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Soviet hegemony in these countries. In the end, the FCMA gave the Soviets less than they bargained for and recognized the limits of Soviet influence in Finland. By offering Stalin the necessary minimum in terms of military security, the Finns managed to prevent the Sovietization of the country. This does not mean that no costs were involved: Finland always had to take into account Soviet foreign policy priorities—a fact which did not go unnoticed in the other Nordic countries. Soviet pressure on Finland and the Friendship Treaty gave strong impetus to Norway's insistence on establishing a formal military relationship with the West in the spring of 1948. According to Korobochkin no evidence has been found to confirm Norwegian fears that a similar Soviet treaty offer to Norway was in the works. Yet the Finnish case showed how a superpower's hard-line approach toward one Nordic country could affect threat perceptions in another.

The Soviets reacted with diplomatic threats against Norway's NATO membership and extracted, in 1949, a promise from the Norwegians not to allow foreign military bases on their soil. Surprisingly, the Soviet Union spared Denmark, even as it stressed in Soviet propaganda that the political leaders of the Nordic members of the Western alliance had sold out to American "imperialists." It was not until 1953 that the Danes under Soviet pressure prohibited foreign bases in Denmark. The policy prohibiting nuclear weapons on Danish and Norwegian soil also reflected a desire not to provoke the Soviets. Iceland, however, did not adopt such a policy, even if it shared Norwegian and Danish anxieties about the role of nuclear weapons in Western military strategy.

The Soviets gradually came to see the Nordic countries in less threatening terms than other members of the Western Bloc. Since the attitude of the Nordic countries was friendlier, they had the potential of becoming what a leading former Soviet official, Georgi Arbatov (Director Emeritus of the then-Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute of USA and Canada) termed "a weaker link in the chain of the enemies of the Soviet Union."5 Thus by returning the Porkkala military base and allowing Finnish membership in the Nordic Council in 1955, the Soviets wanted to strengthen anti-NATO elements in Denmark and Norway as well as to elevate Sweden's neutral position. The Soviets scored some propaganda points in these efforts, but did not succeed in splitting NATO. And although less suspicious of the Nordic countries than other NATO-members, they did not treat them more leniently in their military planning. According to K.G.H. Hillingsø (Royal Danish Defense College), the Soviets consistently overestimated NATO forces, underrated effects of NATO nuclear weapons, and planned to use nuclear weapons as heavy artillery. What was surprising from the Western perspective was the planning for the early and massive Soviet use of nuclear weapons, if war broke out in Northern Europe.

Secondly, during the early Cold War, the Soviets took an inflexible attitude toward the Nordic Communist parties

and displayed on ideological grounds—unmitigated hostility toward Social Democracy in the Nordic region. One can argue that the relationship between the Soviet Communist Party and those of the Nordic countries was problematic from the beginning. Having adopted National Front tactics in 1945 (promoting Communist participation in mixed governments) the Soviets changed course in 1947, partly in response to the Marshall Plan. By forming the Cominform, the Kremlin sought to keep the emerging Communist parties as pure as possible and rejected any cooperation with Social Democrats. This position would, of course, allow the Soviets to exert more influence on these parties' policies, but deprived them of tactical flexibility and tended to reinforce their marginal status.

Only the Finnish Communist Party and the Icelandic Socialist Party maintained substantial electoral strength throughout the early Cold War. This did not, however, translate into tangible power gains. After its electoral defeat and removal from the Finnish Government in 1948, the Finnish Communist Party did not hold ministerial posts until the 1960s. The Icelandic Socialist Party had a similar experience, even if the circumstances were different. In contrast to the ouster of the Communists from coalition governments in Europe in 1947-1948, the Icelandic Socialist Party itself had been responsible for the downfall of a Left-to-Right coalition government in 1946 by opposing a treaty on landing rights for American military aircraft. After a 10-year exclusion, it managed briefly to join a coalition government from 1956 to 1958 as part of an electoral alliance with the non-Communist Left. After that sobering experience, they were left out in the cold for another 12 years.

