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.

PRINCES AND MOMENTS

When asked by GQ magazine which world leader he esteemed most, Nigel Farage answered, “As an operator, but not as a human being, I would say Putin. The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant. Not that I approve of him politically. How many journalists in jail now?” It was March 2014, around the same time that infamous “little green men”, in reality Russian soldiers, were beginning to pop up in Crimea. But it did not stop Farage from gushing in praise.

Some two years later, months before he was elected, Donald Trump spoke about Russia's strongman in similar terms.

Later, in response to a question in a televized interviewed about whether Putin ought not to be labelled “a killer”, Trump calmly pointed out: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?”

The comments were met with disbelief. Had Putin not just invaded and annexed Crimea? Squashed political freedoms in Russia? Beaten up and assassinated journalists, homosexuals and opposition leaders? Trump's political opponents jumped on the opportunity. Hillary Clinton compared Putin's actions in Crimea to Hitler's in Czechoslovakia. Others followed: Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister, Stephen Harper, prime minister of Canada, US Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite.

Theoretical frameworks can be enabling, or they can be straitjackets. If I seek to fit the facts to suit my chosen theoretical frameworks, then both my theory and my research outputs are impoverished. In the philosophy of science, it is well known that it is quite normal for theoretical paradigms to persist even when reality shows them wanting. We should, instead, be flexible about our theoretical frameworks and not try to impose them on recalcitrant facts. I am mindful, of course, that these “facts” are constructed by our theoretical frames and our methodologies. The research terrain is fluid, and we need to be prepared to say when something is not working. Finally, I think we should bear in mind Foucault's challenge to normative understandings of what makes critique legitimate: “Critique doesn't have to be the promise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and those who refuse what is.” There has been a tendency in engaged research on social movements to conflate the role of analysis with what Foucault refers to as preaching “this is what needs to be done”.

The theoretical frameworks considered here are the largely dominant North American social and political science perspectives developed since the 1950s, the European post-1968 “new social movement” (NSM) approach and, finally, the various Latin American options developed to overcome the shortcomings of both these external perspectives.

North American

Orthodox Marxist and socialist theorists had long occupied themselves with social movements in their own particular way, but in the academic milieu they were somewhat under-studied until the 1970s. The socialist tradition was, on the whole, quite instrumental in its approach and it largely looked at why the working class had not fulfilled its allotted historical role. In the first half of the twentieth century the main academic frame related to what we would now call social movements studies, focused on “collective behaviour”, whereby individuals were seen to react emotionally to situations outside their control.

THE HOME STRAIGHT

On 17 January 2017, days before Donald Trump would stride into the White House, Xi Jinping rose to the Davos lectern to address a dejected audience of global business leaders at the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum. Globalization would continue, Xi argued determinedly, if not under US stewardship then under that of his own. “The global economy is the big ocean that you cannot escape from”, China's strongman said, picking his words carefully. “Any attempt to cut off the flow of capital, technologies, products, industries and people between economies, and channel the waters in the ocean back into isolated lakes and creeks is simply not possible.”

The conference hall packed with the great and the good of global capitalism found itself in violent agreement with the Marxist leader. And when he had finished, it broke into applause worthy of a Communist Party clapping frenzy.

Xi was no liberal, but globalization had powered China's rise for 40 years, and its demise would spell disaster. For Trump, globalization seemed a dead end, but for Xi it was the path to regaining China's strength. Smashing the world's architecture would be destructive. What was needed was a new global order, one that would supplant the old structures of the West. There was much to be said for Trump's new politics of strength. But he needed to make sure this brand of politics did not spell the end of globalization.

It turned Xi into the unlikeliest of Davos's heroes. Since his elevation to general secretary in 2012, he had only acted in the best of strongmen traditions, solidifying his personal hold on power by jailing rivals under the guise of anti-corruption campaigns. He had unleashed a brutal policy of cultural assimilation on China's Uighur population in the western province of Xinjiang.

