NATO and Scandinavia

Abstract

The evolving relationship between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its three Scandinavian member-states and two nonmember Nordic countries, Sweden and Finland, has amply demonstrated the quip by Danish sage Robert Storm Petersen that “nothing is harder to predict than the future.” While the European and North American security policy galaxy gives birth to new or reinvigorates older entities—the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC), the Partnership for Peace (PFP), the Western European Union (WEU), and the European Union (EU)—it is not readily clear what membership in such organizations means. As recently as 1988, NATO remained a contentious issue in Denmark and Iceland, and more discreetly so in Norway. Swedish and Finnish membership in the alliance would have been unthinkable. The pattern of Scandinavian security policies seemed set, and the debates remained surprisingly spirited despite their numbing repetitiousness. New issues had certainly arisen during the 1980s: NATO Intermediate Nuclear Forces, pre-positioning of military stocks in Denmark and Norway, and the restrictions on nuclear weapons on NATO ships. And there were numerous encores of earlier themes: the role of the Keflavik air base, the ability of Sweden to provide for its own security, and Finland’s mystical obligations to the Soviet Union under the latest versions of the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance (FCMA).KeywordsEuropean UnionForeign PolicyNordic CountrySecurity PolicyMaastricht TreatyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.