Blog--My Finnish History

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Published: 29 March 2023

Sanna Marin: An International Celebrity Faces the Voters

On Sunday April 2 Finns will choose a new parliament. In the last election in 2019, voters could not have imagined that they were electing representatives to face a global pandemic, an aggressive war by its eastern neighbor, and the end of their country’s decades-long foreign policy of neutrality. The country’s Social Democratic Party won the most seats, reversing years of electoral decline. The party chair, Antti Rinne, resigned just months after becoming prime minister. His successor, Sanna Marin, is now facing the voters for the first time as party chair and prime minister.

Since becoming prime minister in September 2019, Ms. Marin has become an internationally recognized politician if not an international celebrity. One must go back to Marshal Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim, Finland’s military commander during World War II to find a Finnish leader with such widespread international visibility and popularity. When she became prime minister at age 34, Ms. Marin was the youngest head of government in the world. Ms. Marin has parlayed her youth, progressive political stances, and ability to use social media to become an icon for progressives everywhere in a world of growing authoritarianism and austerity.

Behind the filters of her Instagram postings, Prime Minister Marin has led Finland during one of its most challenging periods. Among prime ministers since World War II, only J. K. Paasikivi, (1944-46) who guided Finland during the difficult immediate postwar period and Esko Aho (1991-95) who led Finland through a depression and into the European Union, bore burdens of comparable weight. Ms. Marin led the country through the pandemic using at times stringent lockdowns. Pictures of her at a nightclub flouting Covid rules did not ultimately hurt her credibility. She was a key leader in Finland’s decision to join NATO after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Her frequent meetings with then Swedish Prime Minister and fellow Social Democrat Magdalena Andersson—one such meeting occurred with Ms. Marin sporting a biker jacket--signaled Finland’s aim to work in concert with Sweden’s application to join the alliance. In addition to mastering these truly exceptional challenges, she brought to fruition long-frustrated pieces of legislation ranging from the reform of the social and healthcare sector to a law on transgender rights.

Despite her international notoriety, accomplishments, and personal popularity among voters, Ms. Marin faces tough odds to become Finland’s next prime minister. Her main coalition partner, the Center Party, has ruled out its participation in a renewal of the current government coalition after the election. For months Marin’s Social Democratic Party has been closely trailing the center-right National Coalition Party in the polls and more recently has been locked in a struggle with the far-right Finns Party for second place. The leaders of the National Coalition Party and the Finns Party have signaled strongly that if one of them takes first place at the polls, the other will join it in forming a coalition. Ms. Marin has categorically rejected joining the Finns Party in government. Ms. Marin might experience the same fate as Magdalena Andersson. Her party gained seats in the parliamentary elections in Sweden in September 2022, but the win could not compensate for the losses of her coalition partners and the decision of the nonsocialist parties save one to collaborate with the far right.

Ms. Marin’s uncertain political future forms part of a larger counternarrative to that of Finland as a paradise of social justice promoted by Ms. Marin and many others. Finland has participated in the global neoliberal race to the bottom. It just joined the race later and has run more slowly than most other countries. The country’s educational system, once a leader in the world, has declined markedly over the last decade. The so-called world’s happiest country suffers from increasing rates of mental illness. In a recent survey, one in four workers under thirty-six feels burned out by work. Finland leads the European Union in drug overdose deaths among those under twenty-five.  If the Social Democrats end up in opposition, Finland will likely be governed by the same right-wing coalition including the Finns Party that preceded the current coalition. In a longer-term perspective, Ms. Marin’s government risks becoming a progressive caesura in a longer conservative continuum. Political parties have ceded the issue of immigration to the Finns Party, which has created a solid and growing basis of support by appealing to voters’ fears and bigotries. In a recent survey of foreign students in Finland about half plan to leave the country after they graduate. Black residents experience more racism in Finland than in other EU countries surveyed. As in every election since 2011 when the Finns Party became a major force in Finland's politics, political parties have been unwilling in this election to stand up to the widespread racism that gives traction to the Finns Party. 

Defeat at the polls will not end Ms. Marin’s political career. She will still have the virtually undivided support of her party. Her popularity outside of her party will remain strong. She would be a formidable candidate in presidential elections scheduled for early next year. She could leverage her international stature for political positions outside of Finland. Her record of achievement has already a visible place in Finland’s history.

Jason Lavery is Regents Professor of History at Oklahoma State University and Adjunct Professor (Docent) at the University of Helsinki. He has written widely on Finland’s history and present. His works include The History of Finland (2006) and Reforming Finland: The Diocese of Turku in the Age of Gustav Vasa 1523-1560 (2017). He maintains a blog at history-of-finland.com

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Published: 06 March 2023

Immigration, Schools, and Elections

            In a little less than four weeks Finland will go to the polls to choose a new parliament. Early voting begins in almost two weeks. In the first month of the campaign immigration has become a major issue. The far-right Finns Party opened its campaign by doubling down on its anti-immigration stance by not only reaffirming its long-standing opposition to refugees (that is, unless they are white Ukrainians) but now opposing labor-based migration and even foreign students in Finland. As in previous election campaigns, many think that the Finns Party’s extremism will cost it votes. So far, as in previous elections, this is nothing but wishful thinking. The party remains in three-way fight with the Social Democrats and the center-right National Coalition Party for winning the most seats in Parliament. According to a poll published today a coalition between the Finns Party and the National Coalition party is the most popular choice among voters for Finland's next government.

            The Finns Party’s anti-immigrant cause has been helped by the media as well as politicians from the other side of the ideological divide. In the middle of February leaders of the city of Helsinki called for an end to specialty class cohorts in schools such as those that emphasize music, the performing arts, or lesser taught foreign languages. The main rationale for this proposal is that the influx of immigrant children has led to school segregation in which immigrant children are filling up neighborhood schools while schools with specialty class cohorts have few immigrants. There is a growing white flight in which Finns are moving out of and avoiding moving into certain neighborhoods with high immigrant populations. The Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle recently published online a search engine in which one could find out how many pupils in a school speak Finnish as a second language. The search engine had other factors one could search for, such as average income of the school’s area, but it has been understood primarily as a search engine for parents to find how many immigrants are in a school. In the national discussion, immigrants are being made scapegoats for the decline of an education system that gave Finland world renown just a few years ago. Factors such growing income inequality, underfunding of schools, and a school system in which the strong role of teachers has been replaced by consultants have been given much less attention. Helsinki has since decided to table its proposal, probably to be raised again after the elections.

