The impossible, improbable and implausible alliance. Why a Scandinavian defense alliance is unfeasible.

While the attention of the world has been focused on the horrible war in Ukraine, nations around the conflict have begun to adapt to the new world situation. A world in which the autocratic states such as Russia break world peace as blatantly and as brutally as they wish. As discussed previously, Finland and Sweden are both slated to seek entry into NATO, the North Atlantic alliance that stretches from the shores of Alaska to Arctic Norway. While this was going on, the Danish red-green party, the Unity List (Enhedslisten), has suffered from intense internal debate on the future of their own anti-NATO politics. The Unity List, which is made up of old Euro-communists, old-guard eastern bloc communists and pro-environmental/anti-capitalist green groups, has long held the opinion that NATO is a tool of imperialist oppression worldwide. As their official party program states (as of 15-05-2022):?

“We fight against militarism and work for a Danish exit from NATO. We are for the dismantling of the Danish military to be replaced by a much smaller organisation, which can assist in possible peacekeeping UN missions.” (https://enhedslisten.dk/programmer/enhedslistens-principprogram)

Since the beginning of the situation in Ukraine, including the months of escalation starting in mid-2021, this position has come under heavy criticism in Danish politics, both internally and externally, for reasons that are rather plainly obvious. Politically and perhaps even logically, this is a bad time to have extensive anti-NATO sentiments, as the upsurge in both NATO’s popularity as well as its relevance to the modern world is skyrocketing. So what is the Unity List proposing as an alternative? It can be a bit hard to pinpoint, with the internal politics of the Unity List being somewhat obscured by its very decentralized power structure, but one of the main chairpersons at the higher political level, Pelle Dragsted, stated that:

“The Unity List wants Denmark out of NATO. Instead, we want to build up Nordic defense cooperation.”? (https://twitter.com/pelledragsted/status/1478660034733215746)

This is not the first time in history that the idea of a Nordic defense alliance has been proposed and as such the issues facing such an alliance are not new either. To properly understand the inherent vulnerabilities of such an alliance, let’s first take a brief look at the history of the various Nordic defense attempts.

(Credit wikimedia.org)

First, the genesis of the idea that the Nordic nations (or the Scandinavian nations) should protect each other against external enemies hails from all the way back in the middle of the 1800’s, when the idea of Scandinavism became popular among great thinkers of the time. The idea that a supranational state, Scandinavia, could replace Sweden-Norway and Denmark was rather popular, and for some years it looked likely that some sort of broader cooperation would come into being. However, this quickly fell apart due to the Schleswig wars (1848-50 and 1864), where Denmark, although bolstered by Norwegian and Swedish volunteers, was more or less abandoned to fight first Austria and Prussia in 1848, and then Prussia in 1864.

With the failure of the Scandinavian nations to come together in this most critical of hours, the idea of a common defense union more or less vanished for several decades. It first re-appeared after the Second World War (1939-1945). Both Denmark and Norway had been occupied by Nazi Germany, and Sweden had been forced into an extremely uncomfortable political situation, all due to the three nations being isolated politically and diplomatically owing to their strict neutrality. The neutrality, which had kept all three nations safe through World War One (1914-1918), had proven an inadequate shield against raw autocratic power in the form of Nazi expansion in Europe. More importantly perhaps, Denmark’s military had been thoroughly humiliated, and despite urgent attempts by the Norwegians to protect their nation against the German advance, Germany simply proved too strong for Norway, with the help of Britain and France, to stop.?

(Three Danish soldiers prepare to defend Aabenraa on April 9th, 1940. Credit: Wikimedia.org)

At the same time, it is worth mentioning that Finland was put in a similarly terrible situation when it was forced to surrender land to the Soviet Union following the Winter War (1939-1940). Despite brave and stubborn Finnish resistance, Finland found itself in a impossible situation, and was eventually forced to secede significant territory to the Soviets, which then later led to the continuation war (1941-1945) where Finland entered World War Two on the side of Nazi Germany.?

The experience of all four main Scandinavian nations (depending on how you define them) was that neutrality had failed and that individually the Scandinavian or Nordic nations were incapable of defending themselves against larger industrial titans. Despite the stubborn resistance in Norway and Finland, they were eventually outclassed and outgunned by far larger and far more potent militaries.?

