Väger EU-skepticismen tyngre än fördelar med EU:s försvarssamarbete? : En kvalitativ fåfallstudie av tre nordiska, högerpopulistiska partiers inställning till EU:s försvarssamarbete.

Sammanfattning: Political scientist Cas Mudde predicted, shortly after the beginning of the 2000s, that the world was facing a populist spirit of the times. Although research on populist parties’ attitudes towards the EU has increased, their attitude towards European politics is still relatively unknown. Given that most EU Member States have prominent populist parties, their views on defense and security policy, in particular EU cooperation on these issues, when the security situation in Europe has changed, are of the utmost relevance. It is therefore particularly interesting to study the right-wing populist parties’ attitude to EU defense cooperation, as they tend to have the greatest opposition to EU integration. Henke and Maher (2021) made an attempt to develop a theoretical framework for the probability that populist parties will limit European defense cooperation in their study. As the study does not include Nordic right-wing populist parties, this descriptive case study, in the form of a text analysis, will analyze the attitude of the three Nordic right-wing populist parties Sweden Democrats, Danish People’s Party and True Finns to EU defense cooperation. The political parties are analyzed on the basis of four dimensions: their recommendation on the position of national defense forces, their attitude towards integrated military forces, their perception of national security threats and their attitude towards general defense cooperation in the EU. The results show that the parties agree in their attitude to the position of the national defense force and in their opposition to a specific EU-army, while they differ on other issues. Overall, the parties are less likely to limit EU defense cooperation.