            The debate over schools makes a larger point about the two main discourses concerning immigration. Neither advances inclusion of immigrants. The first envisions Finland without foreigners. The second posits that Finland can successfully integrate immigrants without having to change itself. It does not need to address widespread xenophobia. Programs designed to integrate immigrants often fail because they rest on stereotypes and uninformed biases about immigrants. A recently defended doctoral dissertation confirms what many immigrants already know--that many teachers do not support immigrant students' learning of Finnish. When xenophobia and racism are mentioned as problems, such as Prime Minister Marin has recently articulated, they are only problems in the Finns Party, not the general population. In this election, as in previous elections, I am waiting for the first Finnish candidate for parliament to call out racism and xenophobia as a national problem that will not be resolved by itself or by some change in the bureaucracy or law but rather by a political leadership ready to confront a culture of xenophobia.

          Finland has a long record of resolving national divisions and bringing disenfranchised groups into the national fold through its education system. The Fennomane movement of the nineteenth century focused on the creation of Finnish-language schools to give Finnish-speaking students a ladder into the country's mostly Swedish-speaking elites. My colleague historian Pauli Kettunen has recently commented on this discussion concerning immigrants in schools by pointing out that the current comprehensive school system created in the 1970s was designed to allow less advantaged children in the countryside and urban working class to move more easily up the social ladder. The comprehensive school system was not introduced in the 1970s without criticism. The opponents argued that a more inclusive school system would level down more students than it would level up—an argument one still hears today and an argument for specialty schools. If schools are to continue to be a mechanism for social mobility, Finland’s schools need to be retooled not by blindly going forward with the newest fad from the education-entertainment complex but rather by reapplying what has worked for the country's schools in the past: empowering teachers, betting on the future of its marginalized groups, and daring to innovate in the face of those who wish to preserve the current system of social advantage. In addition, Finland's educators will have to eradicate from their schools what a former US president called "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

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Published: 21 August 2022

Forty years ago today I boarded a plane in Seattle, Washington to Helsinki, Finland. My Finnish history began. Many things have changed in Finland over the last 40 years, changes I try to examine in this blog. There are many things that attracted me to Finland and kept me returning that not longer exist. The biggest loss has been the end of the culture of vastaantulo or meeting in the middle. If you came to the country as an outsider, learned the language(s) and culture, you would eventually attract a support system of people willing to help. If I came to Finland today, learning the language and culture would likely not give me the support system and opportunities it did for me starting 40 years ago. Finland has become a more transactional culture, and seeing an outsider learn the language and culture is not worthy of transacting, especially in what became my profession. English only pliis. I am fortunate to have come to Finland when I did.

The following are two blog postings from two years ago when I opened this blog in which I recall August 1982 in Finland.

A Journey into a Last Fine Time

The Last Fine Time is a novel written in the early 1990s by Verlyn Klinkenborg. The story takes place in Buffalo, New York. The author tells a story of his father-in-law who inherited a restaurant in 1947 and transformed it from a neighborhood watering hole into a swinging night spot at a time growing postwar prosperity. By the end of the 1960s the prosperity began to wane, the regulars began to move into the suburbs, and the upheavals convulsing the rest of the country reached the old neighborhood. The restaurant closed. The last fine time had come to an end.

In August 1982 I landed in Finland during a period that since has been remembered as a last fine time. According to opinion polls such as one by the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation in 2013 , Finns see the 1980s as the best decade to have lived in. This sentiment is not without a factual basis. Unemployment was much lower in the 1980s than in the late 1970s or any time after after the 1980s. The strong Finnish mark made foreign travel not only affordable but outright profitable. If you were short on money for a month in Spain, a bank would gladly loan you the money. The Soviet Union cast a slowly decreasing shadow over the country. Many who had left Finland in the late 1960s for Sweden in search of work were now returning.

The city in which I would spend the next year, Ylivieska, embodied the decade. At the time of my arrival, public buildings from city hall to the library to the swim hall had been built within the last ten years or so. Much of the single-family housing was also new. This city of some 12,000 inhabitants had commercial air service. The only sign of centuries of habitation was the august white church from the late eighteenth century. The church succumbed to arson in 2016.

Of course, in popular memory decades later the prosperity of the era has been even more exaggerated and the difficulties of the era forgotten. Finns longing for the 1980s certainly would not want to return to buying alcohol from state-run stores in which one had to line up at a counter and tell a sales person what one wanted. Taxes were higher. Towing the official line toward the Soviet Union was still a requirement for many for advancement. Life was good if one fit in the very homogenous cultural norms of the time.

The Talk

The early 1980s represented one of the tensest periods in the Cold War. The USSR was in Afghanistan. In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States with promises to enhance America’s military strength against a country he dubbed an evil empire. NATO was in the process of deploying medium-range missiles. In September 1983 the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner. In November 1983, the Soviet Union briefly interpreted a routine NATO military exercise as the beginning of a nuclear attack.

I flew to Finland in August 1982 with fellow high school exchange students from the western US and western Canada. Upon arriving at the airport in Helsinki, we were put on busses and taken to a school for a week of orientation before spreading out across the country. My first meal there was certainly an orientation. I took from the buffet table what I thought was milk and Salisbury steak. It was buttermilk and liver, two foods I never remember having previously. The organizers of the orientation had already exhorted us several times not to waste any food, so I ate my meal. The liver was good. I have never had buttermilk since.

