In the following three chapters, we look at the context of Finland's achievements. The first chapter focuses on geography and climate, which are issues that invariably arise early on in any conversation about the country. Finland is often described as remote, but remoteness is relative. It very much depends on where you are looking from, and how much more easily (for the affluent at least) everywhere is now connected to everywhere else as compared to how difficult travel was even in the recent past. We begin the chapter with a map that puts Finland at its centre, showing how a large part of the world's surface looks from that vantage point.

Chapter 1 continues by showing just how warm the summers are in Finland and how cold it can be in winter, but also how clear the skies can be and how clean the air is. Outsiders are rarely aware of the large geographical variations in climate across the country. We end our introductory chapter by describing how ancient Finland is, geologically speaking, and how its landscape of lakes and forest includes places where rare elements are found in abundance. Although Finland is one of the places where the effects of global warming are likely to be the least adverse, it is also one of the countries at the forefront of initiatives to reduce, mitigate and adapt to climate change – including, controversially, the building of new nuclear power plants that are due to begin operation in 2020 (Reuters 2019).

The second chapter in this section considers the history of Finland amid the empires that surrounded it and dominated it for so long. We chart how for centuries it was the poorest of nations, and show how its towns and cities grew along with the development of transportation routes between its countless lakes; we detail its many border changes, and speculate on the impact of Finland's past as a colony on the outlook of Finns today.

Our third and final chapter in Part I gives a brief overview of the economy and the welfare system that Finland is so famous for.

Traditionally, mid-life is hard to define. When does it begin and end? In Finland currently, average life expectancy for men is 79 and for women 84, with both still increasing and the gap between them narrowing. Because of this we have decided here to define mid-life as being aged 21 to 61, the 40 years after the first 21 years of life and before what, for most people, is typically the last 21 years of their lives.

For most of us mid-life begins after the completion of studies and at the start of employment and possible career, after having left the family who brought you up, but before settling down with a family of your own. This stereotype has undergone various changes, but these key points still remain milestones in the average person's life in one way or another. A growing number of people have no children, but for the majority of Finns, mid-life ends when all your children have left home and you are on your own again. It draws to an end as the career or varied set of jobs you have been doing wind down. It ends as retirement approaches or starts and as your life begins to have more and more in common with everyone else in your age group. Equality is greatest in childhood and young adulthood, and again in old age – especially in Finland. Mid-life is a period of specialization and also the time when people tend to be most unequal.

In Finland children are born remarkably equal. As detailed above, a Finnish child's arrival is marked with a very comprehensive maternity package containing things that the baby and its parents actually need. In Finland the government, and the town or village you live in, ensures that your start in life is one of the most equitable on the planet. As explained in the previous chapter, all children in Finland have access to good schools. The influence of your parents’ income on your outcome in mid-life is minimal (when compared to their influence if you grow up anywhere else).

Finland is far away. Unless you are in Finland, in which case it is – very probably – home. Everywhere is a long way from most places. And everywhere is home to someone.

To the east of Finland lies Russia, endless Russia, Russia as far as the mind can imagine and as far as a car or a train can travel in a day, or two, or three (Figure 1.1). It feels as if it has always been Russia over there.

To the south is the rest of Europe, country after country, sea after sea, peoples and languages, so many languages all just needing to be learned and used in the places just waiting to be visited. And no more meaningful borders. Finland is in the European Union and the eurozone.

In this section there are three chapters that cover the human lifespan, discussing issues that most affect people in their youth, mid-life – which we define as ages 21 to 61 – and old age. We discuss childhood and education in the first chapter, general equality in the second, and health in the final chapter of this section.

We begin by demonstrating how Finland's very high levels of income equality for older people are related to high levels of social mobility for the young; and how schools in Finland further accelerate social mobility. Social mobility is easier when the gap between top and bottom is so much narrower than it is in other countries. We show that Finland is second only to Norway in how little money is spent on private schooling and look at how Finland manages to be a world leader in education without spending more overall than many other countries. We also show how Finland has the lowest variation in school outcomes of any OECD country – which partly explains why its educational results are so good. We end by discussing Finland's work opportunities for the young, youth unemployment and higher education.

