Jukka Relander considers the broader phenomenon of Finlandisation – and argues that Finnish history shows a worrying propensity to bow down before external powers: the Lutheran God, tsarist Russia, imperial Germany, the Soviet Union, international capital...

Finlandisation (Hist.)
A policy of benevolent neutrality towards the Soviet Union, such as was allegedly pursued by Finland from 1944; the adoption of such policy

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on historical principles (1993)

An old joke describes how an American, a Frenchman and a Finn react to an encounter with an elephant. The American immediately begins to think about business: ‘I could sell that at ten dollars a pound’. The Frenchman smacks his lips and reflects that all he needs is a few litres of cream, some onions and a plait of garlic. The Finn meets the elephant. The big grey creature walks towards him on a forest track. The Finn stops in front of it, looks up at the huge bulk, and wonders nervously what the animal thinks of him.
     The joke puts its finger on something essential: the Finlandisation of Finland means unilateral détente, a continual compromise with an external power on the elephant’s conditions. It is the ideology of a rising elite, born of guilt, repressed rebellion and the fears associated with independence. During the course of Finnish history, this emotional structure has been directed at the Lutheran God, tsarist Russia, imperial Germany, the communist Soviet Union as well as, more recently, international capital that has been freed from controls. Thus defined, Finlandisation means an internalised surrender to the whims and random demands – real or imagined – of external power.

