COMMON ENDS OR COMMON MEANS? The Cold War is over and Sweden and Finland are starting to deal with the new security enviroment that has emerged. Grand Strategy in both countries is changing to meet the new Europe and surroundings. Both Sweden and Finland consider the risk of a direct attack in the near future to be highly unlikely and this has effects on the respective countries grand strategy. A broadened approach to security is applied and the military instrument is no longer the primary concern in the strategy. Both Sweden and Finland become members of the European Union in 1995 but neither is a member of NATO, the countries both consider themselves as military non-aligned, the only two countries with a coastline to the Baltic Sea with that stance. This makes for a logic choice to cooperate for the common security and a cooperation is formed to cover security policies to be relevant in peace, crisis and war. Even though the countries are existing in and interpret the new security enviroment in similar ways they approach the challanges in differing ways. This creates the differences that we identify and describe in this thesis. The purpose of this thesis is to identify and describe the differences between Sweden's and Finland's grand strategy, how this difference has changed from 1996 to 2018 and if these differences can have consequences for the cooperation between the two countries, mainly military and at the highest strategic level. The thesis is focused on the elements of the grand strategy that involves the armed forces of the respective countries. This comparative text analysis compares political policy documents within the grand strategy field from both Sweden and Finland. We will compare the period from 1996-2018. The comparison will be made by examining three occasions in the period, year 1996, Year 2004 and year 2018. The documents used have relevance against these years and are analyzed by applying Jacob Westberg's model; ends, means, ways and environment. The differences and the consequences that are the conclusions of this thesis are that cooperation are not always formed because it is the best possible option but sometimest the only possible options. Sweden and Finland's history differ in some parts and this has affected the respective country's security strategies. Finland has a history of coping for itself and has thus a national focus with focus on a stable national defense while Sweden has a history without war in modern times and a constant glance at military international engagement and the political benefits that can be achieved on the international scene.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hh-39980 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Anderssson, Linus, Karlberg, Fredrik |
| Publisher | FM, FM |
| 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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