1.1 Opening Finland to the World

Between 1945 and the Helsinki CSCE meeting in 1975, personalities and institutions in Finland’s government discussed the role of the state in the country’s international cultural relations, both in the frame of the Cold War and in the context of a rapidly changing welfare state. After a period of war and conservativism, the reality of Finland’s opening up to the world could be seen in the emergence of new cultural forms, new movements of population, new economic activities, and a surge in international trade contacts.Footnote 1 Behind these spontaneous changes, one could also discern the handiwork of a series of public institutions and personalities, trying to channel these changes into certain directions, modernize Finland’s society and its position in the world.

This book is an effort to understand what international cultural relations meant for Finland’s foreign policy managers, and to document the development of state activism in this domain during the first three decades of the Cold War.Footnote 2 The process through which the Finnish state aimed at channelling and strengthening the country’s cultural relations overlapped with several aspects of Cold War Finland: foreign policy, domestic cultural policy, domestic political debates, economic considerations, and national identity debates. For some, it was also seen as a way—indeed a duty—to showcase Finland’s participation in international cultural relations, and contribute to the stabilization and pacification of international relations through cultural contacts. It was also framed into a series of concrete aspects of trade, economy, educational and scientific purposes the Finnish state tried to achieve through exchange programmes, study trips abroad, cultural exports or the use of culture to brand Finland as a trustworthy economic and political partner. As an administrative endeavour, finally, Finland’s cultural diplomacy was the object of a tug of war between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and between the state authorities and various private or semi-autonomous organizations.

The Finnish politician Paavo Lipponen reflected on these developments in a long essay published in 1993 by the daily Helsingin Sanomat.Footnote 3 Finland certainly had gone some way since 1945. At the end of the war, the country had to extract itself from the ruins of its wartime alliance with Nazi Germany. It was isolated, impoverished and dominated by its totalitarian neighbour. By the end of the Cold War, Finland had developed into a prosperous welfare state involved in relations with both East and West. In 1993, it was negotiating its accession to the EU. From this perspective, the compromises involved in Finland’s Cold War position, such as accepting a measure of Soviet influence in both foreign and domestic matters, could be seen either as a small price to pay for reconstruction and stabilization or as a faustian bargain, a stain on the soul of a democratic nation.

Part of Lipponen’s essay dealt especially with the reconstruction of Finland’s cultural contacts with the world. Finland had changed since the war, its youth had adopted foreign models and discovered the world beyond their country’s immediate neighbourhood and its relation with the Soviet Union. Private organizations, semi-public societies and public authorities had worked to develop and coordinate the country’s opening to international contacts. For Lipponen, this movement was not spontaneous: Finland did not internationalize as much as it had been internationalized. Starting in the mid-1960s, the Finnish authorities took upon themselves to build a “cultural state” (sivistysvaltio) as an aspect of the “welfare state” (hyvinvointivaltio):Footnote 4 a series of institutions supporting the democratization and the strengthening of education, technology, science and the arts. This process was favoured by the arrival in power after the war of political figures situated left of centre and emphasizing democratic access to education, knowledge and the arts.Footnote 5 It also had an international dimension: it corresponded with a will to reconstruct Finland’s international contacts after 1945, broaden its cultural horizons, adapt its cultural relations to the Cold War, and develop a policy of neutrality dominated by relations with the USSR.

Amongst the personalities whom Lipponen thinks helped and guided Finland’s cultural modernization and internationalization, he mentions Kalervo Siikala, a civil servant in the Ministry of Education.Footnote 6 One could suggest additions to this list: Reino Oittinen,Footnote 7 a politician, educator and early advocate of Finland’s accession to UNESCO; Jaakko Numminen,Footnote 8 the long-term chancellor of the Ministry for Education from the 1960s to the 1980s; Kalevi Sorsa,Footnote 9 a UNESCO civil servant who became Foreign Minister in the early 1980s; Max Jakobson,Footnote 10 a journalist, diplomat and productive non-fiction writer, and tens of civil servants working in the ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs. Lipponen emphasized the role these characters, mostly involved in state agencies, played in modernizing Finnish society and opening it to the world.Footnote 11

The process Lipponen gives his generation credit for was also linked to Finland’s geopolitical position. In the context of the 1950s–1960s, extracting Finland from the war meant first of all building stable relations with the Soviet behemoth, a process where culture and Finland’s international reputation became important tools. Finland was both “finlandized” by the influence of the Soviet Union and “westernized” through its economic and cultural integration, spontaneous and state-led. In a delicate geopolitical position, the expansion of the state’s cultural activism was an attempt at controlling various aspects of public life in order to keep them in sync with a carefully constructed official foreign policy line. Finland’s cultural diplomacy, with its corollaries in educational, artistic and scientific contacts, depended thus on the development of the Finnish welfare state, Finland’s foreign policy in the Cold War and the evolutions of Finland’s national identity.

