Not stuck in neutral: Sweden, Finland and NATO

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. In New York, I'm Jon Fassman.

And in London, I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg would do anything to ensure growth at Facebook, the social network he founded. Now, not so much. We ask what will become of it now that new generations of users just aren't showing up. And you don't have to know anything about black holes to know that getting a picture of one is gonna be tricky. They're black. Real black. None more black. That's why a new image of the one at the heart of our home galaxy is so impressive.

But first— Sweden's ruling Social Democrat Party announced last night that it supports joining the NATO military alliance. The news came shortly after its neighbor Finland formally announced its wish to join. Both countries have stayed out of the 30-strong mutual defense pact set up in 1949. But Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has prompted them to act. Sweden's Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said non-alignment had served the country well in the past, but its future security would be best served by joining NATO. NATO's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that Finland and Sweden joining would be an historic moment.

Their membership In NATO would increase our shared security, demonstrate that NATO's door is open and that aggression does not pay.

Sweden's move is seen as a momentous change in position.

This is a reversal of a longstanding commitment to non-alignment.

Matt Steinglass is a Europe correspondent for The Economist.

The Social Democrats decided yesterday to reverse their longstanding position and support joining NATO. They say that at this point, it enhances Sweden's security. It's an irreplaceable move because they need to enjoy the Article 5 security that NATO guarantees, that all members will respond to an attack against any member. Magdalena Andersson, the prime minister in particular, said that now that Finland is going ahead and joining NATO, it would leave Sweden unusually isolated in the Nordic region if they were the only remaining country that stayed out of NATO. But there are also some political considerations at play for the Social Democrats.

Why weren't Sweden and Finland already in NATO?

Sweden and Finland had stayed out of NATO together, and there are two ways of thinking about the reasons why. One is simply that Sweden has a deep concern for the security of Finland. The Finns, when NATO was formed in 1949, had some years earlier concluded a war with the Soviet Union. Which they fought to a stalemate, but it was clear to everyone in Finland that in the long term, they couldn't stand up to Soviet might. So they had signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union under duress, which would have prevented them from joining NATO. And the concern in Sweden was that if Sweden joined NATO, that would leave the Finns isolated, and it might prompt the Soviets to demand that the Finns join the Soviet military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. And heighten the tensions on the peninsula. That would leave Sweden in a worse security position. So out of concern for the Finns, they decided to remain technically non-aligned. But you can also trace Swedish neutrality or non-alignment much further back. The Swedes have been doing their best to stay out of European wars ever since the Napoleonic Wars. They had a series of unfortunate experiences in the 1700s and early 1800s, which led them to feel that staying out of European conflicts was in their best interests. And they haven't had a war since 1814. So this is a real change in the Swedish sense of where their security interests stand.

And so it sounds as though Finland's decision to stay out of NATO was pragmatic and Sweden's was more ideological.

Yeah. On the Finnish side, they were making just a pragmatic decision about their own security. The Swedes, beyond that initial pragmatic concern for Finland, started to think of non-alignment as a moral and ideological commitment. Particularly in the 1960s. Olof Palme, the Social Democratic prime minister who is a legendary figure in the history of Swedish social democracy, was very opposed to the Vietnam War and marched with the North Vietnamese ambassador to Moscow to protest American abuses during that war. And Sweden began to define its international image as a non-aligned country. Eventually, many years later, they started calling themselves a moral superpower. But the sense was that their human rights-oriented foreign policy was part and parcel of their non-aligned position between the United States and the Soviet Union and their relationship with the non-aligned movement in the South globally. And that became a very deep part, especially of the identity of the Social Democrats, which has made this decision exceptionally difficult for that party.

So the fact that the Social Democrats have switched positions, does that mean that there's now broad support for NATO membership across the political spectrum in Sweden?

There's broad support across the political spectrum starting from the Social Democrats and moving right, but on the Social Democrats' left, the The Left Party and the Green Party both remain firmly opposed to joining NATO for the sort of classic left-wing reasons that used to be advanced by the Social Democrats themselves. And that's a political concern for the Social Democrats. In previous elections, they've had to worry a lot about losing their more left-wing voters and some of their younger voters to the Left Party and to the Greens. In terms of the scheduling, the Swedes are moving ahead at the same pace as the Finns, but it was already clear that the Finns were going to be joining NATO a couple of months ago. And this process in political terms has been more gradual on the Swedish side. It looks as though Magdalena Andersson has had to maneuver a bit more to make sure that she is not getting out ahead of her party, isn't seen to be pushing anybody, and is just allowing the consensus to build.

