I can only speak on this matter from a Swedish point of view: I am grown up in the western part of Sweden and we had close ties to Norway and Denmark and thought of them as good neighbours with similar languages to our own. When I moved to the east of Sweden I came to realize that Sweden and Finland have even closer ties regardless the language barrier. This is of course due to defense reasons, but it has also historic reasons. Finland was a part of Sweden for a very long time throughout history and it was lost to Russia in a war which made Finland a more or less autonomous part of Russia. The formation of the Soviet Union enabled Finland to claim independence which was approved by the Soviet Union.There is also a minority in Finland speaking Swedish and many Finnish have migrated to Sweden during the centuries to find work and good land. It is hard for me to think of Finns as foreigners in spite of the language barrier.