When I spoke to former Nordic Council president Bertel Haarder in 2022, he offered Scotland a very Nordic assessment of its relationship with the Nordic world: the door was open, but it was up to Scotland to walk through it.
Four years on, with the geopolitical landscape transformed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the accession of Finland and Sweden to Nato, I put the same questions to one of his successors.
VILLE Väyrynen, a Finnish MP who is currently the Nordic Council president, is presiding over an international body at a crossroads. The institutions that facilitate Nordic co-operation, which were built across the post-war decades, are having to keep pace with a geopolitical environment that has changed faster than any of its initial founders could have anticipated. The question of who belongs in the Nordic family, and on what terms, has never felt more pressing.
On Scotland specifically, Väyrynen’s message was direct, and notably, he named Scotland independently of the United Kingdom throughout our exchange.
Listing Scotland alongside the Baltic countries as prioritised partners in the Nordic Council’s international strategy, he said that the current geopolitical situation had made those partnerships more important than ever.
“In that sense,” he told me, “the parallel today is stronger than ever.”
The parallel in question is the one that Bertel Haarder drew when I spoke to him back in 2022, between Scotland’s potential relationship with the Nordic Council and the long-established Nordic-Baltic co-operation framework.
Väyrynen not only confirmed it had held but suggested the changed security environment had deepened its resonance.
When I asked whether the Council’s thinking on that kind of partnership had evolved since Haarder’s time, his answer was unambiguous.
“I believe that the UK as a whole, Scotland, the Nordics, and other friends all have much to gain from working even more closely together.”
There is one institutional distinction that is worth noting. The Nordic Council does not use the term “observers” for external partners, preferring instead to use “international co-operation partners”, which is a more active framing than the standard observer model implies.
Each year, Väyrynen confirmed, both the UK Parliament and the Scottish Parliament are invited as international guests to the Nordic Council’s annual Session and the Nordic Summit. That is a form of recognition that rarely receives the attention it deserves in Scottish public debate.
The Finnish presidency’s theme this year is Nordic Comprehensive Security, a concept Väyrynen described as extending far beyond conventional defence to encompass every aspect of society, down to individual citizens.
“Everyone must be included, and everyone must contribute,” he said.
It is a model with obvious lessons for Scotland’s own debates about resilience and the relationship between government and citizen.
The Nordic Council is currently updating its 2019 strategy on societal security, he confirmed, noting that “many of the concerns highlighted in that strategy have since proven to be well-founded”.
On Greenland, Väyrynen was clear. Greenland, he said, is “a crucial and inseparable part of our Nordic family”.
The Nordic Council has given Greenland, along with the Faroe Islands and Åland, permanent positions in its presidium, a continuous commitment to the equal standing of autonomous regions within Nordic cooperation.
A further point of significance concerns the Helsinki Treaty, the foundational document of Nordic co-operation that has not been revised since 1996. A commission has been established to update it, but its mandate falls short of the Nordic Council’s recommendations.
The Council wants security, defence, and comprehensive security all incorporated into the revised framework. The governments have so far confined the commission to reviewing the status of Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Åland.
The Nordic Council, Väyrynen said plainly, believes its mandate should be broadened and that the Council itself should be involved in the commission’s work.
That tension points to something important about Nordic co-operation in 2026: parliamentary institutions are pushing for a faster, broader response to the changed global security environment than governments are yet willing to sanction.
For Scotland, named alongside the Baltic states as a prioritised Nordic partner, increasingly invited into the Council’s highest gatherings, and described by its president as a friend whose interest in the Nordic world is “mutual,” the direction of travel is clear. The door remains open, and the framework around it is becoming increasingly defined.
