Becoming NATO brothers: A feminist analysis of how government officials in Finland and Sweden reconciled national identity with NATO membership

This article analyses how government officials in Finland and Sweden reconciled their national identities as historically non-aligned countries with NATO membership. The analysis builds on, and contributes to, feminist poststructuralist theorizing on militarized nationalisms. Despite the general conviction that nations and nationalisms are based on unity, they simultaneously rely on, and hide, gendered, racialized and classed differences. Violence is a central feature of militarized nationalisms, which is legitimized, in part, through a protection myth positioning men as the ultimate guardians of women’s security. The analysis is based on statements by government officials in Finland and Sweden following their NATO applications on 18 May 2022. Applying a comparative narrative analytical design, the analysis identifies four narratives that, in different ways, (re)inforced gendered, racialized and classed tropes that naturalized Finland and Sweden’s membership in NATO as necessary to (1) reconcile historical pasts, (2) defend the international rule-based order, (3) embrace a natural belonging to NATO and (4) become protectors of/from the North. Together, these narratives (re)instated militarized nationalisms in both countries and, in constructing notions of perfect unity, silenced conflicting experiences of violence and inequality within and between NATO, the Nordics and Finland and Sweden.