1
Continuities and Discontinuities in Finnish Solidarity Movements
from the 1960s to the Present
Risto Alapuro
Academy of Finland and University of Helsinki
(Paper presented in the seminar “Nordic Civicness Revisited in the Age of Association”,Tallinn, November 23-25, 2006)
1. The problem
In the 1960s global consciousness permeated the principal social movements in Western
Europe manifesting itself in a large-scale solidarity. In "solidarity movements" (Olesen 2005) or
"distant issue movements" (Rucht 2000) of the epoch students and other mainly highly
educated young people in developed industrial countries expressed their solidarity with people
of the "Third World" or the poor global "South." The terms convey the crucial point that these
movements supported causes, which did not directly affect people in the societies where they
appeared. The next wave of solidarity movements, comparable in scope to that in the 1960s
and the 1970s emerged, in the opinion of many observers, in the late 1990s and still continues.
It has been called, for example, alterglobalism (Agrikoliansky, Fillieule & Mayer 2005) or the
new transnational activism (Tarrow 2005), depending on the perspective applied.
2
The objective of this paper is to assess these two waves of solidarity movements
in Finland -- the anti-imperialism in the 1960s and the early 1970s, and the movements for
global solidarity at the turn of the 2000s -- and to make comparisons between them.
There are many obvious contextual differences between the two cycles. Today
the world is viewed as one place much more extensively and intensively than forty years ago,
with implications for the perception of "distant" issues among activists. Here the primary object
is not the change itself, however, but a reflection of how the movements in the two periods
solved the problem of making a connection between domestic concerns and distant issues.
Two related aspects of the connection-making seem appropriate in considering continuities and
discontinuities in Finland.
The first question is, how the problem of distance bridging (Rucht 2000) is
solved. How are distant events or grievances of people in other countries framed to make them
a basis for mobilization in the own country (cf. Tarrow 2005, 61-62)? A part of this framing
process involves the nature of representation: how do the activists of the solidarity movement
perceive not only their non-domestic but also their domestic constituency? To what extent and
in which way do the activists see themselves as representatives of aggrieved groups in their
own, developed country, Finland, and not only in "distant" developing countries?
The second aspect stems from the specific role that Finland and other small,
peripheral or at least non-core countries of the prosperous West usually have in the emergence
and "transnational diffusion" (Tarrow 2005, 103-106) of solidarity movements. Both in the
1960s and in the present period, solidarity movements in Finland were adopted from elsewhere,
from big states like France, Britain, or the United States, after they had established themselves
in those countries. To simplify, if the Finns adopt a mode of distance bridging crafted in
France, they do a kind of second-degree bridging work. They adopt a distance bridging that
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already exists elsewhere, shaped by the initiating state's domestic structures, and make (if they
make) of this existing mode their own version, fitting in their domestic conditions. This means
that the dynamics between the perceived domestic injustice and the perceived distant injustice
(and the concomitant construction of the frame defining the domestic and the distant
constituency) may be different in those countries, in which particular movements and their
organizations are created, and in those in which they have been diffused later.
In this paper the focus is on the way the domestic configuration of forces has
shaped solidarity movements. This limitation helps to make comparisons between the periods
feasible and is in line with the importance of adoption in the Finnish case.
2. Anti-imperialism at the turn of the 1970s
Peace and solidarity with developing countries
In Finland, as in so many other Western countries in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, a
dimension in the student radicalism of the epoch involved solidarity with the poor peoples in
Latin America, Africa, and Asia, many of which were painfully undergoing the final phase of
the disintegration of the colonial empires. The war in Vietnam constituted a culmination point
in the substitution of political forms of colonialism for economic ones. Solidarity with he
"Third World" became a part of a broader cycle of militantism that caught the most active
students throughout the Western world and put them against domestic power structures in the
universities and elsewhere in society.
