Neutrality and Neutralism in the Global Cold War

Between or Within the Blocs?

Sandra Bott, Jussi M. Hanhimaki, Janick Schaufelbuehl, Marco Wyss, Sandra Bott, Jussi M. Hanhimaki, Janick Schaufelbuehl, Marco Wyss

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317502692
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Historia
• Sous-sujet: Historia del siglo XX

This book sheds new light on the foreign policies, roles, and positions of neutral states and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the global Cold War.

The volume places the neutral states and the NAM in the context of the Cold War and demonstrates the links between the East, the West, and the so-called Third World. In doing so, this collection provides readers an alternative way of exploring the evolution and impact of the Cold War on North-South connections that challenges traditional notions of the post-1945 history of international relations. The various contributions are framed against the backdrop of the evolution of the Cold War international system and the decolonization process in the Southern hemisphere. By juxtaposing the policies of European neutrals and countries of the NAM, this book offers new perspectives on the evolution of the Cold War. With the links between these two groups of countries receiving very little attention in Cold War scholarship, the volume thus offers a window into a hitherto neglected perspective on the Cold War. Via a series of case studies, the chapters here present new viewpoints on the evolution of the global Cold War through the exploration of the ensuing internal and (mainly) external policy choices of these nations.

This book will be of much interest to students of Cold War Studies, international history, foreign policy, security studies and IR in general.

Part I The evolution of neutrality and non-alignment

1 Non-aligned to what?

European neutrality and the Cold War

Jussi M. Hanhimäki

DOI: 10.4324/9781315715001-2

Introduction

In the spring of 1990, the author of this article, at the time a graduate student at Boston University, spent a week in Washington, D.C., being exposed, alongside 20 other international students from various US universities, to the ways and means of the American government. Our opening speaker was Paul Bremer of Kissinger Associates (and of later Iraq ‘fame’). He addressed an odd recent development: the Soviet Union’s retreat from Eastern Europe. He impressed upon us a triumphalist version of this historical evolution and pontificated on the legacy of the Cold War. Although he remained wary of predicting the eventual dissolution of the USSR, Bremer was unshaken in his belief that the Cold War had indeed been an all-encompassing phenomenon. No country on earth had remained unaffected by the twilight struggle between East and West that had defined the post-World War II era. Most pertinently for the purposes of this chapter, Bremer added that while the ranks of the non-aligned countries had grown in the past few decades, that phenomenon was, in fact, a by-product of the East–West (Soviet–American) confrontation. “Non-aligned to what?” he asked. The meaning and raison d’être of non-alignment was dependent upon the bipolar divisions of the Cold War.¹

Bremer’s comments reflected one view about the countries that, in the four-and-a-half-decade-long period we know as the Cold War, chose not to join a military alliance directed by either the United States or the Soviet Union. But it was a view that hardly did justice to the complex rationales behind the policies adopted by those countries that did not join NATO, the Warsaw Pact or any other military alliance that had been formed in the first decade of the Cold War. For many of the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), remaining outside the Cold War was hardly the sole determinant in their respective foreign policy choices. Avoiding dependency – military, economic or otherwise – was more to the point. The fact that there was more to non-alignment than simply positioning one’s nation between Moscow and Washington is also illustrated by the simple fact that – unknown to Bremer at the time – the NAM would actually outlive the Cold War.²

The history of European neutrality – the main focus of this chapter – further illustrates how the phenomenon of non-alignment was not confined to the Cold War context. As a national security policy, European neutrality, unlike the NAM, was already a ‘longue durée’ phenomenon before World War II had even started. The Swiss, for example, claim that their neutrality dates back to pre-Westphalian times; the Swedes enjoy stressing how their country’s foreign policy emerged at the time of the Napoleonic wars; and the Finns had attempted to forge a neutral policy ever since their independence in 1917. Moreover, neutrality (and non-alignment) outlasted the Cold War international system. The first major point of this chapter therefore is to underscore the fact that while the Cold War was important in defining national security policy choices – in setting the parameters – it was not the only factor.³

