Coordinating and Facilitating Bilateral Cultural Contacts

Abstract

In 1970, when Marjatta Oksanen joined the Ministry of Education, the Department of international affairs was divided into three administrative units: multilateral affairs, bilateral affairs (with two different organizations for East and West) and Nordic relations. The Finnish state managed various forms of cultural relations with countries or groups of countries, mostly in a facilitative function: support for exhibitions or concerts, longer-term support for cultural centres or language teaching and so forth. Most of these bilateral activities originated from private initiatives, and some domains like sports, scientific cooperation or relations with the Soviet Union were dominated by private, non-governmental or semi-public organizations that acted on their own or to whom the state devolved certain functions. Generally, only relations with the Soviet Union and technical issues with strong foreign political dimensions commanded a degree of involvement from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and interest from the country’s higher political leadership.

Our programs of cultural exchanges are essentially public relation efforts, to be managed well or not at all.

—Report from the Ministry of Education’s Department of International Affairs, 1979 (OPMA, Jaakko Numminen fund, Box Kulttuurisopimuspolitiikka, 1979–1984, PM, Suomen kulttuurisopimuspolitiikka 1980-luvulla, Kansainvälisten asiain osasto, 4.10.1979. Translated from Finnish.)

Finland makes full use of the possibilities offered both by UNESCO and by bilateral exchanges for the development of cultural contacts and stipend programs.

—Annual report of Finland’s UNESCO committee, 1962 (OPMA, Box Kansainvälisten kulttuuriasiain toimikunta, 1952-1963, Stipendiasiain toimikunta, Suomen Unesco-toimikunta/Opetusministeriön kansainvälisten stiepdeniasiain toimikunta, PM, Kertomus vuodelta 1962, Helsinki 1963. Translated from Finnish.)

In 1970, when Marjatta Oksanen joined the Ministry of Education, the Department of international affairs was divided into three administrative units: multilateral affairs, bilateral affairs (with two different organizations for East and West) and Nordic relations.¹ The Finnish state managed various forms of cultural relations with countries or groups of countries, mostly in a facilitative function: support for exhibitions or concerts, longer-term support for cultural centres or language teaching and so forth. Most of these bilateral activities originated from private initiatives, and some domains like sports, scientific cooperation or relations with the Soviet Union were dominated by private, non-governmental or semi-public organizations that acted on their own or to whom the state devolved certain functions. Generally, only relations with the Soviet Union and technical issues with strong foreign political dimensions commanded a degree of involvement from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and interest from the country’s higher political leadership. The rest was managed at the level of technical administrations.

In the late 1970s, Kalervo Siikala noted the way in which the Ministry of Education had grown in size and had come to move from this role as a facilitator into a more active role, managing a larger range of activities: stipend programmes, bilateral cultural treaties, Finnish institutes and “Finland houses” abroad, relations with UNESCO, Nordic multilateral relations, a Soviet Institute, the Finnish-Swedish cultural centre in Hanasaari created in 1975, several posts of Finnish language lecturers in foreign universities, the Center for the promotion of Finnish literary exports created in 1977 and so forth.² The state worked as one actor in a maze of organizations and programmes linking Finland culturally to the world. The 1960s–1970s saw the emergence on top of spontaneous cultural relations of an official level of cultural relations, strongly linked to the context of Finland’s foreign policy, from bilateral relations with a variety of countries to the formal, bureaucratic work of international cultural organizations, from short-term events such as exhibitions to long-term programmes and financial support. Bilateral relations brought to view the way ministries in the Finnish state mixed a systematic development of their competencies (e.g. through bilateral cultural treaties and exchange programmes), the increasing coordination of areas of cooperation (through the funding of various organizations) and an evolutive, ad hoc, facilitative role for the initiatives of the private sector.

4.1 The Finnish State as Facilitator and Initiator of Cultural Relations

4.1.1 Bilateral Relations and Relations with “Brotherly Nations”

Bilateral cultural relations between Finland and foreign countries developed after the war without a specific plan, on the basis of existing personal relations or the relations between organizations, from friendship societies to universities. They developed for the most part as a spontaneous effort to reconstruct the links existing before the war: cultural figures took back the habit of travelling to Rome and Paris, Finnish-speaking diasporas in the United States and Canada reformed their links with Finland, embassies started anew their cultural activities, inviting journalists and scholars to Finland, supporting exhibitions and promoting translations of Finnish publications. Relations with Sweden and Western Europe were the first to pick up, followed by the discovery of new avenues of cultural relations on the American continent. Relations with the Eastern bloc were dominated by the USSR’s activities and its relays in Finland, while the 1960s saw a development of relations with Eastern European countries through the signature of cultural treaties.³

As relations started to grow after 1944, each foreign country seemed to form a case in itself, with a history of cultural, political and economic relations with Finland, and organizations or personalities relaying contacts. Apart from strong interest in developing relations with the Eastern bloc, there were no specific efforts in Finland to prioritise relations with specific countries. Embassies had retained the habit of working in local contexts to develop cultural relations especially with political, cultural and economic elites, using country-specific networks and contacts and emphasizing matters specific to the place. But they had very little resources and no sense of coordination from Helsinki emerged from the various initiatives taken at local level. Cultural relations were seen as part of the general foreign policy of the country that insisted on reconstructing relations with the West and adapting to new, friendly relations with the Soviet Union.

France provides a good example of the development of these bilateral cultural relations from the point of view of the Ministry for Foreign affairs and the Ministry of Education. Because of Germany’s postwar division, France seemed a possible door to re-open cultural relations with the West.⁴ The personal preferences of many important Finnish cultural and administrative figures also brought them closer to French culture and the French language as markers of social and intellectual status. France could also seem like a good counterweight to the dominance of Anglo-American culture and a chance to get closer to “old Europe”. The process of European integration, to which Finland started to participate with the 1961 FINN-EFTA treaty, also brought a commercial tinge to these cultural aspects. Bilateral relations were pushed by representatives from ministries, the embassy in Paris, an active community of Finns in France and various organizations: the Finland-France friendship society, the Franco-Finnish Chamber of Commerce and a Finnish-French Technological and Scientific Society created in 1973 by a group of scientists and tradesmen.⁵ These organizations and Finnish embassies remained for the period under study the main poles of bilateral cultural relations, mixing private initiatives to public networks and funding.

The Finnish state, however, started to develop forms of direct involvement. One form of support for bilateral relations by the Finnish state was the funding of Finnish language chairs in foreign universities. The lecturers and professors of Finnish language and culture at Parisian universities had been particularly important human cultural channels between the two countries since the interwar period. Finnish language courses at the French Institute for Eastern Languages (INALCO) in Paris dated back to the beginning of the 20th century: the first holder of the chair of Finnish language had been Aurélien Sauvageot, from 1931 to 1967, helped by the Finn Aimo Sakari from 1937 to 1958. In 1965, the Sorbonne created a course in Finno-Ugric studies for Sauvageot, but a major change took place the following year with the creation of a chair of Assistant Professor: Heikki Kirkinen became its first holder in the autumn of 1967, succeeded in 1970 by Matti Klinge.⁶ These various activities were supported by the Finnish state through grants from the Ministry of Education.

Bilateral cultural relations also followed political contacts, developing after official visits or contacts with foreign dignitaries. In the case of France, important steps were taken in official relations after Kekkonen’s 1962 visit and the French Minister of Culture André Malraux’s visit to Finland in 1965.⁷ The first contacts for an agreement on cultural and scientific cooperation between Finland and France were taken then, and the treaty was signed in September 1970 during the visit of French Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann to Finland.⁸ France was the first country in the Western bloc with which Finland signed a cultural agreement, and expectations were high on both sides. The regular meetings of the Joint Commission set up by the agreement were, however, largely disappointing to the Finns, as the French were mainly interested in developing French language teaching and French cultural organizations in Helsinki. In 1973, evolutions of the political context and the possibility to acknowledge both Germanies made cultural relations easier to organize with both Eastern and Western Germany, and interest in France as a kind of surrogate for traditional cultural relations with Germany became more subdued.⁹ France became also less important than the United States in Finland’s bilateral cultural relations, owing to American activities in Finland and to the vivid interest of Finnish society for American culture starting in the late 1950s.¹⁰

Development of bilateral relations with countries from the Global South or Asia also gathered pace in the 1960s, a novelty compared to the pre-war state of Finnish bilateral cultural relations. Most of these contacts were channelled through UNESCO or private initiatives, but in some instances the government would directly consider for example exchange treaties. Relations with China are a good example of this peculiar mix of foreign pressures, official support and private activism.¹¹ China after the late 1950s tried to build contacts with a country in the West that could prove easier to penetrate than others, both because of its relations with the Soviet Union and because of its size. In the summer of 1952, a Chinese acrobatic group toured locations across Finland, the visit being organized by the Finland-China Society, founded a year earlier in June 1951. The main problem was mainland China’s recognition by Finland: diplomatic relations had been established in 1950, after the leftist part of the Parliament had criticized Prime Minister Fagerholm for failing to recognize the new country. Prime Minister Zhou Enlai’s use of Chinese opera as a tool of cultural propaganda also showed in Finland with several representations in the 1950s, invited by the Finnish Confederation of Theatre Organizations, Tampere’s Workers’ Theatre and the Finland-China Society. Annika Heikinheimo describes the 1950s as a golden age in Finno-Chinese cultural relations. The Finland-China Society had a de facto monopoly on the organization of these contacts with Chinese authorities, and relations with China were managed beyond the reach of the Finnish authorities. The Finnish state, however, tried to develop official contacts as well. In April 1953, a cultural delegation led by Urho Kekkonen’s wife Sylvi left for China at the invitation of the Chinese Association for Foreign Cultural Relations. The practical arrangements and contacts for this visit were handled by the Finland-China Society, and three other delegations visited China in the same conditions in the late 1950s.

In the 1960s, the political upheaval in China ended this first period of relations. The Soviet-Chinese dispute set the Finnish authorities in a bind regarding China, and the Cultural Revolution starting in 1966 changed the tone of Chinese cultural contacts. The emphasis moved to the distribution of political propaganda and blind defence of the Chinese government. A first period of mutual discovery ended almost completely between 1966 and 1970. The Finland-China Society was instrumental in starting new exchanges in the 1970s, but this time the ministries participated more actively. The Society had been taken over by the Maoist Left and internal infightings made activities more difficult to organize. In 1973, an official programme of cultural stipends between Finland and China began as part of Finland’s Minister of Education’s visit to China, as well as close cooperation in the planning and implementation of its content between the Finnish Ministry of Education and the Finland-China Society.¹²

A specificity in Finland’s case was the early role of public administrators in contacts with Hungary and Estonia.¹³ Old cultural relations with these nations dated from the construction of modern national sentiments in the nineteenth century, when the three national movements developed links with each other as the only European countries speaking Finno-Ugric languages. The notion of “brotherly nations” became a rhetorical point in Finland in the interwar period, but relations lacked substance and were emphasized especially by a conservative academic elite.¹⁴ After 1944, this symbolism came back to influence the rhetoric of Finland’s main cultural diplomats, and worked as a background for some of them to consider cultural relations with Hungary and Estonia as a special case: Jaakko Numminen, for example, used regularly the vocabulary of “brotherly nations” to justify the development of relations with Hungary. Hungary’s situation as a contested part of the eastern bloc and the disappearance of Estonia in the Soviet empire complicated these contacts: the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 was a source of considerable shock for the Finns. Kekkonen proposed his mediation to the Soviet ambassador in Finland, but the Finns abstained from criticising Moscow in the UN and were extremely cautious in public declarations. The Finnish government donated 50 million Finnish marks to the Finnish Red Cross, and there was a restlenessness in Finnish public opinion that was transcribed in critical parliamentary declarations and in private donations for Hungary.

