FINLAND HAS BEEN on Europe's periphery, both physically and socially,
for almost all its history. It is still Europe's northernmost country,
with a quarter of its area above the Arctic Circle. By the late 1980s,
however, modern means of communication had substantially reduced its
physical remoteness from the rest of Europe. Modern technology also had
lessened winter's hold on the country. Finns lived comfortably, and they
moved about freely the whole year. In the social realm, Finland had left
its traditional poverty and backwardness behind. Since World War II, it
had become one of the world's most advanced societies. Its citizens
enjoyed prosperity and meaningful employment, as well as benefits from
the social measures they had forged, which guaranteed everyone a decent
and humane share of the prosperity.
During the course of their history, Finns have always moved about,
both within their country and abroad. The years after World War II saw,
however, an unprecedented population shift away from the countryside to
the increasingly more urbanized south. New industries and a rapidly
growing service sector meant that the work force not only relocated, but
also changed in character. Agriculture's and forestry's combined share
of the work force declined from about 50 percent in 1950 to about 10
percent in 1980. Industry's share remained unchanged at about 20
percent, while that of the service sector doubled from 9 percent to 18
percent. Between 1950 and 1980, the number of students and pensioners
quadrupled, going from 6 to 24 percent, reflecting a wealthier and
healthier society.
Personal relationships also changed. Families became smaller; divorce
became more common. A growing public sector meant that many tasks
previously managed by the family could now be entrusted to the state.
Lessened dependence on the family also meant greater freedom for women.
This was reflected in new legislation that gave women greater equality
with men. Traditional habits persisted, however, and in the late 1980s
Finland's women still had a secondary place at home, in the workplace,
and in politics.
Finland was a remarkably homogeneous country. It had no racial
minorities. The largest minority group, the Swedishspeaking Finns, was
so well assimilated with the majority that there were fears it would
eventually disappear. In fact, the group's share of the country's
population had dropped from 12 percent to 6 percent in the twentieth
century. Two very small minorities, the Lapps (or Sami) and the Gypsies,
remained apart from the majority. They still suffered from some
discrimination and from poor living standards, but legislation and more
open attitudes on the part of the majority were improving their lot.
Finland was virtually free of the religious divisions that bedeviled
many other societies. One of the two state churches, the Lutheran Church
of Finland, had nearly 90 percent of the population as members.
Religious freedom was guaranteed by law, and Finns also belonged to
several dozen other churches. Because Finnish society had become
increasingly secularized, differences of opinion about moral issues
caused less friction than they had in the past.
Finns maintained their traditional respect for education. Education
had gradually become more accessible, and an ever greater number of
Finns were studying at all levels. The old system, which excluded many,
had been replaced by one that attempted to meet individual schooling
needs and to keep open as many options for further training as possible;
no one went without education for lack of money.
Finland, like its Nordic neighbors, had created a system of public
welfare measures that was among the most advanced in the world. Through
a steady progression of legislation, Finns came to be protected from
many of life's vicissitudes. Coverage was virtually universal, and it
was seen as a right rather than as charity. Income security measures
guaranteed Finns a livelihood despite age, illness, or unemployment. The
state also provided many services that assisted Finns in their daily
life, such as child care, family counseling, and health care. Although
some social problems persisted, the quality of life for Finns overall
had steadily and, in many instances, dramatically improved. Better
medical care meant that Finns enjoyed improved health, while subsidized
housing brought them better and roomier shelter. Efforts also were being
made to protect the natural environment.
Finland - Population
Finland had 250,000 inhabitants in the sixteenth century. As a result
of wars, the population did not reach the 1 million mark until 1810. Mortality remained high even in the nineteenth
century. The famine of 1867 to 1868, for example, killed 5 percent to 10
percent of the population, and it was not until 1880 that there were 2
million Finns. In the last part of the century, improved living
conditions began to lower the death rate, but a simultaneous fall in the
birth rate and increased emigration retarded growth. As a result,
shortly before World War I the country's inhabitants still numbered only
3 million. A short-lived "baby boom" in the first five years
after the upheavals of World War II allowed the population to reach 4
million by 1950. Since then the country's population growth has been
among the lowest in the world. Low birth rates coupled with heavy
emigration resulted in a population of only 4,937,000 in 1987. The
annual birth rate since the early 1970s has averaged fewer than 14
births per 1,000 persons, a rate that has caused demographers to
estimate that Finland's population would peak at just under 5 million by
about the turn of the century, after which it would decline.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Finland's average population density
fourteen persons per square kilometer, was the second lowest in Western
Europe, just behind Norway's, thirteen and ahead of Sweden's seventeen.
Actual population density varied widely, however. The province of
Lapland, covering 29.3 percent of the nation's area but containing only
about 4 percent of its population, had a population density of about 2
persons per square kilometer, making it one of the earth's emptiest
regions. Uusimaa, Finland's second smallest province, which contains the
capital city, Helsinki, accounted for only 3.1 percent of the national
territory; however, it was home for more than 20 percent of the
country's inhabitants, who lived together at a density of 119 per square
kilometer, a figure identical to that of Denmark. The provinces of Kymi,
Hame, and Turku ja Pori in south-central Finland, which had a mix of
rural and urban areas with economies based on both agriculture and
industry, were perhaps more truly representative of Finnish conditions.
