Tony Insall - The Nordic Countries: From War to Cold War, 1944-51: Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series I, Vol. IX

WHITEHALL HISTORIES: FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE PUBLICATIONS

Writing in 1951, a contemporary expert noted that the importance of the Scandinavian countries in world affairs has lately increased to an extent which is almost startling.

Between the wars the Nordic countries had been among Britains most valuable trading partners, but their remoteness from the likely theatres of any future war (on land, at least) and the absence of serious conflicts among themselves or with their immediate neighbours had led the Foreign Office and the British military authorities to pay them only intermittent and limited attention. This was the normal peacetime state of affairs. In war, naturally, it was different. Indeed for a short time in the winter of 1939-40 Scandinavia became the main focus of strategic interest, as the British and French Governments contemplated military intervention in support of the Finns in their conflict with the Soviet Union and sought to deprive Germany of its supplies of Swedish iron ore while Germany, for its part, prepared the surprise assault that rapidly brought Denmark and Norway within its grip. What differed after 1945 (unlike, for example, 1815 or 1918), was that the Nordic region did not immediately revert to strategic insignificance. The heightened importance of the Nordic region after 1945 derived in part from the shared experience of war, including, for example, the exceptionally close relations established between the British Government and the Norwegian Government in exile. It was also due to common economic difficulties and a strong ideological affinity between the British Labour Government of 1945-51 and its social democratic counterparts in the Nordic countries. But it was due most of all to the development of air power and the atomic bomb, the break-up of the wartime alliance and the growing perception of the Soviet Union as the chief threat to the security of the United Kingdom.

In 1945 it seemed quite possible that the international engagement of the Nordic countrieswhile not, perhaps, reverting to the largely passive neutrality of the inter-war yearswould be confined to membership of the new United Nations organisation. By 1949 only Sweden remained neutral. In April 1948 Finland had signed a Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union; exactly one year later Denmark, Iceland and Norway had become founding signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty. From the point of view of Scandinavian or Nordic solidarity, and especially because it appeared to consign Finland to the Soviet sphere of influence, this outcome was a disappointment. But as an alternative to a power vacuum that would have left Western Europes northern flank open to continued Soviet penetration, and as a vital element in the emerging North Atlantic security system, it was an undoubted success. Within a few years, moreover, the Nordic region had settled into a state of equilibrium in which neutral Sweden acted as pivot between its westward-leaning and eastward-leaning neighbours, and which enabled the region to preserve a measure of detachment from the main zones of cold war confrontation to the south.