NATO Membership May Spell the End of Finland and Sweden as Social Democracies
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a godsend for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization , which had been declared “brain dead” by French President Emmanuel Macron as recently as 2019. Now, NATO has not only gained a new lease on life but also is expected to grow, with Finland and Sweden inching closer to NATO membership. In fact, Putin’s criminal attack on Ukraine has managed to keep Europe within the sphere of U.S.
At a deeper level, the impact of the Russian invasion cannot be disentangled from longer-term processes of political change. Responses to the invasion in Ukraine stem in important part from gradual changes in the taken-for-granted background of social understandings, media representations and political rhetoric, which have prepared the ground for what can be seen as a further shift to the right cutting across all political parties.
It is evident that Russia has started a highly counterproductive war, the byproducts of which now include Finnish and Swedish membership in NATO. A problem is that this membership is in turn a step in the process of escalation of the conflict between Russia and NATO and, so far to a lesser extent, between Russia and the EU. The NATO expansion eastward has been a key issue in the conflict that has escalated step by step since the 1990s.
Nonetheless, the word “retaliation” in your question seems a bit too strong. This is even though for example Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson of the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, has talked about “surprising military countermeasures and actions.” Mostly the Putin regime appears to have adopted a line according to which Finnish NATO membership does not matter that much, not least because Finland was already so close to NATO.
While in terms of income Finland remains a relatively egalitarian country, the continuity to the era of social democracy is limited to certain functions of the democratic welfare state model, especially health and education. Both have been transformed in the neoliberal era, yet all citizens continue to have access to fairly inexpensive public health care and free education.
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