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When Finland joined the European Union (EU) in 1995, it completed a fundamental transformation of its security policy. Until the end of the Cold War, Finland's position in Europe derived from its treaty with the Soviet Union which imposed neutrality upon it and debarred Finland from any security cooperation with Scandinavia, Western Europe, and the United States. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union allowed Finland to move towards European integration through the EU while preserving its own independent defense posture. Other reasons for moving towards the EU stemmed from Finland's new economic vulnerability to trends in the European economy, and its determination that current security challenges no longer included the Cold War threat of military invasion. Rather, current dangers involved the risk of a collapse of Russia's social or political infrastructure which could then confront Helsinki with challenges that it could not meet alone. Therefore, Finland needed to find ways of associating with other states to meet those nonmilitary challenges and, at the same time, terminate its erstwhile political isolation by participating in European integration. It chose the EU over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) because the expansion of NATO to its border would have alarmed Moscow and because Helsinki viewed the threats to Europe as being essentially nonmilitary, and thus outside NATO's mandate or purview. Also, as Finland emerged from the Cold War, it found itself exposed to severe economic dislocations, if not crises, that forced integration upon both it and Sweden (whose international economic lead Finland had to follow). But, by opting for EU and European integration, Finland stimulated fears at home that it was abandoning its reliance on self-defense and chasing what might prove to be an elusive form of indirect political guarantees in future crises. Other domestic groups worried that Finland might be drawn into European crises of others'