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Abstract

This article analyses how government officials in Finland and Sweden reconciled their national identities as historically non-aligned countries with NATO membership. The analysis builds on, and contributes to, feminist poststructuralist theorizing on militarized nationalisms. Despite the general conviction that nations and nationalisms are based on unity, they simultaneously rely on, and hide, gendered, racialized and classed differences. Violence is a central feature of militarized nationalisms, which is legitimized, in part, through a protection myth positioning men as the ultimate guardians of women’s security. The analysis is based on statements by government officials in Finland and Sweden following their NATO applications on 18 May 2022. Applying a comparative narrative analytical design, the analysis identifies four narratives that, in different ways, (re)inforced gendered, racialized and classed tropes that naturalized Finland and Sweden’s membership in NATO as necessary to (1) reconcile historical pasts, (2) defend the international rule-based order, (3) embrace a natural belonging to NATO and (4) become protectors of/from the North. Together, these narratives (re)instated militarized nationalisms in both countries and, in constructing notions of perfect unity, silenced conflicting experiences of violence and inequality within and between NATO, the Nordics and Finland and Sweden.

Keywords

class gender militarized nationalism NATO race

Introduction

In February 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine ‘triggered’ Finland and Sweden to begin the process of applying for NATO membership (Forsberg, 2023: 89). This marked the end of their historical legacies as neutral and militarily non-aligned states, a central feature of Cold War security policy and, to various extent, national identity in both countries (Rainio-Niemi, 2014). Although this article shows how Finnish and Swedish government officials downplayed the significance of the change, describing it as a mere logical continuum of Finland and Sweden’s growing transatlantic military integration over the post-Cold War era, the historical role of neutrality and military non-alignment to their national identities still makes this shift particularly puzzling. How were NATO membership and national identity reconciled in both countries? In this article, we argue that feminist poststructuralist analysis is imperative for answering that question, and in effect, for explaining how NATO membership was legitimized in Finland and Sweden.

As part of the jubilee issue of Cooperation and Conflict, this article is situated in a rich collection of feminist research on peace, security and foreign policy in the Nordics. Over the years, the journal has featured articles outlining feminist critiques of and alternatives to traditional International Relations (IR) theory on security (Hansen, 2001; Sylvester, 2001), national identity (Towns, 2002), and peace (Lyytikäinen et al., 2021) in a Nordic context. While drawing on this wealth of scholarship, our article builds especially on feminist theorizing on militarized nationalism (Åse and Wendt, 2017, 2021). A key starting point in this literature is that, despite the general conviction that nations and nationalisms are based on unity, they simultaneously rely on, and hide, gendered, racialized and classed differences (McClintock, 1993; Shome, 2001).

Violence is a central feature of militarized nationalisms, which is legitimized, in part, through a gendered military protection myth where men are positioned as the ultimate guardians of women’s security. This gendered binary links masculinity with safety, control and activity, and femininity with vulnerability, dependency and passivity (Åse, 2018; Vastapuu, 2021). In constructing the ‘white’ woman as a protection object, and enemies along racialized stereotypes, race is another key feature of the protection myth (Åse, 2018; Khalid, 2018; Vastapuu, 2023). Militarized nationalisms are also imbued with class differentiation. For instance, by homogenizing ‘the woman’ through a white, middle-class and urban positioning, women who do not fit into such categories are written out from the ‘nation’ (Jauhola, 2016; Vickers, 2006: 97).

Drawing on feminist insights about the protection myth and militarized nationalisms, and using a comparative research design centred on narratives, this article explores the co-constitution of gendered security policies and national identities in government official narratives in Finland and Sweden. We are particularly interested in how such narratives participated in legitimizing NATO membership in both countries. Our research questions are: How have government officials in Finland and Sweden (re)constructed national identity in relation to NATO membership through gendered narratives, and how have race and class contributed to their construction? What similarities and differences can be identified? What silences do these narratives entail?

While previous research has conceptualized Finland and Sweden’s NATO decisions as (1) a response to ‘the existential dimension of the current Russian aggression’ towards Ukraine (Edström and Westberg, 2023: 733); (2) the consequence of changes in public opinion (Bjereld and Oscarsson, 2023; Forsberg, 2023) and (3) the outcome of a longer process that started in the 1990s (Jonter and Rosengren, 2024), our analysis is positioned in the literature that (4) treats it as a matter of discursive construction (Hagström, 2021; Juntunen and Rosengren, 2024) and national identity (Hjertström and Hagström, 2024). We contribute to this literature by revealing how power relations related to gender, race and class interrelate with security discourses and national identity.

Our study draws especially on, and contributes to, feminist analysis of the above. Regarding Sweden, such research has revealed how ‘gendered imageries of masculinist protection’ contributed to depoliticizing NATO membership in 2022 (Eduards et al., 2023), how gender and emotions were integral for ruling out alternatives (Berg and Fredriksson, 2024; Jansson et al., 2024), and how Sweden’s commitment to a feminist foreign policy was sidelined during the application process (Wright and Bergman Rosamond, 2024). In Finland, scholars have investigated gendered discourse on national security and NATO (Kivelä, 2024; Vastapuu et al., 2024), gendered silences in the decision-making process (Lyytikäinen et al., forthcoming), the omission of Sámi people from debates (Junka-Aikio, 2024) and the identity struggles of feminist peace and security scholars in the changing security landscape (Hast et al., 2024). This article contributes to such scholarship by demonstrating how gender, race and class, in different ways, contributed to legitimizing NATO membership in Finland and Sweden and, in effect, to (re)construct national identity in two rather similar, but also fundamentally different, historical contexts.

Our study also contributes to a blind spot in IR – empirically based feminist theorization of neutrality. While political scientist Christine Agius (2024: 270) argues in this journal that IR literature has both dismissed neutrality and feminized neutral states by linking neutrality to weakness, irrationality and passivity, we maintain that a closer look at the Nordics may challenge such assumptions. As non-aligned countries during the Cold War, Finland and Sweden performed armed neutrality policies, investing heavily in their national armed forces and enacting mandatory conscription for their male population. Both relied on notions of masculinized military protection in a classical – yet defensive – sense (Jukarainen, 2012; Kronsell, 2012). Due to their defensive orientations, however, they were, in theory, also associated with ‘passivity, weakness and victimhood’, and thereby ‘potentially unmanly or even feminine’ (Wilcox, 2009: 228). In Cold War Sweden, this created gender ambivalence around the neutrality policy (Åse, 2016; Rosengren, 2020). After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, government officials in both Finland and Sweden deemed it necessary to abandon their non-aligned policies to fortify a perceived ‘deterrence deficit’ with NATO security guarantees (Juntunen and Rosengren, 2024; Pesu and Iso-Markku, 2024). Our analysis highlights the role of ‘the gender-neutrality nexus’ and its intersection with other power relations in this context.

