Nationalist justifications of realist policies

How Finnish parliamentary parties turned to favouring NATO membership

Abstract

Russia’s all-out-attack against Ukraine in late February 2022 caused a fast turnaround in Finland’s public support for NATO membership that led the political parties, which had hitherto opposed joining NATO, to reconsider their stances. I argue that those parties, via their elites, employed a realist strategy of security, bolstered by political nationalism to express unity with the population to justify their shift, in an attempt to depoliticise the issue altogether. The premise of the study thus becomes the use of nationalism in explaining states joining international organisations rather than seeing it only as a disruptive force in interstate cooperation. The study also contributes to the previous scholarship on Finnish foreign policy and its different schools of thought by examining how nationalism plays a part in the realms of security and national interest. Ultimately, the membership signals a Finnish foreign policy swing from idealism to classical realism in which Finland had hitherto been an anomaly. This study uses data collected from Finnish parliamentary parties’ council conferences held between April and May 2022, where they formulated their stances.