Sweden & Finland seek to join NATO, but these EU countries turn back from joining NATO
While the Scandinavian countries Sweden and Finland seek to join NATO amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there are four EU countries that still stand outside the alliance. 4 European countries, Austria, Cyprus, Ireland, and Malta all who have declared their non-alignment with military alliances, are not NATO members. They are not in the trans-Atlantic military alliance.
All four are either militarily neutral, which means they cannot join a military alliance, or join or join military conflicts, which means they do not officially support a major power group. In the case of Cyprus and Ireland, neutrality is based on the fact that the two islands have historically been divided into two distinct regions.
The island of Ireland on the other hand is divided between the Republic of Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland with an open border between the two polities that resulted from the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement that ended decades of sectarian violence.
However, all these countries have ties with NATO, but they are not officially in the organization as it has a military neutral approach when something like conflict happens with its partners. The country Cyprus has not yet been into NATO as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February has ignited debates in most of Europe’s neutral countries over whether such a status is still warranted.
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However, Sweden and Finland have traditionally been neutral, but when Moscow sent its tanks to Ukraine, public opinion changed in favor of NATO membership.NATO used to be much smaller, and it is only since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the break up of the Warsaw pact, the communist equivalent to NATO, that the organization swelled its ranks. Currently, NATO has 30 member states on its list.
Moreover, several other European countries have also not joined the alliance. These include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Moldova, and Serbia as well Switzerland. The reason for these countries not joining NATO is different.
