Finlandization is not for export

Tuesday, June 4th, 2019

After fighting the Soviets in the Second World War, Finland had to deal with an awkward situation, as Jared Diamond explains in Upheaval:

If Finland hadn’t prosecuted its own government leaders, the Soviets would have done so and imposed harsh sentences, probably death sentences.

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After those leaders had served out their sentences in comfortable special Finnish prisons, most of them were voted or appointed back into high public positions.

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Paradoxically, though, those reparations proved to be an economic stimulus, by forcing Finland to develop heavy industries such as building ships and factories-for-export.

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Finland imported especially oil. That proved to be a big advantage for Finland, because it didn’t share the dependence of the rest of the West on Middle Eastern oil supplies.

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Paradoxically for a democratic country that had been fighting for its survival against the communist Soviet Union, Finland’s Communist Party and its allies won a quarter of the seats in the March 1945 free elections for Finland’s parliament, and they tried to take over the police force.

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The Soviet Union had already occupied East Germany, was in the process of engineering communist take-overs of four Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania), engineered a successful coup in Czechoslovakia, and supported an unsuccessful guerrilla war in Greece.

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The Paasikivi-Kekkonen line reversed Finland’s disastrous 1930’s policy of ignoring Russia. Paasikivi and Kekkonen learned from those mistakes. To them, the essential painful realities were that Finland was a small and weak country; it could expect no help from Western allies; it had to understand and constantly keep in mind the Soviet Union’s point of view; it had to talk frequently with Russian government officials at every level, from the top down; and it had to win and maintain the Soviet Union’s trust, by proving to the Soviet Union that Finland would keep its word and fulfill its agreements.

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Paasikivi, and then Kekkonen, were so successful in developing a trusting relationship with Stalin, and then with Khrushchev and with Brezhnev, that, when Stalin was once asked why he had not tried to maneuver the Communist Party into power in Finland as he had in every other Eastern European country, he answered, “When I have Paasikivi, why would I need the Finnish Communist Party?”

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For the Soviet Union, Finland was its major source of Western technology and its major window onto the West. The result was that the Soviets no longer had any motivation to take over Finland, because Finland was so much more valuable to the Soviet Union independent and allied with the West than it would have been if conquered or reduced to a communist satellite.

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Because Soviet leaders trusted Presidents Paasikivi and Kekkonen, Finland chose not to turn over its presidents as in a normal democracy but maintained those two in office for a total of 35 years.

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Finland’s government and press avoided criticizing the Soviet Union and practiced voluntary self-censorship not normally associated with democracies.

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“Finlandization is not for export.”

Comments

  1. Graham says:

    On some level it may not have been for domestic consumption, as there were a lot of revelations about the presence of Soviet agents and influencers in Cold War Finland in the past decade or so. Their neutrality was recoloured a bit.

    But it’s hard to argue with what works, especially if it works under the most dire circumstances. They got to stay independent, out of a Soviet military or [formal] economic bloc, and more or less govern themselves. Few nations manage a situation like they had half as well.

    I have earlier mentioned that Canadian wild card political commentator Gwynne Dyer once advocated Finlandization for Canada. Toward the United States, mind you, but still.

    It’s hard to remember now but the term had surprisingly wide currency in the early to mid 80s and was being thrown about as an option for a lot of countries that were emphatically not in comparable situations to Finland.

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