So has Andersson successfully built that consensus? Is it a done deal or can anything derail Sweden's entry into NATO?

Within Sweden, the consensus is clear at this stage and they're definitely going to go ahead and apply at some point during the week. Within NATO, the story is more complicated. The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, decided on Friday to come out in opposition to Sweden and Finland joining NATO at this point. He complains that both countries do too little to go after members of the Kurdish nationalist group, the PKK, who live in their countries. They both have fairly large Kurdish immigrant communities, and he wants them to provide clear security guarantees and lift export bans on arms to Turkey. Before he's willing to back membership. And it's a unanimous deal. Everybody in NATO has to agree to let them in. Antony Blinken, the American Secretary of State, however, is fairly sure that all NATO members are eventually going to come around to approving membership for Sweden and Finland. I can say this much. I heard almost across the board very strong support for Finland, NATO joining the alliance if that's what they choose to do. And I'm very confident that we will reach consensus on that.

What has Russia's reaction been?

Russia has been warning the Finns and the Swedes to stay away from NATO for a very long time. Those warnings have intensified over the course of the succession process, particularly towards Finland, which Russia still considers part of its sphere of influence. Finland was a province of the Russian Empire back in the 19th century, and they had to accommodate Soviet concerns during the Cold War. Vladimir Putin says their plan is a mistake. He has warned earlier that he would station nuclear weapons in the Gulf of Finland area, but they apparently are already stationed there. It's not really clear what that represents. Now he says he's going to station more Russian troops in the area. They may not have those troops considering how tied down they are in Ukraine. And they cut off electricity supplies to Finland. They say that was related to payments, but Russia supplies perhaps 10% of the electricity that Finland gets on a given day. The Finns think that they can get that electricity from other sources, so It doesn't seem like a terribly grave threat. But overall, what's striking, particularly in the Finnish case, is that Putin entered his war in Ukraine with the intention of pushing NATO back from Russia's borders. And instead, he has doubled his border with NATO once the Finns join and overall has brought NATO much closer.

All right, Matt, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you, John.

For a while there, it seemed like Facebook might never stop growing.

When we first launched, we were hoping for, you know, maybe 400, 500 people, and now we're at 100,000 people. So who knows where we're going next?

From its dorm room beginnings, it got huge in a way that nothing else had, bursting into new markets and acquiring users from a sizable fraction of like all of humanity. Nearly 3 billion people are now on it every month. But at the same time, it seems the site's halcyon days are behind it.

I think the last time I used Facebook properly was during university.

On the hunt for a not remotely representative, but an indicative sample, we asked around the office to find out who is still on it.

I don't use Facebook, but I do sometimes use the messaging service.

I still have a Facebook account, but I deleted the app a while back.

I don't use Facebook at all. I think I have the messaging app on my phone, but it's locked me out and I can't remember what my password is.

So what changed for the platform that for some users it's not even worth doing a password reset?

Facebook used to be this really fashionable platform among young people. You know, to start with, it was just launched in colleges.

Tom Wainwright is our media editor.

But these days it's more associated with older folks. People in their 40s and older have become the core of Facebook's users. And just as it's become unfashionable among young people, it seems that it's going out of fashion with investors as well. Its parent company Meta has lost about 40% of its market value so far this year.

So how did Facebook become so unfashionable then?

So Facebook was this huge hit with the generation that we tend to call millennials now. So Mark Zuckerberg is 37, and he's kind of emblematic of the first generation that started using Facebook. And I remember when I was in college around the same time, it was the latest cool thing. But the trouble is it became so closely associated with that generation that subsequent generations have kind of wanted nothing to do with it. Data from Facebook has shown that young users in rich countries do seem to be drifting away. You might remember a year or so ago there was that whistleblower from Facebook called Frances Haugen, and the headlines that she generated were mostly to do with what she considered failures of content moderation. But actually, one of the more important and telling revelations that she had was to do with the number of young people tuning out of Facebook. So she released internal documents from Facebook which suggested that in Facebook's 5 most important countries, the number of account registrations for under-18s have fallen by a quarter in just a year. And there are other independent analysts who've come up with similar estimates. So in Britain, for example, it's estimated that 18 to 24-year-olds are spending about half as much time on Facebook and Instagram, its sister app, as they were 4 years ago. So not looking great for Facebook and young people at the moment, at least in rich countries.

