Från otänkbart till självklart : En longitudinell analys av den svenska försvars- och säkerhetspolitiska diskursens utveckling, 2008–2024

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how Swedish defence and security policy discourse has been reshaped in government defence bills between 2008 and 2024, a period in which Sweden changed from extensive disarmament, to the reconstruction of the ‘total defence’ and ultimately NATO membership in 2023. Utilizing Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, the study analyses four consecutive government defence bills (2008/09:140, 2014/15:109, 2020/21:30, and 2024/25:34) through the discourse analysis tools of nodal points, chains of equivalence, and subject positions. A qualitative coding scheme consisting of sixteen subcodes was applied systematically to the material in order to trace discursive shifts over time. The analysis shows a continuous discursive transformation: from a demilitarised and externally oriented defence in 2008, through the reintroduction of total and civil defence as a necessity in 2014, to the broad societal mobilisation of 2020, and finally to an internationalised total defence following NATO accession in 2024. Throughout this development, threat constructions expand from geographically distant and unlikely to ongoing and ideologically borderless, while citizens, civil society and the private sector are gradually repositioned as integrated components of the total defence. The central contribution of the study lies in identifying the discursive mechanisms that have enabled these shifts: discursive safety valves preserving institutions formally while they are dismantled in practice, the gradual expansion of what is considered a legitimate threat through equivalence chains, and the progressive reformulation of antagonism that closes the discursive space for alternative security policy positions.