1.2 Shifting Notions of Cultural Diplomacy

Cultural and public diplomacy studies are a maze of terms and categories, used to corral a large and rich field of activities. Technical issues such as scientific and technological contacts or exchange programmes have a tendency to spread towards more general matters of foreign policy, image and identity. In a policy field where state action often lags behind private initiatives, the private and public spheres easily entangle, making studying international cultural contacts extremely difficult—even in Finland, a small, tightly-knit polity.Footnote 12 Jozef Bátora and Monika Mokre open their edited volume with a one-size-fits-all definition of cultural diplomacy, as the way “political entities use culture to support their soft power potential, to generate goodwill, to frame international agenda in particular ways, to erect and re-enact boundaries and/or to create societal linkages across them”.Footnote 13 Coping with the same problem, Nicholas J. Cull proposed a narrower definition of cultural diplomacy as “the dissemination of cultural practices as a mechanism to promote the interests of an actor”. This points to the use by state authorities of culture in a strategic, operative sense, and covers most of the ground we are going to study in this book both in terms of practices and in terms of agents.Footnote 14 Cultural diplomacy as we see it in the Finnish case has its origins in state actions, in definitions of the national interest, and in debates about national identity.

Debates about a definition of cultural diplomacy are linked to debates about culture in the history of international relations. In a recent article, Patrick Finney analysed the current state of affairs in international history after the cultural turn, concluding that approaches drawing on cultural studies are now firmly engrained in the heart of the discipline, rejuvenating it with new questions.Footnote 15 Finney advocates a form of profound engagement with the categories and preoccupations of cultural studies, susceptible to completely change the main gist of international history. But he also mentions a more modest approach, which is the one of this book, for which “attending to cultural factors was often justified on the rather more empirical grounds that it produced a fuller picture of the fabric of policy-making”. Culture has added new layers of ground to the floodplains of international history, through which the historian can dig to better understand various aspects of foreign policy and international relations. As we look at official decisions and state policy, culture, representations, images and narratives are now an essential part of what we look for. To understand statecraft without culture would be near impossible, but to study culture without power would yield equally weak returns in terms of elements of answers to what constitute, still, the fundamental questions of international history:Footnote 16 the structures of international and transnational relations through history, the actions of states and other agents, the ways they organized their relations, under which influences and to what ends.

The Finnish case provides a fertile ground for such exercise: culture and image were not just an afterthought in the country’s foreign policy, but an important part of Finland’s relation with the world, institutionalized and thought about, resourced and coordinated by civil servants. Hence, the richness of material available and the fact that tendering to these aspects provides a better, more life-like picture of Finland’s foreign relations and position in Cold War Europe: it highlights the interplay of statecraft and culture, representations and strategic agency, the intersection of private activities and public efforts to coordinate them. The observer can connect broad cultural assumptions and representations to actual policies, the activities of private agents to the institutions of the state, or domestic developments to foreign relations. Pascal Ory underlined the way in which different national instances of the use of culture in foreign policy can be studied as localized patterns of different variables, positions on a series of axes: from official diplomacy to private relations, from structured policy to informal contacts, from massive campaigns to punctual events, from short- to long-term policies, from a field of private agents to a field dominated by public institutions.Footnote 17 My approach will be to consider the way cultural relations were conceived by their own protagonists in Finland’s state agencies: were they mostly about the construction of national identity, the necessities of foreign policy, or the facilitation of economic and commercial endeavours?Footnote 18

