Stefan Forss

On May 18, 2022, the Swedish and Finnish NATO ambassadors formally submitted their countries’ membership applications to the alliance. In doing so, they ended decades – in Sweden’s case, centuries – of military nonalignment and overlapping but varied security arrangements in the Nordics and Baltics. Sweden and Finland, whose bilateral defense cooperation has deepened substantially in recent years, will now contribute to NATO’s defense of the Arctic and the Baltic Sea region. In this anthology, launched in cooperation between Stockholm Free World Forum and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, writers from Sweden, Finland, and beyond explore how Sweden and Finland will adapt to NATO and vice versa. The chapters deal with topics such as how Sweden and Finland will contribute to burden sharing and specialization within NATO, what lessons can be drawn from past enlargements, and how Sweden and Finland can help the alliance deal with hybrid threats.

The Nordic states, just as other regions of Europe which neighbor Russia, are engaged in an urgent reexamination of their security and defense posture. Events in Ukraine in early-2014 threw into sharp focus a local lack of capability following decades of drawdowns and focus on crisis management operations instead of territorial defense. After an unpleasant awakening, countries in the region have turned their attention to the heightened security risks they face and their lack of preparedness for them. In an era of continuing austerity, the challenge for these states is how to design a working security and defense solution in the short and medium term which is both robust enough to survive in isolation, but also capable of being merged into a bigger framework such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) when the time is ripe.