Sweden's quest for shelter: ‘Nonalignment' and NATO membership

Abstract

This paper posits that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Sweden's decision to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and end its official policy of ‘nonalignment’ is neither very surprising nor radical in nature. Utilising the shelter theory framework, we examine the Swedish case to shed a new light on the economic, societal and political shelter‐seeking policy choices that led to Stockholm's NATO application in May of 2022. The analysis finds that Sweden's established strategy of seeking shelter from Western powers eventually induced and facilitated close military cooperation with NATO—ultimately leading to accession on 7 March 2024. The decision to join the Alliance should, therefore, be understood as a culmination, building on a historically flexible approach to neutrality and previously established shelter arrangements that were deemed in 2022, after Russia's full‐scale invasion of Ukraine and subsequent developments in Finland, to be no longer sufficient in deterring or responding to new threat dynamics. The case indicates that shelter theory accurately captures the foreign policy strategy of a small neutral and later nonaligned state. However, analysing Sweden's move towards NATO within the given framework also presents an opportunity for theory development; specifically, the theory ought to more meticulously examine three small‐state shelter‐seeking features, namely, how societal and economic shelter relations may precede and, therefore, affect political shelter strategies (or vice versa), the role of ‘critical junctures’ in the theory; and finally, how small states may be affected by each other's shelter‐seeking strategies.