Kingdom of Nokia

Front matter

Carl-Gustav Linden

How a Nation Served the Needs of One Company

HELSINKI HUP ies

Contents

Acknowledgements v Preface ix Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: A Nation Ensnared 29 Chapter 3: To the Open Market 55 Chapter 4: Troubled Media Relations 67 Chapter 5: Who Dared Defy Ollila? 79 Chapter 6: Politics and Lobbying 95 Chapter 7: Raining Riches 103 Chapter 8: Nokialand Is Born 111 Chapter 9: Subcontractors in Crisis 121 Chapter 10: The Fall of Elcoteq 135 Chapter 11: Factory Exodus to China 143 Chapter 12: Shattered Dreams: India 153 Chapter 13: The Tale of Two Cities 161 Chapter 14: The Decisive Year 167 Chapter 15: Symbian Crashes 177 Chapter 16: Debacle in the United States 189 Chapter 17: Surrender to Microsoft 199 Chapter 18: Another Future 209 Notes 221 Appendix A: List of Interviewees 223 References 229

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a long personal process starting back in the 1980s, when I was a young business reporter trying to understand global business through the prism of Nokia. The professional interest changed from journalistic to reflective academic thinking when I worked on my PhD, National Champions in Combat: Nokia, Ericsson and the Sensemaking of Business News (2012). This was followed up with a book in Swedish published in 2015, and a Finnish edition in 2016, which is also the foundation for this edition.

Preface

This book examines an iconic tech company that transformed the world by providing a new communication tool, the mobile phone, on an affordable and massive scale. However, the company resides in a small country in Northern Europe, Finland. This monograph presents the fascinating story of how a huge global company and a Nordic country emerged in co-evolution and formed what became a brand nation that we here call ‘Kingdom of Nokia. ‘The title of the book comes from the idea that Nokia for around 15 years managed to capture the attention of the Finnish elite, from politicians and civil servants to journalists willing to serve in the best interest of the global company that put Finland on the world map.

We trace the development of Nokia's success in mobile phones back to the development of radio technology in the 1930s and Finnish military spending on radio phones in the 1960s. We can track path dependence back to the coordinated Nordic development of the Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) standard, the first fully automatic cellular phone system which later, through concerted lobbying efforts at the European level, turned into the European standard GSM (1G). The standard is still used today and 5G is x Kingdom of Nokia the latest addition. The Finnish government also helped with state support for R&D in relevant technologies and processes, such as advanced manufacturing of electronic devices.

One important theme is Nokias struggle with new technology, moving from hardware to software and internet to web. The book deals with the failed attempt to introduce a new operating system for mobile phones, getting away from the impossibly dated Symbian to modern systems. The struggle has been attributed to the incapability of Finnish software engineers to understand modern software, but the book points at strategic and managerial shortcomings.

It also examines the factors that initially made the success possible—refusal to give up and belief in its own capacity successfully to deal with problems—but later were the very same forces that brought the company close to destruction. Success breeds arrogance and, for too long, Nokia's management refused to accept that the rules of the game had changed.

The individual who made the company so strong in the national debate was the CEO and Chairman Jorma Ollila, who had close connections to the politically dominant Centre Party and in particular the former Prime Minister Esko Aho. Both are still important influencers in national policy. Thus, the book explores how economic elites are being formed and their influence on institution building.

Kingdom of Nokia covers a wide range of issues. One dominant theme is how Nokia became a global player in mobile communications, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and, as a conseguence, helped establish Anglo-Saxon capitalism in Finland. Through its unexpected success in the 1990s, the company managed to capture the attention of every segment of the Finnish elite, from politicians of all parties to government officials, state funding agencies, standardisation agencies, labour unions and journalists. With concrete detailed examples, the book illustrates how Nokia paid millions in campaign money to politicians in a country that is considered one of the least corrupt in the world. Nokia also played an important role in major national decisions in Finland, such as joining the European Union and adopting the euro.