The concept of Finlandisation was originally created to meet the domestic policy needs of West Germany. The Soviet Union’s small westerly neighbour was used as a warning of where excessive fraternisation over the bloc divisions of the Cold War might lead. At the time when the concept was invented, the German Federal Republic was increasing its diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. As a result of this interaction, the two Germanies recognised one another in 1972. The Finlandisation of Germany was used to mean the phenomenon by which the then second-class superpower might come to resemble Finland. But what if Finland itself were to come to resemble Finland? Would it then fraternise too much with the East, or with itself?
     Seen through foreign eyes, the phenomenon which is known as Finlandisation is understood as a foreign policy practice. From the Finnish perspective, domestic and foreign policy are, however, an indivisible whole. Support for a ‘peaceable foreign policy’ was a highly charged domestic policy stance which automatically entailed alignment with president Urho Kekkonen (1956–1981) against the conservatives who were critical of him. In addition to power-plays within domestic policy-making, Finnish foreign policy also involved relations between generations and genders and the tensions brought about by the cultural transformation of the 1960s as well as the conflicts of interests entailed by the centralised economic policy of the welfare state.
     First, however, it is worth considering foreign policy. According to the Treaty of Friendship, Co-Operation and Mutual Assistance signed at the end of the Continuation War in 1944, Finland was an ally of the Soviet Union without being in alliance with it. Officially, Finland was neutral while unofficially it leaned toward the West, conscious that the approval of the Soviet Union was always necessary for its foreign policy. According to critics of Finlandisation, Finland’s policy toward the Soviet Union should have been more independent and firmer; they believed that excessively close relations with Moscow were linked with the power ambitions of Finnish leftist groups. But in reality the Finns had little room for manoeuvre, as the Soviet Union put constant pressure on Finland. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, for example, many Finns wondered when it would be our turn.
     The other side of the coin, which influenced Finland’s domestic policies, is that Kekkonen certainly attempted to ensure as broad and uncritical support for himself as possible in the circles in which decisions were made. It was simply not possible to become a member of the elite without the correct opinions and the art of silence. A considerable number were forced to make difficult compromises in their choices between morality and career, and a significant number of them chose their careers. There were not many anti-Kekkonen figures among the counsellors, ambassadors, senior civil servants or ministers appointed in the 1970s. Three groups were left outside the Finlandised elite: ordinary people, the tiny, shrivelled anti-Kekkonen front – and old-fashioned communists who had been driven into a self-chosen opposition.
     The Finlandisation phenomenon did not concern the silent majority in the least, except perhaps as a field for identity politics of identification and opposition, agreement and choice of part. The communists, for their part, were simultaneously at the heart of Finlandisation and outside it. Support for communism and the unreservedly positive relationship of the pro-Moscow wing of the party promoted the birth of a working environment that favoured Finlandisation, and through the communists the Soviet Union gained a more secure grip on Finnish society than would have been possible without them.
     The issue of Finlandisation includes numerous questions that have hitherto remained unanswered. Who should carry the blame for modes of action that became customary in Finland? Is Finland merely a piece of flotsam on the sea of its history, or are we at least to some extent also the subjects of our history? Should we feel remorse because we came under pressure from our superpower neighbour and were shaped and maltreated by it? This kind of remorse is possibly just as Finlandised as Kekkonen’s suggestion that we should abandon our negative feelings about the Soviet Union, and not merely satisfy ourselves with correct words and actions. We feel remorse what others have done to us. As the subject of its political history, however, the Finnish republic does not seem to have existed. Finland is the victim of its history; its agents have come from elsewhere. Finland does not decide, it reacts; it does not plan, but prepares to give way; it does not articulate its needs, but adapts to what Others expect of it.
     For this reason Finland is extraordinarily ripe to be a member of any power organisation whatsoever on which responsibility which has for a moment come into its own hands may be offloaded. In the debate on the European Union which took place in the early 1990s, the main question was how Finland should make itself fit for membership, not what the objective advantages for the country might be. And at the moment it looks as if a fairly large proportion of the Finnish elite favours Nato, since the country has already ‘gained admittance’ to many other multinational groupings.
     The problematic relationship with the period Finland spent in the shadow of the Soviet Union is related to the traumas of other east European countries, but it is nevertheless in a class of its own. In the early 1990s, The New York Review of Books ran an extensive debate on how to view a past overshadowed by the Soviet Union. The president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, who joined the fray after Adam Michnik and Jürgen Habermas, remarked that for former hard-line communists and dissidents who had opposed the system, the question did not pose great problems. The dissidents came out from underground as the communists became agents of public remorse. The most difficult issues concerned what Havel called ‘the grey zone’, the system’s silent fellow-travellers, who surrendered to the current without being its active supporters any more than they resisted it. Things had gone relatively well for them; with their silent work and passive influence, they had kept the system going. They had had nothing to be proud of, but at the same time apparently nothing concrete to regret. They formed the majority of the nation.
     In Finland, the situation was and is the same, but opposite. The grey zone was formed by the elite, while the dissidents, in other words ordinary people, pondered the ways of the world in local bars and in the porches of village shops. And the communists feel remorse. In Finnish history, this arrangement is by no means unique. Kai Laitinen, professor of Finnish literature, has remarked that the collapse of the national romantic view of the world that followed the Second World War concerned only the educated elite that had believed in the power of Germany; while the officers grieved for their lost world, the rank and file, once demobilised, drank their fill. Sober again, they rolled up their sleeves and began to build the country. The result was the miracle of reconstruction and a new national pride that was supported by economic success. This nation reacted to pressure from the East with a merchant morality, while the elite internalised the aims of the foreign power as their own. This is the difference: Finlandisation is a morality of the Finnish elite.

