1

Continuities and Discontinuities in Finnish Solidarity Movements

from the 1960s to the Present

Risto Alapuro

Academy of Finland and University of Helsinki

(Paper presented in the seminar “Nordic Civicness Revisited in the Age of Association”,Tallinn, November 23-25, 2006)

1. The problem

In the 1960s global consciousness permeated the principal social movements in Western

Europe manifesting itself in a large-scale solidarity. In "solidarity movements" (Olesen 2005) or

"distant issue movements" (Rucht 2000) of the epoch students and other mainly highly

educated young people in developed industrial countries expressed their solidarity with people

of the "Third World" or the poor global "South." The terms convey the crucial point that these

movements supported causes, which did not directly affect people in the societies where they

appeared. The next wave of solidarity movements, comparable in scope to that in the 1960s

and the 1970s emerged, in the opinion of many observers, in the late 1990s and still continues.

It has been called, for example, alterglobalism (Agrikoliansky, Fillieule & Mayer 2005) or the

new transnational activism (Tarrow 2005), depending on the perspective applied.

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The objective of this paper is to assess these two waves of solidarity movements

in Finland -- the anti-imperialism in the 1960s and the early 1970s, and the movements for

global solidarity at the turn of the 2000s -- and to make comparisons between them.

There are many obvious contextual differences between the two cycles. Today

the world is viewed as one place much more extensively and intensively than forty years ago,

with implications for the perception of "distant" issues among activists. Here the primary object

is not the change itself, however, but a reflection of how the movements in the two periods

solved the problem of making a connection between domestic concerns and distant issues.

Two related aspects of the connection-making seem appropriate in considering continuities and

discontinuities in Finland.

The first question is, how the problem of distance bridging (Rucht 2000) is

solved. How are distant events or grievances of people in other countries framed to make them

a basis for mobilization in the own country (cf. Tarrow 2005, 61-62)? A part of this framing

process involves the nature of representation: how do the activists of the solidarity movement

perceive not only their non-domestic but also their domestic constituency? To what extent and

in which way do the activists see themselves as representatives of aggrieved groups in their

own, developed country, Finland, and not only in "distant" developing countries?

The second aspect stems from the specific role that Finland and other small,

peripheral or at least non-core countries of the prosperous West usually have in the emergence

and "transnational diffusion" (Tarrow 2005, 103-106) of solidarity movements. Both in the

1960s and in the present period, solidarity movements in Finland were adopted from elsewhere,

from big states like France, Britain, or the United States, after they had established themselves

in those countries. To simplify, if the Finns adopt a mode of distance bridging crafted in

France, they do a kind of second-degree bridging work. They adopt a distance bridging that

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already exists elsewhere, shaped by the initiating state's domestic structures, and make (if they

make) of this existing mode their own version, fitting in their domestic conditions. This means

that the dynamics between the perceived domestic injustice and the perceived distant injustice

(and the concomitant construction of the frame defining the domestic and the distant

constituency) may be different in those countries, in which particular movements and their

organizations are created, and in those in which they have been diffused later.

In this paper the focus is on the way the domestic configuration of forces has

shaped solidarity movements. This limitation helps to make comparisons between the periods

feasible and is in line with the importance of adoption in the Finnish case.

2. Anti-imperialism at the turn of the 1970s

Peace and solidarity with developing countries

In Finland, as in so many other Western countries in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, a

dimension in the student radicalism of the epoch involved solidarity with the poor peoples in

Latin America, Africa, and Asia, many of which were painfully undergoing the final phase of

the disintegration of the colonial empires. The war in Vietnam constituted a culmination point

in the substitution of political forms of colonialism for economic ones. Solidarity with he

"Third World" became a part of a broader cycle of militantism that caught the most active

students throughout the Western world and put them against domestic power structures in the

universities and elsewhere in society.

