Finlandisation bites Putin’s pussycats

During the Second World War Finland committed the cardinal error of making an alliance with Hitler to fight Soviet Russia. It was what the English call "Hobson’s choice". There wasn’t one. Germany lost the war but saved Finland. The Red Army never occupied Finland, being preoccupied with the race for Berlin before the Yanks got there.

Finland did not have the luxury of choosing its enemy’s enemy and nor, in truth, did the British have much choice about their wartime buddies. King George VI presented a Sword of Honour to Joe Stalin and the Archbishop of Canterbury praised the murderous atheist as little short of the saviour of mankind.

After that, during the Cold War, Western leaders conveniently forgot what a jolly good fellow Stalin had so recently been. As for Finland, on the wrong side when the music stopped, it was frowned on for being the creature of the USSR.

In the 1950s the then Austrian foreign minister Karl Gruber warned his countrymen - previously part of the Axis, now up against the Soviet bloc - not to go down the Finnish track. Ten years later the term Finlandisierung was coined by the West German scholar Richard Löwenthal from the Freie Universität in Berlin. It stuck, as the description of a special, not quite decent, and certainly not-properly-Western, dependency.

Finland had become, in political terms, not neutral but neutered by its relationship with the Soviet Union, which expected the Finns - in return for not invading them in 1944 - not to rock the boat and understand that they were expected never to act against Soviet global interests.

In the 1960s, the Bavarian maverick right-winger Franz-Josef Strauss used the term to attack Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the slippery slope, according to him, to Finlandising Germany itself.

Then Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s adviser on US national security, along with Charles L. Sutzberger of the New York Times, warned European countries not to do as the Finns had been forced to do, and "to resist Russian desiderata".

It was the worst possible insult. The Finns had killed more than a million Russian soldiers and kept their soil intact. Now the hypocrites of the West, Stalin’s allies, had the effrontery to condescend to them!

But up North we take little satisfaction in observing that Finlandisation is still alive and kicking - but in western Europe nowadays, where the politicians, notably in Germany and France, are like pussycats when it comes to dealing with Vladimir Putin’s new democratic Russia. OK, sometimes, when no one is watching, Finns indulge in a hint of Schadenfreude.

During the Second World War Finland committed the cardinal error of making an alliance with Hitler to fight Soviet Russia. It was what the English call "Hobson’s choice". There wasn’t one. Germany lost the war but saved Finland. The Red Army never occupied Finland, being preoccupied with the race for Berlin before the Yanks got there.

• Primary Source