National resilience is a country’s ability to sustain disruptions and shocks and keep functioning. It involves quantitative strength such as military assets and personnel, infrastructure, and supply, but also things that are much harder to count, like the public’s trust in their state’s strength and the will to defend it. This is the area of psychological readiness, which is distinct from conventional defence strategies and has no fixed standards or guidelines.
How do we measure a state’s psychological readiness? One method is to use public surveys that capture citizens’ confidence in the state’s defence capabilities and, crucially, their willingness to defend their country.
Here, Finland and Latvia, two states that border Russia, make excellent case studies in how it can differ even when the threat is similar. Both are NATO members and, by their own public’s account, similarly view Russia as a major security concern. In 2022, 84% of Finns surveyed and 74% of Latvians saw Russia as a threat.
What sets them apart is their willingness to defend against external threats and confidence in their defence capabilities.
On both counts, scores stay high in Finland, with the latest survey in 2026 showing 80% of the respondents were willing to fight in defence of their country. Another poll in 2022 indicated that 89% of respondents were confident in Finnish defence capabilities.
The case is different in Latvia, where, since 1991, willingness to fight against external threats has declined. In 1991, when Latvia gained independence from the former Soviet Union (USSR), more than 97% of survey respondents said they were willing to “fight for Latvia”. This figure dropped significantly to 31% by 2025. Confidence in Latvian defence capabilities was also found to be low at 21% in a 2025 survey.
One possible answer to the question of why Finns and Latvians differ may lie in the different historical experiences each of them went through with Russia / USSR. The Winter War from 1939 to 1940 is one example, in which some 362,000 Finnish troops fought against the USSR. The aftermath of the Winter War presented soldiers as heirs to a tradition of resistance, instilling a deep sense of duty and the idea of “sisu”, or tenacity, which became part of the state’s self-image. This concept of Sisu helps partially to explain why Finland held strong then and now, why confidence in the military endures among Finns today, and why they believe their defence can work.
Latvia’s history points in a different direction. After gaining independence from Russia in 1918 , it was slowly absorbed into the USSR during the Second World War when the then-Latvian government decided to accede to Moscow’s demands to deploy its forces within Latvian territory and install a pro-Soviet government. Latvian society experienced invasion and occupation by the USSR, then Nazi Germany, then the USSR again, but this did not produce a story of successful resistance like Finland’s.
As a small state, Latvia has since placed much of its trust in NATO, with many Latvians believing the alliance, not they, would have to fight in a major war. National resilience is built on trust between people, its government and its military, and in Latvia that trust is weakened by doubts about the state’s ability to defend the country, institutional trust issues, and by the significant ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking community that generally holds more favourable views of their neighbour. This provides some evidence for why Latvians are less willing to defend their country.
Unlike Finland, Latvian society was never tested in a defensive war, and there was no equivalent of the Finnish story of successful resistance to build upon, which may help to explain why confidence in Latvian national defence has been harder to sustain.
The two case studies – Finland and Latvia – suggest that historical memory continues to shape how each society perceives its ability to defend itself.
This article forms part of a series exploring the impact of historical memory and strategic culture on how states form contemporary defence strategies.
Acknowledgment
My special thanks to Dr. Jack Harding, whose insights helped shape the direction of this piece, and to Dr. Abdul Rahman Bin Yaacob for his constant mentorship throughout the writing process. I also thank Dr. Olli Pekka Suorsa for sharing his Finnish perspective on national resilience
