Do you genuinely want to be Finnish? Answer and win!
COLUMN
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By Paavo Rautio Europe's leaders are between a wall and a hard place. The birth rate in Europe as a whole is low-to-alarming, and the population is rapidly ageing. This means that the workforce is shrinking and the demographic dependency ratio is going downhill: those at work and those employing them have more and more fellow-Europeans to support.
So, where's the answer coming from?
For many European countries, the basis for growth has been in immigration. Finland served as Sweden's manpower reserve, France gathered people in from its former colonies and overseas departments, and the Turks built Germany.
However... immigration and the increasing of it is politically a very sensitive subject indeed these days. The toppling of the Twin Towers in New York City, the riots over those Muhammad cartoons, the murder of maverick Dutch film director Theo van Gogh, honour killings, and last July's London bombings have fused together in the West into a vague but commonly-held fear of foreign cultures and the culture-clash.
Above all, what is feared is Islam - the cultural sphere from which labour would be available in the largest numbers for a stretched West.
Fear and the ageing population in the West are beginning to forge an alliance.
The greater the share of the population that heads into retirement, the more likely it is that the extreme right and xenophobia will swell in power.
This trend has already begun in several European countries. In the future, therefore, it will become increasingly difficult to play the immigration card in order to find solutions to pressing manpower shortages.
Now the EU members are poring over a kind of compromise solution - selective immigration. France has been particularly active in this regard, because the country has a significant and powerful community of people from immigrant backgrounds who have not become Gallified or otherwise integrated into the society.
The big EU countries have been shaping out some sort of commitment compact with immigrants. The aim is that the newcomers would be "decent citizens" - people who would commit themselves to Western values from the moment of their arrival in the host country.
The problem lies in exactly how this "vow of allegiance" should be handled. At its simplest, it means a kind of Do You Want To Be A Millionaire? game-show. When you answer the questions correctly, you get to stay. If you do not answer right, then your fate is unclear.
In Germany, a couple of the statesin the federal republic are already using such tests.
Here are a few selected questions. What does the abbreviation DDR stand for? What happened on November 9th, 1938? [Kristallnacht] What is meant by the right of existence of the Israeli State? Name the major works by Goethe and Schiller.
Some of the questions reveal that they are driven by a primitive psychological attempt to get the immigrant to refresh his or her memory of what is not permitted or acceptable in the West. It is a little reminiscent of the approach used with unruly children in the sand-pit: "Now is it right to grab toys out of someone else's hand like that? Is it?"
Questions in this vein on the German exam-sheet include one about what scope do parents have for determining their children's choice of marriage partner, and what means are illegal in this respect. Or... what would you say to someone who claimed that the Holocaust of European Jewry did not take place? From the question-setting, it is clear that it is Muslims who have been profiled as the respondents.
Holland, too, has adopted its own system. A would-be immigrant is obliged to watch a DVD on Dutch culture and history. It contains for instance a scene where two gay men are holding hands, and another where a topless woman is shown sunbathing.
It is not hard to reach the conclusion that the principle is specifically to tell Muslims that this sort of thing is to be tolerated within Dutch society.
Finland has shown no great interest in arranging quiz-shows, since they are regarded as a populist way to go.
Instead, those who arrive in Finland and want to receive grants and aid for their living, must take part in an acclimatisation programme, learning the Finnish language and culture.
Arguably the Finns have a point: doing well in a multiple-choice test is no guarantee of anything. If racism really does start to grow as the population turns grey, it might well be that Mr. Ahmed, 30, the resident of a Berlin apartment block, knows his Schiller and his Goethe, but that Ahmed's neighbour Günther, 78, knows only a growing dislike and revulsion towards Ahmed.
But if Finland DOES decide it needs something along these lines, the test might emerge as a hybrid of the German and Dutch models.
For example, the immigrant might be ordered to watch a video in which a policeman holds a tired and emotional Finnish May Day reveller by the arm, and a topless Finnish male is shown grilling a meat-free sausage.
Then there could be a decider-question: According to Private Vanhala*, how many Soviet Red Army soldiers does one Finnish soldier correspond to?
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 18.5.2006
*Translator's Note: The answer is 10. Private Vanhala was a character in Väinö Linna's celebrated and twice-filmed war novel Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier). Those not knowing the answer probably need not apply.
PAAVO RAUTIO / Helsingin Sanomat
paavo.rautio@hs.fi
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| 23.5.2006 - THIS WEEK |
 Do you genuinely want to be Finnish? Answer and win!
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