With the European elections around the corner, populists and right-wing parties are gathering momentum and teaming-up into a pan-European alliance.

The alliance is being established around a common anti-immigration and eurosceptic ideology but nationalist parties have something else in common: opposition to climate action.

Research shows that dozens of candidates standing in the election are using climate science denial and anti-climate action rhetoric as a campaign strategy.

In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has embraced climate science denial to ramp-up support against environmental protection using online smear campaigns against the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

In Belgium, leader of the People’s Party Mischaël Modrikamen, who believes climate change is “the biggest orchestrated bullshit in the history of humanity”, has joined ranks with former Trump chief strategist and Breitbart chief Steve Bannon and Italy’s Northern League leader Matteo Salvini to spread populist ideology across Europe.

And from Estonia and Austria to France and the Netherlands, right-wing nationalist parties continue to carry climate science denial into the political conversation. Not all parties deny the scientific evidence behind human-caused climate change, but many have become platforms for such ideas to spread.

DeSmog looks at where candidates for Europe’s key right-wing populist parties stand on climate change:

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – Germany

Since entering Germany’s parliament two years ago on an anti-Muslim and anti-immigration manifesto, the AfD has embraced climate science denial as a new campaign strategy.

Its election manifesto denies human-induced climate change and claims that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has meant “world food harvests have increased significantly”.

“We doubt that man has significantly influenced or even managed the recent climate change, in particular the current warming. Climate protection policy is therefore a mistake,” the manifesto states.

As such, the AfD rejects “all EU measures that justify the reduction of CO2 emissions with the protection of the climate”, including the Paris Agreement, which it describes as a “shift of funds from the highly industrialized countries to underdeveloped countries”.

Most recently, the AfD has conducted a targeted smear campaigns against the climate school strike movement and the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

Climate change barely got a mention on the AfD’s social media channels when the party was founded in 2013. But it mentioned climate change more than 900 times in the past year alone, mainly promoting anti-Thunberg rhetoric, according to a joint investigation by the counter-extremism organisation the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and Greenpeace’s Unearthed.

Party chairman Jörg Meuthen, the lead candidate standing in the election, has repeatedly attacked Green politics and described climate change as “a replacement religion of all left green world parties and patronisers”.

Meuthen repeatedly accused those that want climate action of “Greta hype”, labelling them “CO2 believing disciples”.

Maximilian Krah, another AfD candidate, also targeted Thunberg 10 times in tweets between December 2018 and April 2019, describing the movement she inspired as a “psychosis” and the consequences of a post-Catholic age.

He also compared climate change to homeopathy, claiming the EU could soon declare the latter a science.

Earlier this year, coal miner Guido Reil, also a candidate, defended the party’s false claim that carbon dioxide is good for plants and that it is having no impact on the climate.

The AfD’s anti-climate campaign efforts have been backed by the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), a German-based climate science denial which is known for co-hosting a climate conference with the Heartland Institute, a US-based think tank which has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.

EIKE’s advisory board include Christopher Monckton, a former British politician and advisor to Margaret Thatcher, who was later affiliated with Ukip and a notorious climate science denier.

People’s Party – Belgium

The People’s Party is a primarily Francophone, anti-Islam, right-wing party led by Mischaël Modrikamen.

The party’s lurch to the far-right over the last few years has also seen its stance on climate change radicalised, rejecting climate action as a “collective hysteria” and denying human-induced climate change.

In a statement from February 2019, the party slammed Belgium’s decarbonisation policies as “excessive”. It described “the infinitesimal increase of CO2” as “by no means a pollutant” that “allowed the globalized greening of our planet in the last thirty years as well as the yield of harvests”.

The People’s Party says it is “deeply attached to our land” but says it will instead focus “on the real problems: soil pollution by nitrates, plastics in the oceans, excessive urbanisation, permaculture, short production circuits to avoid wastage.”

A staunch admirer of Donald Trump, Modrikamen is also an ally of his former chief strategist Steve Bannon. In 2018, Modrikamen re-launched The Movement, a Brussels-based far-right organisation that aims to galvanise far-right populist ideology and anti-EU sentiment, with Bannon’s official backing. The People’s Party is officially affiliated to The Movement.

In September 2018, Modrikamen tweeted a picture with Bannon and Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s populist Northern League in Italy, after Salvini joined The Movement.

Modrikamen previously shared articles from Bannon’s Breitbart website, written by climate science denier James Delingpole, which accused school climate strikers of being “ignorant and manipulated”, shared denialist theories about “global cooling”, and called Thunberg’s activism “the biggest orchestrated bullshit in the history of humanity”.

Secretary general of the People’s Party and Modrikamen’s wife,Yasmine Dehaene- Modrikamen is also standing in the election.

Dehaene-Modrikamen has cited the work of some of Europe’s most notorious climate science deniers, including Richard Tol, a former advisor to the UK’s most prominent climate science denying group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish economist who argues it would be too expensive to tackle climate change in a meaningful way and French professor Francois Gervais, who argues that the climate emergency is “a delusion”.

Ukip and The Brexit Party – United Kingdom

Ukip has for long attracted climate science deniers into its ranks. And earlier this year, Ukip’s former leader Nigel Farage, who has a history of spreading misinformation about climate change, launched The Brexit Party to contest the European elections.

As DeSmog previously reported, the Brexit Party includes a number of opponents to measures to tackle climate change. including Ann Widdecombe, one of five MPs to oppose the Climate Change Act in the UK. Annunziata Rees-Mogg, who advocated investments in the Canadian tar sands and sister of climate science denying Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is also a marquee candidate. She joins chairman of Turning Point UK George Farmer and Welsh MEP Nathan Gill, both of whom have questioned mainstream climate science and the need for action..

In the meantime, Ukip’s candidates are continuing the party’s climate science denial tradition.

Ukip MEPs were among a small band of right-wing members to vote against the ratification by the European Parliament of the Paris Agreement in 2016. The party’s current manifesto calls for the country’s 2008 Climate Change Act to be scrapped, and promotes measures to rejuvenate the UK’s coal industry.

Ukip leader Gerard Batten, also a candidate, has defended Ukip’s policy, suggesting there was no need for “a man-made climate change policy”. Candidate Alan Graves Senior likewise confirmed the party’s policy tweeting: “It is not a case of denying climate change it is more that we do not accept it is all man-made”.

And Ukip MEP Stuart Agnew previously described global warming as “a scam” and used a series of cold winters to justify his belief that global warming is not happening.

Other candidates in the elections, including Paul Oakley, Richard Braine, and Richard Elvin have also touted climate science denial.

Party for Freedom ( PVV ) – Netherlands

Party for Freedom (PVV) is best known for the aggressive anti-immigration and anti-Islam rehtoric of its leader, Geert Wilders.

But the party’s stance on climate change is no less zealous. The PVV argues that there is no independent evidence that humans cause climate change and slams the work of the IPCC as unable to prove that relationship.

It objects to climate action largely on cost grounds — a blog post on its website claims that “CO2 reduction would be at least 30 times more expensive for the Netherlands than adapting to any occurring climate change.” Its one-page manifesto for the European elections doesn’t mention climate change but promises “no more money for development, windmills, art, innovation or broadcasting”.

According to a report by the environmental think tank Adelphi, PVV MEPs have voted against all EU climate and energy policy proposals tabled in the European Parliament between 2009 and 2018, including the ratification of the Paris Agreement.

Marcel de Graaff, a PVV MEP since 2014 who is standing again, and co-chair of the right-wing eurosceptic Europe of Nations and Freedom political grouping. He has previously called to “cut the crap”, put an end to climate and decarbonisation policies and “green lies”.

In a parliamentary question, his colleague, Olaf Stuger, another candidate in the election, argued global warming data had been “grossly exaggerated” and “manipulated” and asked the European Commission to review the EU’s policy on climate change.

Freedom Party of Austria ( FP Ö) – Austria

For the right-wing nationalists in Austria’s FPÖ, climate change is perceived as a globalist threat. The party seeks to end its dependency on imported fossil fuels and transition to domestic and locally available energy sources, including solar, wind, hydrogen and bioenergy.

However, party members continue to deny human-caused climate change.

Party chairman Heinz-Christian Strache, a hardliner who pushed the FPÖ further to the right, has repeatedly argued that it is a natural phenomenon that cannot be prevented. In an 2017 interview with Australian national radio ORF, Strache claimed that “Greenland used to be a green country with vineyards,” adding that “global warming cannot be corrected in the face of increasing solar flares and warming of the sun”.

FPÖ’s leading candidate in the elections, Harald Vilimsky, who has been an MEP since 2014, voted against the ratification of the Paris Agreement. And in March this year, Vilimsky submitted an amendment on proposed legislation to establish an asylum and migration fund, which deleted all mention of the “importance of tackling climate change”, the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

National Rally – France

The National Front, now rebranded as the National Rally, has worked to relinquish its image as an anti-semitic and Holocaust-denying party founded in the 1970s by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Under Marine Le Pen’s leadership, the party has worked to green its image and make the environment an issue of national identity.

The party is keen to develop renewable energy sources to end France’s dependence on fossil fuel imports, but continues to cast doubt on the human causes of climate change.

In a 2012 interview, Le Pen declared: “I am not sure human activities are the main source behind the [climate change] phenomenon … The world has seen changes in the climate that had nothing to do with human activity.”

In 2016, National Front MEPs abstained from the vote to ratify the Paris Agreement and have repeatedly abstained or voted against decarbonisation and emission reduction policies in the European parliament, according to research by French newspaper Le Monde.

Breaking with that tradition, the party’s lead candidate in the election, 23-year-old Jordan Bardella, however, described environmental challenges, together with the immigration, as one of the two key issues of the 21st century. Bardella has so far stayed clear of any direct comments on climate change.

But others have been more outspoken. Nicolas Bay, former Secretary General of the National Front and co-chair of the Europe of Nations and Freedom group said in a 2017 interview that it is “very difficult to tell whether, in the long-term, there is warming, to know the share of human activity in causing it and the capacity we [humans] have to influence these phenomena”.

Asked what he believed was the share of human activity in causing climate change, Bay said: “I think it exists but it may be more limited than sometimes said”. In the same interview, Bay rejected the idea he was a climate science denier.

Speaking at the European Parliament in March 2019, MEP Joëlle Mellin likewise acknowledged that while climate change was “a crucial problem” for the world’s inhabitants, climate policy should take into account both human responsibility of a “savage industrialisation process” and of “proven natural climate cycles”.

Mellin also said activists had to “stop saying that humans […] are responsible for everything” and “refute the idea that the Paris Accord is an angel-like solution” to the climate crisis.

Addressing Greta Thunberg during her visit to the EU Parliament, Mellin praised the teenager for raising climate change awareness among her generation but said activists can’t only rely on shock sentences which have no other foundation besides emotion.”

Read more – What the Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Europe Means for Climate Science Denial

Lega Nord – Italy

Italy’s nationalist Northern League party is largely disengaged on the issue of climate change.

Although the party manifesto mentions climate change in the context of developing renewable energy and advocates climate adaptation measures, the topic is mostly absent from official communications, according to research by Adelphi. The party supports an energy transition, energy efficiency measures and a ban on polluting cars with low energy prices a key priority.

But Northern League MEPs did vote against ratifying the Paris Agreement in the European Parliament, with MEP Gianluca Pini describing the agreement as a “downward compromise in continuing to allow Chinese companies and developing countries to compete unfairly with Italian companies, who fully comply with environmentally friendly production”.

Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, who leads his party’s list in the elections and is not shy about his support for Donald Trump, strongly opposed the EU parliament’s recognition of the term “climate migrant”, and tweeted: “It is crazy to exploit a serious subject like climate to legitimise illegal immigration”.

Northern League candidates Mara Bizzotto and Angelo Ciocca have also consistently voted against decarbonisation and climate policies or simply avoided and abstained on environmental and climate votes.

Danish People’s Party ( DF ) – Denmark

Denmark’s Dansk Folkeparti (also known as the Danish People’s Party or DF) has seen its position on climate change evolve in recent years. While many of its most high profile members were previously happy to openly tout climate science denial, the party’s MEPs have shown more willingness to engage with climate policy.

The party’s climate spokesperson said in 2018 that he was not convinced climate change was caused by human activity:

“I can’t rule out the thesis that they are man-made. But as long as there are reliable researchers who say one thing, and then some others say the other, I do not feel completely convinced that one explanation is more real than the other.”

And in August 2018, the party’s former climate lead, Per Dalgaard, told Radio24 that there is “no one in the Danish People’s Party who believes that climate change is man-made”.

But the party’s chairman, Peter Skaruup, said in March 2019 that he accepted “the climate is changing quite markedly quite quickly” and that it was “probably” due to human activity.

Nonetheless, the first and second candidates on the DF’s candidate list, Peter Kofod and Anders Primdahl Vistisen, have both criticised those that want to see faster climate action.

In a letter to Information.dk criticising its coverage of DF Youth’s anti-climate action campaign in 2012, Kofod said:

“The climate debate in Denmark has created a variegated cluster of climate apostles led by Al Gore … a new religion has come: climate fanaticism, whose warm air preachers include counts Rehling on Information.”

And Vistisen was behind a 2012 proposal to suspend the EU’s climate and energy package that seeks to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, which failed to get sufficient support to be considered by the European Commission.

Swedish Democrats – Sweden

Like France’s National Rally and Italy’s Northern League, the Swedish Democrats, a nationalist and anti-immigration party with roots in the country’s white nationalist movement, acknowledges the causal link between human activity and climate change. But it has repeatedly cast doubt on the risks linked to climate change.

The party’s manifesto states that environmental issues are often complex in nature and should be managed in the long term and calls for cooperation within Europe and globally. However, the Swedish Democrats were the only party to oppose the country’s ambitious climate target to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045.

Party spokesman Martin Kinnunen previously tweeted that “warmer climates are positive for the opportunity to grow [food] in Sweden. That is a fact,” and that one hot summer should not lead to climate anxiety.

In the European Parliament, MEPs voting record on climate and energy issues has been mixed.

EKRE – Estonia

The Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) currently has no seats in the European Parliament but doubled its vote in the country’s national election in March, coming third with 17,8 percent of the vote. The right-wing nationalist party ran on a pledge to protect an “indeigenous Estonia” and now forms part of the country’s coalition government.

The party is fielding nine candidates in the European election — all white men.

On climate change, EKRE leader Mart Helme has been keen to emphasise that Estonia’s emissions were insignificant compared to the rest of the world. The party rejects the Paris Agreement, which Helme previously described as a “classic left-wing action”.

Like his father, Martin Helme, who is also a candidate in the election, he has argued that there is no convincing evidence for linking human activity to climate change.

