Cultural Diplomacy in Cold War Finland

Front matter

J A 7

Palgrave Macmillan Series in Global Public Diplomacy

Series Editors Kathy Fitzpatrick University of South Florida Tampa, FL, USA

Preface

Like good novels, good academic books set up the reader with their first sentence. It doesn’t get much better than Robert Jervis’ 1976 book Perception and Misperception in International Politics, where Jervis plunges directly into the thick of things:

Before discussing the causes and consequences of the ways in which decision-makers draw inferences from the world, we must ask a preliminary question: do the decision-makers’ perceptions matter?

A while ago, this question became the heart of my PhD thesis, when I worked to find the influences shaping French perceptions of the Nordic countries during the interwar period. What I came to acknowledge was the role of Nordic governments themselves in shaping these perceptions; for countries small and peripheral to French central concerns, there existed a limited possibility to promote their own image and leverage it for strategic gains. Finland in particular used various means to do so, from Finnish cultural artefacts to publications describing its contribution to a roughly delineated “European civilization”. Set on a background of French expectations and interests, these elements were essential in building up French perceptions. This came to take a certain importance in 1939, when in the context of increased tensions, the French and British leadership had to decide how to react to Soviet aggression against Finland.

1 Jervis 1976.

ix

X PREFACE

Before Finland’s 1917 independence, most of these efforts were spontaneous, personal projects. They emanated from national activists, private promoters of the Finnish national project: the domestic process of building a national identity spilled over through diasporas and cultural contacts. But after 1917, this became a part of the Finnish state’s international activities. Cultural relations, strategically used in the long term by Finnish representatives for political and identity purposes, came to have an effect on the decision-making in 1939-1940. This kind of strategic image promotion by a small state is not a phenomenon for history books only: it is well illustrated by the Ukrainian government’s communication activities towards European and American societies in reaction to the February 2022 Russian aggression.

With time, I learned that this process of convincing others was also an essential part of building the Finns’ perceptions of themselves. National activists promoted abroad an image of their developing nation, and also hoped that the nation would come to correspond to this image and develop in certain directions. Finnish nationalism is a sensitive thing, where self-perceptions develop through contacts with the world in a never-ending cycle of persuading oneself and others of Finland’s worthiness. The contours of Finland’s national project are drawn in a dialogue between external models and blueprints, foreign perceptions and Finnish intentions. This is how I came to see Finland’s cultural and image diplomacy as more than calculated statecraft: a process intertwining with the very definition of Finland’s national identity, one more scene where the debates of national identity played out. The book is the result of this evolution, an attempt at replacing culture and image in the way the Finnish state defined its Cold War foreign policy.

Country-specific studies of public and cultural diplomacy in the Nordic countries are a steady trend, criticized either for lacking in comparative, theoretical depth or for being too concerned with the present day.” This book acknowledges the first criticism but sets its dial to empirical variety and contextualized understanding rather than broad, general explanations. I will, however, take advantage of conceptual suggestions made elsewhere and work to extract from my case some general insights as by-products of empirical exposition. Hopefully, this book will provide enough depth in the empirical case while retaining the interest of those readers mostly interested in wider issues—the cultural Cold War, cultural diplomacy and nationalism, institutional organizations, the foreign policy of small states and so forth. As to the second criticism, this book is an

?For the first critic, see Ang et al. 2015, 365-381. For the second, see Viktorin et al. 2018, 11-12.

PREFACE Xi attempt at moving away from the present day to explore the historical roots of current practices in Nordic public and cultural diplomacy.

Alongside burn-outs and scarce funding, self-branding has become an integral part of the twenty-first-century academic experience on both sides of the Atlantic. For scholars of cultural diplomacy, it sometimes means highlighting one’s interest in culture and the arts, with cultural references a rite of passage in the corporation. Here’s mine, for what it’s worth. I would like in this book to convince the reader of the benefits gained from seeing European cultural diplomacy during the Cold War not as a Rotko painting, made of great, striking masses of colour, but as one of Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of Hell: a burst of hues, forms and situations, with innumerable details tied together by the painter’s style, inspirations and palette. As Bosch’s richness of detail makes his painting what it is, empirical case studies are an essential tool in making sense of the European Cold War. For most small countries, indeed for most countries, the Cold War was not primarily about generalized notions built for great powers, cultural hegemony or ideological battles, but about recognition, survival, postwar reconstruction, the modernization or cultural conservation of societies, idiosyncratic notions of self-identification and nationalism, and specific institutional arrangements. Localized case studies often rime, exposing general variables in different patterns, under different angles. Sometimes they also introduce new elements. An understanding of variety is necessary for one to be able to find common threads linking the cases together. This book is an attempt to contribute to such an understanding.

