In the new Europe of Russia’s making, there’s no room for neutrality

Military neutrality works when potential adversaries respect it. After the invasion of Ukraine, two of the most serious and respected neutral states in the world have decided that Russia may no longer respect their neutrality. Neither Sweden nor Finland has ever used rose-tinted spectacles when looking at Russia and both countries have long had credible defensive military forces as deterrents to Russian adventurism. But the war in Ukraine is a tipping point for Stockholm and Helsinki.

They and their populations have seen the ruthless disregard Moscow has shown for sovereign independence and international law and doubt they can any longer trust in neutrality to protect their security when such an aggressor is on the prowl across Europe. They have drawn another conclusion as well: that their societal values and EU vocations will not allow them to stand aside indifferent to the sheer brutality of the war Russia has chosen to fight. What, they ask themselves, is there left to be neutral about? 

NATO will be strengthened if – more likely, when – Sweden and Finland are admitted. Europe’s security architecture will change significantly. But no less telling is their abandonment of neutrality. What might it mean for the other neutral states in Europe and what lessons will they – and Russia – draw from it? Might even Switzerland, the most ancient of neutrals, subtly tack away from neutrality? Will Russia any longer respect the neutrality of Moldova? In the new Europe Russia is forcing into existence, is there any real room for neutrality?

Neutrality is a relatively modern concept and practice. It was a former Russian leader, Tsar Nicholas II, who convened the 1907 Hague Conference which incorporated in an international treaty the rights (and obligations) of neutral states. A few had been effectively neutral for at least a hundred years already, most notably Switzerland as well as Sweden and Belgium since 1839.

Others sought a similar neutral status as European empires crumbled after the First World War and the number of states grew in number. In the years after the Second World War, a somewhat quixotic medley of states fell into the neutral category including – alongside Switzerland and Sweden plus Ireland from 1939 – Austria, Costa Rica, San Marino, Vatican City, Mexico, Singapore, Japan, Mongolia, Panama and Malta.

As the Cold War shaped alliances and loyalties and the impact of decolonisation added to the complex patterning in a burgeoning United Nations, neutrality took new forms and conflicts arose that some countries felt were no concern of theirs. To militarily neutral states was added a new category reflected in the global non-aligned movement with India and Indonesia among its early leaders. 

But as the Cold War unfroze there was increasingly less to seek neutrality or non-alignment from. Or so it might have seemed unless you were seeking to escape from the residual grip of the Soviet Empire. The names of the countries that claimed military neutrality after 1990 are revealing: Moldova in 1994, Turkmenistan in 1995, and Uzbekistan in 2012. Others sought international guarantees of one sort or another, not least Ukraine when forgoing nuclear weapons in 1994.

If neutrality is to be more than just an aspiration it needs to be accepted by others. A revanchist Russia under Vladimir Putin has offered few if any territorial guarantees and those neutral states bordering Russia have become increasingly uneasy. After the takeover of Crimea in 2014 only amber rather than red warning signs came on for some observers.

Certain European countries had already learnt from bitter experience that autocratic dictatorships are either dangerously unpredictable or all too predictable. Belgium after the First World War and The Netherlands after the Second World War had learned that neutrality had not saved them from revanchist German governments, and in the face of Stalin’s Soviet Union they opted to join NATO in 1949. 

Now hitherto neutral Sweden and Finland are learning a lesson and are wanting to increase their own security, even if joining NATO will pose other risks and generate noisy Russian clamouring and threats. Any regular reader of the Swiss media in recent weeks is well aware of growing Swiss unease at the developments to their east.

The wider world beyond Europe, not least China and India, have calibrated their reactions to Russian aggression according to their own circumstances. Many (though not all) countries outside Europe want to stay out of what they see as unfinished business from a Cold War they avoided.

Standing aside is not the same as being neutral according to international law. Neutrality and non-alignment are not identical. Neither India nor China are neutral about the conflict in Ukraine though they don’t want to be drawn into it directly. They see no overriding principle at stake for them; for particular and often complex economic and other reasons of their own they want to stand aside, or at least avoid taking sides. Self-interests are not, however, the same as principles. 

From the 1950s onwards a large number of countries, often only recently decolonised, sought to place themselves outside the reach of the major powers. This policy of “non-alignment” made more sense when the post-Second World War world was divided into broad zones or groupings led respectively by the US and the Soviet Union.

With the “old” Cold War ended those groupings became less stable or even collapsed as new powers rose in East Asia. International alignments changed accordingly. Standing aside became a more complicated option. 

In Europe, neutral states were accepted as part of the pattern inherited or shaped after the Second World War. But each had become neutral in a different way and for different reasons and with varying degrees of success. Switzerland became neutral first in 1648 following the Treaty of Westphalia but Napoleon had no regard for that when he invaded the country in 1798.

Sweden acted as if neutral for many decades before others recognised it as such (alongside that of Switzerland) at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and again in 1919. Ireland opted for neutrality in 1939 as much to avoid fighting alongside Britain as to evade the prospective European conflict. Austria had neutrality thrust upon it – not least by Russia – in 1955.

Finland took on the status in the same year as part of its efforts to loosen the Soviet Union’s hold over it. Malta opted for neutrality only in 1980, reflecting the deep aversion to military conflict of a small country incredibly heavily bombed in the Second World War.

What has changed the context for all these European neutrals has been the development of the EU – of which they are all members – and the changed geopolitics of Europe as a whole. For a while, the neutrals were a self-conscious grouping which from the 1970s had something of an intermediary or facilitating role between NATO and Warsaw Pact members in the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE). But with the end of the Cold War the neutrals lost that particular international role.

Europe re-shaped itself as the EU grew in membership and ambition in the 1990s. The EU sought a broadly defined security dimension alongside its political and economic goals. Whatever its longer-term pretensions its members realised it was no substitute for NATO with its strategic link to the United States; but the EU was becoming a more assertive “player” as the Central Europeans sought greater western alignment. Russia looked on concernedly and meddled where it could.

The broader development of the EU and the growing grievances of Putin’s Russia rustled against each other, though it was NATO expansion and US involvement that most worried the Russians. Meanwhile, the European neutrals faced troubling security dilemmas. The further they were away from Central Europe and the new geographical interface with Russia, the less concerned they were at remaining neutral.

The invasion of Ukraine has changed all that as Finland and Sweden are demonstrating both as near neighbours of Russia and as believers in the values and aspirations of the EU. But what of the other European neutrals? What exactly does the neutrality of Ireland, Malta and Austria mean any more, even to them? 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is causing unconscionable death, injury and destruction in that country; but it is also having less obvious collateral effects. Among these is the undermining of the security assumptions of many neutral European states.

It would be ironic if the current autocrat governing Russia should be responsible for weakening the sense of security of such states given it was an earlier Russian autocrat, Tsar Nicholas II, who over a hundred years ago played a pivotal role in the establishment of the legal status of neutral states.