In Finland the starting point was provided by the peace movement of the early

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1960s. Through it emerged a new approach to the outside world and Finland's relation to it,

including the developing countries. A student-based peace association was founded in 1963

and named the Committee of 100 after a British organization supported by Bertrand Russell. It

was in a new and and significant way oriented simultaneously both outward and inward. New

in its outward orientation was a radically pacifist conclusion of the policy Finland should adopt

between the two blocs of the Cold War. But the view had a broader dimension as well: "The

Finnish Committee of 100 never restricted itself to opposing nuclear weapons, (...) but engaged

itself straightaway in Third World questions. The logic was that injustice anywhere is a threat

to world peace" (Soiri & Peltola 1999, 19). "These two dimensions, North-South and East-

West, led the Committee of 100 automatically to stress international work for peace and the

development policy" (Hallman 1986, 26). Members of the Committee were active in founding

solidarity organizations with the peoples of developing countries, such as the Finnish Students'

United Nations Association and the South Africa Committee (Soiri & Peltola 1999, 23-26).

Within Finland advocating unilateral disarmament was extremely provocative,

given the country's fragile position in the shadow of the neighboring superpower, the Soviet

Union. But at issue was not only the defense of Finland in the military sense. In taking the army

as its target the Committee of 100 in fact questioned an entire national-patriotic and profoundly

defensive view of Finnish unity that had reigned in the interwar period, after a failed attempt at

revolution in 1918, and in a modified form had continued to reign during the post-World War

II period. The Civil War of 1918 and its close connection to the contemporaneous Bolshevik

revolution in Russia had engendered a division between a dominant national(ist),

anticommunist culture and a strong popular support for communism, seen by others as the fifth

column of the Soviet Union. This heritage, a strong communist movement on the one hand and

a deeply anticommunist dominant culture, including emphatically the educated class, on the

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other, prevailed still in the beginning of the 1960s. It was a challenge to the predominant

cultural hegemony and the division implied by it that was most provocative in the program of

the Committee of 100 ("pacifists are traitors to the fatherland, [...] and therefore evidently

communists" [Hallman 1986, 15]). In fact, the whole itinerary of the solidarity movement in the

1960s and the early 1970s can be viewed as a deconstruction of this cleavage or as a reaction

to it. Hence the considerable national visibility the Committee had in the mid-1960s.1

In the middle of the 1960s this visibility was coupled with a central position in the

burgeoning student movement. Besides members the Committee had a large number of

sympathizers in other student-dominated organizations, including young people in the parties

of the Left. Many of the most visible figures were close to Social Democrats (see Soiri &

Peltola 1999, 19). Although the demands were radical, the forms of activity were not, in

accordance with the pacifist self-conception, an emphasis on the rationality and the common

sense of the demands, and the orderly Finnish tradition of joint action. Order and calm are

highly valued, reflecting the Scandinavian-type intimate connection between the state and civil

society. Demonstrations that accompanied the diffusion of information and debating were non-

violent. The absence of direct action even in the rules of the Finnish brother organization

provoked astonishment in the British Committee of 100 that had organized spectacular

demonstrations in London and outside American military bases in Britain (Hallman 1986, 29).

Anti-imperialism

The solidarity movement proper began to gather momentum as a part of a broader student

movement especially in 1967-1968. Although the Committee had organized the first Finnish

1Its membership figures were not insignificant either. In 1967 it had one thousand members (Hallman 1986,27). Another estimate speaks of "a couple of thousand members in Helsinki and a few hundred more inother (university) towns" (Soiri & Peltola 1999, 19).

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demonstration against the war in Vietnam, in 1965 in front of the US Embassy (Hallman 1986,

54), soon the attitude to the war and more generally to the use of violent means in the

liberation struggles of the Third World began to divide the peace movement. The non-violent

line continued to prevail in the Committee of 100 itself,2 but it was overwhelmed by a more

militant line that sprang from the midst of the Committee and unreservedly accepted armed

resistance. "We support one-sidedly the Front of National Liberation [of Vietnam], one-sidedly

the revolution, and one-sidedly the progress," as this view was expressed in opposition to the

allegedly "many-sided" and "impartial" view of the majority, considered opportunistic (quoted

in Hallman 1986, 59).

