Some kind of Solution: Estonia, Finland and the Enlargement
"No longer a poor cousin awed"
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Estonia's former Foreign Minister Toomas Hendrik Ilves believes EU enlargement can bring to an end an awkward period in the relationship between the two neighbours across the Gulf of Finland.
At the end of World War II, a Finn visiting Sweden felt uncomfortable and resentful, like an impoverished and shabby country cousin invited into the house of a rich and sophisticated relative, yet at the same time looked down on his host with the peculiar sense of superiority that those who have suffered and survived feel toward their more fortunate neighbours.
Max Jakobson, Finland in the New Europe, 1998.
Replace “World War II” with “The Cold War”, “Finn” with “Estonian”, and “Sweden” with “Finland” and you discover that the Grand Old Man of Finnish foreign policy has captured perfectly the complexity of Estonian-Finnish relations. It is a highly ambivalent relationship, infused with respect and envy, arrogance and patronisation, genuine awe, and unthinking blindness and carelessness.
Finland for Estonians has been the benchmark of success, a country by which Estonians measure and prove their own performance. I sometimes wonder if our neighbour were a less successful EU member (poorer, more corrupt, less hi-tech) whether we ourselves would be as successful as we have been, as wired and Western-looking, indeed less corrupt than a number of older EU members.
Our relationship has long been asymmetrical, though not always as thought. Until the 19th Century national awakenings, it was Estonia that was richer, more European, as a comparison of our urban architectures attests to.
Yet Estonia endured centuries of serfdom, while Finland never did. Finland’s preferential position as a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire bequeathed her a head-start in democratisation and modernisation. Although by the eve of World War II Estonians had managed again to achieve rough parity with Finns in economic development, the subsequent brutalization of Estonia by Soviet rule for the next half century meant we re-established independence lagging behind Finland far more than we had ever before in our previously roughly parallel Finno-Ugric histories.
From the 1960s, Finland was occupied Estonia’s window to the West: we watched Finnish television, saw such things as democratic elections (!), realised that Lech Walesa had a moustache (his picture was forbidden), and from bad American television shows like Dallas we came to believe that people in the West lived like JR.
Estonians came to speak Finnish to a degree that Tallinn has become the second largest city in the world where a Finn can get by in his native language. And in the meantime, along with Finns, we acquired a level of English language knowledge that to this day ranks as the highest in Eastern Europe.
But Estonia also offered something to Finland: someone to feel superior to, better than - a chance to be play for once the onetime Swede to the onetime Finn.
Even a relatively poor Finn in the 1990s could feel like a master in Estonia, a member of the Herrenvolk. Good social democrats from Helsinki were transformed south of the Gulf into caricatures of 19th Century colonials, behaving in ways they never could in the homeland.
There was meanness, too: the Finnish tabloid press invariably painted Estonians as criminals and prostitutes. Boorish vodka tourists in Tallinn created the stereotype of the Finnish poro.
Sometimes even the broadest bounds of taste were breached: the initial reaction to the Estonia ferry disaster, before any investigation, was to blame the Estonians. The criminal sought for the brutal murder of two Helsinki policemen was described as “looking like an Estonian”, but in fact turned out to be a Dane skipping out on his prison vacation.
But Estonia also offered the chance to achieve a kind of satori, to do good on the cheap, and feel in a Finno-Ugric kind of way the proverbial “there but for the grace of God go I". Fifteen years ago a packet of coffee or a pair of pantihose given to an Estonian guaranteed devotion and gratitude.
Psychologically the donor feels magnanimous but curiously contemptuous: you know better than they do, you are better than they are. This can lead to self-righteousness and haughtiness.
The 19th Century “White Man’s Burden” of Rudyard Kipling had, by the end of the 20th Century, become politically unacceptable when applied to Africans and Asians. And yet ...fluttered folk and wild / Your new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child was precisely how Estonians were viewed in the post-Cold War era.
