WHO'S AFRAID OF FINLANDIZATION!
Steif, William
Who's Afraid of finlandization' Ronald Reagan is. The Finns are not. BY WILLIAM STEIF Walking down Helsinki's main avenue, Mannerheimintie, I was thinking about Havana. And about Washington—...
...Cooperative projects followed...
...forest products tend to go west, metal products east...
...Two thirds of Finnish oil comes from the Russians, the rest from the Saudis and Iraqis...
...but near the Finnish border, and Finns and Soviets have formed a consortium to market Soviet nuclear reactors in the Third World...
...When Turkey rejected U-2 flights over its territory to verify Russian missile tests, Finlandization supposedly was at work...
...For a decade, Finlandization has been the code word for the Soviet superpower's strategy of whittling away at the independence of smaller nations...
...The United States abhors using its power...
...One of the first signs came in 1955...
...Would they start learning it if the United States gave them back the essentially useless military base at Guantanamo Bay...
...left the Finns resembling the Swedes much more than they resemble the Russians...
...Today one-seventh of the population is rural and the economy is evenly balanced among forest products, such sophisticated industrial goods as roll-on-roll-off ships, and a growing service sector that employs almost half the populace...
...In 1978, the Finns' gross national product amounted to about $38 billion, or $7,900 for every Finn...
...In 1955, the Soviets gave up their lease and removed their troops...
...Is it difficult to believe that this policy has been genuinely embraced, without compulsion!' The word Finlandization sticks in the craw of Pekka J. Kor-venheimo, deputy director for political affairs in the Finnish foreign ministry...
...The Russians do not hesitate to use their power...
...The chief Finnish import from the U.S.S.R...
...Now, for example, Finns and Soviets are building a huge iron ore complex at Kostamos, in the U.S.S.R...
...He suppressed the study, ordered a new scientific check, and gave the offending tuna a clean bill of health—until a Helsinki newspaper blew the whistle...
...There are some islands nearby...
...Ienter a bank to change money...
...The Finns, blond and well-dressed, were scurrying home...
...The Finns surrendered again to the Russians in September 1944, and lost an eighth of their land, including the Karelian gateway to Leningrad...
...At the end of World War II, Finland was the only country that had managed to lose twice—once in the Winter War of 19391940, the second time when it jumped in on the Nazi side to regain the territory lost to the Russians the first time around...
...There are more homely examples, too: In 1974, the Finnish publishing house that held the rights to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago declined to publish the work...
...Back in my room at the Hotel Marski, I flipped on the television set...
...I shouldn't drive these parallels too hard," I think, dozing through the Russian on Channel 3. A ranking Western diplomat in Helsinki concedes there are parallels but insists, "There is one vital difference, more important than ideology...
...To be sure, U.S...
...It is unfair to use the name of our country in the wrong context...
...Like half of all Finnish families, the Niskanens have a "summer home," usually a place by a lake or the sea, where Finns spend weekends when the days are long...
...H There is a kind of historic-cultural parallel, too...
...Who's Afraid of finlandization' Ronald Reagan is...
...We have never denied we are neutral...
...Older Finns recall that in the immediate postwar period blinds had to be fixed over coach windows each time a train passed through Porkkala so that no one would "spy" on the port...
...rule, direct and indirect, left Cuba Spanish-speaking and oriented toward Spain and its Latin American offshoots...
...The Russian czar's armies freed the Finnish colony from the Swedish kingdom in 1809, but 108 years of Russian rule William Steif, based in Washington, covers national and international news for the Scripps-Howard newspapers...
...To some, that is Finlandization...
...Under terms of the 1944 surrender, the Soviets had "leased" for fifty years the port of Porkkala, southwest of Helsinki...
...f Finland shares a 793-mile border with the Soviet Union...
...The trade surplus for 1979 was $700 million...
...I haven't much feeling," she says...
...Finland is a high-technology nation, exporting goods and expertise...
...The word was brandished as a warning by Franz Josef Strauss, the Bavarian Christian Democrat, when he campaigned for the West German chancellorship in late 1980...
