Neuvottelija.com

Episode 33 · 2020-08-24 · 37:56 · Original in Finnish

Security policy, the euro and NATO | Vesa Kanniainen | Negotiator 33

Originally published as “#neuvottelija 33 - Turvallisuuspolitiikka EU:ssa, euro ja NATO (Vesa Kanniainen)”

Vesa Kanniainen, emeritus professor of economics, examines Finland's permanent security deficit and why he considers EU membership one of the most significant post-war security decisions the country has made — even though he is best known as a euro critic. The episode covers a game-theoretic reading of the YYA treaty, the NATO option and the price of exercising it as shared responsibility for the Baltics, the costs of the common currency and the parallel-currency idea, and Kanniainen's work at the boundary of morality and economics from Adam Smith to Vernon Smith.

Guest: Vesa Kanniainen · Host: Sami Miettinen

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Key moments

  1. 00:00 — NATO needs Finland more than Finland needs NATO
  2. 02:00 — The security review and a game-theoretic reading of the YYA treaty
  3. 04:00 — Federation theory and fiscal federalism
  4. 06:00 — Good institutions as a precondition for federation
  5. 08:00 — Euro-scepticism and EU support are two different things
  6. 10:00 — Finland's security deficit and the scale of the EU
  7. 12:00 — Conscription and defence spending as a share of GDP
  8. 14:00 — Is NATO membership still a big step
  9. 16:00 — Shared responsibility for the Baltics as the price of membership
  10. 18:00 — The NATO option and the case for not exercising it
  11. 20:00 — The costs of the common currency and floating rates
  12. 22:00 — Returning to national currencies is not easy
  13. 24:00 — Poland and Sweden manage with their own currencies
  14. 26:00 — A constitution, institutions and defining power in the EU
  15. 28:00 — Poland and Hungary as recipients of the recovery package
  16. 30:00 — Where the work on morality started: the ethics of layoffs
  17. 32:00 — Evolutionary background, altruism and cooperation
  18. 34:00 — Adam Smith and Vernon Smith — two Smiths
  19. 36:00 — The institutional layer and a deepening model of the human being

Summary

Vesa Kanniainen, emeritus professor of economics, examines Finland’s permanent security deficit and why he considers EU membership one of the most significant post-war security decisions the country has made — even though he is best known as a euro critic. The episode covers a game-theoretic reading of the YYA treaty, the NATO option and the price of exercising it as shared responsibility for the Baltics, the costs of the common currency and the parallel-currency idea, and Kanniainen’s work at the boundary of morality and economics from Adam Smith to Vernon Smith.

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The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: #neuvottelija 33 - Turvallisuuspolitiikka EU:ssa, euro ja NATO (Vesa Kanniainen). A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.

People and topics

Guests: Vesa Kanniainen

Topics: Geopolitics

AI and agent resources


Source and content status

Provenance: Finnish source: Owner page assembled from YouTube metadata, the neuvottelija.fi episode record and the published Neuvottelija AI edition summary. No transcript imported.. English subtitles: publisher-provided English cues, imported and quality-checked. QA coverage 0% (metadata only). Original episode: neuvottelija.fi. Imported 2026-08-13 · last reviewed 2026-08-13. Passages the source audio left genuinely ambiguous are marked [unclear] rather than guessed.