Essentially, all of these young people deserting it, is that the only problem Facebook's got?

Well, no. I mean, it's hitting a few different problems all at the same time. There's a few which are temporary. In its latest quarterly results, it had a big drop in users in Europe, and that was because they have just been kicked out of Russia. And so there's an unavoidable loss of users that it experienced there. The state of the economy is not great, which is harming its ad revenues. So those are things that it would hope are kind of transient things. But there are a couple of other things which are bigger deals, which it's going to have to navigate carefully. Apple has introduced new privacy rules, which makes it much harder for companies like Facebook to track users on iPhones. And their business obviously is advertising. And so any limits to the amount of tracking that it can do are going to make it harder for it to sell accurate ads. The other big problem it faces is regulation. And in Europe, we've just seen the European Union agree on some draft rules for regulating big tech companies, and the details of that have yet to be made clear. But that's something that any big tech company is also somewhat concerned about. They've also got quite a big reputational problem which has been growing over the years. There have been various scandals about allegedly leaked data or sharing of data with people that shouldn't have seen it. And lots of people have complained about Facebook's influence on people's behaviour on everything from voting patterns to likelihood of getting the COVID vaccine. And all of this stuff over time, I think, has tarnished its reputation. And led some people to see it as being a platform that they don't want to be associated with.

But as worries about Facebook's growth have come and gone over many years now, the response has often been for Facebook to acquire something cooler or to make a copy of something cooler. I mean, is there a, dare I say, a rejuvenation again in prospect?

Well, people shouldn't get too panicked by the slowdown in new users. I mean, it's got nearly 3 billion monthly users, and there comes a point when they just run out of people on planet Earth to sign up. And so the slowdown is natural to extent. And as for Apple's privacy rules, it seems to be making progress in overcoming those. Facebook, because of its gigantic wealth and its huge staff and expertise, is probably better placed to come up with workarounds for those rules than most other tech companies. And it already seems to be making some progress in doing that.

But what about new vistas, new things it might do or will do?

Well, this is where the company seems to be changing most radically. And if you look back in the past, Mark Zuckerberg was always keen above all to protect his original app. And when Facebook bought Instagram many years ago, some former Instagram staffers used to complain that Facebook seemed to be jealous of Instagram's success. And some of them claimed that it was trying to limit Instagram's growth in order to prevent cannibalization of Facebook's growth. And now the strategy seems to be very much the opposite. Just look at the name change that Mark Zuckerberg implemented last year. The holding company for Facebook has changed its name to Meta. And that's kind of emblematic of the way in which he seems to be launching lifeboats in all directions. They're expanding into the metaverse, they're producing virtual reality goggles, augmented reality glasses. They say they want to produce a smartwatch soon, and new products seem to be shipping increasingly on Meta's other apps. So Reels, which is its new kind of TikTok clone, shipped first of all on Instagram. It's now on Facebook as well. So the days when Facebook was the kind of pride and glory seem to be over.

So if at last then Mr. Zuckerberg is willing to sacrifice his firstborn, does that mean it's going to go the way of all these other digital ghost towns like MySpace, do you think?

No, I think probably it's not going to be a MySpace. There's more to Facebook than simply being a social network. And I think it's probably given up any hope of ever being again the place where, you know, people in their 20s go to kind of exchange messages and chat with each other. But it can play other roles. And social media, as well as being networks, they're places where people go to be entertained, consume video and to read news. Increasingly, they're e-commerce platforms as well. And so what we're seeing at the moment is Facebook apparently pushing more into those areas. So on the entertainment front, it seems to be doing its best to adopt kind of TikTok-type technology. So Mark Zuckerberg says he wants the newsfeed to become what he calls a discovery engine for interesting content from all corners of the internet. And they're doing more on e-commerce as well, hoping that people will go to Facebook to shop, even if it's no longer where they go to talk to their friends.

Thanks very much for your time, Tom.

Thank you.

One of the most interesting things in the night sky is one that you won't see: black holes. There are plenty of them out there, and astronomers reckon there's probably one at the center of every galaxy. There's definitely one at the center of our Milky Way. It's called Sagittarius A*. They draw in everything in their neighborhood, from dust and gas to whole stars, swirling like water around a drain, faster and faster until reaching the event horizon. And then, well, then they're in the hole. Not even light can get out. For decades, black holes existed only in theoretical physics. Then they were inferred from the effects they have on stuff that astronomers can see. But these days, a very clever telescope can actually take a picture of them, sort of. And now we have a snapshot of our nearest one.