However, in the early 1960s, the incentive to build better cultural relations was strong on the Hungarian side, which used old cultural contacts as an ice-breaker during détente. Urho Kekkonen paid an unofficial visit to Hungary in 1963, preparing the terrain for a return to normal relations.¹⁵ Jaakko Sievers notes that, following this visit, official contacts returned at a brisk pace. In 1964, Kalervo Siikala visited Hungary,¹⁶ an invitation he described as an attempt by Budapest to use cultural contacts as new channels of communication with the West—Finland was in that respect something of a low hanging fruit. The trip’s organizers showed the Finnish delegations churches and museums, and avoided the Soviet-style visits to factories, kindergartens and collectivized apartments. Finland was in a good position to take advantage of this renewal of cultural activities in Eastern Europe: the country was perceived as a part of Scandinavia, a potential source of new ideas, new institutions, new forms of social and cultural activities, and it didn’t have any qualms with developing cultural relations with socialist countries. After 1968 and Kekkonen’s re-election, the Hungarians were eager to organize an official visit, and the Finnish president visited Hungary in 1969 as part of a trip that brought him also to Romania and Czechoslovakia.¹⁷

Hungarian and Finnish UNESCO policies also seemed to match in the 1960s. Hungary saw UNESCO as an important organization, but shared Finland’s suspicion towards the organization’s bloated budgets and over-ambitious projects that made participation for smaller states an increasing financial burden. Hungary also insisted on UNESCO’s nature as a world-wide peace and cooperation organization, not only as an agency for the channelling of development aid. In September 1968, the Hungarian UNESCO commission insisted to Finnish guests on the necessity to support the study of Finno-Ugric languages and cultures and to organize the schooling of African heritage preservation specialists in Finland and Hungary in order to keep UNESCO funds in Europe.¹⁸

Relations with Estonia were more complex, as the formerly independent state had been a Soviet republic since the end of World War II. Finland and Estonia had signed a cultural treaty in December 1937 that was never officially cancelled.¹⁹ Pushed by a strong current of private relations and public opinion interest for Estonia, science and cultural relations gave a variety of Finnish organizations the possibility to go around the fact that Estonia was part of the Soviet Union, while the state could not really get involved.²⁰ This had to be done discreetly, and often through the patronage of prominent Finnish political figures. Urho Kekkonen’s trip to Estonia in 1964 was particularly revelatory of this spirit: taking advantage of détente in Europe, Kekkonen gave a speech in Estonian at the cultural heart of the national Estonian project, in the University of Tartu.²¹ This visit was the first step into a series of cooperation schemes between Finnish and Estonian scientists and especially marine conservationists and sea ecology experts. In 1965, visits between the Tallinn university of technology and Finnish university centres were organized, dealing with waste water recycling and water technologies. They ended up in a decision made in May 1968 by the Joint Committee for the 1955 Scientific and Technological Treaty between Finland and the USSR to improve scientific and environmental cooperation in the Gulf of Finland. It established a working group made of natural scientists and engineers, with a Finnish and a Soviet delegation. Environmental concerns on both sides of the iron curtain started to develop at the same time: the Finns were happy with a cooperation that emphasized environmental protection but also gave content to Finland’s general relations with the USSR, and Soviet scientists could learn from Western technology, use libraries and publications in Finland and so forth. This kind of bilateral cooperation showed an interesting mix of private and public actors, spontaneous relations, bureaucratic frames and political background.

Bilateral relations with various countries in the first decades of the Cold War were a varied and crowded field, where the Finnish authorities mostly facilitated the work of more active protagonists—Finland’s new official relations with the Soviet Union could even dissuade some private organizations to ask for public support, for fear of being associated to contacts with the East.²² Friendship societies, universities and often single individuals were instrumental in reconstructing after the war a network of bilateral relations that became more varied than the pre-war network, with extensions towards Asia, the United States and Eastern European countries. From the authorities’ point of view, these relations appeared either through the support given to local activities by the ministries or through arrangements and organizations managed by the Ministry of Education: exchange programmes, regional or country committees, and mostly cultural treaties. No real sense of coordination emerged, apart from a strong desire to develop relations with a wide range of partners beyond the East-West divide.

4.1.2 Support for Artistic and Athletic Relations

International artistic relations were mostly managed by a large field of private organizations, associations and interest groups dating from before the war. From 1947 onwards, a group of artists and directors of artistic institutions, like the head of the museum and exhibition venue Helsingin Taidehalli, Bertel Hintze, travelled regularly to the Nordic Countries and to Europe with plans of organizing exhibitions of Finnish art. In 1945, a Nordic Arts Association had been created in Stockholm, where the Finns were present from the beginning. The goal of the association was the organization of exhibitions, but they had also the intention to publicize the arts and artistic activities through articles in the press. The first years were still under the shadow of the war, and Elina Melgin emphasizes the way the Norwegians, for example, saw Finland’s participation with suspicion—the Finns had been allies with Nazi Germany, the occupier of Norway during the war.²³ The organization used the institutions of Sweden’s image diplomacy, from the Swedish institute to the Swedish PR specialists organization Publicistklubben.

In Finland, the main role was played by the Finnish Art Academy (Suomen Taideakatemia), a private organization that developed the Finnish art field’s international relations. It had money and influence, and worked to coordinate Finnish museums and art galleries in cooperation with other organizations, mostly Nordic in the first postwar years. The first common exhibition of the Nordic Arts League to which Finns participated was organized in Oslo in 1946, and the exhibitions roved yearly through Nordic capitals, reaching Helsinki in 1950. The goal was to avoid officials and ceremonies, and exhibitions gave to Finland a good channel for international contacts. In 1947, Lennart Segerstråle, in a presentation during a meeting of the League in Stockholm about the Finnish arts scene and artistic life, emphasized the difficulties of postwar life in Finland, underlined the desire to reknit contacts both in the arts and in literature, by getting Finnish literature translated but also getting the modern literature translated into Finnish. According to Melgin, the Ministry of Education was involved in those mostly through personal relations in the last years of the 1940s, but contributed also through financial support and subsidies.

The Ministry for Foreign Affairs also contributed, either through the help afforded by the diplomatic network or through direct financial contributions. The answer was not always “yes”, and the Ministry had to prioritise limited resources. In 1944, the four biggest Finnish publishing companies, Otava, Schildt, WSOY, and Söderström unsuccessfully asked the ministry for the creation in Stockholm of a bookstore of Finnish literature. An editor got in touch asking for funding to create an editing company in Stockholm through which Finnish literature and “national propaganda” could be channelled. The ministry refused, saying that they did not want to hide their communication efforts and were planning anyway to open a Finnish institute in Stockholm. The diplomats G.A. Gripenberg and Heikki Brotherus proposed the creation of a “literary attaché” in Stockholm in 1944, but to no avail.²⁴ If the Ministry of Education used arguments linked to the quality of Finnish arts and literature, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs mostly saw the arts and literature as a way to promote a certain image of Finland abroad.

The situation remained similar up until the mid-1960s, when the creation of state organizations to coordinate activities also reached the realm of artistic productions and exhibitions. In February 1962, the government set up a committee to examine the form and extent of state support for various fields of art and draw up a proposal for measures to develop and promote Finnish art abroad.²⁵ The 1965 committee report made a long list of state organizations dealing with culture, with a few of them concerned with foreign cultural relations: the Finnish UNESCO committee, the Finnish Section of the Nordic Cultural Commission and so forth. It emphasized the lack of resources in both ministries to conduct a strong coordinating artistic policy. Each ambassador and diplomats abroad were tasked with managing cultural relations and helping artists, but resources were minimal despite a 1964 instruction clarifying the role of ambassadors and diplomatic envoys in these questions.

Support for artistic projects was mostly directed to the normal directions of Finland’s state-led cultural activities in the Cold War. The Nordic Countries came first: the Finnish section of the Nordic Cultural commission and the Finnish-Swedish Cultural Fund created in October 1958 promoted cultural relations through grants. The eastern bloc came second: a committee on cultural exchanges between Finland and the Soviet Union had been created in October 1963, a Finnish-Hungarian Joint Committee had been created in June 1959 as a result of the Finnish-Hungarian Cultural Agreement, as well as a Finnish-Polish Cultural Committee created in September 1964. The Ministry of Education coordinated these and had also allocated funds for the foreign and domestic information activities of the Music Information Center, established by the non-governmental Finnish Council for Music in 1963.

However, in the committee’s view, this activity had not been carried out in the best possible way. The criticisms were well-rehearsed: operational efficiency had suffered from the lack of centralized organization with the private sector, there had been a lack of cooperation between the various fields of art and insufficient attention has been paid to resources. The report presented the use of art for national image promotion as obviously positive, but support had to be concentrated on efficient action aiming at carefully selected target audiences. Coordination was needed also for national and identity-based reasons. Foreign influences in the development of Finnish art were described both as a globally positive development and as a potential problem: the increase and intensification of international connections brought with it the danger that “Finnish art” would change to emulate foreign models and to embrace superficially understood foreign ideas. Hence, the need for more state coordination, which would give the possibility to control the percolation into Finnish arts of foreign trends. The report proposed a law supporting international relations and setting as the state’s main task the organization of exchanges and the support of exhibitions. These elements remained at the heart of the Finnish state’s activities as a facilitator of artistic international contacts. But despite the 1961 Jakobson report, no efforts were made to systematize the facilitation of cultural contacts, and the Finnish state’s activities in this domain remained reactive, short-term support for initiatives coming from the private sector.²⁶

Sports were an important part of Finland’s collective life and self-image, yet it shows only seldom in the material studied here. Sports belonged to the Ministry of Education and were considered an important part of Finland’s image abroad: the Summer Olympics organized in Helsinki in 1952 were an important milestone in Finland’s return to international visibility after the war. But even more than for the arts, Finnish athletic contacts with the world were mostly managed by specific sportive organizations, outside the coordinating reach of both ministries under study here.²⁷ Amongst public administrators, an unwillingness to insist too much on sports in Finland’s image promotion can also be discerned. Immediately after the war, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs had used sportive achievements to complement the artistic image of the Finnish people as an unspoiled heroic nation who fought hard against industrial revolution and imperialism. However, by the early 1960s these notions were seen as old-fashioned and even dangerous in a rapidly industrializing state that was doing its best to maintain good neighbourly relations with its Eastern neighbour. Sportive, manly, able-bodied agrarian Finland could be seen as too much turned against the USSR, whereas a new Finland, more urbane and industrious, could be better used in the promotion of the national image. The Olympic Games marked a transition between the two roles, and in the commitment of the state authorities to support sports as a part of cultural diplomacy.

