There's a lot to unpack in this one. But it's a great application of the implications of the measurements in Chapter VI of the Handbook, and the observations of growth told throughout.
For most of its history, Sweden and Finland weren't in NATO.
Then Russia invaded another non-NATO country in Ukraine, and both countries reconsidered. Gee ... ya' think?
Except Turkey was in NATO, and didn't want Sweden and Finland in the club. And NATO is a military alliance: you don't get in without unanimous approval of your new allies.
After about a year, Finland got in. After about another year, Sweden got in (just last month).
How does that all work??
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First, Turkey is super-underrated by Americans as a macroeconomic power. It is not as big as the "big 4" western European countries, but it is solidly in the second tier with Russia and Spain (see the top deciles for GDP in Chapter VI). So it has weight it can throw around. It's also economically bigger than Sweden, and quite a bit bigger than Finland.
Second, given the war in Ukraine, Sweden and Finland wanted in to NATO. So what would they give up in the bargain?
Third, Turkey blocked them for a several of months, bargained for and got some concessions. Hmmm ... and Turkey's economy is bigger than both Sweden and Finland (maybe there's something to this macro stuff), and that accounts for a lot of their influence.
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NATO is the military alliance, and the OECD is the overlapping economic group of developed and developing capitalist countries.
Sweden and Finland were not members of NATO. Turkey was. Sweden, Finland, and Turkey are all OECD members too. It stands to reason that the Turks view themselves as fuller members of the club of important countries, in a way that American might not recognize.
Also, Turkey is a really important NATO member. Consistently active since the start, and militarily large. Also, given western European prejudices about language, religion, and skin color ... NATO is Turkey's connection into the club of big, important, countries. So, if Turkey objects to Sweden and Finland joining, NATO will listen because Turkey has been trying very hard to get western Europeans to pay attention to them and this is their wedge issue to make that happen.
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Why is Turkey in NATO?
This actually goes back 4500 years. The first horse-oriented people to ride out of the Eurasian steppes and conquer everyone in their path was ... us. (For reference down below, the Indo-European language group is called that because some went west to Europe and others went south to what is now India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey). Then came the Huns, Avars, and Magyars, who over about 500 years eventually became Hungary. Third came the Turks, who stayed in what is now called Turkey, and after them, the Mongols who rode back home.
Over the next several hundred years, the Turks fight off Crusaders, and eventually conquer the Byzantine Empire. Through the 16th and 17th century, they vied for being the strongest empire in Europe.
But it was a loose, decentralized, empire: the Ottoman Empire was ruled by Turks, but it was much more than them and not tightly held. As an example, the Barbary pirates against whom America fought its first war after the revolution (you know, as in the Marines song "... To the shores of Tripoli") were, in fact, nominally subjects of the Ottomans.
Three things happened as the Ottomans faded from their peak. First, some of the European states started more seriously centralizing power over their nations to form some of the nation-states we still have today. Second, it seems to have been a coincidence, but economic growth started up in the same region as those new western nation-states. As they got economically bigger, they started to extend their political and military influence. And third, a more eastern nation-state in Russia started picking off parts around the edges of the Ottoman Empire.
Both the perception and reality we still have that Russia and Turkey are poorer and somewhat backwards is not so much because they did anything badly. Rather it's that western Europe and America opened a gap by growing first. Turkey didn't get poor. Turkey was normal. Instead, other parts of the world got abnormally rich first. Russia and Turkey did too, but because they weren't as close geographically to the origin of economic growth, they started later. They are poorer today because we got the jump on them then.
But the Russian Empire did centralize into a nation-state and the Ottoman Empire did not. Because it could focus its resources, for 2 centuries it took lands away from the Ottomans.
Now, along come the Prussians who wrest dominance of the Germans from the Austrians in the 1860s, and form another empire. It's insufficiently appreciated in the U.S. the extent to which the new German state always regarded Russia as the big threat. Everyone else, including France and England, was an afterthought. So who do the Germans go looking for as an ally in Europe? Russia's enemy: the Ottoman Empire. And recognizing that economic growth was already happening there too, they put a lot of extra economic support into that region in the years leading up to World War I.
Not surprisingly, the Ottoman Empire fights on the side of the German Empire in World War I. And Americans tend to forget (or never knew) that they hold their own on several fronts, including one against Russia ... because they were a bigger player than we care to know.