Between 1809 and 1917 Finland was part of the Russian empire. The last two decades of this forced marriage were characterised by a policy of Russification that embraced the entire empire, and which, in the case of the grand duchy of Finland, meant the gradual dismantling of the country’s autonomous status. In Finnish historiography, this period is known as the ‘period of oppression’. According to the basic mythology, Nicholas II perjured himself when he published the February manifesto, which limited the self-determination of the autonomous grand duchy of Finland, in 1899. Our Finlandised nation could hardly believe what had happened: despite all the love, humble faith and devout respect directed at the tsar, he rewarded ‘his subjects, who had caused him the least trouble’ (as a history text book of the 1980s still proudly put it) by restricting the rights granted to them by his predecessors. In just over a week more than half a million Finns – a good quarter of the then adult population – signed a Great Petition appealing to the tsar to return to his role as a good father. According to the beliefs of the time, the tsar had been misled by his scheming assistants. The aim of the petition was to appeal to his majesty himself, of whom no evil could be believed. The deliverers of the petition were not even granted an audience with the tsar, and the Russification continued. Is this the historical disappointment from which Finns have never recovered? I do not know.
     At all events, the search for a new father-figure began immediately the country’s independence began to look inevitable. Aptly enough, the son of the German Kaiser himself was the first to be invited to be the adoptive parent, followed by the prince of Hessen. The father-figure was to be bound by blood-ties. When the East proved unreliable, new parents were sought in the West. Gaining the acceptance of the winning nations became the main aim of foreign policy at that stage....
     Finnish foreign policy has been unusually highly emotionally charged ever since the country gained its independence in 1918. It has been used to process domestic conflicts of interest and social conflicts as well as relations between generations and the purely psychological tensions associated with them. The debates conducted during the period of Finlandisation concerning the nature of the Soviet Union at the same time involved relations with the preceding generation. The demonisation of the Soviet Union enhanced those who had fought against it, while its characterisation as a new tomorrow for humankind at the same time rendered the past insignificant: ‘the bourgeoisie is a disappearing class’ was a phrase that occurred repeatedly in the writings of Finnish radicals of the 1970s (unlike everywhere else in the world, the student rebellion of 1968 was channelled in Finland into a strictly pro-Moscow Leninist movement). This message included the idea that the bourgeois father-figure was a disappearing authority whose competence was adapted to a reality which had already fortunately been passed by.
     The western dimension of the Finnish emotional dynamic also contains its own tensions. Europe is strong, and must therefore be placated. Finland’s competing sister, Sweden, on the other hand, is a permissible object of rebellion, a direct descendent of the enemy of the Finnish nationalist movement of the 19th century. The nationalist movement of the rising middle classes fought for space for the new educated generation from the Swedish-speaking elite. It gained more than it dared take.
     The Finnish rebellion is indeed traditionally a rebellion against freedom, not for it. We do not rebel against power, but against its more efficient or better – sometimes also more just – use. We feel sibling rivalry for Sweden, but in addition Sweden and Swedishness represent for us the upper class, superiority, control – the negative sides of the adulthood for which we long. Sweden symbolises what our Finnish upper class once was. A sporting triumph against our western neighbour functions as a direct demonstration that Finns are at least as vigorous a people as their former masters.