“We are told that there is a pause in climate warming, and if this long pause can no longer be explained, we simply talk about climate or heat fluctuations, but no one has been able to talk convincingly about what this is and has to do with human activity,” he said in a 2016 statment.

In the same statement, Helme wrongly claimed that the Paris Agreement does not apply to coal emissions from China, India and the US.

The party’s 2018 manifesto includes no mention of climate change but says it supports renewable energy provided that it does not increase energy prices for consumers and helps to reduce Estonia’s energy imports.

Read more – Meet The Brexit Party’s Climate Science Deniers

Law and Justice Party – Poland

Poland’s Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice Party (PiS)) is a nationalist, pro-coal party that obstructs climate policies at home. However, on the global stage the party is engaged in the UN climate negotiations and considers the Paris Agreement a success.

Under a PiS-government, Poland hosted last year’s UN climate talks in Katowice. At the time, PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki hailed Poland a leader in climate protection and PiS spokeswoman and candidate Beata Mazurek warned that “climate action could not be postponed until later”.

However, Mazurek has significantly less climate ambition at home. In May this year, she defended the party’s pro-coal position declaring that ending the country’s reliance on coal would lead to “drastic rises in energy prices and an economic crisis”. Poland consumes the second largest amount of coal per year in the EU, with around 80 per cent of its electricity production coming from what is the most polluting fossil fuel.

PiS has also been a vocal critic of the EU’s climate policies and has repeatedly advocated for non-binding targets and deregulation. In the European Parliament, PiS MEPs voted against the majority of climate and energy proposals, according to research by Adelphi.

Some PiS politicians have also promoted climate science denial.

In an 2018 interview, Tomasz Chruszczow, Poland’s top climate negotiator refused to confirm whether he backed the scientific consensus that human activity is the key driver of climate change.

And in 2016, Education Minister Anna Zalewska proposed removing climate change and evolution theory from the biology curriculum. In 2014, she told a group of students “there [was] no global warming”.

Fidesz – Hungary

Viktor Orbán’s right-wing party Fidesz is one of the few nationalists parties in Europe to actively support the Paris Agreement, partly using it as an excuse to be less ambitious at home.

Speaking in 2017, Prime Minister Orbán said: “In Hungary, there is a consensus that climate change is real, that it is dangerous and since it is a global phenomenon, requires global action to combat.”

In 2016, Hungarian President János Adér wrote a letter to 10 heads of state from the world’s top greenhouse gas polluters demanding they set an example and tighten their emissions reduction targets. Hungary’s parliament then became the first in the EU to ratify the Paris deal.

But critics and environmental NGOs have accused the Fidesz government of using calls for action on the international stage as an excuse to do little at home.

Kövér László, speaker of the Hungarian National Assembly, has recently attributed rising public concerns over climate change overtaking concerns about immigration to “the brainwashing effect of independent and impartial media”.

Freedom and Direct Democracy – Czech Republic

The Freedom and Direct Democracy party is a staunchly Eurosceptic and anti-immigration party. It currently has no MEPs sitting in the European Parliament, but the party boasts of its links with France’s National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and Italy’s Northern League leader Matteo Salvini.

On climate change, the party-co-founders Radim Fiala and Tomio Okamura, who are overseeing a list of 21 candidates, have sent mixed messages.

In 2015, deputy leader Fiala, said that “under the pretext of combating climate change, unprecedented economic atroci-ties are taking place”. But party leader Okamura admitted that “the climate is really changing” and added it was a question of “how much a person contributes to it”.

The party’s manifesto does not mention climate change but calls for energy security and the “efficient use of renewable resources”.

Vox – Spain

Spanish nationalist party Vox is expecting to do well in the European Parliament elections, having won 24 seats in Spain’s national election in April 2019, making it the first far-right grouping to win more than a single seat in congress since Spain returned to democracy in 1975.

Vox believes that climate change is real and caused by humans, but is reluctant to commit many resources to tackling it.

The party’s first candidate for the European Parliament, Jorge Buxadé, told a recent debate, “the rest of countries must meet the same commitments as Europeans in the fight against climate change. The current situation is an injustice.”

Additional research and reporting by Richard Collett-White and Mat Hope.

Main image credit: djsuffix CC BY–NC 2.0

“Historic events call for historic decisions.” With these words, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called on 6 March for a snap referendum on her country’s opt-out from EU defence. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was the obvious backdrop to this decision. Yet the Zeitenwende speech by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz one week earlier also spurred Frederiksen – and a majority of Danish MPs – to step up Denmark’s commitment to common European defence. They did so by promising to fulfil Denmark’s NATO commitment to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence and by organising the referendum.

On 1 June 2022, a resounding 67 per cent of Danes voted to scrap the opt-out – a legacy of Denmark’s June 1992 referendum, in which a slim majority of voters rejected the Maastricht Treaty. Upon voting “no”, Denmark negotiated opt-outs on defence, the euro, justice and home affairs, and union citizenship. Danes then voted in favour of the opt-outs in a referendum on 18 May 1993.

The result of the most recent vote is indeed historic. Previous governments held referendums on the euro opt-out in 2000 and the justice and home affairs opt-out in 2015 – but, both times, Danes voted to maintain the status quo. Moreover, Frederiksen has also secured the widest “yes” margin in a referendum since 1972, when then-prime minister Jens Otto Krag carried Denmark into the European Communities.

The turnout in the recent referendum was the only cloud in the sky. Sixty-six per cent of the electorate participated in the vote – the second-lowest turnout in Denmark’s nine referendums on the European Union, and significantly lower than the 90 per cent who voted 50 years ago. Nonetheless, this level of participation is on a par with that in the last European Parliament election.

Sovereignty and a European army

The spectre of a European army has long haunted the Danish debate on EU defence. The ‘no’ camp hailed the opt-out as a legal bulwark against the formation of such an army and the eternal loss of Danish sovereignty. For instance, it invoked recent speeches by French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the issue – but the approach did not gain traction this time around.

The fact that the much-dreaded European army had not materialised since Denmark’s ‘no’ vote in 1992 undermined the scaremongering. In addition, the ‘yes’ camp made sure to appeal to a generally Atlanticist electorate by emphasising that ending the opt-out would strengthen the European pillar of NATO and accommodate US demands that Europe step up its defence commitments in its neighbourhood. This tactic prevented the campaign from turning into a battle between “team EU” and “team NATO”.

The fact that two-thirds of participants in the referendum voted ‘yes’ seems to reflect a recognition that Denmark needs more allies and friends in times of crisis

Opinion polls have consistently shown Danes’ strong reluctance to transfer sovereignty to the EU. However, politicians in the ‘yes’ camp appear to have convinced the public that, as the EU’s defence initiatives are purely intergovernmental, the removal of the opt-out would not undermine Denmark’s sovereignty.

The fact that two-thirds of participants in the referendum voted ‘yes’ seems to reflect a recognition that Denmark needs more allies and friends in times of crisis. After Putin’s invasion, Denmark’s position as the only European NATO and EU member state outside the EU’s defence initiatives suddenly appeared odd and insecure. Just as Finland and Sweden pledged to join NATO, Denmark would join its EU partners on defence.

Push factors

A referendum was not in the cards at the turn of the year. Before becoming prime minister, Frederiksen – a social democrat – characterised Denmark’s opt-outs as the foundation of her EU policy. In fact, just a few weeks before Putin’s invasion, both she and Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod argued vehemently that the defence opt-out in no way prevented Denmark from implementing its foreign and security policy. Frederiksen’s position on the issue aligned with public sentiment. Opinion polls had for many years shown public support for maintaining all four opt-outs. But public opinion shifted between February and March as concerned the defence opt-out. Seen from this perspective, there is no doubt that the Putin effect led to the referendum result on 1 June.

In addition, there was likely a degree of spillover from Danes’ growing support for EU membership – a trend that has been apparent since the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. For instance, a poll conducted by European Council on Foreign Relations in April 2021 showed that 28 per cent of Danes thought EU membership was a “very good thing” – the highest proportion of any of the 12 national groupings in that study – while a slightly larger percentage believed it was just “a good thing”. This is in sharp contrast to public sentiment before the referendum in 2015, a year in which the refugee crisis created a wave of scepticism of EU membership in Denmark.

Finally, one should not underestimate the political calculations in play. The liberals in opposition have long argued for the abolition of the Danish opt-out on defence. By calling for a referendum, Frederiksen – who is likely to face a parliamentary election this autumn – forced the opposition into a national alliance and pre-empted its potential accusations that she was failing to support Ukraine by any means necessary.

No Danish EU-phoria

The Danish government’s next step will be to decide which EU defence initiatives to join. Judging by the referendum campaign, it seems likely that Denmark will participate in the EU’s mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina. More importantly, the referendum result contributes to a major shift in Nordic security. Once Sweden and Finland join NATO, all four Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway) and the three Baltics states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) will be able to jointly participate in both NATO and EU operations, and to engage in military planning and exercises accordingly. As former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt has argued, one needs to go back to the Middle Ages and the Kalmar Union to find similar opportunities for a united Scandinavia.

However, one should not exaggerate the impact of the Danish Zeitenwende beyond EU defence. While the referendum marks a sea change in Denmark’s EU defence policy, it does not signal a broader shift in its EU policy. That much became clear on the night of the vote, when Frederiksen immediately promised the Danish electorate that she would “handle the ‘yes’ with great care” and take into consideration the concerns of the 33 per cent who had voted ‘no’. She also stressed that she would refrain from putting the other opt-outs to a vote.

Frederiksen’s Eurosceptic credentials and strong support for a fiscally conservative grouping of member states (which also includes Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria, and – periodically – Finland) during the EU budget negotiations in 2020 might have contributed to the ‘yes’ vote. Danes sceptical of the EU could trust Frederiksen – who has been labelled the most Eurosceptic Danish prime minister in history – not to move against the remaining opt-outs. Frederiksen is also promoting initiatives that are at odds with EU priorities, such as through talks with Rwanda about a new procedure for transferring asylum seekers to the east African nation. Such a procedure would run in opposition to the EU’s asylum policy.

In this light, Frederiksen’s referendum is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. Just as no one feared that the staunchly anti-communist Nixon would appease China, no one expected Frederiksen to transform into a European federalist. Throughout the referendum campaign, she was careful to remind Danish voters (and her European colleagues) that Denmark was against the idea of a new European convention, let alone a new intergovernmental treaty.

Although the Danish Zeitenwende has many nuances, one should not dismiss its psychological effect. The Danish government’s victory has demonstrated that it is still possible to win referendums on closer European integration. Nonetheless, it may be a long wait for Denmark’s next referendum on the EU.

Summary

Fifteen months into the covid-19 pandemic, there has been a major collapse in Germans’ trust in the European Union.

German politicians need to react to the growing pressure on the consensus in German society for an outward-looking and pro-EU Germany.

At the same time, Germany’s traditional ways of thinking are increasingly unsuited to addressing new foreign policy challenges.

To find a viable model for its economic, security, and EU policy, the next federal government needs to address some of the unsettling issues that its predecessors have often ignored.

The key to building support for an outward-looking and pro-EU Germany lies, paradoxically, in anchoring German policy in a narrower focus on the national interest.

To engage more confidently with a world that is changing, outward-looking Germans need to shape a progressive new national identity before it is defined by the forces of isolation and exclusion.

If Germany does not shift its course, it will end up with an inadequate foreign policy that lacks public support.

Policymakers need to better explain how Berlin uses the EU to increase its influence and thereby enhance the wealth, prosperity, and security of the German public.

Introduction

Germany may be on the cusp of a nationalist turn. The external building blocks of its outward-looking economy and foreign policy are under assault. As China and America increasingly use the global economy to compete with each other, the return of great power competition threatens to unravel globalisation. Washington is recalibrating the American security guarantee for Europe in the light of a new race for pre-eminence in the Pacific. The European Union is becoming more divided. And there are increasingly strong arguments in Europe about whether to socialise debt and public spending, which raise uncomfortable questions for Germany.

At the same time, public opinion is challenging the very foundations of German foreign policy. When covid-19 strikes an individual, it can have a short, acute phase and a set of longer-term pathologies. The same is true of its political effects. A series of opinion polls conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations shows that, while the onset of the covid-19 crisis strengthened Germans’ support for European integration, there is a danger that political long covid could sap support for the EU in its most important member state.

There is nothing inevitable about a Eurosceptic turn in German politics. But ECFR’s new data show the dangers of assuming that Germans will always support the EU. External and internal conditions are forcing Berlin to adjust. We argue that there is both a need and an opportunity to turn the situation around in the September 2021 German parliamentary election. In this paper, we look at the status quo and the prevailing consensus in the foreign policy debate in three areas: trade, security, and Europe. We identify the blind spots of the consensus in each of these areas that prevent Germany from meeting today’s challenges, and show what an alternative approach could look like. We feel that German politicians need to react to the growing pressure on the consensus in German society for an outward-looking and pro-EU Germany. They need to radically change their approach to secure consent for a more internationalist politics, and to deliver for German citizens in a new era.

As well as changing many of the policies that have long defined Germany’s engagement with the rest of the world, German leaders should fundamentally alter the way that they engage with the public on these issues. The strongest case for an outward-looking and pro-EU Germany lies, paradoxically, in anchoring German policy in a more overtly patriotic focus on the national interest.

The dangers of presenting foreign policy as a sacrifice

There is no danger of Germany leaving the EU or of a Eurosceptic party winning the chancellery in this year’s parliamentary election, but there has been a major collapse in Germans’ trust in the union. For many years, political elites in Berlin took it for granted that the German public supports the EU. However, there are warning signs that, unless the political class finds a new way of engaging with citizens on European policy, the EU’s most populous member state could eventually take a nationalist turn.

The results of ECFR’s latest poll are striking. In 2019 and 2020, German citizens expressed much more faith in the EU’s political system than people in France or Italy did. But the poor performance around the European Commission’s control of vaccine distribution seems to have changed Germans’ views. Fifty-five per cent of Germans now think the EU’s political system is broken – a jump of 11 percentage points since last year. Correspondingly, in November 2020, one in two Germans believed that the EU’s political system was working; currently, only 36 per cent do.

Forty-nine per cent of Germans claim to have less or much less confidence in the EU as a result of its vaccines policy (the 28 per cent who say “much less” comprise the largest group in this measure). And 33 per cent of Germans now think that the coronavirus crisis shows that EU integration has gone too far, compared to 23 per cent in 2020.

In February 2020 (before the covid-19 lockdown), ECFR hosted Berlin’s leading strategists for a discussion on German foreign policy. One participant in the event said that any policy worth having would need to involve a tangible sacrifice. And speaker after speaker lined up to lay out what that should be: spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence, scrapping the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, abandoning Germany’s opposition to the socialisation of European debt, or agreeing to a budget for the eurozone. The foreign policy discourse became like an auction of competitive sacrifices.

