The Nordic Foreign Policy of Neutrality, 1914-50: From Isolation to NATO

Abstract

In this paper I have attempted to show how the Nordic countries' traditions of isolationism and neutralism affected their foreign policy in the following events: trade in the First World War; fruitless attempts to make the League of Nations a legal, not political, European institution; the defeat of isolationism and neutralism in the Second World War; and the adjustment to a new world system led by the superpowers, in which the Nordic states found themselves lying uncomfortably in the middle of two heavy giants.