The True Finns Party have surged to the forefront of Finnish politics and fundamentally turned the nation’s political discourse in a more nationalist direction. What are the causes of this rise in Finnish populism?

The populist Finns Party, formerly known in English as the True Finns party (Finnish: Perussomalaiset), rushed to the surface of Finnish politics in the 2011 parliamentary election, snatching a remarkable 19 per cent of the vote. Its charismatic leader Timo Soini positioned himself on the side of the ordinary man and against corrupt elites. Referring to ethno nationalism and Christian social values, Soini emphasized Finnishness and the need to protect the national culture from being contaminated by immigrants and other foreign influences. The Party’s surge to the forefront of Finnish politics has fundamentally turned the political discourse in Finland towards a more nationalist direction. In order to gain a fuller understanding of the drivers behind this growth of Finnish populism, it is necessary to examine Finland’s recent history.

A sense of suffering

Traditionally, Finnish society was split on a double axis: urban and rural, landowners and peasants. Through history, it was the bloodiest area in the Nordic region. The Finnish national identity, including a sense of common suffering, was at least partly defined by being locked between powerful and often aggressive neighbours, Sweden and Russia, who repeatedly took turns in dominating Suomi, the Finnish heartland. Nationalistic movements grew strong in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, though it was rather a by-product of the Bolshevik revolution, Finland finally won its independence in 1917. Authoritarian movements soon emerged; for example, the nationalist Lapua movement. Nationalist sentiments were growing fast in the interwar years, but this was also a period of internal conflict, spurring into a full-blown Civil War between authoritarian Nationalists and Social Democratic groups.

Surviving under constant threat from its eastern neighbour, Finland aligned with Germany for a period in the Second World War. Tensions on the Finnish–Soviet border also grew leading up to the Second World War, breaking into the Winter War between the two in autumn 1939. After showing surprising fighting resilience, Finland had still lost 12 per cent of their land in the war in Karelia. When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, the Finns fought alongside them, in what is referred to as the Continuation War, in an attempt to regain lost territories in Karelia. They were beaten back by the Soviets once again three years later and devastated by repeated conflicts. Over the course of these repeated and prolonged conflicts a militaristic mentality developed in Finland, still evident in contemporary life.

Finland emerged humbled from the war, surely with a sense of suffering but also one of perseverance. The country was not only in dire straits economically but also firmly within the sphere of strategic influence of the Soviet Union. Finnish diplomacy revolved around appeasing their powerful eastern neighbour. The geopolitical balancing act, of constructing a Nordic liberal marked orientated welfare state while appeasing the Soviets, paid off, and Finland became a prosperous Nordic state. Crisis, however, hit once again in 1990 when the Scandinavian banking crisis coincided with loss of markets in the East when the Soviet Union dissolved in the wake of collapse of communism.

Still, Finland emerged from the crisis with a growing self-confidence in international affairs, not only by joining the EU but also by adopting the Euro and seeking a core position with the EU. Finland was a homogeneous country with a low level of immigration. Right-wing nationalist populist politics were thus not prominent in the latter half of the twentieth century. Still, agrarian populist versions existed since the 1960s with a noteworthy support. Right-wing populist parties like those that emerged in Denmark and Norway did not, however, gain much popular support until after the Euro crisis hit in 2009.

The Finnish Agrarian Party

Although nationalist extreme-right politics similar to those on the European continent only became prominent in Finland with the surge of the True Finns party in the new millennium, agrarian populism had been present in Finnish politics ever since the beginning of the 1960s. The Finnish Agrarian Party (Suomen Maasedun Puolue – SMP) established in 1959 was founded in opposition to the urban elite and claimed to speak on behalf of the common man in rural Finland, those that they referred to as the ‘forgotten people’ (unohdetun kansa) in town and country, against the detached ruling class in the urban south.

The SMP exploited the centre-periphery divide in Finland. Its greatest electoral success came in 1970, 1972 and in 1983 when the party won approximately a tenth of the vote each time. Their main appeal was with rural workers and the unemployed, who felt alienated in the fast moving post-war society. In a rapid social structural change, Finland was transformed from being predominantly agricultural to a high-tech communication-based society. The SMP ran into serious financial difficulty and a new nationalist populist party, the True Finns Party, absorbed its remains in 1995. In 2011, the party’s English name was shortened to the Finns Party.