In Finland the starting point was provided by the peace movement of the early
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1960s. Through it emerged a new approach to the outside world and Finland's relation to it,
including the developing countries. A student-based peace association was founded in 1963
and named the Committee of 100 after a British organization supported by Bertrand Russell. It
was in a new and and significant way oriented simultaneously both outward and inward. New
in its outward orientation was a radically pacifist conclusion of the policy Finland should adopt
between the two blocs of the Cold War. But the view had a broader dimension as well: "The
Finnish Committee of 100 never restricted itself to opposing nuclear weapons, (...) but engaged
itself straightaway in Third World questions. The logic was that injustice anywhere is a threat
to world peace" (Soiri & Peltola 1999, 19). "These two dimensions, North-South and East-
West, led the Committee of 100 automatically to stress international work for peace and the
development policy" (Hallman 1986, 26). Members of the Committee were active in founding
solidarity organizations with the peoples of developing countries, such as the Finnish Students'
United Nations Association and the South Africa Committee (Soiri & Peltola 1999, 23-26).
Within Finland advocating unilateral disarmament was extremely provocative,
given the country's fragile position in the shadow of the neighboring superpower, the Soviet
Union. But at issue was not only the defense of Finland in the military sense. In taking the army
as its target the Committee of 100 in fact questioned an entire national-patriotic and profoundly
defensive view of Finnish unity that had reigned in the interwar period, after a failed attempt at
revolution in 1918, and in a modified form had continued to reign during the post-World War
II period. The Civil War of 1918 and its close connection to the contemporaneous Bolshevik
revolution in Russia had engendered a division between a dominant national(ist),
anticommunist culture and a strong popular support for communism, seen by others as the fifth
column of the Soviet Union. This heritage, a strong communist movement on the one hand and
a deeply anticommunist dominant culture, including emphatically the educated class, on the
5
other, prevailed still in the beginning of the 1960s. It was a challenge to the predominant
cultural hegemony and the division implied by it that was most provocative in the program of
the Committee of 100 ("pacifists are traitors to the fatherland, [...] and therefore evidently
communists" [Hallman 1986, 15]). In fact, the whole itinerary of the solidarity movement in the
1960s and the early 1970s can be viewed as a deconstruction of this cleavage or as a reaction
to it. Hence the considerable national visibility the Committee had in the mid-1960s.1
In the middle of the 1960s this visibility was coupled with a central position in the
burgeoning student movement. Besides members the Committee had a large number of
sympathizers in other student-dominated organizations, including young people in the parties
of the Left. Many of the most visible figures were close to Social Democrats (see Soiri &
Peltola 1999, 19). Although the demands were radical, the forms of activity were not, in
accordance with the pacifist self-conception, an emphasis on the rationality and the common
sense of the demands, and the orderly Finnish tradition of joint action. Order and calm are
highly valued, reflecting the Scandinavian-type intimate connection between the state and civil
society. Demonstrations that accompanied the diffusion of information and debating were non-
violent. The absence of direct action even in the rules of the Finnish brother organization
provoked astonishment in the British Committee of 100 that had organized spectacular
demonstrations in London and outside American military bases in Britain (Hallman 1986, 29).
Anti-imperialism
The solidarity movement proper began to gather momentum as a part of a broader student
movement especially in 1967-1968. Although the Committee had organized the first Finnish
1Its membership figures were not insignificant either. In 1967 it had one thousand members (Hallman 1986,27). Another estimate speaks of "a couple of thousand members in Helsinki and a few hundred more inother (university) towns" (Soiri & Peltola 1999, 19).
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demonstration against the war in Vietnam, in 1965 in front of the US Embassy (Hallman 1986,
54), soon the attitude to the war and more generally to the use of violent means in the
liberation struggles of the Third World began to divide the peace movement. The non-violent
line continued to prevail in the Committee of 100 itself,2 but it was overwhelmed by a more
militant line that sprang from the midst of the Committee and unreservedly accepted armed
resistance. "We support one-sidedly the Front of National Liberation [of Vietnam], one-sidedly
the revolution, and one-sidedly the progress," as this view was expressed in opposition to the
allegedly "many-sided" and "impartial" view of the majority, considered opportunistic (quoted
in Hallman 1986, 59).