However, public agencies provided strong backup and support to sportive organizations and athletes in their contacts with the world. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs shared information on competitions, facilitated travels, provided interpreters and translators, helped with visa applications and accommodations, worked as intermediary to support private organizations in their dealings with foreign agencies and multilateral organizations and so forth.²⁸ This was especially true in the 1940s–1950s, when Finnish organizations worked to reconstruct their links with other countries: in 1946, the Finnish Athletic and Sportive Union thanked the Ministry for Foreign Affairs for its support, reminding that their competitions had also an international role, to “rejuvenate our good sportive relations with foreign states”.²⁹ Generally, these contacts would be organized through embassies and consulates abroad.

At some points, sports relations became also political, especially in the 1970s linked to the fight against apartheid and relations between blocs. In a 1978 memorandum, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs reminded its agents that Finland had voted for the 1971 UN resolution condemning apartheid in sports.³⁰ Although Finnish sports organizations were autonomous, it was asked of them to do their utmost to avoid relations with apartheid regimes. Finland, like the Soviet Union, also supported mainland China as China’s only representative in sports organizations.

Sport education considered a part of Finland’s educational international cooperation remained the most visible part of this state involvement in Finland’s athletic international relations. This was mostly due to the strength of those specific private organizations managing Finland’s international athletic relations, from the local Olympic committee to organizations managing the interests of specific disciplines. In most cases, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs would receive invitations or information about events, and either act itself or transmit to the Ministry of Education, were decisions for support, technical assistance or the sending of official representatives would be decided between the Department of International Affairs and the Ministry’s Sports Board (Urheilulautakunta).

An interesting matter, mixing the Cold War context, Finland’s image promotion and international sportive ambitions, was the question of military sportive competitions.³¹ In 1964, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs discussed with the Ministry of Education and the International Department of Finland’s General Headquarters the country’s possible accession to the International Military Sports Council. The debate had been going on since 1949, when Finland was approached for the first time by the Council, and hesitations were mostly linked to possible Soviet reactions to what was mostly a Western bloc organization. In 1964, the General Headquarters proposed to take advantage of the thaw in East-West relations to join the Council, a proposal that was accepted by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

4.1.3 The Evolving Landscape of Bilateral Relations with the Soviet Union

From the point of view of the Finnish state, cultural relations with the Soviet Union were a one-way street after the war. Soviet cultural propaganda in Finland dominated the field, managed by the Finland-Soviet Union Society. In 1949, the Finnish embassy in Moscow reported that there were no cultural activities to speak of for the embassy, since the Soviet organization VOKS on the one hand and the Society and other Finnish left-leaning organizations on the other hand managed everything and had the ear of the authorities much more than the embassy.³² Simo Mikkonen also emphasizes the lack of interest of the Soviet organizations for reciprocal cultural relations in the immediate postwar period.³³ However, if the Finnish state worked first to facilitate the activities of these organizations, it was able later in the 1960s to increasingly bring them in its orbit. This was part of a general evolution in which the Finnish state moved from its cautiously friendly containment policy of the 1950s towards a policy of neutrality emphasizing contacts with both sides of the bipolar divide. As the state became more and more involved in relations with the Soviet Union, the gap between communist organizations and the ministries became less and less marked.

The development of cultural relations between Finland and the Soviet Union can be considered to have started with the establishment of the Finland-Soviet Union Society in the autumn of 1944. The Society, which quickly grew into Finland’s most important friendship society, managed the organization of Soviet cultural events in Finland: exhibitions, lectures, film screenings, performances by Soviet artists, the general promotion of the study and knowledge of Russian and other Soviet languages, meetings between Finnish and visiting Soviet delegations and experts and so on.³⁴ Supported by state funding but jealous of its independence, the Society was until Stalin’s death an organization of political propaganda, manned by Finns but working to promote the Soviet cultural and political rhetoric in Finland.³⁵ Soviet interest in Finland was also fluctuating: the Soviets saw the Society as an outpost, built for one-way propaganda purposes, and while the Society tried to cast itself as a neutral organization bringing up neutral information about the USSR, Moscow saw it primarily as a political agitation organization spreading scripted propaganda. The early 1950s were also years where the Society was actively criticized and attacked in Finnish politics as a relay of Soviet pressures. In 1952, for instance, it asked for the creation of a cultural fund between the two countries, fed by forced contributions from companies participating in trade with the Soviet Union. The Finnish government worked to deflect the blow by underlining that, since the funding would amount to a tax, it needed a law in Parliament. The project came back under various guises at various stages in the early 1950s, but Finnish stalling and fluctuating interest in Moscow delayed things.

Following Stalin’s death, the Society was allowed, also in the context of changes in the Soviet propaganda structure, to engage in more cultural activities and especially to take a part in the 1960s development of travels between Finland and the Soviet Union. Finland seemed like a safe place for Soviet tourists, students and researchers because it had agreed to repatriate asylum seekers to the Soviet Union,³⁶ which meant the Soviet authorities could agree to the travelling of citizens to Finland. Stalin’s death and domestic changes in Finland also brought changes in the role of the Society and the state’s relations with it.

The 1950s–1960s saw a process through which the Finnish state took more and more control over the Society. After the mid-1960s, the Society reported regularly to the Ministry of Education and derived increasing parts of its funding from Finnish public funding. This funding came from the budget of the Ministry of Education, to give it possibilities to develop friendly relations with the Soviet Union, a task Jaakko Numminen called the fulfilment of the Society’s “national function”.³⁷ Scientific relations were also managed directly between Finnish and Soviet scientific academies, with the help of the Soviet institute. They contained mostly exchanges of visitors between the countries, study trips and other formal forms of cooperation. Especially with the development of a radical left in the 1970s, the Society was a strong influence in the cultural debate in Finland, relaying Soviet cultural discourses, managing exchange programmes with the Soviet Union, organising touristic excursions and so forth.

While the Society was a private organization increasingly working in cooperation with the Finnish authorities, the Soviet Institute is a good example of a state agency created to manage cultural relations with the Soviet Union.³⁸ The idea of creating an Institute of Soviet Studies was clearly linked to the context of the “years of danger”, 1944–1948. The truce signed in September 1944 was in effect a victory for the Soviet Union, and in Finnish society political forces and social groups on the far left experienced a rebirth. The tide turned in 1947–1948, and after the spring of 1948, successive Finnish governments attempted to wrestle relations with the USSR from the communists—hence the creation of an Institute, founded by a decision of the Finnish Parliament in 1947, as a department of the Ministry of Education. Its task was linked to the promotion of research on all aspects of Soviet society, economy and culture, the management of a library of titles on the Soviet Union and Russia, and the organizations of cultural cooperation between the two countries.

During its existence, the Institute was stuck between the necessity of friendly relations with Soviet organizations and its origin as an arm of the Finnish state to reclaim a measure of control over scientific and cultural cooperation with the USSR. Difficulties can be seen already in September 1950, when the first director of the Institute was forced by a campaign of the Soviet authorities and local communists to resign. Both Moscow and local communists would not leave the Institute to be a simple scientific organization—it had to be integrated in the apparatus of friendly relations with Moscow. By 1951, the Institute was under strong pressure of Soviet representatives that forced Finnish authorities to accept its change into a relay of Soviet cultural propaganda.

In the late 1960s and the context of détente, the Institute became an important centre for the organization of relations with the Soviet Union. Matti Rönkä, its director, was adapted to the atmosphere of the Cold War, maintaining the institute away from overt criticism of the Soviet Union. In 1968–1969, the Institute became the manager of some student and researcher exchanges with the Soviet Union, giving it salience besides the Society. Crises were inevitable in a context where cultural, scientific and political things entangled: in the late 1960s, Siikala waged, for instance, a long battle against the automatic acknowledgement of Soviet diplomas in Finland. Finns were mostly going to the Soviet Union for cheap diplomas in Russian, literature, engineering or medicine, and debates about the quality of these diplomas lasted from 1970 to 1979, when a treaty on the question was signed.³⁹

The Lenin year, organized in 1970 as part of a UNESCO campaign celebrating the Bolchevik leader, was also a delicate moment.⁴⁰ When in 1968 UNESCO decided to celebrate Lenin’s 100th birthday, Finland organized a Lenin symposium in Helsinki, gathering all organizations involved in relations with the Soviet Union. There was a debate around publications, for instance on the book by historian Tuomo Polvinen studying Lenin’s decision to recognize Finland’s independence. Polvinen exposed Lenin’s decision as a tactical ploy, while Kekkonen wanted to please the USSR and present Lenin’s acknowledgment of Finland’s independence as a gift to the new nation. This intervention by the president in academic debates and the organization of the symposium were considered by the Finnish leadership an important way to show goodwill towards the USSR in a matter that seemed extremely important to Moscow. During a trip to the USSR organised by the USSR committee, the Finnish committee noted the obsession of the Soviet partners with the symposium. If most of the programme was in the hands of the Finland-Soviet Union Society, the Ministry participated and delivered funding. The Finnish delegation tried to emphasize things they were attached to, like the situation of Finno-Ugric populations in the Soviet Union,⁴¹ and Finland’s participation was amongst the most visible for a country outside the Eastern bloc.⁴²

Up until the 1960s, Finno-Soviet cultural relations were thus more a story of Soviet pushes and Finnish resistance and deflection than truly one of bilateral cultural relations. Mikkonen also suggests that periods of Soviet activism were scheduled to correspond with the Finnish electoral cycle and to beneficiate to the extreme-leftist coalition during these elections.⁴³ As they stabilized in the 1950s–1960s, official cultural relations between Finland and the USSR consisted mostly of scientific-technical cooperation on the one hand and cultural exchanges on the other hand. Both were based on treaties signed between the two states that tended to lack in substance but expressed strong political commitments.⁴⁴ Cultural relations with the Soviet Union were for the most part coordinated in cooperation with the Finnish state by the late 1960s—a development Kalervo Siikala noted with satisfaction in 1968.⁴⁵ The Ministry of Education used after 1968 the Soviet Institute as an expert organization for the management of all aspects of cultural relations with the Soviet Union. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs managed through an internal committee after 1967 (the TT-committee) the implementation of the bilateral technical and scientific treaty. Finally, the Finland-Soviet Union Society worked autonomously but with Finnish state funding and in cooperation with the authorities to develop grassroots cultural relations with the Soviet Union. Cooperation was not always easy: in the Ministry of Education, lack of resources and protests especially by the UNESCO committee against centralization in the Department for International Affairs meant that technical departments such as the Committee for cultural exchanges between Finland and the USSR, created in 1963, retained a measure of autonomy.⁴⁶ Most of these protagonists however agreed on the basics, such as the necessity to rebuild relations with the Soviet Union after the destructions of the war and the hostility of the interwar period.⁴⁷

The 1970s were generally years of domestic and foreign political rapprochement with the Soviet Union, but initiatives were mostly on the Finnish side and true reciprocity was never achieved.⁴⁸ The Finnish cultural weeks in the Soviet Union were, alongside student and researcher exchanges and town twinnings, one of the rare ways Finland could get reciprocity in cultural relations with the Soviet Union.⁴⁹ They were closely monitored and organized by the Ministry of Education, for which Siikala was sometimes criticized by the press, accused of presenting an official culture sanitized for the Soviet Union. Cultural relations between the two countries remained mostly a story of Soviet cultural events in Finland. Artistic collaboration with the Soviet Union was not insignificant, and it helped certain Finnish cultural sectors to reach international levels of expertise: Mikkonen points out especially the example of Finnish ballet, which reached international levels due to its relation with the Soviet Union.⁵⁰ But the interest for Soviet artistic and cultural productions remained lukewarm amongst the Finnish population, where the domination of Western culture, from the arts to fashion and ways of life, was never truly contested. For Finnish administrators, cultural relations with the Soviet Union were mostly a political endeavour, and it meant the adoption, with varying degrees of sincerity, of the Soviet international and cultural rhetoric. In his 1976 book, Siikala drew a straight line between better cultural relations between the two countries and the establishment of the Paasikivi-Kekkonen line of good relations with the Soviet Union, directly contrasting it with the nationalism- and resent-fuelled hostility of the interwar period.

