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Mahesh

25/01/24 10:19 AM IST

Turkey finally backs Sweden’s NATO bid

In News
  • Sweden’s attempt to join NATO cleared a major hurdle after Turkey’s parliament supported its membership.
Why does Sweden want to join NATO?
  • Sweden has not fought a war in two centuries, staying neutral through the two World Wars and the Cold War.
  • In recent years, while it joined the European Union and collaborated with NATO, it showed no intention of actually joining the military alliance its powerful neighbour, Russia, is hostile to.
  • However, this neutrality had to be abandoned after Russia invaded Ukraine. With public opinion increasingly in favour of joining NATO, both Sweden and Finland applied for membership in 2022.
  • While Finland’s bid was cleared, Sweden ran into stiff opposition from Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
  • Once a country is a NATO member, an attack on its territory is considered an attack on the US-led alliance, and all 31 members are obliged to defend each other.
Opposition by Turkey
  • Turkey had accused Sweden of going soft on groups it sees as terrorists, such as the Kurdish militant outfit the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
  • Quran-burning protests held in Sweden, which its government says are protected under freedom of speech laws, further soured its relationship with Turkey.
  • Recently, Sweden had tightened its anti-terrorism laws, cracked down on the PKK’s activities, and lifted restrictions on arms sales to Turkey.
  • Sweden has also said it will support Turkey’s EU membership bid.
Significance
  • Once Sweden becomes a member, almost all of the Baltic Sea coastline, except that in Russia’s control, will become NATO territory.
  • This will provide the alliance strategic bases close to Russia, make supply lines more streamlined, and make it easier to defend assets in the sea.
  • Sweden’s military, though numerically small, is modern and experienced in past NATO missions. Importantly, it has advanced aircraft and submarine capabilities.
NATO
  • North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a military alliance established by the North Atlantic Treaty (also called the Washington Treaty) of April, 1949, by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union.
  • There are currently 30 member states.
  • Its original members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
  • Joining the original signatories were Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955, from 1990 as Germany), Spain (1982), the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004), Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017), and North Macedonia (2020).
Source- Indian Express

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