Peace Actions and Mainstream Media: Framing Nuclear Disarmament Protests in Welfare Sweden

Abstract

This chapter investigates how reports in Swedish mainstream media framed the 1980s peace movement collective actions in Sweden. By revisiting press coverage of protest events, the analysis identifies the central characteristics of the framing. Primarily, the protests are found to be framed in positive terms and successfully conveyed what Charles Tilly and others have noted as key for a social movement to gain influence: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. In addition, the collective actions were framed as common sense based, festive, and diverse, and in favorable terms in contrast to the notion of the “protest paradigm,” which states that this kind of protest generally was framed negatively, and the framing of collective peace action in other countries. An explanation for the positive framing could be that the peace movement’s claims were non-threatening to the Swedish nuclear welfare state. This favorable framing can be further attributed to what is here analyzed as media-movement co-framing, meaning that the media’s representation of peace actions and collective action framework of them to a significant degree overlapped can explain the favorable framing. As a result, the movement and media framings mutually reinforced each other.

In September 1983, Aftonbladet, one of Sweden’s leading tabloids, reported that the peace movement had been appointed “swede of the year.” The item was illustrated with an image of a peace demonstration. The demo was packed with smiling young women carrying banderols with “Unite the superpowers” and “Life, peace, one world” written on them.¹ The following work is an effort to understand how this framing of the antinuclear peace movement as epitomizing “Sweden in 1983” was possible and how it can be located in the wider context of the European peace movement(s) and its relation to mass media. In Sweden, the media framing stands out as overwhelmingly positive compared to media’s framing of the peace movement in other European countries and the Freeze movement in the US.² In a comparative analysis between British and West German media portrayals of the nuclear disarmament movement, Alexa Robertson finds that the representation of the early 1980s peace movement in the UK was not particularly flattering. While the West German news portrayal of the movements was more balanced, Swedish newspapers texts at large portrayed the peace actions more favorably.³

Alice Holmes Cooper regards the West German INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) protests as owing its “phenomenal success” to frame congruence between media and movement. However, Holmes Cooper misses the opportunity to probe the conditions and processes behind this similarity between public action framing and the media representation of it, which was arguably even more prominent in the Swedish context than the West German. Collective actions against nuclear arms were a frequent element of mainstream media representation of “the peace movement.” I aim to see how mass media, being a catalyst factor for the upsurge of protests, relates to, conditions, and constitutes them. The appeal to and conceptions of common sense, how it is defined with regards to the logic of antinuclear protesting is central. How these protest actions were framed in the press is here an issue for further exploration. The framing of antinuclear protest highlights two things: first, the problems of disarmament movement actions, facing the ambiguously abstract and concrete existential threat of nuclear war,⁴ and second, the mainstream media’s role in sha** protest in the Swedish 1980s. The claim is that in this case, these should be understood together. Through this, this chapter distinguishes framing characteristics that have implications for the understanding of the Swedish 1980s disarmament movement and examines the interplay between movement and media in the framing of contentious action.

Taken together, this leads to the questions:

• How were early 1980s disarmament collective actions framed in Swedish mainstream newspapers?

• What were the main framing tasks and mechanisms, and how does this connect to the specific Swedish situation?

The concept of framing here offers a theoretical lens through which to analyze the content of the news articles and condense the wealth of different news stories into categories and examples.⁵ Subsequently, the framing of the following collective action events in media are examined: (1) a peace procession in Stockholm, (2) the Nordic peace marches to Paris and Minsk, (3) “the great peace rally” in Gothenburg, and (4) a demonstration and symbolic collective action of a human chain between the US and Soviet embassies in Stockholm. However, first a brief background of the early 1980s peace movement is in its place.

The 1980s Peace Wave

In the autumn of 1983 an estimated five million people in Western Europe protested against the Euromissiles. This provides a context for a “nonaligned” antinuclear peace movement and “détente from below,” in which Swedish actors and organizations participated with different approaches. This meant work for increased pressuring of governments and institutions through both formal and more unconventional methods. From UN negotiations, motioning, and establishing Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zones to civil disobedience, peace camps, occupations, protest marches, documenting nuclear arms transports, human chains, study circles, happenings, boycott, and picketing.