Among various solidarity associations (like the new Vietnam or Cuban friendship
societies and the radicalized earlier ones like the Finnish Students' United Nations Association)
the most important became Tricont, "a study group that aims at gathering and diffusing
information about the world's development problems and their causes," founded in 1968 out of
a study group in the Committee of 100 (Soiri & Peltola 1999, 32). A few of its organizers
were, significantly enough, intellectuals from the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. They
had gotten inspiration from Sweden (Soiri & Peltola 1999, 32), which along with bigger
countries has on many occasions served as a source of inspiration in the adoption in Finland of
movements originated elsewhere. (Also in the introduction of the peace movement in 1963
Swedish-speaking students were active a few months before their Finnish-speaking fellows
[Hallman 1986, 27].)
Imperialism and neocolonialism defined Tricont's view of the development
2"Although we see that in some developing countries violence is often the only alternative to thecontinuation of oppression, we are faced with the same options. Our task is to support the social andpolitical goals of national liberation struggles: freedom of the people, development of democraticinstitutions and economic progress. We are most effective not by furthering violence but non-violent meansof struggle." (Communiqué of the Committee of 100 on national liberation wars in 1967, quoted in Soiri &
7
problems and their causes:
The entire activity of Tricont is based on the awareness that the cause of the
problems of the underdeveloped countries lies in international capitalism (...).
Economic development in the industrialized capitalist countries has acquired a
stage at which economic activity must be forcefully extended outside the national
frontiers, in order to guarantee a rapid growth of production and the market for
an increasingly expanding production surplus. Besides, in the own country the
workers' incomes -- as a consequence of determined efforts by worker
organizations -- have acquired such a tolerable level that it has become
impossible to gain any more the largest possible profit from the workforce in the
home country. Therefore it is necessary to use foreign "cheap" workforce, that is,
unprotected workers who have had no chances to improve their living conditions.
Developing countries that are objects of this economic exploitation are usually
former colonies, which even after formal independence remain politically or
economically dependent on the former mother countries or on some other
developed capitalist country and thereby also on the whole economic alliance of
industrial Western countries (into which also Finland is more and more
enthusiastically integrating itself). Economic dependence is completed by political
one, which means that big-power political pressure is exerted particularly from
the side of the United States to maintain oligarchic governments and to put down
national liberation movements. (A presentation of Tricont in 1969, quoted in
Ervamaa 2003, 7.)
This view was not necessarily very militant, if it is compared to propositions and demands in,
for example, France or Italy in the same years (see, e.g., Sommier 1998, 35-39). But it was
open to different emphases. On the one hand the "study group" aspect could be stressed, and
Tricont indeed actively and successfully promoted the introduction and the institutionalization
of the research and teaching on the developing countries in Finnish universities (Ervamaa 2003,
; Soiri & Peltola 1999, 32).
Peltola 1999, 21)
8
On the other hand the approach implied a possibility to different degrees of
identification with liberation wars. A formulation was given in the presentation quoted above:
Finland was viewed as belonging into a larger group of developed industrial countries on which
the developing countries were dependent. Therefore Finland allegedly participated, but rather
indirectly than directly, in the exploitation of the poor countries. Development aid was
considered in this perspective: it was said to benefit selfish Finnish interests and to strengthen
non-democratic structures in the underdeveloped countries, thereby reinforcing the dependency
of the Third World peoples (Ervamaa 2005, ). Thus the "imperialism model" replaced the
"development aid model" (see Hallman 1986, 65).
