ABSTRACT
Now that Sweden has joined the European Union seems a particularly appropriate moment to ask what exactly is the nature of the organisation which it has joined. Is the European Union, as so many of its more ardent supporters believe, the inevitable future for each separate European state? Swedish membership gives the question particular emphasis, because when the European Communities, as they then were, were created in the 1950s, Sweden rejected the idea of membership as an infringement of its national right to maintain the long-cherished principle of neutrality. Not only that, but neither the European Economic Community nor the American government which promoted and supported it wanted Sweden as a member (af Malmborg, 1994).