Approaching culture in Finland’s foreign policy means looking at the way a variety of elements (the arts, cultural phenomena, science and education) were instrumentalized in the state’s strategic planning, and looking at how both local cultural trends and the geopolitical context of the Cold War shaped the process. A set of public policies defined by cultural representations was also seen as a strategic tool deployed in a certain context by various actors in order to try and reach strategically defined aims. This book will present tangible structures occupied and managed by people with constructed meanings and representations, institutions embedded in national contexts. Cultural diplomacy in the Finnish case will be studied as those parts of the state’s foreign activities dealing with cultural matters, using culture for various purposes. The book will concentrate on isolating these purposes, describing the creation of dedicated public institutions and their various activities. Working on historical practices of cultural diplomacy returns us to the notion that the use by state authorities of culture in foreign policy is a part of statecraft, a means in service of conceptions of the national interest. The recent insistence on an altruistic understanding of cultural diplomacy, as an attempt at fostering dialogue between nations in a connected world, might leave us insufficiently prepared for studying the historical use of culture by sovereign states.

In his recent work, Guillaume Tronchet invites us to remember that “the concept of cultural diplomacy, before being a useful category of analysis, was a category of practice, which foreign ministries used to incorporate under their administrative control all international activities distinct from military, economic or political considerations”.Footnote 19 The Finns used a varied vocabulary to designate the ways the state used culture and cultural issues in foreign policy. It ranged from terms referring to pure propaganda efforts, aiming at promoting a certain image of Finland abroad, to more altruistic notions on the use of culture to foster international dialogue and modernize the country. A part of the book will thus be dedicated to exposing the ways the protagonists themselves defined the use of culture in foreign policy and the hopes they invested in it. Another important aspect is the concrete organization of cultural diplomacy: for a small state, smaller central budgets and resources make things more complex and impose specific ways of doing things, such as the extensive private-public cooperation I will describe.Footnote 20

This book will revolve around a narrow definition of cultural diplomacy, as a set of activities linked to the country’s international cultural relations, coming out of official policy and thought about strategically as parts of the country’s foreign policy. This concentration on state activities does not encompass the entirety of Finland’s international cultural contacts, and in many cases such as scientific contacts or artistic collaboration, the Finnish state was far from being the main protagonist. It will force this book to consider also semi-autonomous or private organizations that worked with the state.

I will however mostly focus on culture and image in the activities of agents and institutions located in or revolving around two ministries: the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education. This arrangement will provide the book with a mooring, a set of people and organizations to look at, a repository of archives to work with. It is also in tune with the development of the book’s subject matter, as cultural relations were increasingly construed in Finland as an important sector to be supported by the state, discussed and institutionalized by a group of civil servants. Increasing coordination by the Finnish state of activities linked to cultural relations abroad was a conscious effort trying to pull Finnish society and its spontaneous cultural contacts into certain directions corresponding to definitions of the national interest.

While my insistence on the strategic use of culture suggests the country’s foreign policy as the main context of the book, another background force is domestic and identity-based developments. Cultural diplomacy appears as a process through which the “imagining” of a political group’s own identity as well as the workings of its cultural, scientific and artistic fields were strategically interpreted and coordinated by state institutions as part of the country’s foreign policy.Footnote 21 Despite its focus on the strategic use of culture, however, this book is not unsensitive to the culturalist approach emphasized by Finney:Footnote 22 Finnish cultural diplomacy will appear also as an extension of domestic political and identity debates, with roots in auto- and xeno-stereotypes, local idiosyncrasies of taste and organizations and local attempts to interpret transnational trends.Footnote 23 The Finnish state’s support, control and use of culture and its promotion of certain forms of international cultural contacts over others contributed to a definition of the cultural traits of an ideal national community and their representation and promotion abroad. This suggests that cultural diplomacy must, apart from its strategic role in the country’s foreign policy, be considered also in relation to and as the expression of larger trends of cultural policy and the definition of a national identity.

