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Abstract
After the breakup of the Eastern Bloc, NATO started transforming from a military alliance of the West to a cooperative security organisation of Europe as a whole. When strengthening liaison with the former Warsaw Pact countries, an important German–American initiative was the establishment of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC). From the perspective of Germany, the NACC widened the scope for the European security dimension, whose core element was the Western European Union (WEU). In Finland and Sweden, changes in security thinking resulted in adjustments in the policy of neutrality. The chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl was an active spokesperson for Finnish and Swedish memberships in the European Community (EC) and Nordic participation in the WEU, but for the first time, this article examines to what extent Germany was involved when Finland and Sweden started building their relations with the NACC.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges her gratitude to the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation and to the members of the BALTRANS research project for providing support for this article.
Notes
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74 Statement by Dr. Paavo Väyrynen, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Finland, Opening Stage of the Fourth Follow-up Meeting of the CSCE 25.3.1992, available at the electronic document archive of Finnish foreign policy called Eilen: https://www.eilen.fi/fi/3012/?language=en (accessed 4.5.2022).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marjo Uutela
Marjo Uutela is a visiting researcher at the Department for Northern European Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin. She received her doctorate at the University of Helsinki in 2018. Her current research focuses on Nordic-German relations after the end of the Cold War.