In the following section, we present a brief history of Finland and Sweden, focusing on similarities and differences. We then move on to explain how insights from feminist and poststructuralist theory and comparative narrative analysis help us answer the above-stated research questions. Then follows the analysis, where we identify four narratives that, in different ways, (re)inforced gendered, racialized and classed tropes that naturalized Finland and Sweden’s membership in NATO as necessary to (1) reconcile historical pasts, (2) defend the international rule-based order, (3) embrace a natural belonging to NATO and (4) become protectors of/from the North. The article ends with a concluding discussion where we reflect upon our findings.

Background: historical similarities and differences

There are historical similarities and differences that make comparison of Finland and Sweden especially fruitful. First, they submitted their NATO applications together, aspiring to join the alliance ‘hand in hand’ (Presidential Office of Finland, 2022a; Swedish Government, 2023e). However, the historical relationship between Finland and Sweden is more complicated than what such contemporary notions of unity portray. From the medieval times to 1809, what we now know as Finnish territory was ruled by the Swedish Crown, and from then until Finland’s independence in 1917 by the Russian tsar (Valenius, 2004). During the Second World War, Russia invaded Finland, and experiences from this war are still part of collective national memory (Hast et al., 2024; Kivimäki, 2012). By contrast, in Sweden, the phrase ‘200 years of peace’ is often used to describe the period from Sweden’s peace settlement with Denmark in 1814 to present day and has become a national mantra (Biltekin et al., 2022). Swedish Cold War neutrality was strongly associated with notions of a peaceful self (Rosengren, 2022), whereas in Finland, military non-alignment, and perhaps even more so ‘military self-reliance’, was associated with ‘Finland’s “lone” struggle’ against the Soviet Union (Rainio-Niemi, 2014: 6). Hence, Finland and Sweden have notably different relations to and experiences from empire, war and peace.

Second, Finland and Sweden held onto rather similar security profiles during the Cold War. The armed dimension of neutrality was central to nation-building in both countries, and male conscription ensured the conviction and practice of protecting the nation as a masculine duty. Hence, Finnish and Swedish security policies relied on non-aligned, defensive versions of the protection myth and military masculinity (Jukarainen, 2012; Kronsell, 2012; Rosengren, 2020). Finnish Cold War military expenditure constituted a smaller share of GDP compared to its Swedish counterpart but started to exceed Sweden’s share in the early 2000s. While Sweden’s military expenditure declined between the mid-1960s and 2023, Finland kept its share rather intact (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 2024). In the post-Cold War period, Sweden reformed its defence policy more thoroughly, including the dismantlement of its defence capabilities (Åse et al., 2024: 201), suspension of the conscription system in 2010, and its reactivation through a partial, gender-neutral model in 2017 (Strand, 2019). Finland maintained its defence capability and male conscription-based army, implying a continuity from the total defence doctrine of the Cold War (Juntunen and Pesu, 2018). Hence, while Sweden’s policy changed more profoundly, Finland’s was marked by continuity. After signing the Partnership for Peace agreement with NATO in 1994, both countries increased their military cooperation with NATO and allies (Jonter and Rosengren, 2024).

Third, after the end of the Cold War, both Finland and Sweden advocated a broadened approach to security in international affairs, and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda evolved as a central pillar in foreign policy doctrine in both countries (Jauhola and Lyytikäinen, 2020; Towns, 2002). Sweden, in particular, has cultivated a strong self-narrative as ‘a gender-progressive, cosmopolitan-minded nation’ (Bergman Rosamond and Kronsell, 2018: 176), exemplified by the development of Feminist Foreign Policy under Foreign Minister Margot Wallström in 2015. Both countries are members of the ‘Friends of 1325’ group at NATO and especially Sweden played an influential role in shaping NATO’s adoption of the WPS agenda (Wright, 2016). Sweden led the development of NATO’s concept for incorporating gender into military operations and hosts the Nordic Centre for Gender in Military Operations (NCGM), which serves as NATO’s discipline head for gender training. While not branding its foreign policy as feminist, Finland has directed both financial and human resources towards gender policy in crisis management, development cooperation and UN politics (Jauhola and Lyytikäinen, 2020; Vastapuu and Lyytikäinen, 2022). At NATO, Finland leads the organization’s training on human security, which encompasses several gendered themes, for example, protection of civilians and sexual violence. The agenda-setting role of the non-members within NATO was markedly different from NATO’s WPS collaboration with Ukraine since 2014 that has been characterized as unidirectional knowledge transfer from the alliance to Ukraine (O’Sullivan, 2024). The two countries’ participation in NATO-led missions, particularly the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, was often framed through commitments to peace and gender equality (Bergman Rosamond and Kronsell, 2018), with Finland in particular deploying gender expertise for NATO’s benefit in Afghanistan as a strategic move to strengthen ties with NATO, the US and other Western powers (Mustasilta et al., 2022).

In sum, while Finland and Sweden have fundamentally different experiences from empire, war and peace, their security policy profiles have been rather similar, although with slight variations, during and after the Cold War. We return to these similarities and differences in the countries’ historical, geopolitical and gender policy backgrounds throughout the analysis and in our concluding discussion.

