Miðvikudaginn 3. október 2007 hélt Prófessor Alyson Bailes einkar áhugaverðan fyrirlestur um varnar- og öryggismál Íslendinga á opnum fundi SVS og Varðbergs. Prófessor Bailes hefur góðfúslega gefið leyfi fyrir því að birta erindið hér á þessum vef:
The time in history when there was most serious talk about setting up a collective defence pact among the Nordic states was in the 1940’s, just after the Second World War. Denmark and Norway were those who explored the idea most thoroughly and Sweden was always more hesitant, while it became clear quite early that Finland would be more or less forced into neutrality by its closeness to the Soviet Union. As we know, the end-result was that Denmark and Norway and also Iceland decided to join NATO instead, and - with Sweden as well as Finland remaining neutral - in that way the famous Nordic strategic ‘balance’ of the Cold War years was created.
If we want to start thinking today about the arguments for a new start in Nordic defence cooperation - an idea that might well be in people’s minds here since the new MOU’s that Iceland has signed on defence cooperation with both Norway and Denmark - it could be good to take a frank look at why the idea broke down sixty years ago. Of course there were many details of events and personalities, but I see three underlying factors that have also continued to shape security developments in Norden in more modern times. First - and my Nordic friends are always keen to stress this themselves - the Nordic countries are not actually so like each other, and don’t actually like each other so much, as most people in the rest of the world tend to assume. There are crucial historical and geographical differences that have shaped the different countries’ experiences and feelings about their identities, including of course factors from the time of the Second World War when Western-occupied Iceland, the Nazi-occupied countries, neutral Sweden and Finland with its two direct wars with the Soviets had such completely contrasting fates. Second, there is the fact that the largest power in the region who would normally be at the core and the head of any local defence movement - Sweden - has a longer-term history of extreme military violence and a recent tradition of idealistic neutralism that makes it very opposed in taking the lead to defend its neighbours, while quite a lot of people in the other countries feel equally opposed to letting Swedes take the command over them. Third, and what was certainly decisive in the 1940s, in modern times the Northern part of Europe has been facing threats that were just too large for this group of countries to be able to balance or contain, let alone overcome, by themselves. We are talking about five nations with huge and strategically exposed territories but with a total population of just under 25 million and a total of 103,000 troops in their peacetime armed forces. Even as recently as the mid-1990s, when some US and European thinkers suggested that the Nordic states could form a group to protect the Baltic States so that the Balts would not have to enter fully into NATO with all the political turbulence that might cause, the Baltic leaders themselves replied at once that they just did not think that the Nordics could do the job, even if they had wanted to - and the Nordics for their part made pretty clear that they would much prefer NATO to take the strain.
Now history has been moving very fast in this part of the world as elsewhere, and we could certainly look again at the changing security conditions and how the Nordics as a group have responded to them. It is fair to say that there are at least 3 trends of change that make the idea of Nordic security cooperation both more realistic and more relevant:
First, although Europe still has a problem with the Russians and Putin has been working hard to remind us of that lately, all the experts I know consider that the actual threat of military action from the East is now very low or non-existent. Putin himself seems well aware that energy, other economic assets, and his power to help or not to help in the West’s new frontline concerns such as Kosovo or Iran are his biggest bargaining chips, and the way he is using military tools and topics is probably more for demonstration of his defiant attitude and for atmosphere-building than anything else. It may thus no longer be so relevant how many troops the Nordics could put together to stop the Russians, and much more relevant what influence and arguments the Nordics can put together both to influence Putin himself, and to influence NATO, the EU, and the United States in the right direction for finding convincing Western answers to this new type of Russian challenge. If the Nordics were able to take a common line, for instance, on Russia’s energy plans in the Baltic area, or on the best way to protect our own energy transit routes through the North Atlantic, or indeed how to work better with Russia on the process of climate change in the High North, that would be an effective way of promoting what are now among the most vital Nordic interests and it would probably be a very good thing for the quality of Western policy as a whole.
