A documentary on the 1975 agreement offers lessons for today. The phone call to Putin

Finland has almost a million reservists out of a population of five and a half million, as its President Alexander Stubb repeatedly emphasises, “and not because we’re worried about Sweden”. It is the sort of black humour that is well suited to a delicate geopolitical context, where balances of power and signals of dialogue must somehow alternate and complement one another.

It is one of the perhaps contradictory messages that emerge from the new documentary “The Helsinki Effect”, which is being screened in Italy for the first time on 3 November at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence. The film explains in great detail the events that led to the Final Act of the 1975 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, signed by the United States, the Soviet Union and 33 other countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Viewers will emerge with a perspective that is far from romantic or heroic, and yet, in these times, almost comforting. Stacks of typewritten pages, commas being removed and reinserted, utterly tedious dialogues – which, however, as the voiceover reminds us, are still better than the alternative.

This message has become topical again following the phone call made on 27 October by Stubb and the Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store to Vladimir Putin from Helsinki. What was supposed to be a thirty-minute call stretched to ninety minutes, on their own initiative and not on behalf of Europe. The call dragged on because the two leaders had to sit through a history lesson from the Kremlin leader. He then issued the usual statement: peace is only possible if Russian interests are taken fully into account, without conditions.

It would therefore appear to be yet another failure, and the reaction from neighbouring countries has been frosty. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen compared the initiative to Viktor Orbán’s pilgrimages to Moscow. Sweden’s Ulf Kristersson complained that he had not been informed. Palazzo Chigi reiterated the need for a single European negotiator. For once, without firing a shot, Moscow is dusting off its greatest speciality: dividing European countries that have been saying and doing the same things in defence of Ukraine for almost five years.

The author is biased, having worked side by side with Stubb in the four years leading up to his election as president. The documentary, however, suggests historical parallels that it would be unwise to ignore. The first, tragically ironic, is that Leonid Brezhnev sought, through the Helsinki Accords, to enshrine the inviolability of European borders – which is precisely what Putin has been tearing apart since 2014 in Crimea and since 2022 throughout Ukraine. Brezhnev asked the West to recognise a fait accompli that had existed for thirty years, whilst Putin demands that an invasion be legitimised.

In exchange for the borders, in 1975 the West secured a reference to human rights, freedom of movement and the free flow of information. Moscow dismissed it as worthless paper, but this was a miscalculation for which it would pay dearly. That text gave rise to the so-called Helsinki Human Rights Committees, which provided a network for dissidents from Gdańsk to Prague and which, in turn, contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This, ultimately, is the true Helsinki effect: an imperceptible flutter of a butterfly’s wings which, given time, triggers systemic repercussions. In one exchange from the documentary, Brezhnev himself claims in declassified conversations that ‘we’ve got Finland in our pocket’. Those were the years of ‘Finlandisation’, the humiliating neutrality that the Finns imposed on themselves in order to survive. Half a century on, the Finland that is on the phone today has been radically transformed. The last time a Finnish president rang Putin, in May 2022, it was to announce Finland’s application to join NATO. The exact opposite of Finlandisation.

The dilemma highlighted by developments in recent weeks is rather whether Europe itself is now being ‘Finlandised’ by bilateral negotiations between the Americans and the Russians taking place behind closed doors and over our heads. The paradox is that it is Finland itself that is trying to bring Europe back into the room. I remember perfectly well when Stubb, as a candidate, said he would not answer if Putin called to congratulate him. This dialogue, however, is not a courtesy call but an attempt to influence the negotiations set to resume in November in Abu Dhabi. For the initiative to make sense, it must translate into a position and a presence at future negotiating tables. Where it would be both appropriate and necessary for a united Europe to have its own seat.