By the 1980s, modernity was increasingly questioned in broader groups. Alternative critiques were gradually integrated into society and co-opted by commercial forces over the decade.⁶ According to the sociologist Katsuya Kodama, the 1980s peace movement in general terms, in Sweden, not only challenged military policies, but was part of the popularization of a wider development that questioned social structures, ways of thinking, life styles, and values.⁷ Peace researcher Jan Øberg has claimed, in contradiction to Kodama’s views, that the peace movements in the Nordic countries were protest movements rather than alternative movements, where an inclusive “all” were united against armament insanity.⁸ This chapter suggests that the framing was in line with the latter characterization but included elements from the first as well.

Lawrence Wittner portrays the early 1980s disarmament protests as the third of three global disarmament waves. The first corresponded to Hiroshima, the second with the Cuban missile crisis and increased testing combined with the thermonuclear revolution in explosive yields. The 1980s protests concerned a new cold war escalation once the 1970s détente had waned and a re-actualization of the nuclear annihilation threat with the popularization of concepts such as Nuclear winter.⁹ The Nato two-track decision of 1979 with the deployment of new intermediate and short-range nuclear forces in western European Nato countries was widely understood as an intensifying event. In combination with the increasing nuclear armament of the eastern bloc and the launch of the Strategic Defense Initiative 1983, it called for action.¹⁰ Sweden, as the other West European nations, with this saw large portions of the public taking a stand for disarmament, and rising membership in organizations such as the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (SPAS), Swedish Peace Committee (SPC), Swedish Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF/IKFF), and Women for Peace (KFF).¹¹ These organizations were often internationally oriented, with numerous connections abroad. However, the frames of action differed between varying conditions in national contexts. As we shall see, the Swedish media framing of peace protests was distinct in several instances. Conversely, an elaboration on the framing perspective is made in the following.

The Framing Perspective: Media and Peace Movement Co-Framing

To investigate the relationship between peace movement, collective action, and media I use framing as a conceptual tool. Erving Goffman suggests that people operate under the guidance of frames as schemata of interpretation, enabling the individual to orient, locate and comprehend occurrences.¹² Legacy media and mainstream newspapers, which are here investigated, had the power to influence both the political agenda and framing during the early 1980s.¹³

According to social movement scholars Walgrave & Vleigenhardt, the agenda is set in the intersection between media, protest, and how representations are interpreted.¹⁴ This interpretation is dependent on framing. Alice Holmes Cooper’s work on the media’s framing of the West German peace protest is a concrete example of how framing operates. Holmes Cooper utilizes quantitative measures to assess the degree to which collective action frames and media frames converged. She argues that higher convergence of frames renders greater chances of success in mobilizing support.

Social movement scholars Snow et al. see frames as mechanisms for articulation, linking various elements to convey a coherent meaning. Frames furthermore focus attention by directing the sensory concentration to the “in-frame” and excluding other things. Frames thus often implement a transformative function on the object, remodeling the “way in which objects of attention are seen or understood relating to other objects and/or to the actor.”¹⁵ These functions generate fertile grounds for qualitative interpretation of how news frames and shapes protests. The analysis is thus done by describing the explicit and implicit framing processes. In these processes, WUNC is a useful elaboration on factors that make protests powerful. Protestors who succeed in framing themselves as worthy, united, numerous, and committed exert more influence in this model. More events with higher turnouts (numbers) of people, displaying dignity (worthiness), a cohesive standpoint (unity), and that they truly care about the issue (commitment) increase the likelihood of achieving desired outcomes.¹⁶