Timo Soini and the True Finns

In 1997 the charismatic Timo Soini took the helm of the True Finns Party. Soon, the party found increased support, rising from 1.6 per cent in the 2003 parliamentary election to 4.1 per cent in 2007. It was, though, only in wake of the international financial crisis, that the party surged, winning 19.1 per cent of the vote in the 2011 parliamentary election and becoming the third largest party in the country, behind only the right-of-centre conservative National Coalition Party (NCP) and the Social Democrats (SDP). This was also referred to as the ‘change election’ or the ‘big bomb’, when Finnish politics, to a significant degree, came to revolve around the Finns Party and its populist politics.

The party had increased its vote five fold since the 2007 election, adding full 15 percentage points, which was the biggest ever increase of a party between elections in the Eduskunta, the Finnish Parliament. Its initial rise had, however, started two years earlier, in the European Parliament election of 2009, when the True Finns grabbed 9.8 per cent of the vote. In 2015 the party saw only limited decline in its support, clearly reaffirming its strong position in Finnish politics, and entering coalition government for the first time.

Previously, the True Finns had been widely dismissed as a joke, a harmless protest movement, and a nuisance on the fringe of Finnish politics. Their discourse was aggressive and rude and the media mostly only saw entertainment value in them. After the 2011 election, however, it had surely become a force to be reckoned with. During the election campaign, they had clashed with the mainstream parties and called for ending of the one-truth cosy consensus politics of the established three parties. The Finns Party had now become a forceful channel for the underclass.

Contrarily to most similar parties elsewhere, the Finns Party accepted being branded as populist. Soini, however, refused to accept that his party was extreme-right. Contrary to the progressive parties of Denmark and Norway, the Finnish populists never flirted with neo-liberal economic policies. Rather, the Finns Party inherited the centrist economic policy of the SMP. Its right wing populism was thus never socio-economic, but rather socio-cultural.

Three themes emerged as the main political platform of the Finns Party:

• First to resurrect the ‘forgotten people’, the ordinary man, to prominence and speaking in their name against the elite;
• second, to fight against immigration and multiculturalism;
• thirdly, to stem the Europeanization of Finland.

The forgotten people

Finland has been historically prone to polarization; for example between East/West; Socialism/Nationalism; Urban-rich/Rural-poor; Cosmopolitan/Local. Building on the SMP’s politics, the Finns Party kept exploiting the centre-periphery divide, effectively exchanging the agrarian focused populism for a more general cultural divide based on a more ethno-nationalist program. Timo Soini, for example, adopted the phrase of the ‘forgotten people’, which refers to the underprivileged ordinary man, which, he argued, the political elite had neglected.

The political elite was continuously presented as corrupt and arrogant, having suppressed the ordinary blue-collar man. Positioning themselves against the urban Helsinki-based cosmopolitan political elite consolidated around the south coast, the Finns Party representatives claimed to speak in the name of the ‘forgotten people’, mainly working in rural areas.

Drawing on traditional Christian values the ‘forgotten people’ were discursively depicted as pure and morally superior to the privileged elite. This sort of moralist stance was widely found in the party’s 2011 election manifesto, including claims of basing their politics on ‘honesty’, ‘fairness’, ‘humaneness’, ‘equality’, ‘respect for work and entrepreneurship’ and ‘spiritual’ concerns.

The Finns Party was also staunchly socially-conservative on matters such as religion, morality, crime, corruption, law and order. It is thus more authoritarian than libertarian. They are surely anti-elite, but not anti-system. Indeed, it firmly supports the Finnish state, its institutions and democratic processes, including keeping the relatively strong powers of the president to name but one example.

Finnish ethno-nationalism

Timo Soini and his followers have offered a clear ethno-nationalist focus, strongly emphasising Finnish national cultural heritage. It was suspicious of Swedish influence, dismissive of the indigenous Sami’s heritage in Suomi – often referred to as Lapps in English – and outright suppressive in regard to the small gypsy population. In a classical populist ‘us’ versus ‘them’ style a running theme of the Finns Party’s disourse was to emphasise Finnishness by distinguishing Finns from others.

