RUSSIA’S AGGRESSION ON UKRAINE AS A CATALYST FOR CHANGE OF SWEDEN’S NEUTRALITY POLICY IN ARMED CONFLICTS AND THE COUNTRY’S ACCESSION TO NATO

Abstract

Abstract: The policy of neutrality successfully served Sweden for more than two centuries. It was a pragmatic policy with certain degree of flexibility, rather than a dogmatic one, and its usefulness was in principle not questioned, neither by politicians, nor its citizens. After WW2, when concessions regarding the upholding of the neutrality were made to keep the country outside the conflict, Sweden officially continued to pursue the doctrine of “non-alignment in peacetime aiming to neutrality in war”. At the same time, Sweden developed, in concealment and without public knowledge, a wide range of security and military cooperation with the North Atlantic Alliance and its member states, including technology and intelligence exchange. Today’s dramatically changed European security situation has clearly proven that a policy of non-alignment is no longer sufficient and that a strong national defence is also not enough. The security cooperation with the Nordic countries and NATO members does not offer necessary guarantees to keep the country safe. Only full NATO membership provides such guarantees. The Russian aggression on Ukraine was the direct catalyst for a radical and surprisingly swift change of Sweden’s security policy, demonstrating the essentially pragmatic approach to the policy of neutrality. Only a few weeks after the invasion, a large majority of the parliamentary parties stood behind the government’s decision to apply for NATO membership. The purpose of this article is to briefly portray the historical and geopolitical background, the development, and the reasoning of Sweden’s long history of neutrality policy, as well as present the causes that directly influenced the change of this policy and the implications of Sweden’s NATO accession for the country’s security policy.