Why Norway and Finland Should Preserve Two of Europe’s Most Important Demilitarized Zones

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Svalbard is a stark archipelago of glaciers and coal mines lying 650 kilometers (403 miles) north of Norway’s North Cape, roughly halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. It belongs to Norway but is governed under a 1920 treaty that grants nationals of more than 40 signatory states sweeping economic rights while barring Oslo from constructing naval bases or using the archipelago for “warlike” purposes. Far to the south, in the Baltic Sea between the Finnish and Swedish coasts, lie the Åland Islands, which are composed of roughly 6,500 islands and skerries. They are also home to 30,000 Swedish-speaking Finns. These islands are similarly bound by a 1921 convention that prohibits military fortification, constraining what NATO can do in and above them. When these treaties were inked, a Europe exhausted by World War I believed that treaties, arbitration, and international law would serve as an alternative to force of arms as the primary vehicle for addressing territorial disputes. World War II shattered that illusion, but the treaties survived.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and NATO’s enlargement to include Finland and Sweden have generated serious debate whether these two century-old treaty regimes remain viable in a deteriorating security environment. Critics argue the restrictions are strategically obsolete and that the rules-based international order underpinning them is collapsing under great power assault from Russia, China, and an increasingly transactional United States.

Those arguments deserve engagement but are unconvincing. The military gains from revision would be modest. Finland’s existing capabilities make remilitarization of the Åland region a marginal improvement. Norwegian and allied forces can replicate from mainland positions most of what enhanced Svalbard basing would provide. The diplomatic and normative costs of abandonment, by contrast, would be substantial: handing Russia a propaganda victory, antagonizing dozens of treaty signatories, and signaling that Norway and Finland regard their legal obligations as optional when inconvenient. For smaller states that cannot rely on hard power alone, a reputation for keeping agreements is a strategic asset. Jettisoning these treaty restrictions would trade a modest military benefit for a significant and lasting diplomatic liability.

The earlier of the two settlements, and, in some respects, the simpler, is the Svalbard Treaty , signed at Paris on Feb. 9, 1920. The archipelago then called Spitsbergen had long been terra nullius , belonging to no one. Coal discoveries in the early 20th century created a pressing need for legal administration. Norway, the geographically closest state with the largest commercial presence, had been pressing for resolution since roughly 1890, and the post-World War I Versailles negotiations provided that opportunity.

The treaty, signed by Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, resolved the sovereignty question in Norway’s favor while protecting the economic interests of other signatories. Article 9 , the provision that generates most of the current controversy, specifies:

Norway undertakes not to create nor to allow the establishment of any naval base in the territories specified in Article 1 and not to construct any fortification in the said territories, which may never be used for warlike purposes.

The Åland dispute unfolded against a backdrop of chaos that makes the Svalbard settlement look straightforward. The islands had been part of the Kingdom of Sweden for centuries, sharing language and culture with the Swedish mainland. When Finland passed from Swedish to Russian rule in 1809, the Åland Islands were included in the transfer. Russia constructed a massive fort on one of the main islands, but British and French gunfire pounded it into submission during the Crimean War. The 1856 Treaty of Paris ending that conflict prohibited Russia from refortifying or garrisoning the islands and is the legal precedent for the 1921 convention that demilitarized them.

When Finland declared independence in December 1917, the status of the Åland Islands became a bone of contention between Sweden and Finland. In one of the League of Nations’ first tests, the dispute was referred to the League’s Council in June 1920, where Sweden pressed its case with considerable vigor. When the League’s rapporteurs concluded in April 1921 that Finnish sovereignty was incontestable, Swedish diplomats objected that the ruling was incompatible with the principle of self-determination. Only sustained League diplomacy and the offer of robust cultural autonomy and minority protections for the Ålanders persuaded Sweden’s Liberal-Socialist government to reluctantly accept the Council’s decision.

The resulting 1921 Convention on the Non-Fortification and Neutralisation of the Åland Islands is precisely what its name suggests. Finland may not construct fortifications, station troops, or allow foreign military forces to operate on the islands. Military aircraft may not overfly the zone without special authorization. A bilateral Finnish-Soviet Treaty of 1940, confirmed by the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947 and reaffirmed in a 1992 Protocol between Finland and the Russian Federation , established a Russian consulate in Mariehamn, the largest city in Åland, with the specific mandate of overseeing compliance. That consulate remains open today.

On their face, the two arrangements share a common architecture: great power settlements that resolved contested sovereignty claims in favor of a Nordic state, while placing restrictions on military activity and guaranteeing access rights for other parties. The similarity is real but misleading.