There was a marked tendency within the Nordic Communist Parties to rely on nationalism to maintain political viability. Jón Ólafsson (Columbia University) emphasized that the Soviets could never accept the nationalistic agenda of the Icelandic Socialist Party, even if they knew that it was politically effective, especially in the struggle against U.S. military interests in Iceland." When the head of the Danish Communist Party, Aksel Larsen, decided to renounce Soviet ties and to form a new party in Denmark, the Soviets did nothing to repair the damage and turned down an offer by Einar Olgeirsson, the chairman of the Icelandic Socialist Party, to act as a mediator between the Danish Communist factions. The Soviets were, of course, fully aware of the limited influence of the Nordic Communist parties, especially after their electoral defeats in 1947-1948. But during the late 1940s and early 1950s, they relied to a large extent on local Communists parties for information. Only slowly did the Soviets begin to establish contacts with center parties, particularly farmers' parties in Denmark, Finland, and Iceland. The close relationship with Finnish President Urho Kekkonen, the leader of the Agrarian Party, was in a special category. But the Soviets also cultivated influential members of the Icelandic agrarian Progressive Party and the Danish Liberal-Agrarian Party (Venstre).

The Bulgarian Communist Party did the same thing, as Jordan Baev (Bulgarian Defense Ministry) pointed out." The relationship did not result in any political victories for the Soviets, but it gave them greater access to the political elite in these countries.

Conference participants stressed the negative Soviet position towards Nordic Social Democracy in the early Cold War. The Social Democratic parties dominated political life in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and were not prepared to give ground to the Communist Parties in these countries. As governing parties, however, they sought to avoid a confrontational course in international affairs and hoped to maintain good relations with the Soviet Union. The Finnish and Icelandic Social Democratic parties, in contrast, were far smaller and much more anti-Soviet than their other Nordic counterparts. As Mikko Majander (University of Helsinki) showed, the Finnish Social Democratic Party was extremely hostile toward the Communists at home and played an important role in keeping them out of power during the crucial years 1948-1949. A similar scenario was played out in Iceland, where there was a sharp divide between the Social Democrats and the Socialists.

With some justification, the Soviets blamed rightwing Social Democrats for the decision by Sweden, Norway, Denmark to join the Marshall Plan and for the integration of the Nordic countries into Western economic structures. As it turned out, only Iceland and Finland came close to dependence on barter trade with the Soviet Union during the 1950s. In the former case, the trade volume with the East Bloc reached a record of 35% of the total trade volume in 1957. But this trade was conducted for political rather than economic advantage. For a while in the early 1950s, the Soviet Bloc trade was approximately 18-20% of Finland's total trade. There is more than a touch of irony in the statistics. The Nordic country with the closest military and economic ties with the United States proved to be more dependent on the Soviet Bloc than the country with the closest political ties with the Soviet Union!

Third, the Soviets were, at the outset, suspicious of any attempts to promote Nordic cooperation or neutrality in the region. In the 1940s, the Soviet Union considered Nordic cooperation only a prelude to Western integration. It opposed, for example, the creation of a Scandinavian Defense Union in 1948-1949 and it prevented Finland from joining the Nordic Council until 1955, four years after its foundation. This policy could be criticized on the grounds that the Scandinavian Defense Union served the function of weakening Western solidarity in the crucial months leading up the formation of NATO. Similar arguments could be made with respect to the initial Soviet opposition to Swedish neutrality policies. In the 1950s, the Soviets finally reversed course and began to support Nordic cooperation and neutrality schemes. What was more, they began to prod-with no success, it turned out -the Nordic members of NATO to leave the Western

Alliance and to revert to their traditional policy of neutrality. In the end, Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution effectively scuttled Moscow's neutralist offensive in the Nordic countries. These twists and turns so characteristic of Soviet policies vis-a-vis the Nordic countries-pointed to a sense of improvisation and probing rather than extensive planning in the postwar period. The Soviets realized that they would not be able to reverse the Western integration of Denmark, Norway, and Iceland in the 1950s. By playing the neutralist card, however, they managed to weaken it.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Reykjavik conference was how intertwined were the seemingly disparate security issues in the Nordic region. Self-interest certainly constituted the overriding foreign policy guide. But the Nordic countries were extremely sensitive to the impact of great power politics as well as of their own actions on each other during the East-West struggle. The question of military bases in Greenland, Bornholm, and Iceland is a case in point. In 1945, the Danes were reluctant to allow the Americans to maintain the military presence in Greenland established during World War II, because they were afraid that the Soviets would insist on analogous military rights in Bornholm. For the same reason, the Danes did not welcome the American request for a long-term lease of military bases in Iceland in 1945. This view was shared by the Norwegians, who feared that U.S. base rights in Iceland would strengthen the Soviet demand for joint control over Spitzbergen.

