The question was how to deal with the post-war reality, and Finland's solution inspired the derisive term "
Finlandization": It bent over backwards to keep the USSR happy, being keenly aware that (A) it could not win a head-on war against the Soviets to stave off annexation, if it came to that, and (B) it also could not depend on other Western powers to help, if history was any guide.
This phenomenon -- "
Finlandization" -- helps explain why, when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was translated into Finnish in 1974, the first edition was printed in neighboring Sweden.
This would be true even if the West could or would guarantee the "
Finlandization" of Ukraine--that is, its diplomatic and military neutrality vis-a-vis Russia, the EU, and NATO.
A new word in the global dictionary, "
Finlandization," came to mean a country that was effectively neutralized on the world stage but whose system, in this case democratic, was left intact, unlike most of Moscows targets of interest.
This was the reason that, during the Cold War, "
Finlandization" became a U.S.
The so-called Brezhnev doctrine (of irreversibility of communist gains) postulated the Soviet (Suslov-Stalin) equivalent to Honduras-ization -
Finlandization. Hence, it is safe to say that the Honduras-ization of Eastern Europe nowadays is full and complete.
The Philippines could see its own '
Finlandization' if it does not assert its sovereignty and stand up to China in the territorial dispute in the South China Sea, Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio warned on Monday.
Now he planned to expand them to continental scale." But "NATO kept preventing
finlandization of the whole of Europe" (2004, pp.
And, in what must instill a sense of deja vu among students of Cold War esoterica, the once-obscure term "
Finlandization" is now being bruited about.
Also see controversial academic articles with a theme of what some called "abandoning" Taiwan in Foreign Affairs by Bruce Gilley, "Not So Dire Straits: How the
Finlandization of Taiwan Benefits U.S.
Russia can hardly demand
Finlandization even if it had not invaded and annexed Crimea.
The authors enumerate three specific requirements Russia hopes to impose on Ukraine and then explain why each requirement, if undertaken, will be a severely weaken Ukrainian sovereignty, resulting in the "
Finlandization" of Ukraine.