CHAPTER |

Introduction

I have dealt with Nokia throughout my career as a business journalist from 1985 to 2010, and have been studying the company as a researcher since then. I regard myself as rather well informed about the company; however, I was never part of the company’s inner circle. Still, at a party in 2010, Lauri Kivinen, a Nokia employee from 1988 to 2010 and former Head of Communications, introduced me as a ‘co-worker’. I responded cautiously that we were never actually colleagues, because I was a journalist and he was part of Nokia's public relations team. “Yes, yes, he shot back, “but we worked together. Our complicity was self-evident. Privileged journalists received special treatment from Nokias communications department, including invitations to capital market events and glamorous mobile phone exhibitions in Cannes (1987-2006) and later Barcelona. The Swedish business correspondent, Bengt Carlsson, who was a member of this elite, said in his interview that Nokias managers, journalists, analysts and other members were like a touring theatre company where everyone knew everyone. I needed to reassess my status as an independent journalist and a watchdog. As an economic correspondent, I was not particularly good at seeing events at Nokia from the right perspective. Only after studying Nokia from a researcher's point of view, since 2011, have I been able to examine the company’s various turning points more objectively.

I began writing the first version of this book in autumn 2013, when Nokia sold its mobile phone division to Microsoft after a strategic failure. It was an opportune moment to use the knowledge accumulated over a lengthy period of studying the relationship between Nokia and Finland for my PhD thesis (Linden 2012). The outflow of emotions in Finland after the sale of Nokia phones, accompanied by accusations of treason, showed how bewildering this relationship had been. Finland seemed to be in national mourning. However, Nokia was and is far from a smoking ruin. Even without mobile phones, it is a successful worldwide corporation. This book can therefore be regarded as an interim report, wrapping up the historically rare and fleeting period from around 1980 to 2020 when a Finnish company could bask in global adulation as the source of advanced consumer goods known to all. In this same period, Nokia came to dominate key sectors of Finnish society, as politicians and others sought desperately to claim and cling on to its unexpected success. We do not yet know all the details. Most political revelations come long after the event.

Four Global Stories

The first global story concerns Finland's entry to the world of global capitalism and the benefits of accommodating a huge international company. It also looks at the other side of the coin, a Nordic welfare state dependent on one field of technology and the special interests of one dominant actor with an Anglo-Saxon business mindset. In that context, ideas and argumentation associated with the welfare state have given way to a pro-market business discourse associated with neoliberal ideology (Poutanen 2019). According to the Etla economic research institute, as recently as 2008 Nokia produced by far the most value-added in the Finnish economy: 4.8 billion euros. Value-added is the total of profits, labour costs, depreciation costs and rent. Large corporations are more important to Finland than to neighbouring countries; Finland's 20 largest export companies produce half of its exports, while in

Sweden and Denmark the proportion is a third. Nokias value-added was twice as great as that of the financial group Nordea, which was second largest. Almost a quarter of Finnish corporation tax was paid by Nokia. Just five years later, in 2013, Nokia's name briefly disappeared from the top 10 list of the most valuable Finnish companies.

Major corporations with a corresponding position have been Royal Dutch Shell in the Netherlands, Samsung in Korea and Gazprom in Russia, but they have not had the same influence on the real economy of their home countries. Everyone who lived the Nokia dream awoke to the harsh reality of its decline, as tens of thousands of jobs disappeared at Nokia and its subcontractors. Politicians have still to come to terms with the acute problem of restructuring, now that the state budget has lost the massive support of a worldwide corporation.

What was it like to live in the Kingdom of Nokia? This was a company with huge institutional impact on policymaking, to the extent that it was even able to write its own laws. Political campaign funding, strong lobbying and outright coercion were some of the impact tools utilised. When Nokia decided to sell its mobile phone business in 2013, it left the whole nation in shock. Deriving insights from ignorance studies and agnotology (Croissant 2014; Gross & McGoey 2015; Roy & Zeckhauser 2015; Proctor & Schiebinger 2008), this part of the book answers three important questions: What did members of Finland’s elite know about Nokia? What did they not know? Most importantly, what did they not want to know and why?

The second global story relates to China and the country’s long-standing relationship with Nokia, going back to the mid- 1980s. Thanks to the cooperation and exchange of technology and expertise with Nokia and other global tech companies, often unintended and bordering on industry espionage, China has, in just two decades, become a world leader in mobile communications. The evidence for this statement is obvious when looking at the future of 5G technology and Chinas massive investments and technical superiority in this field.