When the discussion turned to the role that foreign policy would play in the upcoming German election, there was also a degree of consensus among the speakers: despite the growing importance of international issues to ordinary Germans, the election campaign would involve almost no discussion of foreign policy. Some of the participants declared that this might be a blessing, because parties would not be tempted to follow the more regressive instincts of their supporters by questioning military spending, nuclear sharing, or support for Europe. The more ambitious speakers thought this would be a curse, because the new government would not have a mandate for radical change.

Listening to the exchange, it became hard not to see the themes of sacrifice and foreign policy as connected – and to fear what they would mean for Germany in the long term. If German foreign policy was all about sacrifice, it was unlikely to appeal to the German people. Elites would negotiate Germany’s foreign policy programme among themselves, before presenting it to voters as the only reasonable course of action. As a consequence, there would never be a strong popular mandate for German foreign policy, and populist parties could present it as an elite conspiracy. The American experience in 2016 showed how dangerous this pattern could be when the foreign policy consensus lost its social base and was rapidly swept away by Donald Trump’s counter-revolution, leaving the foreign policy community orphaned and directionless.

So, what is to be done?

The patriotic case for international engagement

Leaders in Berlin should start by turning the German consensus on its head. Rather than looking for ways that Germans can sacrifice themselves – to meet the expectations of allies and partners or because of the country’s “special responsibility” – the political class should define and defend the German national interest more explicitly.

Germany’s relationship with its history is one of the wonders of the modern world. Through a painful series of clashes between and within different generations, Germany crafted a new identity that transcends its past by facing up to it. There are various elements to this, the first of which is an attempt to replace ethnic nationalism with a civic Verfassungspatriotismus (constitutional patriotism). Another element has been to directly confront German guilt through a Politik der Aussöhnung (policy of reconciliation), including a remarkable refashioning of Germany’s bilateral relationships with France, Poland, Russia, and Israel. Thirdly, Germans wholeheartedly embraced the idea of a European rather than national identity, becoming ‘model Europeans’.

It is not hard to understand why so many German elites conceive of Germany’s foreign and Europe policy as an act of collective self-sacrifice. The country’s domestic rehabilitation and reconstruction after the second world war was facilitated and legitimated by an international politics of sublimation and integration into alliances. The German strategy was to try to avoid being perceived as threatening or dominant. To this end, German leaders framed German interests as “European interests”. This was a way of rebuilding the trust Germany lost in the first half of the twentieth century. The country did not want to be perceived as the gorilla in the room. ‘No experiments!’ has become a kind of core German brand. The result has been a broad elite consensus on support for European integration, Atlanticism, fiscally conservative macroeconomics, and a very narrow avenue for political competition in foreign policy.

In reality, this policy did not require much self-sacrifice, as it enabled Germany to experience unprecedented peace and prosperity. Germany has benefited massively from the status quo – often at the expense of others. Even the biggest ‘sacrifice’, the abandonment of the deutschmark for the euro, was a very good investment. The last three decades have been especially kind to Germany. As Thomas Bagger explains, in 1989, history ‘ended’ for many Germans, and they found themselves on the right side of it for the first time. They prospered mightily as Europe and the world entered a period of integration, and as economics took precedence over geopolitics.

But it has been counterproductive to cloak the aggressive pursuit of German interests in a rhetoric of responsibility and selflessness. This approach has created suspicion in other European countries, which think that Germany is only pursuing its own interests and has no right to define European interests for them. And, more troublingly, the approach is sapping support for internationalism at home.

Germany will need to adapt its policy of self-abnegation if it is to turn the situation around. Moreover, changes in international politics make this a necessity.

German progressives are particularly wary of talking about the national interest. They are uneasy with the idea of German patriotism and national symbols such as the German flag. So far, the discourse on the national interest has been dominated and often instrumentalised by the far right. But the pressure on Germans to relate to their own national identity has grown steadily in recent years – especially in the aftermath of the refugee crisis of 2015. Therefore, a progressive German foreign policy for the twenty-first century needs to modernise Germanness – and to do so in ways that celebrate Germany’s achievements and defend its interests without alienating citizens domestically or stoking anti-German sentiment abroad.

In a telephone interview with the authors, Cem Ozdemir, a former leader of the Green Party, highlighted the idea of engaging with debates about national identity. “With immigration and globalisation, we need to have a discussion [about] what it means to be German”, he argued. “What are the conditions? What could and what should be a republican understanding of modern citizenship in a European country? It was a mistake that progressives largely ignored the discussion during the refugee crisis. It allowed others to take over the territory.”

Being clearer about what it means to be German will also make it easier to define and defend national interests. This is a debate that the foreign policy community should lead rather than resist. It will, however, be sensitive – because of three major challenges that Germany needs to overcome in relation to the debate about national identity to make a patriotic case for international engagement.

Firstly, there is a need to develop a broader German identity into which immigrants can be integrated. Germany is moving towards multiculturalism but has not transformed from a society of immigration into one of integration. By 2019, 26 per cent of Germans had a Migrationshintergrund (identified as having at least one parent who is not German by birth). And Germany’s carefully crafted national identity is not designed to mediate the conflicts that sometimes arise between Germans who fall into this category and those who do not. Constitutional patriotism is an important part of this new identity but, unless it broadens and gains more emotional content, it will leave a vacuum. The danger is that, unless Germany reimagines its identity as a set of values and aspirations, it could come to be defined by ethnicity and religion. This would lead to more polarisation, making it more likely that Germany would take a nationalist turn.

So far, attempts to define Germanness have often ended up being used to exclude rather than bind newcomers to the country. To facilitate integration, sociologist Bassam Tibi came up with the ideas of a European Leitkultur and ‘Euro-Islam’ – combining Islam with values of modern European culture. However, when Christian Democratic Union parliamentarian Friedrich Merz picked up the term in 2000, he talked about a German Leitkultur that immigrants would need to absorb – thereby setting the idea against that of a multicultural society. These topics came to the fore again in 2015, when polls showed that one-third of Germans were concerned that large numbers of migrants threatened Germany’s “societal and cultural values”. In 2017 then German minister of interior Thomas de Maizière wrote a ten-point plan on German Leitkultur, which was published in a German newspaper and included the example of shaking hands as a German characteristic, as well as the sentence “we are not burka”. As a consequence, many Germans with a Migrationshintergrund saw the debate about Leitkultur as simply expressing narrow cultural suspicion.

Secondly, there are important questions about dealing with the shift of Germany’s past from memory to history. How can a culture of remembrance survive when the last members of the perpetrator generation are dying? There are, of course, even challenges to its survival in a multicultural society in which the parents of many have nothing to do with German crimes of the past. This has implications for the relationship with Israel, for example. And there have often been discussions in Germany about antisemitism among migrants arriving in the country (some of whom see Israel mainly in the context of its conflict with Palestine, not in the context of German history). Germany cannot tolerate antisemitism. At the same time, it needs to heavily invest in education and support immigrants in understanding how Germany’s history fits with the history of their country of origin.

Thirdly, the rise of social media poses a major challenge to a national discussion about what it means to be German. This creates a gulf between heavily self-censored official public discourse and the internet, where anything goes. The situation also reinforces the idea that there is an elite conspiracy to prevent debates about identity – the environment in which the Alternative for Germany (AfD) flourishes. The internet holds many alternative narratives that might never find expression through official institutions. As a result, there is a real danger that the gulf between the censored tolerance of official Germany and the unbridled debate of social media Germany will bring about disruptive political changes like those in the United States in recent years.

Germany needs to come up with a version of German identity that guides its transformation into a multicultural society; supports a European foreign policy designed around the challenges of the future and an awareness of the past; and wins public support for investing the resources necessary for these tasks. It was a mistake for progressives to ignore the debate about what it means to be German – as it is important, even if Leitkultur might be the wrong framing. The debate should be as inclusive as possible, and should be moderated by a public figure such as the German president.

In the process, Germans should discuss the relationship between German identity and European identity. In other words, rather than ask what Germany can do for Europe and the world, they should ask what Europe and the world can do for Germany. Reversing their perspective on these relationships would be the best way to win popular support for international engagement – and could allow Germany to reframe some of the core elements of its national outlook in ways that accelerate Germany’s and Europe’s development. This new framework could create an open discourse that helps Germany engage in some of the politically sensitive foreign policy debates that it has avoided for years.

Economics

For many Germans, there is another German identity that is even more important than Verfassungspatriotismus: the notion of their country as an Exportweltmeister (export champion). ‘Made in Germany’ and the country’s high trade surplus are a central point of pride for Germans – one that still sets them apart from other global economic leaders. This premium on exports revolves around multinationals such as BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen, as well as the Mittelstand (German small and medium-sized businesses) that specialise in advanced technology in areas such as robotics and healthcare. Underpinning Germany’s status as an Exportweltmeister has been successive German governments’ embrace of policies that lift barriers on trade, flows of capital, and investment, and that aim to uphold a rules-based economic order under the umbrella of American security guarantees. One of the big policies in support of this approach was the creation of the euro, which removed many non-tariff barriers to trade with other EU countries and artificially lowered the value of the domestic currency, making German exports even more competitive.

Germans are often unaware of the consequences that their beloved export surplus has for other countries – which, by definition, end up with trade deficits as well as the costs of the macroeconomic policies their governments are supporting. This often leads to conflicts between Germany and its European partners.

There is also the technological challenge – and, first and foremost, the move from the German Verbrennungsmotor (combustion engine) to electric cars. It was a major shock for Germans when Tesla overtook Volkswagen as the world’s most valuable car manufacturer. Today, the market value of Tesla is more than eight times that of Volkswagen, despite the fact that the latter makes around 19 times as many vehicles and roughly seven times as much revenue.

Many Germans fear that Chinese companies will soon set the terms of the fourth industrial revolution (if they are not already doing so) and that Europe will become increasingly dependent on China for crucial technology, not least the software that will run German hardware. While Germany is strong in the biotechnology and chemicals sectors, it has embraced the digital revolution and its innovations too late and too half-heartedly. The current economic fallout because of chip scarcity is just the latest sign of this.

China is already a leading manufacturer of solar panels and electric cars. And China seems poised to dominate the global production of battery cells for some time (although this outcome is far from certain, now that car companies such as Volkswagen have begun to massively invest in such technologies). German firms’ capabilities and market power could allow them to maintain their leadership. But they will only do so if Germany shifts its focus to innovation and new technologies. Otherwise, the country will lose not only its competitive advantage in advanced technology but also the knowledge and skills that accompany this.

However, today, there are two even more profound challenges to the German economic consensus. The increasing fragmentation of globalisation poses a major risk to the German economy, which flourishes in a rules-based and globalised economic order. Germany’s biggest non-EU economic partners, the US and China, are increasingly developing their foreign and economic policy through the prism of competition with each other. In the process, they are fundamentally changing globalisation and the rules-based order.

The first challenge is in Beijing’s new economic vision of ‘dual circulation’, which is designed to make China more self-reliant in terms of consumption, technology, and regulations – partly through the use of entity lists and restrictions on exports to protect its market. In this context, China is increasingly assertive in multilateral organisations; trying to set the global rules for new technologies; using infrastructure and strategic investment to spread its influence; and shutting others out of its domestic markets. China is also using its military to intimidate countries and to gain control over trade routes in places such as the East China Sea and the South China Sea. In the Arctic – where new trade routes are emerging – Russia and China are trying to get the upper hand.

China is implementing dual circulation at a moment when the future of the America First strategy – which dominated US foreign policy under Trump – remains uncertain. President Joe Biden has made clear that he will recalibrate rather than abandon the United States’ tough approach to China. Biden has changed the rhetoric coming out of the White House and aims to build a broad coalition against Beijing. Yet his administration is using many of the same approaches as China does, such as a strong industrial policy and an attempt to reshore supply chains. And it continues to advance Trump’s Clean Network initiative to exclude Chinese technology from US critical infrastructure.

There is much scope for European governments to work with Washington on these issues, but the reality for many German companies will be one of decoupling internally to continue to serve both the Chinese and American markets. They will have to learn to operate in very different regulatory spheres. Some German industrial champions are already taking steps to reinforce their presence in Chinese markets by investing in local plants or research and development centres. The challenge is in how to separate the business of one enterprise between two markets – where they could face punishment or barriers in one market for their dealings in the other.

The second major challenge to the German economic consensus is China’s and the United States’ increasing willingness to weaponise economic relations. This profoundly challenges Germans’ key assumptions about economics generally, their own economy, and even politics. Many Germans have long believed that producing high-quality products is enough for economic success. But, in today’s world, economic statecraft is an increasingly important determinant of that success. Germany is currently incapable of backing up its trading relations with the necessary power politics – and is unwilling to do so, for the understandable reasons of avoiding protectionism and keeping economics separate from geopolitics. At the same time, this has meant that German trade and German policies lack the resilience they need to survive in today’s world – potentially casting doubt on Germany’s economic model, and profoundly affecting its foreign and domestic policies.

Beijing is willing to use its market, medical supplies, and control of critical materials such as rare earths to pressure other countries on foreign policy issues. Moreover, China and the US are increasingly exploring ways to use economic networks to extract political concessions from other countries. These sorts of policies were taken to a new level by the Trump administration, which showed a willingness to leverage the centrality of the dollar and US technology to advance its political goals. The administration used secondary sanctions against companies that were involved in the Nord Stream 2 project and that did business with Iran. As the Biden administration recently showed in relation to Nord Stream 2, the change in the White House does not mean that the US will stop using these tools – even if Biden has eased the pressure on German companies in an attempt to repair relations with Germany.

All this shows that being an Exportweltmeister is a source of not just great wealth but also great vulnerability. Germany cannot continue to pretend that it can handle economics and politics separately. The first step for Germany is to accept that geo-economics will play an increasingly important role. This partly means pushing for greater German sovereignty. But Germany will only be able to face up to great powers such as China by equipping the EU with the tools to bargain effectively within an interdependent system, such as credible counter-threats against attempts to weaponise the global economy or other hostile actions.

If a Sino-American trade and technology war has jeopardised globalisation, greater European unity offers the best hope of safeguarding the German economy and European values. It is, therefore, in Germany’s core interest to develop the European market and boost domestic consumption – collectively, the other 26 EU member states are still Germany’s leading trade partners by far – as well as to invest in building European sovereignty.

