Defining Finland’s Cultural Diplomacy from Postwar to Cold War

Abstract

Cultural diplomacy, as a dimension of the state’s cultural and foreign policy, refers to specific actions planned, coordinated or organized by central public institutions, aiming to support the objectives of the state. But the objectives of any state’s policy are rarely an object of domestic consensus: they might be disputed in society, and different emphases might be found even inside the state’s organizational frame. An important starting point in our search for Finland’s cultural diplomacy is thus to find the various reasons for which Finnish administrators would engage in and develop a cultural diplomacy. Discussing these elements in the context of the Cold War, one has to consider both the weight of the bipolar divide on any policy undertaken by the Finnish state, as well as the local context. Arguments in favor of state-led cultural outreach overseas showed a certain consistency over the three decades studied here, with concerns expressed immediately after the war and continuing up to the 1970s. This continuity was also the result of continuities in personnel, with roughly the same individuals dealing with international cultural relations inside the Finnish civil service. They developed a number of rationales for cultural diplomacy, between supporting Finland’s foreign policy in a difficult geopolitical situation, modernizing Finnish society through curated foreign examples and an opening up to global cultural trends, promoting a new image of the country abroad, supporting trade or participating in the work of international organizations.

First of all, one has to define the reasons why Finland should promote cultural exports. I would summarize it that way: 1. Make our country better known abroad, seek acknowledgment and appreciation. This is what one could call cultural propaganda. 2. Participate in routine international contacts in the arts, science, education and other cultural fields. This is what one could call international cultural cooperation, made of both exports and imports. Its role is to maintain a certain level of development, to avoid arrogant provincialism, and to emphasize Finland’s modest but real contribution to Humanity’s cultural capital. 3. Economic reasons. Either the direct acquisition of export markets for cultural goods or indirectly cultural support for other forms of exports.

—Kalervo Siikala, 1976 (Keskustan ja maaseudun arkistot (KMA), Kalervo Siikala fund, Box 1960-1970 luku kirjoituksia, esitelmiä. Keskustapolitiikka, Taide- ja kulttuuripolitiikkaa, kansainvälistä yhteistyötä, Speech text, Kalervo Siikala Suomen kulttuuriliiton keskustelussa, 13.3.1976. Translated from Finnish.)

We Finns are easily proud of our position as part of a developed European civilization. But this position is a duty, that we are bound to fulfil also beyond our own borders. We need to educate the youth in order for them to understand the necessities and duties of internationalization.

—Reino Oittinen, 1962 (Kansallisarkisto (KA), R. Oittinen fund, Box 17, Unesco yms…, file YK. Unesco, Artikkeleita 1958-1963, Article draft for Opettajain lehti, 26.4.1962. Translated from Finnish.)

By European standards we Finns are latecomers to the cultural race. We will be able to catch up on others only if we wholeheartedly embrace international dialogue and influences.

—Urho Kekkonen, President of the Republic of Finland, 1962 (KA, Fund Urho Kekkosen julkaistu tuotanto, Speech by president Urho Kekkonen, Helsinki, 17.5.1962, Suomi maailman kartalla. Translated from Finnish.)

Cultural diplomacy, as a dimension of the state’s cultural and foreign policy, refers to specific actions planned, coordinated or organized by central public institutions, aiming to support the objectives of the state. But the objectives of any state’s policy are rarely an object of absolute consensus: they might be disputed in society, and different emphases might be found even inside the state’s organizational frame. An important starting point in our search for the contours of Finland’s cultural diplomacy is thus to find the various reasons for which Finnish administrators would engage in and develop such a policy. Discussing these elements in the context of the Cold War, one has to consider both the weight of the bipolar divide on any policy undertaken by the Finnish state as well as the local context.

This chapter will deal with the various contexts in which Finnish protagonists replaced the country’s cultural diplomacy, starting from geopolitics, moving on to reflections on Finland’s cultural identity and ending up with the most concrete aspects of trade promotion or participation in development aid. Arguments in favour of state-led cultural outreach overseas showed a certain consistency over the three decades studied here, with certain concerns expressed immediately after the war and continuing up to the 1970s. This continuity was also the result of continuities in personnel, with roughly the same individuals dealing with international cultural relations inside the Finnish civil service. They developed a number of rationales for cultural diplomacy, between supporting Finland’s foreign policy in a difficult geopolitical situation, modernizing Finnish society through curated foreign examples and an opening up to global cultural trends, promoting a new image of the country abroad, supporting trade or participating in the work of international organizations.

2.1 “Develop an Understanding of Finland’s Goals”: Cultural Relations and Geopolitics from 1945 to 1975

2.1.1 Adapting to a Radically New World, 1945–1953

Despite sharing a long border with the USSR, Finland lies just enough to the North to remain a sideshow of European developments. In 1944–1948, this peripherality compensated to a certain point the country’s difficult position as a small and defeated neighbour of the USSR, giving the Finns a window of opportunity to influence their situation. Finland’s stubborn defence in the battles of the summer 1944 had also contributed to this situation: the Finnish army had managed with German assistance to stave off a Soviet summer offensive in June–July 1944, ensuring that in September 1944, when Finland signed a truce with Moscow, the country was free of Soviet troops. It was however considered a former ally of Nazi Germany and a part of the Soviet remit, although both the United States and Great Britain manifested to Stalin their interest in seeing Finland remain independent and democratic.¹ Exhausted by the war, Finland had to welcome in the autumn of 1944 an Allied control commission dominated by Soviet diplomats and led by one of Stalin’s most prominent feal, Andreï Jdanov. During the winter of 1944–1945, Finnish forces also fought a series of battles against their former allies, as German troops stationed in the North of the country had to be pushed out towards Norway.

In 1945, a country that had been independent for less than 30 years thus found itself isolated from its main cultural and political contacts with Western Europe, first by its wartime alliance with Nazi Germany, then by its position in the Soviet Union’s immediate neighbourhood. Finland was mostly perceived in the West as ripe for assimilation in the Soviet sphere of influence, a development seen as unwelcome but largely inevitable. For Finnish wartime leaders and a large part of the population, external danger was compounded by domestic threats: the Finnish communist party and its organizations, which had been forbidden in the early 1930s, made their return to public life with strong Soviet support. During the 1945 general elections, a coalition of leftist organizations won 49 seats out of the 200 held by the Finnish Parliament, but didn’t get the possibility to rule without opposition despite membership in the governmental coalition (the communists Yrjö Leino and Mauri Pekkala became respectively minister for Domestic Affairs and minister of Defence). This brought back suppressed parts of the Finnish polity, the collective memory of the local workers’ movement, and hopes that the Soviet victory could mean social and political change in Finland as well as a new, pacified relation with Moscow. These hopes, in a postwar context, extended one way or another beyond the confines of Finland’s limited communist movement.

The battles of summer 1944 and Stalin’s decision in the autumn to concentrate his resources on the race to Berlin had left Finland free of Soviet troops. The country retained a functioning army, a legitimate government and popular leaders: successive presidents between 1944 and 1956 were first the wartime commander-in-chief of the Finnish army, C.G.E. Mannerheim, then a veteran of Finnish politics, Juho Kusti Paasikivi. State institutions functioned in a context dominated by uncertainties but also a measure of optimism linked to the end of the war and the economic bustle of reconstruction. The resurgent communist party did not manage to acquire a monopolistic or even a dominant place in Finnish domestic politics: it found itself matched by a social-democratic party which more or less retained its positions both during elections and in the cloak-and-dagger fights for control of the main trade unions. While the communists were admitted in government, the main decisions shaping Finland’s developments remained in the hands of a group of conservatives and social-democrats, whose long careers harkened back for some of them to their experience of Finland’s nineteenth-century autonomy inside the Russian empire. This meant not only familiarity with the Russian language and Russia’s mindset but also a certain frame of mind emphasizing both the core economic and political interests of the country and the inevitabilities of Finland’s relations to its powerful neighbour. It also meant strong cultural links with Western Europe, seen as a culture and a market Finland wanted to remain a part of.

The situation stabilized with the signature in April 1948 of a bilateral treaty with the Soviet Union. Once again, the treaty’s content had much to do with Stalin’s attention being drawn elsewhere: already approached by the Soviet Union in late 1947, Paasikivi delayed negotiations until the late spring 1948, when Stalin had more pressing matters to deal with than forcing a country he didn’t occupy into a harder treaty. Finland did not have to give military assistance to the Soviet Union but only to defend against an attack aiming at its own territory. It didn’t have to coordinate its foreign policy with Moscow, and the treaty even stated Finland’s wish to remain “outside of great powers’ conflicts”. Suspicious of Moscow’s intentions but convinced that Finland had no choice but to comply and to stabilize its relations with Moscow, Paasikivi accepted and made most of the Finnish elite accept a move from the confrontational policies of pre-war times to a policy of cautious reckoning with the USSR’s power. He convinced himself that Moscow had mostly defensive interests in Finland and could be persuaded not to mingle too deeply in Finland’s domestic arrangements, through a mix of giving way to Soviet demands and stalling the most unsavoury ones until Moscow’s interest would shift elsewhere. Soviet trust had to be cultivated in order to avoid moments of crises, which included what Paasikivi saw as painful but necessary measures: the trial of wartime leaders, a return to politics of the communist party, Finland’s polite refusal to participate in the Marshall plan, and a certain level of domestic self-censorship. In a small society, the president himself was quick to react to anything he considered either as undue kowtowing to the USSR, or as visible criticism of Soviet actions.

From this emerged a situation in which Finland took into considerations the USSR’s strategic interests and was nonetheless allowed to retain its social and political model and contacts with the West. Despite Paasikivi’s will to preserve Finland’s domestic policy from Soviet encroachments, a measure of Soviet influence was unavoidable. In economic and trade terms, Moscow asked for the payment of extensive war reparations, after which a system of preferential clearing trade was set into place. While most of the Finnish economy and especially its main staples in the wood and paper industries remained turned to Western markets, some significant sectors became dependent on the USSR: for example, a Finnish refinery sector emerged in the 1950s, geared towards refining Soviet crude oil and selling it to the West.² Finno-Soviet relations became a complex bilateral game engaging Finnish society as a whole. Soviet pressures increasingly relayed by Finland’s state authorities forced all levels of society into various degrees of commitment to an official line regarding the Soviet Union, from rhetorical concessions through self-censorship to actively seeking Soviet support for one’s personal career or commercial endeavours, from cynical assessments of Finland’s geopolitical situation to genuine hopes about moving away from the nationalism of the interwar period. The reflexes, hidden meanings, small lies and doubletalk needed to sustain this arrangement became instinctively assimilated by the Finns, a state of mind observers often misread as wholesale submission to Soviet influence. The country became split by the dividing line of the Cold War: the West had the cultural and political sympathies of a majority of the population and strong positions as a market for key sectors of the Finnish economy, especially wood and paper; the East had a strong communist movement, influence on state authorities and Finnish foreign and domestic policy, and a position as both the main outlet of key Finnish economic sectors and the main provider of oil and gas to Finland. While Finland took in lots of Soviet cultural material, including the rhetorical and ideological content this material was a vehicle for, it also managed to keep up open and thriving cultural contacts with the West.³

In the political as well as in the cultural field, the return of communists to public life did not mean wholesale change: most of the pre-war cultural and academic elites remained in place, a number of them opposed to the new foreign and domestic policy and willing to use their cultural contacts with the West to compensate for the surge in Soviet influence. In 1948, commenting the year’s visa applications to France, the French embassy in Helsinki underlined that Finland’s pre-war cultural elite remained in place: they were mostly conservatives for whom trips to France amounted to temporary exile from what they saw as unfortunate changes in their country’s domestic and foreign policy.⁴ The sharp criticism drawn by Olavi Paavolainen’s 1946 book Synkkä yksinpuhelu, where the writer and former war propagandist cautiously criticized the war and the alliance with Nazi Germany, is a good example of the mood of cultural circles at the time: while most would understand the need for arrangements with the USSR, only few were ready for what they saw as useless self-flagellation about the recent past. Another good example is the Finnish Academy, created in 1948 on the model of the Institut de France. The left and especially the communists opposed the creation of the Academy on the ground that it would be composed of pre-war conservative figures, and it quickly became a centre of opposition to the new official foreign policy line.⁵ Parts of the cultural field however were willing to seize the new situation to usher a new cultural landscape through Soviet support: nominated in the spring of 1945 to lead the national broadcaster Yle, the communist playwright Hella Wuolijoki became the symbol of these groups situated mostly on the left but representing also a wider desire for domestic change and a pacification of the country’s jingoistic wartime foreign relations.

