History
Through the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century, most Swedish diplomatic missions were legations. The ambassador question was dealt with in the council on 25 August 1947. It was decided that some Swedish legations would be elevated to embassies. The first Swedish legations to be elevated to embassies were those in Washington, D.C., London, Paris, Moscow, Nanjing, Copenhagen and Oslo. [6]
In January 2010, the Swedish Foreign Ministry announced that its embassies in Bratislava (Slovakia), Dakar (Senegal), Dublin (Ireland), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Luxembourg (Luxembourg), and Sofia (Bulgaria) would be closed down, while existing section offices in Pristina, Tbilisi, Chișinău, Tirana, Bamako, Ouagadougou, Monrovia, Kigali, La Paz, and Phnom Penh would be upgraded to embassies. [7]
In December 2010, it was announced by the Swedish Foreign Ministry that an additional five embassies would close down; the embassies affected were the ones in Brussels, Belgium, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Hanoi, Vietnam, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Luanda, Angola. [8]
In August 2011, an agreement between the Social Democrats and the governing Reinfeldt Cabinet was announced, with the purpose of keeping the embassies in Argentina, Vietnam, Malaysia and Angola open. [9]
On 30 August 2012, Sweden closed its embassy in Minsk, with the Estonian Embassy charged with representing Swedish interests in Belarus. [10]
On 2 November 2016, the embassy in Lima, Peru, was re-opened. [11] Six days later, on 8 November the embassy in Manila, Philippines, was re-opened, eight years after it was closed down.
In November 2021 the Swedish government announced that it would re-open embassies in Dublin and Brussels, and open a consulate-general in San Francisco. [12] In November 2022, the embassy in Luanda closed and in the same year the embassy in Lima, which had reopened in 2016, also closed. [13] [14]
On 20 June 2024, the Swedish government decided that the embassies in Bamako and Ouagadougou would be closed. For continued effective engagement in the Sahel and West Africa, the government also decided to initiate a process to reopen the embassy in Dakar. The closing is expected to be completed by the end of 2024, while the embassy in Dakar is expected to open in 2025. [15]
The Swedish government announced in February 2025 that it intends to reopen the consulate-general in Houston, United States, and elevate the consulate-general in Brussels to an embassy. [16]