There is public support in Germany for strengthening European sovereignty. Forty-seven per cent of Germans, a plurality, still think that the coronavirus crisis has shown that there is a need for more cooperation on the European level (although this share has declined since last year). Many Germans – 52 per cent in 2020 and 46 per cent in 2021 – are in favour of encouraging companies to produce more medical supplies in the EU even if this means higher prices (when it comes to non-medical goods, the level of support is slightly lower). And ECFR’s November 2020 poll shows that 38 per cent of Germans want to be tougher with the US on economic issues, while 26 per cent think the current level of toughness is about right, and only 16 per cent want to be more relaxed.

Together with its European partners, Germany can develop the ability to fight back against economic coercion and sanctions, be they from the US, China, or other countries. Some of the ideas discussed in ECFR’s economic coercion task force include a public European Export Bank to facilitate trade with certain regions, an anti-coercion instrument, an EU Resilience Office, and an initiative to rebalance the market-distorting effect of economic coercion through penalties on third-country companies in the EU market.

The EU also needs to introduce further geopolitical considerations into its competition policy instruments; ensure that foreign investment screening is effective in all member states; and adopt the regulation on foreign subsidies that distort the internal market. In the longer term, the EU needs to bolster the euro’s international role by fostering deep and integrated capital and banking markets – as well as by working to make the euro more attractive, promoting the currency’s use in more sectors, and establishing a digital euro. Germany, as an economic powerhouse, will be central to all these issues. If the country is too reluctant to think geopolitically – out of traditional hesitation or negligence – the EU could fall behind in the global competition and be vulnerable to geo-economic attacks.

It is also in Germany’s core interest to work on the European level to deal with the green and digital transformations. Rather than preaching the merits of a greener economy, Europe can set a price for carbon and use border-adjustment taxes to persuade others to meet its standards or absorb the costs. Likewise, the EU’s digital agenda and plans for a digital-services tax may yet force global tech giants to abide by European rules.

At the same time, Germany and Europe will need to reinvent their core relationships with countries such as the US, deepen existing relationships, and try to build new ones. The EU will not be able to rely on a single ‘alliance of multilateralists’. Instead, Germany and Europe will need to work out a flexible set of relationships with a shifting cast of other powers on various issues. For example, the EU-Asia connectivity strategy presented by the European Commission in September 2018 is a good way to deepen and diversify relationships with partners in the region, but it needs to be properly financed, promoted, and coordinated. (A recent publication by the Asia-Pacific Committee of German Business discusses how this could be done.)

As ECFR’s polls show, Germans understand that Europe needs such relationships; they regard the United Kingdom, Japan, India, and Russia as “necessary partners” with which the EU should cooperate strategically. In contrast, they generally describe China as a “rival” – a country with which Europe needs to compete – and Turkey as an “adversary”. Germans are also less pragmatic in their thinking on foreign policy than one may assume, given their focus on economics. When asked about their preferred approach to China and Turkey, they stand out as being even more principled than the EU average.

Security and defence

By the time of the 2014 Munich Security Conference, there seemed to be a broad consensus among Germany’s mainstream parties and foreign policy elites that the country needed to take more responsibility for international affairs, in line with its economic and political weight. However, after a short period of new initiatives and increased engagement, it became clear that this ‘Munich Consensus’ was hollow.

To this day, there is no common understanding of what “more responsibility” should mean in a practical sense or of how it should guide a new strategic culture. Left-leaning Germans fear that the idea is a fig leaf for the militarisation of Germany, and warn against an arms race. German conservatives want the Bundeswehr to play a bigger role in European security – but, after 16 years in which members of the Christian Democratic Union or the Christian Social Union held the chancellery and the defence ministry, the German armed forces are still suffering from a lack of personnel and equipment, as well as operational shortcomings. More importantly, neither side has a vision of what kind of military player Germany should become. Instead, the conservatives and their partners in the ruling coalition, the Social Democrats, have turned security and defence policy into an area for trench warfare against one another.

Germany’s established political structures and ways of thinking are increasingly unsuited to addressing the new security challenges the country faces. To find a viable model for its security and defence policy, the next federal government needs to address some of the unsettling issues that its predecessors have often ignored.

Firstly, Germany needs to broaden the debate about security. For years, there has been a heated discussion about the use of force and whether Germany should spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence. At the same time, there is very little talk about the changing nature of security and the way that the German government uses the remainder of its budget. As discussed in the previous section of this paper, the battlefields of the twenty-first century are the infrastructure and institutions of globalisation. German policymakers need to understand that economic security is national security. Deepening economic dependencies on authoritarian powers limits Germany’s political room for manoeuvre and makes the country vulnerable to blackmail.

Another aspect of this challenge is that the German export economy can only prosper because the US guarantees the security of international trade routes. German policymakers tend to take for granted the smooth operation of maritime routes, through which more than 80 per cent of world trade passes. But Washington will no longer be willing to bear the main burden of this – to be the ‘world’s policeman’. In future, Berlin must become more involved in the process, to protect the German economy.

Equally, Trump introduced fundamental doubts about the American security guarantee into the transatlantic alliance. This is another reason to rethink Europe’s dependence on the US. Even if Biden emphasises America’s claim to international leadership and commitment to Europe, it would be negligent to count on Washington forever. The 2016 presidential election may not have been a historical accident, an American aberration.

Therefore, to protect its core interests, Germany needs to prepare for a scenario in which the US no longer regards involvement in Europe as a core American interest. German politicians should no longer retreat to the argument that ‘we cannot defend Europe without the US’ – even if that will remain true for at least the next few decades.

The election of Biden as US president should not lull Europeans into a false sense of security. Instead, they should pursue a two-level strategy. They should increase their contribution to the transatlantic partnership through measures that simultaneously strengthen their own independence. From an American perspective, Europe may be moving to the geopolitical periphery. But the US still has a long-term interest in a stable Europe. And it is in Germany’s interest to try and keep the US militarily engaged with Europe. This is especially important for the nuclear umbrella, which would be the hardest element of the American security guarantee to replace.

Accordingly, Berlin should invest in becoming a better partner to Washington. That primarily means investing in European capabilities that would also be available within NATO and would enhance the operational readiness of the Bundeswehr. Germans and other Europeans should ease the military burden on the US, especially in deterring Russia.

Many German policymakers refuse to publicly discuss a plan for defending Europe without the US. They fear that such a discussion would drive the US away even more and would alienate central and eastern Europeans. However, ECFR’s November 2020 survey shows that EU citizens are well aware that Europe cannot always rely on the US, and that it needs to look after its own defence capabilities. As ECFR’s April 2021 survey shows, only 19 per cent of Germans regard the US as an ally – a country that shares their interests and values. They see the US merely as a ‘necessary partner’ and a country that Europe needs to cooperate with strategically. Therefore, a German debate about a second Trump presidency could be beneficial: it could help convince the German public that investment in defence is necessary – which would, in turn, make the US happy.

As ECFR’s November 2020 poll shows, only 10 per cent of Germans think that they need the American security guarantee a great deal, while 33 per cent believe that it is not important. So, it is not a selling point to emphasise that the US wants Germany to spend more on defence. The next German government should frame the question about defence spending differently – and make it about a stronger and better-equipped Europe (not limited to the EU) that should be less reliant on others.

The European framework makes increased investment and military engagement more acceptable to German parties and voters, even those on the left. Instead of being afraid of a German gorilla, the discussion should concentrate on the question of how Germany can better use its power to protect its neighbours. Indeed, ECFR’s November 2020 data show that many Europeans see Berlin as their ‘go-to’ capital. Respondents in France, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Hungary were especially likely to identify Germany as the most important country with which to build a good relationship. Berlin should act on this vote of confidence.

If Germans want their country to take on a growing role as a security provider in a European framework, they will need to address some particularly controversial issues. For the Greens, which seem very likely to form part of the next ruling coalition, joint armament projects with Germany’s European partners may be a major point of contention. The Greens support the idea of a European security and defence union, as well as the consolidation of the European defence industry. Yet they have repeatedly advocated stricter regulations on defence exports; this is part of their party’s core identity.

Some European countries, especially France, are fundamentally less restrictive than Germany when it comes to arms exports. However, other European governments will only join forces with Berlin in the development of military equipment if they can trust their partner to provide the necessary components to export customers. To allow for greater European defence cooperation, Germany needs to come to terms with the fact that there will have to be a stable compromise between its own requirements and those of its partners.

Moreover, Germany cannot separate questions about how to deal with autonomous weapons systems from the broader issue of European defence cooperation. In their endless debate about armed drones, German political elites have shown how difficult they find it to deal with new security and defence technologies. For moral reasons, many Germans prefer the Bundeswehr to pursue technically unambitious solutions rather than the most effective and advanced technology. In contrast, French strategists identify artificial intelligence – especially in the military realm – as an important area of geopolitical competition. If Germany wants to cooperate with France to develop advanced weapons technologies such as the Future Combat Air System, the countries must find a compromise on such issues. Germany should make military artificial intelligence part of its public debate on security.

Germany and France will almost certainly continue to have different attitudes to many security and defence policy issues. There is simply no will among either political elites or voters in Germany to become a military actor like France or the UK.

Nevertheless, the next federal government will need to address the pressing issues discussed above if it is to protect Germany’s security, economy, and democracy. Germans need a new concept of their security – a post-dependent Atlanticism that has a strong European angle. On security, Germany’s investment in Europe is not a sacrifice but part of the solution. It is only by working together that Europeans can hold their own in a world that, increasingly, functions less according to the rule of law and more according to the law of the jungle. German citizens’ support for the European framework takes the edge off many of the most controversial security and defence issues.

Europe policy

German politics’ orientation towards the status quo is more ingrained and more unsustainable in Europe policy than in any other area. Unlike many European countries, Germany emerged from the crises of the past decade relatively unscathed. The country was spared the political and economic problems other parts of Europe faced: the economy was booming, unemployment was at a record low, and the budget was balanced. There was no fundamental erosion of the political party system as occurred in France or Italy. Therefore, Germans had little motivation to push for radical change. They were among the biggest beneficiaries of the bloc’s single market and the eurozone.

At the same time, Euroscepticism has steadily grown in many other member states. And, following Brexit, there has been widespread fear of the EU falling apart. Berlin sees itself as being in a dilemma: political measures that could reduce scepticism of the EU in southern Europe, such as the further mutualisation of debt, would fuel such scepticism in the north, including in Germany – and vice versa. Berlin’s answer to this has been to prevent the EU from falling apart, but never with a clear idea of how to move forward. It has followed a policy of adapting to external conditions instead of shaping them.

The coronavirus crisis has strengthened these centrifugal forces. The pandemic has contributed to a significant loss of confidence in the EU among Germans, many of whom now doubt that membership of the bloc is in their interest.

The EU’s poor performance in the vaccine roll-out risks transforming Brexit from a cautionary tale about Euroscepticism into a story of liberation from the sluggish bureaucracy of Brussels institutions. However, the pandemic has also shaken Germany out of its complacency. What had been an absolute taboo in German politics up to that point – namely, the idea of EU member states taking on debt together – became a political necessity.

Preserving the status quo or ‘failing forward’ are no longer viable political options for mastering the major challenges the EU faces: the pandemic, climate change, and growing geopolitical competition call for not just cosmetic changes but more radical solutions, which will require political support. The German government must break free of its paralysis by engaging with four central – and, from its perspective, particularly painful – issues. If Berlin continues to be reactive and to cling to the status quo, changes in the domestic and international environment will increasingly limit Germany’s scope for action on Europe policy.

The first of these issues is the belief that the cohesion of the EU27 should take precedence over Europe’s capacity to act. Berlin’s deep-rooted credo of making every political move as inclusive as possible has held the EU together over the past decade. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s greatest strength has been her ability to seek workable compromises between all EU capitals – as she most recently did in the EU’s adoption of its 2021-2027 multiannual financial framework and recovery fund.

However, the costs of cohesion were slow decision-making processes and progress limited to the lowest common denominator. The consequences of ‘too little, too late’ will become ever more severe in view of the challenges ahead. If the EU cannot make progress quickly enough without treaty changes (for which there is currently no majority), Germany should move forward with a group of willing partners. As the negotiations on the EU budget package and its rule of law conditionality have shown, countries such as Hungary and Poland have enormous opportunities for blackmail when they know that Germany would rather have them on board than push through a political decision that risks losing them. During the negotiations, some participants floated the idea of simply adopting the recovery fund within the framework of the so-called ‘enhanced cooperation’ provided for in the EU treaties. Member states could use this provision more deliberately in the future.

Sometimes, however, flexible cooperation is unachievable within the EU framework. Germany is, for example, fixated on overcoming the lack of an effective European foreign policy by introducing qualified majority voting – but some countries’ veto makes this impossible for now. A more promising way to push EU foreign policy forward seems to be informal coalitions of smaller groups of states, which take the lead in certain areas and seek ways to make this beneficial for the union’s overall foreign policy. One option could be to ensure that a representative of an EU institution sits at the table, as Catherine Ashton and Federica Mogherini did in the negotiations on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Germany finds it especially difficult to enter these ad hoc coalitions outside the EU framework. The country fears that this could damage the EU as a whole, as small member states might feel disadvantaged – thereby strengthening the centrifugal forces within the bloc. However, if it is a choice between paralysis as 27 countries or productive cooperation as a smaller group of member states, unity may not always be the best option. If these select coalitions produced tangible results, more EU citizens could come to see the value of European cooperation and the dangers of nationalist impulses.

The second central issue concerns the glorification of the Franco-German engine. In the German debate on Europe, this relationship is the holy grail. Without Paris and Berlin pulling in the same direction, European integration seems to be unthinkable. As a result, there is no other European country with which German policymakers exchange more information or meet more frequently. However, the idea of a Franco-German engine is toxic in many EU countries and fuels their Euroscepticism.

It is no longer enough for Germany and France to reach an agreement alone. Instead of always stressing that there is no alternative to close Franco-German cooperation, Germany should try to form coalitions with other European states, bringing them into discussions with France and sometimes even moving forward without France. French President Emmanuel Macron demonstrated this principle in reverse when he formed a close alliance with Spain and Italy in spring 2020 to pressure Germany to support the issuance of ‘coronabonds’.

The third issue for the German government is the development of economic and monetary union after the launch of the EU’s recovery fund. As it stands, covid-19 is likely to widen some pre-existing gaps between EU economies. Countries in southern Europe, which depend heavily on tourism, have suffered disproportionate economic losses. Croatia, Bulgaria, and Greece receive the largest share of the fund relative to GDP, while Italy and Spain are by far the biggest beneficiaries in absolute terms. However, southern European countries lack the fiscal capacity of northern states to cushion the shock by helping either employees (through temporary unemployment payments) or companies (through state aid). Depending on how long the crisis lasts, the recovery fund may not be enough in itself to prevent further economic divergence.

