ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of the policy process and the political debate leading up to the acceptance of dual citizenship in Sweden in 2001. Understandings of state and nation, integration policies, and features of the political system are explored in order to explain the policy output. In my view the following factors are important for explaining the acceptance of dual citizenship in Sweden:
the extensive de facto toleration, together with minor differences between denizens’ and citizens’ rights and obligations, which are related to central features of immigrant integration policies; the simultaneous focus on denizens in Sweden and Swedish nationals abroad and the stress on treating them equally in the 1990s debate; and the combination of consensus and bloc politics, which delayed acceptance in the 1980s and early 1990s, but facilitated agreement on changing the law in the late 1990s.
