By Yusuf Bangura
Finland’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation yesterday, 4 April, will surely rankle Russia, given the 1,300 kilometres of land the two countries share.
One of the reasons advanced for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year was allegedly to check the eastward expansion of NATO and keep its western border free of NATO troops. Sadly for Russia, the invasion has had the opposite effect.If we exclude Georgia and Azerbaijan in the southwest of Russia, seven countries (Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine, as well as Lithuania and Poland that border the Russian enclave territory of Kaliningrad) share a land border with Russia on its western front. The only friendly country now in that group is Belarus.
Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland slipped out of Russia’s control in the 1990s, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and joined the EU and NATO; and Russia damaged its relations with Ukraine and turned that country into an enemy when it invading it in 2014 and 2022.
Finland and Sweden (with a maritime border with Russia in the Baltic Sea because of Kaliningrad, which was seized from Germany after World War Two) panicked after the invasion of Ukraine and decided to abandon their neutrality.
Turkey has continued, however, to block Sweden’s membership of the military alliance because of Sweden’s refusal to hand over Turkish dissidents for trial in Turkey. NATO’s treaty on accession grants every country in the alliance equal rights or veto power. In other words, they should all agree to the admission of new countries.
Finland’s post-war experience influenced theorisation of the international or East-West geostrategic order during much of the Cold War period. It spawned the concept of Finlandisation, which was very popular in our undergraduate strategic studies class in the 1970s. After almost 80 years of providing empirical data and insights on how great powers manage conflictual relations and protect spheres of influence, Finlandisation is finally dead. And no gun has been shot to oppose it.
Finlandisation refers to the forced neutrality that Russia imposed on Finland after World War Two as the price for that country’s independence from the Soviet Union. This allowed Finland to deepen its economic ties with the West without joining the NATO alliance. It’s one of the ironies of geopolitics that the stealing of a small piece of Ukrainian territory by Russia in 2022 in order to protect its Western border has led to a doubling of NATO’s border on its western flank with Finland’s membership of the alliance. Who says Putin is rational?