We're looking at an image taken by the Event Horizon Telescope of Sagittarius A*, which is the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Dylan Barry writes about science for The Economist.

So just to describe what the image looks like, we've got a donut-shaped ring with a nice black patch in the middle on a black background. The donut bit is largely orange, but there's a bit of structure within that. So there's 3 kind of light whitish-yellow dots, and it fades out to a nice deep red towards the edge of the ring. So there's a dark patch at the center of the image because that's where the black hole is.

And so what we're actually seeing then in the orange rings, the donut, the blobs, and so on, is not the black hole itself, but the area around it.

Yes, exactly. So the center of the black hole is this kind of dark patch. That's the event horizon. That's where the black hole actually is. But of course, we can't see that because not even light can escape. So none of the light from the black hole is reaching us. What we're seeing instead is this ring of very rapidly moving superheated gas that's emitting light from across the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

But I seem to recall this is not the first time a black hole has been pictured, or at least the area around one has.

So yes, you're entirely correct. In 2019, an image of a black hole in a galaxy called Messier 87, which is 55 million light-years away from Earth, was released. But this image is of Sagittarius A*, which is the big black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. It's a lot closer. It's only 27,000 light-years away as opposed to 55 million. But not only is Sagittarius A* much closer, it's also a lot less massive. So it's about 1,000 times less massive than Messier 87*, which was the original black hole that was imaged.

And so was it more difficult then to get a picture of the black hole in our galaxy?

So because the black hole at the center of our galaxy is much closer, it looks bigger in the sky. Messier 87*, which was the original black hole imaged, if you had to have an analogy for the amount of sky it takes up, it's the same as if you had to try and look at a coin on the moon through a telescope. Sagittarius A* is a little bit bigger. It's about the size of a donut on the moon. But there were other technical challenges that made it much more difficult to image. So Because Messier 87* was so much bigger, the light around it, although moving very close to the speed of light, because Messier 87* is so huge, it was kind of relatively stable. So the cloud of superheated gas around it kind of looked the same no matter when we imaged it. Whereas Sagittarius A*, because it's much smaller, the heated gas is rotating around it in a matter of minutes. It's required a much larger amount of images to be taken and to be averaged for us to get a good, nice, clean image of the black hole.

So talk me through that. How is this image even acquired?

So because we're trying to image these really, really minuscule patches of the sky, the smaller a patch of the sky you want to image, the bigger a telescope you need. And so to capture these kind of images, we've essentially needed to build a telescope roughly with an aperture the size of the Earth. Now, of course, you can't literally do that, but by combining images from 11 different telescopes scattered across the globe in a technique called very long baseline interferometry, we were able to piece together images of these two black holes. The images produced have been produced by averaging many, many thousands of images taken from all of these telescopes over a long period of time. Those telescopes combined churned out a massive 5 petabytes worth of data, which is enough to fill around 20,000 laptops. So that's a lot of information. To process that information, scientists had to use supercomputers and slowly assemble a coherent image from thousands of images taken from all of these different telescopes.

And if this thing does look, as you say, like a smudged orange donut, what information does it contain? Is there much to be learned about black holes here, or is this just a look what we can do?

It's a bit of both, of course, but we have learned quite a lot from this. Sagittarius A* is a lot smaller than Messier 87*, which was the original black hole image. What's really interesting though is that the images look almost identical. You've got the central black patch, this kind of smudged orange donut around it with a little bit of structure within it. That looks very similar between the two. And we didn't actually know that that was necessarily going to be the case, right? Black holes can range over a huge range of masses and sizes, and their environments can be very different. So for example, Sagittarius A* is the black hole in the center of our galaxy. That's a relatively small spiral-shaped galaxy. Messier 87* is the black hole at the center of a much larger elliptical-shaped galaxy. But what appears to be clear is that actually, at the point at which you get close to the black hole, it doesn't really matter what its environment is, doesn't really matter how big it is, black holes all look the same. And that's quite an important thing to know. And of course, Messier 87* was a supermassive black hole a very long way away. And while it was a convenient one to image first, of course it's quite different to have a family photograph of the black hole at the center of our own galaxy. It's a little bit more personal.

Dylan, thanks very much for your space time.

You're always welcome.

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