The Finns Party promoted patriotism, strength and the unselfishness of the Finnish people and argued that the Finnish miracle should be taught in school in an heroic depiction; that is, how this poor and peripheral country suppressed by expansionist and powerful neighbours was, through internal strength and endurance, able to fight their way from under their oppressors to become a globally recognised nation of progress and wealth.

More radical and outright xenophobic factions have also thrived within the party. Jussi Halla-aho, who became perhaps Finland’s most forceful critic of immigration and multiculturalism, led the anti-immigrant faction. He has referred to Islam as a ‘totalitarian fascist ideology’ and for example wrote on his blog in 2008 that, ‘since rapes will increase in any case [with inflow of immigrants], the appropriate people should be raped: in other words, green-leftist do-gooders and their supporters’ He went on to write that prophet Muhammad was a paedophile and that Islam as a religion sanctified paedophilia.

Many similar examples exist. A well-known party representative, Olli Immonen, for example, posted on Facebook that he was ‘dreaming of a strong, brave nation that will defeat this nightmare called multiculturalism. This ugly bubble that our enemies live in, will soon enough burst into a million little’.

Many other prominent populist and extreme-right associations also existed in Finland, some including semi-fascist groupings. Indeed, a few MP’s of the Finns Party belonged to the xenophobic organisation Suomen Sisu. In early 2016, in wake of the refugee crisis hitting Europe, mainly from Syria, a group calling themselves Soldiers of Odin took to patrolling the street of several Finnish towns. Dressed in black jackets, decorated with Viking symbolism and the Finnish flag, they claimed to be protecting native Finns from potential violent acts of the foreigners.

Riding the Euro-crisis

Finns Party’s rise was helped significantly by their opposition to the EU and the European Central Bank, who seemed powerless in dealing with the Euro-crisis. They depicted the EU as unworkable and claiming that democracy cannot work in the context of supranational EU governance, and that it favoured elites over ordinary citizens in the European countries. There was a clear demand for a EU critical party, a void the Finns Party was happy to fill because the mainstream parties then held a pro-EU stance.

Leading up to the 2011 elections he Finns Party turned opposition to bailouts for debt-ridden Euro countries into their main issue. That also helped in securing good results in European Parliament elections in 2014, after which they joined the radical-right European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) in the EP.

After coming into government in 2015 the Finns Party found diminished support in opinion polls. Still, their influence had steadily grown and they had found much greater acceptance than before. They clearly led in the growing anti-EU discourse in the country. Soon, many of the previously pro-EU mainstream parties began to adopt their anti-EU rhetoric, and some, subsequently, also became increasingly anti-immigrant.

Eirikur Bergmann is Professor of Politics at Bifrost University in Iceland and Visiting Professor at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. He is furthermore Director of the Centre for European Studies in Iceland. Professor Bergmann writes mainly on Nationalism, Populism, European Integration, Icelandic Politics and on Participatory Democracy. He has also written two novels which are published in Icelandic.

China’s increased involvement in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping in Africa reflects a broader trend of the country taking a more proactive approach to foreign policy.

In December 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping stated that “[China] will proactively push forward the construction of a global network of partners and will proactively push for political solutions for international hot issues and difficult problems”. While this policy began under the presidency of Hu Jintao, the level of Chinese involvement has grown rapidly under the Xi administration. China’s increased involvement in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping is one clear example of this proactive policy. In 2015, President Xi promised to make 8,000 troops available to the UN, and he also offered to help train 2,000 peacekeepers from other countries.

China is now among the world’s top 12 largest contributors of troops, and of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, China is now the biggest contributor of peacekeepers. Most of China’s increased activity in peacekeeping in 2017 took place in Africa. China had more than 2,400 Chinese troops take part in seven UN peacekeeping missions across the continent –most notably in Mali and South Sudan. China has a long history of providing military assistance to Africa, and the continent remains the destination for much of China’s military assistance today. A notable development has been the training and support of African peacekeepers. For example, China provided military assistance to Burundian and Ugandan peacekeepers in Somalia in 2008. China has also made offers to equip African peacekeepers.

