Download Historian käyttö ja väärinkäyttö

Living Next Door to the Bear
How 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 Hentilä
Professor of Political History
University 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 Republic
1956-1981
Mauno Koivisto
(born 1923)
President of the Republic
1982-1994
Martti Ahtisaari
born 1937
President of the Republic
1994-2000
Tarja Halonen
born 1943
President of the Republic
2000-2012
Sauli Niinistö
born 1948
President of the Republic
2012-
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)
Finlandization
”Welcome Comrade
Kekkonen!
Who would ever even
think about that you could
be Finlandized!”
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!