The story of how the Americans achieved their military goals in Greenland and Iceland is another example of these interlocking relationships. During the early postwar period, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff considered Greenland, Iceland, and the Azores a military base area of primary importance. But when they sought military rights in these areas, they quickly ran into opposition. The Danes wanted to terminate the U.S. military presence in Greenland in the early postwar period, even if they did not press the issue. But to the surprise of the Danish Government—and in stark contrast to their anti-colonial public posture-the Americans went so far as to offer to buy Greenland in 1947! As Thorsten B. Olesen (University of Aarhus) showed, the war scare triggered by the Korean War neutralized Danish resistance to continued U.S. pressure, paving the way for the Danish-American base treaty in 1951.10 What transpired in Iceland was very similar: Because of Icelandic domestic political opposition, the Americans obtained only landing rights in 1946, but no military rights. Iceland even made the nonstationing of foreign troops a precondition for its NATO membership in 1949. Yet, in the wake of the Korean War, it abandoned this principle and concluded a bilateral defense treaty with the United States in 1951. These actions showed that the need for an American defense umbrella overrode, in the end, any qualms about the risks of being drawn into an East-West conflict and about the potential offensive use of Greenland and Iceland.

The process leading to NATO membership for Denmark, Norway, and Iceland is also illustrative of how the action of one Nordic country influenced the foreign policies of the others. If the Norwegians had not decided to join the Western Alliance for their own security reasons in 1949, the Danes-who had been the most enthusiastic supporters of the failed Scandinavian Defense Unionand the Icelanders undoubtedly would have rejected NATO membership. This display of interdependence was not limited to Nordic governments. The British and Americans often used Nordic contacts to influence the foreign policies of other Nordic countries. In 1950, the Norwegian foreign minister, Halvard Lange, agreed to press the Icelandic government to beef up military security in Iceland. When a left-wing government in Iceland threatened to close down the U.S. military base in 1956, the Norwegians tried to have the decision reversed. These Norwegian efforts were never decisive in influencing Icelandic policy. But the Americans and British got what they wanted in both cases.

The question of why the Norwegians played such a role cannot be explained solely in terms of Western military solidarity. There was an important element of self-interest at play here. Rolf Tamnes (Norwegian Defense Institute) demonstrated that the Norwegians placed much emphasis on a strong U.S. military presence in Iceland." During the tenure of another left-wing government in Iceland from 1971 to 1974, which promised to abrogate the defense agreement with the United States, the Norwegian government feared that a reduced U.S. military activity in Iceland would result in added American pressure on Norway in the military field. As it turned out, the Keflavik Base played a very important role in this area during the 1970s and 1980s. As Albert Jónsson (Office of the Icelandic Prime Ministry) pointed out, the U.S. Air Force aircraft intercepted more Soviet military aircraft near Iceland than anywhere in the world in the early 1980s. 12

A central point made by many participants at the Reykjavik conference was the influence of domestic political opinion on foreign policy. Specific policiessuch as the Danish and Norwegian decisions to exclude foreign bases or the stationing of nuclear weapons in Denmark and Norway-reflected public unease about the military costs and dangers of the Cold War. In some areas, the Americans seemed to have taken into account these preferences. According to Mats Berdal (Oxford University), there was hardly any U.S. pressure to reverse the Norwegian policy on military bases and nuclear weapons. To be sure, these declared policies amounted to little in practice, because NATO was a nuclear alliance. But the crux of the matter is that the political elites in Denmark, Norway, and Iceland always had to take one thing into account: that public sentiments were heavily influenced by a tradition of neutrality. Indeed, cabinet ministers in all the Nordic countries strove to refrain from taking any steps that could be interpreted by the Soviets as

being provocative. In the words of Bent Jensen (University of Odense), the Danes often behaved as if they were "semi-aligned" after having "half-heartedly joined the Western Alliance."14 Poul Villaume (University of Copenhagen) stressed the aversion of the Danes to crude American Cold War propaganda and showed how the United States increasingly relied on local organizations in Denmark to do the work for them, albeit with mixed results. Is