Cultural diplomacy in Finland is thus at the same time all of three things: an important sphere of foreign policy in itself, this fourth pillar of foreign policy Willy Brandt talked about in 1966;Footnote 24 a state activity aimed at domestic audiences and at influencing the structures of society; a facet of the definition of a national Finnish culture. Cultural relations can be used as ways for the state to foster what civil servants would consider modernity,Footnote 25 not unlike recent nation branding campaigns concerned with both the national and the international.Footnote 26

1.3 Culture and Small Nations During the Cold War

Culture has been integrated in Cold War studies as an important dimension, one of the reasons why the Cold War went the way it went.Footnote 27 Studies dealing with the cultural aspects of the Cold War have, however, mostly dealt with culture as a front of the bipolar ideological fight. Propaganda, attempts at influencing public opinions or the ideological quarrel between blocs have been emphasized.Footnote 28 In a victorious narrative describing the Cold War as a “50-years war”Footnote 29 ending up with the victory of the Western bloc, détente does not have a place, and Europe barely figures: the most important elements are the activities of the Great Powers, their titanic struggle ending up with the death of one at the hand of the other.

However, publications have also started to consider Europe and especially the Nordic Countries beyond the paradigm of great powers and confrontation.Footnote 30 Scandinavia and Northern Europe have seen a number of studies looking at inter-bloc cultural interaction and the Nordic Countries’ use of culture and image in the Cold War.Footnote 31 In their 2004 book, Rana Mitter and Patrick Major insisted on the necessity to look at the Cold War’s home fronts and their specific developments, not only in the United States but also elsewhere, in small states and peripheral places.Footnote 32 Studying Finland’s cultural diplomacy forces one to take such a step aside: a peripheral small state, Finland appears as an interesting example of the role of small European states as in-betweeners during the Cold War, and of the role of local developments in shaping responses to the context of the Cold War. The international behaviour of the smaller nations of Northern Europe and their supposed exceptionalism has been the object of a certain amount of scholarly interest, a good part of it emphasizing the importance of their reputation in giving them a standing beyond their apparent capacities.Footnote 33

This quest for alternative views of the Cold War has also brought scholars to look at moments of begrudging cooperation between the blocs, interstitial spaces and strategies of coping with the environment created by the Cold War. Oliver Bange and Poul Villaume criticized a Cold War scholarship emphasizing confrontation between blocs and forgetting moments of cooperation and (mostly) peaceful cohabitation.Footnote 34 Cities, regions and entire states have defined strategies of survival in-between blocs, specific ways of manoeuvring through the Cold War, using margins of manoeuvre and channels of influence.Footnote 35 Some “places”, both in the abstract and concrete sense, have seen interactions and cooperation between East and West. Some have used their interstitial situation to their advantage, while others have interpreted the Cold War context at variance with the great trends of the bipolar conflict. For some, the Cold War has been before everything the end of World War II and the construction of a new world, or a period of political, economic and social changes, or a rethinking of their national identity in a specific international context. By titling his book Cold Wars in the plural, Lorenz Lüthi aptly reminded his reader of this multiplicity of local versions of the bipolar conflict.Footnote 36

Localized case studies, in this context, allow one to consider different patterns of narratives and agency, chronological context and global trends, and different configurations of actors in different settings: Finland is interesting both in itself and as an example of various Cold War evolutions and international phenomena. It provides us with a different view on the cultural Cold War than the one provided by studies concentrating on great powersFootnote 37 or aiming at theoretical generalization. The Cold War, as we will see, was not the only context in which Finnish cultural diplomacy developed, despite its importance as a structure.Footnote 38 It may have depended also on developments such as the expansion of the welfare state, social and economic modernization, or certain visions of Finland’s position in the world. One example of such localized development is Finland’s perception of itself as a periphery: Marja Jalava, Stefan Nygård and Johann Strang have insisted on the need to look at small and peripheral actors through asymmetries in the transmission of ideas and intellectual backgrounds, assimilation of or resistance to external, global trends.Footnote 39 Small states and peripheral, interstitial places are intellectual spaces where the intractability of the narrative of great powers’ Cold War confrontation can be questioned or at least re-interpreted.Footnote 40

In all these fields, Finland is a particularly rich case, allowing one to consider a specific form of cultural diplomacy beyond models tailor-made for great powers and often brought wholesale to studying smaller states. The country had a developing and modernizing economy and society, changing dramatically in the years between 1945 and the late 1970s. It had its own way of organizing cultural policy in a welfare state, a corporatist organization that spilled over in foreign relations. As a small state, it had a strong and developed reflection on image policy and self-identity, alongside robust debates about culture, modernity, the role of elites and contacts with the world. Its position as a small country closely tied to the USSR contributed to tensions in its domestic and foreign policies, but also made it more interesting in the eyes of the West than it would have been without this relation with the Soviet Union.