City twinnings between Finland and the Soviet Union, which began after Stalin’s death in 1953, were also a noteworthy channel of cultural contact between Finland and the USSR. The incentives for that came from both Finland’s decentralized system of active municipalities and, starting in the 1960s, UNESCO discourse on delegation of cultural policy to local communities.⁵¹ Initiatives often came from Finland and were mediated by the Finland-Soviet Union Society. After 1969 and before the collapse of the Soviet Union, nine major meetings of twin cities were held, alternating in the main cities of both countries. City meetings focused on the foreign and local policy goals of both countries. The Soviet Union wanted the cities to strengthen the agreement between the countries, while Finland wanted immediate and direct cooperation with the cities of a large neighbouring country. Single cities also sought economic and political support in contacts with the Soviet Union. In Finland, in addition to the host city, the Finnish-Soviet Union Society and the Finnish Association of Finnish Cities, which played an important mediating role in Cold War global urban diplomacy, were responsible for organizing the meetings. In the Soviet Union, town-twinning meetings were part of a state-led, comprehensive foreign policy, and the Soviet Union of Twin Cities and Clubs and the Soviet-Finnish Society were responsible for their implementation. The meetings were marked by strict protocol, but at times participants described “genuine friendship”, as hundreds of municipal administrators from both sides got to know each other at the grassroots level.⁵²

4.2 The Finnish State as a Manager of Image Promotion Campaigns, Cultural Treaties and Exchange Programmes

4.2.1 “Wir müssen einen Kulturpakt Machen”

In his memoirs, Heikki Brotherus evokes the 1949 visit of the Hungarian ambassador to Finland, Ferenc Münnich, a former officer that he describes as unpleasant and rigid. Münnich’s first words upon entering his office were clear: “Wir müssen einen Kulturpakt Machen”. Brotherus describes the practice of cultural treaties at this time as mostly destined to develop relations with the Eastern bloc: it was for Finland a process engaging civil servants, involving official cultural contacts and scripted, bureaucratic cultural forms. Brotherus criticizes cultural treaties as a dry form of cultural cooperation, meant mostly as a support for political relations with socialist countries.⁵³ However, from the point of view of the state’s authorities and especially of the Ministry of Education, bilateral cultural treaties would become especially in the 1960s–1970s an important way of channelling international cultural relations.

The Ministry of Education and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs were not always on the same line in these discussions. While the Ministry for Foreign Affairs could think after the mid-1950s about using cultural treaties as a cheap way of showing interest for the Eastern bloc, the Ministry of Education paid attention to the necessities of reciprocity, and was often eager not to spend limited resources on treaties with countries Finland had very little cultural contacts with.⁵⁴ Both ministries also had to deal with the political leadership’s initiatives: Marjatta Oksanen underlined that, once Kekkonen had discussed cultural relations with a foreign potentate, the ministries’ work was mostly to make things happen as fast as possible.⁵⁵ Both ministries agreed in the 1960s to demand a more systematic approach to cultural and scientific treaties, but generally the initiatives remained random and often politically motivated. Only with the rapid development of the number of treaties in the 1970s, as an aside of the CSCE negotiations, did the Finnish government adopt a set of practices and, in March 1972, the principle of a standard cultural and technical treaty to be replicated with all willing Eastern European countries.⁵⁶

Finland’s first cultural treaties were signed already in the 1930s. A typical cultural treaty would then contain a declaration of principles on strengthening cultural links between the states involved, and a more concrete programme containing the exchange of students, scholars, artists, and reciprocal language courses. They would also set an administrative framework managing the treaty’s application. After the war, most of these treaties were declared void and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the number of cultural treaties signed between Finland and foreign countries developed very slowly. This period was dominated by treaties with the Eastern bloc, as Eastern European countries were more interested in developing state-led cultural relations and there was no perceived need of treaties with the West to develop cultural contacts. In 1959, following contacts with Hungarians eager to rebuild relations after the 1956 uprising, a cultural treaty was signed between Finland and Hungary and a joint committee for cultural relations was created between the two countries.⁵⁷ In 1960, the old 1938 cultural treaty with Poland was re-established. In 1968, an agreement was signed with Romania to develop cultural relations during the visit of Romania’s prime minister to Finland.⁵⁸ Several proposals were made, especially by Bulgaria, but didn’t bring results because of the lack of pre-existing cultural contacts.⁵⁹

While a certain defiance towards cultural treaties disappeared in the late 1960s, there remained problems of coordination between the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education: in 1963, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs had to remind the department of the Ministry of Education dealing with international youth contacts that it could not start alone contacts with Eastern Germany, a country not officially recognized by Finland.⁶⁰ Coordination between the ministries was a subject the main protagonists often revisited.⁶¹ In 1968, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs stated in a report that negotiations on cultural treaties had to originate from its services. Things had to be coordinated also with the main interest groups of Finnish industry, especially in the case of “economic-technical” treaties.⁶² The cultural treaties also normally contained clauses emphasizing athletic and sportive cooperation.⁶³

In 1968, before the visit of the Bulgarian president to Finland and following conversations between Kekkonen and the Bulgarian leadership in Sofia in spring 1967, the reflections on a treaty with Bulgaria started negotiations for a cultural treaty that give a good example of the procedures.⁶⁴ The Bulgarians were eager for an ambitious project comprising especially the development of commercial relations. The cultural field and the Ministry of Education did not think that such a treaty was necessary considering the little contacts between Finland and Bulgaria. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs proposed, in order not to vex the Bulgarians, to start negotiating a limited non-paper for 1969, and emphasized how Bulgaria’s treaties with Sweden and Denmark had remained empty shells. In front of this lack of enthusiasm, the ambassador in Sofia tried to emphasize the need to give something to the Bulgarians for political reasons during the Bulgarian president’s visit in June 1968.⁶⁵ But he too thought that, if such a treaty was realized, it had to be general and look for ways to satisfy Finnish interests at a small cost. In February–March 1968, the Finns stabilized a position regarding the Bulgarians insisting on the idea of a treaty, but underlining the costs associated and proposing a more concrete technical and scientific treaty.⁶⁶ Finally, negotiations arrived at a limited cultural treaty in late 1968. Documents show on the one hand a stalling Ministry of Education and on the other hand an impatient Ministry for Foreign Affairs, where especially the Political department demanded at several occasions that things would be rushed towards a politically expedient conclusion.⁶⁷ In 1973, the Finns also negotiated a treaty with Bulgaria on educational, scientific, cultural, and social cooperation, signed in April 1973.

Some caution remained, however, mostly for technical and financial reasons. In a report on bilateral cultural treaties, Siikala insisted in 1967 on the possibility of overstretch:⁶⁸ at the time, a number of countries had expressed their will to make cultural treaties with Finland, from China to Romania, some of them lacking entirely pre-existing cultural relations with Finland. That would mean resources and efforts would have to be directed to artificially developing such relations. But he also underlined how letting spontaneous relations take care of Finland’s bilateral cultural relations “will not do much to cure the problems of dispersion and lack of direction in cultural relations”. Some kind of middle way between spontaneity and the rigidity, conservativism and high costs of state-enforced cultural treaties had to be found, even if for the most part, Siikala’s compass pointed to state coordination. In order to organize, “for political or other reasons”, cultural relations with countries peripheral to the main trends of Finland’s spontaneous cultural relations (the Nordic countries, the USA, Germany etc), he suggested the establishment of temporary exchange treaties in limited amount.

In 1971, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs noted that Finland had cultural treaties or agreements with most of Europe’s socialist countries.⁶⁹ In 1976, in the context of a new period of increased pressures by the USSR on Finland’s domestic and foreign policy, Siikala described that situation as a positive thing, that allowed Finland to help Eastern European countries re-establish relations with Western Europe.⁷⁰ He reminded also that the strengthening of Eastern European national identities, based on a mix of old nationalist visions and new socialist organization, had been enhanced by these cultural relations. Despite numerous demands for cultural treaties, Siikala thought Finland should stay open mostly to serious proposals from countries with which Finland had an interest in developing contacts.⁷¹

In this context, the Soviet Union was, of course, Finland’s most important and difficult partner. The Finns had to accept a proposal made with Anastas Mikoyan in 1954 for a technical and scientific treaty that was signed in 1955 under intense pressure from the Soviets. The main issue from a Finnish point of view was the risks of technical espionage and the problems it might cause to scientific cooperation with the West. The treaty was the first of this kind signed between the Soviet Union and a market economy, and it set provisions for technical and scientific cooperation, exchanges of researchers and students.⁷² The Finns considered the treaty a political risk, and its joint committee, the so-called TT-committee, was organized under the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in order to improve political control.⁷³ The committee gathered Soviet and Finnish members, managed on the Finnish side by people close to Kekkonen such as the ethnologist Kustaa Vilkuna (1960–1974). Its function was mostly to support proposals coming from the technical and scientific field and to help various organizations in their contacts with Soviet scientists.

The Finnish state walked a fine line in these negotiations, trying both to stall the most impervious Soviet exigencies and to give content to cultural, scientific and technical relations with the USSR. The Soviet Institute was left out of the picture, and so was the Ministry of Education: until the early 1960s, the TT-committee was the main centre of technical and scientific official cooperation with the USSR, strongly politicized by the interest of the President and its location in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, while the Finland-Soviet Union Society led most of the cultural and artistic relations.

In August 1960, a cultural treaty was signed between Finland and the Soviet Union, the first cultural agreement concluded by the Soviet Union with a capitalist country. This time, the Finns were better disposed than for the 1955 treaty, as they hoped the treaty would help assuage Soviet suspicions regarding Finland’s EFTA negotiations that would end in 1961 with the signature of the FINN-EFTA convention.⁷⁴ The agreement was relatively short, with only seven articles recording the forms of cooperation existing and promising to continue to support them. It covered a wide range of areas: reciprocal visits by representatives of educational institutions and delegations, teachers and students, in the fields of higher education, education, theatre, film, literature, libraries, visual arts and music, lectures and presentations. The agreement also stipulated support for city twinnings and friendship societies and other cultural, social, sports and other institutions, organizations and associations that directly promoted Finno-Soviet cultural ties. The most important form of cooperation dealt with the exchange of university teachers, students, experts and researchers: a separate treaty was signed in 1969 on these matters.