After World War I, three fading empires are broken up. Austria-Hungary becomes a bunch of little countries along ethnic lines. Russia loses some territory, and turns inward as the Soviet Union. And the Turks lose a lot of loosely held territory, throw out their sultans, and establish a nation-state that's centered on a civilian controlled military as the most effective institution. But, while it's a very stripped down empire, it's still ruling some other nations. More on that later.
To some extent, the Nazis line up the same team for World War II: Bulgaria, Hungary, and Austria fight with them both times (and the Czechs were more solid than they care to admit). They tried pretty hard to get Turkey involved too (if you're curious, a little historical reading shows those Nazis in the Indiana Jones movies were not just randomly placed in the Middle East ... they really were there opportunistically in the 30s). To its credit, the new Turkey was not interested.
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So Turkey is trying to be new and different place after World War I, and after World War II they want everyone to remember that they really were different the second time around and had stayed neutral.
And, in the wake of World War II, the western countries return to worrying about the Soviet Union. And Turkey chimes in to point out that they've had problems with the Russians for centuries.
So when NATO forms, Turkey is admitted almost immediately. And historically, Turkey has been the 3rd biggest contributor to NATO. Why? Partly because they want to be supportive to help change western perceptions of them, but also because they're macroeconomically bigger than Americans tend to recognize: in the 92nd or 93rd percentile according to Chapter VI in the Handbook ... comparable to Mexico. And they have an effective institution in their civilian-controlled military which can be directed to serve larger aims.
And all through this period, Turkey's economy is growing, and Turks are becoming richer. In the 57th or 70th percentile according to the Handbook: comparable to the Russians, Mexicans, or Chinese.
The bottom line for macroeconomists is that a country like Mexico is aspirational for many other countries. Well, Turkey is also aspirational for many other countries, and Americans should understand that better. More on that later.
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So why was Sweden not in NATO?
It is believed this was mostly threat based. Sweden was officially
neutral in both World Wars, but was pretty cozy with Nazi Germany. So after World War II, the Soviets used their size to lean on Sweden and tell the littler country to keep its nose clean going forward.
Again, the country with the bigger GDP ... 3 to 7 times as big according to Chapter VI ... gets its way. And the Soviet Union was even bigger than its remnant in Russia.
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And why was Finland not in NATO? This is more complex.
The Finns had been dominated by the Russians since the early 18th century. Then what is now Finland was part of the Russian Empire. But the Finns freed themselves during the Russian
Revolution.
At the beginning of World War II, Hitler and Stalin were allies. One of the things the Soviets got out of that was a promise that the Nazis wouldn't object if the Soviets attacked Finland. Which they did a few months later.
Fairly obviously then, when the Nazis turned on the Soviets in 1941, the Finns went along for the ride for a few years.
But, as the tide turned, Finland switched sides in return for promises from the ascendant Soviets that they would not invade.
So after the war the Soviet pitch was more along the lines of you're our ally now, so don't even think about joining NATO. Probably the only reason they didn't join the Warsaw Pact was that the Soviets never stationed troops there.
Again, the country with the bigger GDP gets its way. Russia has 5 to 15 times the GDP of Finland, and is right next door.
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None of this addresses why Turkey would not want to have Sweden and Finland as allies in the 2020s.
There's two parts to this.
One, Turkey is economically bigger than either Sweden or Finland, so it's very likely that the Turks would be helping to defend the Swedes and Finns, rather than the other way around. Again, consulting Chapter VI, Turkey is a third bigger than Sweden, and 2-3 times the size of Finland. Turkey also has that big and effective and dispatchable military.
Secondly, Sweden and Finland have a history of supporting militant minorities in Turkey.
That's probably not that smart.
And, I don't know that there's any evidence of this, but it makes sense to speculate that Russian intelligence encouraged their smaller non-enemies in the north to support divisiveness in their bigger enemy to the south.
Again, the story is of an economically bigger country (the Soviets and then the Russians), that leans on smaller countries (Sweden and Finland), to make trouble for the medium-sized country (Turkey).
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In the middle of this are the Kurds. Who are the they, and how did they get involved in this situation?
Again, there are several threads from Chapter VI in the Handbook at work here.
In the 19th century, there's greater interest in nationalism, and the idea that countries should coincide with nations with their own state.