Meanwhile, as discussed, the trend toward deglobalisation makes the strength of the European economy – the eurozone and single market – much more vital to Germany’s economic future. It is in Germany’s direct interest to prevent southern EU countries from slipping deeper into an economic crisis. It will be a great challenge for the new German government to explain to voters at home why the recovery fund may not be a one-off. ECFR’s April 2021 survey shows that public support for jointly shouldering the financial burden of the covid-19 pandemic is already waning in Germany and other European countries.

Many Germans fear that EU member states might misuse their shares of the fund to address long-standing deficits that have nothing to do with the pandemic, from ailing social security systems and infrastructure to other underdeveloped areas. To maintain support from voters in Germany and the so-called ‘frugal states’, the EU needs to closely monitor projects backed by the recovery fund.

Europeans need to see that the recovery fund is helping the EU achieve its sustainability, climate, and digital goals. The fund should make a positive and visible difference, to prove to citizens that it is a good investment in their future and not a subsidy to cover for past mistakes. Instead of talking about Germany as the European paymaster, German politicians should emphasise much more often why it is in Germany’s enlightened self-interest to have a strong eurozone. And this is not only because of Germany’s dependence on the single market, but also because a greater international role for the euro makes Europe more resilient and more capable of acting internationally.

Conclusion

This paper has shown how the challenges of today’s world are undermining the current German foreign policy consensus. If Germany does not shift its course, it will end up with an inadequate foreign policy that lacks public support. Nevertheless, as ECFR’s April 2021 survey demonstrates, Germany still has the opportunity to take an outward-looking and pro-EU path.

German political elites should be aware that this support is dwindling and that they cannot take it for granted. More than 15 months after the coronavirus crisis hit, many Germans have started asking themselves if they would be better off bowling alone.

Germany needs to build a new social consensus around its foreign policy. Otherwise, there is likely to be growing mistrust of elites and a backlash against the institutions and practices on which Germany built its prosperity and success. The election of Trump in 2016 is an extreme example of what happens when one takes the support of the public for granted and ignores the views of growing parts of the population for too long. This might not be an immediate threat for Germany – especially given the inability of the AfD to capture many of the votes of citizens who feel neglected. However, with German elites mostly ignoring the concerns of many Germans in the euro, migration, and covid-19 crises, it is not impossible to imagine that Germany will experience a similar increase in polarisation.

To prevent that from happening, the next German government should turn the debate on its head. Instead of putting forward a foreign policy focused on the sacrifices Germany needs to make, the government should begin with a patriotic account of how Germany can thrive in the next few decades. The first part of the paper describes how German parties need to engage in a more upfront manner with German identity. The second part shows how greater European sovereignty is vital to a German economic model capable of enduring the triple shock of climate, technological, and geopolitical changes. The third part spells out how a broader conception of security in the twenty-first century, and a partial US withdrawal from Europe, could help Germany overcome its post-cold war paralysis and take on a greater role in European security and defence. And, as the fourth part outlines, all this should lead to a major shift in Germany’s policy on Europe.

Brexit has revealed that ever-deeper European integration is not the natural order of events, and that EU citizens need to see where the benefits of membership lie. The good news is that Merkel has convinced Germans that they are in the driving seat in the EU. ECFR’s surveys show that – in contrast to their counterparts in frugal countries – most Germans feel that their country’s influence in the bloc is increasing.

This belief can help unlock public support for ambitious projects within flexible European coalitions. German policymakers and politicians should talk less often about the fact that Germany has a ‘special responsibility’ in Europe because of its history, size, and location. They should explain how Berlin uses the EU level to increase its influence to enhance the wealth, prosperity, and security of the German public. A German investment in Europe is not a sacrifice but a down-payment on Germany’s economic prosperity and political capacity to shape its future. In many ways, Germans already have more advanced views of the future direction of their country’s foreign policy than elites in Berlin might think.

Methodology This paper is based on a public opinion poll in 12 EU countries that the European Council on Foreign Relations commissioned from Datapraxis and YouGov (France, Germany), Dynata (Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden), AnalitiQs (Netherlands), and Alpha (Bulgaria). The survey was conducted in April 2021, with an overall sample of 17,231 respondents. This was an online survey conducted in Austria (n = 1,027), Denmark (n = 1,012), France (n = 3,026), Germany (n = 3,080), Hungary (n = 1,001), Italy (n = 1,003), the Netherlands (n = 1,008), Poland (n = 1,012), Portugal (n = 1,011), Spain (n = 2,036), and Sweden (n = 1,015). In Bulgaria (n = 1,000), the survey was conducted online and through telephone interviews. The results are nationally representative on basic demographics and past votes in each country. The general margin of error is ±3% for a sample of 1,000 and ±2% for 2,000 and 3,000. In France and Germany, YouGov used purposive active sampling for this poll. The exact dates of polling are: Austria (14-29 April), Bulgaria (8-13 April), Denmark (13-30 April), France (31 March-7 April), Germany (31 March-8 April), Hungary (14-30 April), Italy (14-23 April), Netherlands (1-9 April), Poland (14-29 April), Portugal (13-30 April), Spain (14-30 April), and Sweden (14-30 April). Previous ECFR surveys mentioned in this paper include: An online survey ECFR commissioned from Datapraxis and YouGov, conducted in January and February 2019 in 16 countries: Austria (n = 2,081), Belgium (n = 2,102), Czech Republic (n = 1,016), Denmark (n = 2,540), Finland (n = 2,055), France (n = 5,019), Germany (n = 4,799), Greece (n = 505), Hungary (n = 4,013), Italy (n = 4,994), Netherlands (n = 2,001), Poland (n = 5,098), Romania (n = 1,051), Slovakia (n = 506), Spain (n = 4,703), and Sweden (n = 4,007).

An online survey ECFR commissioned from Datapraxis and YouGov, conducted in April 2020 in nine countries: Bulgaria (n = 1,000), Denmark (n = 1,013), France, (n = 2,040), Germany (n = 2,014), Italy (n = 1,009), Poland (n = 1,004), Portugal (n = 1,000), Spain (n = 1,005), and Sweden (n = 1,009).

An online survey ECFR commissioned from Datapraxis and Dynata, conducted in late October 2020 in eight countries: Austria (n = 1,000), Denmark (n = 996), Finland (n = 1,000), France (n = 1,000), Germany (n = 1,001), Netherlands (n = 1,000), Poland (n = 1,001), and Sweden (n = 1,000).

An online survey ECFR commissioned from Datapraxis and YouGov, conducted in late November and early December 2020 in eleven countries: Denmark (n = 1,037), France (n = 2,013), Germany (n = 2,060), Hungary (n = 1,001), Italy (n = 2,017), Netherlands (n = 1,005), Poland (n = 1,002), Portugal (n = 1,004), Spain (n = 1,017), Sweden (n = 1,010), and the United Kingdom (n = 2,031).

About the authors

Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century and What Does China Think?, and the editor of Connectivity Wars. He presents ECFR’s weekly ‘World in 30 Minutes’ podcast.

Jana Puglierin is a senior policy fellow and the head of the Berlin office at the European Council on Foreign Relations. She is also a director of ECFR’s Re:shape Global Europe initiative, which aims to shed new light on the changing international order and how it affects Europe’s place in the world.

Acknowledgments

Without our friends from the ECFR cosmos, this policy brief could not have been written. We would especially like to thank Lucie Haupenthal for her patience and unshakeable belief that our different perspectives would complement each other so constructively. We would also like to thank Susanne Baumann, Piotr Buras, Ulrike Franke, Jonathan Hackenbroich, Anna Kuchenbecker, Rafael Loss, and Janka Oertel for their brilliant intellectual input – and their unfailing ability to pinpoint our intellectual blind spots. We would have been lost without Philipp Dreyer, Gosia Piaskowska, and Pawel Zerka, who carried out painstaking work on the data that underpin this report. Susi Dennison has been an absolute gem in helping us carry this report forward. We are indebted to Chris Raggett, who has done an excellent job making our manuscript more readable, and to Marlene Riedel for making our graphics look beautiful. Swantje Green and Andreas Bock tried to make sure that the world takes notice of our work through their fabulous advocacy work.

Norbert Roettgen and Franziska Brantner on ECFR’s board have been an inspiration to us in their ability to lead a public debate about how a progressive, outward-orientated, pro-European foreign policy can serve Germany’s core interests. Stefan Mair, Claus Offe, and Cem Ozdemir were all willing to share their thoughts on German foreign policy with us, allowing us to refine our thinking about Leitkultur, economics, and the political challenges of modernising Germanness.

We would also like to thank Paul Hilder and his team at Datapraxis for their patient collaboration with us in developing and analysing the polling referred to in the report, and to Alpha, AnalytiQs, Dynata, and YouGov for conducting the fieldwork.

We are very grateful to Michael Schwarz, Anne Duncker, Teresa Spancken, and Stiftung Mercator for their support of our polling work within the Re:shape Global Europe project, on the basis of which this report was written.

Despite these many and varied contributions, any mistakes remain the authors’ own.

He married Krisztina Márfai, a former Hungarian diplomat, in 1992. The couple do not have children, but do own two cats, Snoetje and Pluisje, who have their own account on X with nearly 23,000 followers.

Why is he so controversial?

As a political leader Wilders is known for his inflammatory language, having described Islam as a “totalitarian ideology” and called Moroccans “scum.”

Wilders has said that his aversion to Islam was fueled by the assassination of the anti-Islam filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, as well as the time he spent in a kibbutz in Israel. His election program called for a ban on the Quran, mosques and all Islamic schools, as well as on Islamic headscarves in government buildings.

Several years ago a court convicted him of insulting a group of people based on their background after he called for “fewer Moroccans” in a 2014 speech.

He’s also not averse to attacking other politicians in brutal terms, calling outgoing Finance Minister Sigrid Kaag a “witch” and fat-shaming his opponent, Frans Timmermans, during a debate.

Wilders’ anti-Islam rhetoric has made him a target for extremists and led to his living under 24/7 protection, moving from one safe house to another for the past two decades.

Summary

With EU consensus becoming increasingly harder to achieve, Ukraine needs to explore more opportunities for bilateral cooperation.

The Nordic-Baltic 8 (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden) stands as a strong, unified bloc well-positioned to support Ukraine.

Public backing in the NB8 for Ukraine remains sky-high, with surveys showing strong support for military aid while pro-Russian parties remain on the sidelines.

A shared history of Russian conflict reinforces these countries’ stance against aggression, aligning their interests closely with Ukraine’s.

All the NB8 countries have signed bilateral agreements with Ukraine, with some pledging a specific GDP percentage for aid while supporting EU and NATO integration.

Acting in unison, the NB8 could play an even more pivotal role by curtailing Russian oil exports through the Baltic Sea.

Redirecting Norway’s war-fuelled energy profits could boost Ukraine’s defence capabilities.

Full membership in the Joint Expeditionary Force, of which all NB8 countries are a part, could provide Ukraine with an extra layer of deterrence against Russian aggression.

Introduction

Ukraine stands at a critical juncture as it approaches the fourth year of the war against Russian aggression. The prolonged war has strained Western unity and revealed cracks in the international response, with many allies demonstrating hesitancy and a lack of urgency. Despite vocal commitments to support Ukraine, the West has often adopted a “too little, too late” approach, providing military aid incrementally and insufficiently. This strategy, dubbed by some as “killing me softly,” perpetuates a grim reality where Ukraine endures battlefield setbacks without the resources needed for decisive victories. Underlying these delays are differing threat perceptions among NATO members, some of which—driven by political calculations or fears of escalation—hesitate to commit fully, leading to a lack of consensus on the stakes of Ukraine’s survival.

Over this period, Ukraine has focused heavily on the G7 countries as primary partners for aid and advocacy. As geopolitical realities evolve, it needs to adapt. Donald Trump’s re-election in the United States forces Ukraine to face an even greater imperative to consolidate European support. Achieving this may require moving away from consensus-driven frameworks and instead leverage coalitions of the willing. One underutilised strategic vector is engagement with northern Europe, particularly the Nordic-Baltic 8 (Baltic and Nordic nations, or NB8). These states, geographically proximate and acutely aware of the Russian threat, offer opportunities for deeper collaboration that could complement Ukraine’s broader European and transatlantic strategy in its fight for survival.

Comprising the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) and the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), the NB8 is a unique regional cooperation format that has gained strategic importance in recent years. While formally established in the early 2000s, its roots can be traced back to the post-Cold War era, when the Baltics sought closer ties with the Nordics after regaining independence. Initially, the NB8 aimed to support the democratic transition and economic integration of the Baltic states. With Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joining the EU and NATO in 2004, the objectives of the NB8 evolved towards addressing shared challenges such as digital transformation, climate change, and regional security.

Together, NB8 countries form a resilient and highly integrated economic bloc in northern Europe. Despite varying in size and resources, they are united by strong institutions, high per capita GDP and robust social welfare systems. The Nordic economies, particularly Norway and Sweden, are driven by advanced industries and technology sectors; along with Denmark and Finland, they are key contributors to the EU GDP. Meanwhile, the Baltic states have shown remarkable growth, becoming key hubs for digital innovation and services. Despite being smaller in GDP terms, they have also shown agility in economic reforms and resilience against external shocks.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked a turning point for the NB8, imbuing the group with a renewed sense of purpose and urgency.[1] [2] Faced with a common security threat, the NB8 countries deepened their integration, aligning closely on policies to counter Russian aggression and significantly increasing military, humanitarian, and economic backing for Ukraine.

On 14 February, following Trump’s unilateral announcement of talks with Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine—without its or the EU’s, involvement—the NB8 issued a strong statement reaffirming its commitment to bolstering support for the country’s defence.

This support is rooted not only in government policies, but also in deeply ingrained societal attitudes shaped by centuries of geographic proximity to Russia and a shared understanding of the threats posed by Russian expansionism. Public opinion carries a historical awareness of Russian aggression as well as a commitment to international law, human rights and the defence of smaller sovereign states. This collective stance has made the Nordic-Baltic countries some of the most reliable and enduring supporters of Ukraine, with public backing that is both predictable and sustainable.

Despite being an informal alignment, the NB8 operates through coordination mechanisms, including annual meetings of foreign ministers, prime ministers and sector-specific officials. With an aggregate GDP exceeding €1.5trn in 2024, the NB8 is a significant economic bloc both in Europe and globally. Based on recent estimates, the collective economy of the NB8 ranks around fifth in Europe; globally, the NB8’s collective GDP would rank around tenth. Their integration and economic alignment provide a solid foundation for enhancing economic cooperation with Ukraine, especially in trade, investment and defence.