While the cultural field split itself between East and West, culture could be seen by the Finnish leadership as a way to rebuild relations with the West and to build new relations with the East without too much political consequences. In late 1944, a memoir written to the Finnish embassy in Stockholm, one of the few Finnish embassies functioning in a Western country after the war, spelled out this need, asking the embassy “to do anything in (its) power to strengthen our position in the world’s public opinion and to develop an understanding of Finland’s goals”.⁶ In a context where Finland tried to recreate its contacts with the world after its wartime isolation, culture became a tool in the country’s limited panoply. Cultural relations were considered especially around the president and in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs through the lens of geopolitics, as a way to support the country’s policy, to ensure good relations with East and West, and to buff the economic and commercial potential of a country strongly depending on exports to foreign markets for its economic development.⁷

These state-level reflections were limited by the narrowness of the Finnish state’s involvement in culture. While successive education ministers from 1945 to 1948 were leftists, from the cultural leftist Johan Helo to the communist Eino Kilpi, their ministries were small and dominated by conservative or social-democratic civil servants. The most visible communist nominations of the years 1944–1948 were also short-lived: Wuolijoki, for example, lost her position in 1949.⁸ Finland was between 1944 and 1954 an object of regular waves of active Soviet cultural diplomacy,⁹ mostly connected to political events such as the 1945 general elections, but cultural relations with the East were managed in Finland mostly out of the state’s reach, by non-governmental actors created after the war and trusted by the Soviet Union, such as the Finland-Soviet Union Society.¹⁰ Relations with the West were also dominated by personalities, non-state organizations and non-state institutions of higher learning that worked to rebuild relations interrupted by the war. Those mostly kept their distance from state authorities suspected of selling out to Moscow and local communists. In this field, the state was present mostly through limited funding and facilitation activities especially through the network of embassies and general consulates.

After the war, this situation was rapidly considered as unsatisfactory. In 1945, the first state committee dealing with cultural relations with foreign countries approached the matter mostly through the promotion of Finland’s image abroad and the organization of the state’s official communication. The wartime propaganda organization had been dismantled, and something else had to be built to do the same job in new circumstances. The committee involved both experts and politicians, including Väinö Meltti, a moderate communist who had been imprisoned during the war.¹¹ Its report dealt with what it called “state communication abroad”, including the use of culture for the promotion of a renewed national image. Cultural relations were meant to bring concrete returns for the government’s policy: showcase the country’s stability, promote and support the official foreign policy line, and gather ideas and support for educational and scientific development.

Reflections on these questions developed in sync with Finland’s domestic developments. The year 1948 was an important period, as the treaty with the USSR in April was followed by general elections in July 1948. The Finnish far left made a poor showing in these elections, and Paasikivi nominated a minority cabinet dominated by the social-democratic party. Its prime minister, K.A. Fagerholm, was a former member of wartime governments who had evolved to criticize the policy of German alliance but remained staunchly anti-communist. He intended to show that, while Finland had changed in its relations to the USSR, the communists were not needed to manage new peaceful relations with Moscow, and this could be left to state authorities. He also brought to power social-democratic personalities attached to the promotion of a “national” culture, the development of popular education and cultural relations both in Finland and worldwide, like the new Education minister Reino Oittinen. Realizing the fragility of the country’s position, Fagerholm planned to enhance the state’s cultural activities in order to marshal culture and the country’s image in the promotion of Finland’s position abroad.¹² Oittinen on the other hand had a wider vision of things, wanting to use culture in order to develop education, science and the arts in Finland.

In September and October 1948, the question of external cultural relations was considered during sessions of the evening meetings of the Fagerholm government, where Oittinen directed discussions and a number of tensions appeared.¹³ In his presentation on September 29th, Oittinen spoke of the necessity to rebuild cultural relations with the West, mentioning plans for a Fulbright exchange program and an application to UNESCO. In exchange, he proposed that the state would work to develop cultural relations with the East, mentioning for instance the proposals of the Finland-Soviet Union Society for a cultural treaty with the Soviet Union. On October 8th, he emphasized the lack of state coordination for foreign cultural relations, and the necessity to change this situation, develop cultural representation, cultural treaties, and state support to cultural organizations. Oittinen considered that cultural relations with the West were essential both for the stabilization of Finland’s international position and for the cultural and pedagogical development of its society. Fagerholm however was not overtly enthusiastic, answering Oittinen that “our first order of business should be to get commercial relations to work”. The Fagerholm government was however unanimous in expressing the need to wrestle cultural relations with the USSR from communist organizations and to promote cultural relations with the West.¹⁴ If Oittinen was one of the first to emphasize the importance of UNESCO for a small country such as Finland, accession was seen as impossible due to Soviet opposition but also, as Oittinen himself underlined, due to the perceived high cost of membership for a small country.¹⁵

Official committees were created to debate the place of culture, scientific exchanges and image in Finland’s international relations. In a May 1949 report, a committee created by the Finnish parliament insisted on the need for more scientific, cultural and artistic exchanges and a renewed effort to promote Finland’s image abroad.¹⁶ Led by Professor Erik Lönnroth, the committee gathered political representatives (Leo Ehrnrooth), journalists (Yrjö Kaarne), members of Parliament (Sylvi-Kyllikki Kilpi), scholars (professor of social policy Heikki Waris) and diplomats (Heikki Brotherus). It was expected to make practical suggestions as to ways to strengthen the “development of spiritual exchanges and practical scientific and artistic cooperation with other countries”.¹⁷ The state wanted to promote national culture on the international stage, but the Ministry of Education only had limited subsidies to influence the cultural field’s activities. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs concentrated its activities mostly on producing updated publications on Finland and distributing them through its diplomatic network.¹⁸ Participants emphasized the lack of funds for these promotional and cultural activities, and the need to have them coordinated by a centralized body.¹⁹ For politicians and civil servants in the early 1950s interested in the development of cultural relations and image diplomacy, the main arguments in favour of increased “cultural relations abroad” aimed mostly at recovering contacts with the West and develop relations with the East in a way that would involve state authorities as well.²⁰

Despite this Western emphasis in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the 1948 treaty with the USSR also contained a clause insisting on the development of economic and cultural relations with the Soviet Union: the states were said to have “decided to work in the spirit of cooperation and friendship to continuously develop and strengthen their economic and cultural ties”. Although private organizations linked to the communist movement managed the bulk of these renewed contacts, there was a general atmosphere in which the Finnish government adopted parts of the Soviet rhetoric and jargon on international cooperation, peace and understanding amongst nations.²¹ As Marek Fields aptly summarizes: “Although Finland’s inclination to the West was strong, a large variety of cultural events and ceremonies, together with the overall official policy, were more or less geared to praising the warm friendship the country had with the Soviet Union, making the situation somewhat confusing to both the Finns and Western observers”. Concretely however, most of cultural relations with the East were at the time coordinated by private organizations emanating from the communist movement.²²

2.1.2 Supporting a New Neutrality from Stalin’s Death to the CSCE, 1953–1975

Immediately after the war, culture was thus seen by the Finnish leadership as one of the tools Finland should use to extract itself from the war’s shadow and stabilize its international position especially towards the West. Domestic resistance in Finland as well as the volatility and intransigence of Soviet policy under Stalin complicated the development of state activities in the cultural field. Meanwhile, contacts with the West re-emerged more or less spontaneously.

The death of Stalin in 1953 seemed to herald a period of change that opened possibilities for Finland to explore new options in its relations with both East and West and to stabilize an interpretation of its 1948 deal with Moscow.²³ One of the first results of this change was the possibility for Finland to approach a number of international organizations, and to channel the Finnish leadership’s desire for reintegration in global networks through multilateral cultural relations. The Soviet Union withdrew its objection to Finland’s accession to the Nordic Council, and Finland benefitted from the package deal found in 1955 between the United States and the Soviet Union over the accession of Eastern European Countries to the UN. Inside Finland, the decade between 1955 and 1965 saw an improvement of the state’s capacities to act in international cultural relations and to control also cultural relations with the East.

While the death of Stalin meant a liberalization of Finland’s relations with the Soviet Union, it was also followed by steps in the rapprochement with Moscow and the adaptation of Finnish society to the Cold War. A new pattern of Finland’s geopolitics came about through a succession of crises between 1958 and 1961, their timing a function of the state of the Cold War, bilateral relations between Finland and the Soviet Union, and Finland’s domestic politics. The Fagerholm government had been criticized in Moscow for its perceived aloofness towards the Soviet Union and Finnish communists, and crises of the late 1950s–early 1960s, while overdetermined by the context of the Berlin crisis and the Cuba crisis, also saw the Soviet Union test Finland’s commitment to their special relationship. Moscow reminded the Finns of Soviet influence not only on Finland’s foreign policy but also on its domestic developments, that had to be kept within certain bounds. Elected in 1956 by the slimmest of margins, the successor of Paasikivi, Urho Kekkonen, interpreted those crises as a warning call, using them to justify a closer alignment with Soviet positions and a stricter control over domestic developments as the only way for the country to continue its contacts with the West. At the same time, he managed to use these crises to strengthen his position as the guarantee of good contacts with the Soviet leadership. Re-affirming good relations with the USSR, he went beyond Paasikivi’s and Fagerholm’s friendly containment-like policy and spoke for increased proximity between Finland and the Soviet Union. While Paasikivi had walked a fine line between a rhetoric of friendship with the USSR and conservativism at home, international concessions and resistance especially to domestic communism, Kekkonen more readily embraced the situation, insisting on the necessity to pacify relations with the Soviet Union and welcome the communists in government as part of a policy of neutrality. In doing so, he secured his position and that of his political party, the Agrarian League, as the centre of Finland’s public life for the next 25 years, and imposed a move to a policy using more active cooperation with Moscow to allow for increased economic, cultural and political contacts with the West. State authorities became the relays of this policy, in a context where an extensive welfare state emerged in Finland and the Soviet Union started to develop technical cooperation with the agencies of this developing welfare state. Economy and politics became increasingly intertwined: good relations with the USSR allowed cautious participation in Western commercial and economic integration, which contributed to steady economic growth and the development of welfare state provisions and dirigist policies especially in the 1960s. The development of public institutions and the extension of the state’s reach also meant the stabilization in Finnish society of a certain way to think Finland’s place in the world and international relations: inside the state apparatus, all organizations had to become aware of and promote the necessities of a special relation with Moscow, and contribute to its success under presidential coordination.