The orientation’s program consisted of language training and several presentations about Finland. One of the presentations was given by a senior official in Finland’s foreign ministry. He talked about Finland’s foreign policy and in particular about Finland’s relationship with the Soviet Union. The official told us that, contrary to what we might have learned in our home countries, the USSR did not have any undue influence over Finland’s domestic and foreign affairs. For us to say otherwise would offend our Finnish hosts.

We were each handed a copy of the Finnish-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance (FCMA) signed in 1948. The treaty is frequently referred to in English by its Finnish initials YYA. The treaty was signed after World War II during which Finland had fought on the side of Germany against the USSR 1941-1944. Finns during the Cold War era pointed to this treaty when outsiders questioned Finland’s independence. The treaty specifically stated that Finland was not a part of the Soviet alliance system. While not a formal military alliance, the treaty called on Finland to forestall any outside attack on the Soviet Union through Finland. For the Soviets, it was a soft military alliance.

The presentation that I experienced exemplified how much in Finnish society had become mediated by Finland’s relationship with the USSR. Even the arrival of some forty or so teenagers from the United States and Canada could not occur without bringing in Finnish-Soviet relations. That the country’s foreign ministry felt it important enough to send to a senior civil servant to talk to a bunch of North American teenagers exemplifies how important it was to have everyone in the country toeing the Paasikivi-Kekkonen Line, the name of the country’s official foreign policy.

Much of what was done in Finland the name of Finnish-Soviet relations during the Cold War, especially from the 1960s onward, was not instigated by the Soviet Union. It was done by domestic Finnish elites not so much to keep good relations with Moscow as to strengthen their power and authority domestically. Finland has a long history of using foreigners as a cudgel in domestic politics: the king in Stockholm until 1809, the emperor in St. Petersburg until 1917, the election of a German king in 1918, the Soviet Union, and, more recently, the Somalis in eastern Helsinki as well as the European Union.

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Published: 31 July 2022

The Winter War--Finland’s Creation Story and Rosetta Stone

As a historian, I am sensitive to how communities reinterpret historical events to make sense of and or justify current decisions. In May 2022 Finland’s parliament debated the country’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). By a vote of 188-8, Parliament approved of the government’s proposal to seek NATO membership. As the vote suggests, there was little debate over whether Finland should join the alliance. For many members of parliament, as well as much of the population at large, the frame of reference for joining NATO consisted of both the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the Russian invasion of Finland in November 1939, known as the Winter War of 1939-40.

It is virtually impossible to underestimate the significance of the Winter War in Finns’ understanding of their national history and current affairs. It was indeed a heroic struggle against a country many times its size in land, population, and military resources. But it was more than that. In an interview for the history podcast The Peel in June, I called the Winter War Finland’s creation story. Finland emerged independent in 1917 not out of national unity but national division. Parliament approved the declaration of independence by a narrow margin. In January 1918 civil war erupted between supporters of the non-socialist government and Marxist rebels. The government or “White” forces defeated the Reds within four months. The underlying political division lasted for years. The political parties that represented the winning side in the Civil War found it difficult to form lasting governing coalitions. Even before independence the country’s politics had been divided over language rights and privileges for the country’s Finnish and Swedish-speaking communities.

The outbreak of the Winter War healed these divisions. The Winter War was the glorious war of national independence that the conflict of 1918 was not. It was the first collective achievement by Finns as an independent nation. A national identity based on perpetual national unity “the spirit of the Winter War” was created. An insular and sometimes aggressive us-versus-them attitude would guide Finns’ dealings with outsiders and the outside world.

In addition to Finland’s creation story, the Winter War became Finland’s Rosetta stone for political decision making. The Winter War was used to justify many aspects of public policy ranging from Finland’s decision to join Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR in 1941 to postwar high agricultural subsidies to restrictive asylum policies for decades after the war.

Finland’s Cold War foreign policy of appeasing the USSR was justified by the experience of the Winter War. During Winter War, Finns believed that they were fulfilling their self-appointed national mission as “the outpost of Western Civilization.” At the end of the Winter War in March 1940, Finland’s commander-in-chief General (later Marshal) Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim issued an order of the day to the nation. In it he recapitulated Finland’s mission as Western Civilization’s outpost. He then proclaimed that “but also we know that we have paid to the last penny the debt that we have had to the West.” In other words, Finland no longer needed to pursue a foreign policy out of a sense of ideological indebtedness to the West, a policy that left Finland largely alone to fight the USSR. This phrase by Mannerheim was used as a justification for Finland’s policy toward the USSR during the Cold War. The wartime sacrifices of the Finnish people were to be used to find the best accommodation with the USSR without ideological affiliation. Finland’s most visible diplomat of the Cold War era, Max Jakobson (whose books Diplomacy of the Winter War and Finland Survived are still worthwhile reading) modified Mannerheim’s statement for foreign audiences to “We have paid our debt to the West to the final drop of blood.” In the Cold War discourse, Mannerheim’s understanding of Finland as part of the West was ignored.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Finns returned to their Rosetta Stone. On the surface, Russia’s invasion had many parallels to the Winter War. The Winter War, which for decades had been interpreted as a justification for Finland to stay out of alliances, was now used as a justification to join NATO. In the parliamentary debate over NATO membership, 157 of Parliament’s 200 members chose to speak about NATO membership. Of these, forty-seven referred to the Winter War in one way or another. Some directly referred to the conflict. Others spoke of their great-grandparents having to leave their homes after the new border was drawn in 1940. The most common reference to the Winter War was a quote by another Finnish general and veteran of the Winter War, Adolf Ehrnrooth, “never again alone.” In other words, Finland must not find itself in a position in which it has to face Russia without allies. “Never again alone” replaced having paid the debt to the West as the lesson the country wanted to draw from the Winter War. It has become a wider national rallying cry for NATO membership.

But Mannerheim’s order of the day of March 1940 was not completely forgotten in the parliamentary debate. One member of Parliament even quoted from Mannerheim’s order of the day, “We have a historic task, that we are still fulfilling, the protection of Western Civilization, which for centuries has been our inheritance.”  The MP omitted the rest of Mannerheim's sentence: “but also we know that we have paid to the last penny the debt that we have had to the West.” When the past gets reinterpreted, especially for political aims, context and nuance are often victims.