Notwithstanding the fact that neutrality may have been a long-standing policy choice, however, there was something peculiar to Cold War European neutrality. After all, the Cold War as an international system had its specific features – the role of ideology first and foremost among them – that made it difficult, in domestic politics and external interactions, for countries to practice ‘pure’ real-politik. In other words, whether a country decided to join NATO or the Warsaw Pact was not the only issue at stake, the only choice to be made. As Arne Westad puts it, the Cold War defined not only patterns of alliance, but also “models of state building, and discourses on society on a global scale”.⁴

This general aspect of the Cold War leads to the second major point of this chapter. If the Cold War had something to do with the question of how societies were constructed, and how significant the state’s role was in economic and social interactions, then the neutrals were not ‘truly’ neutral. By and large all countries were ‘western’ neutrals, democracies with a sizeable – albeit hardly identically so – private sector. Among the neutrals was Switzerland, perhaps the socially most conservative country in Europe, and Sweden, often regarded as an avant-garde workshop of modernity. Yet, in part because of their specific societal constructions, the neutrals were symbolically important in the context of the Cold War. They could offer warning signals, scenarios of what might happen (witness the heated debate about ‘Finlandisation’), or be used as model states (e.g. Austrian neutrality and the possibility of German unification-neutralisation). In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans in particular worried publicly and privately about the ‘spectre of neutralism’ in Europe.⁵

The third, and related, point is that Europe’s neutrals themselves were not passive players or uninterested bystanders within the Cold War context. Many neutrals played an important role either as bridge-builders between the East and West (Finland’s role in the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) is often cited as a case in point), or as active propagators of some form of convergence between capitalism and socialism (the Swedish Model, or the Middle Way). Moreover, neutrals may have remained outside the process of alliance building, but they were part of the ‘big debate’ about state and society. Some, Sweden standing out in this regard, even took on the role of global moralisers, actively criticising American and Soviet interventions and promoting the cause of the developing world.⁶

None of this is to argue that the small European neutrals were, somehow, hugely influential in shaping the international history of the Cold War. This would be a counterfactual argument; one of the reasons why countries like Austria and Finland were able to practice neutrality after World War II was that they were but minor players on the international scene. Yet, the history of European neutrality during the Cold War is, as recent research has further shown, far more complex and multifaceted – fascinating might be an overstatement – than previously understood.

The emergence of Cold War neutrality

As already noted, European neutrality was not simply a by-product of the Cold War. The ‘official’ Swiss perspective dates the country’s neutrality back to the sixteenth century, or, in the more conservative version, to the Congress of Vienna.

Sweden – a nation that had commanded a large Northern European empire – gradually adopted its neutral (or non-aligned) foreign policy in the nineteenth century following the Napoleonic wars that brought an end to the country’s great power ambitions. In both countries neutrality evolved into a historically successful policy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because of a number of factors – the unfashionable notion of geopolitics first and foremost among them.

Indeed, by the mid-twentieth century neutrality was not only a chosen foreign policy stance vis-à-vis the rest of the world for Sweden and Switzerland; it had become part of a national identity that had been reinforced by the simple fact that both countries had escaped direct involvement in the two world wars. The logic for continuing such policies, one could argue, was simple: if it is not broken, why fix it? As the Swedes and the Swiss surveyed the sorry state of their neighbours in 1945, there was little reason to believe that the fundamentals of their respective foreign policies needed readjustment. Moreover, having survived – if not without a few blemishes – the two world wars, the neutrality of Sweden and Switzerland was a de facto part of the landscape of European geopolitics.⁷

Not so with Austria and Finland. If Sweden and Switzerland could build upon a long tradition of pre-1945 neutrality that was internationally recognised long before the East–West confrontation emerged as the defining feature of the European state system, Austria and Finland’s foreign policies were defined in tandem with the evolution of the Cold War. In fact, one could argue that without the Cold War neither country would have been able – or forced – to pursue neutrality as a national foreign and security policy. Their neutrality was in essence a by-product of the Cold War. Significantly, because Austrian and Finnish neutrality was so closely tied to the evolution of the early Cold War in Europe, it made neutrality into a questionable construct; ‘true’ neutrality was increasingly difficult to achieve within the context of the bloc formation and ideological juxtaposing that divided Europe in the first decade after World War II.

