Sveriges säkerhetspolitiskastrategi Balancing, bandwagoning eller hedging?

Sammanfattning: Small states tend to use different security strategies to increase and gain influence over their ownlevel of security. Sweden is a small Nordic state with a long history of proclaimed neutralitywhen it comes to security policy. But in the last couple of decades the country has increased itscontributions to, and participations in, numerous EU and NATO security projects and exercises.In 2009, Sweden adopted a declaration of solidarity towards the member countries of the EU. In2014, Sweden also signed a memorandum of understanding with NATO. This has ignited bothan internal and an external debate among political scientists and security experts about what theSwedish security strategy is. This paper seeks to describe and clarify the Swedish securitystrategy by analyzing documents on security policy from the Swedish government. The studyalso examines the level of continuity in the Swedish security strategy.Based on a theoretical framework of security strategies of small states, the study utilizes threeideal types of the small state security strategies balancing , bandwagoning and hedging to analyzeand describe the Swedish security strategy. The study concludes that the Swedish securitystrategy as it is presented in two official documents on security policy ranging from 2009 to 2015mostly indicates balancing . The willingness to strengthen the Swedish military capacity and theeagerness for cooperation with the EU, NATO and USA clearly indicates balancing towardsRussia, a state which is described as a security threat in both documents. However, there are alsotendencies towards hedging due to the insistence of armed neutrality in both documents. Thestudy also shows that while there is a high degree of continuity in Sweden’s security strategythere has been a small shift in strategy towards more balancing from 2009 to 2015.