Nord Stream: Not Just a Pipeline

Nord Stream: Not Just a Pipeline 35
interest people the most. Thus, when Putin was quoted in the subsequent
Estonian debate, he was rarely cited in full (Mäe 2008), and it more or
less became a mantra that ‘Putin said so,’ and ‘that was such a strong,
emotional argument that nothing could counter it’ (Kasekamp, interview).
Why, then, can no similar tendency be found in Finland when it was so
strong in Estonia and to a considerable extent also in Sweden? In the
following subchapter it shall be shown that a combination of history and
geopolitics may help explain the difference.
5.3 The Role of History and Geopolitics
It is necessary to note that tracing and explaining ‘lack of debate’ may not
be as straight-forward as elucidating aspects of a full-blown debate.
When an argument is not present in a discourse it could be because it is
not considered relevant by the actors involved, or it could be because this
particular aspect is actively suppressed in the debate for other reasons. As
regards the Finnish Nord Stream debate and why it has not involved
military-strategic issues, Vaahtoranta (interview) proposes two different
explanations:
Either we [the Finns] are so concerned with Russia that we do not
want to raise the other dimensions of the pipeline. Or … it doesn’t
change our position in any way regarding Russia. Russia is already
so close to Finland. It doesn’t bring Russia any closer. … If you
look at the public debate, it is impossible to say which explanation
is correct.
It can be argued that the geopolitics of the Baltic region plays a decisive
role in shaping public debates and sense of threat. For the Finns, who
share a 1340 km border with the eastern giant, a pipeline will hardly
make a military-strategic difference. By contrast, Nord Stream would undoubtedly
bring Russian interests closer to Sweden, perhaps particularly
if the platform were to be realised. Thus, geopolitics may be a contributing
factor that sheds light on the Finnish-Swedish differences, but it does
not help explain why the Estonian debate differed so much from the
Finnish. Estonia and Finland are both small EU-states, 8 they both border
on Russia, and they are both 100% reliant on the eastern giant for their
gas supplies. Nonetheless, the Estonian debate had more similarities with
the Swedish than with the Finnish in that it was very heated and political,
and involved more than environmental issues. Surely, one must keep in
mind that the official positions of Finland and Sweden are much alike in
that their governments have claimed to be quite neutral with regard to
Nord Stream and will only take a stand on the legal questions and the
EIA procedure. Similarly, the Estonian government’s rejection of the
application for a seabed survey was officially based on a legal contradiction
in the application itself. 9 The main difference, therefore, lies in the
8 Of course, Finland is much bigger than Estonia in terms of both population (4x
bigger) and territory (7.5x bigger), but compared to large states like Germany
and Russia they are both small.
9 Regardless of official explanations, however, several Estonian researchers have
claimed that the Estonian rejection of the application was much more complex
(as will be explored in subchapter 6.3).