With background in the acknowledgement of the current period of major change in the characteristics of traditional Swedish foreign policy, considering the membership in the European Union, as well as the new contextual scenarios that Sweden has been situated in after the end of the cold war, this thesis aims at scrutinizing the Swedish Foreign Policy from 1991 to 2010. The purpose of the thesis is further to localize continuity and change in the ideas which Sweden has explicitly stated in its foreign policy. Based on the theory of institutionalism, the thesis also aims to bring forward plausible explanations built on the main empirical findings. This has been done by identifying different types of goals and means within realism and liberalism as well as categorizing each theory within three ideal types. The chosen research method has been a qualitative text analysis with focus on an ideational analysis. The material on which the descriptive analysis is based upon is constituted by the annual statements of government policy in parliamentary debates on foreign affairs. The results of the thesis show that the ideas that are related to solidarity, consensus and active foreign policy are constant through the period of examination. The ideas of neutrality and non-alignment could, based on the conducted analysis, be understood to continue to go through great changes, of which the engagement in the Common Foreign and Security Policy within the European Union is the most obvious example.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-12011 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Lindqvist, Natalie |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för samhällsvetenskaper, SV |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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