It is the interplay between the media framing the peace movement and the movement’s active employment of media (in the WUNC model, media coverage is understood as an intrinsic part of the action) in framing collective action that I call co-framing.¹⁷ If the media and movement framing converged the media representation of movement actions should in some way mirror the core framing tasks of collective action frames, hereby structuring the peace movement framing. These core framing tasks are the diagnostic (what is wrong?), prognostic (what should be done?), and motivational tasks (by who and why?), constructing vocabularies that motivate people to partake. Snow, Vleigenthardt, and Ketelaars argue that the framing practices of media and the framing practices of social movements are not inherently comparable categories. However, in the present analysis of the Swedish 1980s peace movement, I argue that these two framing practices cannot be separated. With this, the answer to the questions is sought by making a qualitative interpretation to understand how such peace movement action and media co-framing operated.¹⁸

Following Holmes Cooper’s thesis of media-movement frame convergence, the analysis of co-framing between media and collective actions should be seen in relation to the fact that the framing of protest in mainstream media commonly operates by the “protest paradigm.” The protest paradigm implies that protests tend to be framed critically in mainstream media. In its widest conceptualization, McLeod and Hertog state that the protest paradigm combines unfavorable story framing, reliance on officially sanctioned sources and classifications, with pleas to public opinion, showing that the protesters are in the minority. In the case of the early 1980s disarmament movement, Swedish public opinion was essentially against the missiles. As we shall see, this was not the only instance where the protest paradigm was turned around with the Swedish peace protest framings.¹⁹

Robert Benford has published several papers elaborating on the aspects of the framing processes based on data on the nuclear disarmament movement, as well as a critical assessment of the framing perspective.²⁰ Benford demonstrates that social movement mobilization, recruitment and participation in the US disarmament movement relies on vocabularies of severity, urgency, efficacy, and propriety. Assuming a degree of generality, these vocabularies, if identified in the news reports from protest events, implicate that movement and media framings overlap.

Material and Methodology

Corresponding to the aims and questions, the investigation examines news articles on the disarmament movement protests. This material was obtained by searching the general news article database of the Swedish Royal Library, the Swedish Protest Database described by Jansson and Uba in this volume, and Sweden’s most extensive collection of newspaper clip**s. First, a distanced reading of the digitalized material was conducted with the aid of keyword search, where the whole content of articles of all major newspapers in the period is searchable.

In the first search, the material/corpus and delimitation ranged from 1975–1995. Figure 7.1 shows yearly mentions of the term peace movement (fredsrörelse) in Swedish media. It is indicative of a movement “wave” a metaphor also used and generated by the peace movement itself, and in movement historiography.

Fig. 7.1

Yearly “peace movement” term search. KB/Swedish Royal Library. www.tidningar.kb.se

The search renders a general overview of the term “peace movement” trends, with a peak in 1982–1983. However, not all of these articles talk about protest events. Subsequently, the search was limited between 1979, the Nato two-track decision, and 1987, when the INF treaty went into force, thus delimiting the source material scope. I furthermore added “protest,” “demonstration,” and “disarmament” in all combinations with “peace movement” to achieve some level of saturation. This combined search resulted in 1027 texts from the major newspapers. As a result of this it was possible to go through the whole material. I limited the source material to sections of the newspapers that were not opinion pieces, debating texts, editorials, etc. as to focus on what was represented as news.²¹ After this followed a qualitative analysis of the content and form of the texts that reported on collective actions against nuclear missile deployment or for nuclear disarmament. The qualitative examination that follows is structured on illustrative cases of event framing, speaking to general notions of the peace movement framing.

The Peace Procession December 12, 1980: Worthiness, Urgency, and the Wave Narrative

On December 6, 1980, a (re)presentation of a collective disarmament action was printed in the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper. It was a call to the people of Stockholm to join a collective action in the form of a Peace procession on the 12th of that same month. As such, the call functioned both as a representation of the movement in wider terms and an appeal to participate in it. Hereby, the text converged movement collective action framework with media framing of a peace protest. This convergence of media and movement framing seems at odds with the traditional view on (mainstream) media in society, and the “protest paradigm” of framing protest action.²² The fact that a major Swedish news outlet, DN, printed a call for action further suggests a relative unanimity regarding the planned action, its goals, and motives. This further marks that the action was not considered extreme and yet seen as a valuable news item.