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Published: 15 May 2022

The NATO Decision and Turning the Sled in Finland’s History

                In American English the idiom “to turn on a dime” means the ability to change directions instantly. The Finnish equivalent phrase is “to turn the sled (kääntää kelkka).” The Finnish version tends to imply more a person’s or a community’s immediate change in direction from strongly held convictions. The American phrase can be applied to people and machines.

                Turning the sled is an important figure of speech to keep in mind when investigating independent Finland’s history. Despite Finland’s self-image and international reputation as a country with stable and predictable politics, change in Finland—especially in respect to foreign policy—often has come in quick diametric turns of the nation’s sled.

                The latest example of this was Finland’s decision to seek membership in NATO, a topic I wrote more about in a previous blog entry. As late as January 2022, only about a quarter of Finns polled supported membership in the military alliance. Official foreign policy since the early 2000s maintained an option to join NATO, but few seemed interested in exercising it. When the current coalition government was constituted in 2019, only the smallest of the five parties, the Swedish People’s Party, supported NATO membership. In his time as president since 2012 President Sauli Niinistö has often stated that he wanted NATO to become more “European” before Finland would join.

                All of this was before Russia’s attack on Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Immediately Finland turned the sled in respect to Russia. People who opposed NATO membership before the invasion now are doubling down on membership in NATO. People are running away from a policy of neutrality that was for decades supported overwhelmingly throughout society. People who cannot run fast enough risk getting blackballed.

                History does not repeat itself. If it were the case that indeed today repeats yesterday, we would still be in the Stone Age. We can uncover patterns from the past and ask why. The events of the last three months in Finland share patterns with many other turns of the national sled. All of them have to do to varying degrees with relations with Russia. In the fall of 1917 The Grand Duchy of Finland, still a part of the Russian Empire, was led by nonsocialist political parties that opposed a unilateral declaration of independence from Russia. These parties wanted to negotiate a new relationship with Russia. When the Bolsheviks took over on 7 November 1917, the same nonsocialist parties then unilaterally declared national independence on 6 December 1917. The upshot of this turning of the sled was that Finland’s government quickly learned that few countries were willing to recognize Finland’s independence until Bolshevik Russia did. At the end of December, a Finnish delegation in St. Petersburg received from Lenin recognition of Finland’s independence.

                Another quick turn was to happen less than a year later. After a short and bloody civil war in the first half of 1918, Finland’s government, now backed by Imperial Germany, looked for a German prince to serve as the country’s new monarch. Parliament elected Frederick Charles of Hesse king on 9 October 1918. The new king never made it to Finland and Finland never became a kingdom. Germany sued for peace in World War I on 11 November 1918. Not wanting to be caught on the side of the losers, the political establishment quickly jettisoned Frederick Charles and moved toward a republic, a course with the aim of improving Finland’s relations with the winners of World War I. A republican constitution was completed in July 1919.

                The next turn came in the summer and fall of 1944. Finland participated in Germany’s invasion of Russia in 1941 to regain lands lost in the Winter War of 1939. With Soviet troops now pushing into the Karelian Isthmus in the summer of 1944, Finland’s leaders decided to leave the war. In an emergency meeting Finland’s Parliament on 4 August 1944 elected the country’s commander-in-chief, Marshal Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim, president of the republic. The man charged with leading troops into battle was now charged with leading the country into peace. In September 1944, Finland sued for peace with the USSR. In order to meet one of the conditions of the peace, Finland declared war on Germany. The war with Germany consisted of evicting German troops stationed in northern Finland. In its eight-month long withdrawal into Norway, German troops burned Finnish Lapland to the ground.

                The next immediate turn occurred on 19 August 1991. On that day Mikael Gorbachev was overthrown in a coup. Even though the coup lasted just fours days, Finland’s leaders, many of whom for decades had hitched their political fortunes to the wagon of appeasing the Soviet Union, decided that now was the time to leave Moscow’s power-political sphere of influence. In January 1992 Finland applied for membership in the European Union. Before the coup attempt and the subsequent end of the USSR in December 1991, membership in the European Union (then the European Community) did not command a majority in opinion polls, much like support for NATO membership had been before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

                So what can one learn from this pattern of quick turns? There are several. First, a small country has to be agile to survive, especially when it is the neighbor of a great power. Second, Finland’s place in Europe has been and will continue to be to a great extent determined by what happens in Moscow. Third, the public quick turnings of the sled examined here often were preceded by work either in the background and or completely behind the scenes. For example, Finland has had widespread cooperation with NATO since the 1990s. Finnish troops have participated in NATO operations ranging from Kosovo to Afghanistan. While Finns have been rejecting NATO membership for decades, at the same time they have taken steps that have made applying for membership a seeming matter of course. Marshal Mannerheim’s election to the presidency in 1944 was made possible by his predecessor Risto Ryti, who personally promised the Germans that he would make no separate peace with the USSR. When the time came to negotiate with Moscow, Ryti left without having tied the hands of his successor.

                These turnings of the sled have created deep trench-like skids that have made it difficult to master Finland’s past. In other words, these turns have been made not only by breaking with past, but also forgetting it. It was not until the 1960s that the events of 1917-18 started to be widely discussed. Some Finnish historians as well as much of the general public still refuse to use the word “ally” to describe their country’s wartime relationship with Nazi Germany, hiding behind the legal fig leaf that Finland and Germany never signed a formal alliance. Discussion concerning the Cold War era aims tends more to indict individual lackeys of Moscow than to examine why an entire country bought into a policy of appeasing Moscow. Time will tell what kind of trenches the current turn of the sled will create to separate us from Finland’s past.

                A short note of self-promotion: I will be teaching my course “Finland Prehistory to Present” for the Helsinki Summer University 30 May-9 June. See Summer University homepage hsky.fi for more details.