Among various solidarity associations (like the new Vietnam or Cuban friendship

societies and the radicalized earlier ones like the Finnish Students' United Nations Association)

the most important became Tricont, "a study group that aims at gathering and diffusing

information about the world's development problems and their causes," founded in 1968 out of

a study group in the Committee of 100 (Soiri & Peltola 1999, 32). A few of its organizers

were, significantly enough, intellectuals from the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. They

had gotten inspiration from Sweden (Soiri & Peltola 1999, 32), which along with bigger

countries has on many occasions served as a source of inspiration in the adoption in Finland of

movements originated elsewhere. (Also in the introduction of the peace movement in 1963

Swedish-speaking students were active a few months before their Finnish-speaking fellows

[Hallman 1986, 27].)

Imperialism and neocolonialism defined Tricont's view of the development

2"Although we see that in some developing countries violence is often the only alternative to thecontinuation of oppression, we are faced with the same options. Our task is to support the social andpolitical goals of national liberation struggles: freedom of the people, development of democraticinstitutions and economic progress. We are most effective not by furthering violence but non-violent meansof struggle." (Communiqué of the Committee of 100 on national liberation wars in 1967, quoted in Soiri &

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problems and their causes:

The entire activity of Tricont is based on the awareness that the cause of the

problems of the underdeveloped countries lies in international capitalism (...).

Economic development in the industrialized capitalist countries has acquired a

stage at which economic activity must be forcefully extended outside the national

frontiers, in order to guarantee a rapid growth of production and the market for

an increasingly expanding production surplus. Besides, in the own country the

workers' incomes -- as a consequence of determined efforts by worker

organizations -- have acquired such a tolerable level that it has become

impossible to gain any more the largest possible profit from the workforce in the

home country. Therefore it is necessary to use foreign "cheap" workforce, that is,

unprotected workers who have had no chances to improve their living conditions.

Developing countries that are objects of this economic exploitation are usually

former colonies, which even after formal independence remain politically or

economically dependent on the former mother countries or on some other

developed capitalist country and thereby also on the whole economic alliance of

industrial Western countries (into which also Finland is more and more

enthusiastically integrating itself). Economic dependence is completed by political

one, which means that big-power political pressure is exerted particularly from

the side of the United States to maintain oligarchic governments and to put down

national liberation movements. (A presentation of Tricont in 1969, quoted in

Ervamaa 2003, 7.)

This view was not necessarily very militant, if it is compared to propositions and demands in,

for example, France or Italy in the same years (see, e.g., Sommier 1998, 35-39). But it was

open to different emphases. On the one hand the "study group" aspect could be stressed, and

Tricont indeed actively and successfully promoted the introduction and the institutionalization

of the research and teaching on the developing countries in Finnish universities (Ervamaa 2003,

; Soiri & Peltola 1999, 32).

Peltola 1999, 21)

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On the other hand the approach implied a possibility to different degrees of

identification with liberation wars. A formulation was given in the presentation quoted above:

Finland was viewed as belonging into a larger group of developed industrial countries on which

the developing countries were dependent. Therefore Finland allegedly participated, but rather

indirectly than directly, in the exploitation of the poor countries. Development aid was

considered in this perspective: it was said to benefit selfish Finnish interests and to strengthen

non-democratic structures in the underdeveloped countries, thereby reinforcing the dependency

of the Third World peoples (Ervamaa 2005, ). Thus the "imperialism model" replaced the

"development aid model" (see Hallman 1986, 65).

