C old War Home Front: The Militarization of Swedish C ivil Society 1945-1989

Research Project, 2024 – 2026

The civil defense was a logical consequence of the fact that civil society had become an increasingly frequent and even legitimate target in war and from the fact that the border between civilian and military targets had been blurred. The atomic bomb only made this problem all the more acute. Civil defense has been largely ignored in Swedish history during the 20th century, even though civil defense was something that suffused Swedish society during the Cold War. We argue that the civil defense build-up can be best understood as a militarization of civil society, a preparation of the whole nation for total war, and that this process mirrored the build-up of the welfare state during the same period. Militarization is here to be understood as not only a process by which society prepares for use of violence, but also for enduring external and internal violence. With this definition the concept of militarization can be used to shed light on a largely hidden side of Swedish Cold War history, a side where considerable portions of civil society had direct military roles superimposed on its civilian responsibilities. The impact of this double militarization on society at large has not been adequately examined and explored before. The project will investigate the build-up, organization, and maintenance of the civil defense in Sweden during the Cold War from 1945 to 1989 with a focus also on the cultural consequences of this preparedness.