On the road to NATO: a guide for travellers

If Finland intends to apply for membership in NATO, we should first know what NATO is

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By Tanja Aitamurto and Kari Huhta
     
      Welcome to this guided tour of NATO. We shall be making a tour of the alliance, taking in the most important sights. There will also be an opportunity to familiarise visitors with eleven fundamental questions relating to NATO membership, addressed to a group of civil servants, experts, and politicians who know their way around the topic.
     
This is not one of those wildwoods adventure safaris, and to be honest there isn’t really that much to see. As always on a trip, the most interesting bit is getting acquainted with the thoughts and customs of the local natives.
      It should be pointed out that there are other guides, handbooks, and travel brochures doing the rounds.
      This is not the brochure that Foreign Affairs Minister Ilkka Kanerva (National Coalition Party, shown in the accompanying picture) has ordered from his ministry officials.
      And it is also not the other NATO report out there, the one currently being prepared by the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, an independent think tank that functions in association with the Finnish Parliament.
     
Finnish debate on NATO is marked by a considerable degree of caution.
      The sense of secrecy and hugger-mugger mystery gives reason to anticipate exciting revelations in the NATO reports. However, as yet it is still unclear whether the Foreign Ministry report will even be for public consumption.
      This guide is.
      The aim is to produce a dispassionate breakdown of Finland’s position within NATO and outside it under certain situations.
      This NATO guide takes as a premise that the country would be joining the sort of NATO that resembles strongly the one we know today. Our NATO is thus still a mutual defensive alliance that primarily carries out crisis management operations and in which the United States has a strong presence.
      In broader studies, such as those being written up by the Foreign Ministry or the Institute of International Affairs, it is probable that there will also be explorations of what NATO might look like in the future.
     
In preparing the guide, it became clear that the views of experts concerning NATO membership show a remarkable degree of unanimity, regardless of whether they are supporters or opponents of Finland's joining the alliance.
      Nobody expects membership would change anything very much overnight. Some of our experts even admit that it has been necessary in the political discussion of the issue to exaggerate the pros and cons of membership a little bit here and there.
      It is unlikely that even those NATO reports that are more comprehensive than this little guide will find any single overwhelming reason why we should or should not join.
     
NATO membership might increase the participation of Finnish soldiers in international crisis management operations, but it would not force the issue.
      In most respects, membership would have no impact whatsoever.
      NATO is not like the EU, a multinational department store that has products for every purpose flying off its shelves.
     
The questions in this guide will not by themselves be enough to explain the passions that the NATO name generates in Finland.
      But Russia is enough, and so, too, is the United States. The fact is that there are very different conceptions at large in Finland as to our place in the world.
     
The NATO debate gathered steam after the March 2007 parliamentary elections, when the moderate conservatives of Kokoomus (the National Coalition Party) entered the government and the drafting began of a new security policy report.
      For all that, Finland’s NATO discussion is still going over the same old themes it followed in the 1990s.
      An ever-larger share of the security policy elite in the country now supports NATO membership, but the public opposes the idea.
      An opinion poll carried out for Helsingin Sanomat by Suomen Gallup in September showed some 60% of Finns against NATO membership and 25% in favour. The remainder were don’t knows or otherwise undecided.
     
Owing to the strong groundswell of public disaffection for NATO, the elite has more difficulty in openly supporting membership than opposing it.
      Former President Martti Ahtisaari only declared himself in favour of joining after his six-year term ran out in 2000, but Tarja Halonen opposes the idea while still in office.
     
Next year’s security policy report will disclose how the talking and the exploration of NATO membership have influenced the government’s stand on NATO.
      One thing that has already been noted is that those who oppose the publication of the Foreign Ministry’s NATO report are those who also oppose the idea of membership itself.
      The most interesting feature of this autumn has nevertheless been that a considerably more animated discussion about Russia has gone on alongside the NATO debate. It is as if the two things would have been quite separate themes.
      The Russia discussion is not always a NATO discussion, but Russia is always a presence in the NATO debate, at least just below the surface.
     
The supporters of Finnish NATO membership do not willingly base their argument on the threat posed by Russia.
      One reason for this reluctance is that according to the unanimous decisions of all NATO member-states, Russia is not a threat.
      What replaces this argument in the Finnish debate is the conviction that NATO is a community of democratic nations promoting international stability and security, through which Europe can make use of the colossal resources of the United States, and membership in such an organisation is an indicator of responsibility.
     
Those vehemently opposed to the idea of joining NATO are much more open about playing the Russian card.
      In their view, membership in the alliance would cast Finland as an opponent of Russia. In the scenarios presented by the opposition camp, NATO is a militaristic organisation that meekly does the bidding of the United States.
     
It is perfectly clear that the Finnish NATO discussion eventually boils down to two basic questions:
     
      Will NATO membership strengthen or weaken Finland’s security as a neighbour of Russia?
     
      Is Finland a part of the community of Western nations, to which the USA also belongs?
     
      Let us address first the more difficult of the two, the issue of our world-picture and the Finnish identity, our place in the great scheme of things.
      Even if these matters and the undercurrents of attitudes are hard to measure, they have a great influence on the NATO stance of the Finns.
     
One of the variables for explaining Finnish NATO aversions is the ideal and tradition of neutrality.
      The same phenomenon has been observed in the other formerly neutral or non-aligned European countries of Ireland, Austria, and Sweden, none of which are at least for the time being on the road to NATO.
      Belonging to Western Europe does not necessarily mean to Finns that they should also belong to NATO.
      By contrast, a repugnace towards the policies of the United States pretty much predicates that one would also oppose NATO.
     
Nevertheless, there is some kind of change in the wind in these attitudes - in Weltanschauung circles.
      Yes, the war in Iraq drags on, but the shadow of President George W. Bush is receding. People have become become numbed, battled-fatigued if you like, with the anger that the war stirred up, and across the Atlantic the United States itself has started to talk more nicely to its European colleagues.
      The US Presidential Elections a year from now could play a part in shaping Finnish attitudes towards NATO.
      It is quite a different matter to answer in the positive if, say, it is a Hillary Clinton who is proferring an invitation card, and not George Bush.
     
And then there is Russia. The Finnish experts are of the same mind on at least one issue. Finland’s security can have no other military threats than Russia.
      But let’s face it, if Russia were to attack Finland, this would not, could not, be a crisis simply between those two countries.
      Things would have to be very out of kilter in Europe as a whole for such an escalation to occur.
      And from this we get to the nub of the discussion.
      In essence this is the most significant question in the NATO guide - the same question around which the entire NATO debate hereabouts so cautiously bobs and weaves like a wary welterweight: what is Finland’s position - inside NATO or outside it - if the situation in Europe goes dramatically pear-shaped, and if as part of the fallout from this a military crisis develops between Finland and Russia?
     
According to this study, Finland’s position would then be somewhat better - that is “more secure” - as a NATO member than sitting outside.
      The results of the other reports will be had later.
      Perhaps.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 18.11.2007

More on this subject:
 NATO Pros and Cons

TANJA AITAMURTO AND KARI HUHTA / Helsingin Sanomat
kari.huhta@hs.fi