It struck me in the last moments of writing this book that there might also be an autobiographical side to it. Immigration is a limited and recent occurrence in Finnish history, and being born elsewhere very much defines one socially in the eyes of most Finns. Despite the long years, there will always be an accent, an oddly-shaped sentence, a lost cultural reference, a variety of skin colour, or a foreign-sounding family name, bringing you back to the one social role that seems to matter most: being a foreigner. As a humanities scholar, one is obviously conscious of this, and one often thinks about the ways in which it influences one’s work. Some things remain hidden that are obvious to insiders, some networks remain inaccessible. Some things on the other hand are easier, and some realities come in sharp focus that insiders don’t realize. It might also be harder to connect one’s own experience to the subject one studies, and there might be a certain distance with part of the country’s collective experience for someone studying Finnish history “from outside”.

In that case, however, the connection is obvious. Finland was never closed, but it is peripheral and easily isolated. After the war, cultural xii PREFACE isolation was one of the perceived problems some in Finland’s state apparatus worked to resolve through renewed cultural contacts. To many extents, it resolved itself, with the Finns’ cultural, political and economic horizons broadening at the same pace than the rest of Europe. The state was for nothing in young folks taking the boat to Stockholm to buy jeans and rock LPs. But a part of this integration was the result of treaties and policies that facilitated it. The 1955 Nordic Passport Union made trips to Stockholm easier, allowing the trickling into Finland of fashions and cultural artefacts. One of the results of these policies was the increase in personal exchanges, student and academic mobility. Eventually Finland became a more open society, ready in the 1990s for the blossoming of Erasmus programmes. More Finns went abroad, and more foreigners came to Finland—including me. In a way, I am a product of the very process described in this book, a small link in a chain started after World War II and to which Finnish state agencies also contributed.

Academic research is a mix of lonesome work and team efforts. During this work, I have benefitted both from long days holed behind closed doors and from comments and support from colleagues: my heartfelt thanks for both go to the staff of the section of Contemporary History and the Department of History at the University of Turku, and to the members of the Network for New Diplomatic History.

Warm thanks also to the editing team and the series editors for their patience and support throughout the years this book has been in the making.

Several organizations have made it possible for me to write this book and make it electronically available as an Open Access publication. For that, I want to thank the Faro Foundation and the University of Turku, especially the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Department of Contemporary History, Philosophy and Political science.

Time writing a book is spent agonizing over deadlines, the right turn of phrase, insufficient archival basis or the right balance between details and big picture. As one moves to the later stages, when writing each sentence feels like swimming through molasse, one becomes for a while a more distant parent and spouse. Eventually the trip is over. What remains is a bit of confusion and an immense debt of gratitude.

Turku July 2022

Contents

1 Studying Finland's Cultural Diplomacy from World War II to the CSCE 1

2 Defining Finland's Cultural Diplomacy from Postwar to Cold War 29

3 Developing State Agencies and Centralizing International Cultural Relations 87

CHAPTER 1 Studying Finland’s Cultural Diplomacy from World War II to the CSCE

Finland's international cultural relations are a part of this country’s cultural work.

—Kalervo Siikala 1976 (Siikala 1976, 336-338. Translated from Finnish.)

1.1 OPENING FINLAND TO THE WORLD

Between 1945 and the Helsinki CSCE meeting in 1975, personalities and institutions in Finland's government discussed the role of the state in the country's international cultural relations, both in the frame of the Cold War and in the context of a rapidly changing welfare state. After a period of war and conservativism, the reality of Finlands opening up to the world could be seen in the emergence of new cultural forms, new movements of population, new economic activities, and a surge in international trade contacts.' Behind these spontaneous changes, one could also discern the handiwork of a series of public institutions and personalities, trying to channel these changes into certain directions, modernize Finland?s society and its position in the world.

