In line for NATO membership
Strategic Analyst
In international relations, some descriptions are forever. ‘Finlandisation’ is one such. ‘Quisling’ is another. Long after Finland has acceded to NATO, students of international relations will continue to listen to their professors’ lectures about Finlandisation in contexts which have nothing to do with Finland. Seventy-six years after Norwegian Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling was executed by a firing squad, traitors all over the world continue to be referred to as ‘quislings’.
Both countries have benefited from a twin policy of practising western values, and, at the same time, declining to be anti-Russia pawns of the US.
Finland and Sweden applied for NATO membership last week, but even if they are accepted as part of the military alliance, these two countries are not about to be staging posts for anti-Russian armed actions. Finland will stay Finlandised because geography cannot be changed. From the time of Joseph Stalin through Vladimir Putin’s two decades in power, Finland has cared for Russian sensitivities. It did not condemn Soviet military interventions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan. Neither did India.
Yet, this did not prevent Finland from joining the EU. Helsinki has been a full EU member for 27 years. Even before Finland joined the EU, it was part of NATO’s Partnership for Peace, which is just short of membership. Both Finland and Sweden prospered and lived happily from a twin policy of practising western values, at the same time declining to be anti-Soviet — and later anti-Russia — pawns of the US. That is where these two aspiring NATO members fundamentally differ from Ukraine, the third candidate to be inside NATO. Lip service notwithstanding, Kyiv does not share the values of the Finns or the Swedes. Ukraine has been woefully short in practising them too since it ceased to be part of the Soviet Union. When the war in Ukraine is over, whatever its outcome, the peoples of Finland and Sweden will return to their pre-war lives and once again embrace policies, which most favoured them for seven decades. They are not about to change those policies permanently or release the anchor which has been the bedrock of peaceful coexistence in their backyard and neighbourhood.
Sweden has greater reason than Finland to go back eventually to policies which served them well until the Russians militarily intervened in Ukraine. The Swedes eschewed the idea of war as a means to resolve disputes in the first decade of the 19th century and have lived peacefully to their contentment. The fight between Russia and Ukraine is not a good enough reason for Swedes to take up arms for the first time in 208 years. They will defend themselves in the unlikely event that it becomes necessary, but they are not going to fight someone else’s battles.
Relations between Stockholm and Moscow have never been entirely trouble-free. Not for centuries. In the last half century, the troubles have not been critical, or else, their engagement would not have been light-heartedly referred to as ‘Whiskey on the Rocks’. The reference is to the most serious naval incident of all between the two sides in 1981, when an intruding Soviet ‘Whiskey’ class submarine accidentally hit the rocks off the secretive Swedish naval base at Karlskrona. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated in the 1990s that such intrusions by submarines occurred at least 30 times in a year. Other estimates put the number of violations of Swedish naval space by diver vehicles and frogmen at 600 times in 1984. The Swedes responded, but with minimum military action because they are no less Finlandised than their neighbour in defending their space.
Finland and Sweden are both democracies where the will of the people prevails on a scale far greater than in many other parts of Europe. So, if a bare majority of Swedes and a huge majority of Finns want accession to NATO – as recent polls indicate – it will happen as long as statutory blocks to the process within the military alliance are overcome. But the people voting for NATO in both countries are seeking reassurance from like-minded western partners in doing so. Neither Finland nor Sweden has aggressive intentions towards Russians unlike the Baltic states which sought and got NATO membership in 2004. The arguments which Putin has advanced for going to war in Ukraine are equally valid for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The large Russian populations in the Baltics are severely discriminated against at best, persecuted at worst. This has been Moscow’s long-standing grouse against the three states ever since they parted from the Soviet Union and was a forceful argument against their accession to NATO.
Western disinformation in the absence of any counter-narrative from Moscow – caused by worldwide censorship of the Russian media – would have us believe that the war in Ukraine is going badly for Putin. Had this been true, Putin would have raised the stakes in this conflict by seizing the Suwalki Corridor, a tiny strip of land between Russian Kaliningrad and Belarus. It is like India’s ‘Chicken Neck’, which connects the Northeast to the Indian mainland. Seizing the Suwalki Corridor – at least the Lithuanian portion of it – would be as easy as pushing knife through butter given the Russian military might amassed in Belarus. It would completely cut off all access by land for NATO and the EU to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This would also have called the western alliance’s bluff about the NATO statute that ‘an armed attack against one shall be considered an attack against them all’.
The prevailing environment in the entire region is apt to exacerbate matters, not defuse them. Therefore, it is tempting to interpret the Russian state energy company, Gazprom Export’s decision to halt gas exports to Finland last weekend as a reaction to its NATO application. But the Helsinki company that buys the gas has acknowledged that Gazprom has been demanding payment in Russian currency since April. Similar demands over currency had earlier caused Russia to halt supplies of electricity to Finland. Russia, it is clear, does not view all NATO members through the same prism. This will become clearer once the war in Ukraine is over and is a recipe for future divisions within Europe.
