Finland

• 1. Introduction

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  Finland sits between latitudes 60 and 70 degrees north, making it one of the world's northernmost countries. Of all world capitals, only Reykjavik lies further north than Helsinki. At Finland's northernmost point, the sun does not set for 73 consecutive days in summer, and does not rise at all for 51 days in winter. This is a land of over 180,000 recorded lakes and a coastline that opens onto the world's largest archipelago. It was first settled around 9000 BC, after the last Ice Age, and its name once referred only to a small coastal region around Turku in the southwest. How did a country that stayed largely rural and agrarian until the 1950s become one that consistently ranks at the top of global lists for education, happiness, and prosperity? How did a people ruled from Stockholm and then from Saint Petersburg arrive at independence, survive two wars against the Soviet Union without being occupied, and eventually join NATO in 2023? The answers run through famine and civil war, through a national epic and a mobile phone giant, and through a landscape still rising out of the sea.

• 2. Borrowed Crowns

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  From the late 13th century, Finland became part of Sweden following the Northern Crusades. Danes had waged at least three crusades to Finland, in 1187 or slightly earlier, in 1191, and in 1202, while Swedes campaigned against the Tavastians and later, in 1293, against the Karelians. The so-called first Crusade to Finland, possibly in 1155, most likely never occurred. Through the Second Swedish Crusade led by Birger Jarl, and the settling of coastal areas with Christian Swedes, the Finnish lands were absorbed into the Swedish realm and the sphere of the Catholic Church.

  Magnus Ladulas, who reigned from 1275 to 1290, and Magnus Eriksson, who reigned from 1319 to 1364, oversaw the building of an administrative structure, a fiscal apparatus, and codified law. Swedish became the language of the nobility, administration, and education, while Finnish remained the tongue of peasants, clergy, and local courts. During the Protestant Reformation, the Finns gradually converted to Lutheranism. The bishop and reformer Mikael Agricola published the first written works in Finnish in the 16th century.

  Helsinki, Finland's current capital, was founded by King Gustav Vasa in 1555. The first university, the Royal Academy of Turku, was established by Queen Christina of Sweden at the proposal of Count Per Brahe in 1640. Finnish cavalrymen earned a reputation in the Thirty Years' War, fought between 1618 and 1648, where they were known as the Hakkapeliitta. Yet this era also brought catastrophe. A severe famine in 1695 to 1697 killed about one third of the Finnish population, and a devastating plague followed a few years later. In the 18th century, Russian forces twice occupied Finland, in periods the Finns called the Greater Wrath of 1714 to 1721 and the Lesser Wrath of 1742 to 1743.

• 3. We Are Not Swedes

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  On the 29th of March 1809, after being conquered by the armies of Alexander I of Russia, Finland became an autonomous grand duchy within the Russian Empire, recognised by the Diet of Porvoo. In 1812, Alexander I added the Russian province of Vyborg to the Grand Duchy. The arrangement lasted until the end of 1917. In 1854, the British and French navies bombed the Finnish coast and Aland during the Aland War, drawing Finland into Russia's involvement in the Crimean War.

  Adolf Ivar Arwidsson captured the mood of an emerging nation with the words: "we are not Swedes, we do not want to become Russians, so let us be Finns." From the 1860s, a strong Finnish nationalist movement, the Fennoman movement, grew. The philosopher and statesman J.V. Snellman championed the official status of the Finnish language and introduced the Finnish markka in 1865. The national epic, the Kalevala, was published in 1835, and the Finnish language gained legal equality with Swedish in 1892.

  The Finnish famine of 1866 to 1868 struck after freezing temperatures in early September devastated crops, killing around 15 percent of the population. It ranks among the worst famines in European history. The disaster pushed the Russian Empire to relax financial regulations, and investment increased in the decades that followed. In 1906, the Grand Duchy introduced universal suffrage, making Finland the first country in Europe to do so, and the first in the world to give all adult citizens the right to run for public office. Yet that suffrage was virtually meaningless in practice, because the tsar did not have to approve any law passed by the Finnish parliament.

