Yesterday I speculated that Putin’s unilateral decision to invade Ukraine might backfire: it might provoke Finland to join NATO. Austria, Finland, and Sweden joined the EU in 1995. All three countries had a longstanding preference for neutrality in the Cold War, but in 1995 joining the EU was not considered a threatening move against a recently-dissolved USSR.
Joining NATO is a very different issue: it is a military alliance dominated by American interests. Since WWII Europeans have been skittish about letting each other re-militarize. When West Germany joined NATO in 1955, the USSR responded by forming the Moscow Pact alliance with all of the communist governments in eastern Europe. Re-militarization under NATO has also been slow; European governments have happily let the U.S. bear the costs, to the increasing dismay of American conservatives. The reluctance of presidents W. Bush and Trump to support NATO and the United Nations seemed to provoke Europeans to slowly ramp up militarization within the EU organizational infrastructure.
As of yesterday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy applied for Ukrainian membership in the EU. Greece has lodged a formal complaint about the murder of Greek civilians in Kherson by a Russian attack. This might propel Greece to support faster accession of North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Albania into the EU. Greece might even drop its longstanding opposition to Turkey joining the EU (unlikely but possible), in which case Russia’s access to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus will be further constrained.
Today, Finland is considering joining NATO. Note that Finland’s closest cultural neighbor is Estonia, which enthusiastically joined both the EU (2003) and NATO (2004). Sweden is providing weapons to Ukrainian fighters, and Sweden might also join NATO. In which case, Russian naval traffic from St. Petersburg into the Baltic will be watched on both sides, and passage through the Danish Straits (between Denmark and Sweden) into the North Sea will also be constrained.
Furthermore, Europeans see much more need to re-militarize because both the United States and Britain are unreliable geopolitical partners. In which case, NATO membership may become less relevant than EU membership even in a military sense. Germany is now providing military aid to Ukraine, and the rest of the EU seems OK with that. Meanwhile, Poland and Hungary–who were in the political dog-house for their anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-queer policies, are now regaining credibility within the EU. Poland, in particular, is taking on a vast number of refugees and vociferously reminding Russia of historic aggressions against Poland. In summary: without British-American westward entanglements, the EU may congeal quite rapidly into a federation with major economic and military capabilities. This might even be more likely if Russia manages to set up a Russian-aligned government in Ukraine. Whether Putin gets control of Ukraine or not, the long-term strategic consequences for Russia seem disastrous.