In Chapter 5, on the middle years of life, we begin by discussing data that confirm that income inequality in Finland has been low for some time and show how this contributes to high levels of social mobility. Of all the countries in the world, only in Denmark does it matter less who your parents are for your prospects in later life. We show that in the workplace Finnish employees of all grades have much greater flexibility over the hours they work than in all of the 35 other OECD countries for which there is data. This is as true for Finns without formal qualifications as for those with university degrees – employees in Finland are the most trusted to determine their own hours of work. We then discuss the paradox of Finland having one of the lowest proportions of women working in jobs that require science, technology, engineering and mathematics qualifications – despite Finland ranking joint highest on the global index of gender equality, which includes how well girls and women do at school and university in general in Finland. We end the chapter by looking at the taxation that keeps inequality low.

Introduction

In 2019, Finnish politics made international headlines twice. The first time was when the Social Democratic Party won the most votes in the April 2019 general election (The Guardian 2019; Duxbury 2019) and the second was after the prime minister and the Minister for Local Government and Ownership Steering resigned over issues involving a postal strike and his successor, Sanna Marin, became the world's youngest serving prime minister on 10 December 2019 (see Chapter 3). Her appointment meant that the country was governed by a coalition of five female-led parties.

Finland was flatteringly profiled as a hotbed of progressive politics and policies by newspapers such as The Guardian and The New York Times, and by politicians including Hillary Clinton. The hosts for the podcast for the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, “Uutisraportti”, ended their weekly broadcast on a gleeful note about the attention Finland was attracting in the wake of Marin's appointment. It was unbelievable and exciting, they exclaimed, that William Barr, the US's Donald Trump-appointed attorney general, had asked the visiting Finnish Justice Minister, Anna-Maija Henriksson, for her views on the new prime minister (Peltomaki 2019). Barr wasn't the only American to want to know more about Henriksson's homeland: when she visited a US prison, the inmates asked her about politics in Finland.

Politics is important to the story of Finland's success because effective social policy and the welfare state were the outcome of choices and policies made by government. Of course, Finland's politicians have not always made the right decisions: as we’ve discussed in Chapter 6, lawmakers are still grappling with the thorny issue of social and healthcare reform.

The secret word

There has been a recent boom in books about how, if you live the Nordic way, you too could live longer. Hundreds of little tips essentially all boil down to an instruction to be more Swedish, more Danish, more Finnish. Each country has its own special word that signifies the secret to success. In Swedish, according to Bertil Marklund, the word is lagom, meaning “just the right amount”. However, in each case we are told that there is no exact translation, and hence an entire book on “the word” is needed for the reader to glean the secrets it holds.

In Denmark the magic word is hygge, meaning an atmosphere of cosiness, closeness and comfortable conviviality, which in turn generates feelings of greater well-being and contentment (Norway has koselig, meaning nearly the same thing, with some subtle differences.) Candles, cushions and closing the door on unwanted intrusions feature heavily in hygge, and wrapping yourself in chunky hand-knitted blankets and indulging in pastries is how the concept was presented to the outside world (Country Life 2017). Inevitably, there is no exact English translation or short definition that quite summarizes the concept correctly.

It is not just the Nordic countries that have received this treatment. In Japan the equivalent concept is ikigai. According to The Times “Forget hygge. It's all about ikigai (that's Japanese for a happy life)” (Country Life 2017; Mogi 2017). Unsurprisingly, the Japanese term also defies translation and requires an entire book to explain it. What none of these books point out are the many similarities between these countries.

The land between the powers

To the outside world Finland may not appear particularly diverse, but its own people see things rather differently, particularly when looking at the complex history and shifting politics in the years up to the Second World War. Writing in October 1939, one American media mogul claimed “Stalin is treading on dangerous ground when he attacks Finland […] Finland is the most upright and honest nation in Europe. She is the one nation that has recently paid its duly contracted debts to us. She is the one nation whose word of honor is worth a centime or a farthing. She is the one nation that the United States has reason to respect” (Hearst 1939). It may well have been William Randolph Hearst, the model for the protagonist of Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane, who helped create the myth of the steadfast, independent-minded, stubborn yet diplomatic character of the Finns.

From the early twelfth century until 1945, Finns were caught in the middle of larger nations’ ambitions and empires: Sweden in the west, Russia in the east, Germany to the south, and with the cold relentlessly sweeping down from the north to add to the drama. Finland was, in effect, controlled by Denmark in the form of the Kalmar Union of Scandinavia aristocracy from 1397 to 1523, ending with Sweden's rebellion. Sweden then ruled Finland more or less uninterrupted until 1809, although at the end of the Great Northern War (1700–21) its grip was perilously weak. From 1809, Russia dominated Finland, invading at times, ruling at others, until independence day, 6 December 1917. During the period 1941–44, Finland was – despite not being run by Nazis – an ally of Germany and reliant on it for imports of food, fuel and armaments. In 1944, however, the Finns turned on Germany, in the Lapland War (September 1944 to April 1945).

