ABSTRACT
The rising number of humanitarian operations and interventions as well as the related responsibility to protect norm have generated a growing interest in national military ethics. The discursive transformation of national military policies into ‘forces for good’ in ethical consideration of distant others arguably became normalised in the early twenty-first century. The responsibility to protect strangers from crimes against humanity is key to the construction of the discourses, identities and practices of modern Western militaries. These developments have led national militaries to explore how to reconcile their statist duties with those emerging from a cosmopolitan-minded obligation to international society. Western states, Sweden amongst them, have internationalised and restructured their military policies and identities in line with the demands of the emergent international protection norm, and have earmarked a larger proportion of their national defence budgets for international operations. From this it follows that, as Claire Duncanson, argues in this volume, soldiers are no longer expected to solely defend their own polity, but to also be forces for good. The ‘war on terror’, nonetheless, opens up questions about what we mean by ethical behaviour in terms of military policy. The US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, instead of being legitimised in realist terminologies, were couched in explicitly ethical language. Politicians have even used just war theory to underpin their decisions to militarily intervene in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq (see the chapter by Moore in this volume). However, as Bellamy (2008) argues the ‘war on terror’ is not an intrinsically ethical activity but can be contested on moral and political grounds. The ‘war on terror’ and the practice of heavily armed humanitarian intervention have nonetheless made states consider the extent to which brute force can be an ethically justifiable way to defend the international community against new forms of violence. Academic investigations into the ethical underpinnings of recent military operations have tended to centre on the conduct of great powers on international missions (Bellamy, 2008). Less has been said about the legitimising ethical discourses and practices that underpin non-great powers’ international military engagements (Bergman-Rosamond, forthcoming). This chapter analyses the internationalisation of Swedish military policy by deconstructing the legitimising and opposing discourses and practices that inform the country’s recent
military engagements. Sweden has been chosen here because it has actively sought to reconstitute its military in consideration of distant others. The country’s participation in EU-led operations and its decision to send troops to Afghanistan lend credence to this observation – both have been constructed as an obligation to the international legal order and universal conceptions of human rights, in particular those of women. The reconstitution of the Swedish military in consideration of distant others enjoys support amongst most main political parties and the military itself. However, it is not without controversy – the rapid internationalisation of Swedish defence has been contested on financial, political and ethical grounds. In order to illustrate this claim I suggest that the recent structural and financial readjustments to the Swedish Armed Forces as well as the enhanced emphasis placed upon international military engagements have inspired an ethical debate on how to reconcile communitarian obligation to one’s own political community with calls for cosmopolitan protection of distant others. The chapter starts by placing the discussion within ethical debates on the use of force in global politics, in particular by examining the cosmopolitisation of national militaries in the twenty-first century and how this process relates to the so called ‘war on terror’. It then goes on to unpack the ideational roots of Sweden’s international self identity and policies, in particular by identifying the coconstitutive relationship between the country’s role as a pioneer of domestic welfarism and its commitment to global solidarity and peace. It also takes a look at the way in which the country has sought to reconcile its continued commitment to non-alignment with the internationalisation of its military policy. It is suggested that the internationalisation of the Swedish Armed Forces is key to the country’s self identification as a good internationalist state. To lend sustenance to this claim the chapter investigates the gradual transformation of Swedish military policy, identity and discourse into a cosmopolitan-minded force for good (Bergman, 2004). It then unpacks some of the recent structural and financial adjustments to the Swedish Armed Forces, in an effort to illustrate the difficulty of combining cosmopolitan and statist duty. The chapter ends by proposing that the cosmopolitisation of the Swedish military into a ‘force for good’ has shifted the focus of ethical obligation to the international, but not without creating apprehension within the political community itself.
