carried forward by new non-permanent members, the agendas of the incoming E10 countries and teams of diplomats inevitably shift the focus elsewhere in many respects. A greater degree of continuity between outgoing and incoming and elected members was, indeed, a key ambition of the Swedish membership. But, ultimately, the most enduring value of Sweden’s two years in the Council may very well be the insights gained by individual Swedish MFA officials and their counterparts, as well as the networks that arose between them and with international civil servants and policy experts.

A wider issue raised by this research is whether elected members primarily should channel concerns from their respective geographical regions or pursue a more principled stand in solidarity with countries facing serious security challenges elsewhere, not least in Africa. E10 members that adopt a regional outlook are less likely to demand consistency in Council resolutions and in diplomatic practice. By the same token, they are more likely to accept that P5 countries utilize their veto power to block international intervention in their respective backyards or in other areas where they insist they have national interests. The practice of merely rotating regional seats without contested elections reinforces this logic, as it tends to make E10 countries accountable to neighbours rather than to the UN community at large. In turn, this means non-permanent members do not devise and execute elaborate campaigns, during which they need to appeal to universal and internationalist interests, values, and norms.

It is not surprising that many governments find it more convenient to succumb to the power constellation of their respective neighbourhoods than to demand that elected members truly contribute “to the maintenance of international peace and security and to the purposes of the organization,” as stated in the UN Charter’s article 23. Now revived by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the debate on whether to uphold this notion or allow a regional security logic to take hold—perhaps to mitigate the growing global geopolitical rivalry in the short term, will no doubt continue in the coming years. If they are able to coalesce around a position in this regard, arguably, there may be an opportunity for elected members to exert influence on the path forward.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kjell Engelbrekt

Kjell Engelbrekt is Professor of Political Science at the Swedish Defence University, Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and lifetime member of the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences. He has been a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Humboldt University in Berlin, Columbia University in New York, and Illinois University at Chicago. Engelbrekt’s articles have been featured in journals such as Ethnopolitics, European Law Journal, The European Legacy, Global Affairs, Global Governance, Global Policy and International Politics. Recent books are High Table Diplomacy: The Reshaping of International Security Institutions (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016), Bulgaria’s Democratic Institutions at Thirty: A Balance Sheet, coedited with Petia Kostadinova (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), and Digital Media and the Dynamics of Civil Society, the latter with Maria Bakardjieva, Stina Bengtsson and Göran Bolin (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). In 2020, Engelbrekt conducted an evaluation of Sweden’s 2017–18 tenure at the UN Security Council, commissioned by the Swedish parliament. The results were presented to the parliament’s foreign affairs committee and the full report subsequently published by the Swedish Defence University.

Notes

1 Swedish Government, Sweden, Africa and the UN. Sweden for the UN Security Council 2017–2018.

2 Swedish foreign policy toward Africa has long been a cornerstone of the country’s ambitious development assistance programs, increasingly geared toward long-term regional development, as well as its UN-related diplomacy for much of the post-1945 era; see Widmalm, “Defining Partners Hip with Africa.”; and Söderbaum, “Swedish Development Cooperation and Ownership of African Regional Organizations.”

3 Boulden, “Double Standards, Distance and Disengagement: Collective Legitimization in the post-Cold War Security Council.”; Engelbrekt, Sveriges medlemskap i FN:s säkerhetsråd 2017–18: en utvärdering.

4 Sharp, Diplomatic Theory of International Relations; Berridge, Diplomacy: Theory and Practice; Hamilton and Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration; Kerr and Wiseman, Diplomacy in a Globalizing World: Theories and Practices.

5 Adler-Nissen, Opting Out of the European Union: Diplomacy, Sovereignty and European Integration; Pouliot, International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy.

6 Heine, “Latin America Goes Global.”; Sievers and Daws, The Procedure of the UN Security Council; Gifkins, “Beyond the Veto: Roles in UN Security Council Decision-Making.”

7 Thorhallsson, “Small States in the UN Security Council: Means of Influence?”; Farrall and Prantl, “Leveraging Diplomatic Power and Influence on the UN Security Council: the Case of Australia.”; Hassall and Partow, A Seat at the Table: New Zealand in the United Nations Security Council: 2015–2016; Schrijver and Blokker, Elected Members of the Security Council: Lame Ducks or Key Players?.

8 On the campaign, see Ekengren and Möller, “Campaigning for the Prize: The Quests by Sweden and the Kingdom of the Netherlands for Security Council Membership, 2017–2018”.

9 Forty interviews were conducted off the record and seven on the record. The latter resulted in transcripts authorized by the respective interlocutors, all serving in key MFA functions during the campaign or Sweden’s 2017–18 UNSC tenure. It is only the latter that are expressly referred to in this article whereas interviews with the former yielded valuable insights into how peer professionals viewed Sweden’s performance at the Council. Diplomats representing the following countries were interviewed: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Indonesia, Kuwait, Lithuania, New Zealand, Norway, the Russian Federation, South Africa, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. A handful of interlocutors were approached among senior executives at the UN Secretariat, the Security Council Report, the International Peace Institute and PassBlue on UN Affairs.

