Sammendrag:

This Master Thesis is exploring how the balance between imperatives is expressed in the Government bill, St.prp. nr. 48 (2007-2008) Et forsvar til vern om Norges sikkerhet, interesser og verdier. The thesis identify the contents of the functional and societal imperatives in the existing white paper. Samuel P. Huntingtons well-known book, The Soldier and the State, is one of the master references to the civil-military research field. The intention of this study is to try his framework as an ideal model in a specific Norwegian context, not to its whole extent.

The thesis is based on two different methodological approaches, one deductive and one inductive. This means that the functional imperative has been identified with a deductive method, based on the Swedish Effect Model. The cause of this is the high level of abstraction of Huntingtons imperatives. The societal imperative is given an inductive method, where the source has been charted from the text itself, to identify its contents.

The thesis found that the Government has an instrumental approach to how the armed forces should be used, where traceability is a necessary mean. Due to the low threat in international affairs it is seen in Huntingtons ideal model that the objective control has little influence on the long-term-planning. This thesis shows it is not necessarily so. Because of the complex threat assessment, including strong interests in the nation, the Government has put values into a central role of interaction with the armed forces to legitimate it as a tool. This means that the armed forces is linked closer to the civil society to attain the expected effects described in this particular source. This thesis prove the balance between the functional and societal imperative in the Government bill.