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Published: 09 April 2022

Mikael Agricola: Father of Written Finnish, Agent of the Swedish King, European Humanist

Today April 9 Finland celebrates Mikael Agricola Day. Mikael Agricola (c. 1510-1557) is recognized primarily for his achievement in establishing Finnish as a literary language. The pastor and later bishop of the Diocese of Turku in Finland created a body of sacred literature in Finnish. Among his works are a spelling primer for Finnish (1543), a book of prayers (1544), and the New Testament in Finnish (1548). Agricola’s works were the first published books in Finnish.

What remains in the shadow of Agricola’s literary achievement is his advancement of the three larger roles that Finland’s Western Church has played in Finland’s history. By Western Church I mean the medieval Catholic Church until the 1500s and then the Lutheran Church that replaced it. In Finland’s history the Western Church has supported the interests of temporal or civil power, it has worked to create a separate Finnish identity, and has been an important and sometimes only conduit of outside cultural and intellectual influences.

From the time it began to establish itself in Finland in the 1100s, the Western Church has worked closely with the Finland’s rulers, a relationship that has become more distant only in recent decades. The introduction of the Lutheran reformation in the sixteenth century was made possible by a king who wanted to take the church’s wealth and a new generation of clergymen who wanted to make the church less opulent. Agricola’s oldest surviving completed manuscript is not a work of religious literature, but rather an accounting in 1542 of the church’s wealth for King Gustav Vasa. The account book would be used by the king for future confiscations of the church’s wealth. Several years later, Agricola died while performing another service for Gustav Vasa. In the fall of 1556, Gustav sent a delegation to Moscow for peace talks to end a war that had been raging for almost two years. Continuing a long-standing tradition in the Swedish kingdom’s diplomacy with Russia, the Swedish delegation included ecclesiastical leaders. As a member of the delegation, Agricola brought to the negotiating table his firm command of a variety of languages: Latin, Greek, and German, in addition to Finnish and Swedish. At the outset of negotiations with the Russians, it was often unclear what language or languages would be most useful. On the return journey home after signing a peace treaty, Agricola became sick. He and the others in his delegation had suffered months of abuse from their Russian hosts. Agricola died on 9 April 1557 shortly after crossing the border back into Finland.

While serving the Swedish king, Agricola like generations of clergymen before him saw Finland as a distinct region within the Swedish realm. The spread of Western Christianity over most of Finland ensured that Finland would become part of Western Europe and not Russia—a reason why to this day Finns both in popular and scholarly memory have a fondness for the medieval Catholic era not found in many Protestant countries. During the Middle Ages, native-born Finns came to dominate the clergy and high offices. This predominance of local Finnish leadership continued into the Lutheran era. Agricola contributed to this local Finnish identity through his publications in Finnish. He not only used his works to establish a written language for Finnish speakers, but also he sought to articulate a sense of place for Finns. In his introduction to his New Testament, Agricola summarizes Finland’s history. He goes on to list Finland’s various regions and historical provinces. In the introduction of his translation of the Psalms, Agricola lists Finland’s pre-Christian gods and their functions. This list is still a foundational source for scholars. With these history and geography lessons Agricola teaches his readers that they have a distinct past and space of their own, but a space and past clearly within the Swedish kingdom.

Agricola was one of several young Finnish clergymen of his generation who studied at the University of Wittenberg in Germany, the intellectual bridgehead of the Lutheran Reformation. High among the items on the Lutheran reform agenda was the transformation of worship from Latin into the vernacular—the language of the people. Wittenberg was also a center of the new intellectual movement of humanism. Contrary to widespread understandings of the term today, humanism in the context of the sixteenth century (and for centuries afterwards) does not mean secularism or an avoidance of religion. Humanism in the sixteenth century was a scholarly movement that emphasized the study of the humanities—history, philosophy, as well as languages and literatures. Humanists sought to go the original sources of Western thought and religion rather than relying on centuries of commentary on them. They wanted to cultivate existing languages as well as improve knowledge of the biblical languages of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Agricola among other contemporaries brought both Lutheranism and humanism to Finland. Both humanism and Lutheran reform guided Agricola’s work in the Finnish language.

Agricola belongs to the pantheon of Finland’s national heroes. He created a written language that allowed people to worship God in their own language. His work over the long haul protected Finnish as a minority language in the Swedish kingdom. Although Finnish orthography has changed much since Agricola’s time, over seventy percent of the words used by Agricola are still used in Finnish. Much of the rest of Agricola’s text is understandable to a reader of modern Finnish, especially if the reader can decipher Agricola’s neologisms derived from Swedish.

I frequently wonder what Agricola would think as Finns—both Finnish- and Swedish-speaking--are increasingly willing to allow the takeover of the new Latin—English—in their daily communications, business transactions, and education. I consider my mastery of the Finnish language as my greatest intellectual achievement—greater than my doctorate or my books. Will I still be able to use this achievement in twenty years?

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Published: 25 February 2022

Finland: To NATO or not to NATO?

In my class “Germany since 1815” that I teach at Oklahoma State University, I start my lecture on Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall with the 1990 song and video “Wind of Change” by the German band Scorpions. The song drew its inspiration from the fall of Berlin Wall and the end of communism in Europe.  The song would become an anthem for subsequent changes in the world during the early 1990s, such as the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians and the end of apartheid in South Africa. At the time, it seemed that all of the world’s problems were all coming to an end. The political scientist Francis Fukyama proclaimed an “end to history” in the sense that our understanding of the past was based on ideological conflicts that were now resolved. The world seemed to be on an inexorable road to an eternal order of democracy, rule of law, international mobility, and free markets. As a twentysomething at the time whose career depended on international mobility, my future seemed bright.

That age of naïve bliss lasted for about a decade. It started to end on 11 September 2001. For the two decades since, a steady but determined reaction has reversed the course the world was on in the 1990s. The world has become much more authoritarian, arbitrary, aggressive, and closed. Despite all of the push in Finland to “internationalize,” I find the country in many respects much more closed to me than I did 15 years ago. I am not the only foreigner with long-standing ties to Finland who feels this.