The construction of a national identity always takes place through individual identities. The national identity, the stratum of the self which submits to public interaction, is created in modern states by identification with the state itself. According to the German sociologist Norbert Elias who was a refugee from the third Reich, the kind of state identified with is far from being a matter of chance. The German empire was, as a state, young and weak, and as Elias emphasises, Wilhelmine Germany never succeeded in monopolising violence, but was forced to engage in constant hegemonic conflict with the tradition of duelling upheld by the upper-class student societies. When one police chief tried to intervene, the resulting conflict between the student society and the state was resolved in the only possible way: the chief was challenged to a duel. This tradition nourished the thesis which rose to become the state’s leading principle in the 1930s: might is right, resolution of conflicts based on law and negotiation contemptible weakness. Hitler did not arise out of a vacuum.
     The creation of the Finnish national identity began in the 19th century through the work of the Fennomanes, who identified with the language spoken by ordinary people. The political awakening of the Finnish-speaking university students resulted in a nationalist movement, a forum for the creation of an identity for the rising middle class. There were, however, difficulties in the creation of a national identity as such: the object of identification, the state, spoke a different language – it was managed by the Swedish upper classes and governed by the Russian tsar. The situation soon changed. The historian Matti Klinge has stressed how the Swedish-speaking elite began, from the start of the century, to seek employment in the private sector rather than the civil service. This development coincided with the parliamentary and electoral reforms of 1906, through which the Finnish-speaking majority gained control of the political machine. Only one member of the house of nobility is now in the traditional aristocratic post of army officer, which is in the west European context extraordinary. Can the identification of the traditional elite with the state be so slight anywhere else?
     Better than anything else, it is precisely the withdrawal of the classical elite from the state that reflects the volume and completeness of the nationalist (Fennomane) coup d’état. In other European countries, the bourgeois revolution was marked by the identification and mixing of the rising group with the elite it displaced; in Finland, the process was the reverse. The Fennomanes created their identity by rejecting what the elite had represented. The state passed into the hands of the rebellious sons as the fathers withdrew to run industry and trade. The hegemonic group of the Diet abolished in 1906, the aristocracy, formed, in the new unicameral parliament, the Swedish People’s Party, whose support has continued to reflect the Swedish-speaking proportion of the population (5–10 per cent).
     The nationalist and idealist Finnish tradition contains the seeds of Finlandisation, for which history chooses the object. Although the Fennomanes manned the state, they never Finlandised the stages of public activity to the end. In public – that is, on the streets, in the squares, at celebrations, official occasions and in administrative bodies – we function as if we were in a foreign country in which a foreign language is spoken. The members of any residents’ association meeting are transformed from natural people to stiff bureaucrats as soon as the meeting has been declared quorate. The pair of opposites public – private indeed becomes official – unofficial. Unofficially we hold opinions; officially we withhold statements or speak through a spokesman. In terms of international activity, we react in the same way. ‘Abroad’ represents, in our imaginations, either tea-parties intended for our betters (Europe) or the truth about ourselves which is not suitable for salons and which we do not wish to recognise (Russia). Newness, progress and topicality are, in our own reality, in a constant state of becoming. We expect them to arrive from abroad at any moment.
     Our Finlandisation is not limited to this. It means the internalisation of a foreign power, its adoption as guiding principle on all levels. For example, profitability, that economic straitjacket of the 1990s, has been taken into use everywhere from village road committees to the faculties of Helsinki university. The sense in an enormous process of change which involves everyone is, however, hardly discussed. Profitability is an unquestioned dogma from kindergartens to river technology for the simple reason that we believe we expect it from ourselves. Our own is not good enough, so we take someone else’s. This is Finlandisation. And the political elite knows it: in the mid 1990s the Finnish people was prepared for any kind of sacrifice in order that Finland, burdened as it was by mass unemployment after the economic recession, would be first to fulfil the criteria for European monetary union.
     Our Finlandisation is not merely restricted to social activity. The internalisation of the constantly growing demands of others has become a scientific discipline of its own, and it is becoming the most central practice of civics of the 21st century. Our souls, ‘consulted’ to the point of exhaustion, are ready for any efforts in order for us not to slip off the New Age bandwagon as it arrives from some distant place. Smoothly managed workers sit on as many different courses as they can in order to learn that they should not have negative feelings towards business, colleagues, line managers or customers. These thoughts are dangerously close to the teachings of Kekkonen: in addition to negative actions, negative thoughts are also to be avoided. We must learn to think positively so that the West will not abandon us and the markets will not take fright. Power must be internalised; the self must be adapted to the needs of Others. In addition, these needs are more merciless than before: it is not possible to present a Great Petition to the markets! One must merely remove the last obstacles from their path – something which can for every reason be called Finlandisation.
     According to Kai Laitinen’s interpretation it was the elite that was Finlandised, not the people. The same was also to a large extent true of the crazy years of the 1970s: it was useless to look for pushy pro-Soviet careerists in local bars. But what when the people are given their marching orders and the country is governed by urban elites? Are we living in a final, irreversible period of Finlandisation? Yes, but there are other background factors, too, apart from the recession of the 1990s. The gradual development of modern publicity into a more and more predominant power has emphasised the significance of the public information channels at the expense of private networks. A hundred years ago, knowledge, news and opinions still spread from neighbour to neighbour and, through journeymen, from village to village. It was not mere information that circulated with travelling salesmen: news was accompanied by interpretation, which developed through private interaction, without official intervention. Now there is little but this official intervention, our Germanic publicity, to which we have never completely adapted. Privately, really, we may still hold an opinion, but this voice is not heard in the same way as it was before. We live in a time of public, official opinions. Without a view communicated to an Other, our own impressions remain without confirmation, loitering alone in the darkness. The process of Finlandisation will end, certainly, but at its extreme point, in which only that which is thought through the Other survives.

This is an edited version of an article from the book Entäs kun tulee se yhdestoista? Suomettumisen uusi historia (‘And what will happen when the eleventh one comes? A new history of Finlandisation’, edited by Johan Bäckman, WSOY, 2001). The 700-page volume contains articles by 49 writers representing different generations, professions and political views
 
 

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