In recent years, security issues have come to dominate the Nordic discussion on global affairs. The focus is on rearmament, defence budgets, deterrence, and scenarios of potential conflict. This is an understandable development following the war in Ukraine, which has fundamentally altered Europe’s strategic landscape. Yet while Europe deepens its military planning, another transformation is […]
Menej ako 1 min.
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In recent years, security issues have come to dominate the Nordic discussion on global affairs. The focus is on rearmament, defence budgets, deterrence, and scenarios of potential conflict. This is an understandable development following the war in Ukraine, which has fundamentally altered Europe’s strategic landscape.
Yet while Europe deepens its military planning, another transformation is unfolding with far less attention. A new global balance of power is emerging, slowly but clearly, outside the Western sphere.
BRICS has expanded in recent years and now brings together a growing share of the world’s population, resources, and economic weight. Regardless of political values, it is difficult to ignore the group’s increasing global significance.
Despite this, the development receives surprisingly little attention in the Nordic countries. The dominant perspective remains transatlantic, where the United States, the European Union, and NATO form the unquestioned framework for foreign and security policy analysis. As a result, changes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are often pushed into the background, despite these regions being where much of the world’s economic growth and political self-confidence is now emerging.
For many countries in the Global South, BRICS is not primarily about geopolitical confrontation, but about economic room for manoeuvre. It is about investment, trade, and reducing dependence on traditional Western institutions. Where the West often sees a strategic challenge, other countries see an opportunity for diversification.
At the same time, BRICS is far from a homogeneous actor. The differences between its member states are significant, both politically and economically. However, they are united by the view that the global order established after the Cold War no longer reflects today’s distribution of power. This raises a question that is rarely formulated in Nordic debate: how are small, export-dependent economies affected by a world in which multiple centres of power and trade are emerging?
As the world becomes more multipolar, the European discourse appears to become more polarised. Foreign policy is increasingly described in terms of choosing sides between blocs, rather than as a network of relations in which different interests coexist and overlap.
Historically, small states have been most successful when they have combined security with dialogue, and pragmatism with independent diplomacy. The Nordic countries have long enjoyed an international reputation built precisely on this balance: military restraint, economic openness, and active diplomatic engagement.
Today, this dimension has partly been overshadowed by a more unilateral focus on military capability and deterrence. However, while military power can influence balances of power, it cannot replace diplomatic processes. Conflicts are generally resolved at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield.
This does not mean that security policy is unimportant, or that threats should be underestimated. But a strategy built almost exclusively on military logic risks overlooking the long-term economic and political transformations reshaping the international system.
The central question for the Nordic region is therefore not whether to choose between the West and BRICS. The question is rather whether it is able to understand and navigate a world in which such binary choices are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Much suggests that future historians will describe our era as a period in which the global balance of power shifted away from a Western-centred order towards a more multipolar system, in which Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East gained increasing weight.
In this perspective, the Nordic debate’s strong focus on military rearmament appears to be only one part of a much larger picture. While politics often revolves around the next potential conflict, a deeper structural transformation is simultaneously taking place in the global economy and international system.
The question, therefore, is not whether the Nordic countries approve of this development. The question is whether they will understand it in time.
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