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Sweden is militarily non-allied and has for centuries relied on its own ability to defend itself. Even “neutrality” has traditionally been associated with Sweden, but with increased international involvement this concept has been eroded more and more. Sweden has about nine million inhabitants, is geographically extensive with a length of about 1,500 kilometres from north to south and is, especially in the northern regions, often sparsely populated. Altogether these conditions have had an influence on the dimensioning and structuring of the armed forces. For example, during the 1950s Sweden had the fourth largest air force in the Western world and as late as at the end of the Cold War Sweden, at least on paper, maintained an impressive number of armed forces (850,000 after mobilisation). However the equipment and training of these forces left much to be desired (Åselius, 2005).

The past ten to fifteen years have been a turbulent period for the Swedish military. The collapse of the Soviet Union, which was the primary potential enemy, the end of the Cold War, the establishment of the independent Baltic States and Swedish membership in the European Union all combined to render the Swedish defence forces hopelessly outdated. However, although the need for change has been obvious for many years, now many think the progress has been very slow. Some say we should have changed the defence forces dramatically back in the early 1990s. Instead, we chose to implement a series of reorganisations, closing down piece after piece of the old invasion-oriented defence force, while trying to retain as much as possible. What we have today is an eroded conscription system, where military service has become more a question of choice. Despite all this, the public is still quite supportive, thinking that we might need a defence “just in case”, especially as new threats arise. A new trend is that quite many, according to public opinion polls, now think that those who actually do serve as conscripts should get extra compensated with money for this service to society.

In this article the basic value orientations of future officers and civilian students are compared. It is found that the variance between the 13 countries included in the survey is mostly larger than the one between civilian and military students when it comes to the basic value dimensions such as tradition vs. modernity, left vs. right, cosmopolitan vs. localistic, materialistic vs. post-materialistic and civilian vs. military values. Thus, the military are not consistently in all countries more religious, more right oriented and more materialistic than their civil fellow students, even if there exists a tendency for such a trend.

Bahattin Akşit, BA (1968), METU; MA (1971) and PhD (1975) University of Chicago. Dr. Akşit, Professor in the Department of Sociology, Middle East Technical University, conducts research in the following areas: Psycho-social aspects of disaster management; Community participation and volunteer associations; Rural structural transformations, Social change and cleavage in towns and cities; Sociology of religion and secularism; Sociology of Middle East and Central Asia; Army and conflict resolution. Recent publications are: (1) Karanci, N., Akşit, B. and Dirik, G. (2005). Impact of a community disaster awareness training program in Turkey, Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal, 33(3); (2) Akşit, B., Karanci, N. and Gunduz-Hosgör, A. (2001), Turkey, working street children in three metropolitan cities, International Labour Organization; (3) Akşit, B. (1993). Studies in rural transformation in Turkey. In: P. Stirling (Ed.), Culture and the economy: Changes in Turkish villages. Cambridgeshire: The Eothen Press; (4) Akşit, B. (1991). Islamic education in Turkey: Medrese reform in late Ottoman times and Imam-hatip schools. In: R. Tapper (Ed.), Islam in modern Turkey: Religion politics and literature in a secular state. London: I B Tauris and University of London.

This book is a report of cross-national research on the civil–military cultural differences in democratic societies, particularly centred on the attitudes of national elites, here considered as being mainly composed of professionals.Our research is limited to the democratic countries: This limit is grounded in the consideration that the cultural dynamics, especially in civil–military relations, of countries with non-democratic regimes are completely different.The initial project, written up and published in the ERGOMAS and RC01 newsletters, was later discussed at several conferences, and subsequently elaborated in a restricted working group.Researchers investigated a sample of cadets at military academies and their generational peers at civilian universities (“future elites”). An expert survey was also employed to sample “present elites”, both civilian and military.The book is therefore a report of the cross-national research on the civil–military cultural gap in democratic societies. It is divided into three parts: the first is devoted to describing the project's theoretical framework and the methodology used in the field research. The second part, deals with the results of the research on the main survey themes. The third part is aimed at illustrating the national specificities to the reader for better understanding of the results of the cross-national comparison. Finally, the last chapter presents a comparison between the responses of the two interviewed elites, present and future, and an attempt to draw a few conclusions.

This article investigates the effect of modeling extreme events on the calculation of minimum capital risk requirements for three LIFFE futures contracts. The use of internal models will be permitted under the European Community Capital Adequacy Directive II and will be widely adopted in the near future for determining capital adequacies. Close scrutiny of competing models is required to avoid a potentially costly misallocation of capital resources, to ensure the safety of the financial system. The authors propose a semi‐parametric approach, for which extreme risks are modeled using a generalized Pareto distribution, and smaller risks are characterized by the empirically observed distribution function. The primary finding of comparing the capital requirements based on this approach with those calculated from both the unconditional density and from a conditional density (a GARCH(1,1) model), is that for both in‐sample and out‐of‐sample tests, the extreme value approach yields superior results. This is attributable to the fact that the other two models do not explicitly model the tails of the return distribution.