EUROPE's COMING OF AGE

History is about epochal change, and with hindsight we may be able to say what the change was, what our “age” was about and when it started. In the storm of time this is a difficult and often impossible task. The historian is able to connect effect to cause because he already knows the outcome. The politician still has to feel his way at the intersection of past and future, not knowing what great change is being forged. Bit by bit, this is how he discovers, and defines, what his age is, and where he can and cannot tread.

Politics is improvisation, Niccolo Machiavelli taught, and improvisation involves going forward without knowing exactly where you are going, or even what you are doing. In its encounter with the strongman this is precisely what Europe is doing. It is feeling its way forward in unfamiliar surroundings, and it does so by taking small but concrete steps.

This process of improvisation is not random. Events and encounters are pushing the continent into one particular direction. Europe is discovering a certain path, delineating the outlines of a new era. The more of the path it travels, the clearer it becomes where it is leading, and what needs to be done to complete the journey. Minerva's owl only takes flight at dusk, said Hegel. “The vision thing”, as US President George H. Bush once called it, becomes easier the further we advance.

Can we already see where Europe is headed? The answer, I believe, is that we can, although not with the precision that may be demanded from us. Europe is discovering the allure of strength. It is looking for ways to find a place for strength in the world of rules it has crafted. What Europe is feeling its way towards, in other words, is the status of a sovereign power, acting independently on the global stage.

That transformation is driven by events and encounters, and by the realization that unfortunately the world is dominated less by rules than by strength. In such a world what alternatives are there for Europe's disparate nations?

We first need to ask ourselves: what is a social movement? An often cited definition is that of Mario Diani, for whom “social movements are defined as networks of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organizations, engaged in political or cultural conflicts, on the basis of shared collective identities”. Social movements are not necessarily progressive, as some analysts assume; they can be revolutionary, reformist and, indeed, reactionary, as I have shown elsewhere. Furthermore, social movements cannot, in my view, be reduced to a bland category of “civil society”, sometimes conflated with NGOs (non-governmental organizations) or placed in a generic basket called “social protest”. The question of human agency will loom large in this account of social movements.

I then move on to answer the question: why Latin America? As a continent that lies betwixt and between the global North and South, it has generated internationally significant social movements, and it may provide global lessons, not least, on how we should approach the study of social movements. By grounding the studies in a particular region, I hope to avoid the tendency to seek universal validity for what is sometimes known as “social movement theory”, seen as a self-contained discipline.

Finally, I propose an open paradigm, which will serve as a backdrop to the chapters that follow on specific social movements in Latin America. Although I agree in general with the “grounded theory” approach (basically, that theory needs to be based on experience), I will argue that two opening sensitizing concepts will serve us well: Michel Foucault's intuition that “where there is power there is resistance”, and Karl Polanyi's vision of history as a “double movement” of market expansion and societal reaction for self-protection. It is the practice of the social movements in Latin America, however, that will help us build and refine a grounded framework subsequently.

What is a social movement?

The first thing we need to recognize is the complexity and fluidity of social movements. Anyone who has been part of a social movement will understand that there is a degree of unknowability about such movements, something that cannot be captured by sociological theory alone.

The third major historical social movement in Latin America that we need to consider is that of community or neighbourhood associations, and placebased social movements more generally. From its origins, the labour movement always had a strong community presence, and workplace– community links were stronger than in the industrializing countries of the global North. The economic intergeneration of capitalist enterprises and various forms of self-employment and marginal enterprises in part explains this synergy. More broadly, as Joe Foweraker describes, “it is often a sense of neighbourhood that sustains urban social movements in Latin America. And that is created through intense networking and complex relations of exchange and reciprocity.” Solidarity in the workplace is matched by a communalism that sustains social relations, builds identity and forges a platform of common demands. In the periods of military rule, when there were interventions in labour unions and left-wing parties, the mass struggle could rely on a community base and bring in other allies, such as the churches and the human rights organizations.

