Swedish Legalism in a Pragmatic Union: The Realpolitik of EU Compliance
By Love Höglund
Imagine a classroom where every student agrees to follow a shared code of conduct. The conduct would be applicable to all however in reality many students quickly realize that the rules are somewhat negotiable. Deadlines can be pushed, small infractions are overlooked, and compromises are routinely struck. However Sweden would not be ranked among those students. In the front row, meticulously following every single instruction down to the letter is Sweden, even choosing to take on extra assignments that were never mandatory in the first place. This would sound like high praise indeed but the reality is that within the free european market this could in fact be self harming behaviour in Sweden’s part, as it loses many advantages that its fellow member states gains.
On paper, the European Union allows no such exceptions or compromises within its constitutional foundation. The twenty-seven member states are bound by the supremacy of EU law even above their own national constitutions. And are required to enforce directives with equal commitment no matter if the directive lands on a desk in Paris, Rome, Warsaw, or Stockholm. Theoretically carries the exact same binding authority.In practice, the Single Market is split because national systems don't match up. In fact many capitals across Southern and Central Europe treat European directives as opening bids that will result in a political negotiation.Sweden has historically treated them as unalterable technical commands. This positioning Sweden one of the European Union’s most zealous and rigorous enforcers of EU law.Sweden acting differently from the rest of the EU has created a debate among academics in public management. They often refers to this as Bror Duktig syndrome, the equivalent of “teacher’s pet syndrome” in English
The data from the European Commission proves it: its yearly Single Market Scoreboard reports how many EU rules each country fails to pass on time or breaks entirely. Sweden consistently ranks near the very top. For decades, Sweden has been very fast at putting EU rules into law, rarely letting disputes turn into official warnings or court cases, with rare exceptions like their protection of their state monopoly on alcohol that was officially granted an exception in 1997 by the EU supreme court.
But in contrast, founding member states like Italy and France routinely approach their European obligations with an clear political pragmatism. Paris and Rome regularly allow unresolved disputes to drag through the Court of Justice of the European Union for years which grants them years where they operate with clear homefield advantage. A striking case in point is Italy’s protracted standoff over its coastal concessions (concessioni balneari). Despite the 2006 EU Services Directive mandating competitive and transparent bidding across the Single Market, successive Italian governments have continuously extended lucrative beach resort licenses, shielded domestic operators from foreign competition, and defied both Commission warnings and European Court of Justice rulings for nearly two decades. To understand why Sweden reacts so differently to European law, we must look closely at its unique constitutional machinery. Political scientists Bengt Jacobsson and Göran Sundström at Stockholm University, who have extensively charted the Europeanization of the Swedish state apparatus, argue that the root of this behavior lies in Sweden’s administrative heritage—specifically its constitutional dualism (förvaltningsdualism) and the historical absence of ministerial rule (ministerstyre).
Unlike most continental bureaucracies where cabinet ministers exercise direct operational control over their administrative departments, Swedish ministries are small policymaking bodies, while autonomous central agencies carry out implementation. Because Swedish constitutional law strictly forbids ministers from interfering in individual administrative decisions or telling agencies how to apply the law, Swedish civil servants have developed an autonomous ethos rooted in a strict principle of legality. As Jacobsson and Sundström illustrate, when European directives enter this institutional environment, they are filtered through an administrative culture that views compliance purely as a technical and legal duty rather than an instrument of political statecraft. Where a French or Italian ministry can quietly guide its agencies to adopt regulatory forbearance or exploit ambiguities to protect a domestic enterprise, Swedish agency officials consider strict adherence to the letter of the text their ultimate constitutional obligation.
The result? A persistent tendency toward gold-plating, or domestic overimplementation (överimplementering). Rather than simply meeting the baseline requirements of EU directives, Swedish regulatory inquiries and agencies have frequently added additional regulatory burdens, accelerated compliance deadlines, and declined optional exemptions designed by Brussels to cushion small and medium-sized enterprises.
This disparity has sparked continuous pushback from the domestic business community. In commentaries and debate articles in Dagens Industri, industry representatives from organizations such as the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (Svenskt Näringsliv) and the Swedish Federation of Business Owners (Företagarna) have consistently argued that Swedish gold-plating acts as a self-imposed economic penalty. They point out that while Swedish enterprises are forced to absorb front-loaded compliance costs in areas ranging from environmental permitting to corporate reporting, their competitors across Europe operate under lighter minimum-standard rules or prolonged domestic grace periods negotiated through political discretion. How can domestic firms compete on an equal footing when Swedish regulators enforce the rulebook with maximum rigidity while others treat it as a flexible guideline?
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Proponents of the Swedish approach argue that immaculate compliance provides invaluable moral authority in Brussels. When Swedish diplomats demand adherence to fiscal rules or champion the Rule of Law Conditionality Mechanism against democratic backsliding, their credibility remains intact because Sweden cannot be accused of regulatory hypocrisy.
Yet this logic belongs to an earlier, more predictable era of European integration. The modern European Union is no longer solely an orderly common market defined by technocratic harmonisation; it has rapidly transformed into an arena of assertive state aid, industrial protectionism, and geoeconomic friction. In such an environment, unbending compliance, detached from political realism, risks mutating into strategic naivety.
Ultimately, we are left with a pressing question: Can Sweden afford to remain the most disciplined student in the classroom, when the rest of the union has already started playing by entirely different rules?
Love Höglund is pursuing a double degree in Political Science and History at Stockholm University. He serves as Vice President of the Stockholm Association of International Affairs (UF Stockholm) and is the former Editor-in-Chief of The Stockholm Journal of International Affairs. His academic special interests focus on International Relations, European integration and public management within Sweden and the EU.
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