The downside of this political timidity was a government tendency in all the Nordic countries to minimize public debate about security issues—a tendency that, in some cases, came dangerously close to being a concerted effort to deceive the public. This has, for example, led to a major reassessment of key factors in Finnish, Swedish, and Danish foreign policies during the Cold War, one that has received much media attention in the Nordic countries in the last few years. Iceland was, to some degree, in a special category because of the U.S. military presence and because of its status as an unarmed country in NATO. This author argued that compared to other NATO-members, Iceland was in an inferior role in the Western Alliance from the beginning." It was considered a security risk, because it had no adequate system for protecting classified information during the 1940s and 1950s. It was NATO policy not to send any military documents classified above "confidential" or any important strategic-military plans to Iceland. The frequent tensions in U.S./NATO-Icelandic relations during the 1950s can no doubt be explained in part by this lack of communication.

The revelation, in 1995, that contrary to official policy, Danish Prime Minister H.C. Hansen gave the Americans a "green light" to station nuclear weapons in Greenland in 1957 has been widely debated in Denmark. In his presentation, Svend Aage Christensen-who was among the authors of a highly publicized Danish government report on the issue in 1997-made it clear that Hansen's concession was made under conditions of secrecy. In this way, the Soviet Union was not only prevented from exploiting this issue in the Cold War but also from exerting pressure on the Danes. Even more important, Hansen avoided a public debate about the new nuclear policy at a time when it did not have full backing at home or abroad. This policy put much strain on the Danish decision-making system. On the one hand, very few people had direct knowledge of the American storage of nuclear weapons in Greenland or of nuclear overflights over the island. On the other hand, many in government circles suspected what was going on. From 1959 to 1965, the Americans stationed NIKE surface-to-air missiles with nuclear warheads in Greenland. Interestingly enough, they also planned to store such weapons in Iceland during this period, but decided against it in the end, because they were needed in elsewhere.18 The Danes abandoned their dual nuclear policy in 1968 after a SAC B-52 bomber carrying nuclear weapons crashed in Thule. From then on,

the Danes prohibited the stationing of nuclear weapons in Greenland.

The Danes were not the only ones who decided to appoint a government commission to study a controversial aspect of their foreign policy during the Cold War. During this decade, a major debate has taken place in Sweden over its role in the Cold War. One reason was the attempt to keep security policy out of the public domain. It has been argued that Swedish parliamentary debates were well-orchestrated performances with little informative value designed to calm public opinion. What sparked the debate in Sweden was the publication, in the early 1990s, of a number of highly critical revisionist books and articles on the record of Sweden's foreign policy during the Cold War. A double standard the argument went — guided Swedish foreign policy over the previous decades, when officially neutral Sweden almost seemed like a NATO member. In 1992, the Swedish government set up the Commission on Swedish Policy to study Sweden's military contacts with the Western Powers during the Cold War. In its 1994 report, the Commission revealed that extensive planning and preparatory work had been conducted in Sweden to facilitate wartime cooperation with NATO in the case of a Soviet attack. It concluded, however, that these contacts were not as extensive as the revisionists had claimed. Moreover, it argued that the Swedish government did not overstep the basic selfimposed boundaries of peacetime non-alignment. The Swedes did not enter into any binding military commitments with the Western Powers. In that sense, Sweden remained "neutral," even if the public was not informed of the country's preparations for different contingencies.

