For years, Finland preserved its tradition of neutrality. The country had a robust military, autonomous foreign policy and a tradition of global peacemaking. Now, Finland has lost its strategic autonomy, weakened its peacemaking credentials and increased chances of slipping into a large-scale war.
Medea BENJAMIN, Nicolas J.S. DAVIES
On April 4, 2023, Finland officially became the 31st member of the NATO military alliance. The 830-mile border between Finland and Russia is now by far the longest border between any NATO country and Russia, which otherwise borders only Norway, Latvia, Estonia, and short stretches of the Polish and Lithuanian borders where they encircle Kaliningrad.
In the context of the not-so-cold war between the US, NATO and Russia, any of these borders is a potentially dangerous flashpoint that could trigger a new crisis, or even a world war. But a key difference with the Finnish border is that it comes within about 100 miles of Severomorsk, where Russia’s Northern Fleet and 13 of its 23 nuclear-armed submarines are based. This could well be where World War III will begin, if it has not already started in Ukraine.
In Europe today, only Switzerland, Austria, Ireland and a handful of other small countries remain outside NATO. For 75 years, Finland was a model of successful neutrality, but it is far from demilitarized. Like Switzerland, it has a large military, and young Finns are required to perform at least six months of military training after they turn 18. Its active and reserve military forces make up over 4% of the population – compared with only 0.6% in the US and 83% of Finns say they would take part in armed resistance if Finland were invaded.
Only 20-30% of Finns have historically supported joining NATO, while the majority have consistently and proudly supported its policy of neutrality. In late 2021, a Finnish opinion poll measured popular support for NATO membership at 26%. But after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, that jumped to 60% within weeks and, by November 2022, 78% of Finns said they supported joining NATO.
As in the US and other NATO countries, Finland’s political leaders have been more pro-NATO than the general public. Despite long-standing public support for neutrality, Finland joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in 1997. Its government sent 200 troops to Afghanistan as part of the UN-authorized International Security Assistance Force after the 2001 US invasion, and they remained there after NATO took command of this force in 2003. Finnish troops did not leave Afghanistan until all Western forces withdrew in 2021, after a total of 2,500 Finnish troops and 140 civilian officials had been deployed there, and two Finns had been killed.
A December 2022 review of Finland’s role in Afghanistan by the Finnish Institute of International Affairs found that the Finnish troops “repeatedly engaged in combat as part of the military operation that was now led by NATO and had become a party in the conflict,” and that Finland’s proclaimed objective, which was “to stabilize and support Afghanistan to enhance international peace and security” was outweighed by “its desire to maintain and strengthen its foreign and security policy relations with the US and other international partners, as well as its effort to deepen its collaboration with NATO.”
In other words, like other small NATO-allied countries, Finland was unable, in the midst of an escalating war, to uphold its own priorities and values, and instead allowed its desire “to deepen its collaboration” with the US and NATO to take precedence over its original aim of trying to help the people of Afghanistan to recover peace and stability. As a result of these confused and conflicting priorities, Finnish forces were drawn into the pattern of reflexive escalation and use of overwhelming destructive force that have characterized US military operations in all its recent wars.
As a small new NATO member, Finland will be just as impotent as it was in Afghanistan to affect the momentum of the NATO war machine’s rising conflict with Russia. Finland will find that its tragic choice to abandon a policy of neutrality that brought it 75 years of peace and look to NATO for protection will leave it, like Ukraine, dangerously exposed on the front lines of a war directed from Moscow, Washington and Brussels that it can neither win, nor independently resolve, nor prevent from escalating into World War III.
Finland’s success as a neutral and liberal democratic country during and since the Cold War has created a popular culture in which the public are more trusting of their leaders and representatives than people in most Western countries, and less likely to question the wisdom of their decisions. So the near unanimity of the political class to join NATO in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine faced little public opposition. In May 2022, Finland’s parliament approved joining NATO by an overwhelming 188 votes to eight.
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