For a long time, the Nordic countries saw themselves as sleekly humanitarian, peace-keeping powers. To an unusual degree, the national identities of Sweden and Finland are bound up with their foreign policy: Swedes identify with a centuries-old tradition of neutrality, whereas Finns point to their talent for realpolitik, making the best of their volatile geography, which includes an 830-mile border with Russia. As both countries now formally submit their applications to join the North Atlantic alliance, each of them will forgo this deviation from the European norm. Finland in particular now seems poised to adopt a more standard-issue foreign policy. But at what price?
Since the end of the second world war, Finland’s political elite has nimbly navigated between Russian and western power. In a tight spot, the Finns played their hand with exceptional skill. In the postwar decades, Finland went from being the poorest state in Europe in 1945 to the economic level of the rest of western Europe – and maintained a much more equal society. Now, Finland is abandoning this careful strategy of tacking between two zones of power for a wholesale embrace of the west, as the country hurtles into the Nato alliance.