This book is an effort to understand what international cultural relations meant for Finland's foreign policy managers, and to document the lFor Finland's economic and social developments in the 1960s-1970s, see Alasuutari 2017. For the development of Finland's trade and its opening up to new markets, see Aunesluoma 2011; Ojala et al. 2006.

O The Author(s) 2023 1 L. Clerc, Cultural Diplomacy in Cold War Finland, Palgrave

Macmillan Series in Global Public Diplomacy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12205-7 1 development of state activism in this domain during the first three decades of the Cold War? The process through which the Finnish state aimed at channelling and strengthening the country’s cultural relations overlapped with several aspects of Cold War Finland: foreign policy, domestic cultural policy, domestic political debates, economic considerations, and national identity debates. For some, it was also seen as a way—indeed a duty—to showcase Finland’s participation in international cultural relations, and contribute to the stabilization and pacification of international relations through cultural contacts. It was also framed into a series of concrete aspects of trade, economy, educational and scientific purposes the Finnish state tried to achieve through exchange programmes, study trips abroad, cultural exports or the use of culture to brand Finland as a trustworthy economic and political partner. As an administrative endeavour, finally, Finland’s cultural diplomacy was the object of a tug of war between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and between the state authorities and various private or semi-autonomous organizations.

The Finnish politician Paavo Lipponen reflected on these developments in a long essay published in 1993 by the daily Helsingin Sanomat.’ Finland certainly had gone some way since 1945. At the end of the war, the country had to extract itself from the ruins of its wartime alliance with Nazi Germany. It was isolated, impoverished and dominated by its totalitarian neighbour. By the end of the Cold War, Finland had developed into a prosperous welfare state involved in relations with both East and West. In 1993, it was negotiating its accession to the EU. From this perspective, the compromises involved in Finland’s Cold War position, such as accepting a measure of Soviet influence in both foreign and domestic matters, could be seen either as a small price to pay for reconstruction and stabilization or as a faustian bargain, a stain on the soul of a democratic nation.

? As a point of comparison besides Sweden, Matthieu Gillabert has dealt with the same elements in the case of Switzerland: Gillabert 2013.

3 Lipponen 1993. Born in 1941, Lipponen was the secretary for international affairs of the Social-Democratic party in the early 1970s. His political engagement brought him to being Prime Minister Mauno Koivisto’s secretary from 1979 to 1982, then a member of the Finnish parliament from 1983 to 1987. In times of weaker political winds, he made his place in the Finnish press and research milieu as a commentator on international politics, becoming in 1989 the director of the Finnish Institute for International Affairs. Eventually, he served as prime minister under Martti Ahtisaari’s and Tarja Halonen’s presidential mandates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While dominated by Finnish domestic politics, Lipponen’s memoirs for the period 1979-1995 have long developments on international affairs as well: Lipponen 2014. All biographical details to follow are taken from each individual entry in the Kansallisbiografia-biographical encyclopedia: https://kansallisbiografia.fi

Part of Lipponen’s essay dealt especially with the reconstruction of Finland’s cultural contacts with the world. Finland had changed since the war, its youth had adopted foreign models and discovered the world beyond their country’s immediate neighbourhood and its relation with the Soviet Union. Private organizations, semi-public societies and public authorities had worked to develop and coordinate the country’s opening to international contacts. For Lipponen, this movement was not spontaneous: Finland did not internationalize as much as it had been internationalized. Starting in the mid-1960s, the Finnish authorities took upon themselves to build a “cultural state” (sivistysvaltio) as an aspect of the “welfare state” (hyvinvointivaltio):* a series of institutions supporting the democratization and the strengthening of education, technology, science and the arts. This process was favoured by the arrival in power after the war of political figures situated left of centre and emphasizing democratic access to education, knowledge and the arts.* It also had an international dimension: it corresponded with a will to reconstruct Finland’s international contacts after 1945, broaden its cultural horizons, adapt its cultural relations to the Cold War, and develop a policy of neutrality dominated by relations with the USSR.

