Finn-ished with neutrality? Finland and NATO

When Winston Churchill delivered his 1946 Fulton address, to him the northern limit of the Iron Curtain was Stettin (Szczecin) on the southern Baltic. Churchill did not extend it further north for Finland was not occupied by the Red Army (bar the Porkkala peninsula until 1956) though it was uncertain how it would respond to Soviet aggrandisement. To survive against the possibility of intervention from Moscow, the country unofficially adopted the doctrine that came to be known as ‘Finlandisation’, emasculating its foreign policy in the face of blandishments from the Kremlin, combined with media self-censorship. President Urho Kekkonen was the first non-Eastern Bloc leader to visit Czechoslovakia following the crushing of the Prague Spring. The elision of neutrality with sycophancy was the order of the day.
Such a low profile led to misconceptions of Finland, not least that it was dull. The ironic homage to the Land of a Thousand Lakes by Monty Python sealed it in the western imagination as “a poor second to Belgium when going abroad,” though as the same song alludes to ‘lofty mountains’ (Finland is remarkably flat bar a bobbling hills in the north), Michael Palin and Co had clearly not visited it (then).
When the USSR liberalised under Gorbachev before collapsing entirely, Helsinki – freed from the kowtow – became more expressive and determined to assert itself, joining the European Union in 1995 and the Euro four years later (for similar reasons to the Irish: to break dependence on a large neighbour, in this case Sweden). The thorny question of acceding to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) continues to divide opinion. The new prime minister, Alexander Stubb, is a keen advocate of fully enrolling in NATO and Helsinki agreed a Memorandum of Understanding with NATO on 22nd April 2014 that integrated Finnish military forces more closely with NATO and permitted NATO to assist Finland were the latter threatened.
The dark mutterings from Vladimir Putin’s administration about the consequences of such a step offends Finnish pride, making Stubb’s case for him. Russia’s actions, however, must shoulder much of the blame for Finnish flirting with NATO. In 2004, at the height of the Second Chechen War, there was a serious debate within Finland over whether to enter NATO. Such concern at the former imperial master’s violent reaction to Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia 2008 reignited among many a desire for group protection. More recently, Stubb is tapping into fears sparked by the annexation of Crimea and support for pro-Russian insurgents in the east of Ukraine. In summer 2013, 52% of Finns opposed membership of NATO against 29% in favour. In April 2014, the numbers had narrowed to 45% and 34% respectively. The downing of Flight MH17 and the Kremlin’s prickliness concerning it will only harden attitudes among Finns towards their eastern neighbour.
Stubb is an adept and eloquent politician and the longer the situation continues in eastern Ukraine, the more likely he is to get his way. In that sense, Moscow’s prolongation of the rebel tumult in Ukraine may be counter-productive if it induces another of its neighbours to join an alliance towards whom the Kremlin is once more antagonistic. Finland for its part would have to contend with having the longest land border of any NATO member with Russia.
The accusation in June 2014 by Putin’s personal envoy, Sergei Markov, that such talk is stirred by anti-Russian prejudice has more than a kernel of truth to it. Rightly viewing themselves as one of most honest civilisations on the planet (arguably to the point of naïvety in a domestic setting), the default assumption on hearing of criminality is to believe it Slavic in origin. I once had a jacket stolen from a cloakroom and remorseful Finns to whom I related this unpleasantness were of the united opinion that this was the work of Russian gangsters, without any corroborating evidence to support this contention. In many ways, Finnish antipathy to Russia (and, secondarily, Sweden) mirrors that of Mongolia – to whom they have a distant kinship – towards China (and, secondarily, Russia) – a distinctive reaction against the past imposition of imperium.
What consistently attracts more than 50% of Finnish support (notably from Swedish-speaking Finns in the south-west) is a defence pact with Sweden, though Western opinion was withering about a previously proposed Scandinavian Defence Union between Sweden, Norway and Demark in the late 1940s. Sir Orme Sargent, the senior British civil servant for foreign affairs, told his government in 1948 that 0 + 0 + 0 could never be more than zero. Norway and Demark joined NATO at its inauguration in 1949. Similar scepticism would be expressed in the capitals of major NATO countries today about a defensive union between Sweden and Finland.
Being neutral though is not to be nothing; on the contrary, it provides a special status for mediation and peace talks. Though Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and former President of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, has urged his nation to come into NATO (maybe thinking of Norway not being compromised in its role in the Oslo Peace Process), neutrality is fashioned over decades and is hard to regain – Finland should be wary of abandoning it.