What is “Finlandisation”?

THE CRISIS over Ukraine has pushed desperate officials in Western capitals to seek a diplomatic way to avert a Russian invasion. On his way to a meeting with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow, Emmanuel Macron, his French counterpart, was asked about one possible solution: “Finlandisation”, a reference to Finland’s officially neutral status during the cold war. It was “one model on the table”, acknowledged Mr Macron, but he insisted diplomats would have to invent something new. The news sparked anger in Ukraine and also in Finland, where the experience is not remembered fondly. How did “Finlandisation” work in practice, and how might a similar status be applied to Ukraine?

As Europe hardened into opposing blocs led by America and the Soviet Union at the dawn of the cold war, Finland took on a unique status. Though it had resisted a full-scale Soviet invasion during the second world war it was forced to cede large swathes of territory, pay reparations and legalise the Communist Party of Finland. In the immediate post-war period, the country had few connections with the West and was menaced by its giant neighbour to the east. A treaty signed with the Soviet Union in 1948 became the basis for “Finlandisation”. Finland would retain its sovereignty and remain neutral in the superpower rivalry, joining neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact.

In practice, the price of Finnish independence was that the Soviet Union would exert significant influence on the country’s politics. Urho Kekkonen, Finland’s president through much of the cold war, made friendship with the Soviet Union a cornerstone of his time in office, and turned the supposedly indispensable role he played in safeguarding relations with the Kremlin to his political advantage. He regularly exceeded his constitutional authority, established corrupt personal networks and refused to appoint officials to important posts who were not acceptable to the Soviet leadership. The main conservative party, the National Coalition, was kept out of coalition governments, despite winning the second or third-most parliamentary seats in five elections between 1966 and 1987. Finnish media regularly censored themselves when it came to items perceived as critical of the Soviet Union. Tammi, a publisher, buckled under pressure in 1974 and did not release a Finnish translation of “The Gulag Archipelago”, a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a leading Soviet dissident, though the book was eventually published in Finland a few years later.

Nor did neutrality make Finland immune from Soviet influence over its foreign policy. To appease the Soviet Union after it signed an agreement in 1972 with the European Economic Community, a forerunner to the European Union, Finland also joined Comecon, a Soviet-led bloc, as an observer in 1973. Finnish leaders studiously refrained from public criticism of Soviet domestic or foreign policy, even during Soviet military interventions in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979.

Despite the constraints, Finland flourished. It maintained robust defence capabilities and remained a liberal democracy. With the end of the cold war, it could pursue a truly independent foreign policy. In 1994 it joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace, a programme of defence co-operation that falls far short of full membership, and in 1995 it became a member of the European Union. Today Russia’s aggressive stance in Ukraine has driven Finnish leaders to consider even closer relations with the West. In December 2021 it chose to purchase the American-made F-35 as its next fighter aircraft, while Sauli Niinisto, Finland’s president, repeated that Finland was free to choose its military alignment, and that included the option of joining NATO.

For Ukrainians nervously pondering their fate, “Finlandisation” does not seem appealing. Mr Putin’s primary goal is for Ukraine, like Finland before it, never to join NATO. His other demands would limit Ukrainian sovereignty—something that Mr Macron and other Western leaders say is a red line. Implementation of the Minsk protocols, which called for Ukraine to decentralise power to rebel-held regions in eastern Ukraine, could give Moscow a direct hand in Ukrainian politics through its proxies there. Though Ukraine is receiving significant diplomatic and material support from the West, in other ways its position is weaker than Finland’s was at the beginning of the cold war. Its economy and politics are dysfunctional, and Russian forces and their proxies already occupy Ukrainian territory in Crimea and the Donbas. “Finlandisation” might allow Ukraine to avoid an invasion—but the country would be firmly in Moscow’s grip.

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