My second point is that while we do still have a Western military agenda, it is now much more about doing operations out in the world to help deal with indirect rather than direct threats to our survival, such as other people’s conflicts and the struggle with terrorist and other extremist forces. One interesting implication of this non-European operational focus is that it matters much less today exactly which part of Europe countries are in, or even if they are in NATO or not: everyone can in principle contribute forces to the same operations and everyone can in principle develop longer-term military cooperation to streamline and specialize their military contributions, move towards using compatible or identical equipment, and so on. Now, the facts show that all five Nordic states in the last ten years have followed very similar patterns of directing their best forces towards overseas operations - in Iceland’s case of course these have been civilian staff - and also entering into closer mutual cooperation as all Nordics except Denmark have done in the Nordic Battle Group, and as Finland, Sweden and Norway have been doing and planning on a number of different joint equipment purchases, for instance. These Nordic military interactions are already the strongest in modern history and the present Swedish government, in particular, seems keen to push them much further - in synergy with its attempts to economize on its own defence budget through modernization and specialization.
Thirdly, I would argue that so long as the threat was mainly a military one from the East, the varied strategic geography of the Baltic-Nordic region made a big difference in how countries experienced it and how they felt they needed to react. For instance you probably know the Swedish joke: we can afford to be much more relaxed than the Finns because we have a better Eastern neighbour than they do! It is also pretty obvious why Iceland with its mid-Atlantic position was more interested in protection by air and sea than by ground forces and why the USA was the closest as well as the strongest source for Iceland to seek such protection from. Finally, because of this special bilateral relationship of Iceland’s and because Iceland chose not to have its own forces - while universal military service was both the basic military solution and a very important cultural and political feature for all the other Nordics - it is not surprising that the defence and security development of this country proceeded really quite separately from the rest of Norden and there was frankly not much to talk about in terms of joint defence business. As we know, the official Nordic Cooperation system that was set up for all five countries deliberately excluded security cooperation from its agenda, and the word security was not even supposed to be mentioned at Nordic Council meetings until very recently. Now, the present tendency to define national security in much more than just military terms has changed the equation in all these respects. Today’s national defence and security policies have to take account of a whole range of state and non-state threats to every aspect of national survival and welfare, including human threats like terrorism, WMD proliferation, international crime and illegal migration, but also natural disasters like storms, floods and epidemic diseases of people and animals, and longer-term changes in human ecology like the destruction of the environment, the shortage and struggle over energy resources, and all the consequences of climate change. It will be clear that all these are truly transnational threats that can spread across very wide areas and brush aside national boundaries. Most of them can move so fast as to make Norden look like a pretty small area and make the differences among Nordic countries pretty insignificant. In fact, the fashionable new threats like terrorism, SARS or bird flu, major non-European immigration and energy competition create very similar challenges for all Nordic countries precisely because they have not previously been any big part of Nordic security experience: and real and sometimes painful adaptations of policies and systems are needed to deal with them in a way that meets European, American and international expectations. I would argue that this does offer maybe the largest common security agenda that the complete group of Nordic states have had for some centuries in history, and that this very much includes Iceland, and that there would therefore have been more for Iceland to talk to the other Nordics about even if you had not had to face the unilateral US force withdrawal which in itself is such a strong impetus for Iceland to look for new solutions and new friends. Last but not least, I think it is no coincidence that the Nordic Council this spring asked Nordic Ministers to study whether there was a basis for the Nordic countries to start officially cooperating on what they called ’societal security’, that is, pretty much any danger that can hit Nordic citizens in their homes apart from a traditional military attack.