Decreasing fertility and the effects of climate emergency are phenomena that all western, developed countries face. On the one hand, a shrinking and greying population risks the future tax base needed to fund government policies. On the other hand, a larger population would almost inevitably use up more of the planet's scarce resources and further intensify climate change. Immigration is proposed as the solution. The previous chapter illustrated the difficulties Finnish politics and society have faced in adapting to immigration, and detailed the populist backlash against multiculturalism. This chapter, on demography and the environment, delves further into how the contradictory need for greater fertility and the certain need for climate action has played out in Europe, as this will significantly affect Finland's capacity to sustain its welfare state at current levels.

Long-term trends in birth and death rates in Finland reflect the country's chequered history. Spikes in the death rate followed major events such as the 1808–09 war between Sweden and Russia, which culminated in Finland being ceded to its eastern neighbour; and in the Finnish famine of 1866–68 some 270,000 people – 9 per cent of the population – died of hunger. The civil war in 1918 that followed Finnish independence from Russia in 1917 led to the deaths of 37,000 people – mostly men in prison camps. There were smaller spikes during the Winter War (1939–40) and the Continuation War (1941–44) against the Soviet Union, when around 96,000 Finns (2.5 per cent of the population) perished. Since 1945, annual death rates have remained low and stable, at 10 per 1,000 population, while in the past few years birth rates have fallen so low that they are now below death rates (see Figure 8.1).

In this final section of Finntopia, we begin with politics and populism, looking at how turnout in elections varies among affluent countries and across the states of the United States. Finland, alongside other more equitable countries, has relatively high voter turnout – and it has been rising in recent years. However, voter participation is still lower than in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. Politics in Finland is complex, with coalition governments made up of many political parties, and voter fatigue is common.

As we write, in early 2020, the country is governed by a very new, politically progressive coalition made up of a diverse group of parties. To explain how this happened, in Chapter 7 we have redrawn a complex political-space map originally disseminated by the Finnish state broadcaster Yleisradio Oy (Yle) in April 2019. That political map helped explain the positions of political parties’ candidates on a number of issues. We end by mapping the results of the most recent general election over population-space using a population cartogram.

In Chapter 8, we focus on demography and the environment. We begin by depicting how birth and death rates in Finland have varied from 1749 through to the present day, not only highlighting the impacts of famine and war, but also showing how, since 2014, death rates have consistently exceeded birth rates. Next, we consider the fall in fertility over the past century, and then the fall in migration to Finland in the early 1990s and its rise in the twenty-first century. Today net in-migration is the only reason that the population of Finland is not falling. We show where migrants to Finland have come from, and then link all of this to the major environmental challenges being faced by Finland – and the world – today. In matters of environmental action, Finland punches well above its weight.

Chapter 9, on future challenges and success fatigue, begins with the concerns of young people who are suffering or struggling. Mental health is a problem in Finland, but worldwide only Denmark has a smaller percentage of young people who say they are not thriving mentally.

Challenger ecosystem

In 2020 Finland is performing remarkably well in numerous global economic and social rankings and has been for some time. Two years earlier, the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report (World Economic Forum 2018) ranked Finland eleventh in competitiveness, and first for the soundness of its banks. In 2019 the World Economic Forum named Greater Helsinki as one of its 12 “Challenger Ecosystems”, cities close behind the top ten globally leading start-up hubs (Penzel 2019). Finland is also ranked as the most politically stable country in the world, with some of the highest levels of press freedom, and has been proclaimed the happiest place to live (see Parkkinen 2019). In many ways it has achieved what many idealists in the past dreamt of – the winning of freedoms – rather than merely a superficial commitment to the idea of freedom.

Statistics released shortly after the turn of the century led the United Nations to rank Finland as the thirteenth most developed country in the world in its Human Development Report of 2004, twelfth by 2009 and twelfth again by 2019. At the time, few people noticed how quickly it had risen up the ranks, not least because its Nordic neighbours, Norway and Sweden, overshadowed it in their even more rapid rise. However, what is remarkable about Finland is that it has achieved this without the oil advantages of Norway or the historic imperial advantages of Sweden.

Instead, Finland made use of what it had – forests. The forest industry provided material for exports that supported its economic growth throughout the twentieth century when demand was high (Poropudas 1996: 352). Instead of an important land-owning aristocracy or gentry Finland had a significant class of peasant proprietors, or talonpojat (Hakkinen & Forsberg 2015: 101).