One more, militant approach, which followed developments elsewhere,

postulated that the best way to advance revolution and national liberation in the Third World

was a struggle against capitalism in the home country. An influential impulse to this view was

provided by the visit of André Gunder Frank, a prominent theoretician of underdevelopment, in

Finland in 1969. In Tricont and several other solidarity organizations a connection was

established that implied in principle (but not really in practice) domestic action:

[T]he struggle for this new world order will be waged in each country by its own

people, but with the solidary support of the international worker movement.

Therefore the anti-imperialist struggle in Finland means a struggle against Finnish

big capital and capitalism. Also, this is the best we can do for the oppressed

peoples of the Third World. (...) The struggle of the national liberation

movements in the Third World is an integral part of the contemporary

revolutionary process in the capitalist world. (...) Student movements represent

(...) an orientation that conforms with the anti-imperialist struggle of the national

liberation movements. (Halonen 1969)

Thus the solidarity movement had made in a half decade an itinerary from an extremely vague

distance bridging based on the cause of peace -- "injustice anywhere is a threat to world

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peace," and therefore also to the Finns living in the border zone of the East-West division -- to

a seemingly much more concrete one, based on a verbal identification with the "struggle

against Finnish capitalism." The ensuing emphasis on North-South relations at the expense of

East-West relations did not mean, however, that the latter would have completely lost their

significance -- even though this was an accusation directed by the pacifists to the militants

(Hallman 1986, 65-66). But now the East, and notably the Soviet Union, was viewed in the

frame of the anti-imperialist struggle. As elsewhere in the Western "anti-imperialist" movement,

the criticism was directed not only to the capitalist "first" world, but also, even though in the

Finnish case much more mildly, to the socialist "second" world. The socialist countries with the

Soviet Union as their main representative were considered to aggravate the situation in the

underdeveloped countries because of a denial of support for revolutionary movements in them

(Krokfors 1970, 61-62; Ervamaa 2005, ).

Marxism-leninism

However, the Finnish solidarity movement did not remain in the frame common in Western

student radicalism. It underwent one more metamorphosis and then a decline to a marginal

position. In this final turn the weight of the preceding twentieth-century Finnish history one

more time reappeared, in the form of Finnish communism.

The relationship to Communists had emerged as an issue already with the

entrance of the Committee of 100 onto the political stage, in the sense that students, who in the

previous decades had been one of the most definitely anticommunist groups in the country, had

challenged the national-patriotic unity and the twofold division included in it. Then, in the next

phase, Tricont and related solidarity networks and organizations had gone further to the Left

and even approached the Communists. That is, in the Finnish situation the adoption of the anti-

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imperialist "distant" cause inevitably led to an encounter with the own past, with a bourgeois

cultural hegemony that went back to the Civil War of 1918, with which the accounts had never

been really settled.

Now the settlement was taking place, as an aspect of a broader process of

liberalization (see. e.g., Alapuro 2002), and for the young educated class it occurred, to a

significant degree, in a frame in which solidarity toward Third World revolutions played a

prominent part. The point is that this frame was instrumental in the discovery of the putatively

revolutionary force in the Finnish society, the big Communist party of Finland. It was an

electric encounter: for an appreciable number of young intellectuals, the discovery of the

people in the guise of the working class and Communists as its representative was a genuine

revelation.

But the discovery of the Communist party of Finland was not all. Importantly

enough, to discover a hidden history of the country in the form of Finnish Communists and the

"White lie" of the revolution of 1918 inevitably meant also discovering the Soviet Union, the

traditional arch enemy but also a country and a system inextricably linked to the history of the

Finnish communism from 1918 onwards.

The situation implied two things to the Finnish solidarity movement and its

distance bridging. First, it was unconceivable that anti-Soviet Maoist (or Trotskist) views could

have gained significant ground in Finland. Solidarity with such a major event as the Cultural

Revolution in China could provoke only passing enthusiasm; it became soon eclipsed by the

coming to grips with the traditionally Soviet-oriented communism in the own country. Second,

the predominant tendency in the student radicalism came to ally itself not with the

Eurocommunist majority of the Communist party, but -- which indicates how intense the

settlement with the past was -- with the "Stalinist" minority that continued to closely engage

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itself with the Soviets.

