(ANSA) – ROME, MARCH 16 – Austria and Sweden – whose models were evoked today by Moscow for Ukraine but rejected by Kiev – arrived at the choice of neutrality through very different political paths.
The Austrian choice was conditioned by a political compromise. Vienna got rid of the occupation of the USA, Great Britain, France and the USSR after the Second World War thanks to the signing, by the occupying powers, of the State Treaty of May 15, 1955. A month earlier the Soviets had asked Vienna to sign the Moscow Memorandum with the aim of preventing it from joining NATO after withdrawing from the occupation troops: a path similar to that probably imagined by Vladimir Putin and put on the table for talks by the Russian delegation.
On October 26, 1955, the Declaration of Neutrality was promulgated in Vienna, a constitutional act of the Austrian Parliament which therefore does not rely, from a legal point of view, on an international agreement. It is a fundamental law of the State which establishes the perpetual commitment to stay out of any conflict, not to join military alliances and not to host foreign military bases on the national territory.
Sweden, on the other hand, when the Second World War broke out, had been neutral for more than a century, from the end of the Napoleonic wars, and did not take part in the conflict even if in the first phase it granted some logistical facilities to Germany and later, starting from 1944 , to the Allies. A position reaffirmed in 1949 when Stockholm refused to join NATO. Under international law, Sweden has committed itself to “conventional neutrality” and therefore not to permanent neutrality. As a member of the European Union, he is among the promoters of an intensification of the Community defense and security policy and Swedish troops – along with Finnish, Norwegian, Estonian and Irish ones – participate in the Nordic battalion. Starting from 2015, following the Russian military activism, military expenses have been increased and the defense system of the strategic island of Gotland, in the Baltic Sea, has been strengthened. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the debate on joining the Alliance has resumed in Sweden, also following the sending of weapons to Kiev. (HANDLE).
Source: Ansa
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