THE SPECIFICITIES OF SWEDISH POLITICAL CULTURE

As stated above, intelligence literature tends to centre on states with extensive intelligence presence throughout the political establishment (for example the US and the UK). In contrast, this case study of intelligence is situated within a small state, where intelligence holds a more modest institutional position. Intelligence in general, and the MUST in particular, is a rather unusual topic within both contemporary Swedish political debate and research in the social sciences. Correspondingly, the specific traits of the Swedish political culture and political institutional arrangement for intelligence cannot be assumed to be common knowledge. Therefore, this chapter begins with a brief reflection on the particularities of the Swedish political culture that effect the intelligence community itself, and the role of the intelligence community within the institutional setting. It merely serves as general overview of a selection of specificities in the political culture – a background for the following chapters describing the intelligence responsibilities and directions within the institutional setting, and a brief overview of the MUST.

A CULTURE OF COMPROMISE AND CONSENSUS

The function of and role for intelligence has a reclusive existence in societal and political life in Sweden. The character of societal and political life – like in any state – has a number of specificities, thus constituting the unique Swedish political culture. Drawing on such a wide and contested concept as political culture should be seen as a most humble attempt to create some sort of flavour for the Swedish political context, rather than intending a thorough analysis of the same. First, the political system is a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Even though the latest thoroughgoing constitutional amendments date as late as 1976, the roots of the Swedish democracy go back as far as the seventeenth century. However, this chapter aims at displaying the culture within that system.

In the Swedish political context the presence of established constitutive principles for ruling (usually found in constitutional texts) does not hold the same precedence as, for instance, the constitution in the US. Nevertheless, an institutionalised overarching idea in the Swedish political context is that of division of power.