Amongst the personalities whom Lipponen thinks helped and guided Finland’s cultural modernization and internationalization, he mentions Kalervo Siikala, a civil servant in the Ministry of Education.* One could

*In Finnish, sivistys means the same thing as bildung in German, a mix of enlightenment and cultural development. In political terms, it is strongly linked to an idealized vision of the national group and its process of self-cultivation and collective cultural maturation. In the Finnish context of the mid-1960s, it is to be understood as a branch of a developing welfare state marshalling material but also spiritual resources in a process aiming at strengthening and educating the nation. Sivistys also points to the vision of an idealized culture, centrally defined as good and appropriate for this harmonious cultural development of the people. For a presentation of the political and administrative project aiming at a sivistysvaltio in Finland, see Pernaa and Tiitta 2007. On the various models of welfare states and especially the Nordic one, see Béland et al. 2021.

Born in 1932 in Kemi and starting as a journalist in postwar Finland, Siikala became in 1957 the head of Finland's UNESCO committee. Through his activism in the Center Party, he became the personal secretary of Prime Minister J.V. Sukselainen from 1959 to 1961. In 1962, he moved to the national broadcaster Yle before becoming in 1966 the head of the Ministry of Education’s Department of International Affairs. He retired from the ministry in 1997 and died in 2009.

suggest additions to this list: Reino Oittinen, a politician, educator and early advocate of Finland's accession to UNESCO; Jaakko Numminen,’ the long-term chancellor of the Ministry for Education from the 1960s to the 1980s; Kalevi Sorsa? a UNESCO civil servant who became Foreign Minister in the early 1980s; Max Jakobson,!? a journalist, diplomat and productive non-fiction writer, and tens of civil servants working in the ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs. Lipponen emphasized the role these characters, mostly involved in state agencies, played in modernizing Finnish society and opening it to the world."

7Born in 1912, Oittinen was a social-democratic politician, educator and civil servant. Coming from a modest family, Oittinen trained as a teacher, became rector of his school and then branched into journalism before leading the Finnish Workers’ Academy up to 1950. He worked from 1950 to 1972 as the head of Finland’s School administration and served as Minister of Education in five different governments. He is known especially for his role in the creation of a renewed Finnish system of elementary schools in the 1960s-1970s. He died in 1978.

è Born in 1928, Numminen did most of his career as a civil servant in the Ministry of Education. He led the division of Universities and Science from 1970 to 1972 and was the chancellor of the Ministry between 1973 and 1994.

? Born in 1930, Sorsa started his career as a journalist in the late 1950s, in the press of the social-democratic movement, then became an editor. He lived in Paris from 1959 to 1965, where he worked as an international civil servant at UNESCO. In 1965, he became the head of Finland’s UNESCO committee and an assistant director in the Ministry of Education’s Department of International Affairs. In 1969, he was chosen as the first secretary of the Social-Democratic Party, launching a political career that will bring him to assume, at various intervals between 1972 and 1987, the post of prime minister and several ministerial portfolios in a host of governments. Sorsa died in 2004.

10 Born in 1923, Jakobson had a particularly long and rich career between journalism, diplomacy and think tanks. He started as a journalist, working after the war as a correspondent in London then entering the Ministry for Foreign Affairs as a press attaché. In 1958, he became the head of the Press Division of the Ministry, before becoming in 1962 the head of its Political Division. He was Finland’s representative to the UN, then ambassador in Stockholm. In 1975, Jakobson left the Ministry to become the head of the Finnish Business and Policy Forum, a think tank and lobby group for Finnish business circles. He died in 2013.

1 The debate on the internationalization of Finland, meant as the opening of the country to foreign trends and also increasingly to immigration (in stark contrast to the past for a country mostly used to emigration since the nineteenth century) was particularly strong in the 1990s, when Lipponen wrote his article. Books, reports and editorials debated the place of Finland in a new post-Cold War world and its relations with international trends. A good example of such activity is a report written for the University of Helsinki and dealing with the University’s internationalization: Vogt and Heiskanen 1993. Reports dealing with the same subjects and drawing mostly the same conclusions and recommendations have been a regular feature of Finland’s public life ever since.

