SIPRI Policy Paper No. 13

Territorial Disarmament in Northern Europe: The Epilogue of a Success Story?

Matthieu Chillaud

Since the end of the cold war, while the map of Europe as a whole has been transformed, the quality of a certain apartness in the Nordic states’ relation to the main strategic business of the continent has shown a remarkable power of survival. Even such sweeping changes as the entry of Poland and the three Baltic states into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have hardly impacted upon Finland’s or Sweden’s continuing attachment to their non-allied status, or the various opt-outs of Denmark and Norway from both NATO’s and the European Union’s defence-related affairs. NATO itself adopted one similar device for limiting tensions, when it chose not to base nuclear weapons or foreign forces in peacetime on the territory of its new member states.

This Policy Paper begins by examining in depth the legal meaning and strategic rationale of the whole range of national and interstate measures that may be summed up as ‘territorial disarmament’. It shows how different Nordic states and territories have acquired their various special statuses by stages through history and brings out the complex motivations involved that often relate not just to external security, but also to feelings about identity and domestic governance. The last chapter turns to current strategic politics and raises some pertinent questions—worthy of further research—about whether the Nordic penchant for separation will and should survive in face of the continuing shift of European security challenges and priorities towards dimensions that are either transnational (like terrorist threats and epidemics) or entirely non-territorial. The appendix contains the relevant sections of many of the key agreements, including some that are otherwise hard to find, that have created and recorded measures of territorial disarmament in Northern Europe.

1. Introduction

2. The concept of territorial disarmament

3. Cases of territorial disarmament in Northern Europe

4. The functionality of territorial disarmament, past and present

Appendix

Matthieu Chillaud (France) is currently a PhD candidate in political science at the Université Montesquieu–Bordeaux IV. He is also an associate researcher at the university’s Centre d’analyse politique comparée, de géostratégie et de relations internationales (CAPCGRI) and at the Department of Political Science of the University of Tartu, Estonia. After receiving a masters degree in Arms Control, Disarmament and Verification at the Université de Marne-la-Vallée, he worked at the French Ministry of Defence as an analyst in the Delegation of Strategic Affairs (Délégation aux affaires stratégiques), where he dealt mainly with France’s policy towards the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. More recently, he was a guest researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki, and a teaching assistant in political science at the Université Montesquieu–Bordeaux IV. From October 2005 to March 2006 he was a guest scholar at SIPRI under a Lavoisier fellowship received from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has written several articles on strategic issues in Northern Europe in Annuaire français de relations internationales and Nordiques.

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