At the end of the Cold War Finland had to redefine itself in Europe, a topic that I have touched on in some previous blog posts. Since the end of the Cold War, Finns have debated Finnish membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Support for NATO membership has never gone much above 25%. Even political parties that support NATO membership, such as the conservative National Coalition Party and the Swedish People’s Party, have many supporters who do not support or only conditionally support NATO membership. Although support for NATO membership has been low, there has been widespread support for Finnish cooperation with NATO ranging from operations in Afghanistan to Kosovo. Finland recently bought the American F-35 as its next generation of fighter aircraft. Finland along with Sweden participated in meetings of NATO’s Atlantic Council this week. All of these actions taken by Finnish governments have had widespread support even among opponents of NATO membership.

Since the end of the Cold War, Finland has had two good reasons to stay out of NATO. First, Finnish membership in NATO has meant that Finland would have to bear the immediate burden of defending half of NATO’s border with Russia. The Baltic States, Poland, and Norway would defend pieces of the other half. Finland has a justifiably proud history of military non-alignment enforced by a strong commitment to national defense. Finland’s only experience in a military coalition, that led by Nazi Germany, did not end well. Would NATO really defend a distant corner of Europe from Soviet aggression?

Second, Finland has been able to rely on Russia’s tendency to see Finland in primarily defensive terms. Finland, unlike Ukraine, cannot be easily used as a staging ground for significant Russian offensive operations into other parts of Europe. Finland has not been worth the Russian geopolitical investment that other border areas have been. For example, in September 1944 the Soviets agreed to peace with Finland without requiring unconditional surrender by and full occupation of Finland: getting to Berlin was more important than getting to Helsinki. Imperial Russia 1809-1917 and the Soviet Union after the Cold War largely left Finns to their internal devices while keeping the country’s foreign affairs within Russia’s power-political sphere of influence.  In the hands of a perceived enemy power, Finland can pose a threat to Russia. Concerns of Finland falling into enemy hands led Russia to reduce Finland’s autonomous status in the Russian Empire in the years 1890-1914. Security concerns drove the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland in 1939, an event that has for many Finns parallels to the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. That Russian paranoid action in 1939 then moved Finland into the arms of a real threat to the USSR: Nazi Germany, a collaboration that ended in military defeat. Finns with justification have come to consider any alliance as more likely weakening rather than strengthening Finland in respect to its biggest threat to national security.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has obliterated these two justifications for staying out of NATO. In respect to the first reason, if Russia does conquer Ukraine, Finland as a NATO member would no longer have half of the alliance’s border with Russia. Finland would hold a much smaller part of a border that will run from the Artic Sea to the Black Sea. This calculation includes Belarus’ border with NATO. Instead of being a possibly peripheral part of NATO’s overall strategy before the invasion of Ukraine, Finland as a NATO member would be at the heart of the alliance’s mission of defending its eastern border. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has refocused NATO on Europe. Outcomes other than a complete and clean Russian conquest, such as a long-running guerilla war or a negotiated settlement will result in Russian expansion in eastern Europe. Even if Russia turned tail and withdrew from Ukraine today it is unlikely that Russia will be seen as a reliable partner in building European security.

As far as the second reason is concerned, the invasion of Ukraine along with previous actions in Georgia, Moldova, and Belarus suggest that Russia under Putin does not see any of its European neighbors in defensive terms, especially those neighbors that are not members of NATO. Putin’s speech on the evening of the invasion envisioned a recreation of the Russian Empire—an empire that once included Finland. Over the last month Finland has rejected Russian demands that it pledge to never join NATO—the same demands Russia made on Ukraine. As I was writing this post, Russia issued the threat of "military and political consequences" if Finland and Sweden decide to join NATO.

Any formal accession of Finland into the alliance will take months and maybe longer after formal application for membership. If Finland were attacked by Russia today, it would surely receive support from NATO, the European Union, and Sweden.

Finland’s policy of armed neutrality has served it well. Neutrality is a significant part of how I have imagined Finland for some forty years. The strong arguments for an effective policy no longer apply. It is time for Finland to seek NATO membership.

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Published: 05 February 2022

Toxic Silence and Finnsplaining

Silence pervades Finland’s culture. Popular activities such as mushroom picking, fishing, cross-country skiing, and orienteering are conducted with few words. The stereotypical Finn is taciturn. The German poet Berthold Brecht, a refugee in Finland for a short time during the Second World War, concluded that Finns “are silent in two languages.” Finns like to consider their culture of silence as a function of a larger culture that eschews artifice. But just as words can hurt, so can silence. Outsiders who say anything critical or unorthodox about Finland often experience toxic silence.

The silence takes many forms ranging from the cold lack of response to a comment at a meeting over coffee to no response to a social media post, a silence made deafening when a Finn makes a similar post and gets lots of likes and comments. The momentary silence can turn into permanent shunning. I often think that if I stopped talking to every Finn who said something critical about the United States, I would have nobody to talk to in Finland.

Over the last few weeks I have discussed with others of foreign background who have given interviews to the Finnish media in which we shared negative and common experiences concerning Finns’ attitudes and actions toward foreigners. We all experienced several cases in which in the printed interview, our critical comments were edited out, leaving us looking like clueless foreigners and or the uncritical “Suomi-fani” (“Finland fan”) Finns expect all foreigners to be. I once gave a three-hour interview to a Finnish journalist who was writing a book about the Nordic welfare state, a book that became a best-seller in the United States. In the interview I dared to call into question the durability of the universal welfare state in the face of the decades-long neoliberal onslaught that has weakened it. None of the interview made it into the book or even the acknowledgements. I obviously got in the way of upholding the narrative sold to foreigners of Finland as a perfect place. I always acknowledge people and institutions who have given me significant time, even if I did not find the effort behind the time helpful. In fairness some Finnish publications have interviewed me and have printed my critical takes. I have over the years found publications that have published my opinion pieces without altering their content. Nonetheless, Finns often label my writing whether opinion pieces or scholarly writing a “foreign view” or “nothing new.” A foreigner can never know more or differently about Finland than a Finn can.

