Living Next Door to the BearHow Finland managed to survive as a Western Democracy?Finland lecture at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Group Mare Balticum – 2013 from the USA

Seppo HentiläProfessor of Political HistoryUniversity of Helsinki January 29, 2013

Finland

In the North of Europe, between Russia and Sweden

Helsinki on the 60th northern parallel

Surfice Area: 330 000 Sqkm

Common border with Russia: ca. 1 200 km

From the 12th Century to 1809 Swedish Territory

From 1809 to 1917 autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russien Empire

Since 1917 independent Republic

Important historical turning points – Finland during the 20th century

Declaration of Independende: December 6, 1917

Civil war between ”Whites” and ”Reds”: Spring 1918 – 36 000 victims

Winter War from November 1939 to March 1940: Finland managed to prevent the Soviet invasion

In June 1941 Finland joined Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa; ca. 200 000 German troops were stationed in Northern Finland

The war aim was to conquer territories which had been ceded to the Soviet Union in the peace of the Winter War 1940

Continuation War 1941-1944

Finnish troops occupied large territories in Russian Karelia – until to lake Onega

Finland was Germany’s “Waffenbruder” or co-belligerent; no treaty of alliance was signed

Finland’s separate peace with the USSR on September 19, 1944

War against the German troops which were still in the North of Finland

During the last few years heated debates on the nature of the Finnish-German cooperation

Was Finland waging a “Separate War”?

Finland lost the war but it was not occupied by the Soviet troops; Helsinki remained one of the three European capitals which was not occupied by the enemy troops during the Second World War (the other two capitals were London and Moscow)

Finland remained a Western country, but it was a neighbour of the Soviet Union and politically within the Soviet influence, while also having a strong and active Communist Party (ca. 25 per cent of votes in the parliamentary election of 1945)

Contemporaries experienced the situation as threatening, and in the West Finland's position was considered difficult in the extreme

But Finland survived; she was the only country within the Soviet sphere of influence which did not become a communist satellite at the end of the 1940s

Marshall C. G. Mannerheim(1867-1951)

Commander of the Finnish Army during the war and the first President of the Republic after the war 1944-1946

J. K. Paasikivi(1870-1956)

President of the Republic 1946-1956

Urho Kekkonen(1900-1986)

President of the Republic1956-1981

Mauno Koivisto(born 1923)

President of the Republic1982-1994

Martti Ahtisaariborn 1937

President of the Republic1994-2000

Tarja Halonenborn 1943

President of the Republic2000-2012

Sauli Niinistöborn 1948

President of the Republic2012-

Finland’s democracy and the Western judicial and social system all survived, the market economy became a flourishing success, and by the 1960’s Finland developed into a welfare state with a standard of living among the highest in the world

How did this kind of “succes story” become possible?

The “years of danger”, 1944-1948

The terms of the interim peace agreed in Moscow on September 19, 1944 were hard on Finland

The province of Karelia in the South-East was lost, ceded to the USSR, and the Karelian refugees, 400 000 people = ten per cent of the Finnish population, had to be resettled further west;

War reparations were to he paid;

The highest members of the wartime political leadership were to be put on trial

A Soviet naval base was set up just 20 kilometres from Helsinki, and, what was worse, to the west of the capital on the Porkkala peninsula, which was to he leased to the Soviet Union for 50 years

The Allied (Soviet) Control Commission, a body established by the USSR and Great Britain, arrived in Helsinki to monitor implementation of the terms of the peace treaty

Free elections were held as early as March 1945, at a time when the rest of Europe was still at war

There was fear of Soviet intervention, but despite requests by the leaders of the Finnish Communist Party they did not receive any concrete support from their comrades in the Kremlin

Finland left between the blocs

In February 1948 Stalin proposed to Finland the same sort of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance treaty as the Soviet Union had just concluded with Hungary and Romania

The Communists had just seized power in Prague

Was Finland to go the way of Czechoslovakia?

The Swedish press was already writing that Finland's absorption into the Communist bloc was complete in all but name

The Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (FCMA) between the Republic of Finland and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was signed in Moscow on April 6, 1948

The Finnish-Soviet treaty differed decisively from those between the USSR and her satellites: Finland was entitled to remain outside disputes between the superpowers and was not forced into military pact with the USSR

The military articles obligated Finland to defend her own territory “if Germany or some other country allied to Germany were to attempt to invade the Soviet Union through Finland”

Under Article 2 Finland undertook to negotiate for Soviet assistance in the event of being unable to resist the invader unassisted; this so-called 'consultation article' was from the Finnish point of view the most dangerous part of the treaty

During the late 1960s Brezhnev refused to accept any direct statement on Finnish neutrality, preferring instead the tortuous formulation of "the Paasikivi-Kekkonen line, which is based on the treaty of cooperation and mutual assistance and includes Finland's intention to pursue a peaceful policy of neutrality"

The friction in Finnish-Soviet relations was due to Finland's attempts at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s to reorganise her political and trading relations with the West, this time with the European Economic Community (EEC)

”Welcome Comrade Kekkonen!