We were lectured to, told we should be like Finns and take a second state language, forgetting that Swedes had been in Finland for 900 years and Russians in Estonia for just 45, replacing the quarter of our population killed, deported, or exiled in World War II.
When I was Estonian Ambassador to Washington, a Finnish colleague once put his hand on my shoulder and said: “Tom, you Estonians should learn to deal with the Russians the way we do. We Finns have so much experience with the Russians”. To which I could only reply: “Yes, we Estonians have no experience with the Russians”.
What divides us most is the period from WWII until the end of the Cold War (and the YYA Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance that coloured that era).
The Finns fought the Soviets, were abandoned by the West, and reached an accommodation with their Eastern neighbour that allowed Finland to prosper. The Estonian government in 1940 failed to stand up to the Soviets, and although we fought a bitter partisan war into the 1950s, we lived through a traumatising occupation and never reached an accommodation.
Finns are rightly proud of fighting to maintain independence and believe in their neutrality. Estonians regret not fighting in 1940 and believe that NATO is the only way to guarantee our independence. These differing solutions are not incompatible, except in the odd case, as when for example President Mauno Koivisto said in 1991 that it was not in Finland’s interest that Estonia become independent.
In other words, we are alike but our solutions are different. Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with the words “All happy families are alike”, but happy families often think everyone else wants and ought to be like them.
Europeans find grating America’s insistence on its superiority, along with its failure to understand that Europeans might think their own model of success is one to emulate. Similarly, Nordic countries often fail to grasp why, with the self-evident superiority of their social welfare model, the Estonians do not try harder to be like them. They perhaps fail to understand that we have opted for different solutions.
Many Estonians (though I do not include myself among them) are convinced that success lies in low taxes and an American-style social system. Each thinks it needs to teach the other how to do things “right”. Each is convinced it has found the solution.
From May 1st, we shall both change, a little at first, then more. As will our solutions.
Visiting Finland, Estonians will stand taller, prouder. Finns who visit Estonia will be perhaps discomfited that this land, too, is the European Union, that the Estonian is longer a poor cousin awed, neither a supplicant nor someone to teach. Different, yes, but no less European.
There will be excesses: some Estonians will recall earlier slights or patronising remarks, some Finns will sometimes forget that in the Union all - rich and poor alike - are Europeans. Both will have to learn new forms of behaviour toward the other.
There will be other difficulties. Estonians will learn that being equal means also that you are a competitor, that equality of opportunity means in addition that you no longer have excuses for your failures. Paradoxically, being in the Union means being on your own. In other words the old symbiotic solutions will no longer work.
Estonia and Finland will indeed become competitors, just as Sweden and Finland did as they grew out of their own asymmetric relationship. Yet we will become closer. No unequal relationship can ever be healthy: inequality breeds mistrust, it poisons us.
We shall discover the bond of mutual recognition that comes when we are on an equal footing in Brussels. We will know each other as the ones who show up precisely at the stated meeting times, we will discover that we both abhor superfluous rhetoric. We will discover that our linguistic ties are a common ship on a sea of Indo-European languages.
But first we must dispense with our fears and our anxieties, our hurts and our distrust, our asymmetries of belief.
The great 20th Century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy has a poem called Waiting for the Barbarians, in which he describes an imperial citizenry awaiting the arrival in their city of the long-dreaded Barbarians.
It is a poem of Europe on the eve of the Enlargement. The Barbarians are coming, and Consuls of the Empire put on their dazzling jewellery, because Barbarians are said to like sparkling baubles. But the imperial orators are silent, because Barbarians are said to be bored with rhetoric and eloquence.
Cavafy ends his verse:
Why all of a sudden this unrest and confusion?
(How solemn the faces have become).
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
And all return to their homes, so deep in thought?
Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
And said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.
We Estonians, too, have been “some kind of solution”. But now the problems are new, and so too must be our solutions. I trust after May 1st the Estonians and the Finns will find those solutions together.