The author of the text is the DN journalist and Women for Peace (Kvinnokamp för Fred, KFF)²³ organizer Birgitta Nyblom. In the paper´s news section, the text calls upon the public to march in a torchlight procession to protest, on the year date of the Nato two-track decision.²⁴ Reports from this event followed in DN.²⁵ This protest call encompasses several elements of how peace movement actions were launched and framed in Swedish media. For instance, mentioning the numbers of protests and participants across Europe and the date of the procession emphasizing the Nato decision, identifying the superpowers as Other.²⁶ Statements such as these are what I would describe as framing cues, connecting the collective action frame to an assumed previous knowledge and outlook that the newsreader and potential protestors were assumed to care about and understand as a qualified motive to protest.

Further, the media-movement co-framing involves a critical reflection orienting the action toward a general mistrust of the superpower duopoly’s deals and promises. The text here frames the reader and potential participant toward an urgency of the situation, and against the aspiration of the superpowers to keep the planned nuclear war in the “European theatre.” This call to action thus frames a specific diagnostic comprehension of a danger embedded in the superpower interaction and the non-democratic processes implicated by this, to be protested by the active and reasonable citizens of a democratic welfare state, who are at risk of being affected by the insane nuclear arms race.

Nyblom, with the call for the peace procession, presents herself as part of the Women for Peace group and calls on the “women of Stockholm” to participate in the planned procession. The women for peace framing is illustrative as, in the early 1980s, peace movement peace was often represented as a gendered issue,²⁷ underlining certain aspects of womanhood connoting life, and reproduction in connection to the protection of the planet and non-violence (contrasted against masculine techno-militarized modernity).²⁸ Groups participating in the action together with Women for Peace were the social democratic women’s clubs, and “all the peace organizations.”

Nyblom’s unproblematized positions as both journalist and activist/organizer are indicative of the relationship between the peace movement and the media establishment as a form of internal anti-establishment. Many prominent peace movement actors represented themselves as outsiders. Still, they had communicative platforms and positions in media, political parties, and academia, forming a counter-establishment close to and overlap** with the “establishment.” With this, the disarmament protests were not only framed by the media but also with it. The confluence explains to why the movement actions were not framed more in line with the “protest paradigm,” in which protest action tends to be framed less favorably. Instead, the media representations were part of the movement’s collective action framework as well, represented by committed journalists, peace intellectuals, and writers.²⁹

The core framing tasks that Snow, Vleigenthart, and Ketelaars³⁰ describe as the operating functions of collective action frames, are also thus structuring the media framing of these protest actions. First, the diagnosis of illegitimate superpower nuclear duopoly and insanity of increased missile tension was clearly expressed, both in the movement organizations and in Swedish mainstream media/news reporting.³¹ This highlights the prognostic (what should be done) confidence in collective action represented throughout the media-movement event co-framing, as well as the motivational motor of the action, that everybody should act because the imminent threat of nuclear war implicated all.

Framing the Peace Marches for a Nordic Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone: Festive and Womanhood-Framed Critique

In 1981 and 1982, peace organizations in the Nordic countries collectively arranged longer peace marches with women as main protagonists to Paris and Minsk. The goal was to address the urgency of disarmament and grassroots transnational cooperation against the Euromissiles.³² Anne Stefensson, in DN March 7, 1981, before the first march, stated that the Paris march was established to generate opinion for a Nordic nuclear-weapons-free zone, NNWFZ.³³ Ten women from each of the respective Nordic countries were to march from Copenhagen through Europe to Paris. However, all were welcome to join for longer or shorter intervals. Further, DN frames a far-reaching European popular support for the march. The marchers were joined by English, West- and East-German as well as Italian and other European marches in Paris on August 6, 1981, Hiroshima day, starting an international peace festival.³⁴

In correspondence with most of the collective actions investigated here, the peace march was framed as festivities for peace syncretically with the women’s movement. One of Svenska Dagbladet (SvD)’s headlines translates to “Women understand that war threatens them.” The popular peace movement is hereby articulated, and the peace marches framed as female acts, informed by a gendered reason and motivation.³⁵ DN in mid-July 1981 reports from the start of the march to Paris and contrasting the somber mission, the representations of the march connects to a general framing of young, pop-festival peace.