One more, militant approach, which followed developments elsewhere,
postulated that the best way to advance revolution and national liberation in the Third World
was a struggle against capitalism in the home country. An influential impulse to this view was
provided by the visit of André Gunder Frank, a prominent theoretician of underdevelopment, in
Finland in 1969. In Tricont and several other solidarity organizations a connection was
established that implied in principle (but not really in practice) domestic action:
[T]he struggle for this new world order will be waged in each country by its own
people, but with the solidary support of the international worker movement.
Therefore the anti-imperialist struggle in Finland means a struggle against Finnish
big capital and capitalism. Also, this is the best we can do for the oppressed
peoples of the Third World. (...) The struggle of the national liberation
movements in the Third World is an integral part of the contemporary
revolutionary process in the capitalist world. (...) Student movements represent
(...) an orientation that conforms with the anti-imperialist struggle of the national
liberation movements. (Halonen 1969)
Thus the solidarity movement had made in a half decade an itinerary from an extremely vague
distance bridging based on the cause of peace -- "injustice anywhere is a threat to world
9
peace," and therefore also to the Finns living in the border zone of the East-West division -- to
a seemingly much more concrete one, based on a verbal identification with the "struggle
against Finnish capitalism." The ensuing emphasis on North-South relations at the expense of
East-West relations did not mean, however, that the latter would have completely lost their
significance -- even though this was an accusation directed by the pacifists to the militants
(Hallman 1986, 65-66). But now the East, and notably the Soviet Union, was viewed in the
frame of the anti-imperialist struggle. As elsewhere in the Western "anti-imperialist" movement,
the criticism was directed not only to the capitalist "first" world, but also, even though in the
Finnish case much more mildly, to the socialist "second" world. The socialist countries with the
Soviet Union as their main representative were considered to aggravate the situation in the
underdeveloped countries because of a denial of support for revolutionary movements in them
(Krokfors 1970, 61-62; Ervamaa 2005, ).
Marxism-leninism
However, the Finnish solidarity movement did not remain in the frame common in Western
student radicalism. It underwent one more metamorphosis and then a decline to a marginal
position. In this final turn the weight of the preceding twentieth-century Finnish history one
more time reappeared, in the form of Finnish communism.
The relationship to Communists had emerged as an issue already with the
entrance of the Committee of 100 onto the political stage, in the sense that students, who in the
previous decades had been one of the most definitely anticommunist groups in the country, had
challenged the national-patriotic unity and the twofold division included in it. Then, in the next
phase, Tricont and related solidarity networks and organizations had gone further to the Left
and even approached the Communists. That is, in the Finnish situation the adoption of the anti-
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imperialist "distant" cause inevitably led to an encounter with the own past, with a bourgeois
cultural hegemony that went back to the Civil War of 1918, with which the accounts had never
been really settled.
Now the settlement was taking place, as an aspect of a broader process of
liberalization (see. e.g., Alapuro 2002), and for the young educated class it occurred, to a
significant degree, in a frame in which solidarity toward Third World revolutions played a
prominent part. The point is that this frame was instrumental in the discovery of the putatively
revolutionary force in the Finnish society, the big Communist party of Finland. It was an
electric encounter: for an appreciable number of young intellectuals, the discovery of the
people in the guise of the working class and Communists as its representative was a genuine
revelation.
But the discovery of the Communist party of Finland was not all. Importantly
enough, to discover a hidden history of the country in the form of Finnish Communists and the
"White lie" of the revolution of 1918 inevitably meant also discovering the Soviet Union, the
traditional arch enemy but also a country and a system inextricably linked to the history of the
Finnish communism from 1918 onwards.
The situation implied two things to the Finnish solidarity movement and its
distance bridging. First, it was unconceivable that anti-Soviet Maoist (or Trotskist) views could
have gained significant ground in Finland. Solidarity with such a major event as the Cultural
Revolution in China could provoke only passing enthusiasm; it became soon eclipsed by the
coming to grips with the traditionally Soviet-oriented communism in the own country. Second,
the predominant tendency in the student radicalism came to ally itself not with the
Eurocommunist majority of the Communist party, but -- which indicates how intense the
settlement with the past was -- with the "Stalinist" minority that continued to closely engage
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itself with the Soviets.
