New research project investigates NATO's impact on business relations between Finland and Sweden

"The NATO membership is one of the biggest geopolitical changes in the Nordic region in several decades and brings a new aspect of cooperation, not only between Finland and Sweden but also on a global scale. We want to find out what challenges and opportunities the increased military and security cooperation brings to Finnish and Swedish business relations," explains Eva-Lena Lundgren-Henriksson, assistant professor at Hanken.

Lundgren-Henriksson, together with Anna Maaranen, a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University, has already identified an increasing polarisation around Finland's and Sweden's NATO membership based on a collection of approximately 17,000 tweets about the NATO debate. Lundgren-Henriksson notes that social media is a public space for collective memory and has thus democratised the writing of history.

"In 2022, we analysed the debate on, then Twitter, now X, in Finnish and Swedish about opinions on the NATO memberships after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. We found that much of the discussion was about Finland's and Sweden's shared history and identity issues. Now we are interested in seeing if we find similar themes within business dynamics."

The project will continue to analyse the media debate on the pros and cons of NATO and examine how the debate permeates the business sphere. The aim is to expand the material from social media to traditional media.

"The business aspect has so far not played such a prominent role in the NATO discussion. For example, do we think about how history and identity will shape cooperation in business? The project aims to enable a discussion around these aspects," says Lundgren-Henriksson.

The project Neo-historical identities and NATO: Curating Finnish and Swedish business relationships in the changing geopolitical landscape will last for two years.