The Ukrainification of Scandinavia: the portentous fallout of Sweden’s and Finland’s failed NATO accession bid

Apr 03, 2023

STOCKHOLM. After a recent statement by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the repeated attempts by the Swedish government to revive the country's NATO application seem to have failed for good. The event which prompted the meltdown was a staged burning of the Quran outside Turkey's Embassy in the Swedish capital:

"Those who caused such a disgrace in front of our embassy should not expect any benevolence from us regarding their applications for NATO membership."[1]

Casus Belli

It was clear already from the outset that the accession process would be an uphill battle: Sweden has for many years been seen as a haven for Kurdish separatists, referred to as "terrorists" by Ankara, which initially was reported to demand that some 30 individuals be extradited to Turkey before approving Sweden's membership.[2]

As the situation remained unresolved, Turkey bumped up the number of candidates for deportation, first to 70 and most recently to 130.[3]

So far Sweden has put two persons on a plane to Turkey, whilst the extradition of a Kurdish editor has been blocked by a Swedish court on the ground that the alleged offense is political and not a crime in Sweden.[4, 5]

As the impasse approached the six-month mark, a series of political provocations took place, which now seems to have snuffed out Sweden's and Finland's NATO ambitions for good:[6]

4 October 2022: A defamatory Kurdish opposition broadcast, aired by Swedish state television, in which the President of Turkey was personally attacked.
12 January 2023: A mock execution of President Erdogan, close to the Stockholm City Hall, executed by a Swedish peace activist group acting in support of the Kurdish YPG and YPJ militias, which are fighting Turkish forces in Syria.
21 January 2023: A burning of the Quran ceremony outside the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm, executed by Danish-born Lawyer Rasmus Paludan.

It is hardly conceivable that the televised defamatory propaganda piece against the head of state of a foreign nation, on 4 October 2022, had not first been cleared by someone inside the Swedish government; the founding and funding body of SVT, the country's public news broadcaster.

A month after the broadcast, SVT aired a 39 minute one-on-one interview with Turkey's Ambassador to Sweden, Yönet Can Tezel. If the interview was an attempt to improve relations with Turkey, it failed. If anything, it came across as Sweden calling Ankara to the carpet in public.[8]

The event which finally buried Sweden's and Finland's NATO ambitions was the Quran-burning ceremony on 21 January 2023.

It was not the first time Danish lawyer Rasmus Paludan attempted to ignite a religiously fuelled civil war in the Nordics. His greatest success, so far, took place nine months earlier, during Easter 2022, when the mere rumour of his appearance in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby unleashed violent riots across Sweden.

Despite the remarkable achievement, the stuff of Guinness Book of World Records (category: single hate-speech inciting most riots), Mr Paludan was still given the green light by the Swedish police to burn yet another copy of the Quran, this time outside the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm, on 21 January 2023.

Unlike the Government of Sweden, Mr Paludan does seem to be aware of the negative impact his traveling Quran-burning circus has had on Sweden's and Finland's aspirations to join NATO, so he recently returned to Denmark where he is now promoting their memberships by burning copies of the Quran outside the Turkish Embassy in Copenhagen, something he says he will do every Friday until Ankara folds and admits Sweden and Finland into the war-alliance.[9]

Throughout the NATO application process, Finland has said that it would only join NATO if Sweden did so. After the ill-conceived Quran burning service outside the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm, Finland has declared it may ditch Sweden and go it alone.[13]

The idea was immediately shot down by Turkey's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mevlut Cavusoglu, who declared that Sweden's and Finland's NATO applications will only be considered jointly by Ankara, and then added that the point has become moot and that talks about Sweden and Finland joining NATO today are "meaningless."[17]

From Neutrality to NATO

Sweden and Finland were one country until 1809 when the 700-year union of the realms was destroyed by the continent-wide upheavals set in motion by a certain French artillery officer by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Finland became the Grand Duchy of Finland, an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. The arrangement lasted until the Russian Revolution in 1917 when Lenin and the Bolsheviks cut Finland loose. After a brutal civil war, fought between a conservative Swedish-speaking upper-class league known as the "whites" and a Finnish-speaking workers class called the "reds", Finland finally came into its own as a republic in 1919.

The situation lasted for 20 years until Moscow regretted setting Finland free; a consequence of the doomed Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, which was supposed to divvy up Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but in reality was just a stepping-stone for Berlin's march toward Moscow.