Toomas Hendrik Ilves
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 1.5.2004
At the end of World War II, a Finn visiting Sweden felt uncomfortable and resentful, like an impoverished and shabby country cousin invited into the house of a rich and sophisticated relative, yet at the same time looked down on his host with the peculiar sense of superiority that those who have suffered and survived feel toward their more fortunate neighbours.
Max Jakobson, Finland in the New Europe, 1998.
Replace “World War II” with “The Cold War”, “Finn” with “Estonian”, and “Sweden” with “Finland” and you discover that the Grand Old Man of Finnish foreign policy has captured perfectly the complexity of Estonian-Finnish relations. It is a highly ambivalent relationship, infused with respect and envy, arrogance and patronisation, genuine awe, and unthinking blindness and carelessness.
Finland for Estonians has been the benchmark of success, a country by which Estonians measure and prove their own performance. I sometimes wonder if our neighbour were a less successful EU member (poorer, more corrupt, less hi-tech) whether we ourselves would be as successful as we have been, as wired and Western-looking, indeed less corrupt than a number of older EU members.
Our relationship has long been asymmetrical, though not always as thought. Until the 19th Century national awakenings, it was Estonia that was richer, more European, as a comparison of our urban architectures attests to.
Yet Estonia endured centuries of serfdom, while Finland never did. Finland’s preferential position as a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire bequeathed her a head-start in democratisation and modernisation. Although by the eve of World War II Estonians had managed again to achieve rough parity with Finns in economic development, the subsequent brutalization of Estonia by Soviet rule for the next half century meant we re-established independence lagging behind Finland far more than we had ever before in our previously roughly parallel Finno-Ugric histories.
From the 1960s, Finland was occupied Estonia’s window to the West: we watched Finnish television, saw such things as democratic elections (!), realised that Lech Walesa had a moustache (his picture was forbidden), and from bad American television shows like Dallas we came to believe that people in the West lived like JR.
Estonians came to speak Finnish to a degree that Tallinn has become the second largest city in the world where a Finn can get by in his native language. And in the meantime, along with Finns, we acquired a level of English language knowledge that to this day ranks as the highest in Eastern Europe.
But Estonia also offered something to Finland: someone to feel superior to, better than - a chance to be play for once the onetime Swede to the onetime Finn.
Even a relatively poor Finn in the 1990s could feel like a master in Estonia, a member of the Herrenvolk. Good social democrats from Helsinki were transformed south of the Gulf into caricatures of 19th Century colonials, behaving in ways they never could in the homeland.
There was meanness, too: the Finnish tabloid press invariably painted Estonians as criminals and prostitutes. Boorish vodka tourists in Tallinn created the stereotype of the Finnish poro.
Sometimes even the broadest bounds of taste were breached: the initial reaction to the Estonia ferry disaster, before any investigation, was to blame the Estonians. The criminal sought for the brutal murder of two Helsinki policemen was described as “looking like an Estonian”, but in fact turned out to be a Dane skipping out on his prison vacation.
But Estonia also offered the chance to achieve a kind of satori, to do good on the cheap, and feel in a Finno-Ugric kind of way the proverbial “there but for the grace of God go I". Fifteen years ago a packet of coffee or a pair of pantihose given to an Estonian guaranteed devotion and gratitude.
Psychologically the donor feels magnanimous but curiously contemptuous: you know better than they do, you are better than they are. This can lead to self-righteousness and haughtiness.
The 19th Century “White Man’s Burden” of Rudyard Kipling had, by the end of the 20th Century, become politically unacceptable when applied to Africans and Asians. And yet ...fluttered folk and wild / Your new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child was precisely how Estonians were viewed in the post-Cold War era.
We were lectured to, told we should be like Finns and take a second state language, forgetting that Swedes had been in Finland for 900 years and Russians in Estonia for just 45, replacing the quarter of our population killed, deported, or exiled in World War II.
