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Abstract
Recently, Finland and Sweden decided to substantially deepen their defence cooperation and this project involves creating a bilateral standing Naval Task Group (SFNTG). The present article aims at examining the deepening naval cooperation between Finland and Sweden from a regional integration perspective, focusing on its motives, current challenges and future prospects. Driven by perceptions of common challenges and desires for cost-effectiveness, and strengthened by recent successes on sea surveillance and a combined Amphibious Task Unit, the bilateral project has considerable potential to achieve success. To fulfil its objectives, substantial legal changes in both countries are required to allow the use of force on each other’s territorial waters. To cater for the requirement of not conflicting with EU, NORDEFCO or NATO cooperations, the bilateral Task Group must operate according to NATO standards and by using English as the language in command and control. The costs of adjusting the naval units to NATO’s technical requirements are far from negligible and this issue still remains to be solved. If Finland and Sweden manage to incorporate new policies, common structures and common organisational norms among their navies, an even deeper integration, as in Belgium and the Netherlands, are conceivable.
Notes
1. Established by the Treaty of Maastricht, signed on 7 February 1992.
2. Specifying five principal threats: (i) terrorism; (ii) proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction; (iii) regional conflicts; (iv) state failure; and (v) organised crime.
3. To Hoffmann (Citation1966, p. 882), permanent excesses of losses over gains made integration of “high politics” unlikely.
4. based on a positive feedback loop to a specific institutional arrangement.
5. Introduced in 2012, it involves pooling and sharing of military capabilities, priority setting and procurement coordination among NATO members (Doninovska Citation2014).
6. Westberg (Citation2015, p. 99) finds neofunctionalism’s spillover process applicable to the study of NORDEFCO’s internal dynamics by limiting its ulterior aim of creating supranational institutions to the advancement of its member states’ national and collective defence capabilities.
7. Requiring “functional”, “technical” and “political” spillover as specified by Haas (Citation1971) and Schmitter (Citation1970).
8. Equating Schmitter’s concepts “spill-around” and “muddle-about”.
9. Equating Schmitter’s concept “spill-back”.
10. The Netherlands’ 2015 defence budget amounted to EUR 8 billion, while that of Belgium was EUR 3.58 billion. In 1995, the Netherlands spent EUR 6.35 billion and Belgium EUR 3.25 billion on defence.
11. The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research.
12. Company producing electronics for defence and security applications.
13. The sum of 63,912 km2 (the Netherlands [Europe]), 68,783 km2 (the Netherlands Antilles [Leeward]) and 12,169 km2 (the Netherland Antilles [Windward]).
14. Chief of Staff at the Netherlands-Belgian Operational Warfare School.
15. Assistant Chief of Staff of the Policy Branch of the Benelux Steering Group.
16. It spurred a 2008 Swedish–Finnish initiative on unclassified MDA cooperation – Sea Surveillance Cooperation Baltic Sea (SUCBAS) – in the Baltic Sea (Lundqvist Citationforthcoming). Since March 2015, SUCBAS comprises Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the UK.
17. Sweden allocated EUR 1.77 billion (SEK 16.9 billion) to procurement, maintenance, and R&D, EUR 0.11 billion (SEK 1.04 billion) to its Coast Guard and EUR 0.30 billion (SEK 2.82 billion) to its civil emergency agencies in 2015 (CoF Swe Citation2014, pp. 9–10).
18. 1600 permanently assigned personnel. 1900 conscripts undertake basic training.
19. Although the perpetrator remains unconfirmed (SwAF Citation2015b), experts widely assume Russian involvement.
20. Attended also by the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.