10 Engelbrekt, Sveriges medlemskap i FN:s säkerhetsråd 2017–18: en utvärdering.

11 For this article, an additional interview was conducted with the 2017–18 head of the MFA’s Africa Unit, Helena Rietz.

12 Interview with Efraim Gomez, July 16, 2020.

13 Interview with Joakim Vaverka, June 9, 2020.

14 Interview with Annika Söder, August 31, 2020.

15 Interview with Torbjörn Pettersson, September 15, 2020.

16 Interview with Efraim Gomez, July 16, 2020.

17 Engelbrekt, Sveriges medlemskap i FN:s säkerhetsråd 2017–18: en utvärdering, 93–107.

18 Interview with Lotta Segerström, March 4, 2020.

19 Interview with Joakim Vaverka, June 9, 2020.

20 Interview Lotta Segerström, March 4, 2020.

21 Interview with Torbjörn Pettersson, September 15, 2020.

22 Swedish Government, “Sweden, Africa and the UN. Sweden for the UN Security Council 2017–2018”.

23 African Union, “African Peace and Security Architecture Roadmap 2016–2020”.

24 African Union, “Fifteenth (15th) Annual Joint Consultative Meeting between members of the Peace and Security Council of African Union and the United Nations Security Council”.

25 Among likeminded countries in the UNSC, for Sweden EU member states clearly form a special category. This is in part because of continuous, crosscutting cooperation between all EU members, which tends to induce policy convergence on many issues. Another mechanism inducing convergence is the coordination that has been taking place at the EU Delegation to the UN, an activity that has intensified in the past ten to fifteen years. Notably, in December 2019 Sweden’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Olof Skoog, was appointed Head of the EU Delegation.

26 Interview with Efraim Gomez, July 16, 2020.

27 Interview with Annika Söder, August 31, 2020.

28 Lidén and Melin, Sverige i Förenta Nationernas säkerhetsråd 1997–1998; Engelbrekt, Sveriges medlemskap i FN:s säkerhetsråd 2017–18: en utvärdering.

29 Interview with Lotta Segerström, March 4, 2020.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Interview with Joakim Vaverka, June 9, 2020.

33 Ibid.

34 Gowan, “Multilateralism’s Broken Sword: The Ongoing History of Failure at the UN Security Council”.

35 Interview with Olof Skoog, September 14, 2020.

36 Interview with Lotta Segerström, March 4, 2020.

37 Interview with Annika Söder, August 31, 2020, and Helena Rietz, May 4, 2022.

38 Interview with Joakim Vaverka, June 9, 2020.

39 At the Swedish MFA, different desks deal with Africa and the Middle East, which makes it difficult to add up exactly how many countries that have diplomatic representation/development assistance offices. Nordic countries today collaborate very closely in Africa, which extends the network of any individual country beyond their formal reach.

40 Interview with Joakim Vaverka, June 9, 2020.

41 Interview with Olof Skoog, September 14, 2020.

42 Adebajo, “Africa’s Standing Amid the Jostling and Jousting in the UN Security Council”.

43 Interview with Joakim Vaverka, June 9, 2020.

44 Ibid.

45 This characterization is based on off the record interviews with diplomats from EU countries serving concurrently with Sweden in the Council.

46 Interview with Efraim Gomez, July 16, 2020.

47 Interview with Annika Söder, August 31, 2020.

48 Interview with Lotta Segerström, March 4, 2020.

49 Interview with Efraim Gomez, July 16, 2020.

50 Interview with Olof Skoog, September 14, 2020; see also Olsson, Muvumba Sellström, Chang et al. Sweden as an Elected Member of the UN Security Council.

51 AMCEN, Draft African Union Strategy on Climate Change, May 2014.

52 Interview with Torbjörn Pettersson, September 15, 2020.

53 Interview with Helena Rietz, May 4, 2022.

54 From August 2018 to 2021, Swedish Lieutenant General Dennis Gyllensporre served as Commander of MINUSMA.

55 Öberg, “Militära erfarenheter från Sveriges tid i FN:s säkerhetsråd 2017–18”, 106.

56 Ibid., 96–7.

57 Ibid., 101.

58 Thorhallsson, “Small States in the UN Security Council: Means of Influence?”

59 Farrall and Prantl, “Leveraging diplomatic power and influence on the UN Security Council: the case of Australia.”

60 Hassall and Partow, A Seat at the Table: New Zealand in the United Nations Security Council: 2015–2016.

61 Engelbrekt, Sveriges medlemskap i FN:s säkerhetsråd 2017–18: en utvärdering.

62 Adebajo, “Africa’s Standing among the Jostling and Jousting in the Security Council.”

63 Schrijver and Blokker, Elected Members of the Security Council: Lame Ducks or Key Players?