1.4 Literature and Sources

The focus of this book, set mostly on the Finnish state and its conception of Finland’s international cultural relations, has practical reasons: despite the size of the country, studying the entirety of Finnish society’s cultural relations with the world during the Cold War would be a daunting task difficult to satisfactorily fulfil in the length of a single book. Finland’s cultural history has been presented in multi-volume series emphasizing also international contacts as a part of a cultural whole.Footnote 41 Considering Finnish public central institutions and their views regarding the use of culture, science and education in foreign policy, this book is allowed to lean on well-defined archival material and studies dealing with Finland’s cultural foreign relations.

Finland’s international position and foreign policy during the Cold War have been the objects of robust scholarly scrutiny, in Finland obviously but also elsewhere.Footnote 42 Cultural matters and Finland’s public and cultural diplomacy during the Cold War, however, haven’t been the main interests of Finnish historical studies, which remain largely dominated by political relations with the USSR. Studies in Finland’s cultural relations with the world, however, have developed in several directions. Researches on the evolutions of Finnish national culture in an increasingly international and open environment have beneficiated from an unabated editorial and academic fascination with the contours of Finnish culture and national identity.Footnote 43 Studies have also detailed the spreading to Finland of cultural trends, especially coming from the United States,Footnote 44 as well as various aspects of cultural relations with the Eastern bloc such as the role of friendship societies.Footnote 45 There has been a host of specific studies on scientific, technical and artistic contacts, the international relations of various organizations, from sites of higher learningFootnote 46 to municipalities, from companies to language teachers, from diaspora associationsFootnote 47 to exchange organizations such as the Youth for Understanding’s Finnish chapter.Footnote 48 All of these could be described as dealing with the internationalization of cultural practices in Finland during the Cold War. Studies have also looked at Finland as the receiving end of other states’ cultural diplomacy, trade promotion or propaganda.Footnote 49 Research describing bilateral cultural relations with various countries and the image of Finland in these countries have also been a staple of this editorial production.Footnote 50 Finally, studies of Finland’s postwar cultural developments have also described the spontaneous “internationalization” of the Finnish cultural landscape.Footnote 51

Recently, some publications have worked to present and make sense of those parts of Finland’s diplomacy dealing with cultural relations, by outlining the contours of a rhetoric of neutrality,Footnote 52 considering Finland’s image and public diplomacy towards certain states and regions,Footnote 53 or comparing Finland’s case with other Nordic Countries. Some rare researches have emphasized the way culture was used in times of crises by Finland’s foreign policy: Heikki Rausmaa’s PhD thesis describes how, in the late 1980s, while the Finnish state could not officially endorse the Baltic liberation movements, cultural relations and other means were used to support them indirectly.Footnote 54 Access to international organizations was, for Finland, an extremely important aspect of how the country expanded its international reach and especially its international cultural relations. The UN and its ancillary organization UNESCO were one of the first postwar international organizations Finland joined, but Finland’s relations with UNESCO have garnered only little studies.Footnote 55 More is needed to understand the patterns of relations between domestic Finnish institutions and international organizations. Exchange and stipend practices from and to Finland, for example, have been seldom described outside of official reports.Footnote 56

One aspect of our subject that has been especially researched is the specific field of cultural relations with the Eastern bloc, and particularly with the USSR. Studies have long concentrated on the semi-public organizations managing cultural relations with the USSR, especially the Finland-Soviet Union Society. In 2002, Ville Pernaa’s PhD directed analytical light on the activities of Finnish ministries, by studying the creation and development of the Soviet Institute (Neuvostoliitto-instituutti) working inside the Finnish Ministry of Education. Pernaa’s research was ground-breaking in that it looked at Finland’s official cultural diplomacy towards the East as the result not only of interactions between private and public actors but also of policy developments inside the Finnish public sector: the institute was discussed intensely between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, with different logics pulling it in different directions. Pernaa also emphasized the way the Finnish state used culture for various purposes, including buttressing its relations with the USSR, finding educational outlets for students, or promoting exports. But Pernaa’s work has had only a few followers willing to continue studying the various layers of public institutions and policy managing Finland’s cultural policy overseas.