At the turn of the 1970s the link between anti-imperialism and the struggle

against capitalism in Finland was redefined in the marxist-leninist frame assigning the leading

role in the global struggle to the USSR and the socialist camp, and the leading role in the

domestic struggle to the workers led by the minority of the Communist party of Finland.

Through the leninist imperialism theory the major student organization of the time, the Socialist

Student Union, took distance from the "petit-bourgeois" conception of revolution and the

"revolutionary romanticism" and stressed the primary role of the revolutionary action in

Finland. This tendency emerged in 1969 already, even though it gained the upper hand only a

few years later: "Now (...) marxism-leninism should be applied to the Finnish capitalism,

instead of trying to craft revolutionary models for states in Latin America" (Linsiö 1969, 4). In

this view the students had only a secondary role in the division of labor of revolution, alongside

the working class.

This last metamorphosis of the Finnish distant issue movement arrived at the final

conclusion later in the 1970s, with the decline of the student activism. However, even in this

closing phase no concrete action, not to speak of violent action, was initiated for the

revolution, despite militant rhetoric.

All in all, the Finnish solidarity movement of the 1960s and the early 1970s was

clearly marked by the history of the country. Its most closely European phase in the late 1960s

turned out to serve not only as a bridge between the domestic and the distant issues but also as

a bridge from one domestically based version of the solidarity movement to another one.

3. Alterglobalist movement at the turn of the 2000s

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How to bridge the distance?

At the turn of the new millennium both the distant issues and the domestic Finnish

configuration are different from those during the previous wave of action, and thereby also the

distance bridging problem. The neoliberal form of globalization is seen to permeate the fabric

of societies everywhere, linking the global and the local and integrating people in a huge single

system, which does not imply such a clear distinction between "us" and "them" as did the anti-

imperialism frame both in its Third World and in its marxist-leninist variety. As Thomas Olesen

(2004, 27 [emphases added]; cf. Väyrynen 2001, 12) puts it, "the very worldwide character

and relative homogeneity of neoliberal policies has made it relatively easier [than in the 1960s

and the 1970s] to formulate a social critique with global relevance." It is as if the enemy were

everywhere, making it easier to find shared concerns in developed and underdeveloped

countries, but at the same time as if it were so slippery or vague that it is difficult to create a

bridge which seriously takes into the account distant issues and simultaneously makes sense

domestically, in Finland.

The Finnish context is new at least in the sense that apparently no historical

traumas are there waiting to be unlocked, as happened in the 1960s. Even the substitution of

European Union for the Soviet Union as a constraining external context stresses the difference

in the situation. EU is an expression of globalization, but an expression that provides no

unambiguous base for distance bridging. The other thing is that the situation is new simply

because of the preceding wave in the 1960s and the 1970s. That wave has created -- with the

help of continued efforts in the last decades -- an institutional and organizational base, which

serves as a context for the present activism.

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Attac Finland

The work for developing countries that was initiated in various organizations of the 1960s,

including the Committee of 100, has resulted in the establishment of a group of organizations

and administrative structures in this field. Many early activists have been involved in these

organizations and structures, and some of them have become politicians and Members of

Parliament, who have been able to influence the Finnish development aid policy. It relies

heavily on civil society organizations which have a public funding.

When the Finnish solidarity movement began to (re)activate in the mid-1990s to

the extent that the activation provoked references to the hectic years in the 1960s and the

1970s (see, e.g., Wallgren 1996, 131-132; Sundman 2001, 221; Wallgren 2005, 17), the main

civil society actor in the field was called the Service Centre for Development Cooperation

(SCDC). It was founded in 1985 as a common enterprise of 50 different organizations from

Christian associations to the Finland-Cuba society and from political youth organizations to

peace associations, in order to promote and organize volunteer service in developing countries.