The methodology employed for this policy brief combined both desk research and key informant interviews. Desk research involved an extensive review of official documents, policy briefs, reports, and other relevant literature from both Ukraine and the NB8 countries to establish a foundational understanding of the current state of cooperation. Key informant interviews were conducted with representatives from Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence, as well as their counterparts from the NB8 countries. These interviews also included insights from experts affiliated with leading think-tanks in the respective states.

Historical context: Understanding Russian threats

The Nordic and Baltic countries’ geographic proximity to Russia and their historical experiences with Russian expansionism have deeply shaped societal views on security and international relations.

The Baltic states share a deep-rooted and complex history of conflict and subjugation by Russia, which shape their current threat perceptions and strong stance against Russian aggression. This difficult relationship dates to the early 18th century when the Russian Empire annexed these territories. Under Tsarist rule, the Baltic states experienced systematic Russification efforts, which aimed to erode local identities, languages and cultures, with the imposition of Russian laws, the restriction of local governance and forced migrations.

The trauma of Soviet occupation during and after the second world war further solidified the Baltic states’ aversion to Russian influence. The occupation was marked by brutal political repression, including mass deportations, the execution of political leaders and the forced collectivisation of agriculture. Tens of thousands of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were deported to Siberia in the 1940s, disrupting families and decimating national elites. This period is remembered as a time of cultural annihilation and systemic efforts to erase Baltic national identities, further intensifying the historical animosity towards Russia.

The Singing Revolution of the late 1980s, a series of peaceful protests across the region, showcased their collective yearning for freedom from Soviet control. By 1991, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had regained their independence, but the lingering threats from Russia—including attempts at political meddling and economic coercion—have kept their security concerns acute.

The shared experiences of subjugation and resistance against Russian imperialism have fostered a strong sense of solidarity between the Baltic states and Ukraine. This historical alignment is also mirrored in the Nordic countries, whose own experiences with Russian expansionism have similarly influenced their approach to security and reinforced their support for Ukraine’s defence efforts.

Finland, for example, has a long history of conflict with Russia. The Winter War from 1939 to 1940, in which Finland successfully defended itself against a Soviet invasion, remains a cornerstone of Finnish national identity and shapes societal understanding of Russian threats. The subsequent loss of territory and the long-standing policy of “Finlandisation,” in which Finland made concessions to its more powerful neighbour and maintained neutrality to ensure its sovereignty and avoid direct conflict , has left a lasting imprint on how Finns view Russia. Today, not least because of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Finland has distanced itself from this historical tradition by aligning more closely with Western institutions, most importantly with NATO.

Sweden’s historical trajectory is remarkably similar to that of Ukraine when it comes to relations with Russia. For over 300 years, Sweden was locked in conflict with Russia, often centred on control over Baltic territories. This long history of warfare with Russia has left deep cultural and historical marks on Swedish society, with the historical parallels perhaps explaining its strong support for Ukraine. Notably, the situation in Crimea and its strategic importance in the Black Sea resembles Sweden’s own concerns regarding the strategic importance of Gotland and the Baltic Sea.[3] An important historical episode that underscores this shared experience is the alliance between the Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Hetman Ivan Mazepa, and Sweden under King Charles XII during the Great Northern War. The Battle of Poltava in 1709, where this alliance faced the Russian Empire, is a poignant reminder of the long-standing confrontations both nations have had with Russian expansionism and their shared legacy of resistance.

Other Nordic nations, such as Norway and Denmark, have also maintained a vigilant stance toward Russian activities, especially in the heavily militarised Arctic region, where Russia has established new military bases, deployed icebreakers, and is ever expanding naval capabilities to reinforce its dominance. Monitoring and responding to Russian military activities in the Arctic are a priority for Norway, which shares a 198km land border with Russia in the region. Encompassing key areas such as the Sør-Varanger municipality, this border places Norway at the forefront of European security concerns regarding Russia’s ambitions in the “High North”. Additionally, the Arctic’s growing strategic importance, driven by climate change and the opening of new shipping routes, has made the region a focal point of international competition. Norway’s significant energy resources and its NATO membership further underline its strategic role in countering potential Russian aggression. To address these challenges, Norway has invested in modernising its defence capabilities, including surveillance systems and Arctic-ready military forces, while fostering close collaboration with allies to ensure stability and deterrence in the region.

The power dynamics between Russia and Denmark in the Arctic region are shaped by competing interests in security, resource access and geopolitical influence. Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland provides it with a significant foothold in the Arctic, making Greenland critical for monitoring and securing shipping routes, as well as for strategic military operations under NATO. Furthermore, Greenland’s untapped natural resources, including rare earth minerals and hydrocarbons, further bolster Denmark’s influence in Arctic affairs. Denmark advocates for a cooperative approach through multilateral institutions such as the Arctic Council. However, Russia’s increasing militarisation and unilateral actions often undermine these frameworks. This militarisation, coupled with competing interests in exploiting Arctic resources, continues to be a source of tension between the two nations.

NB8’s support for Ukraine

Society

The staunch support for Ukraine among the Nordic and Baltic societies is evident. To illustrate this point, a recent Eurobarometer survey shows strong public support for financing the purchase and supply of military equipment to Ukraine. The survey found that 92% of Swedes, 88% of Danes, 88% of Finns, 76% of Lithuanians, 70% of Latvians, and 63% of Estonians totally agree with this measure.

This support stems from a combination of factors, including the region’s historical experiences with Russia. For the Baltics, for example, the horrors of Soviet occupation are still very much alive. Recent aggressive actions by Russia in their own territories, such as cable sabotage at the Baltic Sea or cyber-attacks, have exacerbated this feeling. There is a common understanding of the security implications if Russia is not stopped in Ukraine, which fosters and keeps the public support to Ukraine in NB8 countries on a high level. Across different parts of society, including top officials and volunteers, it is emphasised that “Ukraine is protecting all of us”, or that if “Ukraine falls, we are next”. For the Baltics and Nordics, the stakes are clear—they need no further persuasion about the gravity of the situation.

In Finland, widespread backing for continued military assistance persists even as tensions with Russia remain high. Finland’s decision to join NATO in 2023, abandoning its long-held policy of neutrality, reflects the overwhelming public consensus on the need to enhance security against Russia. For decades, a majority of Finns were opposed to joining NATO. As recently as December 2021, 51% of the Finnish population opposed NATO membership. But in November 2022, support for NATO membership surged to 78%, with only 8% opposing. Following Finland’s official accession to NATO in April 2023, approval for NATO membership reached an unprecedented 90% in 2024.

In Sweden, public support for Ukraine remains similarly strong, with over 70% of Swedes in favour of providing both economic and military aid. Accession to NATO also reflects a societal consensus on Ukraine. The historical memory of multiple wars with Russia has fostered a collective understanding that small nations like Ukraine must be defended to maintain the balance of power in Europe.

In Denmark, a whopping 91% support imposing sanctions on Russia. In Norway, public sentiment is more ambiguous: While an overwhelming majority of Norwegians support sanctions, 84% of the population also say it is important for Norway to have a good relationship with Russia.

In the Baltics, pro-Ukrainian sentiment was perhaps best reflected in the remarkable social mobilisation. One striking example was in May 2022, when Lithuanian media figure and activist Andrius Tapinas spearheaded a campaign to raise €5mn to purchase a Bayraktar combat drone for Ukraine. The goal was met in just three days, demonstrating both the deep public commitment to Ukraine and the innovative ways in which the Baltics are contributing to the fight against Russian aggression.

A recent poll in Latvia found that 52% of respondents support either maintaining the country’s assistance to Ukraine at its current level or increasing it, with this proportion rising to 72% among those of Latvian ethnicity (and falling to 20% among Russian-Latvians). Meanwhile, a poll in Estonia at the start of year 2024 showed that 61% favour providing military aid to Ukraine, with 95% of Estonian nationals opposing Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

One of the defining features of the Baltic and Nordic countries’ support for Ukraine is its predictability and sustainability. In contrast to other European regions where public opinion might fluctuate due to economic pressures or fears of escalation, the societal discourse in the Nordic countries is more stable. This is largely due to the ingrained historical understanding of Russian threats and the strong belief in defending smaller, democratic nations against authoritarian aggression.

Politics

Throughout the NB8, politicians and parties that adopt pro-Russian rhetoric struggle to garner high support rates. Several interviewed experts noted that suggesting to cut support for Ukraine is viewed as political suicide, since that would antagonise the overwhelmingly pro-Ukrainian public in these countries. [4] [5] [6]

Some political actors across the spectrum voice opposition towards the high level of aid directed to Ukraine. For example, some far-left parties, such as Norway’s Red Party, are calling for limits to the weapons sent to Ukraine, or proposing restrictions on their use to Ukrainian territory only. On the far-right side, parties such as the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) attempted to exploit any resentment against Ukrainian refugees, alleging that “mass immigration” could result in ethnic Estonians becoming a minority in their own country. These stances, however, did not manage to attract widespread support. In EKRE’s case, the 2023 Estonian parliament election saw it lose a few seats and stay in opposition. Following the European Parliament election in 2024, several figures left the party, criticising the pro-Russian views of its leadership.

Lack of support for pro-Russian views was also demonstrated by the presidential elections in Lithuania in May 2024. While the majority of candidates had pro-Ukrainian stances, Eduardas Vaitkus stood out by openly questioning Lithuania’s support for Ukraine, suggesting that Lithuania should not assist Ukraine’s NATO aspirations and asserting that Russia does not pose a threat to Lithuania. His platform garnered approximately 7% of the vote, primarily from the Russian-speaking minority and those nostalgic for the Soviet era. In the subsequent parliamentary elections in October 2024, his party failed to secure seats, and Vaitkus did not gain a position in the parliament.

As politicians cannot cash in on pro-Russia sentiment, many radical Nordic and Baltic political parties opted to align with the pro-Ukrainian policies of the major parties, such as the far-right Finns Party in Finland. In some cases, they even supported policies that deviate from their usual positions. For example, the Norwegian Progress Party (FrP), which usually advocates tight asylum and migration laws, shifted their stance and overwhelmingly backed Ukrainian refugees (in great contrast with their policies towards Syrian refugees). Similarly, while FrP criticised Norway’s NATO commitments and stance on Russia, the party continues to support the government’s handling of the war or stays silent in such debates.

Today, political parties with traditionally Russia-friendly views are increasingly marginalised. While it is not necessarily their pro-Russian stance that pushes them to the sidelines, it is evident that this position does not help them to get votes. For example, the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti), which has traditionally been highly Eurosceptic, has recognised that the war in Ukraine underscores the EU’s critical role in maintaining security, coordinating sanctions, and providing military and financial aid. Indeed, public perceptions have shifted, as many who previously doubted the EU’s relevance are now more likely recognise its strategic importance. As a result, support for hardline Eurosceptic parties like Dansk Folkeparti has waned, with their share of the vote dropping from 26.6% in 2014 to 6.95% in 2024.

In Sweden, the marginalisation is evident in the reluctance of the major political forces to include parties with pro-Russian views in the coalition. The Sweden Democrats (SD) is still seen as untrustworthy even after they moderated their pro-Kremlin views after the full-scale invasion. This stands in stark contrast with the rising support for parties with Russia-friendly views in central Europe, including Germany, where many Russlandverstehers enjoy comfortable polling positions.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine dampened support for Russia-friendly politicians in NB8 countries, it also paved the way for the rise of Russia hawks who actively criticise Russia’s actions on the national, European and global stages. Notable figures include Latvia’s president Edgars Rinkevics, Estonia’s former prime minister Kaja Kallas (now the EU’s top diplomat), and Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen. High levels of public support for Ukraine give Nordic and Baltic governments the political space to continue providing military, economic, and humanitarian aid without fear of significant domestic backlash. This alignment between public opinion and governmental action ensures that the Nordic and Baltic contributions to Ukraine’s defence remain steadfast and reliable.

Military aid

The NB8 countries have been at the forefront of military support for Ukraine since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, often leading the way with contributions and actions that set precedents for other Western allies. By leading by example, these countries have challenged the cautious approaches in the West, setting new standards for military support and encouraging broader international coalitions to increase and diversify aid to Ukraine.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were among the very first to send lethal aid, including Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger MANPADS, just before the full-scale invasion in February 2022. This decisive action underscored their commitment in the face of imminent conflict. They demonstrated a strong political stance by clearing the way for other countries to supply advanced weapons systems, breaking the psychological barrier of providing offensive military aid.

Estonia was the first country to send significant quantities of heavy artillery, including howitzers, to Ukraine. The provision of 122mm and 155mm howitzers early in the invasion played a crucial role in bolstering Ukraine’s defensive capabilities and marked a departure from cautious Western policies. Also, being a global leader in cybersecurity, it was quick to provide substantial cyber defence support to Ukraine.

Denmark was among the first to pledge and deliver Leopard 1 main battle tanks to Ukraine. This commitment was crucial in influencing other European countries to follow suit with pledges of more advanced Leopard 2 tanks. Denmark’s decision played a key role in breaking the deadlock on sending Western-manufactured tanks. It was also one of the first countries, alongside the Netherlands, to commit to training Ukrainian pilots and delivering F-16 fighter jets. This move set a precedent for other countries and significantly boosted Ukraine’s capabilities in air defence and counteroffensive operations. Moreover, Denmark has played a pioneering role in supporting Ukraine’s defence industry by directly funding the production of Ukrainian-made weaponry, notably the Bohdana self-propelled howitzers. In July 2024, Denmark announced the financing of 18 Bohdana howitzers, marking the first instance of a NATO country investing directly in Ukraine’s domestic arms manufacturing. This initiative not only provided the Ukrainian Armed Forces with vital artillery systems but also bolstered Ukraine’s defence production capabilities.

Following Denmark’s lead, other nations have adopted similar approaches. Norway, for instance, approved the production of Norwegian-developed artillery ammunition within Ukraine, facilitating quicker supplies for Ukrainian forces. Additionally, Norway is considering measures to further increase production capacity, potentially channelling funding through initiatives that support Ukraine in acquiring arms directly from its defence companies. Norway also took the lead in providing Ukraine with advanced air defence systems, such as the NASAMS, a critical asset for countering Russian missile attacks. But most crucial is Norway’s Nansen Support Programme for Ukraine, established in 2023. It is a comprehensive initiative providing around €7.5bn over the five years between 2023 and 2027 to support Ukraine through military aid, humanitarian assistance, and reconstruction efforts. This programme is notable for its long-term commitment, distinguishing it as one of the first multi-year support frameworks of its kind for Ukraine. In 2024, the Norwegian government proposed an expansion of the Nansen Programme, increasing the total funding to €11.6bn and extending its timeline to 2032.