Research design: a feminist narrative analysis

Our research design combines insights from feminist poststructuralist theory with an intersectional lens. We are thereby informed by previous efforts to integrate postcolonial perspectives in feminist IR (e.g. Agathangelou and Ling, 2009; Blaney and Tickner, 2017; Ling, 2016; Parashar, 2016) to reveal how gender is situated in specific local contexts (Oyěwùmí, 1997; Vastapuu and Wibben, 2025) and constructed in relation to and through other power relations. Poststructuralists conceptualize nations and national identities as socially constructed and historically contingent entities. National identity is a key feature of nations and nationalisms and crucial for how security policy is conceptualized and advocated, since perceptions of national identity – including values, rights and responsibilities of the self – enable and legitimize policy (Hansen, 2006). By representing the identity of the self in particular ways, policies compatible with the self are enabled, while alternatives are marginalized and/or ruled out (Doty, 1993). Through such self-constructions, relationally organized other(s) are simultaneously constituted (Hansen, 2006). In combining poststructuralist methodology with feminist theory and an intersectional lens, we maintain that while nations are often assumed to be marked by unity among citizens, historical performances of nations have incorporated gender, racial and class differences (McClintock, 1993; Shome, 2001). While our focus is primarily on gender, we hold that ‘gender, class and “race” or ethnicity are mutually constituting, coming alive in and through one another’ (Mulinari et al., 2009: 5; Vastapuu, 2021) in the making of nations and nationalisms. In the following we explain how power relations related to gender, race and class are central to a key concept in our study: the protection myth.

The protection myth

For years, feminist IR has exposed how the military ‘protection myth’ is a key, and fundamentally gendered, feature of conventional thinking about security (Åse, 2018). This myth contributes both to the mobilization of men in armed forces globally, and to military solutions being continuously prioritized over alternatives (Enloe, 2023). Referring to this as ‘the logic of masculinist protection’, Iris Marion Young (2003) describes how this logic is infused with the ideal of chivalrous masculine behaviour. Such behaviour entails a caring and loving attitude towards the nuclear family, while at the same time keeping an eye on the dangers that might threaten it. Masculinist protection is here considered ‘needed to make a home a haven’, placing the protected in a subordinate position (Young, 2003: 4). Young argues that this logic also characterizes the state level, where state officials take on the responsibility as protectors. This puts citizens and residents in the position of vulnerability and thus in need of protection (Young, 2003: 9).

Within the logic of masculinized protection, the ‘good man’ uses weapons to secure both women in his family, and national territories (Young, 2003). Such territories are often symbolically marked by female bodies like the national symbols ‘Mother Svea’ in Sweden (Eduards, 2007) and the Maid ‘Suomi-neito’ in Finland (Valenius, 2004). External enemies are central to justifying the logic, and such enemies are often constructed through racialized stereotypes, where the ‘white woman’ is described as threatened by non-white states and actors (Åse, 2018: 274). Historical constructions of the white self through the ‘Western Enlightenment project’ have relied on a relationally constituted ‘Oriental Other’ to assign greater value to the Western self (Agathangelou and Ling, 2004: 33). Moreover, the intersection of gender, race and class has historically been manifested in the nuclear family ideal across the Nordics, where the normative family is constructed as middle-class, white, and heterosexual (Mulinari et al., 2009).

The nation-family analogy within the protection myth is key for how collective identities are constituted. Maria Wendt and Cecilia Åse (2019) argue that the historical linkages between nation and gender, and their co-constitution, ‘strengthens their perceived naturalness’ (p. 19). Imageries that associate nations with family relations and bloodlines make collective political identities appear as both natural and beyond political deliberation. When state leaders talk about ‘family values’ as characteristic of a community, they evoke powerful emotions of belonging. According to Wendt and Åse (2019), ‘[t]he way in which the family trope is associated with values such as love, care and loyalty makes hierarchies appear as not only natural but inherently benign’ (p. 19). Thus, familial metaphors naturalize these power relations, portraying nations as unified and hiding hierarchical relationships within collectives.

While the protection myth has historically made violence ‘a naturalized expression of masculinity’ (Higate, 2018: 78), the meanings of masculinities still vary across place, space and time and intersect with other power relations related to class, race and more (Connell, 2005: 67–86). Hence, we maintain that masculinity is a fluid concept that is simultaneously ‘a place in gender relations, the practices through which femininities and masculinities are enacted upon, as well as the effects of these practices at the everyday level’ – spatial, practical, impactful, and inherently tied to the local context (Connell, 2005: 67–86). In Western contexts, the ideal form of masculinity, that is, hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 2005), is often understood as achieved and maintained through military action in general, and combat in particular. Thereby, hegemonic masculinity becomes associated with militarized ideals, favouring toughness, violence, aggression, courage, control, and domination (Eichler, 2014: 81–82).

Drawing on insights from the literature introduced above, this article aims to reveal how gender, alongside race and class, contributes to the co-constitution of security policy and national identity in Finnish and Swedish government narratives about NATO membership. Rather than aiming for verification/falsification of our theoretical assumptions, we use insights from theory and our empirical cases to shed light on the processes studied. Such analysis is especially important since most of the feminist IR literature on the protection myth focuses on offensive security strategies. Further analysis of historically defensive cases contributes with theoretical insights about continuities, changes and nuances within the protection myth and of national and geographical differences. Epistemologically, we thus combine poststructuralist analysis and feminist standpoint theory, the latter of which leans on situated knowledge with the aim to achieve ‘strong objectivity’ (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1986).

Denaturalization through comparison

While gender, race and class interrelate with security policy and national identity in complex ways, underlying assumptions about these concepts are often treated as natural facts. Therefore, feminist scholars have called for research strategies of denaturalization, or critical scrutiny of ‘how taken-for granted and widely accepted assumptions uphold hierarchical gender binaries, norms, and relations’ (Wendt and Åse, 2019: 17). To uncover how national selves have been constructed by Finnish and Swedish government officials, we compare government narratives about NATO in both contexts. Drawing on Annick Wibben’s (2011) work on security narratives, our focus is on ‘how subjects and meanings are constructed through security narratives and how these processes are gendered’ (pp. 65–66).

We perceive narratives as ‘schemes of intelligibility, seeking to replace uncertainty with a sense that the world is basically knowable and explainable’ (Edenborg, 2016: 42). Narratives normalize things by making them self-evident and incontestable. They also rely on exclusion of that which does not fit into the narrative, that which ‘complicates, blurs or contradicts the story’ (Edenborg, 2016: 42). That is why narrative analysis not only focuses on what is explicitly included, but also the ‘noisy silences’ on which narratives rely (Wibben, 2011: 61). Hence, there is a difference between how silences in narratives contribute to their construction and the intentional act of silencing counter-narratives. Silences are also key to reveal gender in narratives. Annica Kronsell (2006) argues that silences on gender make masculine norms remain hidden in plain sight, and that revealing silences requires ‘methods of deconstruction, to study what is not contained within the text, what is written between the lines’ (p. 109). In our analysis, we unpack silences through comparison and contextualization.