In this context, Kekkonen knew how to resist the most aggravated Soviet pressures, but he used also the situation for domestic political advantage, and left a context in which speech and acts were scrutinized in relation to the official foreign policy line: in order for the country to be able to fulfil its Western destiny, there had to be as little friction as possible in its relation with the East. By the 1960s, while Finland had tried to showcase a neutrality that would operationally be the equivalent of older European neutralities, its position remained ambiguous due to strong Soviet influence.²⁴ Finland’s situation did not go unnoticed abroad, as many observers in the United States or Britain wrote about Finland “disappearing from view” or becoming a people’s democracy.²⁵ The Finns thus had to work to promote abroad a certain understanding of their neutrality policy, which they presented in their contacts with Western countries as a policy of careful equilibrium between East and West born of the hardships of the war.

This necessity to convince foreigners of Finland’s neutrality policy but also of the country’s steady economic development placed renewed pressure on cultural propaganda and the state-led promotion of Finland’s image abroad, in a context where the state administrations were increasingly able and willing to take on these tasks. This was particularly visible in the early 1960s, following the 1961 “crisis of the note” during which the Soviet Union used pressures to influence Finland’s domestic policy, or after the 1961 FINN-EFTA treaty making Finland an associated member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Finland’s image promotion in the Western countries became then an essential part of Finland’s foreign policy.²⁶ A committee led by the diplomat Max Jakobson wrote a report on the question in May 1961, where the promotion of Finland’s image and its foreign cultural relations were described as a primary diplomatic and political concern, a guarantee that the Western side of Finland’s geopolitical balance would hold.²⁷

After the Cuba crisis in 1962, détente and the easing of relations between East and West also provided a context in which cultural propaganda was easier for the Finns: it offered the possibility to think in less dramatic terms the country’s international contacts, including its cultural relations, with both East and West. In a context where relations between blocs warmed up, neutrality could finally play out as an identity and as a foreign political position, making the rhetoric forced on Finland by its position as a neighbor of the Soviet Union into an actual foreign policy line. The country had changed in economic and social terms,²⁸ its population growing, becoming more urban, more prosperous, gaining more leisure time and thus spontaneously engaging in more international cultural contacts. The economy slowly moved from bulk products, agriculture and the exploitation of resources to an industrial and soon service economy. A functioning and wide welfare state developed, with the establishment of corporatist measures of social negotiations. Barter trade with the East, set in the first years of the Cold War, did not stop a movement of economic and commercial integration with Western markets facilitated by a series of free trade treaties with various trade blocs: the EFTA in 1961, and the EEC in 1973.

For a generation who had lived the war, the reknitting of relations with Russia and détente seemed like genuine opportunities to pacify the country’s foreign relations and to exert social, cultural and political reform. Both good contacts with the East and familiarity, engagement with the West could be construed together as the most desirable situation for Finland—despite the tensions it imposed on the country and the risks it contained as each word and action had to be weighted on the scale of relations with Moscow. Starting in the late 1950s, a new generation also arrived, marked both by the Cold War, World War II and the development of a welfare state building new state agencies and opening the possibility of a democratic middle way between capitalism and socialism. This generation was more inclined to live up to the promises and rhetoric of neutrality and détente, carrying with them a strong rhetoric of postwar reconstruction, peaceful international relations and expansion of the state’s position in society.

This context had an effect on the way cultural international relations were conceived and linked to domestic developments. In his writings of the late 1950s, when he worked as the secretary of Prime Minister J.V. Sukselainen, Kalervo Siikala mixed Finland’s reconstruction, the extension of the state’s influence and peaceful relations with the Soviet Union into a programme aiming at extracting the country from its pre-war jingoistic foreign policy. He described the social-democrats of the Fagerholm variety as “fascists” eager to topple these efforts and opposed to putting relations with the Soviet Union on a better quill than before. In cultural terms, this meant efforts to support neutrality and a programme of peace and understanding amongst nations, where the state had to expand to control most organizations engaged in cultural exchanges.²⁹ Neutrality gave the 1950s–1960s generation a focus for what they saw as a project combining a modernized nation and a pacified foreign policy. For someone like Siikala, cultural nationalism, friendlier relations with the USSR in the name of peace, and friendly relations with the West could be mixed into a policy of neutrality.³⁰ In this context, cultural diplomacy was an opportunity to modernize the country in its new geopolitical situation.

After the mid-1960s and especially in the 1970s, these premises evolved once more. The policy of neutrality as a way to balance between East and West became criticized more and more vocally by the New Left, and then by a Soviet-leaning radical Left on the lookout for traces of anticommunism and “Western tendencies” in the public debate, especially in cultural matters. A more radical vision of relations with the Soviet Union and of domestic politics gave a more radical tinge to the cultural debate.³¹ The social-democratic party moved towards Kekkonen and a policy taking at face value Soviet promises of international pacification. Youth organizations and a younger generation of administrators also broadened their horizons beyond the East-West divide, towards multilateralism, development aid, and cooperation with the Global South.

For this younger generation, the Soviet Union was not anymore an overbearing partner to be accommodated or the guarantee of Finland’s change towards a more pacified foreign policy: it was a natural part of Finland’s environment, presenting a social model they could relate to, and carrying a rhetoric of peace, international opening and cooperation they largely shared and that corresponded to the rhetoric of multilateral organizations like UNESCO they actively participated in. While some of them piggybacked this rhetoric for the accomplishment of their own agenda and the pursuance of their own careers, some also embraced it as a part of their environment, notwithstanding accidents such as the repression of the Prague Spring in 1968. Neutrality was reinterpreted as a policy of bridge building between East and West, and Finland championed various international attempts, mostly originating from the East, at fostering international dialogue and peaceful coexistence. The goal was, in the context of détente and until the mid-1970s and the CSCE conference in Helsinki, to use Finland’s means to actively contribute to a deflation of tensions in Europe.

This was particularly visible in the process towards the creation of the CSCE in 1975. The events of Prague 1968 had been a disappointment to Kekkonen and other Finnish leaders, who saw it as a potentially fatal blow to détente, a possible return of the USSR to its Stalinist daemons. Kekkonen was thus quick to seize the opportunity waved by the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1968 for a European conference aiming at a Europe-wide treaty. Finland became one of the most active advocates of such a conference, eventually landing the organization of the negotiations and final conference of the CSCE in Helsinki in 1972–1975. The whole process was seen by Finland’s authorities and foreign policy apparatus as a resounding success, bringing forward an image of Finland as an international problem-solver, mediator, and fosterer of European collective security. Organizing the conference in Helsinki gave the Finns an occasion to showcase their neutrality to the world.³² At the same time, however, tensions with the USSR slowly came back in the 1970s, with several episodes where the Soviet embassy in Finland interfered in Finnish domestic politics and supported the most radical fringe of the leftist movement.

2.1.3 Neutrality as a State-Led Effort to “Break the Circle of Fear and Hate”

Neutrality, as it became the centre of Finland’s foreign policy, was also the object of internal debates: in order to keep the country in this position, the Finnish leadership needed to persuade the population as well to speak and act “neutral”. That meant caution but also an involvement in and a pedagogy of international relations, with the hope to extract Finland from what was perceived as the parochial nationalism of the interwar period. Finland could not remain the peripheral, conservative society it used to be: it had to rise to its role as a neutral bystander in the international arena, which meant understanding international relations but also participating at the highest level in these relations. This need for open and realistic international contacts showed in the writings of several of the most important managers of Finland’s cultural diplomacy in those years. It corresponded also with a certain position in domestic politics, namely the part of the political spectrum located between the right of the social-democratic party, the centrist Agrarian league and a limited liberal part of the conservative right. They could embrace good relations with the Soviet Union for reasons ranging from personal advantage to ideological conviction, and at the same time lay an emphasis on Finland’s national culture and the necessary rejuvenation of the country’s contacts with the West.

This Finnish neutral Sonderweg was described as a necessity to keep the balance even between considering the USSR and opening up towards the West, refining and affirming national identity and emphasizing international outreach and knowledge of international relations.³³ Juhana Aunesluoma and Johanna Rainio-Niemi have convincingly argued that Finnish Cold War neutrality, if it corresponded to the necessities of a geopolitical position and was for the most part a pragmatic discourse used to placate the Soviet Union and allow for relations with the West, also became an important part of the country’s identity, that had to be defended in the eyes of foreign but also domestic audiences and eventually became meshed with the Finns’ self-image.³⁴ This narrative changed and evolved, but neutrality in Finland became a set of values and actions, useful in a certain situation but also invested with meaning.

In several declarations and speeches along the years, Kekkonen himself brought forward a vision of national culture that aimed for a synthesis between the traditional national culture, a rapidly modernizing society, and the necessities of the country’s foreign policy line. New relations with the USSR were promoted as an effort to “break the circle of fear and hate” that had characterized relations with the Soviet Union in pre-war times,³⁵ while old cultural traditions were presented as signs of the nation’s resilience, of its attachment to the long-term aspects of national survival in different international situations. The war was presented in Kekkonen’s speeches as a trauma Finland had to walk away from through the construction of peaceful relations with the Soviet Union and the world.³⁶ The 1944 defeat should not be seen as a depression but as the possibility to rebuild Finland’s position in the world.³⁷ Nationalism and cultural identity had to develop in this context, without the aggressiveness of times past but with a renewed sense of certainty born of wartime survival and postwar reconstruction.