• 4. Reds And Whites

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  On the 4th of December 1917, the right-wing government led by Prime Minister P. E. Svinhufvud presented the Declaration of Independence, which the Finnish Parliament officially approved on the 6th of December. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, led by Vladimir Lenin, was the first country to recognise Finland's independence, on the 4th of January 1918. On the 27th of January 1918, the government began to disarm Russian forces in Ostrobothnia.

  The socialists took control of southern Finland and Helsinki, while the white government continued in exile in Vaasa. The short but bitter civil war that followed ended with the Whites, backed by Imperial Germany, defeating the Reds and their self-proclaimed Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic. After the war, tens of thousands of Reds were interned in camps, where thousands were executed or died of malnutrition and disease. A deep enmity was sown that would last until the Winter War and beyond.

  After a brief experiment with monarchy collapsed, when an attempt to make Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse king of Finland failed, the country adopted a republican constitution. K. J. Stahlberg was elected its first president on the 25th of July 1919. A liberal nationalist with a legal background, Stahlberg anchored the state in liberal democracy and promoted the rule of law. Finland moved early on women's equality too, with Miina Sillanpaa becoming the first female minister in Finnish history, in Vaino Tanner's cabinet of 1926 to 1927. The Finnish-Russian border was established in 1920 by the Treaty of Tartu, which gave Finland Pechenga and its Barents Sea port.

• 5. Two Wars, No Occupation

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  The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on the 23rd of August 1939, dividing Europe into spheres of influence. In accordance with the pact, the Soviet Union launched the Winter War on the 30th of November 1939 to annex Finland. Joseph Stalin set up the Finnish Democratic Republic to govern the country after a Soviet conquest that never came. International condemnation of the unprovoked attack led to the Soviet Union being expelled from the League of Nations.

  The Red Army was defeated in numerous battles, most notably at Suomussalmi. After two months of negligible progress and heavy losses, Soviet forces advanced in February and reached Vyborg in March. The Moscow Peace Treaty was signed on the 12th of March 1940, and the war ended the following day. Finland kept its independence but ceded 9 percent of its territory. Between 1939 and 1944, some 400,000 people were evacuated from Karelia.

  Hostilities resumed in June 1941 with the Continuation War, when Finland allied with Germany following its invasion of the Soviet Union. The aim was to regain the lost territory. Finnish troops occupied Eastern Karelia from 1941 to 1944 and assisted in the Siege of Leningrad. The Soviet Vyborg-Petrozavodsk offensive of summer 1944 broke through until the Finns repulsed it at Tali-Ihantala. The Lapland War of 1944 to 1945 followed, as Finland fought retreating German forces in the north.

  The armistice and treaty signed with the Soviet Union in 1944 and 1948 brought reparations and further territorial concessions. Finland lost 12 percent of its land area, 20 percent of its industrial capacity, its second largest city Vyborg, and the ice-free port of Liinakhamari. Around 97,000 Finnish soldiers died, and reparations were initially set at 300 million dollars in 1938 prices, later adjusted to 226.5 million dollars. Along with Great Britain, Finland was one of the only European combatant countries never occupied that preserved its democracy throughout.

• 6. The Long Neutrality

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  From 1956, President Urho Kekkonen held a virtual monopoly on relations with the Soviet Union, which was crucial to his lasting popularity. During the Cold War, Finland officially embraced a policy of neutrality. The YYA Treaty, the Finno-Soviet Pact of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, recognised Finland's desire to stay outside great-power conflicts. In politics, there was a tendency to avoid any statement that could be read as anti-Soviet, a phenomenon the West German press dubbed "Finlandisation."

