Introduction

This chapter focuses on one of the most dramatic days in Swedish contemporary history and the subsequent Swedish counterterrorism policy process. The day in question is 24 April 1975, when the West German Stockholm embassy was attacked and occupied by West German Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorists. For all involved, it was obvious that the Swedish police did not have the capacity to act professionally in a terrorist situation. Yet the decade that followed was marked by stasis in the realms of Swedish counterterrorism policy making. This development is puzzling, not least from the perspective that acts of terrorism typically put a spin on counterterrorism policymaking. For example, the West German antiterrorist force GSG 9 was set up as a direct consequence of the 1972 Munich massacre (Tophoven 1984); even in Norway, a similar force was installed in 1975 after the Stockholm experience (Flyghed 2000). More recently, the events of 9/11 led to an overhaul of domestic security measures in the United States (see Parker and Dekker, this volume).

Crises are often viewed as catalysts for policy change, but such change is not inevitable. The aftermath of the Stockholm embassy seizure is an example of policy stasis; the focus of this chapter is to explore the reasons for this. In doing so, we utilise multiple-streams theory (MS) (Kingdon 1984, 2003), the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993; Sabatier 1999) and punctuated equilibrium theory (PE) (Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 2002).