Security through European integration or flexible autonomy: ambivalence in Sweden’s position on the Eastern Partnership?

ABSTRACT

This article explores Sweden’s multiple roles in foreign policy in relation to its actions as an EU member state, seeking also to contribute to the understanding of small-state roles and behaviour at the dawn of a new age of uncertainty in Europe. Based on analytical tools derived from role theory within foreign policy analysis, as well as European integration theory, the article presents an analytical framework according to which the outcome in terms of security-seeking roles can be described as either security through integration or security through autonomy. This framework is then employed in an empirical analysis of the Swedish position on the Eastern Partnership. The article concludes that during 2008–2017, Sweden has balanced its strategies of both EU integration and autonomy from the EU in pursuit of security cooperation on a broad front.

KEYWORDS:

• Small states
• autonomy
• integration
• EU
• Sweden
• EaP

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Elsa Hedling is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science at Lund University and an associate fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stockholm, Sweden. Her research interests broadly lie in the intersection of EU politics, European integration, media and political communication and international relations. She has previously authored publications on the European Citizens’ Initiative and the Europeanization of Swedish civil society.

Douglas Brommesson is an associate professor of political science at Lund University, Sweden (PhD, University of Gothenburg, 2007). His research interests include Swedish and Nordic foreign policy as well as the intersection of media and foreign policy. Most recently he has published the monograph The Mediatization of Foreign Policy. Political Decision-Making and Humanitarian Intervention (together with Ann-Marie Ekengren) (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), where the adoption of media logic in Finnish, Swedish and British foreign policy, in cases of humanitarian interventions, is studied. His work has also appeared in journals such as Cooperation and Conflict, International Politics, Journal of International Relations and Development and International Review of Sociology.

Notes

1. We do not discuss whether this decision is best explained by rational self-interest or by an ideational perspective on normative beliefs (Trolle Smed & Wivel, 2017; see also Brommesson, 2010).

2. The analysis stretches until the time of writing in early November 2017 and therefore does not include the fifth EaP summit planned to take place at the end of November the same year.

3. This declaration was preceded by the Reykjavik Declaration (underlining a common will for greater Nordic cooperation in foreign and security policy) and the Haga Agreement (on cooperation on civilian contingencies), both in 2009 (Britz, 2012, pp. 223–224).

4. In 2014, the newly formed Swedish government announced itself the first feminist government in the world. Central to this position was the launch of a new “feminist foreign policy” guided by gender equality as a fundamental aim of Swedish foreign policy (Swedish Government, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Council of Norway: [Grant Number 238017/F10].