Finland has become the “by way of contrast” country, as the British Medical Journal described it in 2018. Finland is the one place, above all other places in Europe, that shows that something much better is possible than the status quo. That is a weighty responsibility. Of course, Finland is not Utopia, but today it offers one of the closest approximations.

In 2018, when Finland first achieved its top placing in the UN's World Happiness Report, a UK newspaper reported the news with the caveat: ”… even though its GDP is below that of the US and Germany” (Boseley 2018). Finland shows why achieving a very high GDP is not necessary for great happiness as GDP is one of the measures where Finland does not top the tables. When Finland overtook Norway to take first place in the World Happiness Report, it did so with a GDP per capita that was more than a third lower than that of Norway; and it held that top ranked position in both 2019 and 2020.

Finland is the country that shows how it is possible for happiness to be achievable without becoming ever richer, and while having living standards in terms of material wealth that are far below those in the most affluent parts of the world, including its more affluent Scandinavian neighbours. However, the publication in August 2018 of “In the Shadow of Happiness”, a report on mental wellness, prompted some in the media to question the picture of Finland and its Nordic neighbours as happy places:

One of the social movements in Latin America that most clearly shows both “old” and “new” facets is the women's movement. Most Latin American countries experienced the emergence of classical liberal feminist movements in the early twentieth century. Oriented towards suffrage issues, these movements were the start of a bid to “engender” citizenship – clearly a precondition if it is to be a universal good. This early feminism could probably be classified as an “old” social movement, in so far as it made demands on the state and was clearly political in its orientation. Contemporary feminisms emerged in the late 1960s, at least in part in response to the military regimes and their suppression of social and individual rights. Feminists saw clearly how the military state was inextricably linked to patriarchy, in a terrible symmetry impacting on all domains, from consumption to repression. Male violence and state violence were, arguably, one and the same, and women's reproductive rights were dramatically curtailed. Later, in the 1980s, we saw a flourishing of women's participation in communal and other social movements. These mujeres populares (working-class women) brought a different dynamic to the struggle, with their emphasis on what became known as practical gender needs, rather than the strategic gender needs prioritized by the feminists.

This second-wave mobilization of women coincided with neoliberalism's cultural, political and economic restructuring of society. Free trade policies, the reduction of state services and the weakening of social policy all impinged directly and disproportionately on women. Although many women participating in these actions were not, or did not see themselves as, feminists, their public participation in social movements inevitably impinged on their “private” lives. As they moved from passivity to a new combativeness they began to also take on the patriarchal attitudes of the political or trade union bosses, as well as that ever-present feature in their daily life. In the wider feminist movement there was a growing divide from the 1990s onwards between the autónomas and the institucionalistas, the latter being more committed to working within the new democratic institutions and, to some extent, leaving behind the militant social movement orientation characteristic of the anti-dictatorial struggle period.

Peasants and rural landless workers have been at the forefront of recent social movements in Latin America. In fact, we are witnessing a resurgence of ruralbased social movements precisely when some analysts are predicting the “death of the peasantry” because of the advance of capitalism. After providing some conceptual and historical background on peasants, we move on in this chapter to consider first the case of Brazil, where the MST (Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra: Landless Workers’ Movement) has become one of the most significant rural movements to date. This is followed by a case study of Colombia, where the peasant-based FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) once controlled a territory the size of Switzerland in “independent republics”, and is thus a unique case. The next case study is of Chile, where we have seen a more “classic” pattern of capitalist modernization of agriculture and large-scale agrarian reforms. Finally, we turn to the transnational domain, where Vía Campesina, which originated in Latin America, has for the first time shown the potential of the peasantry as a transnational counter-globalization force. This cluster of cases, taken together, shows the great capacity for resistance and innovation of Latin America's rural dwellers.

In Latin America

The second major historical social movement in Latin America after the workers’ movement is that of the peasants and landless rural workers. From the Mexican Revolution in 1910 through to the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the long-running insurgency in Colombia, peasants have been at the forefront of social and political transformation in Latin America. Old and new forms of capitalist exploitation combined in rural areas and so have the forms of rural dweller resistance. Thus, in Colombia, a long-standing tradition of rural organization and revolt going back to the 1950s was combined with communist insurgency models to turn the “independent republics” into instances of dual power. In a different way, in Brazil, we saw in the early 1960s a combination of peasant leagues organizing smallholders with a national confederation of rural workers, CONTAG (Confederação dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura: Agricultural Workers’ Confederation), organizing rural workers.