Transnational European Peace as Frame Mechanism in 1980s Sweden

Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow have defined ‘transnational collective action’ as “coordinated international campaigns on the part of networks of activists against international actors, other states, or international institutions.”³⁶ The anti-INF protests were framed as transnational as they were protesting something beyond national borders and coordinated internationally. Almost every news report from peace events recounted simultaneous action across Europe. The reports demonstrate a key element of the movement actions as being part of a larger international popular movement with a kind of “solidarity in numbers,” with this reinforcing itself and connecting to the peace wave narrative.³⁷ In transnational activism, contacts across borders are intrinsic: both with frames operating across borders, and with transnationalism as an appealing frame-component. In the cold war context, transnationalism was, however, not obviously favorable.³⁸ The transnational aspect could have been framed as a liability signaling “foreign influence.”³⁹ However, in the Swedish media framing, border-crossing practices arguably became favorable framing mechanisms in themselves, as the official Swedish neutrality standpoint converged well with the peace movements disarmament work. On Swedish news pages, antimilitary disarmament action was not represented as a threat. Instead, the framing aligned the protest with a form of healthy, youthful dissent imbricated with internationalist values.⁴⁰

The collective actions against the new missiles and for a Nordic nuclear-weapons-free zone that took place in Sweden were typically framed positively. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions, such as the Nordic peace march to Minsk made in 1982. This march was more ambiguously framed, with some articles suggesting the march would be used as Soviet propaganda. It was hence represented as both suspect and naïve.⁴¹ Here a line was drawn in the framing between common-sense-based and over-zealous activism in agreement with the protest paradigm. In the Swedish news reports, this serves as an exception. The reports on the “great peace meeting” in the spring of 1982, before the Minsk March, were optimistic as we shall see in the following.

Contention for All: Co-Framing Common Sense of the “Peace Man” at the Peace Rally in Gothenburg 1982

The “peace movement wave” across Europe, as it was represented in Swedish news media, was characterized as distinctively popular and broad, in line with worthiness-connoting, harmless counter-cultural frameworks of expression. The mainstream media representation of a Swedish peace rally, “the great peace meeting,” on May 15, 1982 underlines how this type of framing operated. The meeting took place in Gothenburg. There the local organization of WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Internationella kvinnoförbundet för fred och frihet, IKFF) had an active and radical tradition to build on.⁴² In an item on the 12th of May, 1982 of the national daily newspaper SvD “50 000 väntas tåga i största fredsmarchen” 50,000 Expected to Partake in the Greatest Peace Rally—the preparations for the large-scale peace meeting are described, and the action is with this also promoted. The (re)production of the event follows Tilly’s WUNC framing conceptualization rather narrowly, recounting numbers even before the event had taken place.⁴³ The text furthermore, as the procession appeal above, functions as a call for collective action while reporting the planned event. It is emphasized that no party or individual organization is arranging the event, instead mobilizing by appealing to a multiple, plural, and post-political (as the text represents that the organizers does not consider the action as political) sentiment of peace. A unifying aspect is however, located in the watchwords dictated in the news report by the collective action planners: “nuclear free Europe” and “for a Nordic nuclear free zone”.⁴⁴

As the media represented it, the peace movement was remarkably well organized and disciplined within these mediated worthiness frameworks. Further, the event was represented with interviews with one of its planners, expressing an effort to “Awakening the ones who are not normally involved in these kinds of things”.⁴⁵

