How Democracy Promotion Became a Key Aim of Sweden’s Development Aid Policy

Abstract

How did democracy promotion become a key goal of Sweden’s official development assistance (ODA)? Existing research has regarded comparatively high levels of ODA as a key indicator of Sweden’s foreign policy exceptionalism, supposedly rooted in domestic values of solidarity, democracy, and equality. However, such culturalist accounts of foreign policy exceptionalisms tend to mystify rather than clarify the influence of values. In this chapter, I seek to provide a different account of how values shape foreign policy, using the goal of democracy promotion through ODA as an illustrative case. While policy documents occasionally refer to unique Swedish experiences of democracy, I argue that the beliefs governing Swedish democracy promotion efforts rather result from contentious political processes and have been partly shaped by evolving international conjectures. Empirically, the paper analyzes how Swedish policymakers have framed the aims and strategies of democracy promotion in ODA from the 1960s to the 2010s.

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