Med neutraliteten som drivankare. Sveriges motsträviga väg mot EU-medlemskap

Abstract

This paper gives an account for the main factors behind Sweden's reluctant process towards membership of the European Union from 1961 to the membership application in 1994. The starting point is the policy of neutrality. Until the then Prime Minister Erlander's speech on the Metal Workers' Union Congress in August 1961 Swedish neutrality policy was built on a pragmatic approach which were considered compatible with membership in international organizations and participation in international collaboration with supranational decision-making functions. In his speech Erlander nevertheless dismissed Swedish membership of the EC/EU, arguing that membership would be contrary to the policy of neutrality. The position in the membership issue can be seen as a political reaction against the trends that made the European integration during the post-war period; the liberalization and harmonization of European countries' market based institutional structure and its opposite – the fear that the institutional competition within the framework of the European integration would threaten "the Swedish model". The dismissal of Swedish membership of the EEC/EU had the effect that the traditional Swedish policy of free trade was combined with an "institutional protectionism" that subsequently came to hamper trade, economic development and Sweden's place in the international system. The choice of the policy of neutrality as an "anchor" for the Swedish EEC/EU policy came to be of great significance. The Swedish neutrality policy had such a strong emotional and political charge that it prevented every ambition to reconsider the EU-membership issue for three decades. Locking the EEC-issue into an argument of neutrality was so binding, that it was hard to excuse a shift without very clear security policy arguments – regardless of other reasons to justify a more flexible and pragmatic approach to the matter. This "window of opportunity" came first with the fall of the iron curtain and the end of the cold war.