Inside the Fence but Outside the Walls

Abstract

The primary focus of this article is the foreign and security policies adopted by Austria, Finland and Sweden during the first post-Cold War decade. The main aim is to examine the policy responses of these three countries in the 1989–99 interval, to the developments that occurred within the principal European security institutions. From a foreign policy standpoint, the argument is that the militarily non-allied states altered their pattern of international involvement. They did so by shifting from a historical logic of exclusion to one of inclusion directed at securing a greater measure of influence on the design of post-Cold War European security. Particularly characteristic of the latter was fully-fledged membership of the European Union, observer status in the Western European Union and the establishment of cooperative security and military relations with NATO. Yet, such a new logic of inclusion did not lead to a radical change of their security policies, since it translated exclusively into an involvement in security and military frameworks not calling for the surrender of military non-alliance. Hence the major strand of the argument revolves around the metaphor ‘inside the fence but outside the walls’ used to portray the distinctive posture of the Alpine and Nordic countries in the post-1989 European security building dynamics.