But there's also the reasonable 19th century observation that most of the country-nation-states that are growing in economic power ... were also pretty big to begin with. So there's a bias against small countries because it was thought they would not be viable. The idea that a Switzerland or The Netherlands could become economically powerful didn't happen until after World War II. This is the polar opposite from the view from the 1960s onward that we ought to give every nation a chance to grow and be rich no matter how small. And honestly, the jury is still out on whether that happens in anything other than the special cases of banking and tax havens (see the discussions in Chapter VI on richness vs. bigness).
Anyway, that bias is there after World War I. So when they completely break up the empire of Austria-Hungary, mostly break up the Ottoman Empire, and lop some chunks off what was the Russian Empire, the plan is to make sure the new countries succeed by making them big enough.
But what if the nations aren't big enough to reach whatever size threshold was envisioned for a country? Well, that's how we got Czechoslovakia! Which amicably broke into 2 countries about 30 years ago, because the Czechs and the Slovaks don't view each other as the same. That one worked pretty well. But it's also how we got Yugoslavia, which broke apart with genocidal events at about the same time.
And it's also how we got Iraq! Which was never a country until the U.K. (again, a bigger economy) decided to clip economically desirable parts (full of oil) off of the economically smaller and poorer Turkey between the wars. But, the region had smaller nations, so it cobbled 3 bigger ones, and a some smaller ones, into one country. One of those bigger groups was the Kurds, some of whom were also in Persia (before it renamed itself Iran), and a bunch of whom were left in the new-ish Turkey.
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Update: I forgot to mention that there were several treaties involved in the carving up of the Ottoman Empire. An initial one signed while the Ottomans still held power did give the Kurds their own country mostly inside current Turkish borders. But before it was put into effect, the Ottomans were overthrown, and the new Turkish government negotiated new treaties, the most important of which did not give the Kurds their own country.
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So what makes the Kurds view themselves as a nation?
Ethnically and culturally Kurds are related to the Iranians, and they speak a language that is distantly related to English, but fairly closely related to Persian (the prime language of Iran). Recall that these languages are hugely distinct from Turkish.
However, Islam has two big divisions: Sunni (about 80%) and Shia. And they regard each other as apostate (analogous to Catholics and Protestants in Europe in the 16th century). The Iranians are Shia, but the Kurds are Sunni.
So Iran has a majority of Shia Iranians, and a minority of Sunni Kurds. Iraq has Sunni Kurds mixed with some Shiites, and Arab Sunnis. And Turkey is Sunni, but the Turks speak a vastly different language from the Kurds, and have dominated them for centuries.
So the Kurds think of themselves as a distinct nation without a country or state.
And that tends to foment violence and revolutionary tendencies.
Into which the Swedes and Finns blundered by accepting Kurdish refugees for decades ... probably because they were an oppressed nation. Which is very big-hearted. But also, it's a recipe for trouble because, as is typical, there's exiled revolutionaries and militants mixed in.
There's also a problem that we've seen globally over the last 50 years. It used to be that oppressed minorities didn't travel very far. Everyone was poor, and maintaining links to home if you emigrated was not cheap. Think about how a few centuries ago very few Europeans could afford to move to America. And how even as that became more common, and people were drawn from increasingly remote parts, it was too expensive for most to stay in touch with the home country. That's not really the case over the last few decades: more people can afford to move around the globe, and maintain better ties with their homelands. So as everyone gets richer, because everyone eventually hits that kink in Chapter II of the Handbook, we see a lot of local militant/terrorist/revolutionary activity extending tentacles like an octopus from a head that's safely at a distance.
Thus, Turkey has a long-standing beef with Sweden and Finland that they harbor and maybe even nurture terrorists able to reach and target Turks in Turkey.
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We are probably never going to know what the Finns and Swedes conceded to the Turks to get into NATO. But it took the Finns a year to agree to it, and it took the Swedes two ... so it is probably not a minor thing.
It should also be fairly clear that there was probably a huge pressure on Turkey from the more western countries in NATO.
Also, keep in mind that Turkey is aspirational for lots of developing countries around the globe. They probably don't think they can be like Sweden or Finland, but they can be like Turkey some day. So it's a good bet that a lot of states around the world had their diplomats tell the Swedes and Finns to back off a bit.
One thing is for sure: it is probably very bad for the Kurds who are still in Turkey.
