Sun of Finland: A case of lived experience exceeding national boundaries 

Emigration from Finland reached a record high in 2025.  International immigration offsets the domestic decline in birth, keeping the country’s overall grow trajectory stable. Under what conditions do homegrown Finns leave their country? How do immigrants come to view Finland as their permanent home?

National identities are formed by much more than passports, flags, and borders. Jon E. Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss write that to make the nation, the state must “make people national” through such endeavors as the promotion of standardized languages, national educational curricula, military conscription and taxation. National identities, thus, are a personal and collective experience played out in everyday lives, as scholars such as Anthony P. Cohen, Tim Edensor, and Michael Billig have demonstrated. 

But life experience itself cannot always be contained within national borders. This past century has been characterized by unprecedented mobility – migration, globalization, diasporas, exile, imperialism, high speed communication, and accessible travel. Despite this global fluidity, national identity is not simply a matter of individual choice.  Rights and protections are accorded by national membership, for which the barrier of entry can be quite high.  Furthermore, nationalist socialization can make it difficult for individuals to shed national identities.

Individuals may maintain multiple, and sometimes competing, national identities, as scholars like Benedict Anderson and Rogers Brubaker have shown. How is one’s sense of self affected when an ascribed national identity does not align with one’s self-identification? There is a difference between formal national membership and the emotional experience of belonging to the nation, as Ville Kivimäki, Sami Suodenjoki and Tanja Vahtikari explain.  People derive part of their self-esteem and self-conception through membership to groups, including nations. What happens to a person’s psyche when they are not “at home” in the nation in which they reside?

In my book project Sun of Finland, I explore the psychological implications of national misalignment, or the incongruency between national citizenship and the lived experience of belonging. I do this through a historically grounded case study of a binational married couple. Tuuli is a Finnish woman who emigrated out of Finland during the cold war, only to return in the 1990s with an Egyptian husband, named Fady.  The book weaves top-down political and economic histories of post-1945 Egypt and Finland with bottom-up personal life stories (based on oral histories), which are anonymized to protect the privacy of those involved. 

In the 1980s and freshly graduated from high school, Tuuli left her small, rural town in Finland to seek adventure in the USA. She had grown up milking cows and singing Finnish national songs; she had never seen a foreigner in her life. She spent her twenties bouncing between countries like Mexico and Japan, supported by gig jobs and often hitchhiking. Every time she came back to Finland to try to settle down, she did not last. She did not feel at home in her home.

In the 1990s, Tuuli landed in Cairo, where she met an Egyptian man, Fady, who wanted nothing more than to leave his country for the USA.  Denied a visa by the American embassy on multiple occasions, Fady saw marriage as his only way out.   When twenty-six-year-old Fady arrived in Helsinki with Tuuli, he was uncertain about how he would earn a living. He did not speak Finnish, and it was his first time in Europe. All Fady had to his name were three juggling balls, from his work in the Egyptian national circus, and the promise of upward mobility in a post-Soviet world to which Tuuli afforded him access.

For Fady, moving west to Finland represented hope and an opportunity for economic prosperity that was not available in his home country. For Tuuli, having Fady by her side made living in Finland more bearable: she brought the exotic home.

Now, nearly three decades later, what has become of Fady and Tuuli?  Fair-skinned Finn who hunts for mushrooms and gathers berries in the summer, Fady has not become.   The vestiges of Fady’s childhood live in him, compelling him to find a way to help the family he left behind in Egypt.  Neither singularly Egyptian, nor singularly Finnish, Fady feels “out of place” in Finland, echoing Edward Said’s description of life lived between cultures.

Settled Finn who adores her nation and no longer dreams of life abroad, Tuuli has not become. The vestiges of her youth live in her, constantly pulling her to seek happiness elsewhere. She feels perpetually out of place herself in Finland.

This case studies raises deeper questions: How do real life experiences reshape the national identities defined by passports, borders and flags? Why did Fady and Tuuli seek belonging outside their homelands?  How is emotional national belonging made and unmade?

These questions are important for a variety of reasons, including understanding why Finns chose to out-migrate and how immigrants can best develop a sense of belonging, attachment, and investment in their new home in Finland.

References

Anderson, B. R. O. (1992). Long-distance nationalism: World capitalism and the rise of identity politics. Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam.

Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. SAGE Publications Ltd.

Brubaker, R. (1996). Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Cohen, A. P. (1996). personal nationalism: A Scottish view of some rites, rights, and wrongs. American Ethnologist, 23(4), 802–815. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1996.23.4.02a00070

Edensor, T. (2002). National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Routledge.

Fox, J. E., & Miller-Idriss, C. (2008). Everyday nationhood. Ethnicities, 8(4), 536–563. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796808088925

Kivimäki, V. (with Suodenjoki, S., & Vahtikari, T.). (2021). Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800-2000 (1st ed. 2021.). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69882-9

Said, E. W. (2012). Out of Place: A Memoir. Vintage.