1982 on the 16th of May, Göteborgsposten (GP) wrote several reports from the march and Gothenburg peace rally, with varying perspectives. The text “Mäktig demonstration av aktiv fredsvilja” (Powerful Demonstration of an Active Will for Peace)⁴⁶ described a “warm feeling in the atmosphere” and that around 70,000 marched through the city. Forty thousand were described as moving into the sports stadium, Ullevi, to demonstrate their nuclear disarmament commitment and support the slogans.⁴⁷ The texts represented a festive mode where all were invited. The police reported of a very peaceful day without “intermezzos,” and a mild passion for a general peace concept is framed here. A speaker at the event, the Finnish peace intellectual, and educator Helena Kekkonen highlighted the potential of the mass acting as individuals. She recognized that the general task of the movement should be to create a new human being, the ideal “peace-man” through “peace education,” for a human elevated to feeling responsibility for life and value all people as equals.⁴⁸

GP further reports that the marchers expressed no use in provocative, violent action against the structural anticipated violence of nuclear war as “we are all for peace.” The marchers are described by one protestor as “drunk on each other, the sunshine and nature,” and that “everybody” was participating, “beginner-protestors, old and young, punks and Christians.”⁴⁹

Images and short interviews with people marching for peace illustrate the peace march reports in GP. Significantly, the imagery portrays older people and children as an expression of innocence and diversity, framing “common people” as a moral face of humanity, the framing represented by the following description:

strikingly, many of the participants in the peace march were unorganized. People who felt that here was something they could take part in. Many elders joined in the march. Women, children, and professions for peace, värmlänningar (people from a rural Swedish region, Värmland) for peace and, skövdebor (people from a Swedish township, Skövde) for peace. A priest from Färgelanda, a woman from Dals långed. (Two small Swedish communities).⁵⁰

A noteworthy aspect here is that, besides the many professions and places mentioned, women, elderly, and children are often highlighted in the reports from collective action events of the peace movement. These groups are particularly prominent in a kind of peace protest iconography.⁵¹ The peace iconography signaled, as a specification of the worthiness framing, a certain aspect of real-ness and human face contrasted with “political games” and abstract political figures, as well as harmlessness in contrast to protest aggression.

Under what was co-framed by the media and the peace movement as the “hot autumn” of 1983, these elements of inclusive unity and common sense appeal intensified. It meant an urgency-provoking countdown to the deployment and consisted of mediated events and reports in the months approaching the implementation.⁵²

The Hot Autumn Ends with a Bang

Artists for Peace (Artister för fred) were pop musicians, show business people, and artists who arranged concerts as public events for peace. As mainstream media framed it, the peace movement had become intertwined with entertainment. During the hot autumn of 1983, Artists for Peace organized a final event before the missile deployment, officially starting on the 23 of October. The peace artists celebrated and performed at Berns salonger (a traditional venue and variety institution in Stockholm). The halls were decorated with Peace doves for the 1000-headed crowd. Earlier in the day, the crowd had taken part in a collective action of 80 000 people building a peace chain between the US and Soviet embassies.⁵³ Olof Palme, who at the time led the Swedish government, held what was presented as an unprompted speech at the demonstration. He was thus represented, in line with his interests in common security, as a figurehead for the wide popular force of the early 1980s peace movement and its position of respectable critique.⁵⁴

These reports from the Swedish actions are combined with coverages of West European and US peace action in October–November 1983, with large-scale demonstrations framed with their number of participants in Bonn, London, Rome, and Paris. The movement actions in Bonn in mid-November 1983 were, in contrast to the Swedish actions, represented as “Full-scale war in the streets”.⁵⁵ Foreign movement actions were represented as more contentious and violent, with higher stakes in comparison to the framing of the Swedish collective actions. However, in the reports on foreign peace movement action, counter to the “protest paradigm,” the news report in Sweden frames the police as acting as aggressors.

However, there were two distinct sides to the newspapers. The news reports most often highlighted positively coded aspects on the news page, with established anti-establishment peace progressives reporting on the action potential and reproducing it as a positive force for disarmament. (The journalists were often of a younger generation, often women). On the other page were “cold warriors” and security professionals questioning this same peace endeavor as naïve, from the mainstream newspapers’ opinion/debating, commenting, and editorial pages.⁵⁶ The two positions crystallized on the op-ed pages more than in the news sections. The news described the events almost exclusively as “good news,” in line with the peace movement position, framing itself as post-political or apolitical.⁵⁷ The protests framed as (good) news were thus implicitly, although the movement was framed as apolitical, emphasizing political fractures in the ostensibly “homogenous” Swedish welfare state society.