However, cultural relations with the East in particular haven’t been laid to rest, and remain an important subject of historical research and political polemics in Finland. The subject was somehow re-ignited in 2018 by the journalist Leena Sharma, whose pamphlet on relations between the Finnish cultural milieu and the USSR marshalled a string of anecdotes in the service of a foregone conclusion on Finland’s cultural elite’s cosy if not traitorous relations with the USSR during the Cold War.Footnote 57 Sharma’s book exemplifies a recent critical return on the real or imaginary excesses of Soviet influence in Cold War Finland, in which the history of the Cold War is used as a tool to justify current policy options or to delegitimize political and public personalities in the present day. More recently and more seriously, Simo Mikkonen’s study on the role of the arts in Finno-Soviet relations during the early Cold War came in 2019 to rejuvenate this field of studies.Footnote 58 Mikkonen was already well-known for several contributions to the study of Cold War cultural relations,Footnote 59 and his book brought forward a wealth of details on the specificities of Soviet cultural activities in Finland.

Based on both Finnish and Russian sources, Mikkonen’s book certainly set the bar to clear for any coming attempts to study Finno-Soviet cultural relations. He highlights the role of private or semi-private organizations in Finland and the influence of Soviet state-led cultural diplomacy on bilateral cultural relations between Finland and the Soviet Union. He also makes sense of periods of intense activity on the Soviet side and periods of relative disinterest, and describes the difficulties for Finnish protagonists to coordinate their activities with mercurial Soviet authorities prone to quick changes of mind. He retraces the effects of wide political changes (the end of World War II, Stalin’s death) on these cultural relations, and insists on the way Soviet cultural diplomacy managed at times to reach wide stretches of the Finnish population while emphasizing high European culture: this is well illustrated by late 1940s scenes of classical musicians from Leningrad playing for audiences of workers in factories’ courtyards or the halls of transportation companies. Twenty years later, the same type of audiences would probably listen to rock’n’roll before attending state-funded adult education sessions organized by trade unions. Some of them would travel through UNESCO’s workers’ exchange programmes, while their children would go to the United States on a Fulbright grant or get their engineering degree in Leningrad.

From another perspective, Marek Fields has dealt extensively with British and US cultural propaganda in Finland in the first decades of the Cold War. Fields also looks at ways in which the Cold War context influenced Finnish governments to develop their own cultural propaganda activities, completing Elina Melgin’s 2014 doctoral thesis on Finland’s interwar and wartime cultural diplomacy.Footnote 60 In an ambitious work, Melgin presented Finland’s reorganization of its field of propaganda institutions and cultural diplomacy in the years 1944–1948. Her work was essential in unearthing for the first time a series of case studies of cultural and artistic cooperation, insisting mostly on the role of private actors and providing unique information on these activities. Melgin also presented the way the Finnish state’s cultural diplomacy activities developed slowly during the interwar period, then experienced a major boost during the war before disappearing after 1944.

The research project on Finnish cultural policy concluded in 2010 and organized by the Finnish organization for cultural relations CUPORE deserves special mention here. Coordinated by Anni Kangas, this project brought several interesting publications. The most relevant for us is a book by Tomi Mertanen,Footnote 61 who writes an overview of Finnish cultural and arts policy in the 1940s and 1950s. The book gives a basis for studying the international aspects of this policy that have mostly been left outside of its scope.

The two ministerial organizations that form the core of this book, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education, have been considered through broad administrative history projects. The three-volume administrative history of the Ministry of Education has dedicated several pages to international cooperation and the creation of institutions to manage these.Footnote 62 Timo Soikkanen’s two-volume history of the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs has brushed upon the development of a press and culture bureau inside the ministry as well as the creation of a network of cultural attachés.Footnote 63 However, entire fields such as the negotiations of cultural treaties or the organization of exchange programmes remain unexplored. A series of books made using mostly the archives of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ Press Bureau, and concentrating on the Bureau’s image promotion and propaganda efforts, will also be useful in this study.Footnote 64

The archival material used in this book is mostly originating from the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Ulkoasiainministeriön arkisto, UMA) and from the Finnish National Archives (Kansallisarkisto, KA). The archives of the Ministry of Education held in the National Archives have been used, as well as the archives of the Finnish UNESCO committee. A number of documents dealing with the activities of the Ministry of Education were still deposited at the ministry at the time of research, and have been used especially to highlight relations with UNESCO and stipend programmes (Opetusministeriön arkisto, OPMA). The archival situation of these documents is, however, changing in 2022, when they are in the process of being deposited to the National Archives. The classification of archive boxes and the structure of funds should, however, remain the same. The dichotomy between funds in the Ministry and funds in the National Archives has been preserved in this book in order to reflect the situation at the time of writing.

