In 1959, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills published a book titled The Sociological Imagination. In it, he argued that US citizens needed a new "quality of mind", an awareness that allowed them to connect their personal lives with the great social changes taking place in post-war American society. In Mills’ eyes, it was the job of sociologists to expand people’s perspectives, to get them to see what was really happening in what seemed to be happening. At the same time, Mills argued that established sociology was a failure. It was trapped in conventional wisdom, which could imagine nothing other than the society that existed and which ruled out the notion that the dramatic upheavals of times past could not be repeated.

Similarly, in my view, the same holds true of today’s official Swedish – and, as I understand it, European – approach to security. There is almost a complete lack of what one might call "historical imagination