Today the Centre has more than 270 member organizations, and its activities are funded,

among other sources, by the Foreign Ministry of Finland. Besides the SCDC, in the 1990s in

this field operated other organizations, such as Trade Union Solidarity Centre of Finland, the

Network Institute for Global Democratization,3 and Fairtrade (see Laine 2005), all of which

are members of the SCDC.

It was especially in this organizational milieu that issues of globalization were

discussed in the late 1990s (Sundman 2001, 228). In the same article in which the director of

the SCDC made this remark in 2001, he also welcomed a new actor in the field, the imminent

"landing" in Finland of the "Attac-network," originated earlier in France (Sundman 2001, 251);

3It emerged from the Finnish follow-up process (1995-1997) to the UN Secretary General's annual reports

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in the founding meeting of Attac Finland later in the same year he became a member of its

working group (Meriläinen 2002, 21).

The development aid context in which Attac "landed" in Finland (it is also a

member of the SCDC) seems indicative of the orientation it has adopted as a distant issue

movement. As the original French chapter (founded in 1998) and the some thirty other national

chapters to date (Uggla 2006, 53), it portrays itself as a pressure group that brings forth

concrete alternatives to the neoliberal form of globalization, which is said to promote the

interests and the welfare of a small minority and to widen inequalities between the North and

the South. It works for a global civil society, and its objective is the prevalence of political

considerations over financial ones, implying notably the so-called Tobin tax (to curb

speculative transactions on currency markets and to finance international development

projects), the cancellation of the debts of the developing countries, and the annulment of the

"tax havens" (Ervamaa 2005, ). The movement sees itself as a part of the global justice

movement that opposes neoliberalism and was active in the big demonstrations accompanying

the meetings of IMF, WTO and World Bank, and in the creation of the World Social Forum.

These questions are definitely "distant" rather than domestic, even though, as just

noted, they have ramifications everywhere. In line with this stress on distant issues are Attac's

contacts with the SCDC and the whole cluster of development organizations, as well as the

active interest and participation in the World Social Forum (see Ylä-Anttila 2003). "It is our

challenge [in the movement for developing countries] to convey impoverished people's

experiences and views and to promote their demands for change as effectively as possible," as

the main task has been formulated (Rönkkö 2005, 165). Domestic demands, viewed from the

global perspective are by no means absent, but they appear to play a clearly secondary role.

on democratization.

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They include a defense of the equality principle of the welfare state and the public services, and

resistance to cuts in social security, to growing income differences, and to the privatization of

state-owned enterprises (Ervamaa 2005, 25). The apparent secondary status of domestic

themes finds support also from a preliminary look at communiqués of Attac Finland during

recent years (www.attac.fi).

This impression of the orientation of Attac Finland parallels Fredrik Uggla's

(2006) finding about the great significance of international issues in the Swedish chapter of

Attac. The finding may seem self-evident, but in his comparative study Uggla found that this

was much less true of Attac's home ground in France (and even of Attac Germany). Unlike in

Sweden, especially in France the most pronounced demands and issues were national and

increasingly so. Uggla (2006, 62-63) links the difference to varying success of the chapters in

the respective countries:

[T]he clearest tendency is the decline of global issues among the demands of

Attac in France and Germany, and the corresponding stress on national and

European issues (...) this reorientation responds to a political calculation in which

concrete (and proximate) demands that can draw adherents are sought (...) it

remains to be noted that Attac has actually not fared equally well in the three

countries. In particular, Attac-Sweden has become politically marginalized to a

much larger extent than in the two other countries (...) In contrast to the situation

in France and Germany, Attac-Sweden has rapidly lost members during the years

since its foundation (...) the relative absence of concrete demands at the national

level that could draw and maintain adherents might bear some relation to the

faltering membership figures and the marginal political position of Attac-Sweden.

