Postcard from Helsinki

Greetings from the Helsinki the city which is often referred to as the Daughter of the Baltic Sea!

Helsinki is also a city which stands between the East and the West. During the Cold War the city was the Soviet Union’s gate to the Western world. In fact, the existence of the Anglican Church in this city has much to do with the geopolitical position of Finland. Many English people living in Russia at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917 ended up here, including the priest of St Andrew’s English Church in Moscow.

The history of Finland and the Finns dates back for centuries although the first governmental structures were slowly introduced by the Swedes. People here were literally living first in the Church and only after that in the State. Gradually, more formal structures were introduced and the Finns started to have more direct links with Central Europe in the fields of economics, culture and education.

When looking at the map of Europe, Finland is in the upper corner with water separating it from the rest of Europe. And that is how the Finns have seen themselves: separate from the rest of Europe.

We are still ‘going to Europe’, ‘more European habits and trends’ are still being introduced to us. We are becoming more European. But this is fast changing. The next generation of Finns is more European than we are, they have learned to travel freely, crossing the borders as we travel from one county to another.

In the 1800s, during the Napoleonic Wars, Finland was occupied by Russia. The Czar allowed Finland to maintain its (Swedish) laws, border control and to introduce its own currency, the Markka. The 19th Century thus was the time when Finnish national identity was fostered. A. I. Arwidsson, a historian and political journalist who lived in the first part of the 19th Century, came up with a phrase which summarized the agenda of Fennomans: “Swedes we are no longer, Russians we do not want to become, let us therefore be Finns.”

This ‘otherness’, perhaps stubbornness or self-sufficiency, is part of Finnish identity. The history of this country is the history of Sweden and Russia. From the mid-1850s this nation has been building up its own identity. But still the time between the Declaration of Independence of 1917 and the joining of the EU in 1995 can be seen as a time of seeking friends. It has been time for building identity as a member of the family of nations: first the League of Nations, then the UN, and finally the EU.

Finland’s membership in the EU happened at the time when heavy austerity measures had been introduced . Three years earlier, as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes which took place in the financial markets, Finland fell into deep recession during which the unemployment rate went up from 3 per cent to almost 20 per cent. So it is no wonder that the Finns were debating vigorously whether joining the EU would bring any good.

I could spend the rest of this article by listing pros and cons and pondering whether the EU memberships has done any good. There would be enough surveys in support of both views.

For most of the Finns the EU does not represent any form of a more noble ideology. They have a very pragmatic approach to it: the European Union exists to secure peace and welfare in Europe but, most of all, to secure people’s everyday life.

In a recent article (in Finnish) the national broadcaster, YLE, asked the citizens to write about “What good has the EU done for you?”.

The responses vary much – understandably. Most of the people seem to agree that the domestic problems would have been there anyway – even if Finland would have not joined the EU or would have opted out from the shared currency, the Euro. What most of them seem to think is that Europe might be a more insecure place and offering less possibilities without the European Union. There are some calls for an EU referendum in Finland too, but at least for now this does not seem very likely.

Debate about the European Union brings into my mind the very common story of people of one town: among themselves they keep complaining about their home town but when travelling, they keep praising it.

About the author

Tuomas Mäkipää is a priest of the Anglican Church in Finland. He is a native Finn who studied theology at the University of Helsinki. His plan was to seek ordination in the Lutheran Church in Finland but eventually was called to serve in the Anglican Church under the Porvoo Agreement, an ecumenical document signed by Anglicans and Lutherans. He was ordained in 2010 and was elected to the General Synod of the Church of England in October 2015.