Swedish professor demands Nordic states fund Finland's army, calls it strategic obligation not charity

• Finland maintains a 1,340 km land border with Russia, the longest of any NATO member state
• Professor Hårdstedt frames Nordic defence financing as strategic self-interest, not aid
• The proposal challenges the Nordic habit of treating defence spending as a purely national budget question
• No formal mechanism exists for cross-Nordic military financing despite deepening defence cooperation

Martin Hårdstedt, professor of defence history at Umeå University, has made a blunt case that Sweden, Norway, and Denmark should pay to sustain Finland's army. Writing in Hufvudstadsbladet, the Finnish-Swedish daily, Hårdstedt argues the obligation is both moral — rooted in the historical abandonment of Finland during the Winter War — and rational, given that Finland now holds NATO's longest land border with Russia at 1,340 kilometres.

The argument is deceptively simple. Finland's border defence benefits every Nordic country. If that line fails, the threat reaches Sweden across the Gulf of Bothnia and Norway's Finnmark in hours. Yet Finland bears the fiscal weight of maintaining a wartime strength of 280,000 troops — a conscription-based force structure that dwarfs anything its Nordic neighbours field — largely on its own. Hårdstedt's position is that this arrangement is not generosity from Finland but a subsidy that Stockholm, Oslo, and Copenhagen receive without paying for.

What makes the proposal uncomfortable is that it challenges how every Nordic government thinks about defence budgets. Defence spending is treated as a sovereign line item: each country sets its percentage of GDP, buys its own equipment, and staffs its own units. Cross-border procurement deals exist — Norway and Finland jointly purchased South Korean K9 howitzers, Sweden and Finland signed a bilateral defence cooperation agreement in 2018 — but no mechanism exists for one Nordic country to directly finance another's standing forces. The EU has structural funds for economic convergence between member states. NATO has cost-sharing for joint infrastructure. The Nordics have neither for defence.

Building one would require answering questions no Nordic politician has publicly addressed. Would contributions be proportional to GDP, to geographic exposure, or to some formula blending both? Would donors get a say in how Finland allocates the money — and would Helsinki accept conditions on its force structure from countries that spent decades outside NATO? Norway, flush with petroleum revenue and already spending above the NATO two-percent target, might be the easiest sell. Sweden, still ramping up from decades of defence neglect, would face the harder domestic argument: why send money east when Swedish units remain underequipped?

The deeper tension is between parallel rearmament and genuine collective defence. All five Nordic countries are now increasing military spending. Sweden has committed to reaching two percent of GDP. Denmark reversed its defence opt-out from the EU and is building up. Norway is expanding its navy. But each country is doing so on its own terms, for its own force structure, according to its own political timeline. Hårdstedt's proposal implies this is insufficient — that Nordic defence requires not just more spending but shared spending, with Finland's land border recognised as a common asset requiring common financing.

The professor is making an argument that Nordic defence planners privately acknowledge but publicly avoid: the five countries either function as a single strategic unit or they remain five small states hoping the Americans will show up. A Nordic defence financing mechanism would be a concrete step toward the former. That no government has proposed one tells you which option they have actually chosen.

Finland, meanwhile, keeps 280,000 reservists trained and ready. The invoice goes to Helsinki alone.

Sources: Hufvudstadsbladet