19

All the conference participants in Reykjavik who dealt with Sweden touched on this debate in one way or another. Juhana Aunesluoma (Oxford University) argued that the British played a pivotal role in establishing contacts between the West and Sweden in the early Cold War. The British Government showed understanding for Sweden's neutrality policy and influenced the evolution of U.S. thinking on the issue. Having taken a very critical attitude toward Swedish neutrality policies in 1948, the Americans gradually accepted it for geopolitical reasons, albeit without enthusiasm. While taking note of the discrepancy between what was officially said and tacitly done, Mikael af Malmborg (University of Lund) argued that the West and Sweden struck a good deal.20 Through Sweden's significant military resources, the United States and NATO assured a satisfactory defense along the long northern European Flank without any costs and binding commitments. An overt agreement would have meant a mutual pledge of automatic support in a future war.

Despite its concessions to NATO, Sweden maintained its policy of non-confrontation towards the Soviet Union, which was regarded as important as a strong military defense. This raises important questions of interdependence. Ingemar Dörfer (Swedish Institute for

Defense Studies) disagreed with Malmborg, arguing that Sweden was totally dependent on the Western Alliance militarily and economically. For this reason, he argues, it should have made a formal commitment to the West by taking sides in the Cold War.21 Jaakko Iloniemi (former Finnish Ambassador to the United States) went even so far as to argue that despite the 1948 Friendship Treaty with the Soviet Union Finland was, in fact, more neutral than Sweden during the Cold War, since it did not enter into any informal military arrangements with the Soviets.

There was always a strong undercurrent in Swedish society on the center-right to abandon non-alignment under the Social Democrats based on Sweden's Western democratic traditions and ideology. Thus Sune Persson (University of Gothenburg)-co-director of a major research project on Sweden during the Cold War-argued that Swedish security policy was a "consensus under disagreement."22 Domestic contradictions as well as the dramatic change in the implementation of Sweden's security policy during the Cold War was rooted in a failed effort to bridge idealism and Realpolitik. This was reflected in the tension between national sovereignty and international dependence, between ideological proWestern orientation and non-alignment, and between a democratic open society and military demands for secrecy. This is another indication of the important role of public opinion in the calculations of Nordic policymakers. As Krister Wahlbäck (Swedish Foreign Ministry) pointed out, the Swedish Social Democrats always had to take the left-wing of the party into account in the implementation of Sweden's neutrality policy and make sure that leftist voters did not defect to the Communists. This dilemma of juggling Realpolitik and idealism resulted in excessive secrecy and efforts by political leaders to conceal military contacts with the West from their own party members and the public.

The impact of the Cold War on Nordic culture remains an understudied field. One need not dwell on the pervasive influence of American culture in the Nordic countries. Jussi Hanhimäki (London School of Economics) argued, however, that no major cultural conflicts existed between Scandinavia and the United States during this period.23 There were certainly tensions in some areas, reaching a climax with the near breakdown in Swedish-American relations during the Vietnam War. And the presence of U.S. forces in Iceland was so unpopular that it led to a ban on off-base movements of soldiers. Indeed, as Ólafur Hardarsson (University of Iceland) pointed out, a large majority of the Icelanders wanted to close down the base in Keflavik in 1955 on cultural grounds, according to a secret public opinion poll sponsored by the U.S. Government.24 There were also persistent Nordic criticisms of McCarthyism and the reputedly excessive role of religion, racism, and poverty in American society. Conversely, the Americans found fault with "the godless Middle Way" as expressedstereotypically-in "sin, suicide, socialism, and

smorgasbord." Yet, Hanhimäki maintained that there were many more factors drawing the countries together than apart and that the Scandinavians thought of themselves as part of the same Western value system as the Americans. Soviet cultural influence was, of course, far less pronounced in the Nordic countries. Again, Finland and Iceland seem to have provided the most fertile ground. Given the proximity and close political relations with the Soviet Union, this was logical in the Finnish case. In Iceland, the Soviets were surprisingly active, not least because of the strong position of the Icelandic Socialist Party, because of the high level of trade between the two countries, and because of the U.S. military presence. Apart from funding the activities of the Soviet-Icelandic Friendship Society, the Soviets sponsored lavish cultural events in Iceland. Americans realized that they could did not sit idly by, and what followed was a sort of a Kulturkampf: in the 1950s, both superpowers spent large sums of money to influence the hearts and minds of the Icelanders in the political-cultural sphere. As it turned out, this worked both ways. As Árni Bergmann (University of Iceland) argued, the Soviets began to project an image of Iceland that was far more positive than of Western societies in general.25 To be sure, the Nordic countries in general got much credit for their cultural achievementand Finland and Sweden some extra bonus for their neutrality policies in the late 1950s. But Iceland was somehow put in a special category in terms of the level of Soviet praise heaped upon its culture.