The 1960 treaty had a concrete effect on the relations between the two countries: the Soviet Union started to be more active, sending literature and movies to Finland, and tourism developed between the two countries.⁷⁵ A few years after, in 1963, a committee for cultural exchanges was created under two administrators closed to Kekkonen, Kustaa Vilkuna and Lauri Posti. Cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union became more institutionalized, and the Finnish state earmarked budget for these exchanges. The committee, however, was disbanded before the end of the decade, in part because its partner in the Soviet Union, VOKS, ceased to exist. The responsibility in Finland for cultural contacts with the USSR went back to the Finland-Soviet Union Society, but the treaty strongly involved the Finnish state: in the context of détente, the Society managed to stabilize its economic situation only with state funding, becoming a semi-official organization of the Finnish state.

In 1967, Finland and the Soviet Union created a joint bilateral economic commission, on the basis of which a treaty for economic, technical and industrial relations was signed in 1971. In 1974 and 1975, long-term plans for cooperation in natural sciences, social sciences and humanities were negotiated between the two countries.⁷⁶ In order to develop and codify wide-ranging cultural cooperation, a five-year programme for cultural and scientific cooperation has been negotiated and signed since 1978, negotiated by the Soviet Institute.⁷⁷

In the early 1970s, the CSCE negotiations started a process of development of cultural relations through treaties that extended to both sides of the iron curtain: between 1970 and 1980, Finland signed cultural treaties with numerous countries from both the Eastern and Western blocs. Oksanen writes in her memoirs that one of the main focuses of the Ministry of Education in 1972 was still the development of cultural treaties with Eastern bloc countries.⁷⁸ Cultural treaties were managed by joint committees, mostly coordinated by the Ministry of Education but with the help of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Their content corresponded rather well with what Andreas Åkerlund describes:⁷⁹ provisions were vague in most fields of cultural and artistic cooperation, while other aspects were restricted and controlled, such as the movement of researchers and students. Treaties mentioned revision of schoolbooks, translation efforts, exchange of arts exhibitions and so forth. Strict reciprocity was an important element, especially with Eastern bloc countries who wanted to control contacts in order to protect themselves from unwanted influences.

Sometimes cultural treaty projects would not come to fruition and Finland would opt for more restricted forms, generally stipend programmes: in 1976, for example, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs sent to the embassy in Canberra a memo of the Ministry of Education in reaction to proposals for a cultural treaty with Australia.⁸⁰ The Ministry of Education made it known that there was in their view no reason to enter into negotiations for a cultural treaty with Australia. But since the interest was mostly linked to the situation of Finns living in Australia, the ministry proposed to start with a reciprocal system of grants. The same arguments were used with other countries, such as Bolivia in 1974.⁸¹ These limited exchange treaties were also used in the case of countries with an uncertain political status, or as a form of first step, like in the case of mainland China in 1973.

In the 1970s, cultural treaties were from the point of view of the Finnish ministries an important part of state-managed, official bilateral cultural relations. They expressed, to use the words of Benjamin Martin, a statist vision of cultural international relations as well as a vision of culture distinct from the market and from society and strongly linked to state-led national development and the welfare state.⁸² In the specific case of Finland, they also allowed for a measure of support to the country’s delicate foreign policy arrangements with the Eastern bloc, a support that was considered difficult to obtain only through spontaneous cultural links.⁸³ After 1970, they supported Finland’s relations with various countries both in the West and in emerging regions such as Asia or Africa.

This maturation of Finland’s cultural treaty arsenal came also with the emergence of increasingly varied forms of cultural cooperations used by political leaders for developing relations with a widening range of countries, often without coordination with the Ministry of Education and under the influence of varied organizations or personalities. Friendship societies, single ambassadors or cultural and artistic figures would lobby and insist on developing cultural relations with their country of choice, or a political leader would throw the development of culture and education as a cheap way to please a foreign interlocutor.

4.2.2 Exchange Programmes as a Concrete Part of State-Led Cultural Relations

In 1964, the commission for stipend programmes of the Ministry of Education summarized in a report a largely shared view on exchanges and stipend programmes:

There are many obvious reasons for the expansion of scholarship programmes. The programmes are cheap and effective. They provide opportunities for effective language training and promote the exchange of information and the spread of new stimuli in different fields. Their importance as an enhancer of professional and scientific competence is undeniable. They promote a balanced perception of foreign countries and contribute to the establishment of lasting international friendship and cooperation.⁸⁴

Exchange programmes were a concrete way in which the Finnish state worked to develop Finland’s international cultural contacts. After the 1950s, some of the exchange programmes for researchers and students were channelled through UNESCO, the organization acting as a facilitator between Finland and other countries: in 1957 for example, UNESCO connected Finland and Poland for exchanges linked to the study of Slavic languages.⁸⁵ But most of these exchanges worked through bilateral contacts and treaties with foreign countries. The stipend programmes were reciprocal, moving researchers, artists, students from Finland to the world and from the world to Finland. This development took place within the context of the postwar development of scholar and student exchanges.⁸⁶

When in 1957, the freshly created Finnish UNESCO committee took to managing the stipend programmes already existing and managed by the Finnish state, Finland had state-managed bilateral exchange programmes with Belgium, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, France, Sweden, and Western Germany (see Table 4.1).⁸⁷ While most were managed by the ministry, the USSR was the exception: the exchange programme was managed by the Finland-Soviet Union society.⁸⁸ Private organizations or organizations not linked to the Finnish state managed a lot of exchange programmes: civil society organizations, from industrial interest groups to cultural organizations, universities, the Finnish chapters of international organizations such as the Youth for Understanding,⁸⁹ PEN, Rotary clubs or YMCAs, and a variety of private companies also organized their own exchanges, language trainings abroad, summer schools, etc.

Table 4.1 Finland’s cultural treaties and other bilateral instruments of cultural cooperation, 1945–1980

The question was very much, once again, one of resources. In the 1960s, the Ministry of Education in particular lobbied for more of these exchange programmes to be managed by the Ministry, and with better resources. A 1961 report by the Ministry of Education stated that “within the framework of UNESCO as well as on a bilateral basis, the opportunities for international cultural interaction and the development of scholarship exchanges are being fully exploited”.⁹⁰ This expansion of scholarship programmes, however, met with resistance concerning funding for most of the 1960s. The Ministry of Education’s repeated requests for additional funding were met with limited response, and programmes were typically run, on Finland’s side, as cheap as possible. In May 1963, Oittinen and Siikala expressed their frustration at the situation:

To date, the funds required for scholarship programmes have been paid out of profits gained by Finland’s state monopoly on betting and automatic gambling machines, and have not been taken from the state budget. As the programs are likely to increase as a result of the expansion of international cultural cooperation, it is proposed to consider whether the necessary funds should be included in the budget, for example for expenditure on international cultural exchanges.⁹¹

In 1964, the committee proposed an end to this system and the incorporation of stipend programmes in the regular budget of the ministry.⁹² Similar requests, such as a broader commitment to the cost of accommodation for foreign fellows, had to be repeated by the Ministry of Education throughout the 1960s, largely in vain before the 1970s.⁹³ Siikala used often foreign examples as arguments to ask for more resources: after a trip to the US in 1964, he described the lavishness of US accommodation facilities for foreign students and the resources put at the disposal of foreign students, regretting that Finland’s financial situation did not allow this kind of hospitality, although exchange programmes were the best way to foster a positive image of the country.⁹⁴

Most of the existing official exchange programmes were managed by the Ministry of Education, and after 1956 by the UNESCO committee. For most programmes, the Ministry annually announced applications for Finnish students and researchers, collected applications and either made proposals for their distribution or implemented the decisions of specialized committees responsible for certain programmes: exchanges with the Nordic countries, Hungary and Poland were managed by their own committees; exchanges with the Soviet Union were managed either by the Finland-Soviet Union Society or by the Soviet Institute; exchange programmes with the United States were managed by a specific committee; and the Ministry also had a committee for the Sibelius programme meant for musicians.⁹⁵ The fact that the UNESCO committee was a key player until the mid-1960s was sometimes misunderstood: applicants had to be individually informed that the scholarship was paid by a foreign government and not by UNESCO.⁹⁶ In order to avoid misunderstandings, the Ministry of Education decided as early as 1959 that the committee should function under a different title in its tasks related to scholarship programmes, the International Scholarship Committee. In 1968, the name was changed to the Scholarship Division of the Department for International Affairs.⁹⁷

Starting with the creation of the UNESCO committee, the number of applicants was modest at first: in 1961, the Ministry of Education received a total of 131 exchange applications for the programmes it managed.⁹⁸ The number of outgoing and incoming students seems to have remained at about the same level until the mid-1960s, despite the fact that the number of students in Finnish universities increased year after year. This was, of course, also influenced by the fact that the number of scholarships offered by foreign countries and coordinated by the Finnish state remained almost the same throughout the 1960s, despite repeated requests from the UNESCO committee: in the academic year 1965–1966, there were 75 scholarships offered to Finns, excluding ASLA-Fulbright, and 25 scholarships offered to foreigners in Finland.⁹⁹ Numbers changed a bit the next year (see Table 4.2) but remained at the same levels. The number of both scholarships and applications did not start to grow clearly until the 1970s. In the case of Western Germany, the Ministry of Education was already in 1970–1971 processing 110 applications for this country alone.¹⁰⁰

Table 4.2 Exchanges managed by organizations under the Ministry of Education, 1958

Application documents filled by foreigners and Finns make for fascinating reading, as well as the reports written by stipend holders upon their return. Most Finns justified their applications either by the desire for better qualification, or a will to see the world and “internationalize”. Application for the Soviet Union only extremely rarely expressed any ideological background: the point was most of the time to obtain diplomas recognized in Finland for cheap, and a sense of adventure.¹⁰¹ Assessors and writers of recommendation as well as the choice of destination played a role in the application process: if the applicant was leaving for a place with few applicants, his or her chances were naturally higher. Countries also offered exchanges of varying lengths: the Soviet Union and West Germany had generally a high number of applicants because of their longer exchange periods.

Regarding the everyday life of educational exchanges, there is a large amount of correspondence with individual scholars in the archives of the International Scholarship Commission, for example, about studying in the Soviet Union. Exchanges with the Soviet Union caused few costs, since the Soviet Union took care of the needs of Finnish students, but problems were often of a practical nature. In 1964, Finnish Soviet scholarship recipients turned to the Ministry of Education to increase the amount of their scholarships: at that time, scholarships for Finns were 90–100 rubbles a month, when, for example, the French received 170 rubbles, the Americans 150 rubbles and the Swedes 140 rubbles.¹⁰² Lack of basic amenities such as warm water and the rather spartan conditions of life in Soviet student accommodations were also emphasized.