The third global story covers the rise of mobile communications in India, giving hundreds of millions of Indians means to connect with families, friends and business associates. The history of Nokia in India is also the story of a giant nation getting connected to the rest of the world. Less known is the story of how Nokia identified the potential of an emerging market and managed to lobby the Indian government into following its advice for deregulation and lower import taxes on mobile phones. Unfortunately, when the market for smartphones exploded, Nokia was no longer present as the mobile business had been sold to Microsoft. What is left of major investments in manufacturing capacity are gigantic, empty factories outside Chennai in Tamil Nadu.

The fourth and last, but not the least important, global story, is the rise of Silicon Valley in mobile communications, how Nokia in just a few years went from an unbeatable market share of mobile phones with absolute world domination to oblivion. Nokia management saw the advent of the iPhone (Apple) and Android (Google) much like air traffic controllers at an airport see airplanes land and depart, but were prisoners of their own success and incapable of addressing the imminent challenges. This global story also deals with the overall feature of Silicon Valley giants conquering the world.

Why did Nokia go down? Years of success had bred a corporate culture characterised by hubris, obsessed with cost control, savaged by fights between middle managers, marked by a fear of being the harbinger of bad news and, perhaps most importantly, a CEO and chairperson who mostly resembled a dictator everybody lived in fear of, including outside the company. One important explanation is Nokias struggle with new technology, moving from hardware to software and internet to web. Nokia had every opportunity to meet the challenges from the iPhone and Android, but failed to make the right decisions. We look closely at the failed and painful attempt to introduce a new operating system for mobile phones, getting away from the impossibly dated Symbian system to modern ones.

Methodology

This book is very much an oral history of Nokia and Finland, as it is based on semi-structured or open-ended interviews conducted in the period from 2015 to 2019, predominantly in Finland, but also in Sweden, Estonia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore and India. Some people have been interviewed several times to allow for checking missing information or facts. Most of these people have been or are working for Nokia, but the list also includes subcontractors, civil servants, politicians, journalists, industry experts and academics. All interviews have been recorded, transcribed and categorised according to the topics covered. The book also makes extensive use of news and industry reports on Nokia, as well as official documents.

Some people refused the interviews altogether. Nokias past involves many successes, but recent years have contained failures that are difficult to come to terms with. Perhaps some of the people I approached wanted to keep the success story alive. Others may have had legal reasons for refusing to discuss any events at Nokia. This is why I believe that the study of this subject will continue long into the future. I know of researchers who have obtained interviews only by promising that the person would not be quoted until after their death.

In my efforts to explain the different stages of Nokia's development trajectory, I have been inspired by institutional theory; that society develops according to laws, norms and rules, written and unwritten, and how they are applied, as well as to behavioural models, habits, half-truths, myths and prevailing logic. The US economic historian and Nobel laureate Douglass North (2005) describes institutions as ‘the rules of the game A demotic definition of an institution would be: the way we do things over here (March & Olsen 1989; Scott 2001). Nokia is a modern global tech company with deep historical roots in Finnish soil, going back to the second half of the 19th century, and has been balancing its heritage with the image of tech future. However, it has been unable to escape its Finnishness, or perhaps has not tried hard enough. This was especially obvious during the period from 2004 to 2008, when Nokia's mobile phones ruled the rest of the world, except for the United States. Stubbornly, Nokia thought that what was good enough for Europeans should also be sufficient for Americans, thus missing what was going on in Silicon Valley and the emergence of the iPhone and Android.

I see institutions principally as behavioural models that are subconscious or tangible to those involved, but are often invisible to outsiders. In this case, the guestion is how the political and economic elite in Finland acted in relation to Nokia. What patterns directed the behaviour and exercise of power by those in positions of power? My perspective is therefore elitist (Corcoran 2009; Robinson 2010; Ruostetsaari 2007). I offer few to no insights on how the majority of the population experienced Nokia.