Then there is the verbalized silencing that I call Finnsplaining, yes, the relative of mansplaining. Finnsplaining occurs when an outsider says something that a Finn thinks threatens the national narrative assigned to foreigners. Like mansplaining, Finnsplaining is meant to silence and reassert authority; a reminder to outsiders that they need to adhere to the narrative given by Finns to foreigners about Finland, regardless of their own experience.  It is meant to assert the epistemological superiority of the Finn over the foreigner in matters related to Finland. One time several years ago I had my bicycle stolen in Finland. When I shared this incident with my Finnish coworkers a common response was to assure me how uncommon my misfortune was because Finns are so honest. I was supposed to think that Finns were incorruptibly honest because Finns told me to do so, regardless of my experience. Meanwhile, I was reading in the newspapers about the growth in bicycle thefts in the country over the previous years.

Finnsplaining often consists of blaming foreigners for any bad experiences they have in Finland. The foreigner has a bad attitude, can’t take a joke, is ungrateful, or does not understand the Finns. An offended foreigner is often asked to be forgiving because Finns are shy and or that immigration is “new” to Finland. Yet another kind of Finnsplaining is mutkuttelu or whataboutism. Finland does not have a problem because other countries have it. Once a journalist responded to my concerns about xenophobia in Finland by stating “Well, the Finnish immigrants in Stockholm get treated as poorly as Somalis in Helsinki.” Racism in Finland is relativized into harmlessness. Finns who read this blog post will likely respond that Finns themselves who do not adhere to the national orthodoxy are often silenced. True, a topic for another blog post! But do two wrongs make a right?

Every year for the last two decades millions of euros have been spent on elaborate and ineffective plans for integrating people of foreign background. In some cases, it seems that the goal is to employ Finns rather than immigrants. Here is a free plan for integration from a researcher who has been living this topic for decades: stop weaponizing silence. Now. Instead, utilize silence as a tool for listening and inclusion. It might be uncomfortable for a moment, but the person speaking likely has been in a state of discomfort for years. Take the examples of my Finnish colleagues and friends who have patiently listened and discussed my views of the country for decades without toxic silence or Finnsplaining. They have not melted or lost their sense of nationhood. They have the superpower of empathy.

For those of you Finns who think I just arrived in the country and can thus dismiss what I have written, klick the link Blog--My Finnish History below for 40 years of dealing with Finland.

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Published: 14 December 2021

The Summer of 2021

At this time last year I closed out 2020 on this blog with the hope that I would be able to visit Finland in 2021. The year 2020 had been the first year since 1995 in which I did not spend a day in Finland. The outlook for 2021 was very uncertain: vaccines were not yet widely available. Would they be effective? Would countries open their borders to the vaccinated? Would I want to go to the other side of the world only to have to stay in a room due to quarantines and lockdowns?

Every day from the beginning of January 2021 I followed daily the newsfeed dedicated to the corona virus on the websites of Finland’s biggest daily Helsingin sanomat and the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation (Yle). Every few days I would check in with the website of the Finnish Border Guard. I followed these sources out of an interest about Finland’s response to the virus as well as a desire to know when a trip might be possible after classes ended here in May. I followed the situation with greater attention when I got my second shot at the end of March.

Throughout the world the pandemic has forced people to draw new boundaries. These boundaries often reflect larger long-developing and previously unarticulated mental landscapes. For Finns and Finnish officialdom in particular the pandemic has revealed a significant change in how they have viewed the world. From the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War Finns saw themselves as outside of Europe. In the 1980s I would frequently be asked in Finland if I had ever been to Europe. In the final analysis what really mattered to Finns was their place and status in respect to two countries—the USSR and the USA. Europe was an area of Cold War division and possible entanglement.

In the last two decades, the horizon consisting of the Washington-Moscow axis has been replaced by the European Union. The pandemic has starkly revealed that. For the first half of 2021, Finland’s border was closed with some fluctuating exceptions. What was consistent and for me frustrating was that information concerning closures focused almost always on Finland’s “internal border” or its border with other EU member states. It was as if people did not exist on other continents. This EU-centrism has continued even as Finland has opened its borders. In September Finland stated to adopt the electronic Corona virus passport used in the European Union. Currently one needs to show the passport to get into restaurants and large events. An official decision to allow people vaccinated outside of the European Union to enter these premises with their national vaccination documentation was not made until last week.

Until the end of August, one from outside of the EU could only enter the country with special permission. With the academic year starting here in the middle of August, I planned to leave for Finland in the middle of July for two reasons: research work for my current book project and the course that I teach on Finland’s history at the Helsinki Summer University. I was denied entry for the first reason but allowed entry for the second. The long 24-hour journey from here to Helsinki almost did not get beyond the airport in Oklahoma City. Although Finland now allowed non-Finnish citizens to enter the country with special permission, Finnish officials did not relay their decision to the airlines. The inability to disseminate information has been a widespread problem in Finnish officialdom during the whole pandemic. After waiting for an hour at the ticket counter as the agents called central management, I was finally let on the plane.

Little did I know that the incident in Oklahoma City was going to be the hardest part of getting to Finland. When I arrived I showed my vaccination card to an official and then my permission papers at passport control. Between the two checkpoints I walked through a virtually empty airport in July, normally vacation season.

On my arrival, it looked like Finland and the world had a grip on the pandemic. Within two weeks, the delta variant had arrived at a time when Finns participate in large events such as music festivals. Many Finns had not yet been able to get their second shot. Most under thirty had not yet had their first shot. This convergence of circumstances has led to a spike in cases that continues to the current moment. My course that started at the beginning of August had both an in-person and on-line option. On the day of the first lecture some 40 people participated online and one was present in person. In the following lectures I spoke to an empty room with at least forty online. Rules still required that I lecture with a mask in case someone came into the lecture hall.