With the end of the Second World War, all four nations now found themselves in a rather precarious position. Denmark was unsure of what its future security arrangements would look like, and looked to both Norway and Sweden for some sort of arrangement. Norway sought solutions mostly abroad, acknowledging that a Scandinavian defensive alliance would be unable to defend itself sufficiently. Sweden had watched Finland become a Soviet pseudo-satellite state (more or less), and was unwilling to further escalate tensions in the baltic, fearing that it would lead to Finland being further drawn into the Soviet camp. Although negotiations took place in 1948-1949 regarding the idea of a Scandinavian defensive alliance, it ultimately fell through as the cold war heated up, and the Soviet Union and its new array of satellite nations, proved to be warmongering and generally untrustworthy (See the Czechoslovakian coup of 1948). In the end then, Norway and Denmark joined NATO and came under the collective security of the two main European powers, Britain and France, as well as the North American superpower, the United States of America. Sweden kept its neutrality, but stayed armed to the teeth, and even pursued the idea of an independent nuclear capability for a while.?

(Diagram of unbuilt Swedish nuclear device. The Swedes ultimately abandoned the idea of building a nuclear weapon, but retained civil nuclear power for energy needs. Credit: wikimedia.org)

To understand why the Scandinavian defensive alliance was simply unviable, we simply have to zoom back out and take a closer look at the world that faced the Scandinavian countries in the late 1940’s. Individually, and even collectively, Norway, Denmark and Sweden were dwarfed by the military mastodon that was the Soviet Union, which was even further augmented as the Soviets produced a vast nuclear arsenal. As the Danes noted in a report in 1949, war with the Soviet Union would mean Denmark would need assistance “within hours”(1), this being even before the era of Soviet nuclear weapons.

Logistically and strategically, a Scandinavian defense alliance has a lot of issues. If one imagines an alliance consisting of Denmark, Norway and Sweden exclusively (disregarding Finland, as they were forced to do following 1945), the three members states ability to mutually augment each others forces would have been highly questionable. Soviet forces could attack Norway via their shared border, Sweden via an amphibious/airborne invasion and Denmark could be locked down by the much larger (even then) Soviet navy. In essence, while all three nations could theoretically defend themselves to a point, they were simply unable to offer enough forces in common defense. All three nations had, unwillingly, become frontline nations in the new cold war between the West and the East, and as such had plenty of defensive challenges themselves. What Denmark and Norway needed, based on their relatively small population and agricultural economies, was a larger or many larger powers that could come to the rescue in case of a war. This is what NATO offered which the Scandinavian defense alliance could not match.?

(Map showing Soviet invasion plans for Denmark, dated around 1970. Graciously provided by Koldkrigsmuseum langelandsfortet. Special thanks to Peer Henrik Hansen for sending this to me for my masters thesis)

The same remains true today. Denmark and Norway are capable of defending themselves to one extent or another, and so is Sweden, but none of the three nations have sufficient military strength that they can abandon their own defenses to augment the other. Including Finland into this equation changes very little, as Finland shares a large continuous land border with Russia which it would have to defend no matter what, tying up most if not all of its military strength. All of this is not even mentioning the nuclear issue, which arose in the 1950’s. Without a “nuclear umbrella” to sit under, a Scandinavian defensive alliance would be extremely vulnerable to nuclear blackmail (or bluffing). No amount of common defense can outweigh having to face a superpower with nuclear weaponry, who can at any moment escalate beyond your capability.?

Essentially, while the idea behind a Scandinavian defense alliance holds a certain old-world charm to it, the cold hard reality is that it is not to any of the nations benefit. NATO, conversely, is a warm soft reality. Through a common defensive alliance, member nations gain not only a nuclear umbrella, but also the assurance of immediate assistance in any security situation. Norway can count on immediate US and UK support in case of a war, and Denmark merely has to hold the baltic closed until the massive NATO navies can arrive. There is simply no alternative to this rather straightforward truth in our present political reality.?

As an aside, I am rather comfortably in the leftist camp politically, and it worries me greatly that it seems that the core idea that NATO is a militarist and imperialist organ of world capitalism has not yet withered in the face of true imperialism and true militarism from Russia. You may not agree with American foreign policy, or British foreign policy or indeed French foreign policy, but together we are safe, and together we are strong, and there is simply no realistic alternative to this strength.?

Thank you for your time.

(1): https://koldkrig-online.dk/historie/danmarks-vej-ind-i-atlantpagten-nato-1949/ great website to learn more about the idea of a Scandinavian defense alliance, and why it fell apart in the late 1940's.