Conceptually, the book is framed by institutional theory, focusing on elite discourses and actions (Burns & Nielsen 2006; Campbell 1998; DiMaggio 1988; Djelic & Ouack 2003; Granovetter 1992; March & Olsen 1989; North 1990; Scott & Meyer 1994). Looking at institution building and stakeholder relations, we explore how Finland almost by coincidence acguired a peculiar form of economic nationalism (Helleiner & Pickel 2005) and became a brand nation (Aronczyk 2013; Moilanen & Rainisto 2009; Van Ham 2001), though not in the sense of commodified national identity (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009), but banal nationalism (Billig 1995). Finland's active attempt at nation branding failed, but instead the country's nation brand developed more or less without any campaigns or coordination. Institutional theory is useful for interpreting the motivations of decision-makers. As Stefan Tengblad has pointed out, it is based on three interrelated phenomena: rules, players and actions (Tengblad 2006). In his view, the main focus should be on what the players—‘the Romans’—do. Although their acts are directed by visible or invisible rules, decision-makers do not obey them blindly, but have an identity built on their actions. Actions also give rise to new rules, and this book contains a few examples of such changes, for instance in the law.

Institutional theory is good at explaining why things tend to stay as they are, and much less adopted for understanding disruptive technological change, one key theme of this book. Still, traditional explanations of technological change neglect the social embeddedness of the process through which new innovations become widely accepted (Granovetter 1985; Hargadon & Douglas 2001; Munir & Phillips 2005).

This book is also inspired by other forms of social construction, suchas stakeholder relationship theory. Through this lens, the book examines actors in Nokias network, their interests and reasons for actions and change over time. For instance, it is important to recognise ‘the wider configuration of businesses, industries, communications platforms, services and networks that have made the cell phone possible’ (Goggin 2006: 8). Theory around the concept of stakeholders provides a rich context for discussing who these people or organisations are and what are at ‘stake’ (Miles 2017; Mitchell, Agle & Wood 1997). Stakeholders are individuals, groups of people and organisations in the political and economic system we know as Finland. This network includes managers, the board of directors, employees, subcontractors, competitors, researchers, state agencies, regulators, unions, civil servants, journalists, politicians and, not least, the company’s shareholders. They all have crucial relevance to Nokia’s development and success or failure. Perhaps the most important stakeholders are top corporate managers themselves and, in the case of Nokia, Stakeholder Number One was Jorma Ollila.

Nevertheless, the book argues that the network of stakeholders could also include ordinary Finns who have bought in to the idea of a Finnish national champion (Lindén 2012), a global company whose interests are crucial and need to be served by ‘the nation. Even retired people are dependent on the return on investments by financial companies responsible for pensions.

The institutional perspective plays a background role in influencing the conclusions of this book. Although we know that economic development is dependent on investment and technology, progress also requires appropriate political, legal, economic and other institutions. Admittedly, it is difficult to find agreement on what these institutions might be, but the issue concerns complex and interrelated social structures that provide stability and predictability.

Literature

Nokia has been, and continues to be, a popular subject for research and authorship. In 2000, two Finnish journalists, Staffan Bruun and Mosse Wallén, published Boken om Nokia (Bruun & Wallén 2000), a narrative that told perceptively how the giant corporation came back from the verge of bankruptcy and renewed itself to become the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones. Bruun and Wallén point out that Nokia created an entirely new industry sector. Written at the turn of the millennium, the book is tinged with the zeitgeist, optimism and anticipation of the next thousand years. During that time, the internet was changing the world and everyone was expected to benefit from this new technology. In February 2000, Nokia did indeed become the world’s fifth most valuable company. In June, Nokias share price rose to an all-time high of €65.

There was a steady flow of heroic tales, written with the assistance of Jorma Ollila and other Nokia executives. An early example is Nokia Saga (1995), commissioned by the Nokia management from the copywriter Marco Makinen. It was intended to reinforce Nokias corporate culture and identity, but, together with his closest subordinates, Ollila reshaped the text into a celebration of company management. In 2001, Dan Steinbock published The Nokia Revolution: The Story of an Extraordinary Company that Transformed an Industry (2001), which opens up the history of Nokia. The following year saw Trevor Merriden’s admiration of the ‘coolest telecom company in the world’: Business the Nokia Way: Secrets of the Worlds Fastest Moving Company (2001). Harvard researchers Örjan Sölvell and Michael E. Porter joined in the chorus of adulation with Finland and Nokia: Creating the Worlds Most Competitive Economy (Sölvell & Porter 2002), which sets the institutional context for Nokias success: policy changes made in the 1990s. Then in 2010 came Steinbock's second eulogy Winning Across Global Markets: How Nokia Creates Strategic Advantage in a Fast Changing World (Steinbock 2010). Its blurb promised ‘a roadmap for developing, capturing, and sustaining strategic global advantage. It had the misfortune to appear just as Nokia lost its footing.