Comparative analysis is particularly suited for disentangling national narratives, since comparison helps uncover that which is taken for granted in each specific context (Wendt and Åse, 2019: 20). With two insiders from each national context, our team has the ‘linguistic skills, a deep understanding of the wider cultural framework, and extensive knowledge of the political and social conditions and national history’ (Wendt, 2020: 246) concerning both Finland and Sweden. By contrasting the cases with each other, we develop deep, situated knowledge about our own cases as insiders and explore unexpected dimensions of each other’s cases as outsiders (Wendt, 2020: 245).

Our research design has followed an abductive process, by which we adjusted our theoretical and methodological tools based on findings from the sources (Rosengren, 2020: 16, 25). First, we identified the source selection introduced below. Having read a large compilation of sources from Finland and Sweden respectively, we met in Turku, Finland, to compare findings from both contexts and identify key narratives based on our initial readings. We then modified our theoretical tools and research questions to enable a more systematic analysis of the sources. A crucial step in the research process involved changing focus from our ‘own’ country-specific sources to each-other’s respective cases. This step made it possible for us to reveal unexpected content in the sources, and to identify differences between Finland and Sweden.

Sources consist of statements by government and state officials in both countries from 18 May 2022, when Finland and Sweden’s NATO applications were jointly submitted, until the 2-year anniversary of their submissions in 2024, roughly 2 months following Sweden’s official accession to the alliance. Officials include prime ministers (PM), foreign ministers (FM), defence ministers (DM), other country-specific ministers and, in Finland’s case, presidents. The data for Finland is sourced from the Eilen Archive and Chronology of Finnish Foreign Policy and websites of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the President of the Republic. Finnish parliamentary elections in April 2023 and Presidential elections in April 2024 resulted in a data set that includes speeches from both Social Democrat and Conservative led coalition governments as well as both Presidents Sauli Niinistö and Alexander Stubb. Swedish data was collected from the Government Offices of Sweden’s website, where all statements by government officials related to NATO are stored. The data includes statements from both the Social Democratic government (2014–2022) responsible for Sweden’s application for NATO membership in May 2022 and the subsequent Conservative government (in power since October 2022) overseeing the ratification process. Our data set includes 44 speeches from Finland, and 42 from Sweden. While most of the speeches are available in English, we have translated those that are not.

Our data set made it possible to analyze government narratives following the joint submission of Finland and Sweden’s NATO applications. Consequently, our study does not aim to investigate the preceding national debates, in which those critical of applying for NATO membership were able to challenge the very initiation of this process – a prolific time of public deliberation that is beyond the scope of this study. Nor do we study how government narratives were challenged in broader debate after the NATO applications had been submitted. Instead, we focus on government narratives produced during the official process of Finland and Sweden’s NATO accessions to explore how their national identities were (re)constructed in relation to NATO membership. While we recognize that the NATO process in both countries followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and acknowledge that existing research has contributed with essential feminist theorizing on various aspects of Russia’s imperial war in Ukraine (Hendl et al., 2023), our study contributes to the state of the art by providing feminist analysis of government narratives about NATO membership in Finland and Sweden.

Analysis: becoming NATO brothers

Our analysis identifies four narratives that, in different ways, drew on gendered, racialized and classed tropes in representing Finland and Sweden’s membership in NATO as necessary to (1) reconcile historical pasts, (2) defend the international rule-based order, (3) embrace a natural belonging to NATO and (4) become protectors of/from the North. These narratives were identified through the abductive research process described above and are used to structure the following analysis.

Reconcile historical pasts

The first narrative identified in our analysis concerns how government officials reconciled Finland and Sweden’s histories of neutrality and non-alignment with their decisions to apply for NATO membership. Notably, officials in both countries presented the historical significance of their NATO decisions in somewhat inconsistent and contradictory ways. For example, joining NATO was characterized as a ‘paradigm shift’, ‘turning point’ and the beginning of a ‘new era’ (Swedish Government, 2022e, 2024d, 2024f, 2024h; Finnish Government, 2023b, 2023c). At the same time, it was also presented as a mere continuation of growing military cooperation with and integration into NATO over the post-Cold War era (Swedish Government, 2024a, 2024f; Presidential Office of Finland, 2022b). As such, government officials both emphasized and deemphasized the historical significance of their NATO decisions, enhancing their ability to reconcile the apparent complexities and contradictions between their national histories and NATO membership.

Previous research has demonstrated how Swedish neutrality, alongside the national welfare state project, was a central feature of Swedish Cold War national identity, and how both were profoundly gendered (Rosengren, 2020). The central logic behind Sweden’s armed neutrality policy was to convince adversaries that the military costs of attacking Sweden were simply too high to be worthwhile. This, however, created gender ambivalence for military masculinity and national identity. First, as the ability of the Swedish armed forces to successfully protect the nation against a hostile intruder remained uncertain, the Swedish military was placed in a potentially ‘dishonourable position, lacking the military muscle that it encouraged others to expect’ (Åse, 2016: 116). Second, the Swedish neutrality doctrine remained defensive and was, therefore, in contrast to more offensive security doctrines, more associated with a feminizing passivity (Jansson et al., 2024: 66). This gender ambivalence around neutrality was (re)activated during the public debate and in government narratives around Sweden’s NATO application.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the decision by Finland and Sweden to apply for NATO membership, Swedish officials echoed earlier advocacy for Swedish membership in the alliance that had framed neutrality as a shameful ‘myth, as a nostalgic and hypocritical social democrat delusion’, associating neutrality with cowardness and double standards (Juntunen and Rosengren, 2024: 34). In broader discourse around Sweden’s application, the history of Swedish neutrality was dismissed by proponents of NATO as ‘naïve, childish and unworldly’, and some lamented how ‘“soft” and gender equal Swedish men did not have much to contribute when war was knocking on the door’ (Eduards et al., 2023: 39). Such representations framed Sweden’s historical neutrality policy and its ability to remain non-aligned and outside of NATO with gendered notions of dishonour, cowardice and unreason, while the historical opposition to the Swedish neutrality policy and the decision to abandon non-alignment for NATO membership was masculinized through its depiction as honourable, brave, and rational. Government officials following Sweden’s application for NATO membership drew on these gendered narratives when celebrating ‘the brave Swedes who promoted NATO membership in a time when they got nothing but mockery in response’ (Swedish Government, 2023f) and declaring the need to re-establish the political reason and morality of those ‘unsung heroes’ (Swedish Government, 2023c).

