Finland says “yes” to NATO. The decision was announced on Sunday May 15 by the Finnish executive couple, president and prime minister, who welcomed a historic day. Historic, because it is the end of neutrality which has served as the rudder of Finnish foreign policy since the end of the 1950s.
This is the story of a very small country which shares its border with a giant, and which above all does not want to get angry with him.
Former Russian province (from 1809 to 1917, date of its independence), Finland was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939. At war with the USSR for most of the Second World War, it was forced during the War cold to a forced neutrality, under the control of Moscow. A status described as “Finlandization” and which was based on a political and economic balance: a market economy, internal autonomy but constrained sovereignty, unlike the so-called Soviet bloc countries.
After the Second World War, Finns forged their diplomatic identity around non-alignment. Neither Russia nor the West. And for years, recalls researcher Louis Clerc, from the Finnish University of Turku, Finland played the intermediary between East and West: “ The meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump happened in Helsinki, a good connoisseur of Russia and a mediator between Russia and the world. In 1975 had already taken place in Helsinki the first conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe which committed the East and the West to guarantee the borders of Europe.
► To read also: Finland formalizes its application to join the Atlantic Alliance
A neutrality that can no longer exist
But during the 2000s, the climate deteriorated. Chechnya, Georgia, annexation of Crimea, Russia is gradually marching on all its neighbors. And the Russian-Finnish friendship bursts for good at the time of the war in Ukraine which throws Helsinki into the arms of NATO. ” NATO appears first and foremost as a means of deterrence, continues Louis Clerc, at the microphone of Vincent Souriau of international service. These post-Cold War hopes no longer exist and this idea of neutrality between the West and Russia no longer really has the possibility of existing. »
Technically, the integration of Finland into the Atlantic Alliance should not pose any difficulty because the Finnish forces, well equipped and highly prepared, have long been conducting joint military exercises with several NATO member states.
