Sweden's Grand Strategy : Predicaments of a Small Liberal State in a Hostile World

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

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)

Douglas Brommesson, Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, Linnaeus University, Sweden,Ann-Marie Ekengren, Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden,Anna Michalski, Professor of Political Science, Department of Government, Uppsala University, Sweden

Douglas Brommesson is professor of political science at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His research interests include foreign policy analysis, security policy, and crisis management. He has published several books, among these The Mediatization of Foreign Policy, Political Decisionmaking and Humanitarian Intervention (with Ann-Marie Ekengren, Palgrave, 2017) and his articles have appeared in journals such as Cooperation and Conflict, European Journal of International Security, European Security, Global Affairs, International Affairs, International Politics, Journal of Contingency and Crisis Management, Journal of International Relations and Development, and Scandinavian Political Studies.


Ann-Marie Ekengren is professor in political science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research revolves around foreign policy decision-making, security policies, and UNSC elections. The monograph The Mediatization of Foreign Policy, Political Decisionmaking and Humanitarian Intervention (with Douglas Brommesson, Palgrave) was published in 2017. Her articles have been published in journals such as International Affairs, European Security, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, International Studies Quarterly, Party Politics, and The Hague Journal of Diplomacy.

Anna Michalski is professor in political science at the Uppsala University, visiting professor at the College of Europe, and associate senior fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. She is chair for the Swedish Network for European Studies in Political Science and series editor of Interdisciplinary European Studies (Palgrave Macmillan). Her research focuses on diplomatic practices in European foreign and security policy and EU-China relations. She has published monographs with Palgrave Macmillan and Edward Elgar as well as articles in Journal European Public Policy, Journal of Common Market Studies, European Journal of International Relations, International Affairs, European Journal of International Security, European Integration, Asia-Europe Journal, European Security, Journal of Development and International Relations, and Foreign Policy Analysis.