Finally, neutrality was emphasized as a function of self-restraint, cautiousness and an understanding of the overall situation in which Finland had to work. This self-discipline was considered by Kekkonen and Finland’s leadership as necessary, and Kekkonen opposed it to the “politics of protest” he saw elsewhere.³⁸ Culture thus became part of a rhetoric on the national self formatted for the Kekkonen era.³⁹ In a text from 1963, Siikala describes the re-election of Kekkonen in 1962 as an ideological fight between those ready for a policy of pacific relations with the Soviet Union and a modernized Finland, and those attached to a policy of confrontation, that he describes in the harshest possible terms. To him, Kekkonen continued the Paasikivi line, ensuring that it would not be a “passing, opportunistic second-best solution based on weakness, but a durable, concretely and ethically sustainable solution to the problem of relations between a small country and its great power neighbour”.⁴⁰

In thinking about international cultural relations, the civil servants implicated in Finland’s cultural diplomacy thus clearly considered it in the context of accompanying the country’s foreign policy evolutions. In a text written in 1960, Oittinen insists on the necessity for international relations to spread understanding, fight prejudices and develop education and communication between nations.⁴¹ Wars are avoided not only through political and economic means but also through cultural communication and the spread of education.⁴² In a 1962 text, Oittinen defined the work of a new generation as the development of pacified cultural relations: while “Finland is vividly conscious of its position and of the importance of its foreign policy line in terms of security and independence”, the USSR also “knows that Finland does not want anything else than to live in peace outside of the quarrels of great powers and guaranteeing that its territory will not be used for an aggression against the Soviet Union”.⁴³

This rhetoric of Finland’s development in a more peaceful direction can be found distributed across a wide spectrum of protagonists under review in this book, from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of Education, and increasingly so in the 1960s. In his papers, Siikala writes at length about Finland’s neutrality, describing the country as a bridge between nations. The mirror image was often the war and pre-war years, considered as times of upheaval and uncertainty. For Finland, cultural diplomacy was thus the only common-sense thing to do. Siikala emphasized this rhetoric strongly in a 1978 lecture in London, reflecting on the relation between culture and diplomacy,⁴⁴ describing the increasing role of the Finnish state in that process of pacification.

In a 1979 speech, Siikala emphasized the role a small state such as Finland and its cultural relations can have in the pacification of international relations.⁴⁵ For him, to demonstrate the neutrality of the country to foreigners was the continuation of an internal process through which the Finnish administration looks for a middle way between the extreme-left and the conservative anti-Soviet fringe. Siikala sees Kekkonen as the incarnation of this middle-way, who acts and works as a bridge between blocs.⁴⁶ He criticizes in extremely strong terms the “big-mouthed heroes” who would endanger through their comments and reactions this fragile equilibrium and the president who guarantees it.

This view mixing cultural connections, domestic developments and the geopolitical position of neutral Finland is also clearly on display in the documents of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the activities of Finland’s cultural attachés. In a situation where Finland’s neutrality remained ambivalent due to the strong role of the Soviet Union,⁴⁷ cultural relations were seen also by diplomats as one of the means to strengthen the country’s image and develop relations beyond the East,⁴⁸ easing international relations, especially in the 1960s. The focus of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ Press Bureau’s action had to be on state-led international communication and efficient image diplomacy, while coordination with other actors needed to be maintained as smoothly and consensually as possible.⁴⁹ Jakobson’s 1961 report thus reasserted the general notion that information directed towards foreign countries and its funding should remain within the duties of the state: only the state could guarantee continuous funding and a network of envoys that could spread information, control its coherency, and provide feedback.

2.1.4 A “Finlandized” Cultural Diplomacy?

The question of the sincerity of Finland’s relations with the USSR and of Soviet pressures on Finland’s domestic politics in the 1970s have translated into a debate on “Finlandization”. Were cultural relations and a specific rhetoric linked to cultural diplomacy also parts of a process through which Finland kowtowed to the USSR under a president concentrating all powers in the name of stability and relations with the USSR? Was the rhetoric of world peace and internationalization just a prop to cover an ideology force-fed by Soviet overseers or a lever in the hands of certain political forces and individuals to ensure their stay in power?

The debate was already going on in the 1970s, forcing Finnish cultural diplomats to address it. At the end of a 1978 presentation, Siikala pondered whether cultural cooperation had been appeasement of an “ideologically expansive” Soviet Union, a betrayal of Finland’s democratic values.⁵⁰ He answered by emphasizing economic relations, which had an effect on Finland’s wellbeing and would not have developed without improved cultural, scientific and intellectual relations with the East. Improved relations had also appeased domestic politics: the communists had been admitted back into the political fold without much consequences. Finland was still a democratic country and a market economy. Siikala also emphasized the way socialism in the USSR had become a concrete thing for the Finns, something they could judge on the merits instead of through ideological lenses, due to their proximity with it and the empirical contacts they had with the USSR.

In more private texts, Siikala describes the Cold War as it stabilized with the death of Stalin first of all as closure from the catastrophe of World War II, which had ended in defeat and with Finland associated to the group of Nazi Germany’s former allies. The work done by Paasikivi and Kekkonen was a process of stabilization, during which “domestic conditions slightly stabilized in the early 1950s and the sails of foreign policy, full of the winds blown by the 1948 treaty and its introduction, pushed us out of the troubled waters of great powers’ quarrels”.⁵¹ This was welcome both in terms of foreign and in terms of domestic policy. The long-term civil servant of the Ministry of Education Margaretha Mickwitz insisted, for example, on the necessity to reknit the links between Finland and the cultural group to which it was felt to belong: the Nordic Countries and more generally the group of Western European democracies. Reasserting Finland’s position in this group after World War II and in the ambiguous circumstances of the Cold War was for her an essential part of Finland’s cultural diplomacy.⁵² “Finlandization” was before everything the successful reconstruction of Finland’s international status and contacts after World War II.

In an article for the intellectual review Kanava in 1976, Siikala described Finland’s cultural diplomacy as an evolution from postwar reputation management to the CSCE and participation in global cultural relations.⁵³ Most of the process was directed towards the West since it was there that the reputation of Finland and its export markets were in danger. Making Finland known in the Soviet Union was a different kind of process, led from the top of the political echelon. On both sides, the emphasis had to be on a modern and democratic Finland: force-feeding foreigners the same nationalist narrative that had been a staple of pre-war publications seemed ill-suited to a new international context where the Soviet Union dominated every aspect of Finnish foreign relations.⁵⁴ On the other side, the Finnish state took upon itself to develop official cultural relations with the Eastern bloc and other aspects considered as important for geopolitical reasons, but that couldn’t be left to the spontaneous flow of Finland’s cultural relations.

For someone like Siikala, the 1970s were thus not moments of submission to the USSR but moments when Finland’s involvement in international cultural debates reached a plateau, good relations with the USSR allowing for renewed relations with the West. In the build-up to the Helsinki conference, international cultural relations also acquired new meanings as a part of Finland’s involvement in the CSCE: a wider, more democratic vision of culture emerged, and an increasing involvement of the state in the cultural field.⁵⁵ International cultural relations had become the focus of a sizeable public sector, but it was the CSCE that brought this sector into view, especially education and culture, cooperation in the field of sciences and technology, and the role of the media. “Culture” had been defined anew globally as more than the elite artistic and intellectual contacts of the pre-war world, and Finland could play a role in these new relations as a bridge: “Finland is, thanks to the peaceful policy of neutrality and wise decisions of its state leadership, a trailblazer in these fields (cultural exchanges and education). Especially in the building of relations between countries representing different social, political and economic systems”. On this basis, our group of cultural diplomats emerged from the Cold War convinced they had given nothing important to the Soviet Union, while at the same time preserving and even developing essential forms of cultural cooperation in the Cold War context.

Siikala affirmed also strongly that international cultural relations were for a country such as Finland an essential part of international dialogue. Culture was not anymore separated from politics and statecraft per se, as “cultural relations have become the fourth dimension of foreign policy, with political, military, and economic relations”.⁵⁶ The dominant idea was to organize a peaceful coexistence between the blocs, something that could be achieved only with the help of cultural relations. In cultural diplomacy terms, the conference of Helsinki was thus seen as the high-water mark of an effort to modernize Finland, its foreign policy, its culture and its image abroad.

Siikala’s book contained also a wrap-up of those principles Finnish cultural diplomats approached the CSCE negotiations with.⁵⁷ He emphasized the political nature of international cultural relations, the necessity to participate and show a certain image of the country, and the development of Finnish culture through contacts with increasingly complex multilateral organizations. Siikala’s vision went beyond the pragmatic damage control of the 1950s: more exchanges, more freedom of movement and more exchange of information between people meant a new role for cultural relations in the strengthening of peaceful relations in the world.⁵⁸ Beyond the rhetoric, results were disappointing from this point of view, as Anna Salonsalmi suggests: in Budapest in 1985, the final document of the cultural forum remained unsigned by participants. Only in Vienna in 1986–1989 did the follow-up meeting accept a final document on cultural relations and cultural treaties and the creations of cultural institutes across the bipolar divide.⁵⁹

2.2 “Make Sure that We Get What We Need from Other Countries”: The Emerging Welfare State and Finland’s Cultural and Economic Modernization

2.2.1 Cultural Policy and the Welfare State

While geopolitics and neutrality were dominant aspects of the Finnish state’s involvement in international cultural relations, another strong incentive was the development of a welfare state and the perceived necessity to open Finland to the world in order to make it a more developed country. In 1959, the professor Aulis Joki emphasized this in a speech for a seminar on Finland’s cultural policy,⁶⁰ where he underlined that the Finns haven’t yet woken up to “the incredibly quick development of international cultural cooperation”. Staying apart from this development would mean becoming a cultural backwater, something a small country with reasonable ambitions for its cultural development could not allow. Joki concluded: “we need in all the important sectors of our society a strong will to participate in international cultural contacts”. Ten years later, a report by the Department of International Affairs in the Ministry of Education stated in the same way that “the planification of change has to follow global trends and to adapt these to Finnish conditions”.⁶¹ Starting in the 1950s, the Finnish state developed a strategy for national planning in culture, the arts and education, and one can observe the emergence in Finland of a state-led cultural policy linked to politics—not only Cold War politics but also considerations linked to the development of the population, national identity and the construction of the welfare state as an egalitarian project. Besides geopolitics, this constitutes a second important element of context in our study of Finland’s cultural diplomacy.

Cultural subsidies from the beginning of the 1900s had supported a limited number of artistic activities. Those were chosen mostly amongst art forms considered as representatives of the nation and supportive of the national project. Public support for the arts was rooted into the nineteenth century’s national movement that revolved around a strong effort to build a homogeneous, majoritarily Finnish-speaking national culture. This process supposed the development of a national literature, national visual arts, theatre and so on. It was important to bring Finnish to the level of a “civilized language” and the Finns to the level of a “civilized people”, also through science and scientific endeavours. University creations across Finland in the 1920s, or the first Finnish Nobel price, given in 1939 to the writer Franz Eemil Sillanpää, were important milestones in this process, originating mostly in private initiative. The University of Turku, for instance, was created in 1920 as the result of what would be called today a crowdfunding effort: a national subscription and various private financial supports, for example a gold nugget found in Klondike by two Finnish prospectors, were used to prop up the first entirely Finnish-speaking university in Finland.⁶²

The development towards a state-funded cultural policy was hastened by the context of World War II. During the war, organizations were created under the direction of the Finnish government in order to manage most aspects of Finland’s cultural and image relations with the world. The arts and culture, and organizations interested in international cultural cooperation, were marshalled for wartime propaganda and moral support. Finland presented itself as a country first attacked in 1939 and then either defending Western civilization and its independence or pushed to war by adverse circumstances. After the war, despite the will for more coordination in cultural activities, a distinct unwillingness to sustain this kind of state-led wartime organization in front of Soviet criticisms limited the state’s intervention. In December 1944, the Finnish government closed the organization responsible for wartime propaganda. The 1947 Paris treaty forbade “war propaganda” and propaganda critical of the USSR, and the government created a new, smaller organization called the government’s communication centre (valtioneuvoston tiedotuskeskus).⁶³ Melgin emphasized the way Finnish organizations of public relations specialists, who were mostly composed of veterans of wartime propaganda, helped the government to reconstruct its image diplomacy especially towards the West under the Soviet authorities’ radar. Things were first organized on an ad hoc basis, between a limited amount of existing public agencies and private organizations.