Austria effectively had neutrality bestowed upon it as a precondition for state-hood. The Austrian State Treaty of 15 May 1955 finally ended a decade long occupation of the country by American, British, French and Soviet troops (which had been preceded by a seven-year occupation by German troops). Independence came with a price, however: the Soviets insisted that the new Austrian state commit itself to remaining neutral. Accordingly, on 26 October 1955 – the day after the last foreign troops had left the country – the Austrian Parliament passed a constitutional act declaring that the country would remain permanently neutral. To make the point clear, 26 October was made a national holiday in newly independent Austria.⁸

The Austrian settlement was closely related to the institutionalisation and eventual stabilisation of the East–West division of Europe. On 9 May 1955, only a week prior to the signing of the Austrian State Treaty, the Federal Republic of Germany had joined NATO; on 14 May the Warsaw Pact, incorporating East Germany, was formed. Indeed, the major objective behind certain Soviet concessions to Austria during the rapid negotiations was undoubtedly to pre-empt the possibility that a future Viennese government would consider joining NATO. The long-term result, though, was that the geopolitical map of Cold War Europe was effectively finalised within one week in May 1955. And, more importantly for the purpose of this chapter, neutrality was considered as a useful compromise solution for certain contested cases. After a decade of tension and uncertainty, and notwithstanding the unresolved status of Berlin, peaceful coexistence was beginning to emerge, symbolised by the so-called Spirit of Geneva, the high-level meeting held in Switzerland in July 1955.⁹ As the Finnish scholar Harto Hakovirta put it, the years 1955–56 marked “the most dramatic expansion of post-war European neutrality”.¹⁰

This was good news for Finland. Sandwiched between the Soviet Union and Sweden, the country had maintained a precarious position ever since its independence in 1918. Having fought on the ‘wrong’ side of World War II, the Finns had managed to avoid outright occupation by negotiating a separate armistice in 1944, but were compelled to cede a significant part of their territory and to pay heavy reparations to the USSR (completed in 1952). In 1948, Finland had signed a security pact with the Soviet Union that guaranteed that Finland would not be used as a base for an attack against the USSR. While the treaty also spelled out Finland’s desire to remain outside great power conflicts, there were few in the late 1940s who would have referred to Finland as a neutral country. This began to change in the mid-1950s. By 1956, the Soviet removal of a naval base in Porkkala (approximately 40 kilometres south-west of Helsinki), Finland’s membership of the United Nations (UN) and Nikita Khrushchev’s public acknowledgement of Finland’s neutral status provided for a substantial improvement in the country’s international standing and claim to neutrality. Yet, the proximity to the Soviet Union, the continued existence of the 1948 treaty and the prospect of Soviet intervention in Finland’s domestic politics made the country’s status a precarious one.¹¹

To cut a long story short, by the mid-1950s, the division of Europe into groups of countries that were either allied or neutral/non-aligned was essentially settled. Sweden and Switzerland had successfully adapted their foreign policies to fit the new order; Austria and Finland had at least begun to stabilise their international positions. Add to the mix Yugoslavia and Ireland – two other non-aligned countries with very different geopolitical positions and ideological outlooks that are outside the scope of th...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: a tightrope walk – neutrality and neutralism in the global Cold War
• PART I The evolution of neutrality and non-alignment
• PART II Neutrality and neutralism in practice
• Conclusion: neutrality and non-alignment during and beyond the Cold War
• Index