Some personal archives have been useful to this book, especially Jaakko Numminen’s archival funds, kept at the Ministry of Education, and Kalervo Siikala’s papers, kept in Helsinki at the archives of the Centre Party (Keskustan ja Maaseudun arkisto, KMA). Finally, papers kept in President Urho Kekkonen’s presidential library and archive centre have been used whenever necessary, as well as a few documents deposited in the Archives of the Workers’ movement (Työväen arkisto, TA). The records of parliamentary debates and committees on cultural policy have been used to complete these sources.

Several publications by protagonists have also been used, written at the time and dealing with Finland’s cultural diplomacy. Kalervo Siikala,Footnote 65 whom we will meet regularly in this book, Jaakko NumminenFootnote 66 or the former head of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ Press Bureau Heikki BrotherusFootnote 67 have written witness accounts of their work that will be used in this book. They provide excellent starting points to recompose the atmosphere in which this process started and the main intentions that shaped it. Despite the analytical take of especially Siikala’s and Numminen’s books, those will be treated as primary sources, in order to re-situate their emphasis on the state’s role in opening up Finland to international trends and contacts.

1.5 Finland’s Cultural Diplomacy Between Modernization, the Welfare State, and Geopolitics

The organization of this book will follow three threads, in an effort to make sense of the development at the official level of a Finnish cultural diplomacy between 1945 and 1975, with dedicated organizations and practices, a certain context and certain goals.

The first part of this book will delve into the way civil servants framed Finland’s cultural diplomacy in the context of Finland’s Cold War developments. Reflections about cultural diplomacy mixed national identity to modernity, geopolitics to economy and trade, education to technological development.

There are many reasons and many possible patterns of activities and explanations for why a country would engage in cultural diplomacy. Varga and a large literature on nation branding have described a post–Cold War moment in which foreign cultural policy has become economized, de-politicized and transformed to assist nation branding efforts.Footnote 68 This is a specific pattern in evolutions that have seen constant negotiations between various poles in order to define the main thrust of cultural foreign policy, with two main tensions: between economy, identity and politics; between state coordination and an autonomous cultural field. Cultural diplomacy crystallized in Finland as part of a wider endeavour concerned with the management of cultural, artistic, technological, scientific relations with foreign states and international organizations.

While Finland's geopolitical situation next to the Soviet Union is one of the most important incentive for the country's cultural diplomacy, there are other reasons this chapter will explore. A part of the reason for small states having a cultural diplomacy in the first place has to do with a fear of cultural backwardness, a desire to modernize their society through the appropriation of cultural trends and organizational frames.Footnote 69 At the same time, these small states can also consider themselves as the origin of unique, idiosyncratic cultural practices susceptible to become selling points, identity markers to be presented abroad, bridges to dialogue with others, models to be followed. There is thus an ambiguity in the case of Finland between the desire to adopt foreign cultural trends out of a necessity to modernize the country, and an emphasis on national features considered as unique and susceptible to be preserved and maybe “exported” to the world. This happens bilaterally but often also multilaterally as small states can project on multilateral organizations their desires and goals.Footnote 70 This “export” of cultural trends was increasingly conceived as the contribution of Finland to international cultural relations aiming at peace and stability. The same reflex will have smaller states emphasize the necessity for them to participate in international exchanges in order to emphasize their worthiness as international agents. Limited resources might, however, force them to manage this engagement “on the cheap”, looking for cooperation with other countries, economies of scale and emphasizing the efficiency of international organizations.