Does all this mean that we can expect rapid progress towards a new kind of coordinated Nordic team both for performing the new-style military tasks more efficiently, and for forming a common front against non-military threats and on the big issues of strategic policy where Norden’s voice needs to be heard? Could this offer a good formula to meet Iceland’s own possible security deficit now that the Americans have gone? Much though I may personally like the idea, I’m afraid I can’t give you a simple Yes on either point. The fact is that all of the basic problems of the 1940s are still with us today, even if in different forms. The first is that the common challenges of the early twenty-first century have often driven the Nordic countries in different political and technical directions. Denmark and Iceland went with the US into Iraq while Sweden called the operation illegal. In terms of general defence policy, Denmark has completely given up the idea of territorial defence and now reserves its army just for peace operations abroad and for helping the police in internal security, while old-fashioned territorial defence is still the alpha and omega of security in Finland, Finland still calls up more than 80% of its young men for military service while Sweden uses less than 17%. Norway is more or less alone in still having a very big issue about the direct defence of its northern provinces. Without having time to go into detail, I can also assure you that there are also very important differences both of doctrine and performance between these countries in handling terrorism and the other new threats I spoke about. For instance, in Denmark the army is welcome to help in handling almost any kind of security emergency at home while in Sweden the role of the army at home is tightly restricted for historical reasons.
Of course, many of the detailed differences are also explained by the large and striking differences in the pattern of institutional membership in Norden. While a total of 21 European states today find it both natural and necessary to belong to NATO and the EU at the same time, Denmark is the only Nordic country to do so and even it has opt-outs from the EU’s most security-relevant policies. These differences matter because the EU is now turning into a very active and quite powerful actor for tackling the political, economic and other non-military aspects of security, and three Nordics are having to accept all the new standards it sets in those fields whether they like it or not. Conversely, even if the 5 Nordic states did arrive at a common position on something like how to handle Russia only three of them could argue that case in NATO and a different three could argue for it in the EU. Personally I believe that, just as you might expect, a clear Nordic voice has not really been heard lately in either of those institutions and that to a great extent this is because the Nordics have not tried or perhaps even wanted to get their act together to start with within this region. And one of the reasons they haven’t is that Sweden, which was the stumbling block to the Nordic pact proposals of the 1940s, is still highly attached today to its policies of non-alliance and independence and is pushing forward the ideas of active military cooperation and equipment cooperation partly because these are things which can be handled as practical solutions independent of national or institutional policy doctrines, but which by the same token do not imply any real deep-down commitment to work for truly joint self-defence solutions with any of Sweden’s neighbours.
More than all of this, however, I would argue that the strongest argument against a Nordic pact at least if we want to see it as an independent solution - for Iceland or for anyone else - is still that the five Nordics are not the kind of group of states that could solve all the necessary problems on their own. If a solution is going to be found for living and working peacefully with Russia it must be a solution for all of the West and indeed for all of Russia’s frontiers. If we are to continue going abroad to fight and solve other people’s wars there are not many peace missions that could be carried out just by the Nordic battle group alone. Even less can a group of five states on the edge of Europe hope to control among themselves the flows of terrorism, immigration, money, technology, disease and natural processes that are so often these days not just pan-European in scale but truly global in their dynamics. For those purposes, there seems no alternative but to work through all the competent institutions that we have and with all the great powers who do have the scale of resources to make a difference: the UN and EU as well as the USA, NATO as well as China and India.
Does that mean there is nothing for the Nordic states to talk about or work on together? Absolutely not. I think where my argument is really leading is that we need more Nordic cooperation for the sake of better institutional policies in the EU, NATO, UN or anywhere else and as a contribution to more effective dialogues and partnerships between Europe and all the larger powers that we depend upon in some way. But to get that kind of result the Nordics would have to talk together with their eyes firmly fixed on the outside world, on the dynamics of the different multilateral communities they belong to, and on all their inevitable interdependence with that larger world and those larger communities under the new comprehensive security agenda. What is more, they would have to be ready to talk more frankly than ever up to now about the differences between their national defence and security policies and structures and about the reasons for those differences, and whether they are really essential in modern conditions and how any process of change and closer harmonization could be managed in political terms, given that the demands and sensitivities of public opinion are actually very different from one Nordic state to another. Iceland’s situation and Iceland’s need for innovation and new partnerships today might be one of rather few active forces pushing towards such a fresh and frank evaluation. It must be said, however, that Iceland’s full potential to promote change in Norden is not going to be fulfilled unless Iceland itself is prepared for some perhaps quite significant changes as well.
