The Ideological Cold War

The Politics of Neutrality in Austria and Finland

Johanna Rainio-Niemi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415836722
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135042400
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This book opens new perspectives into the Cold War ideological confrontations. Using Austria and Finland as an example, it shows how the Cold War battles for the hearts and minds of the people also influenced policies in countries that wished to stay outside the conflict.

Following the model of older European neutrals, Austria and Finland sought to combine neutrality with democracy. The combination was eagerly challenged by ideological Cold Warriors on both sides of the divide and questioned at home too. Was neutrality risking the neutrals' commitment to democracy, or did the commitment to the western type of democracy threaten their commitment to neutrality?

Confronting these doubts grew into an organic part of practicing neutrality in the Cold War world. The neutrals needed to be exceptionally clear regarding the ideological foundations of their neutrality. Successful neutrality required a great deal of conceptual consistence and domestic unanimity. None of this was pre-given in Austria or Finland. However, in the model of Switzerland and Sweden, (armed) neutrality was systematically integrated with the official state ideology and promoted as a part of national identity. Legacies of these policies outlived the end of the Cold War.

1 Introduction

NEUTRALITY AS PUBLIC OPINION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

The Puzzle of Public Opinion

In January 2013, Austrian citizens were called upon by their government to express their opinion in a nationwide, nonbinding referendum on whether the country should abolish the mandatory military service and switch to a professional army. Sixty percent voted for the maintenance of the old system. While opinions on the actual meanings of this popular consultation remained mixed, one conclusion seemed easy to draw: once again the people had expressed their support for the status quo and Austria’s neutrality.¹

Looking at the map of Europe today, only one other country among the European Union member states can be found which, like Austria, is militarily nonaligned and has compulsory military service.² That country is Finland—a fellow Cold War neutral whose fragile neutrality on the other side of the over one-thousand-kilometer-long border with the Soviet Union never ceased to raise concerns but which, in 1995, joined the EU shoulder to shoulder with Austria and another neutral, Sweden. Today Sweden remains militarily nonaligned but abolished conscription in 2009, whereas the other “historical” neutral of Europe, Switzerland, is militarily nonaligned with compulsory military service. Unlike the other former neutrals, Switzerland has not joined the European Union.

All former neutrals are often referred to as “success stories” of post-1945 European history and the Cold War. They figure among the most prosperous, stable, and democratic countries on the continent and are respected members of the international community—active peace-builders and peacekeepers around the world, traditional host countries for international summits, conferences, and organizations. In all these respects, the countries in question have been able to draw upon the overwhelmingly positive images assigned to European neutrality from the 1960s onwards. The legacies of these international images are a resource for the former neutrals’ crisis management still today even though neutrality as such has lost its previous relevance as an instrument of their national foreign policies.

In all post-1945 neutrals, the end of the Cold War changed the vocabularies and the code of conduct of national foreign and, also, security policy. The transformation was most obvious in the three EU member countries. Over the past decades, Austria, Finland, and Sweden all reshaped their foreign and security political concepts to meet the requirements of the emerging common European defense and security policy and the deepening transatlantic cooperation—not least in the field of crisis-management. The will to participate brushed away the notions of neutrality and modified the meanings of military nonalignment in order to allow the participation in international cooperation. In relative terms, all former neutrals have contributed actively to the joint EU-NATO-UN operations since the 1990s, leaning here also on their long-standing traditions as former United Nations peacekeepers. In course of the 1990s and 2000s, however, the steadily tightening contacts between the national, the transatlantic, the common European, and, in the case of Finland and Sweden, the Nordic security networks made many observers ask whether the former neutrals too would eventually let go their “inherited inhibitions” regarding military alignment—widely understood as the “the remaining core” of their former neutrality (cf. Munro ed. 2005). This sort of debate was particularly intense at the turn of the millennium when the common European security and defense policy was launched during Finland’s EU chairmanship in 1999 and the NATO was preparing for the 1999 and 2004 enlargement rounds. Although many experts and politicians within the former neutral countries signaled their interest in a serious reconsideration of military nonalignment and the “NATO-option,” the two enlargement rounds came and went. Most of the former Warsaw pact countries joined the alliance but, despite the intense debates, none of the former neutrals.