At the turn of the 1970s the link between anti-imperialism and the struggle
against capitalism in Finland was redefined in the marxist-leninist frame assigning the leading
role in the global struggle to the USSR and the socialist camp, and the leading role in the
domestic struggle to the workers led by the minority of the Communist party of Finland.
Through the leninist imperialism theory the major student organization of the time, the Socialist
Student Union, took distance from the "petit-bourgeois" conception of revolution and the
"revolutionary romanticism" and stressed the primary role of the revolutionary action in
Finland. This tendency emerged in 1969 already, even though it gained the upper hand only a
few years later: "Now (...) marxism-leninism should be applied to the Finnish capitalism,
instead of trying to craft revolutionary models for states in Latin America" (Linsiö 1969, 4). In
this view the students had only a secondary role in the division of labor of revolution, alongside
the working class.
This last metamorphosis of the Finnish distant issue movement arrived at the final
conclusion later in the 1970s, with the decline of the student activism. However, even in this
closing phase no concrete action, not to speak of violent action, was initiated for the
revolution, despite militant rhetoric.
All in all, the Finnish solidarity movement of the 1960s and the early 1970s was
clearly marked by the history of the country. Its most closely European phase in the late 1960s
turned out to serve not only as a bridge between the domestic and the distant issues but also as
a bridge from one domestically based version of the solidarity movement to another one.
3. Alterglobalist movement at the turn of the 2000s
12
How to bridge the distance?
At the turn of the new millennium both the distant issues and the domestic Finnish
configuration are different from those during the previous wave of action, and thereby also the
distance bridging problem. The neoliberal form of globalization is seen to permeate the fabric
of societies everywhere, linking the global and the local and integrating people in a huge single
system, which does not imply such a clear distinction between "us" and "them" as did the anti-
imperialism frame both in its Third World and in its marxist-leninist variety. As Thomas Olesen
(2004, 27 [emphases added]; cf. Väyrynen 2001, 12) puts it, "the very worldwide character
and relative homogeneity of neoliberal policies has made it relatively easier [than in the 1960s
and the 1970s] to formulate a social critique with global relevance." It is as if the enemy were
everywhere, making it easier to find shared concerns in developed and underdeveloped
countries, but at the same time as if it were so slippery or vague that it is difficult to create a
bridge which seriously takes into the account distant issues and simultaneously makes sense
domestically, in Finland.
The Finnish context is new at least in the sense that apparently no historical
traumas are there waiting to be unlocked, as happened in the 1960s. Even the substitution of
European Union for the Soviet Union as a constraining external context stresses the difference
in the situation. EU is an expression of globalization, but an expression that provides no
unambiguous base for distance bridging. The other thing is that the situation is new simply
because of the preceding wave in the 1960s and the 1970s. That wave has created -- with the
help of continued efforts in the last decades -- an institutional and organizational base, which
serves as a context for the present activism.
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Attac Finland
The work for developing countries that was initiated in various organizations of the 1960s,
including the Committee of 100, has resulted in the establishment of a group of organizations
and administrative structures in this field. Many early activists have been involved in these
organizations and structures, and some of them have become politicians and Members of
Parliament, who have been able to influence the Finnish development aid policy. It relies
heavily on civil society organizations which have a public funding.
When the Finnish solidarity movement began to (re)activate in the mid-1990s to
the extent that the activation provoked references to the hectic years in the 1960s and the
1970s (see, e.g., Wallgren 1996, 131-132; Sundman 2001, 221; Wallgren 2005, 17), the main
civil society actor in the field was called the Service Centre for Development Cooperation
(SCDC). It was founded in 1985 as a common enterprise of 50 different organizations from
Christian associations to the Finland-Cuba society and from political youth organizations to
peace associations, in order to promote and organize volunteer service in developing countries.