Finland, traditionally neutral, also provided substantial military support, including anti-aircraft systems, ammunition and artillery, marking a historic shift in its defence policy. As of December 2024, Finland had delivered 26 packages of defenсe material to Ukraine, with a combined value exceeding €2.3bn. Finland is a member of the tank support coalition, alongside Germany, Italy and Poland, and participates in the IT coalition led by Estonia and Luxembourg. Furthermore, Finland has joined the Czech-led initiative to procure ammunition for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Sweden’s military aid packages, which included everything from anti-tank weapons to winter gear and medical supplies, were not only sizable but also well-tailored to meet the immediate needs of Ukrainian forces. At the end of January 2025, the Swedish government announced its largest military aid package to Ukraine to date, valued at $1.25bn. Among other objectives, the package aims to enhance Ukraine’s long-range capabilities, including enabling the domestic production of long-range missiles and drones. Sweden’s decision to join NATO during the war further reinforced its commitment to Ukraine’s defence.

Bilateral security agreements

All eight countries signed bilateral security agreements with Ukraine in 2024. Although the frameworks are not mutual defence pacts, they reflect the countries’ strong commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and aligns with similar security agreements Ukraine has made with other Western allies. They share several common themes while the specific contributions of each country are tailored to its strengths, capabilities and priorities, creating a comprehensive and multi-faceted support structure for Ukraine.

All these agreements are long-term, typically spanning ten years, and emphasise sustained and deepened collaboration. A cornerstone of the agreements is military support, which includes the provision of advanced weaponry, air defence systems and combat vehicles. Denmark, Norway and Sweden have notably pledged to enhance Ukraine’s air capabilities, with Denmark committing to the delivery and maintenance of F-16 fighter jets, Sweden offering Gripen jets, and Norway providing expertise and resources for F-16 training. In addition to these contributions, the agreements focus on improving Ukraine’s overall defence posture through air defence, artillery and armoured vehicles.

Alongside military assistance, the Nordic countries are deeply committed to supporting Ukraine’s humanitarian needs, and the protection and reconstruction of its infrastructure. The agreements outline funding for demining efforts, energy sector restoration and civil defence, with Finland specifically focusing on mitigating environmental damage from the war. Norway has committed to supporting Ukraine’s reconstruction through the Nansen Support Programme. This holistic approach underscores the importance of rebuilding Ukraine’s resilience not just through military aid but also through economic and humanitarian efforts.

Another key common element is the emphasis on cybersecurity and intelligence collaboration. Several countries, including Denmark, Lithuania and Sweden, have prioritised cooperation in countering Russian cyberattacks and hybrid threats, strengthening Ukraine’s resilience against these increasingly sophisticated forms of warfare. The agreements also align with broader geopolitical goals, with all Nordic-Baltic countries voicing strong support for Ukraine’s integration into the EU and NATO. Lithuania and Latvia in particular have committed to advancing Ukraine’s defence interoperability with NATO, while several countries have pledged to expedite Ukraine’s accession process.

While the financial contributions across the agreements are significant, they also vary depending on the country’s economic capacity and geopolitical priorities. Denmark stands out with a €8.5bn commitment through its Ukraine Support Fund, which extends until 2028, while Sweden has pledged €6.5bn in military aid from 2024 to 2026. Norway has committed to providing €6.4bn through its multi-year support programme, with a focus on air defence and maritime defence in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov. Iceland’s financial commitment, while smaller at €30mn annually, is distinctive for its logistical support and focus on the integration of women in the Ukrainian military. Lithuania and Latvia have both pledged to contribute 0.25% of their GDP annually, emphasising their strong commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and regional stability.

Support of Ukraine’s victory plan

In October 2024, Odesa hosted a visit by eight foreign ministers representing the Nordic and Baltic countries. The discussions primarily centred on enhancing Ukraine’s defence capabilities and bolstering its energy resilience in preparation for the winter months. Particular emphasis was placed on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s victory plan, which includes a formal invitation to join NATO and more weapons delivery with no restrictions on their use.

While NATO accession is likely off the table for the time being, most of the NB8 countries have voiced clear support for the plan, illustrated by former Lithuanian foreign minister Gabriellus Landsbergis’ speech at the Odesa meeting: “Lithuania and Latvia have a clear goal and vision and that is Ukraine’s victory. We all agree that Ukraine must win—there is no other way. Russia will not stop until it is stopped. […]. All I know is that if we choose a plan other than Zelensky’s, we will deeply regret it later.”

The plan comprises five points: an invitation to join NATO; a defence aspect; deterrence of Russian aggression; economic growth and cooperation; and post-war security architecture. Looking at the main points of the plan, the three that are crucial for ending the war on favourable terms for Ukraine are supported by the NB8 countries.

NATO accession

All NB8 countries have expressed support for Ukraine’s NATO accession in the face of Russian aggression. In fact, all bilateral security agreements with the NB8 underscore support for Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO, with several countries committed to accelerating Ukraine’s defence interoperability with the alliance. Meetings of the NB8 presidents and foreign ministers have reiterated their NATO commitment.

Yet, Trump’s recent comments suggest that Kyiv’s NATO membership is currently off the table. In a recent interview, Trump expressed sympathy for Russia’s opposition to Ukraine joining NATO and criticised former president Joe Biden for allegedly changing the US stance on the issue. While Ukraine continues to push for an invitation to the alliance, it is becoming clear that alternative security guarantees also need to be considered.

The transatlantic security landscape is increasingly shifting toward “coalitions of the willing”—countries ready to take proactive, decisive action without waiting for the slow consensus-building that often characterises NATO. This approach is both pragmatic and effective—and aligns more with Trump’s logic, which favours smaller, more flexible groups capable of decisive action, rather than the broader, more bureaucratic processes favoured by Biden.

In Europe, a coalition of the willing is gradually taking shape, with most NB8 countries on board, aimed at deterring Russia and supporting Ukraine. It is important to note, however, that these efforts are not seen as a replacement for NATO. Instead, they represent an adaptation to new geostrategic realities, where NATO’s key member, the US, is more likely to take seriously those allies who take initiative and are ready to contribute to their own security.

Deterring Russia

Another element of Ukraine’s victory plan focuses on enhancing non-nuclear deterrence. The proposal seeks to establish a “comprehensive non-nuclear strategic deterrence framework” on Ukrainian territory to mitigate the risk of future aggression. Although this point includes a classified annex and has not been fully detailed, it can be inferred that it involves leveraging a strategic presence. This could entail deploying international training missions, positioning allied troops or conducting maritime patrols similar to the UK’s pre-invasion activities, which included joint naval exercises and freedom of navigation operations in the Black Sea to demonstrate deterrence.

Ukraine’s leadership is not foreseeing this deterrence strategy as a NATO-wide mission but as a “coalition of willing states.” This approach, known as “protection by presence,” seeks to create a credible deterrent effect through the visible and sustained involvement of a coalition of committed states, potentially including members of some of the NB8.

While France and the UK have been more outspoken on this matter and are likely to take on a leading role in case of need, the Baltic states have also signalled their willingness to contribute, strengthening the potential coalition of the willing for deterring Russia. For instance, Kaja Kallas has mentioned that her country does not rule out deploying military trainers to Ukraine, while Lithuania’s former defence minister Arvydas Anusauskas has shown openness to sending Lithuanian troops for training missions. These countries, along with the UK and France, have begun a political and bureaucratic process to determine how such a joint mission could be structured, funded and sustained.

Enhancing Ukraine’s capabilities

Ukraine and its partners have established eight capability coalitions with 34 member countries from the Ukraine Defence Contact Group. The coalition format became widespread in 2023, aimed at coordinating multiple countries for the delivery of specific types of military equipment rather than having individual nations make separate decisions. Capability coalitions are expected to become the primary tool for shaping military aid packages from partner countries. The coalition format enables a rapid response to urgent needs of the defence forces while also supporting the long-term development of capabilities.

Here, too, the NB8 countries are prominent supporters of Ukraine, leading or co-leading five out of the eight coalitions. Specifically, Estonia co-leads the IT Coalition, Lithuania and Iceland co-lead the Coalition for Demining, Latvia co-leads the Drone Coalition, Norway co-leads the Naval Capabilities Coalition, and Denmark co-leads the Coalition for Aviation Capabilities.

Use of weapons on Russian territory

The second point in the Zelensky’s victory plan stresses, among other things, the need to lift restrictions on long-range strikes in Russia, commit to additional supplies of long-range missiles, as well as building up Ukrainian defence capabilities.

In early 2023, when Russia intensified its attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, the Baltic states, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and the UK signalled that they did not object to the use of their weapons against targets on Russian territory. By August 2024, a total of 13 NATO countries (Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the UK) had officially permitted Ukraine to utilise Western-provided equipment, including tanks, artillery and infantry fighting vehicles, within Russia. In November, the US approved Ukraine’s use of long-range US weapons inside Russia, yet only in the Kursk oblast.

Seizing the opportunity: Recommendations for NB8-Ukraine cooperation

Cutting Russia’s oil revenues

A critical component missing from Ukraine’s victory plan is a comprehensive strategy for addressing the implementation of sanctions, particularly in the energy sector. For Russia, this sector is a crucial source of revenue that directly funds its military efforts. The Achilles’ heel of Putin’s regime lies in the revenue derived from oil exports, as gas now plays a much smaller role. Following the onset of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia lost its main European market for natural gas exports, making oil and petroleum products even more significant—likely accounting for over 70% of Russia’s current energy exports. These revenues are the largest external source of funding for Russia’s military expenditures, including the procurement of military equipment and dual-use goods, contributing around one-third of the federal budget (8-9trn roubles). As long as Russia can continue exporting oil, it can sustain its war efforts.

The NB8 countries, with the Baltic Sea as their internal waterway, are uniquely positioned to play a decisive role in reducing Russia’s maritime exports of oil and petroleum products. The combined exports from the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea account for approximately 80% of Russia’s total maritime oil trade, amounting to about 15 million tonnes of crude oil and 6 to 7 million tons of petroleum products per month. Among these, the Baltic Sea is particularly significant, accounting for 60% of Russia’s maritime crude oil exports due to its favourable political and geographical conditions.

Despite existing sanctions, Russia continues to generate substantial revenues from oil exports due to loopholes in enforcement. The so-called price cap is not effective as it has no safeguards against falsifying documents related to the value of tanker cargo[7]. Since 2022, signing contracts in compliance with the price cap has been prohibited in Russia by decree and is strictly monitored. Meanwhile, 30 to 35% of Russia’s maritime crude exports is transported from Russian ports by tanker fleets from EU members, primarily Greece. Additionally, approximately 10% of Russian oil is transferred via ship-to-ship operations near EU waters in the Mediterranean, from where it can be shipped in small batches with falsified documentation. Russia disguises shipments of petroleum products as non-sanctioned goods like fertilisers and vegetable oil, or circumvents price caps by using a shadow fleet of old tankers insured through shell companies.

A paradigm shift in the sanctions approach is necessary, focusing on physically limiting Russia’s ability to export oil rather than relying solely on price caps. The NB8 countries should lead efforts to declare a “special period” for the temporary suspension of certain international maritime laws governing freedom of navigation and transit, such as those outlined in the Copenhagen Treaty of 1857. Under current maritime law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, it is difficult to implement restrictive measures in peacetime conditions. However, a “special period” would allow partner nations to take actions that may not fully align with peacetime legal norms, effectively tightening control over Russian oil exports. The proposed “special period” concept could be accompanied by legal justifications under hybrid threats doctrine: arguing that hybrid warfare tactics (such as undersea sabotage) require exceptional legal responses.

While the ideal approach would be a consensus-based decision by the EU, achieving unanimity has become increasingly challenging in recent years. Opposition from Hungary and Slovakia has frequently stalled decisive European action, making a unified stance on energy sanctions unlikely. However, this would not be the first time actions have been taken outside the framework of full EU or NATO unanimity. Given these constraints, bold measures should be considered from the Baltic Sea security perspective.

There is growing concern over Russia’s use of hybrid tactics in the Baltic Sea, including the suspected sabotage of undersea cables and pipelines, which have intensified in recent months. These actions aim to destabilise the region and test NATO and EU member states’ responses. While NATO and the EU play significant roles in regional security, the immediacy and specificity of hybrid threats prompt the Baltic Sea nations to act autonomously. Proactive measures such as restricting Russian vessel access to the Danish straits would signal a firm commitment to safeguarding critical infrastructure and maintaining stability in the region.

The Baltic Sea nations, acting independently of broader EU or NATO consensus, could take immediate steps given that the Baltic Sea is essentially an internal NATO waterway. They could temporarily enforce mandatory pilotage in the Danish straits, limiting the passage of sanctioned vessels. This measure, along with a comprehensive ban on providing pilotage and other maritime services to sanctioned tankers, would block the primary exit route for Russian oil from Baltic ports.

Furthermore, the NB8 countries should swiftly sanction all tankers recorded in the past several months as transporting Russian oil. These sanctions should extend beyond territorial waters to include bans on access to ports, anchorages and maritime services. A prohibition on tankers lacking proper insurance from transiting through territorial waters—particularly near Denmark and Latvia—would further disrupt Russian exports. Additional sanctions should target companies providing reinsurance for these shipments.

At the EU level, a complete ban on EU-registered shipowners transporting Russian oil and petroleum products from Russian ports is essential. This measure would create a temporary shortage of tanker capacity, significantly hindering Russia’s export capabilities. The NB8 coalition is well-positioned to advocate for such multilateral action within the EU, leveraging their strategic interest in curbing Russian aggression.

Such measures could disrupt the global oil market, potentially affecting price stability and energy security in multiple regions. Therefore, they must be carefully managed to prevent or mitigate broader energy instability. The West could collaborate with key oil-producing nations to offset the reduction in Russian supply. Increased production from alternative sources, particularly the US, could help stabilise global markets—a move aligned with Trump’s energy policies. Additionally, encouraging Norway, Europe’s largest oil exporter, to ramp up production would further bolster European energy security.

Naturally, a potential Russian response and the West’s fear of escalation remain the biggest obstacles to decisive action. However, it is crucial to recognise that Russia is continuously testing the West on multiple fronts, including in the maritime domain. Since the start of its full-scale invasion, there have been at least nine confirmed incidents of Russian drones and missiles crossing into NATO countries, including Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania. Additionally, at least 11 Baltic undersea cables have been damaged since October 2023. These actions are part of a broader Russian strategy to probe NATO’s defence systems and response protocols. By deliberately violating NATO airspace and maritime zones, Russia seeks to assess the alliance’s reaction time and preparedness.

By finally responding with strength, the Baltic Sea states can send a clear message to Russia—using the only language it understands. A key reference point is the 2015 incident when Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 bomber near the Turkey-Syria border after repeated airspace violations and multiple warnings. Russia initially retaliated with harsh rhetoric, economic sanctions and a diplomatic freeze, displaying its characteristic aggressive posture. However, despite its threats, Moscow ultimately sought reconciliation, and by mid-2016, relations had begun to normalise after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed regret. By 2017, Russia and Turkey had fully restored economic and military cooperation, including energy projects like TurkStream and joint operations in Syria—demonstrating that Russia respects only decisive action and quickly re-engages when confronted with strength.