In all former neutrals, the decision to not let go of military nonalignment has typically been legitimated by reference to an extraordinarily resolute public opinion. In all these countries, popular opinion on national defense plays a notably significant role in policy making and has done so for decades. Already twenty-five years ago, in 1989, Hans Thalberg was able to refer to the recent decades’ opinion polls which had consistently demonstrated over 80 percent popular support for neutrality in Austria and, in line with the official doctrine of neutrality, for the general conscription (Thalberg 1989, 236; see also Neuhold and Wagner 1973; Ulram 1989; cf. also Enzelsberger 2006). A similar pattern with a notably high and stable, typically 80–90 percent, public support for neutrality and the related system of national defense was detectable across the former neutral countries, including also Finland (see Ståhlberg 1989; Väyrynen 1983; Kandolin 1980). As can be observed today, this public sentiment did outlive the end of the Cold War (e.g. Munro 2005; Ojanen 2003; Gärtner and Höll 2001; Kekäle 1998).

In all neutral countries, as this book will show, the history of regular public opinion charting on the key questions of national foreign and security policy goes back to the 1960s at the latest.³ While the contents of these surveys have changed over time, the tradition itself is well and alive still today; the results of the surveys are regularly reported by the media and carefully observed by policymakers. Illustrative of their standing, national defense questions are rarely discussed in public without references to the well-formed public opinion and, more precisely, to the support that it gives to military nonalignment.

Secondly, the more outspoken policymakers have been regarding their openness to rethinking military nonalignment, the more hesitant seems the public. For instance, when the head of the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee in Finland signaled that in her opinion the time may have had come to consider the official registration of a long-time “marriage-like cohabitation” with the NATO, the initially low public support for military alignment was simultaneously dropping by almost 10 percent in three consecutive opinion polls in 1998, 2000, and 2002.⁴

This book does not discuss the validity or invalidity of today’s or yesterday’s public opinions on military alignment or nonalignment. Instead of the question of whether or not any of the former neutrals should join a military alliance, the book focuses on the phenomenon of public opinion as such; on the exceptionally sound standing the public opinion on defense and security policies has had and, to an extent, still has in society. The role of this public opinion is interesting in a historical perspective and its perseverance stands out in regard to the many profound changes in the overall concept and practice of foreign and security policy in all formerly neutral countries since the 1990s. The continued public adherence to certain basic ideas of military nonalignment and independent national defense suggests that these ideas must have been more significant to the erstwhile politics of neutrality than is commonly acknowledged today. These meanings are the ones in which this book is interested in.

Neutrality as National Identity

Scholars often explain the public support for neutrality (or the remnants of it) by references to national history and neutrality’s role in the former neutral countries’ national identity. Mirroring the more general interest in the issues of nationalism and national identity in post-Cold War Europe, also neutrality’s place in various neutrals’ national identities has been a widely debated topic in all former neutral countries, especially Sweden and Austria. While most of this interest has been contemporary by focus— assessing the options for a fusion of the national and common European identities—the question has received historical attention too, again especially in Sweden and Austria.

There is an impressive amount of literature analyzing neutrality, together with the famous Swedish welfare state, as a cornerstone of the distinctive Swedish state ideology and internationally active foreign policy (e.g. Lödén 1999; Bjereld 1992; Nilsson 1991; Johansson and Norman 1988; Sundelius 1989; Wahlbäck 1986; Andrén and Möller 1990; Huldt and Misgeld 1990; Goldmann 1991; Malmborg 2001). Sweden has even been profiled as a model for a “third” alternative between capitalism and communism (e.g. Nilsson 1994; Johansson 1995; Berge 1990; cf. also Childs 1947; Strode 1949).

