#9 The opening ceremony of the Swedish Riksdag
in Parliament Buildings: The Architecture of Politics in Europe
Dear readers,
I’m happy to share a chapter just published in a massive (and open access available) volume under the title Parliament Buildings: The Architecture of Politics in Europe (ed. Psarra, Staiger, Sternberg 2023 UCL Press). My contribution is titled “The opening ceremony of the Swedish Riksdag”. It is based on a paper I presented back in 2021 titled “Secular liturgy in the Swedish Riksdag”, and this is still at the core of the paper – what ritual performance and legal sacraments do we experience and enact in this ritual.
Every year in early autumn the Swedish Riksdag starts its parliamentary session with an opening ceremony that the king attends. Between 1974 and 1975 this ceremony changed dramatically. The opening of the parliamentary year serves, as we will see, as a condensation of the Swedish constitution. In 1974, a new Instrument of Government was enacted which codified the modern constitutional order. The main fundamental law of the Swedish constitution, the Instrument of Government, had persisted since 1809, and although amended it gradually had become more and more out of sync with the actual political system, which included parliamentarism. This major shift in formal constitutional order was not only represented but, I argue, embodied and enacted through the transformation of the opening ceremony.
I based my analysis in the chapter on two video recordings of different opening ceremonies, which are available online.
The first a military affair with the regalia on display, and the king seated at a throne:
The second a civil event, where the king is invited by the new sovereign, the Riksdag,
This of course connects to the blog post about Charles III’s coronation and the deep roots of kingship, ritual and legitimacy which I shared with you this spring. Swedish monarchs no longer let themselves be coronated, and the current king has stopped sitting on a throne. However, all the tools and paraphernalia of the monarchy are still kept, to be re-used in different ways. As just one example, see the silver throne, standing empty behind the king, queen and the crown princess on the celebration of the princess’ 18th birthday.
The whole book is available freely as open access, on the UCL Press website and contains lots of interesting architectural, art historical, political theoretical, etcetera, contributions concerning parliament buildings and their content. It is all introduced in this blog post at the Hansard Society.
Best,
Tormod