ABSTRACT
Introduction Recent analyses of the opportunities and challenges of small states in Europe point out three reasons why we should expect the European Union (EU) to play an important role in Nordic security. First, the EU provides protection by offering unparalleled, wide-ranging shelter against the soft security challenges emanating from globalisation, environmental degradation and non-state violence that are now of primary concern to many small-state makers of foreign policy in Northern Europe (Bailes et al. 2014). Second, on a global scale and in its own geopolitical neighbourhood, the EU promotes a set of values that resonate well with traditional Nordic value promotion (Schouenborg 2013a, 2013b). These values include peaceful conflict resolution, arms control, human rights and international development and are at the same time key elements in EU common policies at the UN (Laatikainen 2003). Thus, the EU offers a platform for the Nordic states to pursue their values proactively on a regional and global scale. Finally, the EU offers unique opportunities for influencing the policy process through various institutional channels of the Union’s decentralised decisionmaking structures (Bailes and Thorhallsson 2013; Wivel 2005, 2010). The three Nordic EU member states have proved themselves to be among the most effective and competent in coordinating policy positions domestically and providing instructions for negotiators (Panke 2010), and opportunities for influence were further strengthened in the Lisbon Treaty by facilitating the pursuit of strategies such as lobbying, self-interested mediation and norm entrepreneurship (Grøn and Wivel 2011). In spite of these opportunities for furthering Nordic security interests and values by actively engaging in the EU, the Europeanisation of Nordic security and defence policies has been relatively modest thus far. Indeed, it might be argued that the Nordic countries continue to live in the shadow of history, still clinging to Atlantic and Nordic solutions and refusing to recognise the virtues of the postmodern European security actor developing before their very eyes. This chapter seeks to unpack how and explain why this is the case using a three-step procedure. First, we provide an overview of the Europeanisation of Nordic
security and defence policies, tracing the historical roots of the Europeanisation of Nordic security and mapping its current status. Second, we assess the relative lack of Europeanisation in Nordic security and defence policies and discuss it in the context of the recent intensification of Nordic cooperation on security and defence affairs. Finally, we discuss how geopolitics, the lessons of history and a pragmatic functionalist approach to the institutional developments in Europe interacted to condition the timing, content and form of the Europeanisation of Nordic security and defence policies. Compared to the other policy areas covered in this volume, global developments play a relatively major role in the development of Nordic security and defence policies. The critical junctures in their development, to use the language of historical institutionalism presented in the introductory chapter, have been closely related to global power shifts rather than to the institutional and policy developments of the EU; and to the extent that EU developments have influenced Nordic security and defence policies, these were themselves results of global shifts. Furthermore, the path dependencies following these shifts reflect logics of both appropriateness and consequentiality, as Nordic interests in stability and influence interacted with the particular values of the Nordic states in the formation of policy towards European and global security orders.