The process Lipponen gives his generation credit for was also linked to Finland's geopolitical position. In the context of the 1950s—1960s, extracting Finland from the war meant first of all building stable relations with the Soviet behemoth, a process where culture and Finland’s international reputation became important tools. Finland was both “finlandized” by the influence of the Soviet Union and “westernized” through its economic and cultural integration, spontaneous and state-led. In a delicate geopolitical position, the expansion of the state’s cultural activism was an attempt at controlling various aspects of public life in order to keep them in syne with a carefully constructed official foreign policy line. Finland’s cultural diplomacy, with its corollaries in educational, artistic and scientific contacts, depended thus on the development of the Finnish welfare state, Finland’s foreign policy in the Cold War and the evolutions of Finland’s national identity.

1.2 SHIFTING NOTIONS OF CULTURAL DIPLOMACY

Cultural and public diplomacy studies are a maze of terms and categories, used to corral a large and rich field of activities. Technical issues such as scientific and technological contacts or exchange programmes have a tendency to spread towards more general matters of foreign policy, image and identity. In a policy field where state action often lags behind private initiatives, the private and public spheres easily entangle, making studying international cultural contacts extremely difficult—even in Finland, a small, tightly-knit polity.!? Jozef Bátora and Monika Mokre open their edited volume with a one-size-fits-all definition of cultural diplomacy, as the way “political entities use culture to support their soft power potential, to generate goodwill, to frame international agenda in particular ways, to erect and re-enact boundaries and/or to create societal linkages across them” 1° Coping with the same problem, Nicholas J. Cull proposed a narrower definition of cultural diplomacy as “the dissemination of cultural practices as a mechanism to promote the interests of an actor”. This points to the use by state authorities of culture in a strategic, operative sense, and covers most of the ground we are going to study in this book both in

P2 For general reflections on the influence of smallness on decision-making processes, see Corbett and Veenendaal 2018; Baldersheim and Keating 2015. For specific reflections on Nordic societies and their political and social peculiarities, see Aucante 2013. For a general presentation of the most salient aspects of Scandinavian societies and cultures, see Lindskog and Stougaard-Nielsen 2020.

13 Bátora and Mokre 2011, 2.

terms of practices and in terms of agents.'* Cultural diplomacy as we see it in the Finnish case has its origins in state actions, in definitions of the national interest, and in debates about national identity.

Debates about a definition of cultural diplomacy are linked to debates about culture in the history of international relations. In a recent article, Patrick Finney analysed the current state of affairs in international history after the cultural turn, concluding that approaches drawing on cultural studies are now firmly engrained in the heart of the discipline, rejuvenating it with new questions.!° Finney advocates a form of profound engagement with the categories and preoccupations of cultural studies, susceptible to completely change the main gist of international history. But he also mentions a more modest approach, which is the one of this book, for which “attending to cultural factors was often justified on the rather more empirical grounds that it produced a fuller picture of the fabric of policy-making”. Culture has added new layers of ground to the floodplains of international history, through which the historian can dig to better understand various aspects of foreign policy and international relations. As we look at official decisions and state policy, culture, representations, images and narratives are now an essential part of what we look for. To understand statecraft without culture would be near impossible, but to study culture without power would yield equally weak returns in terms of elements of answers to what constitute, still, the fundamental questions of international history:!* the structures of international and transnational relations through history, the actions of states and other agents, the ways they organized their relations, under which influences and to what ends.

The Finnish case provides a fertile ground for such exercise: culture and image were not just an afterthought in the country’s foreign policy, but an important part of Finland’s relation with the world, institutionalized and thought about, resourced and coordinated by civil servants. Hence, the richness of material available and the fact that tendering to these aspects provides a better, more life-like picture of Finland’s foreign relations and position in Cold War Europe: it highlights the interplay of statecraft and culture, representations and strategic agency, the intersection of private activities and public efforts to coordinate them. The observer can connect broad cultural assumptions and representations to actual policies, the

activities of private agents to the institutions of the state, or domestic developments to foreign relations. Pascal Ory underlined the way in which different national instances of the use of culture in foreign policy can be studied as localized patterns of different variables, positions on a series of axes: from official diplomacy to private relations, from structured policy to informal contacts, from massive campaigns to punctual events, from shortto long-term policies, from a field of private agents to a field dominated by public institutions.!? My approach will be to consider the way cultural relations were conceived by their own protagonists in Finland’s state agencies: were they mostly about the construction of national identity, the necessities of foreign policy, or the facilitation of economic and commercial endeavours?!*