Media coverage and some scholarly writing treat Svalbard and the Åland Islands as two demilitarized zones where military activity is broadly prohibited. The characterization is accurate for Åland but misleading when applied to Svalbard. The distinction matters.

Andreas Østhagen’s 2024 article “ The Myths of Svalbard Geopolitics ” provides the best systematic corrective. The most consequential misconception, Østhagen demonstrates, is describing Svalbard as demilitarized. Article 9 prohibits naval bases and fortifications and bars warlike use of the archipelago. It does not prohibit military transit, naval patrols, or military presence for non-warlike purposes. The Norwegian Coast Guard regularly docks at Longyearbyen for resupply and the Norwegian navy sends a frigate annually to demonstrate Norwegian sovereignty.

The Åland Islands are demilitarized in the full legal sense of the word. The 1921 Convention neutralizes the islands: Finland may not use them as a base of wartime operations and foreign belligerents are barred from the zone. This is a substantially more comprehensive set of restrictions than those pertaining to the Svalbard archipelago.

Two distinct but reinforcing arguments drive the case for revision. The first is straightforward: Times have changed. Both Norway and Finland now sit at the frontline of an alliance facing a revisionist Russia, creating a geopolitical situation utterly unlike anything the framers of 1920 and 1921 contemplated. The restrictions designed to keep these archipelagos out of great power competition increasingly feel like unilateral disarmament. The second argument is more corrosive: The rules-based international order that gives these treaties their normative foundation is itself under siege, not from adversaries alone, but from allies. When great powers treat international legal obligations as optional, the argument for small and medium-sized states to bear the costs of compliance weakens considerably.

Svalbard’s position near the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom-Norway gap and its proximity to Russia’s Northern Fleet on the Kola Peninsula gives it real military relevance: The archipelago overlooks the routes Russian submarines must transit to reach the Atlantic. On Svalbard, concerns have grown since Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In 2018, James K. Wither, a professor at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, warned that Svalbard’s distance from the Norwegian mainland, Russia’s presence in Barentsburg, and the absence of any arbitration mechanism for treaty disputes left the archipelago “exposed both politically and militarily.” More recently, Chair of the Longyearbyen Community Terje Aunevik argued that Norway must be able to defend the archipelago, asking an audience in Harstad how NATO would respond to a possible military attack.

The Åland Islands’ significance is primarily as a potential control point sitting astride the sea lines of communication and air corridors between Sweden and Finland. Concern about these has intensified since Finland and Sweden joined NATO. Alpo Rusi , a professor and former presidential advisor, has described Åland as “the Achilles’ heel of Finland’s defence,” arguing that its status creates a military vacuum Russia could exploit. Pekka Toveri , a former major general and ex-chief of intelligence of the Finnish Defence Forces, asserts the demilitarization clause does not hold well: “The world has changed, the security situation has changed, our neighbour has changed, and none of them has changed to a better direction.” A 2022 Yleisradio Oy poll found that 58 percent of Finns on the mainland supported a military presence on the islands. The Ålanders themselves have been considerably more cautious, but the Finnish mainland debate has shifted.

The argument for revision gathers additional force from the increasingly open contempt with which great powers treat the rules-based international order when it does not suit their interests. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was the most dramatic violation of the foundational premise of the postwar order that force is not a legitimate tool for redrawing internationally recognized borders. In the Baltic Sea, a campaign of undersea sabotage between October 2023 and January 2025 severed around a dozen pipelines, power cables, and communications links in anchor-dragging incidents attributed to shadow fleet vessels. In the Arctic, Russian subversive activities on Svalbard constitute a sustained campaign to test Norwegian reactions through provocations calibrated to remain below the threshold of NATO’s Article 5.

China’s behavior in the South China Sea has made the same point from a different direction. Beijing dismissed the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling against its South China Sea territorial claims as “null and void” and has continued constructing artificial islands and military installations regardless. If a major economy can simply disregard an adverse international legal ruling without meaningful consequence, the credibility of rules-based constraints is damaged for everyone who relies on them.

Even from within the Western alliance, the signals have been troubling. At the 62nd Munich Security Conference in February 2026, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed the entire post-Cold War framework of a rules-based global order as “a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.” Weeks later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was dismissive: “We let ourselves get distracted by empty globalist rhetoric about the rules-based international order, while European capitals threw open their borders and hollowed out their militaries.”

The question this raises for Oslo and Helsinki is uncomfortable: Why continue observing treaty restrictions when your large and powerful neighbors seem to regard the rules-ba