Today the Centre has more than 270 member organizations, and its activities are funded,
among other sources, by the Foreign Ministry of Finland. Besides the SCDC, in the 1990s in
this field operated other organizations, such as Trade Union Solidarity Centre of Finland, the
Network Institute for Global Democratization,3 and Fairtrade (see Laine 2005), all of which
are members of the SCDC.
It was especially in this organizational milieu that issues of globalization were
discussed in the late 1990s (Sundman 2001, 228). In the same article in which the director of
the SCDC made this remark in 2001, he also welcomed a new actor in the field, the imminent
"landing" in Finland of the "Attac-network," originated earlier in France (Sundman 2001, 251);
3It emerged from the Finnish follow-up process (1995-1997) to the UN Secretary General's annual reports
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in the founding meeting of Attac Finland later in the same year he became a member of its
working group (Meriläinen 2002, 21).
The development aid context in which Attac "landed" in Finland (it is also a
member of the SCDC) seems indicative of the orientation it has adopted as a distant issue
movement. As the original French chapter (founded in 1998) and the some thirty other national
chapters to date (Uggla 2006, 53), it portrays itself as a pressure group that brings forth
concrete alternatives to the neoliberal form of globalization, which is said to promote the
interests and the welfare of a small minority and to widen inequalities between the North and
the South. It works for a global civil society, and its objective is the prevalence of political
considerations over financial ones, implying notably the so-called Tobin tax (to curb
speculative transactions on currency markets and to finance international development
projects), the cancellation of the debts of the developing countries, and the annulment of the
"tax havens" (Ervamaa 2005, ). The movement sees itself as a part of the global justice
movement that opposes neoliberalism and was active in the big demonstrations accompanying
the meetings of IMF, WTO and World Bank, and in the creation of the World Social Forum.
These questions are definitely "distant" rather than domestic, even though, as just
noted, they have ramifications everywhere. In line with this stress on distant issues are Attac's
contacts with the SCDC and the whole cluster of development organizations, as well as the
active interest and participation in the World Social Forum (see Ylä-Anttila 2003). "It is our
challenge [in the movement for developing countries] to convey impoverished people's
experiences and views and to promote their demands for change as effectively as possible," as
the main task has been formulated (Rönkkö 2005, 165). Domestic demands, viewed from the
global perspective are by no means absent, but they appear to play a clearly secondary role.
on democratization.
15
They include a defense of the equality principle of the welfare state and the public services, and
resistance to cuts in social security, to growing income differences, and to the privatization of
state-owned enterprises (Ervamaa 2005, 25). The apparent secondary status of domestic
themes finds support also from a preliminary look at communiqués of Attac Finland during
recent years (www.attac.fi).
This impression of the orientation of Attac Finland parallels Fredrik Uggla's
(2006) finding about the great significance of international issues in the Swedish chapter of
Attac. The finding may seem self-evident, but in his comparative study Uggla found that this
was much less true of Attac's home ground in France (and even of Attac Germany). Unlike in
Sweden, especially in France the most pronounced demands and issues were national and
increasingly so. Uggla (2006, 62-63) links the difference to varying success of the chapters in
the respective countries:
[T]he clearest tendency is the decline of global issues among the demands of
Attac in France and Germany, and the corresponding stress on national and
European issues (...) this reorientation responds to a political calculation in which
concrete (and proximate) demands that can draw adherents are sought (...) it
remains to be noted that Attac has actually not fared equally well in the three
countries. In particular, Attac-Sweden has become politically marginalized to a
much larger extent than in the two other countries (...) In contrast to the situation
in France and Germany, Attac-Sweden has rapidly lost members during the years
since its foundation (...) the relative absence of concrete demands at the national
level that could draw and maintain adherents might bear some relation to the
faltering membership figures and the marginal political position of Attac-Sweden.