One day historians will examine the world history of Covid-19. I hope they take into account local and national differences. Although at the time of my stay in Finland the rates of vaccination in Finland were lower than in the United States, in many ways felt much safer in Finland than in the US and Oklahoma in particular. Mask wearing was mandatory in more public places and most people wore masks even when it was just recommended. Most people wore the blue disposable surgical masks. In America I had been used to people wearing masks as a fashion statement. I was able to find some nice Finnish design masks made by Finlayson four for ten euros. This is probably the only time I will ever use the words Finlayson and bargain in the same sentence. The only place in which I felt like I was in a koronalinko (literally corona centrifuge, a place where spread takes place) was on the subway in Helsinki. Particular attention was given to hand washing. One could not step into a building without encountering dispensers of hand sanitizer. In the case of one grocery store I frequented there were dispensers in the store’s vestibule, then again as one entered the store proper. Then there were more dispensers at the checkout counter. And if you tried to pay in cash you got a dirty look from the cashier.

Upon leaving Finland I had to do what anyone entering the United States has to do regardless of vaccine status: get a PCR test for Covid. I tested negative. At the same time I was trying to come to grips with the situation I would be facing upon returning home: the start of a new semester at my university where all Covid restrictions were removed despite the spread of the delta variant. As I printed off the negative test result I jokingly thought that a positive result would not have been a bad thing. I would have had to stay in Finland longer and avoid what was indeed chaos at work. 

After the last two years, I take no future travel as guaranteed. I hope to be in Finland for research, teaching, and friends in 2022.

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Published: 06 May 2021

Government Crises

During the first sixty or so years of its experience as an independent state, Finland’s politics were marked by short-lived governments. It was not until the 1980s that a Finnish cabinet remained in office during an entire four-year period between parliamentary elections. Several structural factors contributed to the short lifespan of cabinets. Parliament has always had a multitude of parties with not one party having more than a quarter of the seats in parliament. The calling of early elections has meant the end of a government. Until the 1980s, there was a tradition of governments resigning after a presidential election. Add to these structural factors the political pressures that split coalitions in any democracy. In one hundred two years of independence, Finland has had seventy-six governments.

The term government crisis is used in Finland to describe a cabinet that has either collapsed or about to collapse. My first experience with a government crisis in Finland occurred in December 1982. The coalition which consisted of the Social Democrats, the Center Party, the Swedish People’s Party, and the far-left and mostly communist Finnish People’s Democratic League (SKDL) ended when the SKDL left the government over a proposed increase in defense spending.

In one way, this government crisis was typical of many. After formally submitting its resignation to the president, Prime Minister Kalevi Sorsa was empowered by the president to continue in office and reshuffle the portfolios among the remaining coalition partners. The coalition still held a majority of seats in parliament, although its work was made more difficult since it no longer held the two-thirds of seats then needed to pass budgetary measures without opposition help. In fact, the collapse of many cabinets resulted in most of the parties returning to government, if not immediately then after an election or a short-term caretaker government.

The departure of the SKDL in 1982 would prove of historical significance since it ended an era since 1966 in which the coalition of the Social Democrats, the Center Party, and the SKDL dominated Finnish politics. The end of the so-called “Big Three” or “Popular Front” coalition marked the beginning of a period in which the weight of politics would shift slowly to the right. The SKDL and its major component, the Finnish Communist Party ceased to exist by the early 1990s. In their place a new party, the Left-Wing Alliance was created. It returned to government in 1995-2003 as a partner in the governments of Social Democratic Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen.

Since the end of the popular front in 1982 government crises have been few. Ideological differences between the parties for the most part have narrowed. Coalition partners have made detailed agreements and stuck to them. Since 1982 the only two major government crises occurred in 2003 and 2019. In both cases the crisis lasted a few days and was resolved by the resignation of the prime minister while leaving the coalition intact.

In the summer of 2019 the Popular Front materialized again, but it was no longer the Big Three. The Social Democrats were the largest party still, but the Center was the fourth largest part and the Left Alliance the sixth biggest party. Like in the old Popular Front coalitions, the small Swedish People’s Party is also partner. A party that did not have representation in Parliament in 1982, the Greens, are also partners.

This current coalition under Prime Minister Sanna Marin has received much international attention, mostly because of the fact that the leaders of all five coalition parties are women. Despite the progressive aura around this government and proclamations to foreign audiences as yet another example of the paradise that is Finland, this government has accomplished little in terms of advancing a progressive agenda. This is largely because of the pandemic that has consumed most of the government’s energy. Even many supporters of opposition parties agree that the government and Prime Minister Marin in particular have done well despite everything in keeping the virus in check.

At the end of April the coalition partners entered into their midterm conference. Since the 1980s this conference has become a practice by which the parties revisit their original agreement and negotiate possible adjustments to it. These midterm negotiations drew the coalition to the brink of collapse. The parties were divided over how to handle the budget deficit caused by the pandemic. The main question was over how much to cut with the Center Party pushing for the most severe cuts. Another question was over the question of subsidies for the use of peat as an energy source. The peat is an important but declining energy source in Finland as well as a provider of jobs in rural areas where the Center Party draws its support. The Center Party wanted to weaken the goals for reducing the emissions caused from peat. This put the party at loggerheads with the Greens. For a week the parties negotiated and came to an agreement. More peat use was accommodate by lowering caps on other kinds of greenhouse gas emissions and giving subsidies to peat producers whose product had experienced increases in price and decreases demand. Part of these subsidies will be paid for by raiding the budget on research. So much for a progressive government. Most other state agencies will have their budgets cut.

The backdrop to this crisis is the same backdrop for all of Finnish politics over the last ten years: the far-right Finns Party.  After years of cutting into the support of left-wing parties, the Finns Party’s continued growth now comes out of support from the non-socialist parties, the Center Party in particular. The Center Party is facing in next month’s municipal elections a historical defeat to the Finns Party in the areas in northern and eastern Finland where they have dominated for decades. The Center Party has to show its voters that it still defends the interest of rural Finland. The Center Party will likely become yet another party that thought it could ignore the Finns Party without cost. If the government had collapsed, it would have been difficult to imagine an alternative coalition with majority support in parliament without the Finns Party.