Not only the balance between distant and domestic issues seems similar in Finland and Sweden,

but also the trend in the membership figures. The early top figure of some 2500 members in

Attac Finland in 2001-2002 has declined to fewer than 2000 in 2006. In Finland as well the

relative absence of national issues among the demands seems to go hand in hand with the

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relative marginalization of the chapter. Why is it so? Why is this vicious circle (if it is one)

avoided in France (and Germany), but not in Sweden -- and, especially, as it seems, not in

Finland?

A hypothesis can be advanced starting from the relationship of the respective

chapters of Attac to their home countries. Here the question of adoption, or of a second-

degree bridging work, appears relevant. Attac has French origins, and it bears the mark of the

French way to relate domestic problems to global ones, or expresses the French perspective to

globalization and its threats; hence the more or less smooth frame bridging. It is in accordance

with this view that Éric Agrikoliansky, Olivier Fillieule and Nonna Mayer (2005, 73, 24) have

stressed the importance of "internal political transformations" for the forms the

altermondialisme took in France in the 1980s and the 1990s. "La lutte pour une autre

mondialisation n'est pas un mouvement à recrutement direct, mais plutôt une mobilisation de

mobilisations qui se fonde sur la coordination de groupes s'associant, au delà de leurs propres

objectifs, dans une structure nouvelle." In the French case the struggle for "another

globalization" has evolved from a "multiorganizational field," where "diversified struggles" and

organizations having stakes in the French society have fused to create a new movement. (See

also Luhtakallio 2001, 10; Clinell 2001; Ronkainen 2002, 84, 87; Rönkkö 2002, 80.)

This is not what happened in Finland. The Finns adopted the movement,

including its main demands. Even though these make sense in Finland as well, there they get

spontaneously settled in a development cooperation context rather than in a larger national

context, and therefore they are more difficult to make concrete than in France, producing often

rather general or vague bridging formulations: "The global gap in the income division splits

increasingly radically also our society" (Rönkkö 2005, 155), or: "In this world order the global

and the national justice go hand in hand" (Luhtakallio 2001, 9).

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Friends of the Earth

Yet Attac and other development cluster organizations do not constitute alone today's

solidarity movement. Another tendency are the environmental movements (Sundman 2001,

228), represented notably by Friends of the Earth Finland. They are another variety of the

consciousness that "the world is one place" (Robertson 1992, 183), along with the pervasive

penetrating capacity of economy, and as such another specifically contemporary dimension of

the sensitivity to globalization.

On the one hand this trend has links to alterglobalism that stresses the gulf

between the North and the South, but on the other hand in its proximity lie more contentious

and less organized or temporary groups and networks of (eco)activism. Friends of the Earth

was founded in Finland in 1996, in the middle of a cycle of environmental activism and

influenced by it, including the animal rights movement. Rather than being an environmental

movement in a narrow sense, it has adopted, like its mother organization Friends of the Earth

International, the environmental consciousness as the frame for the perception of global and

local issues and their interconnection. Main global issues raised by the Finnish organization are

the climate change and sustainable development, from whose perspective are assessed

questions of world trade and global justice that are common concerns with Attac. Most visible

domestically has been the campaigning against continuing nuclear power plant construction.

(Stranius 2005)

Despite its vigorous start in 1996 (the initial phase of Attac was equally very

active in 2001), its demands, domestic or global, have inspired no extensive movement. A

differentiation has occurred between it and those more radical forms of activism that

accompanied it during its early years and had a global environmental dimension of some kind in

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their agenda. Friends of the Earth Finland has moved into a more moderate direction including,

at maximum, an "open, non-violent citizen disobedience" (Stranius 2005, 323), whereas those

more contentious small, fluctuating and loosely organized groups of activists, connected

through home pages in internet, have on some occasions continued to look for encounters in

street demonstrations and have caused some material damage. Like Attac or Friends of the

Earth, they as well are signs of "another globalization" in the sense that they too are local

expressions of corresponding international activism.4 Peculiar to the sensitivity to disorder is

that their media attention seems to grossly exceed their real weight in the Finnish activism.