The drivers behind China’s increased peacekeeping involvement

There are many commonly suggested reasons for China’s increased involvement in peacekeeping in Africa which include: protecting China’s assets and diaspora across the continent, giving Chinese troops combat experience and increasing Chinese soft power in the region. While there may be an element of truth to each, most of these possible drivers fail to apply to all cases of Chinese involvement in peacekeeping in Africa. For example, in Mali, where Chinese peacekeepers were part of a UN mission which started in 2013, China has a relatively small economic footprint and there is only a small Chinese community in the west African country. What is clear is that China’s involvement in peacekeeping in Africa is part of a national branding strategy which is aimed at both global and domestic audiences. This strategy is deployed through two interlinking national narratives – that of the responsible great power and the leader of the developing world.

The expanding role of Chinese peacekeeping in Africa aligns with China’s foreign policy goal to project itself as a responsible great power. Becoming a responsible great power is part of China’s stated policy of a “peaceful development,” which is China’s attempt to reduce fears that China will challenge Western dominance of the current system of global governance. Playing a greater role in peacekeeping is part of this role and is a clear example of China’s attempts to increase its involvement in global affairs within the current system and often in partnership with established actors.

In Africa, China’s attempts to project itself as a responsible great power meets another of China’s national narratives – that of China as the leader of the developing world, a nation that stands in brotherhood with other developing states. Within this narrative, China’s actions in Africa are undertaken in the spirit of South-South cooperation whereby African states are equal partners within the process and are encouraged to find their own paths to solving issues. In terms of Chinese peacekeeping in Africa, this narrative has affected how China shapes its overall security approach in three ways.

First, as a developing state itself, China is aware that due to a lack of capacity in their economic systems, developing states are more open to structural shocks, which affects the production of food and water. In Africa, China has adopted a comprehensive, integrated security approach to its peacekeeping missions that moves beyond just traditional security. This has meant that China’s peacekeeping missions also focus on non-traditional security threats, such as water and food insecurity, to build peace in an area of conflict. China often sends technicians and engineers to help rebuild water and agricultural infrastructures, as water and food insecurity plays a part in the overall development of a conflict.

Second, China also focuses on the long-term economic development of African states in conflict, as poverty is seen as another major driver of conflict. China has increased investment and development aid in African states, which brings much needed jobs and infrastructure projects to the continent. In particular, the One Belt One Road initiative attempts to improve African transport infrastructures by integrating markets across the continent and with the rest of the world. This could lead to greater economic development by reducing poverty and, therefore, conflict.

Finally, the spirit of South-South cooperation requires China to support other states in finding solutions to their problems. For this reason, China supports African-led responses to conflict in the region, including African Union–led peacekeeping missions, which tend to be undermanned, under-trained, and under-resourced. China offers training, equipment and financial aid to the African Union (AU), as well as to other regional bodies. China has also worked with other actors to support their efforts in building capacity among African states to send peacekeepers. For instance, China supported the EU training program for Malian troops. Beyond providing material support for African regional bodies in peacekeeping, China has also looked to these bodies to be the final decision makers in determining military interventions on the continent. This has given African regional bodies greater ownership of these missions, which should, in theory, increase the possibility of these missions succeeding in their objectives.

Conclusion

While there may be more material drivers behind China’s increased involvement in peacekeeping in Africa, these two national narratives – that of the responsible great power and the leader of the developing world – have shaped how China develops its role within peacekeeping, creating limitations to China’s actions. These narratives will therefore shape China’s role in peacekeeping in Africa in the future.

Dr. Niall Duggan is a lecturer in international relations at the Department of Government and Politics at University College Cork. He is also the director of the MSc International Public Policy & Diplomacy. His latest publications include ‘The People’s Republic of China and European Union Security Cooperation in Africa: Sino-EU Security Cooperation in Mali and the Gulf of Aden’. International Journal of China Studies, and’China’s New Intervention Policy: China’s Peacekeeping Mission to Mali’ in: Chris Alden, Abiodun Alao, Zhang Chun, Laura Barber (eds). China and Africa: Building Peace and Security Cooperation on the Continent. Basingstoke: Palgr

This article was originally published on openSecurity’s monthly Sustainable Security column on 25th April 2014. Every month, a rotating network of experts from Oxford Research Group’s Sustainable Security programme explore pertinent issues of global and regional insecurity.