In the 1960s–1970s, the volume of foreign exchanges grew. The Foreign Study and Research Scholarships (Ulkomaiset opiskelu- ja tutkimusapurahat) brochure published by the Ministry of Education in the late 1970s brought together different scholarship opportunities by country. At this point, the socialist countries dominated quantitatively in interstate official agreements. In the case of the Soviet Union, 20 full-time scholarships, 25–30 yearlong research fellowships, a number of fellowships in various fields for academic studies, and 100 summer course fellowships were listed.¹⁰³

In the 1960s, more exotic destinations alongside Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union started to emerge. In 1965, consideration was already given to including Japan in the programme. The proposal originally came from the embassy in Tokyo, and the first eight-month grant to Japan came in the same year. Although there were no applications during the first years, in a few years, there were many times as many applicants to Japan as there were possibilities.¹⁰⁴ The same phenomenon was repeated with Thailand. All in all, however, stipend holders headed primarily from Finland to European countries and the United States, but the panel started to diversify: in the 1963–1964 school year, there were individual entrants to Algeria, Brazil, Ceylon, India and Pakistan.¹⁰⁵ Exchange programmes with mainland China were opened during a state visit of the minister of Education Marjatta Väänänen in the spring of 1973. The Chinese example shows well how these exchanges could be very different from one country to the other: the treaty stipulated the sending of a Chinese language lecturer in Helsinki and reciprocal language stipends for Finnish and Chinese students.

Exchange as part of stipend programmes worked in both directions, and the number of foreign students in Finnish universities started to increase in 1954, when there were 105 foreign students in Finland.¹⁰⁶ The number remained close to a hundred for a decade: according to the Ministry of Education, a total of 115 foreign students studied at Finnish universities and colleges in the academic years 1959, 1960 and 1961. The figure was significantly lower than in other Nordic countries, as the Ministry of Education often pointed out, a situation they said originated from poor hospitality conditions and the small number of stipends offered by Finland.¹⁰⁷ The number of students who came to Finland even decreased in the early 1960s, with 88 students in 1963.¹⁰⁸ In its 1964 report, the Stipend Commission stated bitterly that “there is no reciprocity to be talked about, but the scholarships awarded by Finland represent only a small fraction of the scholarships received by Finland”. The situation “does not correspond in any way to the pursuit of active international cultural relations, which is a declared principle of Finland’s foreign policy”. The Ministry of Education wanted to propose more stipends to foreigners, and a 1964 report called for a long-term plan to increase the number of scholarships.¹⁰⁹ The results were modest: two new scholarships were opened, one for African countries and one “for Nordic researchers in the Finnish language”¹¹⁰ (see Table 4.2).

In the mid-1960s, exchange programmes brought students to Finland mainly from other parts of Europe and the United States. For example, in the academic year 1963–1964, 14 of the foreign students who were in Finland on programmes directly managed by the Ministry of Education were from Western Germany, 11 from Sweden, 14 from the United States, 5 from the Soviet Union and individual students from other countries.¹¹¹ Statistics from the UNESCO committee show that almost half of the students who came to Finland through programmes managed by the government came to study the humanities (mainly the Finnish language, literature and history), a quarter came to study social sciences and about a fifth natural sciences, design, architecture, and technology.¹¹² One of the main motives for studying in Finland was scientific interest in the Finnish language, as Pertti Virtaranta describes in his book about foreign linguists’ relations with Finland.¹¹³ Of the scholarship students in 1960–1963, the largest single group (16 students) came to study the Finnish language, literature and history.¹¹⁴ Contacts with the Finnish language or Finland often preceded a student exchange. A good example of this is the 1970 application by Béla Gunda from Hungary: the head of the Department of Ethnology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, he had previously studied Fenno-Ugric ethnology.¹¹⁵

Decisions on foreign scholarship holders to Finland were largely made abroad, in cooperation with embassies, local authorities and the Ministry of Education. For example, Finnish state scholarships for British students were decided in 1970 on the basis of a shortlist established by the embassy in London, with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs sending the information to the Department of Education for implementation.¹¹⁶ In the case of Sweden, the scholarship committee of the Swedish Institute sent a list of named recipients to the Embassy of Finland, and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs forwarded it to the Ministry of Education.¹¹⁷ In cases where the application volume was relatively small, the delegation simply sent a list of applicants to the Ministry of Education, which, in turn, made decisions about the recipients of the scholarships.¹¹⁸ In the case of more distant countries, decisions could be taken entirely by the embassy: the candidates nominated by Nigeria were evaluated at the embassy in Lagos on the basis of letters of recommendation from their professors. The personnel of the embassy added comments on the applicants’ psychology, family situation, supposed intelligence and other qualities or defaults.¹¹⁹

In the case of non-European developing countries in the 1960s, the Ministry of Education regularly collected applications but asked for an opinion from the International Development Assistance Office of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The increase in scholarships for students and researchers in developing countries in the 1960s was the result of Finland’s response to UNESCO’s call for scholarship programmes to be used as a form of development cooperation:¹²⁰ in 1963, UNESCO called on its member states to consider awarding scholarships to African graduates who wished to continue their studies abroad. In January 1964, the Department of International Scholarship Affairs of the Ministry of Education considered African scholarship programmes on this basis. The Finnish UNESCO Commission set up a special section to deal with the matter, which proposed five scholarships to African countries. Outside Europe, interest in Finland gradually expanded:¹²¹ in 1966, the countries that received scholarship applications to Finland without having specific dedicated programmes with Finland but as part of extra contingents were typically from Africa and Asia.¹²²

During the 1970s, the network of exchange agreements began to expand significantly, expanding the exchange opportunities for Finnish students both in terms of new countries and the number of available places. This laid the foundation for the actual breakthrough of international mobility that took place in Finland in the 1990s, with the development of the Erasmus programme and Finland’s EU membership. In the context of the Cold War, the stated goals of the exchanges emphasized neutrality and adhered to the goals set by Finland for its cultural diplomacy: economic and trade development, educational development, geopolitical factors and the promotion of Finland’s international image, but also the development of the national project, internationalization and the modernization of society came to the fore. Scholarship programmes were mainly seen in a positive light and were particularly important to the Ministry of Education, which tried also to improve foreign stipends’ living conditions in Finland.

Finland also participated in stipends and exchange programmes coordinated by UNESCO: already in late 1958, Finland contributed 21,500 dollars to participate in a variety of stipends organized by UNESCO, from a seminar for art teachers to a stipend for television journalists,¹²³ from internships for young workers’ associations to a scientific seminar on atomic energy.¹²⁴ Through UNESCO, exchange programmes for workers and trade unionists developed in Finland. In 1958, for example, the UNESCO committee offered workers’ education programmes, through which delegations from trade unions would travel, for example, to Switzerland, Western Germany, Belgium, Holland or Denmark.¹²⁵ The 1959 report stated that “during the previous year the stipends have grown in numbers, especially UNESCO’s education programs for workers, in which Finland is both sender and receiver”.¹²⁶ In the 1960s, Finland’s trade unions and workers’ associations could apply for mobility programmes and exchanges through UNESCO¹²⁷, and direct UNESCO stipends were also open to Finns for trips and studies of certain disciplines.¹²⁸ In 1961, for instance, UNESCO opened stipends for writers, composers and artists, “specialists in information processing and automatic computation”, or specialists in sea ecology.¹²⁹ Although educational exchanges were perceived above all as university exchanges, Oittinen especially emphasized the importance of internships and exchange programmes for young workers. His views emphasized the need for the working population and young people to get a true picture of the world, as well as the need for Finland to be active in international cultural organizations.¹³⁰ In the early 1960s, he was eager to emphasize and preserve UNESCO’s Workers Travel Grant programme: Kalevi Sorsa reported in 1963 to UNESCO that Oittinen considered the scheme as “one of the basic working methods of UNESCO (just as fellowships were) which cannot be replaced by something else”.¹³¹ These forms of exchanges however disappeared in the 1970s.

Development cooperation agreements were also signed under the leadership of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Stipends with Africa were discussed in the mid-1960s as part of a growing Finland’s development aid destined to former colonies.¹³² Discussions insisted especially on attracting young diploma-holders in technical disciplines. The main problems were the difficulties to choose these candidates due to the little Finnish diplomatic representation in Africa. So UNESCO organized a lot of these programmes, such as the UNESCO East-West programme. In 1965, the Finnish government, however, considers that exchange programmes were extremely important for Finland and should not have only an emphasis on developing countries.¹³³

In this palette of exchanges between Finland and the world, two programmes stood out: exchanges with the United States and exchanges with the Soviet Union. Both were managed in part outside the Ministry of Education, but got drawn in the Ministry’s area of influence around the 1960s.

With the United States, the main form of exchange was the ASLA-Fulbright programme. The Fulbright programme started in 1946 after Congress adopted a law concerning the use of excess war budget to build a stipend programme for foreigners. Finland joined the programme in 1952. However, Finland got the benefit of a distinct programme, the ASLA (Amerikan Suomen lainan apuraha, Finnish for “Grants from the American Loan to Finland”)—programme. This was set in 1949 through a separate law which authorized the use of the repayment and interest of Finland’s World War I debt to the United States for educational and cultural exchanges between the two countries.

In his work, Marek Fields describes well how the development of the ASLA-Fulbright cooperation began in 1948.¹³⁴ Heikki Brotherus remembers in his memoirs the cultural suspicions against contacts with the United States present among the Finnish leadership in the late 1940s. The geopolitical situation was also difficult before the spring 1948 and the signature of a treaty with the Soviet Union. Finland was one of the first nations to be offered the opportunity to join the Fulbright Program in 1947, but since it was just re-establishing relations with the Soviet Union after the war, an extensive agreement on educational cooperation with the United States might have been perceived as a threat at the other end of the political spectrum.¹³⁵ However, in 1948–1949, Brotherus and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs were able to answer positively to American demands and started negotiating an academic exchange treaty based on the law set by the American Congress. The basis for this law was the enormous goodwill garnered in the United States by Finland’s timely repayment of its loan, and the country’s resistance in front of Soviet aggression in 1939–1940. Problems became technical, and negotiations revolved mostly around the composition of the committee in charge of managing the exchange programme: in December 1949, the United States accepted the Finnish demand that the committee would be made of an equal number of Finnish and American members and that the Finnish government would nominate the Finnish members.¹³⁶

Finland sent out the first ASLA-grantees in 1950. Finnish students and scholars gained access to educational resources not available at that time in Finland. Mikko Majander also describes the way these exchange travels were used by the anti-communist wing of the Social-democrats and trade unions to gather money to finance the party in Finland, using the argument that the SDP was the best wall against communism in Finland. The trade unionist Olavi Lindblom’s trip in the autumn of 1951 was a good example of that: he left with advice to gather money from US trade unions. The exchanges also contributed to the spread in Finland of American ideas on management and state intervention. Ideologically, the exchange programme was a part of US Cold War politics, which strived to strengthen the mental barrier between the Western and the Eastern bloc, yet without openly challenging the Soviet Union. This worked in spreading economic, social and industrial methods, the American way of life, as well as building a link between some Finnish organizations and the United States.¹³⁷ In his book, Ambassador Jukka Valtasaari reminds his reader of the importance of the exchange programme in keeping alive relations between the United States and Finland in difficult times.¹³⁸ In 1971, the Ministry of Education counted that, from the beginning of the scheme, a grand total of 427 Americans and 554 Finns travelled respectively to Finland and to the United States as part of the ASLA-Fulbright programme.¹³⁹