In contemporary Latin America there are many examples of place-based social movements, often lauded by NSM theorists who see them as exemplars of identity-based movements. Thus, Libia Grueso, Carlos Rosero and Arturo Escobar refer to Colombia's Pacific black movements as “a complex process of construction of ethnic and cultural identity in relation to novel variables such as territory, biodiversity, and alternative development”. Although most acknowledge the verve and dynamism of the Afro-Colombian place-based movements, we might also query whether territory is really a “novel” feature and whether these movements are harbingers of an alternative development model. Similar conceptual inflation occurred in Argentina in relation to the 2001/2 neighbourhood councils and barter economies set up to cope with the impact of economic collapse. The slogan “Qué se vayan todos” (“Let them all go”, referring to politicians) was itself a political refrain of the far left groups, and the neighbourhood organizing, though impressive, did not outlast elections and the return of a progressive Peronist government.

THE SILENT CONTRACT

The strongmen govern through strength, not through rules. But what do the politics of strength look like? Why strength? On the whole, European states, which are based on rules, function like well-oiled machines. Their bureaucracies are vast and capable of reaching into the smallest pockets of society. There are rules for the tiniest minutiae of our lives: from the emission levels of diesel cars, to urban planning laws, to the percentage of cacao in chocolate bars. What do we need strength for?

The strongman's answer is that government is not always an efficient and reliable machine. Institutions of government can break or lose their relevance. Great civilizations and states view themselves as eternal. They place themselves at the centre of the world and blindly assume they will remain there forever. But Machiavelli's warning is that they are wrong. If we take the long view, the greatest challenge of order is its evanescence. States are vulnerable to crises, to wear and tear and decay. And when institutions are weak, dysfunctional or at risk, the politics of strength takes over. Formally, rules and constitutions may still exist. A machinery of government may still exist, on paper. But if these structures no longer possess political agency, the ability to govern or change things, strength provides an answer.

One of the sources for the politics of strength is what I call the “silent contract”, an informal and covert bargain between the strongman and an elite of powerbrokers recruited by the strongman to help manage the nation's public affairs. It is this band of helpers that, in part, gives the strongman his power, his ability to create and lead an often highly effective system of government in the shadow of the state. And as I will argue in this chapter, the character of this shadow system of government, and the personal and informal ties that hold it together, can be best understood as the ancient principles of feudalism and the obligations between a lord and his vassals.

In order to start thinking about the future and charting the way(s) forward, we need to conduct a mapping of social movements in Latin America today, building on what we have found out in the case studies above. The notion of cognitive mapping is integral to our cultural political economy approach, which seeks to depict social space, and in our case social movements, in the current epoch. We need a method for “cognitive mapping” to understand the current state of play of social movements in the new political era now opening up in Latin America “after” the progressive turn. On this basis, we can move to the second section of this conclusion to examine the lessons we can draw from our six case studies in relation to the theoretical framework we laid out in the opening chapters. What was presented as a mosaic of distinct social movements for the sake of analysis is now shown as a holistic and integrated social counter-movement. I examine their relation to state politics, NGOs and civil society as well as their international projection. Finally, I seek to move “beyond the fragments” in terms of the dispersed, even divided, map of social movements in Latin America today. What is the common social or political denominator that might make the whole greater than the sum of its parts? We explore, in particular, the notion of “democratic equivalents” and the way in which social movements might become harbingers of a new social order.

Mapping

The categories of analysis that informed our case studies in the pages above are the obvious ones. We have focused on the complex and contradictory relationships between social movements with the state, political parties and civil society. It moved us beyond the old belief that social groups have “interests” that they pursued automatically. We must examine instead the complex process of grievance articulation, protests around them and the construction of social movements with a clear objective. We need to examine their articulation with other social movements and mediations with the political process. Finally, we need to examine the national and transnational alliances they form.