How Finland Destroyed Itself For NATO

Finland, often known as the happiest country in the world, now has the highest unemployment rate in Europe, demand for food aid has exploded by more than 70%, and homelessness, which had been declining for more than ten years, has increased 34% in just two years. Conditions in the country are so bad that almost 20% of Finland’s population is now considered at risk of poverty,

Once considered the standard bearer for the good life, for competent governance and a strong social state, Finland is unravelling at warp speed. What has gone wrong so quickly?

In three words, NATO, austerity and Russophobia.

All are linked. Finland is slashing its social state to the bone to meet NATO’s 5% GDP military spending target, a target which became necessary after the country abandoned neutrality and swapped the welfare state for the warfare state after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The speed of the collapse has been stunning.

In 2019, the at-risk of poverty rate was 11% and by 2022 the country was on course to hit record low unemployment.

Everything changed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the country’s hysterical over-reaction to an imagined threat. This is not just my judgement. A number of Finnish academics, including Heikki Patomäki, professor of world politics at the University of Helsinki, have said that the conditions simply did not warrant Finland joining NATO, cutting off its economically valuable links to Russia and militarising its border.

The facts support this.

At the time of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia had just a couple of thousand troops spread out across various bases on its 1,340 km border with Finland. The bases were home to handful of missile defence batteries and a few dozen tanks. Many of the troops and much of the equipment was subsequently deployed to Ukraine, leaving the bases empty. There was obviously no invasion threat, and Putin in May 2022 emphasised this in a phone call to Finland’s then-president Sauli Niinistö.

But by this point, the Russophobia and hysteria for NATO membership had begun to take on a life of its own. Sanna Marin, Finland’s young female prime minister at the time, and a liberal media darling, was a particularly effective saleswoman. Despite claiming in the days following Russia’s invasion that there was no threat, her tone became decidedly more hawkish in the months that followed. She said Russia “poses a threat to all of us” and began talking like a war-time leader, saying in September 2022 that “Russia may challenge Finland, blackmail us and threaten us, but we will not give in.” Bear in mind, Russia at this point had practically zero troops and equipment on its western border with Finland. The Russian threat she was invoking was entirely imagined, an hallucination.

Nevertheless, in April 2023, Finland joined NATO, just days after Marin was defeated by the right and far-right in an election where the policy choice on Russia was one of uniformity, with the conservatives, the ethno-nationalists and Marin’s social democrats all singing the same tune.

After her defeat, Marin scuttled off to work for Tony Blair, while the new conservative-nationalist government set about decimating Finland’s welfare state to pay for the privilege of NATO membership.

The Finnish government is now a substantial way through its programme to cut €9 billion of public spending by 2027, including large reductions to social security (including housing, child, and unemployment benefits) healthcare, education, and municipal funding budgets, while it also increasing taxes on average earners. Cuts to healthcare provision have been particularly brutal, including the large reduction of hospital staff numbers, elderly care and disability services while redefining “minimum service obligations” to justify providing patients with lower quality care. The government has also slashed funding for organisations working on peace and initiatives which would address the new cold war-style relations with Russia.

In addition, the new government fully closed all the border crossings with Russia that Marin’s Social Democrats had partially closed, and began building large sections of a border fence, securitised with troops, night vision cameras and motion detectors.

And while the entire country is now suffering as a result of the pro-war paranoia that has gripped Finland’s leaders, its border towns have taken a particular beating.

Before the war, Russians routinely crossed to shop, eat, stay in hotels and visit holiday properties they owned in the towns and villages along the border. That has all gone away. One estimate cited in a recent Finnish study puts the loss of Russian tourism in the border region of South Karelia at as much as €1 million per day. Unemployment in some border regions is now approaching 20%.

The border also used to be an important commercial gateway between the EU and Russia, but its closure eliminated much of the road freight and transit business. The OECD says eastern Finland has gone from being an “economic gateway” to a “security barrier,” a transformation which of course it praises rather than mourns, claiming that confronting Russia is important not only for Finland but for Europe as a whole.

Then there are the commodities like gas and timber.

In 2021 Russia accounted for about 92% of Finland’s gas imports. Finland has replaced all of that with a mix of sources, including far more expensive LNG from the US, meaning that Finland, after having some of the lowest gas prices in Europe, now has the highest gas prices in Europe.

As for timber, in 2021, 70% of Finland's wood imports came from Russia, and this wood supplied approximately 10% of all the raw wood used by Finnish industry. Pulp mills in Finland subsequently went bust and the industry faced shortages which persist to this day after the EU, with Finland’s support, banned countries from buying wood from Russia.

Finland’s decisions, both independently and collectively through the EU, have immiserated many millions of Finnish citizens. Yet at the same time as the country is slashing the social state, it is spending more money than ever on weapons of war to fight a threat that previously didn’t exist. A threat that Finland has made real by its new-found anti-Russia NATO militancy, with Putin promising to respond to Finland’s border build-up.

And among the beneficiaries of a new tooled-up and aggressive Finland are the arms dealers of the Israeli apartheid-genocide complex, which in 2024 sold Finland its questionably functional “David’s Sling” air defence system for €316 million. Finland has also bought tank and ship missiles from the Israeli company Rafael which supplied most of the weapons and equipment used to commit the genocide of Gaza. The Finnish government said Israel’s genocide of Gaza would not stop it buying weapons from the country, a position which is par for the course among the morally bankrupt leaders of Europe.

Finland is also spending €10 billion on US fighter jets, and a few billion euros on missiles and glide bombs to fire from those jets.

It’s all utterly deranged, but completely unsurprising given the Russophobia which pervades all European halls of power and has become embedded on the continent.

Finland has effectively taken a scythe to all the things that made it, in the eyes of many, the envy of the world. The country has trashed the model which delivered such a high standard of living, a model which included neutrality and good relations with Russia.

Instead the country has enacted a self-imposed structural adjustment programme to pay for membership of a military alliance it didn’t need, with that membership creating an enemy that didn’t exist, an enemy which happens to be a nuclear superpower with which it shares a huge border.

The price has been, and will continue to be a steep one, and it is a price ordinary Finns will be paying for a long time.

But it is not just in Finland.

We are watching, across Europe, the shameful replacement of the welfare state with the warfare state while the merchants of genocide and death laugh all the way to the bank.

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