Managing Norway’s “war profits”

In 2022, Norway’s revenues from oil and gas sales soared to unprecedented levels, driven by the spike in global energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Norwegian state more than doubled its earnings from these resources compared to 2021—from approximately $60bn to $140bn. This surge is primarily attributed to Europe’s urgent need for alternatives to Russian energy supplies, solidifying Norway’s role as a critical energy provider to the continent.

However, this windfall has sparked domestic and international debate over the ethical implications of profiting from a conflict that has caused immense human suffering. Critics argue that Norway has a moral obligation to allocate a substantial portion of these revenues to supporting Ukraine. Beyond the general question of whether such funds should be directed to Ukraine, a more critical issue is how to allocate these funds most effectively. While reconstruction and humanitarian aid remain vital, prioritising military support—particularly funding Ukraine’s defence production—would yield the most significant strategic and long-term benefits for Ukraine’s survival and sovereignty.

The Norwegian government has partially addressed these concerns through the Nansen Aid Program, a five-year initiative encompassing military and humanitarian assistance. In 2024, the government proposed expanding the programme, increasing its total funding to 135bn NKr (or €11.6) and extending its timeline to 2032. This move reflects Norway’s acknowledgment of Ukraine’s enduring needs and its commitment to sustained support.

However, the programme has been critiqued for its lack of urgency. Instead of spreading funding evenly over the years, the allocation should prioritise a significant increase in the 2025 budget to address Ukraine’s immediate defence needs, particularly through investments in Ukrainian weapons production, following the example of Denmark – currently the undisputed leader in support for Ukraine’s armed forces among the Nordics, with an allocation of €6.4bn in military support or 1.6% of its GDP. The ongoing negotiations between Norway and Ukraine regarding a proposed “Norwegian model” for establishing joint military enterprises with Norwegian financial backing offer a promising avenue for bolstering Ukraine’s underfunded defence production capabilities. Concurrently, an alternative approach could involve allocating a portion of Norway’s available funding to procure US weaponry—readily available and stockpiled—to address Ukraine’s immediate military needs.[8]

Encouragingly, the programme’s flexible design allows for adjustments, as demonstrated in 2023 and 2024 when the government front-loaded and increased initially budgeted contributions multiple times. If Ukraine and Norway swiftly reach an agreement on the financial and bureaucratic mechanisms underpinning the Norwegian model for financing Ukraine’s military production, it is plausible that additional funding could be integrated into the allocated Nansen Aid Program budget for 2025.

In light of evolving geopolitical realities, including uncertainties surrounding the new US leadership, Norway has a unique opportunity—and responsibility—to assert a more visible role in European and transatlantic security. With its extraordinary financial gains directly linked to Russia’s war on Ukraine, Norway can and should leverage these resources to strengthen Ukraine’s military resilience and contribute decisively to European stability.

Expanding Ukraine’s production capacity

In a joint statement from May last year, Nordic leaders and the Ukrainian president committed to enhancing defence production capabilities, declaring: “We will jointly strive to increase Ukraine’s and our own production capacity to meet Ukraine’s needs for battle-decisive munitions.” This pledge reflects the urgent necessity for Ukraine’s partners to invest more significantly in the country’s defence industry, which has rapidly expanded since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion but remains underutilised due to limited domestic funding.

Despite its rapid growth, Ukraine’s defence industry is operating far below its full potential due to budgetary constraints. According to Oleksander Kamyshin, Ukraine’s former minister of strategic industries, the total capacity of the sector currently stands at $20bn annually, yet only $6bn is available domestically to fund production. As a result, only one-third of Ukraine’s production capacity is fully utilised, leaving untapped potential that external investments could unlock.

This surplus is particularly evident in Ukraine’s burgeoning drone industry, which now includes over 200 companies producing millions of drones annually. The rapid expansion has outpaced the state’s ability to procure these drones, creating a risk of companies relocating abroad or shutting down. To prevent this, Ukraine’s partners should place direct orders with Ukrainian drone manufacturers, a step Denmark has already taken.

In April 2024, Denmark became the first country to procure weapons for Ukraine’s Armed Forces directly from Ukrainian manufacturers, setting a critical precedent for other allies.

This has already provided Ukraine with €50mn, which funded the production of Bohdana self-propelled artillery systems. By autumn, the scope of this collaboration expanded significantly, with Ukraine and Denmark signing contracts worth approximately €535mn to procure Ukrainian-made artillery systems, strike drones, anti-tank weapons, and missiles. These contracts were financed through contributions from the governments of Denmark and Sweden, as well as revenues from frozen Russian assets. In November, Norway’s minister of defence stated that the country would join the Danish support format and finance the production of Ukrainian weapons and equipment. Finland and Estonia have also expressed interest in purchasing Ukraine-made drones and exploring joint production opportunities.

Following the Danish example, the Nordic countries can significantly upscale the volumes and funding of similar procurement contracts while spearheading other ways to support Ukraine’s defence sector. This includes direct purchases of Ukrainian military equipment for their own arsenals, joint production ventures, co-investments, localisation of manufacturing, or collaborative defence projects. Domestically produced long-range weapons are particularly crucial. Ukraine’s defence strategy increasingly emphasises the development of long-range drones and missiles capable of striking deep inside Russia. Defence minister Rustem Umerov recently confirmed that ramping up the production of these capabilities will be a key priority for 2025. Given that Western partners often restrict Ukraine’s access to long-range weaponry, supporting the domestic production of such systems becomes a strategic imperative. Each of these approaches contributes to strengthening Ukraine’s military production base, which is essential for sustaining its defence efforts and bolstering European security.

However, Ukraine must also address its internal policies by permitting the export of domestically produced weapons—a step that could significantly stimulate production and compensate for the government’s budgetary limitations.[9] Enabling such exports has the potential to generate up to $15bn annually for arms manufacturers, while simultaneously accelerating the growth of Ukraine’s defence industry.

Strengthening Ukraine’s northern security through the JEF

An important opportunity for Ukraine’s northern foreign and security policy lies in deepening its cooperation with the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF). This UK-led defence coalition was established in 2014 in response to heightened security threats in northern Europe and the Baltic region, particularly following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, hence implicitly linking it to Ukraine’s broader security concerns. Ukraine joined the JEF as an observer in March 2022, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion, as part of its efforts to engage with accessible security alliances beyond NATO. Notably, the majority of JEF members are part of the NB8 group, with the coalition comprising ten nations: the NB8 countries, the UK, and the Netherlands.

The JEF benefits from the unique contributions of its member states, enhancing its operational flexibility. The UK leads the JEF, providing command capabilities and substantial military assets. Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Norway contribute naval strength and cyber expertise, bolstering the JEF’s response capacity in the Baltic and Arctic regions. Finland and Sweden, joining in 2017, strengthen the coalition’s northern presence with highly skilled troops, air defence systems, and cybersecurity capabilities. Iceland, despite lacking a conventional military, adds strategic value through intelligence-sharing and maritime surveillance in the north Atlantic. Ukraine’s potential membership would offer significant benefits, leveraging its experience as Europe’s only battle-tested army. Ukraine’s proven ability in multi-domain operations, including cyber and electronic warfare, advanced counter-drone tactics combined with its extensive field-testing of Western equipment, would provide the JEF with critical operational insights and enhanced readiness.

The primary mission of the JEF is to provide a rapid and flexible response to crises affecting regional stability. This flexibility is a core feature, reflected in both its operational approach and decision-making processes. The JEF can mobilise forces quickly, allowing for swift deployment in response to emerging threats. Unlike NATO’s consensus-based decision model, the JEF operates with fewer formalities, enabling faster decisions—an essential factor for addressing hybrid threats that require immediate action.

It is important to emphasise that potential full membership in the JEF would not replace but rather complement Ukraine’s aspirations of NATO integration. While it is true that the JEF does not offer the mutual defence guarantee of NATO’s article 5, it still provides a valuable defence partnership that enhances Ukraine’s strategic options. Full membership would strengthen Ukraine’s defence, particularly through rapid deployment support, which is crucial given ongoing Russian threats. Participation in JEF exercises would also deepen Ukraine’s interoperability with Western forces, enhancing access to advanced military training, which could be aligned with the training programmes Ukraine’s armed forces are currently undergoing.

The experiences of Finland and Sweden provide a useful precedent for Ukraine, demonstrating how JEF membership can facilitate deeper integration into European defence structures, including NATO. Both countries joined the JEF in 2017, significantly boosting their defence readiness. Through participation in exercises like Baltic Protector, Finland and Sweden aligned their operations with NATO standards, streamlined command structures and enhanced their hybrid warfare capabilities. This alignment was key to their seamless transition to full NATO membership, mitigating security risks during the interim period before formal accession. This latter approach could similarly benefit Ukraine, as JEF membership could provide an extra layer of deterrence against Russian aggression—especially if formal NATO security guarantees or bilateral assurances, as seen with Finland and Sweden, are delayed. While not identical to NATO membership, it would nonetheless provide a critical layer of regional defence, reinforcing Ukraine’s position within the broader European security architecture.

Boosting defence reforms through civil society development

The full-scale war has highlighted the urgent need to overhaul the management and decision-making processes within Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence, from enhancing analytical capabilities to developing effective defence policies. Despite efforts to modernise, Ukraine’s defence system remains largely rooted in Soviet-era structures, only now beginning to adopt NATO standards amid the complexities of wartime challenges. Before 2014, the armed forces of Ukraine suffered from years of neglect and a lack of societal support, resulting in an outdated, rigid and highly conservative bureaucratic culture resistant to innovation.

Since 2014, the influx of volunteers and civic activists has introduced a culture of self-organisation and leadership, creating a wave of innovative practices within the defence sector. Between 2022 to 2024, these innovators reached a critical mass, paving the way for a shift in the defence culture of Ukraine. However, while there has been significant growth in the number of civil society organisations and think-tanks aiming to support defence reform, the broader ecosystem of non-state actors in this sector remains underdeveloped. This weakness results in a lack of timely, high-quality analytical support for strategic decision-making. It is paradoxical that in a country known for its vibrant and resilient civil society—a driving force behind numerous successful reforms—the defence-focused civic ecosystem remains relatively weak. This is largely due to the lack of funding for NGOs, think-tanks, advocacy groups and educational institutions working on these issues. While countries like the UK and Canada have provided financial support to civil society organisations in the security and defence sector, most other nations treat such assistance as impermissible military aid, constrained by a strict separation between official development assistance (ODA) and military support.

Nordic and Baltic countries are well-positioned to adopt a similar approach to the UK, which directs about 93% of its defence aid to Ukraine into ODA-compliant activities. These efforts focus on three key areas: improving governance, enhancing transparency and anti-corruption measures, and bolstering human and reputational security initiatives, such as women, peace, and security programmes and the protection of civilians under international humanitarian law.

Countries like Iceland, which lack a conventional military, or the Baltic states, which may have limited capacity to provide impactful military support, could focus on strengthening Ukraine’s civilian defence ecosystem. Financial resources required for such support are minimal compared to direct military aid, yet the potential systemic impact on Ukraine’s defence sector would be substantial. In a nation where civil society plays a critical role in driving change, investing in the development of a strong, independent ecosystem of non-state defence actors would offer invaluable support to Ukraine’s long-term security reform efforts—especially given that the end of the war is not yet in sight. The Baltic states, given their shared Soviet past and recognition of the importance of grassroots, non-governmental networks as key drivers of change (in contrast to the Soviet administrative hierarchy), are particularly well-suited to support and fund civil society initiatives.

Conclusion

The NB8 has solidified its role as staunch advocates for Ukraine, drawing on shared historical experiences, aligned geopolitical interests, and strategic foresight to uphold Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. United in its opposition to Russian aggression, this coalition of the willing has become a dependable partner, providing critical military, financial and diplomatic support. As the transatlantic political landscape shifts, particularly under a new Trump administration, the NB8’s role in supporting Ukraine’s defence is poised to become even more important, cementing these countries as a crucial foreign policy and security vector for Ukraine’s fight for freedom.

The NB8’s dedication stems from a shared threat perception rooted in a history of direct confrontations with Russian expansionism. This commonality positions the Nordic-Baltic region as natural allies for Ukraine, with each country leveraging its unique strengths—whether advanced defence technologies, humanitarian aid or diplomatic advocacy—to counteract Russian aggression. As Europe increasingly relies on coalitions of the willing amid changing transatlantic dynamics, the NB8 is well-positioned to take a leadership role with others, such as France and the UK, in supporting Ukraine and securing their own regional security.

To maximise the potential of this partnership, deeper strategic collaboration, enhanced bilateral and multilateral connections, and greater investment are essential. The NB8 can amplify their impact by addressing critical areas such as blocking Russian oil exports through Baltic ports, ensuring that Ukraine’s NATO aspirations are not lost, expediting mechanisms for joint military initiatives in Ukraine, building consensus for Ukraine’s full membership in the JEF, and scaling up funding for defence procurement to bolster Ukraine’s defence capabilities. Additionally, strengthening Ukraine’s civil society organisations in the defence sector is vital to keep crucial reforms going despite the war challenges.

This enduring partnership not only secures Ukraine’s future but also strengthens Europe’s broader security architecture, fostering a more unified and resilient continent. By learning from the experiences and lessons of its Nordic and Eastern neighbours, Europe can better prepare for the challenges ahead while supporting Ukraine’s path to peace and stability.

About the author

Lesia Ogryzko is a visiting fellow with the Wider Europe programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to express heartfelt gratitude to Gabriele Valodskaite, programme coordinator at Wider Europe, for her invaluable support in researching and uncovering critical information. Her dedication, insightful contributions and unwavering encouragement played a significant role in shaping this work and keeping the author’s spirits high throughout the process.

[1] ECFR in-person interview with a senior Ukrainian diplomat, August 2024.

[2] ECFR online interview with a senior Swedish diplomat, December 2024.

[3] ECFR in-person interview with a senior Swedish foreign politicy expert, November 2024

[4]ECFR in-person interview with a senior Norwegian diplomat, December 2024.

[5] ECFR in-person interview with a senior Swedish diplomat, December 2024.

[6] ECFR online interview with a Swedish researcher, November 2024.

[7] ECFR in-person interview with a Ukrainian sanctions expert, November 2024

[8] ECFR in-person interview with a Norwegian researcher, January 2025

[9] ECFR in-person interview with a Ukrainian drone manufacturer, December 2024