Regarding Austria, the analyses on neutrality’s identity political meanings have benefitted from a longer, also internationally established, research tradition on the many particularities, paradoxes, and conflicts of state- and nation-building in Austria. The Habsburg Empire has long been a classical case for the historically orientated state- and nation-building literature (e.g. Mann 1986; Hobsbawn 1990; cf. also Barkey and von Hagen 1997; Roshwald 2001). Also the Second Republic’s cultural memory and neutrality’s crucial meanings within its layers—as something that lend wings to Austria’s “self-assertion and a remarkably successful project of nation building” (Gehler 2005, 136), become “the identity of Austrians,” the crux of the “Austrian way” (Liebhart 2001, 7)—have been tracked in a whole body of analytically nuanced literature since the 1980s (e.g. Wodak et al. 2009; Thaler 2001; Bischof, Pelinka, and Wodak 2001; Bischof and Pelinka 1997; Bruckmüller 1996, 2003; Haller 1996; Stourzh 1990; Rathkolb 2005, 2010; Reiterer 1988; Heer 1981). Methodologically, Austria’s many “failures” as a nation, state, and a nation-state have helped to give rise to a particularly strong, analytically reflexive research tradition on the questions of collective identity that resonates beyond the boundaries of Austria’s national history and have been a major source of inspiration for this book’s comparative-historical design too.

By contrast to Finland and Sweden, in Austria neutrality is an officially recognized part of the state’s and the nation’s identity still today (cf. Enzelsberger 2006). The constitutional paragraph on Austria’s permanent neutrality, introduced in 1955, has not been repealed to this date—despite the many ambiguities created by Austria’s EU membership. Neutrality’s constitutional mandate enjoys firm public support. Because neutrality resides “in the hearts” of the Austrians, as the often-cited phrase goes, the political will to start amending the constitutional standing has remained low. Moreover, neutrality is something that citizens continue to be particularly proud of as the public opinion polls on “Austria-consciousness” (“Österreichbewusstsein”) have demonstrated year after year from the 1960s onwards (Bluhm 1973; Ulram 1989; Bruckmüller 1992; Thaler 2001, 164–175; Stourzh 1990; also see Wodak et al. 2009). The Austrian popular affection to neutrality seems to have remained fairly undamaged also by the historical findings on the country’s “secret partnership” with the West during the Cold War years (e.g. Bischof 1999; 2000; Rauchensteiner 2005). Rather, at the level of general public debate, the information on these contacts seems to have functioned as a sort of positively charged confirmation of the fact that Austria’s Cold War neutrality was indeed leaning westward, not eastward.

Regarding Sweden and Finland, one detects equally evident but different links between neutrality and national identity. The link is not as unproblematic as it is in present-day Austria. Sweden, by contrast to both Austria and Finland, stands out by its longest history of neutrality. Reaching back to the early 19th century, neutrality is without doubt one of the major threads in Sweden’s national history, one of the founding myths of Sweden as a modern state and nation (Malmborg 2001; cf. also Wahlbäck 1986). In the images of post-1945 history, neutrality figures centrally, together with the other main symbol of modern Sweden, the welfare state. Both symbols having been richly embroidered with hints of moral superiority—Sweden’s (social democratic) model being rather openly represented as the third alternative and a model for the rest of the world to follow—the domestic disturbance caused by Sweden’s hidden contacts with the West has been much deeper, more occupied with the basic questions of political truthfulness and untruthfulness than in Austria (cf., e.g., Agrell 1991; SOU 1994:11; Bjereld and Ekengren 2004)

Neutrality’s insincere histories being a source for “a rather inflammatory” (Bjereld and Ekengren 2004, 143) history political debate in Sweden still today, the concept of neutrality has lost its relevance as a part of the official foreign policy. Already in 1992, Sweden’s prime minister noted that neutrality no longer was an “adequate general designation” for the policies that Sweden wished pursue in the new Europe. Sweden now needed a “clear European identity” (Carlsnaes 1993, 83). Yet the neutrality concept was still referred to and Sweden continued to be perceived as a neutral country. Pernille Rieker (2002, 17, 32) explains this “attachment to neutrality” by neutrality’s role as “an important part of Swedish national identity” in and, also, outside Sweden. Illustrative of the latter, still in 2000, Jacques Chirac mentioned that he knew how important “neutrality” was to the Swedish people.