Linked to this question of the goals envisaged for cultural diplomacy is the question of balancing between those activities aimed at foreign audiences and those aimed at domestic audiences. As we will see, Finland’s cultural diplomacy’s aims were not only to solidify prestige, win sympathy, markets and cultural and scientific contacts for the country but also to actually usher into existence the sophisticated yet idiosyncratic national culture it promoted outwards. Somogy Varga describes in his work on Germany’s Goethe Institute the way the 2003 Institute’s brand manifest called for each German to “live the brand” in order for the brand to succeed in competition.Footnote 71 In Finland, cultural and public diplomacy documents insisted already during the Cold War on the necessity to push also the population of the country to act in certain ways in order to foster the country’s neutrality and to enhance its society’s development in the right direction. A small state situated in a difficult situation had to use image and narratives as resources, not only in its foreign policy but also in transforming its society. Cultural interactions had to be used to change the country and its population, to hasten its modernization, to open it to the world. There is a modernizing ethos to the discourse of Finnish cultural diplomats that matches long term trends in the way Finnish civil servants saw their role in society during periods of momentous changes. More generally, this part will show how, despite the importance of the Cold War as a backdrop, cultural diplomacy was also framed in terms specific to Finland’s national, domestic development.

In his contribution to Scott-Smith and Krabbendam’s edited volume on the cultural Cold War in Western Europe, Scott Lucas suggests that the most efficient way to approach cultural diplomacy is to descend into each national case to look at concrete institutional organizations.Footnote 72 The second part of this book will thus look at the field of agents, agencies and organizations developed by the Finnish state to manage a cultural diplomacy.

The process was one of slow institutionalization, ushering a situation in which the state coordinated parts of the field of international cultural relations without dominating it completely. In such a small polity, contacts between protagonists over administrative boundaries were easy and frequent. The state could not do much without the support and often the initiative of nongovernmental actors, while non-state actors also needed the state. The division of labour between government and civil society changes from one country to the other, and even inside public administrations the division of labour between various organizations is different. While Åkerlund and Pamment see public–private cooperation as mostly a result of the end of the Cold War and globalization, in the Finnish case, this kind of collaboration is already on display during the Cold War.Footnote 73

From these considerations will appear a constant negotiation and dialogue between the state and society, and an increasing need for state involvement born of the growing complexity of cultural phenomena and the increasing resources needed. It is this crowded field that Chaubet and MartinFootnote 74 describe in their book, where centralization under the state is always resisted by private actors but also by NGOs, international organizations, transnational actors. Mass culture and high culture erupt at different levels and at different times, with the state picking and choosing what will be emphasized in its activities.

Finally, I will look in the third and fourth parts of the book at the activities of this field, from cultural treaties to Nordic cooperation, exchange programmes to trade promotion campaigns. Small states, as we will see, emphasize cooperation with other small states. They can also join efforts and cooperate closely to achieve common foreign policy and economic goals. International organizations such as UNESCO will be the object of particular attention, as the implication of Finland in international cultural organizations was considered as one of the most efficient way to develop the country’s cultural policy overseas. The organizations were seen as capacity enhancers for a small state, aggregators of knowledge, influence and networks, despite the cost they entailed. In the 1950s–1960s, the administrators of Finland’s cultural policy abroad, especially in the Ministry of Education, were in touch with a host of international organizations in order to rejuvenate Finland’s contacts with the world. This part will also dedicate some time to consider the negotiation and nature of the cultural, technical, economic and scientific treaties signed by Finland in the 1950s–1960s. These treaties will give us an occasion to consider the relations between diplomats, politicians and cultural actors in the domain of international cultural relations. We will be able to consider for example the way the Ministry of Education and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs shared their responsibilities in the negotiations of these treaties.

In the conclusion, I will consider the ways cultural diplomacy was defined in Finland and the roles it was assigned by state agents. It appears as a crossroad between four processes: the creation of institutions and a process through which the state came to expand its role in Finnish society; the creation of a new “public policy” in a cultural field that had been dominated by private efforts, and at the same time the preservation of strong private agents; geopolitical debates about the position of Finland between East and West, and the role of cultural diplomacy in defining the role of Finland in this new environment; and finally, a reflection on the modernization of the country and its cultural identity. Cultural diplomacy, as we will see, was not only a reaction to a certain geopolitical situation (the Cold War) but also a part of a redefinition of Finnish identity and a modernization of Finnish society. The conclusion will also question the existence of Finnish specificities in the use of culture in foreign relations, amongst which feature prominently the perception of state-coordinated cultural foreign relations as a tool for centralized modernization and their role in the management of Finland’s specific international position.