The Evolution Of Finland’s Sentiment Towards NATO Membership
For Finland, the invasion of Ukraine has hit close to home, and provoked the country to end 74 years of neutrality and seek to join the NATO alliance alongside Sweden, despite Putin’s evolving threats and the sobering thought that conflict could return to the country once again.
Finland is a country with an identity that is unknown to most, its enigmatic, rejects materialism and therefore doesn’t find itself in many conversations. In fact you’d be lucky to find anyone who knows that big names like Nokia and Angry Birds are in fact Finnish creations. It’s neither known as a beachy holiday destination and it doesn’t make headlines for political scandals, it’s just a normal, no nonsense country.
My mother is from Tampere, Finland’s third largest city where we often go on holiday. Visiting at the end of May just after the country announced that they would seek NATO membership, I knew would be particularly thrilling, and give me a chance to explore the public sentiment more intimately.
So while most people in the West were consumed by the courtroom theatrics and social media warfare that the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial had unleashed onto media cycles and social media feeds, Finland in typical even-tempered fashion decided to focus their attention on the real war, right on its doorstep.
Support for joining NATO among Finns has been steadily rising for decades, particularly after the annexing of Crimea, although even during the crisis, support was still the minority, with a poll done by Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s biggest newspaper, showing that support stood at only 18% in February 2014.
Since 1991 Finland has had 10 prime ministers, most of which have avoided the political risks of NATO membership despite some personally supporting it, and continued Finland’s tradition of pragmatic politics. A poll done by state broadcaster Yle a day before the Russian invasion found 53% of Finns are for Finland joining the military alliance, with 28% against and 19% unsure, a complete swing from a poll also commissioned by Yle at the end of 2017, which saw 53% against, 19% for and 28% unsure.
I spoke to Pekka Salosaari, a Collections Manager at Yle Audio Archives, for his historical insight on why Finland wasn’t favourable for NATO membership sooner, which at its core is the fear that provoking the Soviet Union would lead to another invasion. These fears go back to the first half of the 20th century after Finland began transitioning from a self-governing part of the Russian Empire, also known as a grand duchy, to an independent state in 1917, following the Bolshevik revolution which subsequently lead to a civil war between the Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic (The Reds) and The Whites, who revolted against the rise in communism in Finland.
More than 20 years later the Soviets suffered disproportionate losses compared to the Finns during the Winter War, and ended after 3 months with the Moscow Peace Treaty, which instructed Finland to cede 10% of its territory along the border. Finland was forced to sign after mounting losses itself and the Soviet advancing, but peace was put on pause once again a year later for the Continuation War in 1941, which lasted until 1944.
Eventually it resulted in an armistice requiring the German troops that Finland allied with to be removed, for all areas of Karelia and Petsamo to be ceded and for the Finnish war time leaders to be put on trial, along with reparations of $300,000,000 million, with the Soviet-led Allied Control Commission installed to enforce and monitor the armistice agreement. Pekka points out that “with that kind of history it feels quite natural for the Finns not to provoke the big bear from the neighbour with alliance projects [for] as long as the Soviet Union existed. Just look at the Cuban missile crisis, and the discussion of how close the onset of WWIII was at the time”.
Finland’s ability to appease both its Western and Russian neighbours harks back to a technique known as “Finlandization”, which described the method of Finland adopting policies that weren’t aggressive towards the Soviet Union, while still remaining neutral with the West. The term itself originates from political discourse in Western Germany in the 60s and 70s, but the official expression is “Paasikivi–Kekkonen doctrine”, which was established after Finnish Presidents Juho Paasikivi and Urho Kekkonen, who’s terms lasted from 1946 to 1956 and 1956 to 1982 respectively, established the foreign policy of neutrality, which kept both the Soviets and the West smiling while Finland maintained peace and its own independence.
However the term itself is considered offensive by many Finns because it discards the geographical and political reality that Finland was wedged between. One of these critics is Former Finnish Primeminister Alexander Stubb, who criticised French President Macron for reportedly using the term and raising it as an option for Ukraine, which he later denied, with Zelenskyy also saying he hadn’t heard the President say it. What is true is that there is anticipation that suggests the foreign policy strategy could apply to Taiwan, Mongolia and other Asian countries concerned with an overreaching China, but Stubb makes a vital point, “Old terms for new situations rarely work”.
Since the decay of the Soviet Union, the Finns have aimed their criticism of Finlandization at many of the politicians that lead the country from WWII to as recent as the 2000’s. Pekka tells me that Yle’s recent documentary series ‘Kylmän sodan Suomi’ (Finland in the Cold War) does exactly this, “some of the people that have seen Jari Tervo’s programme say, the criticism presented in the programme do not take into account the historical fact that after WWII Finland had very little space to make independent decisions and was all the time under Soviet pressure. Probably the truth lies somewhere in between’’.
Geographically alone Finland also has a lot to worry about, sharing a 830 mile border with Russia. All male citizens are required to enrol in the defence forces once they turn 18, with some exceptions for those who are medically exempt or have dual nationality, such as myself, with service time lasting between 165 and 347 days depending on the type of duty.
This type of rigorous consistency makes Finland a big player in defence, despite being small in numbers (23,000 active personnel, 900,000 reservists), which is probably best illustrated by the viral meme of the Google captcha showing a forest covered in snow, which says “select all images with Finnish snipers”. Of course, there are no snipers in the image, but it demonstrates how organised and deadly the Finnish military is and has always been. Finland’s preparedness for aggression of all kinds can also be applied to its infrastructure. In my nan’s apartment building on the bottom floor is a storage room doubled as a bomb shelter, with a sign that directly translates to “population safety”, labelled with the triangular civil defence shelter symbol.
Many wonder what does NATO look like with two new progressive Nordic countries joining the pact? Many people on the left would hope for a less hawkish NATO, but the policy initiatives are unlikely to change drastically. Instead, Finland has emphasised an interest in strengthening the security community and mutual defence, as they have shown since joining the EU in 1995, where they participated in the NATO lead Partnership for Peace program, exchanging intelligence and assisting in peacekeeping missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan.
So the rapid change in public opinion is cemented, with the latest Yle poll showing support for NATO membership increasing by 14%, up from 62% in March to 76%, with 12% against and 11% unsure. With change as certain and historic as that, I wasn’t surprised at all to see Putin on the front of newspapers in supermarkets, news anchors mention Zelenskyy on hourly bulletins, and despite not speaking Finnish, the outrage of which the Finnish people spoke about the invasion into Ukraine felt heavy. And you don’t need to be a political scientist to sense that given the history of Finland, the fury Finns feel is naturally going to further strengthen support for NATO, Europe and Finland’s long held security values, for as long as “war in Europe” is part of people’s everyday vocabulary.