Conclusions and Summary: Framing Swedish Antinuclear Peace Action

The portrayal of the early 1980s disarmament was overwhelmingly positive in Swedish mainstream news reporting. This positive framing stands out vis-a-vis representations of the peace movement in other European countries and the freeze movement in the US.⁵⁸ Elsewhere, the collective actions of the disarmers were less univocally embraced and framed as more “political” and divisive. Entman and Rojecki find “framing judgements” of journalists in the US to be influenced by an underlying professional ideology encompassing an ambivalence to public participation and commitment in security politics, supportive of mass participation in theory but nevertheless suspicious when movements organize to exert power. Swedish mass media coverage of the early 1980s peace movement shows less suspicion, and instead the prominence of an idea that public action demonstrated the will of the masses and through this a responsibility of the “active” individual had a place in security politics, extending even beyond the national borders.

Further, the nuclear disarmament movement’s core framing tasks are identified in the texts reporting on peace events, especially since collective action events also were announced and promoted as news items. Generally, the framing tasks were expressed as follows: First, diagnosing the missile escalation as being against common sense and second, prescribing collective action to affect politicians, promote an NNWFZ, and support the movement organizations in the western European deployment Nato states, in a “respectable” way. Third, motivating as many as possible who do not usually participate in protest actions to commit to the cause.

The Swedish mainstream media’s and the movement’s framing with this appear to be converging in several instances. In motivating people to partake and, prescribing action in response to the severity and urgency of the issue, the simultaneity across Europe, and an idea of responsibility to act on the extreme stances of the nuclear alliances. The conclusions can be concentrated into the following points:

• First, media and movement isomorphism is identified, meaning that media representation of the movement actions and collective action framework of the peace movement mirrored and overlapped, mutually enforcing each other. This framing, dependent on a counter-establishment asserting a specific position of virtually post-political peace aspirations, co-constitutes a framework of popular common sense based disarmament nationalism, relating to Sweden as a small welfare state with an ostensibly independent security policy vis-a-vis the superpower nuclear duopoly.

• Second, the peace movement protests in Sweden were not framed according to the protest paradigm. In some protest events, reporters and journalists took part in and shaped the collective action framework, co-constructing the collective actions as media events. The arena of struggle was not the news reports, and thus an apparent convergence between movement and news framing occurred.

Furthermore, the positive framing of the collective actions was built on WUNC, the unifying nuclear threat, wave narrative transnationalism, gendered peace values, and celebratory connotations. One possible factor in explaining the favorable portrayal of the peace actions is that direct actions primarily concerned either policy that corresponded to the Swedish official foreign position or was directed not at Swedish but mainly nuclear duopoly installations.

The media framing of the early 1980s Swedish peace movement action drew on a cultural frame of consensual, internationally oriented reasonability beyond the superpower duopoly’s “armament insanity.” This framing in the media completely overshadowed other cultural frames suggested and emphasized as motivators, such as alternative individualist lifestyles or nuclear fear.⁵⁹

The movement events were generally represented as festive and connected to womanhood, both by the level of organizing groups and in how the events were represented. In earlier nuclear protests, gendered aspects of disarmament were less pronounced.⁶⁰ The focus on missiles, de-escalation in an already urgently framed present, and transnational solidarity with movements across Europe were central elements for the broad appeal, circumventing conflictual and divisive issues regarding security policy and involvement with either pact. Therefore, even though the issue was deeply divisive, it was not so on the mainstream news pages. Indeed, the mainstream media framings were never the only valid frames of peace protests, as frame disputes are ubiquitous in social movements, as Benford puts it.⁶¹ However, as this chapter highlights, in 1980s Sweden, the strong tendency of co-framing between media representations of events and the peace movement can be seen as a beneficial factor of the movements’  ability to mobilize and the meaning that its symbolic actions came to have as “Swede of the year” in 1983.⁶²