Swedish government officials also described joining NATO as an act of solidarity. In 2023, Swedish PM Kristersson described Sweden’s application for NATO membership as the culmination of a ‘200 years long journey from neutrality to solidarity’ (Swedish Government, 2023f). In such descriptions, solidarity was represented as replacing neutrality, even though solidarity had long been recognized as a central component of Sweden’s Cold War neutrality policy, welfare state project and support for global justice (Agius, 2006; Rosengren, 2020). Thus, government officials introduced a new understanding of solidarity as, first and foremost, an ‘alliance policy, aiming to enhance security and stability in our own neighbourhood and the Euro-Atlantic area’ (Swedish Government, 2024a), especially in support of Ukraine (Swedish Government, 2022b, 2023g, 2024b). In using solidarity as a moral and political justification to abandon Swedish non-alignment for NATO membership, government officials inscribed new meanings to solidarity as a military obligation to defend Western allies that, in consequence, set out new boundaries for what solidarity is and who it should be granted to.

In Finland, references to historical neutrality appeared more easily reconcilable with NATO membership, as joining the alliance was framed as a continuation of the pragmatic realism that was said to have guided Finnish security doctrine throughout the 20th century. Government officials described Finland’s Cold War neutrality policy as primarily a strategic necessity after the war with the Soviet Union during the Second World War, granting Finland some ‘diplomatic distance’ (Möller and Bjereld, 2010) to its Eastern neighbour. As President Stubb described it, Finland ‘aspired to neutrality, not out of our own free will, but out of necessity’ (Presidential Office of Finland, 2024). Thereby, government narratives around Finland’s historical neutrality were less infused with the normative meanings prevalent in the Swedish case. Moreover, the end of the Cold War had already generated a period of time where Finnish neutrality became less central to national identity as the country embarked on a project of reimagining Finland as a natural and active member of the European Union and the West (Browning, 2002). Therefore, in describing a long-standing security legacy shaped by persisting navigation in relation to the Soviet Union/Russia, and increasing proximity to Europe and the West, government officials in Finland could more easily reconcile their national history and identity with NATO membership by insisting that ‘we have not been neutral for a long time’ (Finnish Government, 2023c).

Alongside creating distance to Cold War neutrality, Finnish narratives reconciling national history with NATO membership were also strengthened by messaging that constructed a vision of the Finnish character as inherently and enduringly realistic, pragmatic, and devoted to national security. Government officials referenced Finland’s wartime experiences with the Soviet Union when describing Finns as inherently ‘security-oriented people’ with the capacity to act ‘quickly and coherently’ under present security conditions (Finnish Government, 2022a). Long-standing war preparedness and a strategic vigilance towards the Soviet Union/Russia were emphasized as central qualities of the national psyche, being part of the ‘blood’ of the nation. As PM Orpo described it, ‘Finland’s story has been a story of survival’ (Finnish Government, 2023b). Such narratives were typically supported with strong messages of solidarity to Ukraine against Russia’s on-going imperialist violence (e.g. Finnish Government, 2022a, 2023c). These references drew on notions of a defensive military masculinity as a source of national pride.

In sum, government officials in Finland and Sweden both emphasized and deemphasized the historic significance of their NATO decisions. In Sweden, greater effort seemed necessary to overcome the long-standing centrality of peace, neutrality and non-alignment in Sweden’s Cold War national identity. In comparison, government officials in Finland could rely on historical examples of more recent wartime experiences with the Soviet Union and notions of Finns as inherently ‘security-oriented people’ to emphasize continuity.

Defend the international rule-based order

The second narrative concerns how government officials presented joining NATO as necessary to defend the international rule-based order against an existential enemy. This involved drawing a binary moral distinction between NATO, as the order’s ultimate defender, and Russia, as its greatest threat. In both Finland and Sweden, government officials maintained that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had ‘fundamentally changed’ European security by overhauling its principles of order (Presidential Office of Finland, 2022a). However, as recent publications recognize: ‘the scale, viciousness and brutality of the invasion, the genocidal violence toward the civilian population, as well as the extremity of Russia’s official rhetoric surrounding it are indeed shocking; but they should not have been surprising’ considering the imperial dynamics underpinning this war (Hendl et al., 2023: 172. See also Oksamytna, 2023). In this setting, government officials in both Finland and Sweden narrowed the scope of action to a singular choice between either submitting to Russia’s tyranny or defending freedom nationally and worldwide by joining NATO.

The choice presented between Russia and NATO relied on a powerful moral dichotomy between ‘Western’ and ‘anti-Western’ values. Finnish and Swedish government officials described NATO as a ‘Western community of values’ (Finnish Government, 2023b) guarding ‘freedom, democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law’ (Swedish Government, 2024e). Government officials in both countries argued that Finland and Sweden shared these intrinsic values with NATO, as exceptionally ‘strong democracies’ defined by their ‘commitment to the rule of law, democracy and human rights’ (Presidential Office of Finland, 2024; Swedish Government, 2024g). By presenting Nordic countries as ‘a group of like-minded countries’ (Presidential Office of Finland, 2023) and arguing that ‘[f]reedom, justice and democracy are part of our DNA’ (Swedish Government, 2023a), the Nordics were construed as naturally imbued with the same values and abilities.

In contrast, Russia came to represent the very antithesis to NATO’s moral virtue. Swedish PM Kristersson depicted Russia as an ‘aggressive’ and ‘authoritarian’ regime ruled by ‘tyranny’ (Swedish Government, 2022c, 2023d), FM Billström condemned ‘Russia’s menacing nationalism’ (Swedish Government, 2022d), and DM Jonson described the Russian government as one that ‘lies, oppresses, murders, invades, occupies and deports – both adults and children’ (Swedish Government, 2023b). Finland’s FM Valtonen denounced a ‘power-crazed Putin’ and condemned the ‘wickedness’ of his ‘cruel, illegitimate war’ (Finnish Government, 2023c). Putin’s Russia was recognized as everything NATO was not: threatening, illegitimate, imperialistic, oppressive, autocratic, brutal, and morally indefensible. This assessment by government officials in Finland and Sweden, regardless of its validity, functioned as a powerful symbolic contrast that imbued NATO with absolute moral legitimacy that circumvented discussions around its own history of imperial violence.