Finnish historian Martti Häikiö wrote an entire trilogy about Nokia (Häikiö 2001a; Häikiö 2001b; Häikiö 2001c), with a condensed version of the most important events in English (Häikiö & Virtanen 2002). These have been an important factual source while studying the company prior to 2000 as Häikiö has enjoyed the luxury of unrestricted access to Nokias archives. However, the book series was commissioned by Nokias board of directors and work controlled by a committee of board members and employees.

History is often used for branding purposes where managing the past becomes an important function of corporate communications. The need for control arises especially when problematic episodes occur and events or issues do not unfold as planned. Organisations may be stigmatised by their life histories and unable to explore or identify alternatives as choices ‘because their life trajectory propels them in a particular direction (Carroll 2002: 559). But companies can also use history-telling to reverse that process and use images of the future to help reshape images of the past, ‘to recast the past in more appreciative terms, to reframe the past to highlight images or interpretations that can be just as real, authoritative, and inspirational as the ones we inadvertently use to guide our lives’ (Carroll 2002: 559). Organisational nostalgia combines idealisation of the past with a symbolic enrichment—mythologisation (Gabriel 2000). One of the pioneers of this was the sports shoemaker Nike, which started a storytelling programme in the 1970s. Storytellers at ‘Nike University’ concentrated on innovation and heritage, telling how Coach Bowerman needed better shoes for his team and started experimenting (Ransdell 2000).

Nokia has also been a popular subject for the business world. One measure is the number of Harvard Business School case studies, an educational tool that presents the greatest challenges confronting companies. Up until January 2020, there were 46 studies related to Nokia. This is not much compared with studies concerning American giants like Microsoft (250 case studies) and IBM (135)—not to mention Apple (376). Still, the name of Swedish electronics corporation Ericsson cropped up only 14 times. Studies about Nokia cover such matters as strategic choices, methods of cooperation, subcontracting, marketing, patent management and the challenges of continuous success and overcapitalisation, meaning too much money on the balance sheet.

Not surprisingly, the few case studies undertaken after 2011 have titles such as ‘The Rise and Fall of Nokia (Alcacer, Khanna & Snively 2015) or ‘Nokia: The Burning Platform’ (Alcacer, Khanna & Furey 2011). Probably the best example of this educational logic is the removal of case studies on the success of Enron after the company collapsed, and the introduction of a new species of case studies on ‘the ethical and accounting issues posed by Enron's misadventures’ (Broughton 2009).

In studies of Nokias economic and industrial impact on Finland, the work of Jyrki Ali-Yrkkö (Ali-Yrkk6 2000; Ali-Yrkkö 2001a; Ali-Yrkkö 2001b; Ali-Yrkk6 2008; Ali-Yrkkö 2010; Ali-Yrkkö et al. 2011; Seppälä 2010) and his colleagues at ETLA Economic Research is in a class of its own because of the volume, continuity and quality of studies. ETLA’s predecessor was founded by the industry in 1946 and has played an active role in the transformation of the Finnish economy with long-term economic growth as both focus and goal.

Corporate consultants, business administrators, technology experts and economic journalists—all have wanted an opportunity to tell people about this company from the cold north and its incomparable triumph. Nokia gave new self-confidence to the Finns, from the elite to the factory floor. Until Nokia’s conquest of the world, Finns lacked future visions to which they could attach national identity and symbols. The essence of being Finnish was founded on the past: the spirit of the Winter War (1939-1940) and the Finns’ defensive victory against the Soviet Union; ‘great men such as Field Marshal Mannerheim (1867-1951) and composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), as well as stories about hunger, hazards and sacrifice (Saari 2000). Then Nokia arrived and put Finland on the world map (Kuisma 1999).

Branding a Nation

Success stories can be created in many ways. In November 2010, a working group called ‘Finland Promotion Board; functioning under Jorma Ollila, Chairman of the Nokia board at the time, published a report on Finland as a brand (Maabrandivaltuuskunta 2010). The report caused a stir at the time because it was only a few years since the previous effort to create a ‘Finland brand. and the decision of the Finnish Tourist Board to try to market Finland to the world as ‘Credible, Contrasting, Creative and Cool’ (Holmen 2009; Laamanen 2013). The diplomatic service, the civil service and in fact the whole nation were urged to tell everyone about the 4Cs.