Approaching culture in Finland’s foreign policy means looking at the way a variety of elements (the arts, cultural phenomena, science and education) were instrumentalized in the state’s strategic planning, and looking at how both local cultural trends and the geopolitical context of the Cold War shaped the process. A set of public policies defined by cultural representations was also seen as a strategic tool deployed in a certain context by various actors in order to try and reach strategically defined aims. This book will present tangible structures occupied and managed by people with constructed meanings and representations, institutions embedded in national contexts. Cultural diplomacy in the Finnish case will be studied as those parts of the state’s foreign activities dealing with cultural matters, using culture for various purposes. The book will concentrate on isolating these purposes, describing the creation of dedicated public institutions and their various activities. Working on historical practices of cultural diplomacy returns us to the notion that the use by state authorities of culture in foreign policy is a part of statecraft, a means in service of conceptions of the national interest. The recent insistence on an altruistic understanding of cultural diplomacy, as an attempt at fostering dialogue between nations in a connected world, might leave us insufficiently prepared for studying the historical use of culture by sovereign states.

In his recent work, Guillaume Tronchet invites us to remember that “the concept of cultural diplomacy, before being a useful category of analysis, was a category of practice, which foreign ministries used to incorporate under their

7 Ory 2002, 11-12.

"8 For an attempt to define a series of similar variables for public diplomacy, see Clerc 2016, 110-123.

administrative control all international activities distinct from military, economic or political considerations” ° The Finns used a varied vocabulary to designate the ways the state used culture and cultural issues in foreign policy. It ranged from terms referring to pure propaganda efforts, aiming at promoting a certain image of Finland abroad, to more altruistic notions on the use of culture to foster international dialogue and modernize the country. A part of the book will thus be dedicated to exposing the ways the protagonists themselves defined the use of culture in foreign policy and the hopes they invested in it. Another important aspect is the concrete organization of cultural diplomacy: for a small state, smaller central budgets and resources make things more complex and impose specific ways of doing things, such as the extensive private-public cooperation I will describe.”

This book will revolve around a narrow definition of cultural diplomacy, as a set of activities linked to the country’s international cultural relations, coming out of official policy and thought about strategically as parts of the country’s foreign policy. This concentration on state activities does not encompass the entirety of Finland’s international cultural contacts, and in many cases such as scientific contacts or artistic collaboration, the Finnish state was far from being the main protagonist. It will force this book to consider also semi-autonomous or private organizations that worked with the state.

I will however mostly focus on culture and image in the activities of agents and institutions located in or revolving around two ministries: the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education. This arrangement will provide the book with a mooring, a set of people and organizations to look at, a repository of archives to work with. It is also in tune with the development of the book’s subject matter, as cultural relations were increasingly construed in Finland as an important sector to be supported by the state, discussed and institutionalized by a group of civil servants. Increasing coordination by the Finnish state of activities linked to cultural relations abroad was a conscious effort trying to pull Finnish society and its spontaneous cultural contacts into certain directions corresponding to definitions of the national interest.

While my insistence on the strategic use of culture suggests the country’s foreign policy as the main context of the book, another background force is domestic and identity-based developments. Cultural diplomacy appears as a process through which the “imagining” of a political group’s own identity as well as the workings of its cultural, scientific and artistic fields were strategically interpreted and coordinated by state institutions as part of the country’s foreign policy.” Despite its focus on the strategic use of culture, however, this book is not unsensitive to the culturalist approach emphasized by Finney:” Finnish cultural diplomacy will appear also as an extension of domestic political and identity debates, with roots in autoand xeno-stereotypes, local idiosyncrasies of taste and organizations and local attempts to interpret transnational trends.” The Finnish state’s support, control and use of culture and its promotion of certain forms of international cultural contacts over others contributed to a definition of the cultural traits of an ideal national community and their representation and promotion abroad. This suggests that cultural diplomacy must, apart from its strategic role in the country’s foreign policy, be considered also in relation to and as the expression of larger trends of cultural policy and the definition of a national identity.