...The pace and the air were brisk—not Havana or Washington, but more like Minneapolis...
...In 1975, when I first visited Finland, the yearly inflation rate was 16 per cent, the trade deficit $1.8 billion...
...The dollar's worth is being lowered by 2 per cent against the Finnmark...
...But the Finns are not so dependent on oil for their overall energy needs as, for example, is nearby Sweden...
...Smaller amounts of energy come from indigenous peat and natural gas piped in from Leningrad...
...Greece's threat to oust NATO bases is cited as a case of Finlandization...
...On my most recent visit, the inflation rate was 7.5 per cent, unemployment was 6 per cent of the workforce, the economic growth rate was about 6.5 per cent...
...is crude oil, sent to the national refinery at Porvoo...
...The treaty provides that if either the Soviet Union or Finland becomes the object of armed aggression through Finnish territory, Finland will try to repel the attack, if necessary with Soviet aid...
...But Korvenheimo insists that "this is not a military alliance treaty...
...Finland is a staunchly capitalistic welfare state, with tax rates high enough to provide for societal dropouts...
...It popped up in Ronald Reagan's Presidential campaign, and is an underlying thread in politics from Britain to Turkey...
...The Finns rarely criticize Soviet conduct in foreign affairs...
...We view this term as being offensive," sgys former Finnish Foreign Minister Keijo Korhonen...
...Also in 1974, scientists in the Finnish health agency found that Soviet tuna, a popular import, contained mercury well beyond the safety limit...
...It would be nice if I could go swim to them...
...That was close to the Japanese and Canadians, well in front of the British and Italians...
...They are there [in Karelia] and we are here...
...Four-fifths of the economy is in private hands...
...Havana is west of Miami, Helsinki east of Riga and L'vov...
...None of this has really changed the Finnish trade pattern...
...And there are other parallels, inexact but tantalizing: f Finland and Cuba exist within the orbits of the world's two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States...
...They can't...
...The Finnish president is dominant, though this may change under the successor to Kekkonen, who recently stepped down because of ill health...
...Seventy per cent of the Swedes' energy use is oil-based, 50 per cent of the Finns...
...The United States freed the Cuban colony from Spain in 1898, but subsequent U.S...
...Leena Niskanen, thirty-eight, works for the Finnish National Board of Social Welfare...
...I ask...
...We have nothing to hide," he says...
...The Finnish Communist Party, legalized after World War II, consistently draws about 18 per cent of the vote, though the party is split between hard-line Stalinists and backers of the present Soviet regime...
...We're part of the Nordic area...
...Is it really so difficult to grasp that Finland has created its own basic security policy...
...Why not...
...Three Communists have unimportant Cabinet posts in the latest of the endless succession of left-center coalitions that have ruled the country since World War II...
...We get used to living in Finland...
...The something, I discover, is revaluation...
...The banks are doing something to the money," the teller apologizes...
...President Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, feared Finland-ization, and President Reagan's Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, has warned against it...
...Our country's good name has been used wrongly, as a cudgel in conflicts which have nothing to do with us," said Finland's seventy-nine-year-old President Urho Kekkonen at Hamburg in mid-1979...
...II There are 4.8 million Finns, 260 million Soviets...
...As a Western-style country in a Communist bower, Finland has signed trade agreements with all blocs, the pro-NATO European Economic Community, the neutralist (but capitalist) European Free Trade Association, and the pro-Soviet Council for Mutual Economic Assistance...
...But U.S...
...Yet she, like most Finns of her generation, harbors no bitterness toward the Russians...
...Will the Cubans ever learn this...
...For many Americans it is very difficult...
...It occurs to me that what Cuba needs is Finlandization...
...Her brother was born in Viipuri—Finns do not call the lost Karelian city Vyborg...
...The rest of the Finnish energy mix is coal (from Poland), hydro power, forest industry waste products, and nuclear power (the first two reactors were Soviet-built, the second two Swedish...
...There was no Marshall Plan for a loser, the economy was wholly based on a single resource, timber, and two thirds of the Finns were rural workers...