Given the divergent paths taken by the Nordic countries in the Cold War, one is reluctant to lump them together in a geopolitical sense. Pan-Nordic interests were never allowed to determine the direction of the foreign policies of the states involved. Indeed, the Cold War tended to underscore Nordic disunity rather than harmony. That the Nordic countries belonged to the West, and— with the exception of Finland-were closely integrated into Western economic structures is, of course, a well known fact. Yet, they all had to take into account the policies of the Soviet Union for political, economic, or security reasons. As reluctant participants in the Cold War, they were striving for an imaginary middle ground designed to lessen (or remain aloof from) East-West tensions. For this reason, they could never be taken for granted by the Great Powers. Whether "non-aligned" (Sweden and Finland) or “aligned" (Denmark, Norway, and Iceland), they were dressed in gray-and they adopted a foreign policy stance that closely matched the color, laying somewhere between solidarity and neutrality.

Alexei A. Komarov, "From World War II to the Cold War: Soviet Interests in Finland and Norway, 1944-47.”

2 Kimmo Rentola, "The Spring of 1948: Which Way Finland?" 3 Maxim L. Korobochkin, "Soviet Policies toward Finland and Norway, 1947-1953."

4 Bent Jensen, "The Soviet Union and Denmark, 1945-1965: Perceptions and Policies."

"Georgi Arbatov, "The Cold War and the Nordic Countries.” K.G.H. Hillingsø, "The Role of Denmark in Warsaw Pact War Plans."

Jón Ólafsson, "The Icelandic Socialists in the Fifties: Resisting Petit-Bourgeois Degeneration - The Reasoning Process."

* Memorandum, “Information über ein Gespräch mit Genossen Einar Olgeirsson," 28 September 1961, Nachlaß Walter Ulbricht, 182/1279, Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (Berlin).

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Mikko Majander, "The Finnish Communists and the Soviet Union."

10 Thorsten Boring Olesen, "The Jewel in the Crown': Denmark, the United States, and Greenland, 1941-1951.”

"1 Rolf Tamnes, “Military Buildup and Nordic Stability in the 1970s."

12 Albert Jónsson, “Iceland and Soviet Military Activity During the Second Cold War."

13 Mats Berdal, "Norway and U.S. Maritime Strategy in the 1950s."

14 Bent Jensen, "The Soviet Union and Denmark, 1945-1965: Perceptions and Policies."

15 Poul Villaume, "Reluctant Ideological Cold Warrior: Denmark and U.S./NATO Propaganda Warfare, 1948-1954.” 16 Valur Ingimundarson, “The Illogic of Passivity: The Role of Iceland in NATO and U.S. Strategic Thinking, 1945-1965.” 17 Svend Aage Christensen et al.: “Greenland in Danish and American Nuclear Policy, 1951-1968."

18 Valur Ingimundarson, “The Illogic of Passivity."

19 Juhana Aunesluoma, "Limits of Neutrality: Sweden and the Western Powers in the Early Cold War, 1945-54.”

20 Mikael af Malmborg, "Neutrality as Political Identity: Sweden in the Cold War."

21 Ingemar Dörfer, "Swedish Neutrality and the Second Cold War."

22 Sune Persson, "Sweden: The Reluctant Peacekeeper.” 23 Jussi Hanhimäki, “A Culture Clash? The United States and Scandinavia during the Cold War."

24 Ólafur Th. Hardarsson, “Public Opinion and Iceland's Western Integration."

25 Árni Bergmann, "Soviet Perceptions of Icelandic Culture.”

Dr. Valur Ingimundarson teaches at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. He was the main organizer and host of the CWIHP-sponsored conference "The Nordic Countries and the Cold War." He has published extensively on Iceland's and East Germany's role in the Cold War.

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