This situation was considered as inadequate, and the question of the state’s involvement in cultural policy and thus in cultural relations with the world was actively discussed from the war to the 1960s, with opinions voiced for a stronger involvement of the state in cultural policy. Jaakko Numminen, in a report written in 1964, summarized the case for such a state-led coordinated cultural policy,⁶⁴ where public actors (the state, but also municipalities) would manage a cultural policy similar to what Finland was developing in its social policy.⁶⁵ Like Siikala, Numminen regretted the lack of state engagement in cultural relations and cultural policy. Both pleaded for more resources and power to be given especially to the Ministry of Education: while most international affairs would be seen as belonging to the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, culture was seen as too complex and too dependent on domestic developments to be managed by diplomats alone.⁶⁶ These developments were justified not only by the needs of Finland’s cultural and educational progress but also by international developments: Numminen and Siikala insisted in their writings on the risk for Finland to be left aside of international cultural developments if it did not adapt and strengthen the state’s cultural policy.

The development of Finland’s cultural diplomacy is inextricable from this increasing state involvement in cultural policies, replicating at the Finnish scale a broad European movement towards state-led cultural policies.⁶⁷ In fact, the definition and the development of Finnish cultural diplomacy is an aspect of this expansion of the Finnish state’s remit towards a stronger coordination of the cultural field. The Finnish state during the 1950s–1970s created or developed several institutions dealing with cultural, artistic and educational affairs, and controlled through finances a growing host of private organizations, societies, institutions and associations involved in cultural affairs. A growing field of cultural affairs was thus slowly absorbed in the public sphere, international aspects constituting a shared terrain between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education.

Development of a Finnish cultural policy went hand in hand with the development of Finland’s welfare state. Although Peter Katzenstein’s reflections on democratic corporatism apply well to Finland,⁶⁸ Johanna Rainio-Niemi described the development in Finland of a specific brand of democratic corporatism that formed a backdrop to the development of a specific cultural policy.⁶⁹ By the mid-1960s, there existed a consensus on entire chunks of political life, and especially on the country’s foreign policy. Economic prosperity had to be developed in order to build the groundwork for a consensual social order, a modernization of society, and the foreign relations of the country had to be stabilized in order to adapt to the new geopolitical context. Both the welfare state and the obligations born of the special relations with Moscow pointed in the same direction: an expansion of the state’s control on society and the market. This happened despite deep resistances that continued to mark Finnish politics and industrial relations up until the 1980s: administrative centralization and state intervention, as well as Kekkonen’s foreign policy line, were never entirely unopposed, and state agencies were never the only protagonists, for example in cultural matters.

This link between the development of a cultural policy and the development of the welfare state is also emphasized by Pertti Alasuutari.⁷⁰ He describes the way in which 1960s Finland started to consider also cultural policy as part of the state’s democratic welfare state policy. The state contributed to the cultural field through grants, infrastructures, the creation of institutions and nationalizations, for example, the nationalization of private-owned universities in the 1970s. An important question became the necessity to reach equality of social and regional chances in the consumption of cultural goods, as part of a policy of national enlightenment.⁷¹ In 1968, the reform of the Basic school system was a good example of this development: the Finnish state, after a long political debate, took in charge of the system of basic schools, including private ones dating from the development of education institutions in the nineteenth century, and created a state-funded system of public elementary schools.⁷²

This development happened in connection with the development of the Ministry of Education as a strengthened administrative entity managing an expanding brief of cultural policy.⁷³ In 1922, when the former department for Ecclesiastical affairs of the Finnish Senate became a Ministry of Education, its brief was limited and mostly dealt with education and schools.⁷⁴ But with the war and the development of state policies after 1945, the ministry changed in the 1950s–1960s. Up until 1963, the main administrative leader of the Ministry of Education was State Secretary Arvo Salminen, a conservative figure who aimed at saving money and avoiding the accession to the Ministry of younger, more leftist administrators.⁷⁵ His departure opened up the Ministry, which in 1966 had already 60 employees, and about 150 in 1972.⁷⁶ The Ministry developed into a stronger administrative machinery, where the responsibilities and power of single administrators to influence and manage specific technical aspects became greater than before.

This development went hand in hand with the assignment of new tasks to a developing welfare state with a strong rhetoric of national cultural development. At the end of the 1960s, this national rhetoric was present in all general discussions regarding the development of culture and of the Ministry. In the 1970s, definitions of culture emphasized by UNESCO also found an echo in Finland, for example, in the 1974 discussions of a law on municipal cultural activities. The place of culture in democracy was emphasized, as well as the importance of international cultural contacts.

Therefore, while schools and education had already become a state matter in the interwar period, culture, science and the arts in the largest possible sense became an administrative matter, a state affair managed by specific public policies, growing budgets and administrative organizations only after the 1940s. Cultural policy became an integral part of the welfare state, integrated in notions of governance, technocratic planification, administration and culture as a tool to modernize and develop society. An important aspect of this development is its link with Finnish nationalism. Anita Kangas and Sakarias Sokka insist on this vision of Finland’s cultural policy as a way to strengthen the nation and enlighten the country’s population.⁷⁷ The goal was to democratize culture through increased public coordination and to use public power to support the arts as an essential and coordinated expression of the national self.⁷⁸ In the 1960s, in particular, the development of the welfare state emphasized the building of a “civilized state”, which also strengthened public coordination in the cultural field. The formerly limited role of the state, mainly as the patron of the arts, began to expand in the 1960s as a coordinating force for cultural policy. When in 1953, the Finnish government proposed cutting 13% of the state budget for culture and education, the debate that followed was strongly framed in terms of national improvement and Finland’s civilizational rank amongst nations: culture and education were presented by the defenders of their budget as matters of national life and death.⁷⁹

Marja Jalava also shows how during the 1960s–1970s, this process corresponded with the arrival in Finland of the idea of human capital—what was mostly a national cultural process became also an economic one, once culture and education were recognized as ways to improve the productivity of workers and the economic competitiveness of the country. Jalava frames the 1950s–1960s culture discussion in Finland into new economic and social developments:⁸⁰ as the level of added-value rose in Finland’s industrial products, the competitive edge of the country could not anymore be only low costs and comparative advantages. The discussion on raising the level of human capital arrived, around the late 1950s, adding economic preoccupations to the reflections on national culture. By the mid-1960s, most were convinced that higher education was an investment, and the idea of equality came on top of that. Sustained growth through better education was considered as essential to create a welfare state and equality.

Education and culture became much larger preoccupations in these times: national cultural construction and considerations linked to the “level” of national culture, economic considerations and human capital, considerations of immaterial goals, unselfish self-development of the population, equality of chances, mental and social health, aspects of access to cultural consumption goods, and finally political elements linked to the peace and cooperation rhetoric of contacts with the USSR. Finnishness was based on the feeling of a lack of something, a lack of the sophistication of “higher” nations, which pushed the state to support the acquisition from abroad of certain cultural traits and knowledge. This also explains the specific cultural, identity-driven angst about the national image abroad that is at the heart of Finland’s efforts in public diplomacy.

Finally, this development of state-led and state-funded organizations of cultural policy had a geopolitical aspect: in the context of a tightening official policy line, there was a need to bring the main private or semi-private organizations dealing with Finnish-Soviet cultural relations and other important aspects of international cultural relations under the control of the state. Simo Mikkonen gives a good example of that when he describes the slow movement of the Finland-Soviet Union Society towards the sphere of public funding and public coordination, and its evolution from a political organization considering cultural relations with the USSR as a branch of political activism into a cultural organization to which the state devolved certain missions. Despite the interest of its Finnish organizers for wider cultural and technical relations, the Society had been for most of the 1950s seen by the Soviet Union as an arm of Stalinist cultural propaganda. During détente and in the context of larger changes in the Soviet propaganda structure, it was allowed to become more cultural and to coordinate increasingly its activities with the Finnish state.⁸¹

This vision of cultural development was also linked to the evolution of education and scientific contacts with the world. Cultural relations especially with the West were essential both for the stabilization of Finland’s international position and for the cultural and pedagogical development of its society. In 1949, Auli Joki summarized things by saying that “we must make sure that we get what we need in cultural terms from other countries”.⁸² This was connected to a renewed importance after the war given to democratic access to knowledge and education as well as the renewal of education methods and its contents.⁸³ In 1970, a report by Anja Stenius for the Ministry of Education defined the role of international contacts in education as the establishment of peaceful notions about other nations that would guarantee peace and cooperation between nations.⁸⁴ The best summary of this point, however, is found in a 1963 report, where the Finnish UNESCO committee wrote:

The primary basis for our activity is Finland’s active interest in international cooperation in various fields of cultural and economic life and social activity. Only through developing this interest for international relations can we obtain a truly effective and widespread exploitation of the opportunities opened up to Finland. On the other hand, it is important for the cultural development of our country that Finland monitors international developments in the field of education, science and culture as closely as possible. This requires not only an interest for international affairs, but also a well-functioning connection. ⁸⁵

2.2.2 The Finnish Elite and International Cultural Cooperation Between Tradition and Modernization

The creation of a cultural policy with an international dimension naturally brings the question of what kind of cultural exchanges the state would wish to support. Regular reports criticized the paternalistic tone of cultural support and the barriers between high and popular culture, but Finnish coordinators of this policy generally retained a conservative vision of what kind of culture was useful, appropriate and worthy of public support. Criteria of accessibility, equality and high artistic or cultural quality were retained for public financing and support. Already in the late 1940s, the head of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ Press Bureau, Heikki Brotherus, had insisted on the need to curate global cultural trends for the people, in order to prevent “our new global civilization from becoming a civilization of salesmen and film stars”.⁸⁶

If the development of this cultural policy is the result of activity by the Finnish state, it is also linked to the conception by postwar Finnish cultural and intellectual elites of their role as the careful curators of international cultural trends for the Finnish people: the new culture of a new Finland had to be of the highest quality, and contribute to peace and understanding among nations. Like Lipponen, Hiski Haukkala writes about the ways the Finnish elites “internationalized Finland”—a notion that remains strong in interpretations of Finland’s national development and still today shapes the self-perception of Finland’s economic, political and cultural elites.⁸⁷ In a peripheral country, Marja Jalava has emphasized this role of elites in the transmission of transnational knowledge and their self-definition as aggregators and reenactors of desirable foreign cultural forms for a wider domestic audience.⁸⁸ The cultural, political and civil service elites saw as their primary function the merging of international norms in the national culture, the “domestication” of international trends.⁸⁹ This is well-illustrated by a speech Paasikivi gave already in 1937,⁹⁰ where he called for the coming of a new national poet, able to make sense of modern evolutions and to include those in a wide “national synthesis” able to foster a sense of belonging in the people without disconnecting it from the world.

