Sweden and the issue of NATO membership: exploring a public opinion paradox

ABSTRACT

The past decade has seen substantial shifts in Swedish security policy and major change in the domestic debate about NATO. For the first time, all of the right-of-centre “alliance parties” are calling for a full NATO membership, and popular support for NATO has increased. Yet public opinion contains ambiguities and paradoxes that complicate the picture. At the same time as support for NATO has increased, the public is overwhelmingly for continued military non-alignment. Drawing on previous research, longitudinal data from national surveys, and other sources on defence and security issues, this article aims to increase our understanding of the development and change in Swedish public opinion on NATO. A key argument is that Erving Goffman’s theatre metaphor, combined with neo-institutional decoupling theory, to a large degree can help understand the public opinion paradox.

KEYWORDS:

• Sweden
• NATO
• defence
• security
• paradox
• public opinion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The institute is located at the University of Gothenburg and has conducted national surveys annually since 1986. For more information, see www.som.gu.se. All translations from Swedish to English in this article are made by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Armed Forces [grant number 9225337].

Notes on contributors

Karl Ydén

Karl Ydén is Senior Lecturer at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, with research interests including complex organizations and civil-military relations.

Joakim Berndtsson

Joakim Berndtsson is Associate Professor at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Berndtsson’s research interests include public opionion of the armed forces, security outsourcing and civil-military relations. Together with Christopher Kinsey, Berndtsson is the co-editor of The Routledge Research Companion to Security Outsourcing (2016).

Magnus Petersson

Magnus Petersson is Professor of Modern History at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo, Norway. His research interest are mainly connected to NATO, Nordic defence and security policy. His latest book is NATO and the Crisis in the International Order (Routledge, 2019).