For the Soviet case, numbers remained unequal: only a few Soviet students came to Finland while hundreds of Finns went to the Soviet Union. For most of the period under scrutiny, these exchanges worked through the Finland-Soviet Union Society, but what Ville Pernaa called “a state-coordinated way to the Soviet Union” opened up already next to this “political way” in the late 1950s.¹⁴⁰ In 1957, an exchange treaty was signed, comprising the mobility of 20 Finnish students per year to the Soviet Union and a couple of Soviet students towards Finland. This exchange was managed by the stipend committee in the Ministry of Education, then by the Soviet Institute. Things became more systematic and volumes grew in 1969, after the negotiations between Finnish universities and ministries and Soviet organizations of an agreement on cultural exchanges. The exchange was signed for the period 1969–1973, but continued up until the early 1990s. 100–200 Finnish students went to the Soviet Union every year during the 1970s and 1980s through this exchange programme, under the coordination of the Soviet Institute, to which the Ministry of Education had given the responsibility to manage exchanges.¹⁴¹ Besides this “official” line of exchange, the “political” line remained under the coordination of a variety of left-leaning organizations, some of them supported financially by the state: the Finland-Soviet Union Society, the Finnish Communist Party, the League of Socialist Students, the League of Cultural Workers and so on.¹⁴² The late 1970s saw however a strong push by the Finnish government to develop and grow the official line at the detriment of the political line. No cases of industrial espionage left a trace in the archives of the ministry, and for Jaakko Numminen, the Finns were both more interested and gained more from these exchanges than the Soviets.¹⁴³

The students were warned by the ministry of the tight schedule of studies in the Soviet Union and to consider carefully whether the conditions were ok for them. Pernaa emphasizes the difficulties met by the students in the USSR, especially concerning living conditions. This was managed without much publicity in the Ministry and reports highlighting poor living conditions and destined to the Ministry of Education were marked “only for official use”.

As to Soviet students, most of them were either in technical fields or natural sciences.¹⁴⁴ Despite Finland’s good reputation as a safe destination, travel abroad was considered with suspicion in the USSR, which was also reflected in educational exchanges.¹⁴⁵ Although the Soviet Union opened up to educational exchanges as early as the mid-1950s, the country received significantly more students than it sent abroad. Contemporaries considered that, compared to other Western countries, Finland had an exceptional number of student exchanges with the Soviet Union, both proportionally and absolutely. However, Ritva Kaipio from the Ministry of Education estimated that the contacts with the Soviet Union were above all formal and that without the various cooperation bodies involved contacts would have been much smaller.¹⁴⁶ Official delegations from ministries and official organizations were more numerous than students.¹⁴⁷ In the 1970s, various Finnish-Soviet seminars and conferences were also organized (see. Tables 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5).¹⁴⁸

Table 4.3 Exchanges managed by organizations under the Finnish Ministry of Education, 1966–1967

Table 4.4 Foreign exchange students and researchers in Finland, through instruments managed by organizations under the Ministry of Education, 1973–1974 (not including summer schools)

Table 4.5 Finnish students and researchers abroad, through instruments managed by the Ministry of Education, 1975–1976 (not including summer schools)

4.2.3 Image Promotion Campaigns, Language Teaching and Finnish Institutes

Leaving Finland in a dire political but also financial situation, the end of the war was not conducive to long-term national image promotion.¹⁴⁹ But the end of ticketing in the early 1950s, postwar reconstruction and especially the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki brought new initiatives. Paasikivi was himself interested in the use of the arts and especially exhibitions as a form of development of cultural relations and promotion of Finland’s image.¹⁵⁰

As the promotion of Finland’s image abroad was one of the most important incentives to the management of international cultural relations by the Finnish state, image promotion campaigns and initiatives appear often in the record of the organizations under study here. Between 1945 and 1960, and especially in the early 1950s with the approach of the 1952 Olympic games, the Ministry’s Press Bureau initiated several projects of publications on Finland. Some like Arvid Enckell’s book were supported and others like the 1950 proposal by geographer Jalmari Jaakola were not supported. All of these projects provoked discussions between the Ministry and embassies, especially when it came to the representation of war times (how to present the Soviet aggression in 1939? How to tone down the presence of German troops already in 1941 and Finland’s co-belligerency with Nazi Germany?¹⁵¹) but also of Finland’s situation in the 1950s (how to explain in a convincing manner Finland’s odd position in the Cold War?). Most of the Finnish ambassadors abroad deplore two things: that nobody knows much about Finland, and that most people up until Stalin’s death consider Finland to be under the Soviet yoke, more or less visibly. The Ministry, however, worked hard to develop publications, brochures and pamphlets and distribute them abroad. The focus of these activities moved from Europe to the United States, and the Finnish consulate in New York in 1950 had 11,700 copies of a variety of brochures and books aiming at giving an updated image of postwar Finland.¹⁵²

The importance of getting the word out about Finland also meant that some initiatives coming from abroad could possibly go beyond the bounds of acceptability in the frame of relations with the Soviet Union. A good example of that is a thick volume published in 1953 by the British journalist Wendy Hall and dealing with Finland’s economy. Hall had been impressed by the survival of wartime Finland and explained the contours of Finland’s wood and paper industries, although she also took pains to extoll also Finland’s resistance during the war. For the Ministry, the book was welcome and its success in the United States was a boon for Finland’s image promotion, but the publication’s critical tone towards the USSR was not appreciated. In a move typical of its activities, the Ministry decided to invite Hall to Finland, where she spent a few weeks in 1956 before a new edition of the book.¹⁵³ Inviting journalists to Finland for promotion tours of the country and a steady diet of explanations on Finland’s official foreign policy line was an activity that had started before the war and was pursued actively.¹⁵⁴ This work was essentially destined to Western countries, as there was only little interest and possibility to promote or spread an official image in the Eastern bloc. Work towards the Global South or Asia was also very limited before Finland’s entry in UNESCO.

Most of this work was done by embassies. The Finns were quick to react to any publications they felt could complicate Finland’s image abroad. The foreign press was followed at the top level of the state, where Kekkonen personally followed a number of foreign publications. For example, he reacted to a 1959 article by the French journalist Henry Bénazet concerning Mikoyan’s visit to Finland and the possible influence it may have on Finland’s relations with EFTA.¹⁵⁵ The Ministry worked on Bénazet for a number of years, and he was finally invited to Finland in 1962. Some crises were considered important, such as the one provoked by a 1968 caricature in The Times where Finland was associated to the group of Eastern European people’s democracies. This caricature was the occasion of a strong debate in the Finnish press about Finland’s image abroad, and a flurry of activity by the Finnish embassy in London.¹⁵⁶

The 1961 Jakobson committee report emphasized the need for more sophistication in these campaigns and initiatives. The tone had to be less nationalistic than during the interwar period, and the dissemination of information had to be less indiscriminate and concentrate more on “useful audiences”: foreign journalists, opinion leaders, politicians, business circles and youth organizations. This policy would replace the undirected injunction to “make Finland known” with a limited, realistic and professional effort aimed at providing specific audiences with tailored information relevant to them: the Jakobson committee in 1961 insisted on “thinking hard about what we want to make known, where, and with which means”.¹⁵⁷ Finland’s image had to be efficiently curated for quality, by emphasizing things that were of an international cultural quality, but also for political content, in a context where the slightest slip of the tongue could ruin diplomatic efforts and the image of developed, realistic neutrality the country aimed for. The so-called crisis of the note in October 1961, which was interpreted abroad largely as the Soviet Union gaining a say in Finland’s domestic political development, made this process into something even more important.

The committee emphasized new images to be concentrated on: a country on its way to prosperity, caring and socially egalitarian, with a lively cultural life, and ready to act in international relations as a neutral, pacifying influence.¹⁵⁸ These themes were already present in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ Press Bureau’s material: in one of the main publications distributed in the late 1950s, the leaflet Speaking of Finland, the country was described as an established democracy, economically prosperous, industrialized, sporting an evolved cooperative movement, a functioning welfare state and an ideal mix of nature and modernity, capitalism and state-funded safety nets. The war was quickly glossed over, while the 1948 Treaty with the Soviet Union, neutrality and the “new relations” with Moscow were described at length.¹⁵⁹ One can find the same in other publications coordinated or supported in many different ways by the Finnish state. These ideas and themes could be found also in trade promotion brochures. These elements were also well in sync with attempts by the Finnish authorities at reshaping the national self-definition of domestic audiences.¹⁶⁰ A service providing ready-made press articles was also started in March 1961, Finnish Features, and publication activities became more discriminating in their intentions and targeted audiences.¹⁶¹

While the promotion of a certain image of Finland was a shared goal of all state protagonists, the most focused part of image promotion work was under the responsibility of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. In 1961, following the Jakobson report, the Ministry received 50 million Finnish marks to further develop its informational activities overseas.¹⁶² This came in addition to 2.5 million in order to organize exhibitions and films. Of this sum, 34 million was used to acquire publications but also films about Finland to be distributed by the ministries. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs bought about 50 publications, of which about 30 were done with the help and support of the Ministry. The distribution was mostly done by Finland’s diplomatic network, the Finnish Institutes and private organizations defending the interests of economic sectors: the national air company Aero oy, Metex for the metal industry, the interest groups of the wood and paper industry, big companies, tourism promotion organizations, event organizers and the like. Films were produced with the help of the Press Bureau, especially documentaries, which were distributed through Finland’s diplomatic network. With the Soviet Union, these activities had to answer to a rigid system of reciprocity: in 1961, a Soviet film week was organized in Tampere, Turku and Helsinki, which allowed for a Finnish film week to be organized in 1962, especially in Leningrad.

Exhibitions were an important aspect of international contacts from the point of view of the Finnish authorities. Here again the activities started slowly during the 1940s–1950s and developed especially during the 1960s. During the 1960s–1970s, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ Press bureau managed between 50 and 70 exhibitions per year in foreign countries. These exhibitions concerned culture, the arts, but also a lot of exhibitions organized with the private companies responsible for Finland’s industrial and artisanal design sector. These exhibitions are often accompanied by presentations dedicated to Finland by diplomats, politicians or cultural figures. In 1963, the UNESCO committee participated intensively in the organization of an exhibition in Zurich on the Finnish education system. The exhibition was organized in the frame of UNESCO cooperations, and moved from Zurich to other countries.¹⁶³

Erik Kruskopf described the first exhibitions of Finnish handicrafts and design in the 1950s, especially involving the architect and designer Tapio Wirkkala.¹⁶⁴ Kruskopf managed the participation of a Finnish delegation to the Milano triennial in 1951, with a stop on the way to the Kunstgwerbemuseum in Zurich. Finland had received an invitation for the same triennial in 1948 but had refused to participate for fear of costs and humiliation so soon after the war. The new invitation had been received in 1950. The Ministry of Education proposed to contribute to the costs but could not pay everything. This limited contribution itself was due to the intervention of Hermann Gummerus, a diplomat’s child, journalist and the public relations (PR) chief for the industrial design company Arabia. He managed to convince the Ministry to match 50 Finnish pennies to every Finnish mark of private assistance for the exhibition. Kruskopf describes the Milano Triennial as the event that brought Finnish design back on the world stage. Other exhibitions were organized after this first one about with the same idea: initiative came from private sector, but ministries helped and coordination went mostly through personal relations.