In her work, Johanna Rainio-Niemi insists on the fact that, in the frame of this narrative, economic and social policies became tools used to refashion the country and its image in the eyes of both domestic and international audiences.⁹¹ State policies were seen by their managers (politicians, civil servants, cultural leaders etc.) as ways to change Finnish society, both in its workings and in its image. There was a link between the nature of the country, its image abroad, and the way the Finns perceived it. For some Finnish authorities, modernizing the country and its image was a desirable consequence of the organization of foreign cultural relations: foreign examples and influences brought incentives for change and modernization, which the Finnish self-defined elites were supposed to bring to realization.

Another part of this role was convincing the people to accept the geopolitical situation of Finland as a neighbour to the Soviet Union. As Alasuutari emphasized, this process was supposed to involve the entire society into a certain atmosphere, certain ways of doing things:⁹²

The rhetorical patterns imposed by the context of the foreign policy line did not impose itself only on political decision-makers. It also trickled into the behaviour of the people and public opinion, both of which had, after the hate of war times and pre-war times, and despite the propaganda of the Western capitalist countries, to give in to true friendship (with the Soviet Union) and Finland’s foreign policy line.

Many were quick to deny after 1990 the reality of this Cold War order, and to emphasize the necessity of the hour that pushed them to adapt to a certain rhetoric. This is not without merits: for most postwar Finns, the official foreign policy line and relations with the Soviet Union were a natural context in which to act, lip-service paid to the power of the hour more than ideology they would share wholesale. It left Finnish foreign policy and Finnish society with a lot of ground to cover beyond relations with the Eastern bloc. For most Finns of the postwar generation, what we could describe as a form of speech imposed by the USSR and parroted by an endoctrined population was mostly rhetoric, repeated as much as was politically useful but lacking in conviction, a part of the scenery mostly unreflected upon. For some, it could also be the expression of a genuine desire for stabilization, peace, a new relation with the world, a rejection of the war. In any case, for the state’s authorities this rhetoric was essential as a background to the country’s relations with the Soviet Union.⁹³

In this context, the role of Finnish elites was not only concrete but also symbolic leadership, and it exerted strong demands: the elites, and especially state administrators, had to pick and choose the right cultural elements, and the state had to organize, finance and coordinate this process. The role of the people was on the other hand to make itself available, to share the consensus and to educate itself.⁹⁴ This vision was not only one for Finland’s conservative cultural milieu: the social-democratic left’s cultural project, for instance, was based on the same premise of a pedagogical duty for the elites and a duty to educate themselves for the people. A vocabulary of cultural activation, participation and inclusion developed in committees and institutions, which was both encouraging and insistently pushing an idealized national community into a certain direction. The reforms wrought by the welfare state broadened the duty given to citizens to educate and develop themselves to new areas.

This duty had to focus on a certain kind of culture, defined by the state around the canon of “high” or useful culture. State support had to go to useful and civilizing scientific, cultural and artistic activities.⁹⁵ American modern art and pop culture were often pitted against European artistic traditions preserved in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden and Great Britain but also the USSR. This also influenced the definition of what forms of Finnish culture were fit for foreign exposure. Alasuutari described the emergence of an “official art” (edustustaide), supposedly fit to represent the nation abroad and emphasized as the country’s calling card.⁹⁶ This didn’t necessarily mean the research of pure, national, Finnish motives at all costs: part of the process was also trying to prove that the Finns could as well as others interpret the classical artistic and scientific trends of their time, prove that the country could be part, in its own language, of these trends, and even contribute to them.

Since the postwar period brought the rise of pop culture also in Finland,⁹⁷ notions of arts and culture became split between state-sponsored culture, seen as useful, enlightening, and the rest.⁹⁸ Paradoxically, the torch of fighting against cheap, Americanized pop culture passed from the conservative cultural generation of the 1940s to a part of the 1970s radical leftist generation. The massification of culture and the alleged simplicity of American pop culture, its cheap commerciality, were seen as impediments to the cultural elevation of the people towards more sophisticated forms of culture and arts.⁹⁹ Matti Klinge, in his memoirs, illustrates these aspects as part of a general discussion on culture that irrigated also the activities of Finnish cultural diplomats.¹⁰⁰ To Klinge, rejecting international trends was not an option, but neither was the sheepish acceptation of cheap American pop. The balance had to be found through a European culture susceptible to mix national cultures and high European cultural trends. For others, the solution was a “democratization” of high culture, bringing it to the people through state-sponsored forms of high culture.

Reflecting on the period, Klinge presents the rapid internationalization of the 1950s–1960s as an ambiguous process.¹⁰¹ The social groups arriving to power in the 1960s–1970s came from outside the country’s traditional cultural elites, and brought with them different tastes and less reverence for, knowledge of and interest for the high culture people like Klinge were looking for overseas. There were differences as to what kind of culture people would seek through their international contacts, and even more so there was a discussion as to what type of culture the state should encourage them to pursue through international contacts. During the discussions of the Brotherus committee in 1952, the diplomat and Foreign minister Carl Enckell emphasized the need for Finland, as a peripheral country, to find its place within “classical culture”, and to reject shallow American pop culture.¹⁰² By an interesting coincidence, these conservative cultural notions tended to match with the cultural programme of the worker movement’s leaders, which insisted on high culture and educative, formative, civilized cultural hobbies, as well as with the cultural discourse of the Soviet Union, which condemned the frivolity and materialism of American culture.

These same debates appear at the highest levels of the Finnish state. The group formed by Kekkonen in 1965 to reflect on changes to Finland’s university policy in order to develop the international competitiveness of the country is described thus by Marja Jalava: “In the conservative academic circles of Finland, it was still relatively common to despise the USA for its vulgar commercial mass culture and barbarity thought to have a degenerative influence on age-old European Bildung traditions”.¹⁰³ This is particularly true of the late 1940s and 1950s, when the cultural elites were old guard types emphasizing a Finnish national culture that should express itself as a version of European high culture. After the 1960s, this Bildung-based discourse will be in part continued by the leftist criticism of the United States as a cultural backwater compared to a USSR insisting on high culture.

However, Marek Fields emphasizes through the example of literature and the activities of the Finnish-American Society’s local branches the degree to which American culture was promoted and met with enormous interest and reception amongst Finnish audiences. The environment was considered by American cultural promoters as exceptionally fertile already in the late 1940s, and American culture, especially pop culture, came to dwarf Soviet cultural efforts and were more evenly distributed in time.¹⁰⁴ The situation changed in the 1960s–1970s, when under the influence of political elements such as the Vietnam War, the tone towards the United States became more critical. However, the domination of Western pop culture left Finland’s cultural diplomats uneasy, less because of any systematic kowtowing to the Soviet Union than because of their instinctive disdain for cheap American pop culture as unfit for the project of national development they had in mind.

2.2.3 Foreign Seeds and the Cautious Fertilization of Finnish Culture

Finland’s cultural diplomacy was also conceived by its protagonists as an extension of debates on the Finnish nation and on Finnish identity. In 1960, Siikala already dedicated some pages of his book to the idea of a cooperative cultural dialogue with the world and Finland’s place in it.¹⁰⁵ The term he used then was “cultural foreign relations”, which he thought necessary to extract Finland of its perceived feeling of cultural inferiority regarding wider and more developed cultures. Describing the construction of a national identity through the work of poets, painters, artists and composers, he described Finland’s idiosyncratic culture as linked to a specific place in which it developed. But he also saw a need for “foreign seeds” that “men and women full of application, enthusiasm and devotion” would plant on Finnish soil. This fertilization of Finnish culture was, from Siikala’s point of view, the role of the state and of a slowly developing “cultural foreign policy”. For Siikala, this cultural foreign policy had to carry dividends in terms of the modernization of Finland’s culture and society. In 1968, Siikala summarized the idea: international relations are a chance for Finland to develop its innovation capacity, to “renew itself by adapting cleverly and independently other countries’ experiences and international incentives”.¹⁰⁶

This idea finds its roots in Finnish discussions about the welfare state and ways through which the population had to be convinced to support a consensus on certain basic elements of political and social relations.¹⁰⁷ Some of these elements are linked to the country’s ambiguous geopolitical position: the writer Matti Kurjensaari described Max Jakobson telling him that the Finns themselves had to be convinced they were “really” neutral before foreigners could be convinced.¹⁰⁸ Matti Klinge, in his memoirs, presents neutrality as an essential trait that must be internalized by the Finns and also acted upon in terms of cultural relations, allowing a pacification of their relations with the USSR and thus the opportunity of open relations with the West.¹⁰⁹ For him and for Siikala, these views are naturally rooted in the seminal experience of the war.¹¹⁰ Neutrality provided a focus for domestic cohesion, a facet of nation building, a way to cohere the nation and to provide it with a pacified purpose.¹¹¹ This appears clearly in Rainio-Niemi’s study of Finland’s policies of “spiritual national defence” developed after the early 1960s.¹¹² The development of cultural diplomacy and cultural relations found its place in these efforts to build an internationalized, modernized, neutral and coherent nation. It had to embrace a sober “national realism”, reject wartime conservativism and jingoism, domesticate foreign cultural trends, especially coming from the West, in the modernization of its own culture, and strengthen cultural relations with the Eastern bloc. That would contribute to keep Finland away from twin dangers: blind opposition to the USSR or complete submission to Soviet pressures, shrivelling of its national culture or entire submission to international cultural trends.¹¹³

All these elements appear in the part of Finland’s cultural diplomacy dealing with internationalization and aiming at “teaching” international contacts to the Finns. Cultural diplomacy, exchanges and dialogue could be used as a tool to maintain contact with the Western world and also to change Finnish society in a more open, international direction:¹¹⁴ to get rid of old-fashioned nationalism, to improve education and research, to open up society and the arts, to reform the country and its culture, to change the image of the country abroad. In 1976, Siikala wrote after the CSCE negotiations that Finland needs fruitful international cultural dialogue in order to develop its national culture.¹¹⁵ The aim was nothing less than a remodelling of Finnish culture mixing idiosyncratic elements and foreign influences, an improvement of the Finns’ knowledge of international relations, to avoid the threat of provincialism and isolation. This was the background to a more constructive policy where Finland could knowingly set itself in-between East and West, as a mediator between the West, its natural family, and the East. These arguments are mobilized in order to get more resources for the conducting of cultural diplomacy, the organization and coordination of cultural relations.¹¹⁶ In a 1966 book, Siikala emphasized the optimism of the period, wrote admiringly of Kennedy, and envisaged a future of appeased international relations where Europe would repay its debt to the people it had enslaved through colonialism.¹¹⁷ For Finland to take its place in this movement, it had to get rid of its tendency towards pessimistic isolationism, Russophobia and nationalistic jingoism.