If the past 12 months have taught us anything it is that, despite the predictions of many, the potential for conflict between the major powers is still one of the defining characteristics of world politics. From the tensions between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands (with the United States waiting in the wings as ever) to the proxy confrontation between Russia and the US over the future of Ukraine (with its European allies desperately trying not to be forgotten in the diplomatic chest-beating), crisis diplomacy and inter-state rivalry are back on the global agenda.

One of the legacies of the “war on terror” years is that the focus of most organisations and analysts working on the concept of sustainable security—an approach to policy-making which downplays the reaction to immediate symptoms of insecurity in favour of addressing the factors that underlie them—has been on terrorism, insurgency and “non-traditional” security issues. Of late the large-scale trends of climate change and the division of the world between a global elite and a non-elite, combined with resource scarcity and the challenge of paramilitarism, have absorbed most of the focus of those concerned with conflict prevention.

Yet recent events suggest that the sustainable-security framework which NGOs, scholars and policy-makers increasingly deploy in their analyses and prescriptions needs equally to be applied to the traditional “high politics” of relations between the great powers–from geopolitical flashpoints and the politics of crisis diplomacy to the seemingly old-fashioned world of strategic-arms-control negotiations.

The long shadow of Vienna

Although security analysts have spent much of the past two decades concerned with “small” wars and counter-terrorism, inter-state rivalry and great-power politics never went away. Even in Syria, where the brutality of urban-guerrilla warfare and competition between paramilitary factions appear to be defining characteristics, the competing desires of regional and global powers have played a major part in the nature and longevity of the fighting. Moreover, the only serious attempts to end the war have been the multilateral negotiations in which Washington and Moscow have been key players.

Major powers descending on a capital city to sort out—among themselves—the fate of vulnerable individuals caught in cycles of violence is a trope reminiscent of the Concert of Europe meetings in Vienna in 1853 and 1855 on the “eastern question” or even Paris in 1860 on the Syrian revolution. But it is not the only sign that great-power politics is back. So too is the concern over “flashpoints” and the traditional response of crisis diplomacy.

In the East China Sea, Japan and China have been jostling over the remote rocks of what the Japanese call the Senkaku and the Chinese the Diaoyu islands. Those predicting unparalleled eastern economic prosperity in the “Asian century” have become increasingly concerned over the downward spiral in relations between these two north-east Asian (and at least to some extent global) heavyweights.

The announcement of an air-defence identification zone over the islands late last year by China’s increasingly assertive regime, led by Xi Jinping, met an undiplomatic and extremely defensive response from the Abe government in Japan. Tokyo of course looked to its major military ally, the US, to join it in talking tough to Beijing, leading to a tense stalemate in which Japan is scrambling F-15 fighter jets from the Naha airbase in Okinawa almost daily.

If this was not enough of a gold-plated gift to those keen to make historical analogies with the great-power rivalry and security-dilemma dynamics of 1914 and the outbreak of the first world war, the increasing tensions between Russia and the west over influence in Ukraine have created a European crisis to rival the brinkmanship in north-east Asia.

The drama in Ukraine has prompted much talk of a renewed cold war. Moscow’s effective annexation of Crimea, its 40,000 troops along the border and mid-April’s four-way crisis talks among Ukraine, Russia, the US and the EU all reinforce the idea that old-fashioned “power politics” is alive and well.

These two developments, involving two members of the BRICS coalition of rising (or in Russia’s case re-emerging) powers, come against the backdrop of a predicted global power transition and “rise of the rest”. One need not entirely accept Robert Kagan’s argument about the “return of history” to appreciate the importance of new centres of power challenging Washington’s dominance—in economic, diplomatic and, perhaps eventually, even military terms.

Echoing their voting behaviour at the UN Security Council on the intervention in Libya in 2011, all Russia’s BRICS counterparts abstained from the recent UN General Assembly vote denouncing the Crimea referendum (Russia voted against). And when the Australian foreign minister announced that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, might be banned from the G20 summit in Brisbane in November, the foreign ministers of the BRICS released a dissenting statement.

