Sweden was the first country to adopt such a policy in 2014, permitting it to project its longstanding state feminism abroad, and to assume a new moral posture in the international arena. Domestically, there were positive Atlanticist stories in women’s magazines. In the “Mama” section of the Swedish newspaper Expressen, targeted at female readers, one interview with Angelina Jolie emphasised that Nato can protect women from sexual violence in war. Jolie also stressed that there is little difference between humanitarian aid workers and Nato soldiers, as they “are striving towards the same goal: peace”.

The academic Merje Kuus has written that Nato enlargement involves “a two-fold legitimation” strategy. First, Nato is rendered ordinary and unremarkable, pedestrian and everyday, and second, it is portrayed as above reproach, vital, an absolute moral good. The effect of this, she says, is the simultaneous banalisation and glorification of Nato: it becomes so blandly bureaucratic that it is below debate, and so “existential and essential”, that it is above debate.

And this legitimation strategy has been evident in the limited, tightly-controlled debate about Euro-Atlantic integration in the Nordic countries, neither of which held referendums on membership. After decades of popular resistance to the alliance, Nato, it seems, is above democracy. But as Kuss writes, that does not mean that Nato is imposed on a society. The aim is instead “to integrate it into entertainment, education, and civic life more broadly”.