Oittinen as well insisted on the necessity for the Finns to shed away their inferiority complex and to open up to the world, on the role of exchanges and personal contacts for the youth, women and workers. While Siikala spoke of the national group in general terms, workers were never far in Oittinen’s speeches, as international cooperation was for him a continuation of pre-war cooperation inside the International Labour Office and the workers’ international:¹¹⁸ the themes of education and cultural work constituted the source of a moderate leftist and internationalist vision of cultural diplomacy that overlapped with a lot of Siikala’s more conservative vision of national development.¹¹⁹ Kalevi Sorsa, writing in 1969 during his period working for UNESCO in Paris, emphasized the necessity to spread an internationalizing ethos to the Finnish youth and especially worker youth. The goal was to foster understanding and a better comprehension between nations and races, educating workers and youth to peace and humanist values.¹²⁰ This meant changes in Finland as well, which cultural diplomacy could help to usher. In a period that most of these protagonists described as one of cultural upheaval, cultural diplomacy under the aegis of the state would open the possibility of a synthesis between old and new, East and West.

In other circles of Finnish society, the balance to be found between foreign and domestic cultural trends was to be set in a different pattern. Annamari Sarajas, a professor in literature at the University of Helsinki and a figure of the conservative cultural milieu in Finland, wrote for instance at the beginning of 1962 about the necessities of developing a truly Finnish culture:¹²¹ before reaching out towards the world, the new generation had to be tethered to the cultural heritage of their own nation. The “international idea of peace, the United Nations, development aid and racial equality” could be accepted only if one did know and research one’s own nation’s culture. In 1989, the sociologist Erik Allardt described the way foreign cultural influences in Finland had been written about from a rather negative point of view.¹²² In a recently industrialized country that passed almost without delays from a rural society to an information technology, demands for homogeneity have been strong in response to quick changes.

This shows how, for a small state at that time, cultural diplomacy was also a facet of a difficult debate about modernity, a way to organize cultural relations in a new world, to adapt oneself to new international ways, a part of the research for a national cultural synthesis. This synthesis has to go between the desire for isolation of the elders and traditionalists, and the desire for cultural deconstruction of the cultural radicals. In 1964, Siikala made things clear,¹²³ writing that Finnish culture should not fear increasing international cultural relations but on the contrary seize on them to modernize itself. This demands resources to better the Finns’ level in foreign languages and improve their knowledge of foreign countries through exchanges and contacts. Lager louts speaking only Finnish in Ibiza were bad publicity for Finland and bad education for the cultural elevation of the Finnish people: tourism had to be rethought in order to emphasize cultural quality. Finally, more foreigners had to be brought to Finland in order to be able to see for themselves the place and its inhabitants.

The modernizing ethos of Finland’s cultural diplomacy and the idea of the Finnish state and elites as drivers of the people’s cultural edification brings us back to debates about what culture would be worthy of state support and should be emphasized by the Finnish elites and civil servants. Meant as a process curating cultural contacts and forms of expression that would “develop” and “activate” the people, cultural policy had become a part of the Finnish welfare state’s approach to state-supported wellbeing. In a country where culture not only refers to arts, science or cultural productions but also and mostly to a national identity, the idealized ways of life it should entail, and the level of development it should attain, the Finnish cultural and political elites saw it as their duty to curate foreign cultural trends for the people.¹²⁴ Pirkkaliisa Ahponen describes the same process, an evolution through which cultural policy developed in Finland out of a will to organize the cultural expressions of society, with in mind the goal of raising the people’s level of civilization and level of artistic production, as well as the creation of artistic and cultural productions susceptible to strengthen the national feeling. The comparison with foreign countries was used as an incentive to insist on necessary societal changes in the country, justified by external pressures coming variably from the East or West.¹²⁵

Essential to this discourse was a vision of Finland as a peripheral, isolated country that had to be opened culturally by its elites, following certain ideas and developments that would steer it away from cheap pop culture.¹²⁶ Here too, the counter-example was often US cheap, consumerist pop culture. English-language pop songs and cosmopolitan merchandising was not the internationalization Finnish cultural diplomats of the 1940s-1960s wanted. In order to develop the national mind, one has to emphasize teaching, education, research and high-level culture. This dilemma and the balanced solution that is necessary to it, between opening and the preservation of national languages and identities, is at the heart of several texts by Siikala and others.¹²⁷ A parliamentary committee on artistic activities, for example, emphasized in 1965 the unwanted consequences of unbridled international contacts that brought low-quality, consumerist cultural products to Finland.¹²⁸ The writer Arto Paasilinna was one of those who criticized “television gazers, who lap up anything coming from abroad, and accept wholesale anything coming from the US, or Germany, because it is the will of the masses, it is cheap and contemptible”.¹²⁹ In 1985, the Finnish writer Olli Jalonen described the way in which “cheap stuff from abroad” was criticized and “national cultural autarchy” emphasized still way into the 1960s:¹³⁰ for the cultural diplomats we study, it was essential to find a middle ground between opening up the country and preserving the high quality of its culture. Oittinen manifests the same interest for high cultural production out of a concern for education and cultural diversity amongst the working class. In this context, the duty of the state and of its cultural diplomacy was to exert a measure of control on the culture coming in.

Like in most aspects of Finland’s Cold War society, this frame of Finnish cultural diplomacy was rooted in domestic developments but also had geopolitical aspects to it. The USSR could appear in the context of the Cold War as a counter to American mass pop culture, and this feeling that at least the Soviets appreciated high culture sedimented over long period of time also among people with experience of the Eastern bloc.¹³¹ Siikala’s 1976 book was also a plaidoyer for a certain form of culture, linked to a national project of bettering the Finnish culture and protecting it against low cultural quality: “next to the avant-garde of modernization and liberalization and next to those who work for serious cultural work have appeared sleazy (niljakkaita) merchants and disgusting copycats, whose only goal is to earn easy money through cheap rebellion and stupid eroticism”.¹³² American culture was important, but state-supported cultural imports to Finland had to concentrate on high-quality culture and possibilities for exchanges and study periods.¹³³ A new, modernized Finnish society should be given high-quality dreams, a culture of the highest calibre to share with the world and to contribute to with its own production. The role of the state was to enrich the national culture and to avoid the brutality and vulgarity that would result if cultural exchanges were to be dominated by commercial incentives.

2.3 From Image Promotion to Development Aid: Culture in the Service of Pragmatic Aims

2.3.1 Differences in Rationale and Emphases Between Ministries

In 1968, Kalevi Sorsa wrote a lengthy memorandum for Finland’s UNESCO committee dealing with the intentions of Finland in cultural European cooperation, where he mentioned in passing a lack of interest amongst diplomats for the cultural aspects of international relations.¹³⁴ In a context marked by the strong development of a domestic cultural policy and its spilling over into international relations, the field of cultural diplomacy was a divided territory between the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, its more traditional overseer, and the Ministry of Education, whose role became more important. Turf wars between ministries reveal also differences in the conceptions of cultural diplomacy in Finland as part of Finland’s foreign policy, from more idealistic to more pragmatic conceptions.

In his dealings with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Siikala insisted on several occasions on the differences he saw between a cultural diplomacy meant as an extension of foreign policy and a cultural diplomacy meant as an extension of cultural policy. He defended adamantly the latter version of cultural diplomacy, as he stated in numerous documents, maybe most clearly in 1978 when talking about culture to a British audience: “I shall decipher the word as meaning education, science and scholarship, and the arts. Cultural policies are the public measures that deal with these branches of human endeavour and cultural diplomacy is the international aspect of these public measures”.¹³⁵ Culture specialists, situated in the Ministry of Education, should have the main role in the managment of these affairs over generalists situated in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

In the same presentation, he insists on the newcomer status of cultural affairs in diplomatic relations, but defends their full inclusion into the foreign political practices of modern states. States should establish institutions able to coordinate and support cultural relations, and do it according to the logic of their own cultural developments and cultural international exchanges, not only geopolitics. In the postwar world, cultural relations should aim at peaceful international relations and dialogue, not only at peddling the state’s propaganda, selling cheap “cultural exports” or satisfying what he calls national arrogance. Most protagonists located inside the Ministry of Education would lay the same emphasis on cultural diplomacy as a scientific, cultural, artistic dialogue with foreign audiences naturally meant to be managed at least in part by the Ministry of Education.

In a 1969 book, on the contrary, the diplomat and head of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ Press Bureau Matti Tuovinen insisted on the policy aspects of cultural and public diplomacy, the need for coordination and control, and rooted the promotion of a specific image of the country abroad into a broad variety of policy reasons. If Siikala insisted in several publications on the necessity to reject what he called a French model of cultural diplomacy, where culture is used mostly as a tool for foreign policy and cultural relations are managed by diplomats,¹³⁶ his colleagues in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs considered cultural relations overseas, especially as they incarnate in potentially political affairs (relations with the Soviet Union, activities in international organizations, national image of Finland as a neutral country, negotiations of cultural treaties etc.), as mostly an extension of foreign policy.

The negotiations of cultural treaties with Eastern European countries give good examples of the frictions existing between the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the president and the Ministry of Education. The treaty with Bulgaria, for example, was mentioned in passing during a visit in Finland of the Bulgarian Prime Minister. Kekkonen supported it as a way to buff contacts with Eastern Europe without too much engagement. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs executed the president’s instructions, but the Ministry of Education complained about the lack of actual cultural contacts and the reciprocity of the treaty, which might mean hidden costs in its possible implementation.¹³⁷ Diplomats answered that something had to be done but that the treaty was a necessity: culture was a set of means to a set of ends, and should be used instrumentally in order to prop the country’s general foreign policy, and demonstrate friendship at a low political cost. The obvious idea behind that was that culture is one of these value-free ways in which Finland can participate in international relations and in the international organizations without provoking a reaction from the Soviet Union, a neutral ground for diplomatic relations and contacts.¹³⁸

This tug of war between ministries shows the way in which, despite the existence of a broad canvas of intentions widely shared within the Finnish civil service, different schemes could be considered with various levels of enthusiasm by different civil servants in different institutions. The characters emphasized in our introduction nicely represent these varieties of backgrounds. Siikala might be the most idealist, his speeches and activities full of notions linked to the pacification of Finland’s domestic and foreign policy as well as international relations. For him, cultural diplomacy was not only foreign policy but also a way to move the cursors of Finnish society away from their wartime pattern. Jakobson, the diplomat, might emphasize mostly the role of cultural relations as props for neutrality, the country’s image and its commercial fortunes. Due to his own personal experience, he might see cultural diplomacy also as a way to get Finnish youth to circulate in the world—for Jakobson, especially the Western world—and learn its ways. For Oittinen, a social-democrat bearing the memories of pre-war internationalist cooperation and whose career’s highlights included Finland’s accession to UNESCO and the reform of the Finnish school system, international cooperation mostly meant fostering education, scientific and technological exchanges, with an emphasis on the youth and the working class.