Not only the balance between distant and domestic issues seems similar in Finland and Sweden,
but also the trend in the membership figures. The early top figure of some 2500 members in
Attac Finland in 2001-2002 has declined to fewer than 2000 in 2006. In Finland as well the
relative absence of national issues among the demands seems to go hand in hand with the
16
relative marginalization of the chapter. Why is it so? Why is this vicious circle (if it is one)
avoided in France (and Germany), but not in Sweden -- and, especially, as it seems, not in
Finland?
A hypothesis can be advanced starting from the relationship of the respective
chapters of Attac to their home countries. Here the question of adoption, or of a second-
degree bridging work, appears relevant. Attac has French origins, and it bears the mark of the
French way to relate domestic problems to global ones, or expresses the French perspective to
globalization and its threats; hence the more or less smooth frame bridging. It is in accordance
with this view that Éric Agrikoliansky, Olivier Fillieule and Nonna Mayer (2005, 73, 24) have
stressed the importance of "internal political transformations" for the forms the
altermondialisme took in France in the 1980s and the 1990s. "La lutte pour une autre
mondialisation n'est pas un mouvement à recrutement direct, mais plutôt une mobilisation de
mobilisations qui se fonde sur la coordination de groupes s'associant, au delà de leurs propres
objectifs, dans une structure nouvelle." In the French case the struggle for "another
globalization" has evolved from a "multiorganizational field," where "diversified struggles" and
organizations having stakes in the French society have fused to create a new movement. (See
also Luhtakallio 2001, 10; Clinell 2001; Ronkainen 2002, 84, 87; Rönkkö 2002, 80.)
This is not what happened in Finland. The Finns adopted the movement,
including its main demands. Even though these make sense in Finland as well, there they get
spontaneously settled in a development cooperation context rather than in a larger national
context, and therefore they are more difficult to make concrete than in France, producing often
rather general or vague bridging formulations: "The global gap in the income division splits
increasingly radically also our society" (Rönkkö 2005, 155), or: "In this world order the global
and the national justice go hand in hand" (Luhtakallio 2001, 9).
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Friends of the Earth
Yet Attac and other development cluster organizations do not constitute alone today's
solidarity movement. Another tendency are the environmental movements (Sundman 2001,
228), represented notably by Friends of the Earth Finland. They are another variety of the
consciousness that "the world is one place" (Robertson 1992, 183), along with the pervasive
penetrating capacity of economy, and as such another specifically contemporary dimension of
the sensitivity to globalization.
On the one hand this trend has links to alterglobalism that stresses the gulf
between the North and the South, but on the other hand in its proximity lie more contentious
and less organized or temporary groups and networks of (eco)activism. Friends of the Earth
was founded in Finland in 1996, in the middle of a cycle of environmental activism and
influenced by it, including the animal rights movement. Rather than being an environmental
movement in a narrow sense, it has adopted, like its mother organization Friends of the Earth
International, the environmental consciousness as the frame for the perception of global and
local issues and their interconnection. Main global issues raised by the Finnish organization are
the climate change and sustainable development, from whose perspective are assessed
questions of world trade and global justice that are common concerns with Attac. Most visible
domestically has been the campaigning against continuing nuclear power plant construction.
(Stranius 2005)
Despite its vigorous start in 1996 (the initial phase of Attac was equally very
active in 2001), its demands, domestic or global, have inspired no extensive movement. A
differentiation has occurred between it and those more radical forms of activism that
accompanied it during its early years and had a global environmental dimension of some kind in
18
their agenda. Friends of the Earth Finland has moved into a more moderate direction including,
at maximum, an "open, non-violent citizen disobedience" (Stranius 2005, 323), whereas those
more contentious small, fluctuating and loosely organized groups of activists, connected
through home pages in internet, have on some occasions continued to look for encounters in
street demonstrations and have caused some material damage. Like Attac or Friends of the
Earth, they as well are signs of "another globalization" in the sense that they too are local
expressions of corresponding international activism.4 Peculiar to the sensitivity to disorder is
that their media attention seems to grossly exceed their real weight in the Finnish activism.