...Her mother still lives in Virolahti, a town of 3,800 within two miles of the Soviet border1...
...That corresponds to our security interest...
...I want to do some shopping in the boutiques fringing the Esplanade that leads from Mannerheimintie to the harbor...
...The Soviet interests are mainly military," says Korvenheimo, and adds, "When Nikita Khrushchev was here in 1960, President Kekkonen told him that ideologically we are not neutral...
...But they have learned to unbend, too...
...There are 9.5 million Cubans, 226 million Americans...
...We cannot do it today," the woman teller says, embarrassed...
...Trade with Eastern Europe continues to run about 23 per cent of the total, most of it (18 per cent) with the Soviets...
...There is a parallel for Cubans: They pick up television broadcasts from Key West, Florida, ninety miles away...
...military power hasn't been brought to bear against Cuba in the twenty years since the Bay of Pigs invasion...
...Is it really so difficult to grasp that Finland has created its own basic security policy...
...But despite their comfort and prosperity, the word Finlandization obsesses the Finns...
...Finnish politicians build their careers on giving the impression they're in contact with the Russians, know what and how they think, and are trusted in Moscow...
...The firm was owned by Finland's Social Democratic Party, which felt publication would embarrass the Social Democratic prime minister...
...the largest shares are with Britain, West Germany, and Sweden...
...The Caribbean is an American sea, and half the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico is American...
...The autumn night comes early in Helsinki, a city as far north as the southern tip of Greenland...
...Channel 3's broadcasts originate forty miles from Helsinki on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, in Tallinn, U.S.S.R...
...The north was devastated because part of the Finns' deal with the Soviets was to chase the Germans out of Arctic Finland, where the Nazis pursued a scorched-earth policy...
...They are wary of any Finnish politician who is too blatantly pro-Western...
...It is possible to make a buck, or a lot of bucks, in Finland...
...They had to pay more than $500 million in reparations—a sum paid in goods by mid-1952—and care for 422,000 refugees from Karelia...
...economic power—in the form of a rigid trade embargo and other sanctions—is arrayed against Cuba every day, with devastating effect...
...The islands are Russian...
...About 60 per cent of its foreign trade is carried on with Western Europe...
...We Finns need neither guardians nor sympathetic 'understanders.' As a nation, we are of age, and we are capable of managing our own affairs...
...It declares the right of Finland to stay out of international conflicts...
...Channels 1 and 2, Finnish and in color, were packed with glossy commercials for refrigerators, toothpaste, summer homes, supermarkets...
...he had been president since 1956...
...Especially if they sit in a superpower's lap...
...The Russians show a continuing but marginal interest in Finnish politics...
...But to the Finns it is hard-headed, self-interested realism...
...Summer homes invariably have a sauna, but the Niskanens' is different in one way...
...Like West Germany, Finland exports more than a quarter of its GNP...
...Channel 3, in fuzzy black and white, was soporific, as usual—a solemn lecture from behind a desk...
...When Norway refused to let West German combat troops take part in 1978 NATO exercises on its territory because of Russian protests, Finlandization was blamed...
...The report went to the agency's second-in-command, a Communist who was acting chief while his boss was on vacation...
...When they do, as in the cases of the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, they keep their comments low-keyed...
...Is it difficult to believe that this policy is in Finland's own interest, that it is the Finnish people's own policy, a line which has been genuinely embraced, without compulsion...
...The Finns have learned that nations may be sovereign but that they are not equal...
...And about Washington— about Ronald Reagan and his policymakers, who stand in terror of the "Finlandization" of Western Europe...
...A Swedish company rushed in with a Finnish Gulag and cleaned up...
...If the whole world is Communist, Kekkonen continued, we'll remain a parliamentary democracy if the majority of our people want it...
...We can see the Russian border from our house," she says...
...Sweden needs our neutrality, we need their neutrality...
...In 1948, the Finns, still very much under the Soviet thumb, signed a "Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Aid" with Moscow...
Vol. 46 • February 1982 • No. 2