This image promotion also took place as an aside of the development of student and researcher exchanges. As a function of exchange programmes, the UNESCO committee organized seminars for students and researchers leaving abroad, aiming at explaining to them the contours of Finland’s history, foreign policy, society and the like. The committee also organized receptions, summer schools and activities for foreign students in Finland. The seminars were organized yearly and contained mostly representatives of various sectors explaining the official image of Finland. Oittinen would talk about Finland’s schools, a representative of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs would talk about foreign policy, Siikala would talk about Finland’s international cultural relations, someone would talk about the economy, Finland’s products made for exports, the culture and so on.¹⁶⁵ Apart from that, the Ministry of Education advised the students and researchers leaving for foreign countries to take with them material related to Finland, such as posters with a Finnish theme.¹⁶⁶

Part of the cultural activity organized by the Finnish state was in close coordination with a series of private or semi-public organizations. Short-term events came mostly from the state’s support to private initiative. The Finnish Council for Music (Suomen musiikkineuvosto) got in touch with the UNESCO committee in 1962 for the preparation of the 100th anniversary of Sibelius’ birth in 1965.¹⁶⁷ The promotion of the Finnish language abroad was also a matter of coordination between the ministries and semi-public committees and organizations. Finnish as a language would potentially attract linguists interested in one of the world’s rare Finno-Ugric languages, and language teaching abroad was considered very early on by the Finnish state as an excellent channel for bringing forward ideas and notions about Finland and Finnish culture. Finnish lecturers abroad but also translators were thus treated by the Finnish authorities as informal cultural ambassadors. At this point in time, Finland paid local Finnish language lecturers in Sweden (Stockholm, Uppsala and Lund), in Western Germany (Hamburg and Tübingen) and in Eastern Germany in Greifswald. Those were mostly remnants of pre-war cultural relations with Sweden and Germany. Sent lecturers were also active in Paris and in Copenhagen, as well as in Leningrad, Hungary and the United States, mostly in places where Finns had emigrated en masse in the late nineteenth century.

In this domain as well, the movement between 1944 and 1975 was a movement of institutionalization and of expansion of the state’s coordination of private organizations. The Ministry of Education first set in 1962 a Committee for Foreign Lecturers to develop teaching of Finnish abroad. In 1963 was created another organization to manage language course in Finland and to organize the participation of Finnish students in Nordic language courses. In 1969, these two were fused into UKAN (Ulkomaanlehtori ja kielikurssiasiain neuvottelukunta, in English the Advisory committee for Finnish lecturers abroad). This organization and its leader, professor Pertti Virtaranta,¹⁶⁸ worked under the Ministry of Education to organize summer camps for lecturers of Finnish abroad and other lessons (the first in Tampere in 1963), often in the region of the lakes in the centre of the country, which was considered to correspond to exotic clichés foreigners would have about Finland.¹⁶⁹ There is an interesting insistence from the Finns on teaching Finnish as a language and Finnish history and the like abroad through systems of lectureships and teaching positions organized in cooperation with foreign universities. The Finns kept track of these posts and reflected intensively on their role and the possibilities open for them. For example, Finnish language courses started in 1964 in the University of Groningen, in Holland, and Finnish could be read in Amsterdam as a minor since 1969.¹⁷⁰

In 1974, the Ministry of Education counted 24 Finnish lecturers abroad, which received from the Ministry a compensation for their teaching according to the level of their salary in the university they worked in.¹⁷¹ There was, however, a problem of competence, and the Ministry wanted to sharpen the criteria used in recruitment. In 1971, the Ministry for Education calculated that a grand total of 251 foreigners had participated since 1963 in the Finnish language and culture courses organized by Finnish organizations.¹⁷² By far the most important group was Swedes (105), then Hungarians (30) and then Soviet citizens (21). UKAN was described as the ideal organization to promote cultural contacts: it didn’t weight much on the state’s budget, and had good contacts with the academic world both in Finland and abroad. The Ministry also drew a list of the reasons for this activism in linguistic studies: the need to participate as real states do in reciprocal language teaching contacts, the need to create bridges with more developed languages, the need to use these courses, which are quite cheap, to develop and promote Finland’s and Finnish culture’s image abroad, and the fact that Finnish can be useful in the context of diasporas. The question of the Finnish diaspora comes back in this context at various occasions. In 1964, after a trip to North America, Siikala regreted the lack of language skills and contacts with Finland amongst the descendants of Finnish families in the United States. He saw amongst those an outdated and rather negative image of Finland, which should be corrected by information on the welfare state, social policy, urbanism, handicrafts and so on.

There were several attempts to use UNESCO as a funding source for efforts to promote Finnish culture abroad. In 1962, there was a discussion in the UNESCO committee about the promotion of Finnish literature abroad and the possibility to get funding for that from the organization.¹⁷³ The committee wrote that books in Finnish were rarely proposed to foreign editors, because translators rarely took the risk to translate books with uncertain selling prospects. The UNESCO committee thus demanded that money would be given to it in order to pay for translations of extracts of books in Finnish, to be presented to publishers abroad. This was linked to the will by UNESCO to work in order to make better-known literature in smaller languages. The committee proposed grants that translators could apply for, and the Finnish state developed a system of aid to translation of Finnish cultural material.¹⁷⁴ There were also several projects by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to support translations of literary and artistic work but also of books developing general notions on Finland, like a well-known short introduction to Finland’s history by Matti Klinge. Siikala on several occasion described translation as an essential tool in modernizing the country, its literature and opening it to international literary currents.¹⁷⁵

In the field of science, the government was mostly active through funding and support for scientific institutions. Finnish universities were semi-private up until the mid-1970s, and the Ministry of Education worked mostly through a host of specialized committees and the Academy of Finland to develop foreign scientific contacts. Most of these contacts came from private initiatives that were upgraded into state actions, often for reasons that were described as linked to image promotion but also out of a desire to support Finnish scientists in their international contacts. In the early 1980s, Siikala wrote that with the spontaneous development of scientific international contacts more coordination would be needed, but no efficient model had been found in a field where the protagonists (especially universities) were jealous of their autonomy.¹⁷⁶ The main organizations were specialized committees, the Academy of Finland and universities. Siikala, of course, thought that coordination should be located in the Academy and the Ministry of Education, under the control of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs on the general lines.

One of the things in which the state was directly involved was participation in international organizations such as CERN. CERN was an interesting example also of the incentive for Finland to balance between East and West in its contacts abroad, especially in the 1970s when contacts with the East were often a prerequisite to contacts with the West—the entry fee, in a way, to pay for access to the West. In 1970, a committee pondering Finland’s possible integration in CERN emphasized that Finland should also develop the same contacts with the Dubna Institute for Nuclear Research situated near Moscow.¹⁷⁷ The report emphasized that, while cooperation with CERN is most important scientifically, a possible cooperation with Dubna could open “interesting perspectives”. Another report the same year underlined Finland’s caution towards cooperation with nuclear research centres, and took the occasion to criticize the timidity of Finns in international research contacts more generally.¹⁷⁸ Resources could not anymore be a reason for such isolation, said the report. Professor Laurikainen, who signed the report, criticized in strong words the Finnish authorities for their timidity. An ad hoc cooperation had been signed with CERN, where Finland did not pay but got only partial access, which made everything more difficult for Finnish scientists. Laurikainen insisted on the fact that, if there was no will to advance with CERN, at least Finnish researchers should get full access to Dubna.

Before the 1980s, a few projects of Finnish Institutes abroad emerged. In 1949, the committee report on international cultural relations insisted on the necessity to develop these Finnish institutes abroad as places where scientists and artists could get lodgings and work abroad for periods of time. In 1950, the Kekkonen government decided to create the first of these institutes, buying the Villa Lante in Rome.¹⁷⁹ In 1954, a Finnish institute was created in Rome in the villa, mostly for artists, students, and researchers of architecture and archaeology. The Villa Lante was founded on the model of a scientific institute that could host researchers and organize scientific and artistic exhibitions.¹⁸⁰

The Villa Lante was for long the only Finnish Institutes abroad, despite a number of initiatives before the 1980s. In 1960, the UNESCO committee discussed the creation of a Finnish institute in Paris. The initiative came from the Finnish embassy in Paris, which demands consequent public funding.¹⁸¹ In July 1961, Maja Genetz, commercial counsellor, and Heikki Herlin, managing director of the industrial company Kone, contacted Professor L. A. Puntila of the University of Helsinki and then the Finnish Cultural Foundation to apply for funding. Support was sought for a project aimed at establishing a Finnish cultural centre in Paris, the “centre of European culture”, under the auspices of which the French would come into contact with Finnish culture and its representatives. The house would be a kind of Finnish cultural centre, from which “it would also be easier for Finnish researchers, students and artists to get a closer look at French science and art”. There was already a Finland House, an embassy, a consulate and a sailor’s church in London, but there was nothing like it in Paris. Herlin actively promoted the project, and he received help from Vilho Kallioinen, a Finnish language teacher in Paris, and Gurli Sevón-Rosenbröijer, an old Parisian Finn, journalist and au pair agent. However, the matter did not progress due to a lack of money and interest from the Cultural Fund. After 1970, however, the role of the Finnish cultural and scientific institutions in Paris (a possible Finno-Ugric educational centre and the Nordic section of the Sainte-Geneviève university library) was considered by the joint commissions provided for in the Finnish-French cultural agreement.

In 1975, the Finnish and the Swedish government discussed also the creation of a Swedish-Finnish cultural centre in Hanasaari, in Espoo near Helsinki. The centre was the result of the activities of the Finnish-Swedish cultural fund and works as an event organizer, an exhibition hall and a hotel. The centre was opened on the occasion of a state visit by the Swedish king Karl Gustav XVI in June 1975. But the emergence of Finnish Institutes abroad mostly happened in the 1980s–1990s, when a dozen Institutes were created by Finland as a result of the end of the Cold War, amongst which the Finnish institute in Paris finally created in 1991.

Some of these centres were linked to the local activities of the Finnish embassies, for example the London-based Finland House created in December 1958. In 1970, a similar Finland-house (Suomi-talo) was founded in Stockholm. The creation of Finland Houses, mostly destined to work as places for export promotion, was delayed by lack of resources up to the late 1950s, but the idea was in the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ plan since the war. Until the mid-1960s, these creations were mostly the result of local initiatives.¹⁸²