Sweden's Grand Strategy

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Using the example of Sweden, the authors reassess the grand strategies of small states in international politics from the end of World War II until its new membership in NATO in 2024. Utilizing role theory, they identify a small state's grand strategy through specific national foreign policy roles which at certain times coalesce into master roles. Four foreign policy action strategies, building on domestic agency and the influence of systemic structures, depict this domestic process of role adaptation.

Sweden's foreign policy roles were shaped according to the degree of autonomy and integration deemed necessary for security, economic development, and social cohesion as perceived by the domestic political elite. The ensuing empirical analysis identifies this set of evolving roles in an increasingly unstable international security environment. The authors thus explore how a small state can develop certain roles over time and how the dominant roles can coalesce into an overarching grand strategy.

The Oxford Studies in Grand Strategy is a major new series of cutting-edge monographs that examine the grand strategies of states, and those intergovernmental organizations and nonstate actors who credibly aspire to sovereignty. Books concentrate on the contemporary aspects of grand strategy, while paying due respect to the historical antecedents of a nation's grand strategy and their relevance for a leadership's current choices. The series is pluralistic in terms of theory and method, and maintains a broad view of the ways, means, and ends that undergird a grand strategy. Analytical and explanatory in contribution, books in the series feature a rigorous analysis of the interaction between domestic factors and global forces and provide a clear understanding of how that interaction shapes a grand strategy's formulation, codification, and implementation.

Series Editors: Thierry Balzacq (Sciences Po, Paris), Peter Dombrowski (US Naval War College), and Simon Reich (Rutgers University, Newark)