NATO Goes North

By Risto E. J. Penttilä
Director of the Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA

This article was published on NORDICUM 3/2009

The word North regained some of its lost political significance when Denmark’s Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently became the head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation aka NATO. This is likely to be followed by the membership of Finland and Sweden in the alliance.

Sounds preposterous? It is not. Plenty of arguments pave the way for a Nordic expansion of NATO. Let’s start with the most vexing question: the relationship between Russia and NATO.

Russia does not want NATO to expand. NATO, on the other hand, cannot give Russia a veto over its future plans. What is to be done?

The answer is to continue NATO’s expansion but to change direction. In other words, forget Ukraine and Georgia for a moment. Look up North!

Russia would have no trouble accepting the membership of Finland and Sweden in NATO. These Nordic countries are as trouble-free as countries come. Furthermore, they already belong to the European Union and are, therefore, beyond the Russian sphere of influence.

NATO membership would suit the needs of Finland and Sweden nicely. Sweden has dismantled most of its national defence capabilities since the end of the Cold War. According to Wilhelm Agrell, a Swedish defence analyst, years of cuts in defence spending have left Sweden defenceless. Finland, on the other hand, has been one of the few countries in Europe that has been building up its defence forces since the end of the Cold War.

Both countries have reacted strongly to the Georgian crisis in August 2008. The Swedes have begun to consider two unpleasant alternatives. The first is to rebuild a system of national defence from scratch. Understandably, the Swedish government is not too keen to spend more money on defence. There are other more pressing economic needs to be met. The other alternative is to join NATO. In terms of money or effort, this would be much simpler. After all, the Swedish defence forces are already totally interoperable with NATO forces.

A sudden change of course would not be a first for Sweden. The country had no plans to join the European Union (or the EC, as the Union was called back then) in the early 1990s. However, it landed in an economic crisis and, as a result, changed course overnight. More recently, the Swedish government reversed an old policy of not building new nuclear power. Pragmatic Nordics have no trouble following the advice of John Maynard Keynes: ‘When facts change, I change my mind, what do you do, Sir?’

Most Swedish politicians agree that Sweden will not join NATO without Finland doing so. But if Finland and Sweden joined together things would look different. Together, Finland and Sweden would bring a strong tradition of moderation and pragmatism into the alliance. They would not aggravate the NATO-Russian relationship. They would improve it.

The likelihood of Finland saying yes to NATO is getting stronger by the day. Since the Georgian crisis, the support for membership in NATO has risen while opposition has gone down. Today, roughly thirty percent of Finns support membership while half of the people are against. Yet, most observers agree that if the President and the Prime Minister started to speak in favour of membership, the Finns would follow their leaders. Support of NATO has also gone up in Sweden. It is between 24 and 33 percent depending on the exact wording of the opinion polls.

The Obama factor is strong in Sweden and Finland. Joining an alliance with President Bush at its helm was simply not acceptable to the Swedes and Finns. Joining an alliance with President Obama as its chief spokesman is much more attractive.

Considering how progressive the Swedes and Finns see themselves, their defence policies are terribly old-fashioned. Indeed, they still follow the policy of the former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld: permanent alliances like NATO are not needed because each mission will determine the needed coalition.

It may be time for Finland and Sweden to give up their Rumsfeldian view of the world. Permanent alliances are much better than everyone doing their own thing. One would think that two modern countries with a strong tradition of multilateralism would finally take the plunge.