Numminen, the conservative civil servant, whose career was dominated by the cultural, scientific and educational arms of a developing Finnish welfare state, might consider Finland’s cultural diplomacy through his visions of what a “civilized state” (sivistysvaltio) should be, as well as the most concrete aspects of cultural relations, from trade to scientific and cultural exchanges, the promotion of Finland’s culture overseas through exhibitions or publications and the development of cultural institutions between the domestic and the international context.¹³⁹ For all of them, these relations would be mostly focused on the West, as cultural relations with the East followed a different logic, less administrative and more political, involving other institutions than the ones they had under their control. But none of them would consider East and West as mutually exclusive: Finland’s cultural diplomacy, as much as possible, would be considered in the frame of Finland’s geopolitical position as an opportunistic effort to foster relations with both East and West. For all of them as well, cultural diplomacy was a part of a broader effort to master and control the pace of change and modernization in postwar Finland. As late as the 1950s and 1960s, alignment between different goals was actively sought.

2.3.2 Finland’s Image Promotion Through Cultural Means

In 1952, in a report on the Finnish government’s publication activities abroad, the former journalist and diplomat Urho Toivola expressed a widely shared feeling on Finland’s situation: “I would like to emphasize that Finland is today more isolated than it was before the war. Thus, communication towards foreign audiences has a more important role than it had before”.¹⁴⁰ An incentive shared between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs for the strengthening of cultural contacts overseas was their conception of cultural contacts as a way to define and promote abroad a certain image of Finland. If this effort was often designated as propaganda before the 1960s, it was referred to in colloquial conversations with a convenient byword: “Finland-image”, Suomi-kuva. The word had the same signification than its Swedish equivalent, Sverige-bild, and refered to a host of activities aiming at promoting certain images of the country abroad. Protagonists in the Ministry of Education and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs refered early on to their “international communication” efforts to designate this image promotion work.¹⁴¹

Immediately after the war, the necessity to renew Finland’s image abroad was emphasized as a part of the process moving Finland away from the war. Most of the material produced before 1939 was considered by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs as useless: it was too old and too hostile to the USSR. The new material would have to concentrate on Finland’s democracy, reconstruction efforts after the war, tourism, the economic life of the country, and cultural sites and productions: churches, music, landscapes and towns. Discussions in 1948 concerning the edition of Arvid Enckell’s book on Finland’s democracy give a good idea of this desire for modernization and a new take on Finland’s image.¹⁴² Another example is the debate over the re-edition in 1950 of the book Finland Today, printed in 1948. The pictures in particular provoked some debates, with the embassy in Washington and the Ministry insisting on the necessity to present modern pictures of Helsinki, with happy people in the streets dressed in the latest fashion. Finland’s image promotion also had an important role in supporting the country’s foreign policy line: in the 1970s, the emphasis was on fighting against the use of the term “Finlandization” to designate Finland’s international position.¹⁴³ Credibility was an essential resource for Finland’s foreign policy during the Cold War, and it meant constant work to monitor and refine Finland’s reputation.

This feeling of urgency remained during the entire period under scrutiny. In 1969, in the proceedings of a seminar linked to Finland’s image in the world, the Foreign Minister Ahti Karjalainen strongly emphasized the importance of reputation for a small state. Karjalainen described quick developments during the late 1960s in the public coordination of these activities, from participation in international organizations and cultural treaties to the coordinated presentation of Finland’s scientific, cultural and intellectual achievements.¹⁴⁴ One important point was the teaching of Finnish abroad, in Siikala’s terms the most idiosyncratic export Finland had to offer.¹⁴⁵

If it shows especially in the papers of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs as an essential part of selling Finland’s neutrality and industrial products to the world, this role of cultural relations for the promotion of Finland’s image abroad is widely expressed in official papers throughout the 1940s–1970s as one of the reasons Finland should find its place in international cultural cooperation. More than the contours of this image, the main worry for the Finns was the lack of any notions related to Finland amongst foreign audiences. The translator and writer Jaakko Ahokas, who amongst many other things worked in the 1950s–1960s for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs as a translator, wrote in 1968 in Uusi Suomi an article deploring the lack of contacts between Finland and the world. Communication activities had to be developed in order to promote a modern image for Finland. If the official communication activities of the Finnish state have improved, Ahokas writes, the country’s cultural and image policy should be coordinated by a state-funded body.¹⁴⁶

As time passed, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in particular tended to see cultural relations mostly from the point of view of media relations and the communication of a positive image of Finland to foreign audience, for economic and foreign political reasons. Cultural relations were described, for example, in the 1961 report of the Jakobson committee as a necessary part of the country’s foreign policy line.¹⁴⁷ Cultural exchanges coordinated by the state were seen as a part of the state’s efforts to refine the image of the country overseas as a modern country that had changed from the interwar period. This new country was pacific in its relation with the USSR, more prosperous, more open to the world. It had a developing and strengthening welfare state.

In the 1960s, the Finnish state’s efforts at “international communication” were situated mostly in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as parts of an effort promoting neutrality and developing trade. But parts of these efforts were also linked to a will to make the image of the country correspond with the contours of its rapidly changing postwar society. In 1969, the head of the Minister’s Press Bureau Matti Tuovinen delivered a long analysis of his work for a conference organized by the University of Turku.¹⁴⁸ He concentrated on the nature of communication as both informational (inform about the nature and evolutions of Finland’s official activities) and influential (trying to influence others’ vision of Finland). He emphasized the need to rid Finland of old notions which had plagued its public image abroad since the war and placed it in the same group as the countries of Eastern Europe. A small state, Tuovinen emphasized, uses communication first of all to make itself known, while bigger states have “wider intentions” such as the spreading of ideologies or imperialist ambitions. He reminded the reader of the commercial and economic elements behind cultural relations and the communication of a good image of Finland: giving the image of the country as a reliable, serious international player also enhances its commercial attractiveness.

In 1976, Kalervo Siikala brought forward the same necessity to improve Finland’s image abroad through an emphasis on cultural diplomacy.¹⁴⁹ Describing the field of “international communication” as scattered across a wide swath of private and public agents, he underlined the importance to keep contacts with different groups of “specialized audiences”. However, he also presented the way in which Finland’s cultural diplomacy, that started after 1944 from a need to “make Finland known to the world”, has developed into a wider process of cultural and educational cooperation, both bilateral and multilateral.

After the 1966 creation of the Department for International Affairs in the Ministry of Education, image promotion and cultural relations became more clearly separated in administrative terms. The first one went more clearly to the Press Bureau of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the second more clearly to the Ministry of Education. But they remained difficult to entangle for a country where all international relations were considered a part of the promotion of its international image. While information and people would flow freely, Siikala also hoped that each Finn abroad would become a potential ambassador for his or her country.¹⁵⁰

2.3.3 Culture as the Handmaiden of Trade and a Channel for Development Policy

An element that enjoyed wide support in both the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education was the importance for cultural contacts to result in economic and trade benefits for the country.¹⁵¹ In his PhD thesis dealing with cultural relations between Finland and the Soviet Union, Ville Pernaa emphasized the way economic and trade aspects were presented as essential elements in the presentation of cultural diplomacy, especially in discussions with the Finnish Parliament. They were essential in framing cultural diplomatic activities towards the Finnish Parliament, in Finland the main instrument of budgetary power, which held a generally stingy attitude to costs and funding.¹⁵² Another direction in which this kind of framing was essential was the private sector, and especially companies, which the Finnish state tried to associate to activities linked to the promotion of Finland’s image abroad.¹⁵³

While cultural relations were seen as important for neutrality, national identity and increasingly as a part of a developing welfare state, concrete, pragmatic reasons for the development of this cultural diplomacy had to be regularly emphasized in public discussions with Parliament and private actors. In several publications scattered through the period studied here, protagonists emphasized the concrete advantages Finland could get from international cultural contacts. Siikala in 1976 pointed the way artistic productions were also “trade goods”, parts of the country’s economic activity and elements especially of its export activities, including the commercial exchanges Finland had with the Soviet Union.¹⁵⁴ This was especially the case with Finland’s industrial artisanship, from design to architecture, which was described as both an artistic endeavour and an economic activity susceptible to result into better trade and exports. Public activities came in the tail of the international activities of companies in the sector: after the war, these companies aimed first at Sweden and then at the rest of Europe for their development.¹⁵⁵ This insistence on concrete, financial gains from cultural relations was linked also to the role in the early Cold War of private protagonists in the development of cultural contacts between Finland and the world.¹⁵⁶ It extended to discussions about the cost of cultural policies and the cost of participation in international cooperation.

In 1976, Siikala and the Ministry of Education organized a seminar on “cultural exports”, meant to consider the monetization of cultural relations,¹⁵⁷ under the form of either the direct selling of artistic and cultural products or indirectly through supporting the opening of new markets. For Finnish civil servants, trade would be facilitated by promoting certain images of Finland as a worthy country producing reliably good products. If Siikala used in this presentation the term “cultural exports” in the sense of actual exports of cultural products, the ambivalence often shone through. In his book published in the same year,¹⁵⁸ he used the term in the sense of the export of Finnish culture, language and scientific achievements. But he also emphasized that Finnish “culture” was still strongly import-based: the world taught Finland more than Finland taught the world.

A developing aspect of Finland’s cultural diplomacy was also the role of cultural, scientific and educational cooperation in the country’s participation to development aid efforts that started and developed in the 1960s. A good number of cultural diplomacy’s protagonists linked development work to Finland’s cultural outreach, internationalization and a kind of international duty to fulfil. This aspect is emphasized in publications as a way for Finland to participate in global relations, burden-sharing and the construction of peace and understanding in the world. In 1976, Siikala wrote how “Finland managed through hard work to develop its production and its culture. This brings also a duty to help those poorer and less developed than Finland. Hence the need for its youth to become more acquainted with others, because it helps to build the foundations of an international organization based on peace and understanding”.¹⁵⁹

In strong words, Siikala defended cooperation with the Global South as a part of the change he wanted to usher in Finland through the development of international cultural relations: “Those who consider development work as useless banter are neurotic navel gazers, whose selfish and arrogant positions make the intellectual atmosphere of our country so heavy”. The choice to be made is not between the development of one’s own country and development aid—both have to be considered together as contributions to a peaceful international development.¹⁶⁰

A significant portion of Finland’s official development activities was thus cultural activities, channelled through UNESCO: in the 1960s, the organization had turned its activity strongly towards the Global South and aid to developing countries. Finland participated in this turn, organizing for instance in 1964 a Finnish-African conference in Helsinki.¹⁶¹ In 1970, in a speech for the national broadcaster Yle, Siikala described the rise of development aid concerns in UNESCO and presented it as a natural and welcome development.¹⁶² The organization had moved under the influence of decolonized countries from a forum of developed countries destined to emphasize a humanist global culture, to an organization turned mostly towards concrete realisations in the Global South, especially the development of education campaigns. Siikala wrote that Finland participated in that through its modern and well-performing education model that could easily outmatch the old French and British models present in former colonies. This remained a staple of Finland’s vision of UNESCO throughout the 1970s: in 1979, a report of the Ministry of Education stated that strengthening contacts in UNESCO was a much cheaper and effective way than reciprocal cultural treaties to develop cultural contacts with developing countries.¹⁶³