The biggest newspaper in Finland recently conducted a survey among Finnish expatriates regarding their views on the country’s foreign policy. It was not the first survey of its kind, but the expats were more interested in answering than ever.
Dealing with the image of the country abroad, it was the question of racism that inspired more comments than anything else. Most were quite concerned about the racism and open intolerance that had been associated with the name of the country since the True Finns party had started to attract support.
Finns tend to think that nobody outside our country ever knows anything about what is happening here. In the years after the Second World War, Finland was above all a country of emigration, and the backwoods and boondocks were emptying into the automobile factories of Sweden: back in the 1970s, ‘Volvo’ became a synonym for ‘jobs’.
In recent decades, though, it has turned out that foreigners are quite happy to settle down in Finland, and as regards poverty and hardship, there isn’t much left of that either. The success of the high-tech company Nokia has brought Finland into global spotlight. In my childhood days I would mostly associate Nokia with rubber boots and tyres, and it seems there still are lots of Finns who don’t understand how much things have changed.
So when one of our domestic politicians is struck with the idea of saying something racist, he isn’t quite aware of the fact that his words will be instantly repeated in the whole of Europe and beyond. When Jussi Halla-aho, the leader of the extreme rightist faction of the True Finns party, ‘joked’ to his henchmen on Facebook that a military junta and tanks in the streets would be necessary in Greece to put its economy in order, the ‘funny’ utterance made it to the world’s media in 24 hours and was duly reported in Greece itself. Similarly, such politicians’ brutal and uncivilised utterances about Muslims and Africans cannot be kept away from the ears of Muslims and Africans anymore.
Of course, different kinds of racism have been quite common in Finnish society, and it’s possible that there is less of it today, because since the last wave many people have got to know more and more immigrants. Besides, even capitalists in Finland understand that racism will do their business no good if their logo is associated with it. Racism is no ‘corporate value’. That’s the reason why overt racist propaganda disappeared from public discussion toward the turn of the millennium.
This insight dawned upon business people and politicians in the 1990s. Back then, skinheads in Joensuu attacked Darryl Parker, a young black American who was playing basketball on the local team. He was so frightened by the attack that he immediately returned to the States. But something good did come out of this sad story.
There are lots of Finns for whom sports is all there is to life, and lots of those usually take little interest in big words about tolerance and stuff. When a black athlete was victimised by skinhead violence, lots of people changed their minds about these things, and business owners and politicians understood that that racism simply wasn’t acceptable if they wanted to keep their town alive.
But it looks like Finns need to learn their old lesson again. The expats who expressed their anxiety about what Finland’s international image has begun to look like left a country which had just learned that lesson – the way the country was in the end of the 1990s and in the first years of the new millennium. Now, though, we are back to square one, back to a time when mainstream politicians were happy to mouth racist phrases in their propaganda and the skinhead movement was growing. That’s how it looks to the expats, anyway.
Panu Höglund is a Finnish online writer and translator