  Valmet, originally a shipyard and then several metal workshops, was established to produce materials for war reparations. Trade with Western powers and the payment of reparations to the Soviet Union helped transform Finland from an agrarian society into an industrialised one. In 1950-46 percent of Finnish workers were employed in agriculture, and a third lived in urban areas. As new jobs in manufacturing and services drew people to the cities, the average number of births per woman fell from a baby boom peak of 3.5 in 1947 to 1.5 in 1973. Hundreds of thousands emigrated to more industrialised Sweden, with emigration peaking in 1969 and 1970.

  The Soviet Union persuaded Finland to refuse Marshall Plan aid, but the United States provided secret development aid and supported the Social Democratic Party. By 1975, Finland's GDP per capita was the 15th highest in the world. During the 1970s and 1980s, the country built one of the most extensive welfare states in the world. Then miscalculated macroeconomic decisions, a banking crisis, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a global downturn produced a deep recession in the early 1990s. The recession bottomed out in 1993, after which Finland integrated more closely with the West, joining the European Union in 1995 and the euro zone in 1999. Much of the growth of the late 1990s was fuelled by the success of the mobile phone manufacturer Nokia.

• 7. A Land Still Rising

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  Halti reaches 1,324 metres at the border between Finland and Norway, the highest point in the country. The highest peak entirely within Finland is Ridnitsohkka at 1,316 metres, directly adjacent. The distance from the southernmost point, Hanko in Uusimaa, to the northernmost, Nuorgam in Lapland, is 1,160 kilometres. Finland has about 168,000 lakes larger than 500 square metres and 179,000 islands, and its largest lake, Saimaa, is the fourth largest in Europe.

  Much of this geography is the work of the Ice Age, when glaciers were thicker and lasted longer in Fennoscandia than elsewhere in Europe. Their erosion left a mostly flat, hilly landscape, scattered with terminal moraine ridges of gravel and sand, among them the three Salpausselka ridges that cross southern Finland. Having been compressed under the weight of the ice, the land is still rising through post-glacial rebound. The effect is strongest around the Gulf of Bothnia, where the land rises about 1 centimetre a year and the country's surface area expands by about 7 square kilometres annually.

  Forest covers 78 percent of the total area, made up of pine, spruce, birch, and other species, making Finland the largest producer of wood in Europe. Granite is the most common rock, visible wherever there is no soil cover. The Gulf Stream and the moderating Baltic Sea give Finland an unusually warm climate for its latitude, compared with places like Alaska, Siberia, and southern Greenland. The endangered Saimaa ringed seal, one of only three lake seal species in the world, lives only in the Saimaa lake system and has fallen to about 390 animals, becoming the emblem of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation.

• 8. An Egalitarian Republic

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  A new constitution, enacted in 2000, made the Finnish presidency primarily a ceremonial office, and the country is now considered a parliamentary republic in which the Prime Minister is the most powerful person. The president, directly elected and limited to two consecutive six-year terms, still leads foreign relations and serves as commander-in-chief of the Finnish Defence Forces. Alexander Stubb took office as president on the 1st of March 2024. The 200-member unicameral Parliament, the Eduskunta, holds supreme legislative authority and is elected for four years using the proportional D'Hondt method.

  Modern Finnish values are rooted in egalitarian ideals, expressed through robust LGBT rights, broad protections for women, secularism, and environmentalism. Transparency International ranks Finland as one of the least corrupt countries in Europe, and around 92 percent of residents have confidence in its security institutions. A day fine system applies even to offences such as speeding. In 2008, President Martti Ahtisaari was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and in the 2000 election Tarja Halonen became the first female President of Finland.

  Finland maintains universal male conscription, under which men above 18 serve 6 to 12 months of armed service or 12 months of civilian service. Standard readiness strength is 34,700 people in uniform, while the entire reserve numbers around 900,000. Finnish support for NATO rose sharply after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, shifting from a narrow majority against membership before February to a supermajority in favour by April. On the 17th of May 2022, the Finnish Parliament voted 188 to 8 in favour of accession, and Finland became a member of NATO on the 4th of April 2023. The NATO organisation will site a command unit at Riihimaki in 2027.