That the two main strands rather complete each other than compete with each
other, is shown not only by the membership of both in the SCDC. A survey of members of
Attac Finland shows that remarkably many of its members are engaged in different
environmentally oriented organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Finnish
Association for Nature Conservation, Finnish Nature League, or Animalia – Federation for the
Protection of Animals.5 In accordance with this result, the two political parties reportedly
closest to the members of Attac Finland are the Green Union and the Left Union (the successor
party of the Communists and the left-wing socialists), followed, well behind them, by the Social
Democratic party (Järvelä & Luhtakallio 2002, 32).
4. Continuities and discontinuities
4Examples are Ya Basta!, No Border, and Tottelemattomat (Finnish Disobedients).
5The total number of memberships in these organizations covers 48 percent of the number of those whoparticipated in the member survey of Attac Finland (Järvelä & Luhtakallio 2002, 21), but if the overlappingmemberships are eliminated, the percentage is of course considerably lower.
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The two main forms of today's activism give some clues about continuities and discontinuities
in the Finnish distant issue movements from the 1960s to the 2000s. First of all, in the work for
the developing countries there is an unmistakable continuity both at the institutional-ideological
and the individual level. As stated, the organizational frame of development activity emerged in
the 1960s and the 1970s as a result of the work of the pioneers of the epoch. The members of
the SCDC include such organizations active in those decades as the Committee of 100
(Suomen Sadankomitealiitto), which is a member of the Peace Union of Finland (Suomen
Rauhanliitto), and the Finnish Peace Committee (Suomen Rauhanpuolustajat). It is not
surprising that some prominent individuals of the former epoch also figure in today's
movement. The best-known of them is undoubtedly the present Foreign Minister of Finland,
Erkki Tuomioja, who was a young activist of the Committee of 100 in the 1960s, as is now a
member of Attac. Another aspect is the close relation between the state administration and this
form of activism, implying a certain state-orientation in the latter. As Suvi Ervamaa (2003, 35-
37) has shown, the reliance on the (national) state as a buttress against neoliberal globalization
is pronounced in Attac Finland. The Attac network formed in Parliament in 2001 gathered 40
MPs (20 percent of their total number) mainly from the Greens, the Left Union and the Social
Democrats (it is not active anymore) (Ervamaa 2005, 28).
Finally, a striking indication of continuity is the fact that a few most visible
initiators of Attac Finland were founders of Tricont in 1968; and as happened then, also this
time the Swedish connection was instrumental.
In other words, a continuity there is, but with the earlier phases of the former
solidarity movement only. The alterglobalization frame can be aligned with the development
frame of the early 1960s, and also with the anti-imperialism frame of the late 1960s if the
teleology of emancipation is removed from it, but not with marxism-leninism. The latter
20
discrepancy shows the limits of continuity; the militantism of the 1970s has no followers in
today's activism.
The nature of the continuity also appears in the age structure of Attac Finland.
Interestingly, it has two peaks: the most numerous cohorts are those born in 1945-1956 (27
percent), and those born in 1969-1980 (33 percent) (Purhonen 2005, 263), that is, those who
were young in the 1960s and the 1970s, and those who were young at the turn of the
millennium. The different age groups have a somewhat different relationship to the two main
tendencies of the present solidarity movement, in a predictable manner. The younger are more
often members in the environmentally oriented organizations and the Green Union than the
older, of whom relatively many support the Left Union and even the presently existing tiny
Communist party ( ; Purhonen 2005, 265). Naturally enough, among the older there are
some who in their youth were active in Tricont or members in peace organizations of the time
(Järvelä & Luhtakallio 2005, 21).
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