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512 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1990)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0512 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD NORDIC SECURITY: PAST MIRRORS AND FUTURE FACES The Nordic area has been characterized as a low-tension area during the cold-war period. The Nordic states chose not to constitute their own security organization. Autarchic solutions would have collided with the realities of geography and great-power interests; they exceeded the capacity and incli- nation of the Nordic states. They chose different roads to security; however, they also chose to take into account the position and interests of their neighbors when making decisions about security. Over time a system of mutual consideration and restraint emerged, particularly in regard to the engagement of external powers in the management of the security arrange- ments. The Nordic security system was not the product of deliberate design but rather the aggregated result of incremental decisions and adjustment. The factual situation assumed normative functions over time; maintaining the tradition of mutual consideration and restraint became a shared objective in security policymaking. THE NORDIC SYSTEM OF MUTUAL CONSIDERATION AND RESISTANCE The basic structure of the Nordic security system is well known and has been analyzed, some would claim overanalyzed, through the years. It is characterized by a decreasing degree of integration into the Western system of defense arrangements as we move from the West to the East. Iceland's defenses depend on American forces stationed there-the Iceland Defence Force-as the country maintains no military forces on its own. Norway and Denmark are founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but their participation in the military aspects of the alliance is circumscribed by political decisions not to accept the stationing of foreign troops in peacetime or to allow deployment or stockpiling of nuclear and chemical munitions. Sweden pursues a policy of nonalignment aiming for armed neutrality in the event of war. Finland is also nonaligned, but its policy stance is circumscribed by a treaty of friendship and mutual assistance with the Soviet Union. The Nordic security system has sometimes been referred to as a Nordic balance, a term that seems inappropriate as a label since the Nordic states are not poised against each other nor is there any equivalence between the commitments assumed by Iceland, Denmark, and Norway in NATO and Finland's obligations under its treaty with Moscow. The Nordic states chose their different roads to security in the postwar era largely on the basis of their experiences during World War II. That traumatic watershed continues to condition responses and reflexes in the realm of 8

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