2007-12-22

Foreign Ministry's NATO report

It's the all-singing, all-dancing... No, actually, the Foreign Ministry's NATO report is boring. (It's currently available in Finnish, but an English translation is underway.) The chosen approach is to state basic facts and not much else. As the introduction says, "The report doesn't present evaluations about NATO's or Finland's operational environments or potential threats, and it contains no recommendations." In other words, they left out the interesting bits.

The report's tone is polite and cautious. For example, it says that membership would bring "both challenges and possibilities" in the relationship with Russia - which means nothing, but sounds vaguely positive. Some media highlighted the finding that membership fees and personnel expenses would be about 40 million euros, less than previously estimated. Foreign Minister Ilkka Kanerva's assessment was that the difference between membership and the current situation is "hair thin" in terms of the extent of cooperation with NATO.

In other news, in a recent poll (fi) 69 percent of respondents said that Finland shouldn't seek NATO membership. 26 percent are in favor. The numbers have barely changed from last year.

2 comments:

Giustino said...

Is the big factor influencing Finland's domestic opinion Russia or the United States or both?

And if, say, Hillary Clinton became president, would that make Finland any more likely to join?

I know in Estonia, they basically decided that they couldn't adopt the Finnish "total defense" strategy because it's hard to defend Estonia.

So they opted for "collective defense" which in Europe means NATO. Relations with Russia wer ebad already, so why worry about annoying them again, when you've annoyed them so many other times ...

Ari said...

Is the big factor influencing Finland's domestic opinion Russia or the United States or both?

I think I'll post some numbers on this later, but the short answer is both. I mean, NATO is what it is because of US involvement, and Russia is always central to Finnish foreign policy.

And if, say, Hillary Clinton became president, would that make Finland any more likely to join?

Yes, a little. Many Finns oppose membership because they don't want to get dragged into other people's wars. To the extent that the next US President seems less of a war-monger than the current one, that'd help to alleviate some of the NATO opponents' fears. I previously wrote about this here.