In Finland the wish to break the ties with neutrality has been most total. Like in Sweden, references to neutrality were brushed away from the official foreign policy vocabularies by the mid-1990s but unlike there, neutrality has not been given much historical thought in Finland. In a notable contrast to Austrian and Swedish debates on neutrality and national identity, the dominant view in Finland has been that in this country neutrality never had any identity political relevance (e.g Blomberg 2011, 654–655; Lipponen 2008, 212–213; Himanen 2003; Väyrynen 2003; cf. also Railo and Laamanen 2010; Tarkka 2012). Finland’s neutrality was a thoroughly instrumentalist, pragmatic choice, determined by the necessities of national survival in the Cold War world, in the immediate vicinity of the Soviet Union. The priority was to keep Finland on the Western side of the Iron Curtain and to find options for as much western European integration as was possible (cf. Tarkka 2012). Neutrality, in this interpretation, was of very secondary importance and, according to some observers, just a sort of a “disguise” on Finland’s inherently Western national identity, not desirable but the best option that was available (e.g. Harle and Moisio 2000, 56, 275, 282). When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union dissolved, Finland could drop neutrality overnight and, with EU membership, the country was back on the right identity political track again. In his analysis of the 1990s identity political debates in Finland’s foreign policy, Christopher Browning (2002) has identified a strong “Westernising” tendency that has not lost its vitality until today (cf. Aunesluoma and Rainio-Niemi, 2014).

This book argues that something was left behind by the four decades’ intense striving for neutrality in Finland too. Historical sources cited in this research provide plenty of evidence that neutrality was explicitly wished to have to do with national identity in all neutral countries, also in Finland. Furthermore, in all these countries, the entanglements between neutrality and national identity went through the notions of armed neutrality, national defense, and mandatory conscription. Illustrative of this, in contemporary Finland, there is a distinct word for the adamant popular attachment to armed national defense—“national defense will” (maanpuolustustahto), a term that is closely associated with the collective popular understandings of the country’s national identity and history. Since the late 1990s, almost all public debates on possible reforms in the field of national defense or the policy of military nonalignment have kept coming back to this will and to the extraordinarily strong popular support for the established arrangements of national defense among the people (cf. Kekäle 1998; Sinkko 2009).

While the strong public sentiments of military self-reliance are typically led back to Finland’s “lone” struggle against the Soviet giant in the Second World War, this book serves to remind that, they are equally much, if not more, connected with the institutional and ideational legacies of erstwhile neutrality—a policy by which a distinctive national self-defense “ethos” was endorsed in all former European neutrals under the aegis of armed neutrality. Regarding this ethos and the more general notions of post-1945 armed neutrality, Finland—a country that had a bilateral security pact with the Soviet Union since 1948—provides not the most self-evident but highly interesting case nevertheless.

To a great extent, the post-1945 neutrality was about peacetime foreign policy and the neutrals’ highest priority was the avoidance of war by means of neutrality as foreign policy (Hakovirta 1988; Karsh 1988; Sundelius ed. 1987). Agreeing with this view as such, this book broadens it by drawing attention to the meanings that nevertheless were given to the notions of armed neutrality and the related “ethos” of national self-defense as vital parts of the post-1945 policies of neutrality in all European neutral countries and, also, internationally. Promotion of this ethos, argues this book, was much more systematic and loaded with much broader political, and, indeed, identity political meanings than is commonly remembered. It was of great domestic and international importance during the Cold War and not least because of the ideological battles over the hearts and minds of the people that were understood to be a part and parcel of the conflict across the national borders. This ethos was, as this book wishes to argue, one of the main channels, if not practically speaking the channel, through which neutrality submersed deep down to the minds and hearts of the people, to the national identity of the neutral countries during the Cold War decades.

RETHINKING NEUTRALITY AND IDEOLOGY IN THE COLD WAR

Rethinking National Myths of Neutrality

During the Cold War decades, the analysis and the conduct of foreign policy were never far apart from one another. The great majority of literature on neutrality was written by practitioners from various neutral countries; by diplomats and journalists, by the most prominent experts of international law, military strategy, and inter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Modern History
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 National Traditions in a Comparative Perspective
• 3 International Reflections
• 4 Criteria of Neutrality and the Newborn Neutrals
• 5 The Missing Link
• 6 Closure and New Challenges
• 7 Faces of Neutrality in the Cold War World
• Notes
• References
• Index