Adios wartime neutrality
It seems that unprovoked attacks, like hangings, concentrate the mind. Finland and Sweden are feeling less neutral.
Finland and Sweden could apply for Nato membership within days – a monumental shift for two nations with a long history of wartime neutrality and staying out of military alliances.
Russia strongly opposes the two states joining and uses the expansion of the West’s defensive military alliance as a pretext for its war in Ukraine.
Well, Putin opposes. What Russia thinks independent of Putin is not always easy to know, because Putin doesn’t allow it to be easy.
Putin is all of the totalitarian force and punishment of Stalin, with no trace of any fig leaf of working class solidarity or any other ideological veneer.
Finnish public support for joining Nato was for years at around 20-25%. But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has shot up to a record high of 76%, according to the latest opinion poll. In Sweden, 57% of the population want to join, again far higher than before the war.
Unprovoked attack on a near neighbor will do that, I guess.
Vladimir Putin’s actions have shattered a long-standing sense of stability in northern Europe, leaving Sweden and Finland feeling vulnerable.
I wonder if he’s asking himself how clever it was to bounce Finland and Sweden into joining Nato.
Finnish ex-Prime Minister Alexander Stubb says joining the alliance was a “done deal” for his country as soon as Russian troops invaded Ukraine on 24 February.
Swedish Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist describes that day as the moment the Russian leader proved he was “unpredictable, unreliable and prepared to wage a cruel, bloody and brutal war”.
And to do so without any shred of pretext convincing to anyone not under his thumb.
For Finns, events in Ukraine bring a haunting sense of familiarity. The Soviets invaded Finland in late 1939. For more than three months the Finnish army put up fierce resistance, despite being heavily outnumbered.
They avoided occupation, but ended up losing 10% of their territory.
Watching the war in Ukraine unfold is like reliving this history, says Iro Sarkka, a political scientist at the University of Helsinki. Finns are looking at their 1,340km (830 mile) border with Russia, she says, and thinking: “Could this happen to us?”
And knowing the answer is of course it could.
Something I think most of us suspected long before the attack. Certainly those of us who followed the Trump/Putin fan club.
For me, the case of Sweden is especially interesting. Sweden absorbed a huge number of wartime refugees from the three Baltic nations in WWII, enough that it caused internal strife. Think of the southern USA states and many of the residents there decrying the “invasion” of peoples from Mexico and farther south; the situation was similar. Complicating the issue was that many people in Sweden during that time (the 1940’s) had a very innocent view/understanding of the Soviet Union and communism, and looked upon the refugees fleeing the Soviets as betraying some supposed ideal of marxism, so the refugees were doubly despised: first, for being foreigners, and second, for being anti-marxist. It seems that many of them thought that the refugees’ problems were their own fault, and that if they’d just stayed put at home, the Soviets would have taken care of them (despite such details as, e.g., the Soviets having bombed my ancestral family island home into oblivion). Those feelings didn’t entirely subside in subsequent years, either.
Having Finland there as a physical buffer probably contributed somewhat, in the sense that the Swedes had no sense of urgency in terms of needing protection from a neighbor, and for many years from my childhood through young adulthood and almost to this day I’ve been accustomed to stories from my Swedish relatives (former refugees) of how the Swedes looked down upon military and conflict and alliances, as if militaries were wastes of money, conflict was a choice, and alliances were bullying. So to see a majority of Swedes today polling in favor of joining NATO is nothing short of amazing, to me.
I suppose that I shouldn’t be too surprised, because I think that there has been an awakening in Sweden over the last few decades of just how unpredictable and violent the world still is. Ukrainians are not that much different from Swedes, in terms of appearance and customs; it’s probably easy for them to imagine themselves looking down a Russian gun barrel, watching the news out of Ukraine. Too, the original refugees of the 1940’s are still there, and they’ve passed down to their children and grandchildren all the stories of what they suffered under Soviet oppression, so maybe those stories are being more widely heard now.
I don’t really know for certain; I’m really just babbling. It’s still surprising to me, and I have to say that it’s encouraging.
It’s interesting how we (at least, people in general, including me) somehow absorb ideas about other populations that turn out to be both wrong and destructive. I keep realizing afresh that I grew up thinking of southern Europe as vaguely “lesser” – less rich but also less educated, less fabulous, less in charge of things. “Underdeveloped” I guess was the parlance. It’s so idiotic, and I don’t even really know where it came from. It sounds as if Swedes grew up thinking of the Baltic countries the same way. It’s horrifyingly easy for children to pick up ideas like that and then get stuck with them.