When I was Estonian Ambassador to Washington, a Finnish colleague once put his hand on my shoulder and said: “Tom, you Estonians should learn to deal with the Russians the way we do. We Finns have so much experience with the Russians”. To which I could only reply: “Yes, we Estonians have no experience with the Russians”.
What divides us most is the period from WWII until the end of the Cold War (and the YYA Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance that coloured that era).
The Finns fought the Soviets, were abandoned by the West, and reached an accommodation with their Eastern neighbour that allowed Finland to prosper. The Estonian government in 1940 failed to stand up to the Soviets, and although we fought a bitter partisan war into the 1950s, we lived through a traumatising occupation and never reached an accommodation.
Finns are rightly proud of fighting to maintain independence and believe in their neutrality. Estonians regret not fighting in 1940 and believe that NATO is the only way to guarantee our independence. These differing solutions are not incompatible, except in the odd case, as when for example President Mauno Koivisto said in 1991 that it was not in Finland’s interest that Estonia become independent.
In other words, we are alike but our solutions are different. Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with the words “All happy families are alike”, but happy families often think everyone else wants and ought to be like them.
Europeans find grating America’s insistence on its superiority, along with its failure to understand that Europeans might think their own model of success is one to emulate. Similarly, Nordic countries often fail to grasp why, with the self-evident superiority of their social welfare model, the Estonians do not try harder to be like them. They perhaps fail to understand that we have opted for different solutions.
Many Estonians (though I do not include myself among them) are convinced that success lies in low taxes and an American-style social system. Each thinks it needs to teach the other how to do things “right”. Each is convinced it has found the solution.
From May 1st, we shall both change, a little at first, then more. As will our solutions.
Visiting Finland, Estonians will stand taller, prouder. Finns who visit Estonia will be perhaps discomfited that this land, too, is the European Union, that the Estonian is longer a poor cousin awed, neither a supplicant nor someone to teach. Different, yes, but no less European.
There will be excesses: some Estonians will recall earlier slights or patronising remarks, some Finns will sometimes forget that in the Union all - rich and poor alike - are Europeans. Both will have to learn new forms of behaviour toward the other.
There will be other difficulties. Estonians will learn that being equal means also that you are a competitor, that equality of opportunity means in addition that you no longer have excuses for your failures. Paradoxically, being in the Union means being on your own. In other words the old symbiotic solutions will no longer work.
Estonia and Finland will indeed become competitors, just as Sweden and Finland did as they grew out of their own asymmetric relationship. Yet we will become closer. No unequal relationship can ever be healthy: inequality breeds mistrust, it poisons us.
We shall discover the bond of mutual recognition that comes when we are on an equal footing in Brussels. We will know each other as the ones who show up precisely at the stated meeting times, we will discover that we both abhor superfluous rhetoric. We will discover that our linguistic ties are a common ship on a sea of Indo-European languages.
But first we must dispense with our fears and our anxieties, our hurts and our distrust, our asymmetries of belief.
The great 20th Century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy has a poem called Waiting for the Barbarians, in which he describes an imperial citizenry awaiting the arrival in their city of the long-dreaded Barbarians.
It is a poem of Europe on the eve of the Enlargement. The Barbarians are coming, and Consuls of the Empire put on their dazzling jewellery, because Barbarians are said to like sparkling baubles. But the imperial orators are silent, because Barbarians are said to be bored with rhetoric and eloquence.
Cavafy ends his verse:
Why all of a sudden this unrest and confusion?
(How solemn the faces have become).
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
And all return to their homes, so deep in thought?
Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
And said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.
We Estonians, too, have been “some kind of solution”. But now the problems are new, and so too must be our solutions. I trust after May 1st the Estonians and the Finns will find those solutions together.
Toomas Hendrik Ilves
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 1.5.2004
Helsingin Sanomat