Who would ever even think about that you could be Finlandized!”

Finlandization

During the 1960s, people in West Germany began to talk of Finnlandisierung – Finlandization

Taken literally, this meant becoming like Finland

It was seen as the fate awaiting other Western countries if they gave too much ground to Communism

As a term, Finlandization became indelibly engraved on Finland's image abroad, and it also left its mark on historiography

Was Finland actually Finlandized, and, if so, what did this mean in practice? It was generally thought in the West that the Soviet Union interfered in Finland's internal affairs and forced the Finns to do as it wanted

It is beyond question that some Finnish politicians pursued their own interests in unscrupulous fashion by bowing to Moscow more deeply than was really necessary

Kekkonen sometimes used to say: ”When you bow to the East you bare your bottom to the West, and vice versa," and it was through such an approach that Finland managed to secure her vital economic interests in the West

In using the concept of Finlandization, it is thus essential to examine the “angle of bow” and to distinguish when it was a question of essential management of Soviet relations in the national interest, when again plain grovelling in pursuit of selfish political advantage

Finland's relative economic growth from the 1960’s to the early 1990’s was more rapid than that of any other OECD country

This development saw the poor, predominantly agricultural Finland grow during the 1960’s and 1970’s into a Nordic welfare state with one of the highest standards of living in the world During the decades when Urho Kekkonen was in power there was unquestionably a fair amount of grovelling in relations with the Soviet Union But at the same time Finland experienced in the cultural arena, and above all in terms of popular culture, a process of Americanization, a process even more marked in Finland than in the other Nordic countries

In contrast, there was precious little cultural influence from Russia amongst the ordinary people of Finland; this was to some extent a problem, in that so few Finns took the trouble to even learn Russian language From whatever angle one chooses to view Finland's survival, from the situation in the 1940’s or from the result in the 1990’s, it can certainly be considered a minor miracle

Finland managed to preserve the integrity of her most important political and social institutions

Alone among those ten European countries which gained their independence in 1917-18, Finland has been able to continue uninterruptedly on her own chosen path

Actually, Finnish democracy can nowadays be considered one of the oldest in Europe, in the sense that it has continued without interruption since 1917

In 2006 Finland was celebrating the 100th anniversary of universal suffrage for men and women at the same time

Finland after the end of the Cold War

The break-up of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990’s coincided with deepening integration in the West

Without the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Finland would not have been able to join the new, political phase in European integration

When the members of the EC signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, establishing the European Union, not many people in Finland dreamed that they might participate in such political integration in the near future

Less than three months had elapsed from the break-up of the Soviet Union, when the Finnish government applied to the membership of the Ec in March 1992

Austria and Sweden had also recently applied to join, and Norway renewed its earlier application soon afterwards

The question of joining the EU was in Finland deeply controversial

In October 1994, the matter was submitted to a consultative referendum Security policy and agriculture emerged as the central issues in the public debate

The supporters of the membership saw a unique opportunity to join the West, to which Finland had in fact belonged for centuries, and the EU membership would confirm Finland’s Western identity

Political integration was also seen as a source of security, particularly against the background of chaotic conditions in Russia

Opponents of the EU membership claimed that the EU would deprive Finland of its sovereignty, opening of borders would bring refugees, crime and foreign influence

The farmers feared for their profession: given the harsh climatic conditions, Finnish agriculture could never compete in an open market, they maintained

The supporters of EU membership won the referendum, but the margin was narrow at just under six percentage points (56.9 - 43.1)

The nation was divided: support for the membership was strongest in southern Finland and among well-educated city-dwellers and young people By contrast, the less-educated, the older generation and the inhabitants of eastern and northern Finland were mainly opposed to membership

Finland became a member of the EU on January 1, 1995; it was a transition from a country in the Eastern sphere of influence into an outpost of the West with incredible speed

Finland and the NATO – shall they never meet?

Do any of the previous turning-points of our country’s history provide a point of comparison?

Can we liken the Finnish EU membership to the arrival of the Roman Catholic Christianity on the Finnish peninsula in the mid-twelfth century; or to the annexation of the Grand Duchy of Finland by the Russian Tsar in 1809; or to the Declaration of Independence in 1917; or to Finland’s survival of the wars of 1939-1944?

Thank You for your attention!