All this makes predictions of a world without inter-state rivalry—even a “nonpolar” world—more than a little premature. The task then is to think through what a sustainable-security approach can highlight, as diagnosis and prescription, for the seemingly inescapable world of great-power politics.

Militarisation, flashpoints, brinkmanship

A number of drivers of global insecurity stand out. First, the specific nature of great-power politics can create the conditions for crisis and instability. (And of course one could argue that the distinction between great and lesser powers itself helps to marginalise the views of most of the world’s population and is therefore a driver of insecurity.)

In his classic 1977 work on the social foundations of international order, the late international-relations scholar Hedley Bull argued that a degree of order could be provided by the great powers, but only if these states balanced their “special rights” with the concomitant “special responsibility” to manage their relations with each other peacefully and avoid crises. The art of great-power management appears lost on the current leaders in Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow and Washington—and this makes for dangerous times.

The drama in Ukraine has prompted much talk of a renewed cold war.

Secondly, existing work on sustainable security already provides some clear guidance on the drivers of inter-state insecurity through a focus on militarisation. Trends in arms transfers and spending are worrying when combined with a move away from a western-dominated world.

Recent research from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute concluded: “The increase in military spending in emerging and developing countries continues unabated.” Although global spending on arms fell by 1.9 per cent in real terms last year, China and Russia’s spending increased by 7.4 and 4.8 per cent respectively and the US, Russia and China were three of the five largest spenders. Not only are the leaderships of the major powers neglecting their great-power responsibilities—they are also upping their spending on the means to turn a crisis into deadly warfare.

Such spending raises the stakes in any crisis situation and makes such crises more likely by diminishing trust and souring diplomatic relations. There is little doubt that the controversial US missile-defence and Prompt Global Strike programmes have helped give the Russians the impression of being backed into a corner and made the already difficult Sino-Japanese relationship even more fraught.

Broadening the sustainable-security approach

And what policy priorities follow if these underlying drivers of insecurity are to be addressed? The first is demilitarisation, beyond the human-security/small-arms agenda.

In recent years significant gains have been made in the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants in war zones and on security-sector reform, as well as the eventual conclusion of the Arms Trade Treaty. The same cannot however be said of large-scale strategic weaponry. The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty risks being seriously undermined by the glacial progress of the P5 states in living up to their article VI obligations on disarmament. And the chances of serious headway on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty are slim at best.

The ultimately futile trend towards trying to achieve security via superiority in strategic conventional weapons (as well as armed drones), rather than the much harder task of trust-building, is only making matters worse. A renewed effort to negotiate long-term, sustainable, strategic arms control is needed to reverse this trend, no matter how difficult immediate progress will be.

The second priority is to move beyond crisis diplomacy in the major interactions between the great powers. By definition reactive rather than preventive, this can only ever provide limited opportunities to address the root causes of mistrust and insecurity between states.

While a far from perfect arrangement—questions of justice were frequently overlooked in a quest instead for “order”—the regular meetings of the Concert of Europe powers throughout most of the 19th century could provide some inspiration. This arrangement did have a clear sense of the purpose of being a great power: it was not just a privileged position in the hierarchy of states but carried a responsibility to manage relations with other major powers in ways that avoided, where possible, the downward spiral of military brinkmanship. This unavoidably involves a willingness to consider the world from the position of one’s adversary and to take seriously the perceptions and worldviews of one’s peers, even when disagreeing with them.

Yet breaking the moulds of entrenched diplomatic practice will not be easy. As the diplomat-turned-scholar E.H. Carr remarked over 70 years ago, “The bureaucrat, perhaps more explicitly than any other class of the community, is bound up with the existing order, the maintenance of tradition, and the acceptance of precedence as the ‘safe’ criterion of action.” The task seems so enormous as to be overwhelming.

But if policy-makers, analysts and civil-society actors are to come up with ways of reversing the trend towards an increasingly competitive, militarised and crisis-driven inter-state order, thinking through the implications of a sustainable-security approach to great-power politics is the most useful path to follow.

Benjamin Zala is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester, UK and an Advisor to the Sustainable Security Programme at the Oxford Research Group. He is on Twitter at @DrBeeZee