Why haven't Finland and Sweden already joined NATO?

While other Nordic countries like Norway, Denmark and Iceland were original members of the alliance, Sweden and Finland did not join the pact for historic and geopolitical reasons.

 

Both Finland, which declared independence from Russia in 1917 after the Bolshevik revolution, and Sweden adopted neutral foreign policy stances during the Cold War, refusing to align with either the Soviet Union or the United States.

 

Sweden's policy of neutrality goes back to the early 1800s, when the country steadfastly stayed out of European conflicts. Its King Gustav XIV formally adopted that neutral status in 1834, according to NATO, and Sweden declared a policy of "non-belligerency" during World War II -- allowing Nazi troops to pass through its land into Finland, while also accepting Jewish refugees.

 

Sweden opted to maintain its neutral status after the war ended.

 

Finland's neutrality has historically proved more difficult, as it shared a long border with an authoritarian superpower.

 

A Finno-Soviet treaty known as the Agreement of Friendship, signed in 1948 and extended on occasion through the decades, prohibited Finland from joining any military alliance considered hostile to the USSR, or from allowing a Western attack through Finnish territory.

To keep the peace, Finns adopted an arrangement sometimes called Finlandization, in which leaders acceded to Soviet demands from time to time. The term was coined during the Cold War and has been applied to other countries in which a superpower exerts control over smaller neighboring states.

 

Both countries' balancing acts effectively ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sweden and Finland joined the European Union together in 1995 and gradually aligned their defense policies with the West, while still avoiding joining NATO outright.