That the two main strands rather complete each other than compete with each

other, is shown not only by the membership of both in the SCDC. A survey of members of

Attac Finland shows that remarkably many of its members are engaged in different

environmentally oriented organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Finnish

Association for Nature Conservation, Finnish Nature League, or Animalia – Federation for the

Protection of Animals.5 In accordance with this result, the two political parties reportedly

closest to the members of Attac Finland are the Green Union and the Left Union (the successor

party of the Communists and the left-wing socialists), followed, well behind them, by the Social

Democratic party (Järvelä & Luhtakallio 2002, 32).

4. Continuities and discontinuities

4Examples are Ya Basta!, No Border, and Tottelemattomat (Finnish Disobedients).

5The total number of memberships in these organizations covers 48 percent of the number of those whoparticipated in the member survey of Attac Finland (Järvelä & Luhtakallio 2002, 21), but if the overlappingmemberships are eliminated, the percentage is of course considerably lower.

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The two main forms of today's activism give some clues about continuities and discontinuities

in the Finnish distant issue movements from the 1960s to the 2000s. First of all, in the work for

the developing countries there is an unmistakable continuity both at the institutional-ideological

and the individual level. As stated, the organizational frame of development activity emerged in

the 1960s and the 1970s as a result of the work of the pioneers of the epoch. The members of

the SCDC include such organizations active in those decades as the Committee of 100

(Suomen Sadankomitealiitto), which is a member of the Peace Union of Finland (Suomen

Rauhanliitto), and the Finnish Peace Committee (Suomen Rauhanpuolustajat). It is not

surprising that some prominent individuals of the former epoch also figure in today's

movement. The best-known of them is undoubtedly the present Foreign Minister of Finland,

Erkki Tuomioja, who was a young activist of the Committee of 100 in the 1960s, as is now a

member of Attac. Another aspect is the close relation between the state administration and this

form of activism, implying a certain state-orientation in the latter. As Suvi Ervamaa (2003, 35-

37) has shown, the reliance on the (national) state as a buttress against neoliberal globalization

is pronounced in Attac Finland. The Attac network formed in Parliament in 2001 gathered 40

MPs (20 percent of their total number) mainly from the Greens, the Left Union and the Social

Democrats (it is not active anymore) (Ervamaa 2005, 28).

Finally, a striking indication of continuity is the fact that a few most visible

initiators of Attac Finland were founders of Tricont in 1968; and as happened then, also this

time the Swedish connection was instrumental.

In other words, a continuity there is, but with the earlier phases of the former

solidarity movement only. The alterglobalization frame can be aligned with the development

frame of the early 1960s, and also with the anti-imperialism frame of the late 1960s if the

teleology of emancipation is removed from it, but not with marxism-leninism. The latter

20

discrepancy shows the limits of continuity; the militantism of the 1970s has no followers in

today's activism.

The nature of the continuity also appears in the age structure of Attac Finland.

Interestingly, it has two peaks: the most numerous cohorts are those born in 1945-1956 (27

percent), and those born in 1969-1980 (33 percent) (Purhonen 2005, 263), that is, those who

were young in the 1960s and the 1970s, and those who were young at the turn of the

millennium. The different age groups have a somewhat different relationship to the two main

tendencies of the present solidarity movement, in a predictable manner. The younger are more

often members in the environmentally oriented organizations and the Green Union than the

older, of whom relatively many support the Left Union and even the presently existing tiny

Communist party ( ; Purhonen 2005, 265). Naturally enough, among the older there are

some who in their youth were active in Tricont or members in peace organizations of the time

(Järvelä & Luhtakallio 2005, 21).

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