The Nordic Countries and the European Security and Defence Policy

90 INSTITUTIONAL AND NATIONAL POLITICSequally insistent that ‘it must not take the form of a common defence’. 18 Nevertheless,the Swedish public also regard it as crucial that international approvalfor such activities is maintained and that military operations are sanctioned bythe international community and the UN.In Finland, the discourse contains more prominent and traditional preoccupationswith hard security. On the one hand, Finnish domestic actors andthe public are more comfortable with the European integration process in generalthan are their counterparts in Sweden. As Pernille Rieker observes, EUmembership has been ‘seen as a way for Finland to confirm its long repressedWestern identity, and not as a threat to national sovereignty and freedom ofaction’. 19 Hence, in the Finnish case, the ESDP seems to be more readily, if notuniversally, accepted as a possible future substitute for non-alignment and as anintegral part of the EU as an existing security policy actor. However, the Finnishdomestic discourse on security matters is still shaped by traditional securityconsiderations and by the country’s long border with Russia.Performance characteristics have been invoked to rationalize retaining nonalignment.The Swedish and, to a lesser extent, Finnish publics largely hold theview that non-alignment has a good track record and has delivered direct benefits.For the Swedes, it is widely perceived to have enabled their country toavoid involvement in wars since 1814, while the more pragmatic Finns universallyregarded non-alignment following World War II as the only viablepolicy—other than being subsumed into the Eastern bloc—that could balanceFinnish preferences with Soviet security concerns. Thus, any new arrangementsmust be seen as delivering equivalent or improved benefits in terms of Finnishand Swedish peace and security. As Anders Bjurner comments, Swedish securitypolicy ‘has to be based on popular support and the view of the majority ofthe people has to be respected’. 20Given Finland’s and Sweden’s successful histories of involvement in NATOledcrisis management operations, as well as their influence as non-aligned EUmembers on the emerging agendas of the Common Foreign and Security Policyand the ESDP, the majority of Swedes—and to a lesser extent Finns—are stillinclined to feel that their country should abandon non-alignment only if futuremembership of NATO would discernibly increase the country’s or the region’ssecurity. The ‘burden of proof’ remains with those who want Finland andSweden to join NATO. The case has so far not been sufficient to convince thepublics that NATO membership would bring benefits on the necessary scale.Nordic publics also seem receptive to arguments that military crisis managementmust be complemented by EU (and NATO) civil arrangements as part of18 Persson, G., Swedish Prime Minister, ‘Information to the Riksdag giving the government’s views onthe future of the EU’, Stockholm, 19 Feb. 2003, URL .19 Rieker, P., ‘Europeanization of Nordic security: the European Union and the changing security identitiesof the Nordic states’, Cooperation and Conflict, vol. 39, no. 4 (Dec. 2004), p. 375.20 Bjurner, A., ‘Sweden’, ed. H. Ojanen, Neutrality and Non-alignment in Europe Today, Finnish Instituteof International Affairs Report 6/2003 (Ulkopoliittinen instituutti: Helsinki, 2003), URL , p. 45.