 "Officials hoisting Sweden's flag along with that of other NATO nations on Monday, AFP.")
On March 7, 2024, Sweden became the 32nd country to join NATO, giving up on its 200-year-long policy of neutrality in wartime. Sweden’s policy of neutrality was deeply rooted in the minds of all Swedish citizens. The Cold War politics were animated by ideological differences between the US and Soviet Union.
The ensuing bipolarity in the structure of international politics wasn’t enough to bring Sweden on board with its European counterparts in NATO.
While various political crises and military conflicts have struck so many parts of the world—from Korea, the Soviet-Chinese border, Afghanistan, and Iran to Central Europe and Berlin—Northern Europe has existed in a state of relative calm (Astrom, 1989). Sweden had successfully sailed through two World Wars and the Cold War on the policy of neutrality.
Sweden’s foreign policy has a moral orientation. Sweden’s active foreign policy of international peace, developmental aid, activism for disarmament, and criticism of human rights abuses provides its foreign policy with a normative international outlook.
Sweden’s aggressive great power past stands in marked contrast to its peaceful small power status today. It was only after the defeat at the hands of the Russians in 1809 and the subsequent installation of Baptiste Bernadotte that Sweden began to transform its role from an aggressive military power to a more modest actor in international relations (Kruzel, 1989).
The principle of neutrality strived to create the best possible conditions for Sweden to stay out of the military conflict in Northern Europe. The other purpose of the neutrality policy was to stabilise Northern Europe.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe geography has doomed tough foreign policy choices for Sweden. The country has to avoid coming under the influence of a nearby superpower while also not becoming an outpost of the other superpower (Astrom, 1989).
Neutrality, scholar John Logue states, has become so much a part of the national tradition as to be virtually beyond political dispute. Among significant Swedish policies, neutrality particularly enjoys the broad-based support of all of the political parties and major interest groups (Logue, 1989).
Even the day before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Minister for Foreign Affairs Ann Linde declared to parliament that membership in NATO was unthinkable, even in the light of increasing Russian hostility. The policy of non-alignment was described as contributing to stability and serving Swedish interests.
Fall of Neutrality
The post-Soviet era is witnessing Sweden’s accession to NATO, a state that remained neutral throughout the Cold War! Angela Stent, an expert on Europe and Russia, believes NATO is back to its original mission of containment—the Soviet Union then and Russia now!
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, there were more Swedes in favour of NATO membership in the same year. By May 2022, nearly 60 per cent of the Swedes were in favour of the country joining NATO, a trend that continued into 2023 and 2024 (Statista, 2024). Almost 63 per cent of the population voted in favour of joining NATO as of March 2024 (Novus; January 18-24, 2024).
On March 16, the government initiated security policy discussions with the parties of Riksdagen on the changed security situation following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and decided to set up a parliamentary committee to deliberate Sweden’s defence and security policy cooperation, including the issue of a possible Swedish NATO membership (DS 2022:8:3).
The report concluded that the accession of Sweden to NATO would have a deterrence effect in the region as the EU lacked collective defence capabilities in the event of an attack.
“Swedish NATO membership would raise the threshold for military conflicts and thus have a deterrent effect in northern Europe. If both Sweden and Finland were NATO members, all Nordic and Baltic countries would be covered by collective defence guarantees.” (DS 2022:8:40).
The Social Democratic Party, long opposed to joining NATO, finally applied for accession in May 2022, a step that overhauled Sweden’s identity as an independent and non-aligned country in Europe. The bid to join NATO was supported by as many as five Swedish parties in Riksdag.
The Russian Aggression
President Putin, in his famous Munich Security Conference speech in 2007, criticised the US’ hegemonic dominance in international affairs. The end of the Cold War couldn’t ensure Russia and the US could work out an acceptable security arrangement for themselves. The US was convinced that it had won the Cold War and expected the Kremlin to play a role subordinate to Washington, a view contested by Russia (Trenin, 2019).
Russia’s weakness in the 1990s and early 2000s had allowed the US to expand its NATO alliance to the borders of Russia over the objections of Russia, which was too weak to oppose (Mearsheimer, 2015). The US exploited the unipolar moment in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR by further expanding the Cold War security alliance NATO eastward, close to Russian borders.
One of the long-term strategic consequences of Russia’s war against Ukraine is that NATO is growing larger and stronger in northeastern Europe (Raik, 2023). ‘The biggest mistake of all came in 2008 at the annual NATO summit in Bucharest, when Georgia and Ukraine were invited to join NATO’, (Mearsheimer, 2015).
The outbreak of the war in Georgia coalesced the two Nordic nations, Finland and Sweden, into building a shared security culture. Finland and Sweden, since 2008, have ramped up bilateral defence agreements and have been cooperating in defence.
Russia: A Threat?
The most pressing problem (although to most Swedes, perhaps not the most serious one) is how to respond to the peacetime threat posed by continued incursions of foreign submarines into Swedish territorial waters (Kruze, 1989).
Soviet submarines were frequent in the Swedish defence zones during the Cold War. As recently as 2014, the Swedish Navy reported that a Soviet vessel(s) had escaped the Swedish defence zone without being intercepted. Russia had illegally annexed Crimea and commenced a proxy war in eastern Ukraine. These events drastically altered the perception of Russia among the Nordics, from a “difficult partner” to a“ main security challenge” (Lunde Saxi).
The Swedish government asserted Sweden as an ‘Arctic Country’ in its latest Arctic Policy document for 2020. The government asserts cooperation in the region, led by eight Arctic States, while also onboarding outside states to contribute to the effort. Sweden also stressed the greater role of the EU in the region of the Arctic.
Russia’s Arctic ambitions are not hidden. The Kremlin’s quest for resources and secure trade routes has compelled it to cast a wary eye on what it sees as a challenge from the US and NATO to its position and ambitions in the Arctic.
Russia’s actions in the Arctic—its aggressive rhetoric and its far-reaching territorial claims—have done little to improve its diplomatic position there vis-à-vis other Arctic states and only antagonised them (Rumer, Sokolsky, Stronski 2021).
Sweden’s pivot to NATO underscores a shift in Europe’s security dynamics. The eastward NATO expansion towards the Russian border has only antagonised the Kremlin. The annexation of Georgia’s territory was the first step in a long time by President Putin to redraw Russia’s political border close to Soviet times. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have put to rest the idea that Europe is immune to conventional wars. The small states like Sweden and Finland face security threats from the ensuing struggle between the great powers.
The author is a postgraduate from JNU. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.