In early June, Hanna Gunnarsson picks up the phone in my native county of Skåne, a rolling region about the size of Connecticut that marks the southernmost end of Sweden. In a break between meetings, she is eager to discuss the NATO-related questions I posed over email.

I am calling Gunnarsson, a Left Party deputy member of the Swedish Parliament’s Committee of Defense, in the midst of a string of in- and ex-situ interviews with civil servants, academics, civil society leaders and politicians from across the political spectrum — all part of my Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy summer project. A hallmark of the program, the research grant allows students to explore a pressing political, economic, or social issue of their choosing. On the agenda for today is the tumultuous spring of 2022, when Sweden decided to apply for NATO membership; Gunnarsson’s Left Party voted against the application. Yet, what she most seeks to emphasize three years later is the virtue of political pragmatism. As a politician, she insists, you have to be willing to compromise. If you don’t, you won’t have a seat at the table.

The example of Hanna Gunnarsson, a left-wing politician who is navigating a new era of ambitious Swedish defense policy, epitomized the question that drew me to my research project in the first place: How was it possible for Sweden — with a centuries-long tradition of military neutrality lasting through two world wars — to change the direction of its defense policy so swiftly and so deeply?

At the time of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Sweden was — and still is — enjoying over 200 years of continuous peace. Since the final decade of the Cold War, mandatory military service had withered away; by 2017, military spending hit an all-time low of 1.02% of GDP. For Sweden, like for much of Europe, Putin’s invasion changed everything. In a rapid turn of events, by May 2022, six out of eight parties in the Swedish Parliament voted in favor of applying for NATO membership.

From the vantage point of a Swede following the NATO debate from abroad, I was struck by an apparent dissonance between the Sweden of my childhood — with an “end of history” mentality, supremely skeptical of primarily military means of preventing war — and the image that emerged from the news cycle. Article after article was devoted to how best to expand the country’s military capabilities. To some extent, the cultural shift could be explained as a reaction to Russian expansionism, yet Russia had posed a security threat to Sweden before. Very few of the articles addressed the disorientating loss of identity I was experiencing.

This was the moment I chose to revisit for my GS project. I wanted to better understand how Swedish stakeholders conceived of and explained the turn toward NATO. How does the decision reflect Swedish self-perception and grand strategy with regard to defense? How was it possible to make the decision so quickly? And was the shift truly as profound as it seemed?

My research method centered around stakeholder interviews. Throughout the project, I spoke with Swedish civil servants, academics, politicians, and civil society leaders in Brussels, Stockholm, and over Zoom. Some highlights include conversations with Kerstin Bergeå, president of Sweden’s largest peace organization (SPAS); Allan Widman, Liberal Party politician and former chair of the Committee of Defense; and three professors in political science at the University of Gothenburg. The second part of my project, which will play a greater role in my written work, was dedicated to framing my research insights through the political thought of French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943). Thanks to the program, I was able to conduct archival research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Richelieu) in Paris, home to the Simone Weil archives.

The more people I interviewed, the more I recognized the limitations of the assumptions that had shaped my initial line of inquiry. First, while NATO membership constituted a substantive policy shift for Sweden, it was not necessarily an identity shift. Rather, the conception of Sweden as “neutral” is only one competing narrative for explaining modern Swedish foreign policy history. Not only has Sweden been politically aligned since joining the European Union in 1994, but the country’s collaboration with NATO far predates its membership. Through joint exercises, intelligence cooperation and political alignment, Sweden has long positioned itself within the NATO sphere, so that even at the height of the Cold War there was no confusion as to what Swedish “military neutrality” meant in practice. According to this narrative, NATO membership can be understood as a natural extension of Sweden’s post-WWII role as a generous foreign aid donor and integrated European partner.

A second insight is the disproportional importance of Finland for Sweden’s decision. While Finland and Sweden are neighbors and close allies, their historical relationship with Russia differs. Finland’s recent history of occupation and direct conflict with its eastern neighbor, with which it shares an 830-mile border, made it democratically feasible for its Social Democrat government to come to a swifter decision in favor of NATO membership. Once Finland announced their intention to Sweden, many of the stakeholders I interviewed agreed that staying out of the alliance became both politically and militarily unfeasible. In this light, Sweden’s decision looks less like an autonomous policy shift and more like a strategic response to the actions of its allies. However, this also raises domestic democratic concerns. If the outcome of the NATO process was essentially predetermined, what role did public debate truly play?

That Finland was the last of Sweden’s neighboring countries to join NATO should inform our assessment of the significance of the shift. Sweden’s primary security interest has always been to defend the Baltic Sea region. In a world where Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Denmark and Norway — all countries bordering Sweden or the Baltic Sea — are part of NATO, the significance of membership is bound to change. Rather than an alliance risking entanglement in conflicts far from home, from a Swedish perspective, Finnish membership solidified its status as a framework for collectively defending our home.

It is not every day you are given the time, funding, and encouragement to travel across Europe to research a geopolitical issue of your choosing. I’m returning to the New Haven classroom with a more nuanced understanding of Swedish defense policy and a fresh set of questions that will animate future research.

Agnes Sjöblad is a senior in Yale College and a student in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.