The conflation by Finnish and Swedish government officials between the international rule-based order, the Western self, and NATO reinscribed the alliance’s own self-identification as the supreme defender of the global order (Beaumont et al., 2024) and, implicitly, the gendered, racialized and classed hierarchies of power underpinning that order. Indeed, Maryam Khalid (2018) argues that both race and gender are integral to how ‘“Western” and “masculine” values (of “appropriate” global governance, order, development, and economic rationality) are privileged over the (feminized) “backwardness” of the “underdeveloped Other”’ (p. 40). In Finnish and Swedish government narratives, a particular vision of NATO’s Western military masculinity was associated with political reason and moral justice, while Russia was made emblematic of ‘masculinity gone wrong’ (Higate, 2018: 76). According to Young (2003), differentiation between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ men is a central feature of the logic of masculinist protection, where ‘virtuous masculinity depends on its constitutive relation to the presumption of evil others’ (p. 13). Although both ultimately ensure their power through military violence, NATO was rationalized as a legitimate military actor through its association with the hegemonic masculinity of the white affluent West. Such binary constructs also silence the complex relationship between masculinity norms, gender and class in Russia (Walker, 2022), instead constructing homogeneous stereotypes of the enemy other.

Embrace a natural belonging to NATO

The third narrative concerns how familial imagery portrayed Finland and Sweden as naturally belonging to NATO. Expanding on the previous narrative of the shared moral identity of NATO and the Nordics, government officials in both countries also appealed to notions of a shared belonging in ‘the family’ – or ‘the brotherhood’ – of NATO in ways that further legitimized their decisions to join. For example, Swedish ministers described joining NATO as ‘coming home’ (Swedish Government, 2023g, 2024d, 2024f, 2024g), turning the alliance into more than just military cooperation. Following their application, Finnish PM Marin celebrated Finland’s embrace of ‘the family we belong to’ (Finnish Government, 2022c), a sentiment mirrored by Swedish FM Billström in the weeks following Sweden’s accession by declaring the country to now be ‘fully part of the family in which we belong’ (Swedish Government, 2024g). These familial symbolisms were essential for instilling a sense of continuity and familiarity in the decision to apply for NATO membership, making what could have been an uncomfortable and radical change feel more desirable and inevitable.

By describing NATO as a family to which Finland and Sweden inherently belonged, government officials also navigated the gendered implications of this familial symbolism. As Frank Costigliola (1997) demonstrates, historical representations of NATO strongly resemble those of the conservative heterosexual nuclear family ideal, where the US is both mothering and fathering its subordinate family members, who are dependent on their protection. Therefore, in deciding to apply for NATO membership, government officials in Finland and Sweden were confronted with the potentially feminizing implication of requiring military protection from a more powerful (family) member (cf. Jansson et al., 2024: 68–69). As such, their applications appeared to reinforce the symbolism of the protection myth and generated some gender ambivalence for Finland and Sweden’s self-conceptions as masculine protectors in their own right.

Indeed, in spring 2022, national media coverage portrayed Sweden as a bride in white desperately pursuing protection through her marriage to the formidable groom, NATO (Rosengren, 2023). Following Sweden’s NATO application, government officials instead portrayed NATO as a familial alliance in which Sweden was a ‘brother’ among equals. For example, during a state visit from French president Emmanuel Macron in 2024, Swedish PM Kristersson praised NATO as an alliance underpinned by the values of ‘[l]iberté, égalité, fraternité’ (freedom, equality, brotherhood) (Swedish Government, 2024c). Paraphrasing Alexander Dumas, Kristersson also declared: ‘We are now standing here strong, together – for peace and freedom. All for one, and one for all’ (Swedish Government, 2024d). Through such representations, Sweden was repositioned from a defenceless wife to a brother among allies, resisting feminization and reaffirming military masculinity as part of Swedish national identity enabled through the NATO decision.

Depictions of NATO as a family or brotherhood were further strengthened by portrayals of an intimate friendship and familial bond between Finland and Sweden, made manifest in their decision to join NATO ‘hand in hand’ (Swedish Government, 2022a). Narratives of Nordic belonging were especially prevalent in statements by Finnish government officials. This seemed connected to the longer history of Finnish representatives performing both Nordicness and Europeanness as a way to break free from former relations with the Soviet Union (Browning, 2002; Ojanen and Raunio, 2018) and accessing the privileged forms of whiteness and affluence associated with Northern and Western Europe (cf. Mulinari et al., 2009). Finnish President Niinistö lauded how the NATO application process brought Finland and Sweden – two countries ‘united by geography, values, language and culture’ – closer together (Presidential Office of Finland, 2022a), FM Haavisto invoked historical narratives of ‘being part of the same kingdom’ (Finnish Government, 2023a), and minister Tuppurainen affectionately described Sweden as central to Finnish ‘history, identity and soul’ as ‘vårt gamla fosterland [our old homeland]’ (Finnish Government, 2022b). The unity of Finland and Sweden as, ‘best friends and neighbours’ (Finnish Government, 2023a), was also framed as a consequence of shared historical confrontations with Russia, as President Stubb argued: ‘the threat from the east is one of the factors that has always united us’ (Presidential Office of Finland, 2024).

In constructing a narrative of equal familial unity between Finland and Sweden, officials in both countries ignored the historical hierarchies between them and their continued impact. As Wendt and Åse (2019) argue, the use of familial imageries in describing such relations often hides the power imbalances that threaten narratives of unity and equality (p. 19). By presenting Finland and Sweden as ‘one country for 600 years’ and ‘the western and eastern halves’ of an empire ‘united by the sea’ (Presidential Office of Finland, 2024), officials like President Stubb left out colonial power wielded by the Swedish Crown over what is now recognized as Finnish territory and Finland’s experience of imperial rule by both Sweden and Russia (see Merivirta et al., 2021). In more recent history, this historical legacy can also be discerned in the exploitation of Finns in the Swedish labour market (Ericsson, 2024: 120–126) and racialized stereotypes of Finns as violent and drunkards in Swedish popular culture (Liimatainen, 2022) over the 20th century. In public debates preceding their NATO applications, this power imbalance came to the fore as Finland was seen as overtaking Sweden’s role of ‘big brother’ by commanding and spearheading their joint move towards the alliance (Ålander and Salo, 2023: 57). Following their applications, the overarching message of perfect familial unity between Finland, Sweden and NATO (among others) remained the central argument for government officials that, in effect, concealed the violence and inequality existing within and between these collectives.

