Like fresh fruits and vegetables, international institutions have a limited shelf life after which they cannot be saved.
Most international institutions work well when they were founded but over their lifetimes they become less and less effective. The Holy Alliance, the League of Nations, and the World Trade Organisation are all good examples of initially powerful institutions which faced a long and slow decline into irrelevance. These institutions fail because of the difficulty of reinvent themselves with the times. Ultimately we have to face the reality that they have limited shelf lives and that it is more worthwhile to build new structures than to try to restore old ones to their former glory. The latest institution to have outlived its expiry date and which has to face its inevitable decline is NATO.
I’ve written often about NATO on the blog, and my belief that the alliance is old and no longer relevant remains. What has changed recently in Sweden is the talk surrounding our application. It used to be a hobby horse for the right wing to join NATO until Putin invaded Ukraine at which point it became almost universally accepted that Sweden had to join. Over a year into the process which has continually been stalled by Hungary and Turkey it seems the liberal-leaning leader pages have come around to my position: that it is humiliating for Sweden to continually beg to join and always being shut down. A major reason why politicians of all stripes came together over the NATO application was that all the power players in NATO – the US, the UK, and Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO – assured Sweden that the application was mainly a formality. We would be welcomed with open arms after a quick process. 16 months later we are still waiting.
If the current mood persists and a movement to withdraw our application forms, as I hope it will, it could be a real challenge to the internal politics of NATO. Not to get ahead of ourselves, this will be resolved if Ankara decides to finally approve Swedish membership, but given how many promises have been broken already I don’t see why this time would be any different. How would Finland and the rest of Scandinavia feel if their treaty allies refused entry for a strategically important neighbour with which they have strong cultural and commercial ties?
NATO’s future is uncertain already given that Donald Trump has a good chance of becoming America’s president again, and his dim view of the US’ alliances haven’t improved in the last four years. As I’ve said before, it’s in no one’s interest to formally declare that an alliance is dead, but with the way things are heading now NATO could be on its last legs. NATO was a good idea when it was formed but new times require new policies and structures. Joining now would be like joining the League of Nations in 1932.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by Hasan Hüseyin Yücel from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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