The protocol of the new right
COLUMN
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By Antti Blåfield
Georg Ehrnrooth, Chairman of the Finnish Business and Policy Forum (EVA), was clearly stumped on Tuesday as he opened an event presenting a report on how Finland is to succeed. The report was drafted by Tapani Ruokanen, editor-in-chief of the news magazine Suomen Kuvalehti. The room - the former Adams cinema - was packed full. An impressive sampling of major figures in Finnish business were summoned to the event, but even if there had been no invitations, the crowd would have been quite sufficient. The air was thick with the expectation of change.
Although Hannu Savola, editor-in-chief of the late-edition tabloid Ilta-Sanomat, dismissed the EVA report as a "collection of platitudes" in the paper’s Wednesday edition, the book is anything but that. The turns of phrase may be soft, but the core idea of the book is that the Finnish business community is serving notice that a change is needed. Taxation must change, incomes policy must change, education must change, public services must change, income transfer policy must change. Talk about a welfare state must stop.
Finnish business has made its political declaration public. At a quick glance, the EVA report may seem platitudinous, but it is a protocol, which business leaders will follow in the future in their words and their actions.
The message of the business leaders is that nationality and the nation-state are no longer limitations. Enterprises have been set up to produce value-added for their owners. Earlier profits could be made by being a buddy to the president. Now the rules of the game are different. There is a constant competition for the best minds, and the location of the markets and the cost level are increasingly important aspects from the point of view of production.
The message from the business community is that companies cannot take responsibility for Finland - it is the Finns themselves who must do that.
Previously national feeling was a propaganda tool of the political right and the management side of industry. Now national feelings have been usurped by the left for its own purposes.
When the manager of a big corporation ponders in his management team whether or not nation-states have any meaning any more, commentators on the left invoke the national poet J.L. Runeberg and the spirit of the Winter War.
From the corporate managers’ point of view, there is no point in appealing to what is old. Patriotic language is used quite sparingly in the EVA report. In fact, the report actually turns its back on the traditional spiritual roots of the political right.
"The roots of Finnish anti-business sentiments can be found in the Fennoman movement. According to the ideology of J.V. Snellman, the strength of a nation is in education and community. It must not be violated by greed and selfish promotion of interests. Civic duties come before civic rights", writes historian Kalle Michelsen in an article appended to the report.
In so doing the business community is questioning the basic myths of Finnishness - the myths on which the national identity has been built throughout the time of Finnish independence. A new right is becoming stronger in Finland, whose starting points are international, and opposing it is a new kind of left, which leans on traditional national feeling. In this situation, the traditional party of the right, the National Coalition Party, faces a difficult choice.
The Young Finns party, which lived for a few years in the 1990s, promoted the ideas of the new right, but still at that time the most important corporate leaders were silent.
The vim and vigour of the new right derive from international experience and domestic frustration.
When regulation was dismantled and foreign investors became owners of Finnish companies, the companies also linked into the web of international interaction, which has very little to do with the Finnish atmosphere of debate and our historical experience.
Corporate managers had to explain the logic of their own actions to new, faceless owners, and to clients that were constantly growing in size, for whom the quality of the products of the Finnish company was a given, and for whom price is the only competitive factor.
International experience and Finnish debate might as well be from different planets. When companies started introducing systems of incentives according to international practice, here in Finland there were complaints of greed, and when production was transferred to where the markets were, there were condemnations of a lack of social responsibility.
It was the experience of corporate managers that their demands to improve the preconditions for enterprise were shrugged off. The concept of a welfare state became a shield for the Finnish political system, and for globalised companies it became an excuse for politicians not to react to pressures for change.
Although Finland has been linked solidly as a part of Western Europe, our internal debate has remained very national, as if the rest of the world were real only in foreign news stories - and naturally, they do not apply to us.
On Tuesday last week at the latest Finland’s internal debate became a pan-European competition. In the future there will be no need to dismiss statements of the business community as platitudes. Talk will become tougher. Politics is to make a comeback in business life - and in politics.
It will be interesting to see what the reaction of individual large firms will be in this arm-wrestling. Will the companies hold job auctions, as large German companies have done? How many corporations will move their head offices out of Finland?
For companies, abandoning the home country is not an insignificant matter, because it is ultimately through its domicile that a company defines its own operating principles - its values. And even though it is easy to smirk at the value programmes of the companies, a clear foundation of values is the backbone of a successful corporation. Finland is still the homeland.
Perhaps this is why corporate managers are in such a frenzy, even though their choices of words are polite.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 7.10.2004
ANTTI BLÅFIELD / Helsingin Sanomat
antti.blafield@hs.fi
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| 12.10.2004 - THIS WEEK |
 The protocol of the new right |
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