Become protectors of/from the North

Building on the foundation established by the above-mentioned narratives, the final government narrative identified in this analysis projected a new vision for Finnish and Swedish identities in NATO as protectors of/from the North. In the months following their application, President Niinistö declared that ‘[a]s Finland seeks protection, it is also ready to provide it’ (Presidential Office of Finland, 2022b). In similar ways, Swedish government officials emphasized Sweden as a ‘security provider’ that would ‘fully share burdens, responsibilities and risks with our allies’ (Swedish Government, 2024c, 2024e, 2024f, 2024g).

Even so, government narratives in Finland and Sweden around their position in NATO differed according to their distinct proximities to a military past and, thereby, a militarized national identity. Swedish narratives to a greater extent emphasized the distinctly Northern strength the country would provide. Swedish PM Kristersson asserted that Sweden’s ‘modern and well-trained armed forces’ in ‘the air, in the sea and under the surface’ and in ‘the cold snow’ would ‘bolster NATO’s capabilities’ (Swedish Government, 2024c, 2024e). Sweden’s cooperation with allies would be reciprocal, as Kristersson maintained: ‘We will learn and we will teach’ (Swedish Government, 2024e). Here, Sweden’s defence industry was emphasized as a particularly ‘important asset’ to NATO with a ‘unique technological edge’ (Swedish Government, 2024a, 2024e), and Sweden’s geographical location in the Baltic and North Sea was described as constituting ‘the missing link connecting Allies in the east with the Atlantic’ (Swedish Government, 2023f, 2023e). By ascribing Sweden with advanced technological and geographic military capacity, Swedish military masculinity was reinstituted and aligned with NATO’s claim over modernity. More specifically, Swedish officials invoked a distinctively Northern military masculinity in ways that reinforced ‘a traditional division between masculinity, technology and dominance on the one hand, and femininity, nature and surrender on the other’ (Malmén and Rosengren, 2023: 26).

While Swedish defence contributions were mainly described as protecting allies, Finnish narratives, in line with a longer historical trajectory in Finland of emphasizing territorial defence (Ojanen and Raunio, 2018), centred on the protection of Finnish national territory. According to President Niinistö, ‘[f]or both Finland and NATO, it is of utmost importance that Finland will continue to primarily take care of defending its own territory’ (Presidential Office of Finland, 2022c). Similarly, PM Orpo held that ‘[w]e will look after our independence and territorial integrity. This has always been and will continue to be at the heart of Finland’s foreign and security policy’ (Finnish Government, 2023b). DM Kaikkonen noted that Finland had defended itself during the Winter War, and that ‘[i]n the future, too, Finland will be defended by Finns, that is how we want it to be, and that is what NATO expects of us’ (Finnish Government, 2022d). In effect, while Swedish narratives constructed what we conceptualize as a modern and tech-savvy officer masculinity, Finnish sources instead drew on a traditional combat-ready ground-force masculinity constructed through references to universal male conscription, citizens’ high ‘willingness to defend’ and societal resilience to crises. These differences reveal discrepancies in Finland and Sweden’s economic and geographic positions, with Swedish officials focused on replicating and advancing NATO’s military hierarchy and Finnish narratives more centred on guarding Finland’s (and NATO’s) border with Russia as a long-standing ‘working-class’ frontline nation.

Ultimately, both Finnish and Swedish government representatives positioned themselves as providing security to both their own territories and foreign allies. This moved government narratives beyond the mere justification of their NATO decisions, turning instead to claim symbolic power in the alliance by positioning themselves as unique security providers. By ‘becoming’ protectors of/from the North, government officials in Finland and Sweden could describe themselves as NATO brothers among equals, who would reciprocate the security they were granted. Representing the supposed unique strength of Finland and Sweden, individually and together, was especially important in solving the gender ambivalence produced by their need for NATO’s protection and dependence on the security provision of more powerful allies. For Sweden, the reinstitution of military masculinity was especially important for making Swedish national identity compatible with and equal to the NATO ideal (Jansson et al., 2024: 69–70). Our analysis suggests that in Finland, such reinstitution was not as necessary, as the country was already deeply militarized (in ways appealing to Swedish officials), albeit with its own distinct insecurities, including geography. Ultimately, government officials in both countries navigated the power dynamics of becoming NATO members by reconciling their historical legacies of armed neutrality and defensive military masculinity with becoming security providers of/from the North.

Concluding discussion

This article demonstrates that Finland and Sweden’s path to NATO membership was not just a matter of security policy, but of national identity. Indeed, as revealed through a feminist poststructuralist analysis, government officials represented Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership as rational, justified, and inevitable by drawing on gendered, racialized and classed narratives around both security policy and national identity. Through these narratives, Finnish and Swedish government officials were able to mobilize their close relationship as Nordic countries to (re)construct militarized nationalisms compatible with NATO membership. Moreover, by also presenting themselves as unique security providers to the alliance, what we refer to as NATO brothers, officials navigated the gender ambivalence of seeking protection from more powerful allies and reinstituted confidence in the military protection myth central to their national identities. In this concluding discussion, we focus on some of the most notable differences and similarities in the Finnish and Swedish government narratives, while also examining the ‘noisy silences’ they entail (cf. Wibben, 2011: 61).

A major difference in Finnish and Swedish narratives around NATO membership concerns their contrasting historical experiences of empire, war and peace, and the ways in which military masculinities were (re)instituted in both countries. Here, Finnish government narratives often referenced Finland’s historical relationship to the Soviet Union/Russia to contextualize the country’s NATO decision, emphasizing how Finland had always adjusted its security policy to the potential threat of its Eastern neighbour. Finland’s wartime experiences with the Soviet Union in the 20th century and its enduring military and civil preparedness since were the principal reference points in this regard, invoked by government officials as they described the identity of the Finnish people as inherently realistic, pragmatic, and concerned above all with the protection of national security. This contributed to a particular ideal of Finnish military masculinity as centred around Finland as a frontline nation with an embattled ground-force army made up of everyday Finns. Ultimately, these historical experiences and national ideals were, therefore, central in legitimizing Finland’s NATO membership by framing national identity as not only compatible with but related to the founding purpose of the alliance: to defend the West against its Eastern adversary.