The war against Finland did not go well for Moscow: with 12 killed Soviet soldiers for each dead Finnish, peace negotiations quickly ensued. Finland kept its independence. The price tag was handing over to Moscow parts of some Eastern provinces bordering the Soviet Union.

Finland's Cold War neutrality arrived in 1948 in the form of an Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with Moscow. The treaty recognized Finland's continued independence. In return, Helsinki pledged that Western powers would never use Finland as a springboard for a military attack against the Soviet Union.[10]

If political stability, the absence of war, and economic growth are indicators, the treaty was a success: keeping tensions in the Nordic region low whilst elevating Finland to one of the Soviet Union's top trading partners, during the Cold War.

Finland’s Mannerheim and Soviet Russia’s Stalin

Sweden's neutrality is usually recognized as having started in 1812, when French Marshal Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, under the name Karl XIV Johan (Charles XIV John), was elected King. Since then, Sweden has been on the sidelines of pretty much all wars in Europe, including WWI and WWII.

Sweden's Cold War Neutrality was schizophrenic. Under the guidance of the domestically dominating Social Democrats, Sweden was politically neutral and ideologically neutral-to-left. At the same time, few doubted who the real enemy was: the Soviet Union, which was the country that the Swedish military prepared to fight, with the covert military support of, and cooperation with, the United States of America.

The event which finally broke the spell of neutrality was the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme on 28 February 1986.

With his death, expired also the policy of "active neutrality", in which the Swedish government considered US imperialism a bad thing and sided with what was back then called the Third World - countries outside of the so-called First World (the Second World being industrialised Socialist countries in the Northern Hemisphere).

Mr Palme's and Sweden's work in this respect was similar to the efforts of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), created by Yugoslavian leader Tito in 1961, offering an alternative to either of the World's two military power blocs: NATO and the Warsaw pact.

STOCKHOLM 1968: Olof Palme and Vietnam Ambassador marching together against the US war in Vietnam.

After a few years in limbo, followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1988-1991, Sweden openly started to gravitate toward NATO:[12]

The 1990s: The Swedish military adopts NATO standards to increase interoperability with the alliance.
1994: Sweden joins NATO's Partnership for Peace program.
2013: Sweden starts to be part of advanced NATO exercises.
2014: Sweden and Finland become Enhanced Opportunities Partners to NATO. The step was blamed on Crimea's referendum to rejoin the Russian Federation in 2014, which came in the wake of the US-instigated 2014 Coup in Ukraine.
2016: Sweden becomes a host nation to NATO: facilitating troops from NATO countries, such as the USA, to operate in Sweden.
2022: Sweden and Finland apply to join NATO.

According to recent polls, the Swedish population is pretty much in agreement with the policy shift, with 68% in favour of NATO membership, 22% negative to it, and 10% undecided.[14]

The numbers for Finland agree, although less enthusiastically: 53% for NATO, 28% against, and 19% undecided.[15]

Why NATO?

Why did Sweden and Finland throw out the successful policies of neutrality in favour of joining the planet's foremost war alliance?

The ostensible reason was Russia's intervention in the slow-burn civil war/genocide in Eastern Ukraine, which, in early 2022, looked like it was about to become an imminent security concern for Russia itself.[16]

Aside from the distinct possibility that Sweden and Finland, like the rest of the West, over the decades have been successfully brainwashed into believing that the West is always in the right and that its enemies du jour are always in the wrong, the most compelling indication which recently has surfaced is that Finland, and by extension, Sweden, have been promised parts of Russia in a future war.

The map below was recently put on display at the headquarters of the Ukrainian Military intelligence: promising Helsinki and Stockholm a doubling of Finland's territory, stealing away from Russia the Murmansk and Karelia regions and over half of the Leningrad district (top-left on the map).

Cui Bono?

The problem with NATO for an expansionist power, is that it creates stable borders (remember the Cold War in Europe). For a party bent on military adventurism, this is an obstacle in need of a fix.

The circumstance which enables Ukraine to be used as a pawn in the proxy war against the Russian Federation, is precisely this: it allows for lifting the lid on Pandora's Box, whilst reducing the risk of a direct backlash against NATO itself.

Who benefits from Finland and Sweden, after openly throwing neutrality overboard and unmasking themselves as anti-Russian, are now kept outside of NATO - making them usable as vectors and patsies for opening up a new front against the Russian Federation?

Sources:

blueshift’s substack

The Ukrainification of Scandinavia: the portentous fallout of Sweden’s and Finland’s failed NATO accession bid

Casus Belli

From Neutrality to NATO

Why NATO?

Cui Bono?