The political philosopher Isiah Berlin quotes the Greek poet Archilochus for the comment that the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. ‘There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision,’ Berlin writes, ‘and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.’ While Berlin spend his working life in Oxford, his family came from Latvia. Perhaps it is fitting, therefore, to use Berlin’s distinction between single-minded foxes and wide-ranging hedgehogs to describe the new conditions in Baltic security after the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO.
History and geography have made Sweden and Finland military hedgehogs. Their defence policy has been focused on one big thing: defence against Russia. Sweden and Finland have organized their armed forces for territorial defence. While the rest of Europe transformed their armed forces after the end of the Cold War, the armed forces of Finland and Sweden remained based on the mobilization of conscript forces for national defence. Finland remained truer to the concept of national defence than Sweden which in practice abandoned conscription and reduced the national defence budget to the point where the Swedish Chief of Defence shocked the nation when he admitted that försvarsmakten could not defend Swedish territory without help from NATO.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Finland and Sweden was thus confronted with the question of whether their armed forces would be able to withstand a Russian attack. While other European countries discussed, and continues to discuss, whether the Ukrainian war in fact means a direct threat to national security, Finland and Sweden had settled that question already by not changing the purpose and nature of their armed forces. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a change in the quantity of the threat – not the quality. Since Finland and Sweden was quite aware that their defence forces did not have the quantities to withstand a Russian attack, the increased likelihood of Russian aggression made NATO membership the only way to regain a sense of national security.
Collective defence is thus the one thing Sweden and Finland want from NATO. They are hedgehogs in the same way Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are defence hedgehogs: their geography and history tell them the same thing – they need allies to defend them against Russia.
The Norwegian and Danish experience is different. Although Norway also shares a border with Russia, the two countries are defence foxes. They do not have a single central vision for their defence policy, but several different commitments. As founding members of the Alliance, Norway and Denmark have experienced how NATO redefined itself from a defensive alliance focused on organising the military defence of Western Europe to an organisation for managing the risks of the post-Cold War World. Both countries argued for Baltic membership of the Alliance in the belief that this would create stability in Eastern Europe and the Baltic Rim Area. This was not done in the belief that NATO was to deter or to come in conflict with Russia. On the contrary, Norway and, especially, Denmark focused resources on operating in NATO’s international missions as well as in the Arctic which plays a significant role in the defence policy of both countries.
Even as the Baltic countries remained focused on the need to defend themselves against Russia, they joined the Alliance at a time when this was neither a top priority nor a publicly valid argument for their joining. On the contrary, the ‘membership action plans’ by which they joined the Alliance stressed that they were not to constitute a security problem. In other words, NATO did not want to import a commitment to a conflict with Russia, so the Baltic countries did their best to downplay such scenarios and adopted policies towards their Russian minorities that gave the minorities more rights than a state suspect of their loyalties and fearing subversive activities would otherwise have been inclined to give.
The hedgehogs Sweden and Finland are thus joining an alliance which has been ‘foxy’ for years, but which is now becoming more focused on deterring Russia. In joining NATO, the two countries make the Nordic, Baltic region a larger factor in the Alliance. The fact that some of the existing NATO-members in that region are defence foxes with a broader focus and that other of the existing members have also been socialised into more fox-like behaviour even if they are fundamentally hedgehogs focused on the threat from Russia means that the Nordic, Baltic region is far from coherent and unlikely to talk with one voice at the ambassadors’ table in NATO HQ in Brussels. As the Baltic states, Sweden and Finland will need to adapt their policy to an alliance where the security issues of the Mediterranean are also relevant and where Sweden and Finland will be expected to contribute.
Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen
Professor in International Relations
University of Copenhagen
Denmark