In comparison, while Finnish government officials could invoke these historical experiences to emphasize continuity in the NATO decision, greater effort seemed necessary in Sweden to overcome the historical centrality of peace, neutrality and non-alignment to Sweden’s national identity. Indeed, Swedish officials often dismissed the policy of neutrality and non-alignment by underemphasizing its historical significance and feminizing its character through associations with cowardice and dishonour. In the absence of recent involvement in war on its own territory, Swedish government narratives instead emphasized different strategic assets that made the country compatible with and a great benefit to NATO. For instance, officials highlighted the technological edge of the Swedish defence industry, contributing to the ideal of Swedish military masculinity as one defined by modern technological expertise. Moreover, government narratives also focused on the geographic position of Sweden in the Northern and Baltic regions as well as the unique capacity of the national armed forces to control the cold and harsh Nordic landscape, seemingly projecting the country as the leading NATO power and security provider of the High North. Hence, different experiences of empire, war and peace, related to distinct geopolitical positioning vis-a-vis the Soviet Union/Russia, contributed to the construction of distinct but complementary ideals of Finland and Sweden as NATO brothers.

Moreover, while Finland’s historical experiences with its Eastern neighbour were described as marked by tension and war, its history with Sweden was in many ways glorified. Despite the historical violence enforced by the Swedish crown, the relationship between Finland and Sweden was described as an unbreakable brotherly bond, throughout history. As this view of Finland and Sweden’s relationship as marked by almost perfect unity became cemented, the violent history of Swedish occupation and discrimination against Finns was noticeably absent from government narratives (on Finland, Sweden and racism, see Ericsson, 2024). Moreover, while government officials from both countries ascribed their countries with an exceptional capacity for democracy, freedom and equality emblematic of the Nordics – and by extension, NATO – the impact of power structures related to gender, race and class in both countries were similarly overlooked (Mulinari et al., 2009). Here, silences regarding the indigenous Sámi population were especially noisy, not least since Sápmi land stretches across the Nordics to Russia, thus disrupting strict national boundaries, and Finland and Sweden both have a long history of colonial violence against the Sámi population (Ericsson, 2024; see also Junka-Aikio, 2024; Kuokkanen, 2022). Discarding the contradictions of their imperial past and unequal present, government officials from both countries seemed able to mobilize the powerful ideal of Finland and Sweden as NATO brothers, legitimizing their unified decision to join the alliance.

Finally, both Finnish and Swedish government officials also presented Finland and Sweden as inherently united with NATO through values associated with Western military masculinity and the international rule-based order. This image relied on contrasting notions of a threatening and antithetical masculinity embodied by Russia, a symbol of military masculinity ‘gone wrong’ against which NATO’s legitimacy was made evident. Importantly, through representations of NATO as a moral collective ensuring the very survival of the West, the alliance’s dependency on military violence and nuclear weapons as well as the underpinning structures of inequality enforced by its order were left out of the story. This meant that, while government narratives in Finland and Sweden rightly presented critiques of Russia’s illegal and imperial violence against Ukraine, it simultaneously relied upon silences regarding how ‘NATO and its most powerful member (the US) have pursued wars and practices that bend, break, and undermine international law’ (Beaumont et al., 2024: 417). Here, it is especially noteworthy that, despite their prior leadership in advancing gender-inclusive strategies within NATO, both Finnish and Swedish government officials downplayed the importance of gender policy during their NATO accession process (c.f. Lyytikäinen et al., forthcoming; Wright and Bergman Rosamond, 2024).

In addition to the answers it has provided, our study has opened avenues for future research and analysis. Additional feminist attention should be paid, for example, to continuities and changes in Finland and Sweden’s relations with NATO over the post-Cold War period, and to the formative years during the 1990s when both countries increased their military cooperation with NATO allies. Similarly, it will be interesting to track the future development of the countries’ national identities in the context of NATO membership. What kind of masculinity/ies will eventually develop for the two NATO brothers, and how will they interact with the militarized masculinity of the alliance? Will there be space to reinvent the more feminized aspects of Nordic foreign and security policy, such as the promotion of human rights and gender equality internationally? This question is especially relevant given Finland and Sweden’s inability to sufficiently respond to war crimes and acts of genocide carried out by Israel in Gaza since late 2023, an inability at least partially attributed to the need to align with NATO allies, particularly the US. Moreover, Nordic responses to the second Trump administrations’ undermining of the rule-based order within NATO and elsewhere need further feminist scrutiny.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank participants in the gender seminar at the Department of Economic History and International Relations, Stockholm University, the ‘Feminist thinking on militarism’ panel at the 8th national conference of the Finnish International Studies Association, and the research seminar at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

ORCID iDs

Emma Rosengren

Leena Vastapuu

Astrid Brodén

Ethical Considerations

This project has been approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority, project number 2025-01224-01.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research has generously been supported by the Swedish Research Council, grant number 2023-06145, and the Research Council of Finland, grant number 370177.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Emma Rosengren (PhD) is a researcher at the Department of Economic History and International Relations at Stockholm University, and at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. Her research interests include historical and contemporary nuclear weapon and disarmament policy, Swedish security policy, and feminist and intersectional theory.

Leena Vastapuu (PhD) is academy research fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute, University of Tampere, whose research focuses on gendered inequalities in crisis and war. Currently on leave from her position as senior lecturer of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, she leads the HomeFront project, examining everyday militarism in Finland following its NATO membership.

Astrid Brodén is a programme manager for the Europe Programme and the Programme for Global Politics and Security at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. Her research interests include critical social theory, peace and conflict studies, and feminist and intersectional theory.

Minna Lyytikäinen is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include the Women, Peace and Security policy agenda, Finnish foreign policy and feminist peace and conflict research.

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Becoming NATO brothers: A feminist analysis of how government officials in Finland and Sweden reconciled national identity with NATO membership

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Background: historical similarities and differences

Research design: a feminist narrative analysis

The protection myth

Denaturalization through comparison

Analysis: becoming NATO brothers

Reconcile historical pasts

Defend the international rule-based order

Embrace a natural belonging to NATO

Become protectors of/from the North

Concluding discussion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

ORCID iDs

Ethical Considerations

Funding

Declaration of conflicting interests

Author biographies

References