The problem with the 2010 strategy was the assumption that a country can create a brand for itself. Rarely has a working group painted itself so guickly into a corner as when Jorma Ollila began the report with the statement that Finland is the world's best country. One problem was that too few foreigners regarded Finland as a paragon. The Finland Promotion Board had only one real piece of evidence for its boast. In August 2010, the US periodical Newsweek had declared Finland to be top of the league (Forohaar 2010). Its criteria were education, health, quality of life, a dynamic economy and political atmosphere.

Finns do have every reason to be proud, but that is not a part of their national identity. The facts speak up for Finland: When the country celebrated 100 years of independence, Statistics Finland (2018) aggregated all the indexes that put Finland on top of the world, the freest, safest, most stable, with the best governance, least organised crime, most independent judicial system, best protection of property rights, and so the list goes on.

Looking at Finnish history, the low-key profile makes more sense. The country tried to navigate politically between the Soviet and Western spheres of interest after the Second World War and stay neutral, with Switzerland as the role model. Closely monitored by the Kremlin, Finnish decision-makers tried to avoid any controversy that might upset Soviet leaders, even positive events. ‘No news is good news’ was considered the best strategy (Brander 2019). One can imagine the shock and boost to the national ego when, in 1988, Nokia offered Finns the chance to become ‘owners of Europe; as the biggest ever share issue in Finland to date was marketed (Makinen 1995). In contrast with the post-Second World War strategy of keeping their heads down, Finns now entered into a completely new era.

A British consultant on national branding, Simon Anholt, provided a small contribution to the Finland brand. Anholt had made a fortune with marketing concepts intended for regions and nations. (Finland paid Anholt €150,000 for just a few days of work.) Anholt had worked extensively in Sweden and observed the endless discussion that preceded any decisions there. Finland was the opposite. In an interview with the Finnish current affairs magazine Suomen Kuvalehti, Anholt commented that if he had a problem, he would invite a Finn to solve it (Angesleva 2010). A Finnish think tank, Demos, helped the promotion board to write their report. Demos translated Anholt’s image into something reminiscent of a taciturn and unemotional plumber, who travels around the globe with their toolkit to settle almost any major problem, including drought. Taking phone calls from the four corners of the world, the plumber replies: ‘Consider it solved? This was to be the way of selling global investors and tourists on the legend of a clean, efficient and practical country. Finland was branded as the Silicon Valley of social innovations.

The prescription was strongly criticised and even ridiculed by the Finnish media and public and was soon forgotten, but this is brought up as an example of how life appeared in Finland some years ago—and how much the economic recession from 2008 onwards has changed Finland, psychologically, culturally, economically, politically and socially.

Among the Nordic countries, Finland has had the greatest difficulties in balancing state income and spending after the economic recession which began in 2007 (Valkonen & Vihriälä 2014). Even Iceland, wrecked by a banking crisis, made a guick comeback, while Finnish economic growth even in early 2016 was the slowest in the euro area after Greece, far from the rate of 4 to 4.5 per cent in 1993, when Nokia was booming. In December 2019, Finland had still not recovered fully from the economic recession (Rehn 2019), and the transformation after the collapse of Nokia’s mobile phone business was still under way.

In just a short period of time, from 2008 to 2013, Finland changed from being the economic hero of Europe to a potential problem state, suffering from unemployment and runaway national debt. Nokia was part of the reason. An impending deep crisis in the Finnish social system was masked until 2009/10 by Nokias glorious success (although Finnish exporters were also helped by strong world demand).

In 2007, when Nokia recorded the largest profit in its history, the Finnish government fostered a two-year labour market agreement that gave wage-earners pay rises of 8.5 per cent. This had a destructive effect on the economy, especially on the cost competitiveness of export industries, as anticipated by a Bank of Finland analysis in 2009 (Honkapohja et al. 2009). According to one elite account, Finland had become a prisoner of its own success, just like Nokia. One well-known Finnish businessperson summarised the Nokia effect in an anonymous interview as follows: “The Finns were suddenly full of themselves. Social renewal came to a halt. It was rather like modern Norway, with the difference that oil is still worth something. Finnish politicians lost all sense of urgency about reform. The conseguences have been unpleasant?