During the 1980s, their population densities ranged from thirty to forty
persons per square kilometer.
<>External Migration
Demographic movement in Finland did not end with the appearance of
immigrants from Sweden in the Middle Ages. Finns who left to work in
Swedish mines in the sixteenth century began a national tradition, which
continued up through the 1970s, of settling in their neighboring
country. During the period of tsarist rule, some 100,000 Finns went to
Russia, mainly to the St. Petersburg area. Emigration on a large scale
began in the second half of the nineteenth century when Finns, along
with millions of other Europeans, set out for the United States and
Canada. By 1980 Finland had lost an estimated 400,000 of its citizens to
these two countries.
A great number of Finns emigrated to Sweden after World War II, drawn
by that country's prosperity and proximity. Emigration began slowly,
but, during the 1960s and the second half of the 1970s, tens of
thousands left each year for their western neighbor. The peak emigration
year was 1970, when 41,000 Finns settled in Sweden, which caused
Finland's population actually to fall that year. Because many of the
migrants later returned to Finland, definite figures cannot be
calculated, but all told, an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 Finns became
permanent residents of Sweden in the postwar period. The overall
youthfulness of these emigrants meant that the quality of the work force
available to Finnish employers was diminished and that the national
birth rate slowed. At one point, every eighth Finnish child was born in
Sweden. Finland's Swedish-speaking minority was hard hit by this
westward migration; its numbers dropped from 350,000 to about 300,000
between 1950 and 1980. By the 1980s, a strong Finnish economy had
brought an end to large-scale migration to Sweden. In fact, the overall
population flow was reversed because each year several thousand more
Finns returned from Sweden than left for it.
Finland.
However significant the long-term effects of external migration on
Finnish society may have been, migration within the country had a
greater impact--especially the migration which took place between the
end of World War II and the mid-1970s, when half the population moved
from one part of the country to another. Before World War II, internal
migration had first been a centuries-long process of forming settlements
ever farther to the north. Later, however, beginning in the second half
of the nineteenth century with the coming of Finland's tardy
industrialization, there was a slow movement from rural regions toward
areas in the south where employment could be found.
Postwar internal migration began with the resettlement within Finland
of virtually all the inhabitants of the parts of Karelia ceded to the
Soviet Union. Somewhat more than 400,000 persons, more
than 10 percent of the nation's population, found new homes elsewhere in
Finland, often in the less settled regions of the east and the north. In
these regions, new land, which they cleared for farming, was provided
for the refugees; in more populated areas, property was requisitioned.
The sudden influx of these settlers was successfully dealt with in just
a few years. One of the effects of rural resettlement was an increase in
the number of farms during the postwar years, a unique occurrence for
industrialized nations of this period.
It was, however, the postwar economic transformation that caused an
even larger movement of people within Finland, a movement known to Finns
as the Great Migration. It was a massive population shift from rural
areas, especially those of eastern and northeastern Finland, to the
urban, industrialized south. People left rural regions because the mechanization
of agriculture and the forestry industry had eliminated jobs. The
displaced work force went to areas where employment in the expanding
industrial and service sectors was available. This movement began in the
1950s, but it was most intense during the 1960s and the first half of
the 1970s, assuming proportions that in relative terms were
unprecedented for a country outside the Third World. The Great Migration
left behind rural areas of abandoned farms with reduced and aging
populations, and it allowed the creation of a densely populated
postindustrial society in the country's south.
The extent of the demographic shift to the south can be shown by the
following figures. Between 1951 and 1975, the population registered an
increase of 655,000. During this period, the small province of Uusimaa
increased its population by 412,000, growing from 670,000 to 1,092,00;
three-quarters of this growth was caused by settlers from other
provinces. The population increase experienced by four other southern
provinces, the Aland Islands, Turku ja Pori, Hame, and Kymi, taken
together with that of Uusimaa amounted to 97 percent of the country's
total population increase for these years. The population increase of
the central and the northern provinces accounted for the remaining 3
percent. Provinces that experienced an actual population loss during
these years were in the east and the northeast--Pohjois-Karjala,
Mikkeli, and Kuopio.
One way of visualizing the shift to the south would be to draw a
line, bowing slightly to the north, between the port cities of Kotka on
the Gulf of Finland and Kaskinen on the Gulf of Bothnia. In 1975 the
territory to the south of this line would have contained half of
Finland's population. Ten years earlier, such a line, drawn farther to
the north to mark off perhaps 20 percent more area, would have
encompassed half the population. One hundred years earlier, half the
population would have been distributed throughout more than twice as
much territory. Another indication of the extent to which Finns were
located in the south was that by 1980, approximately 90 percent of them
lived in the southernmost 41 percent of Finland.
Finland.
Finland's export-dependent economy continuously adapted to the world
market; in doing so, it changed Finnish society as well. The prolonged
worldwide boom, beginning in the late 1940s and lasting until the first
oil crisis in 1973, was a challenge that Finland met and from which it
emerged with a highly sophisticated and diversified economy, including a
new occupational structure. Some sectors kept a fairly constant share of
the work force. Transportation and construction, for example, each
accounted for between 7 and 8 percent in both 1950 and 1985, and
manufacturing's share rose only from 22 to 24 percent; however, both the
commercial and the service sectors more than doubled their share of the
work force, accounting, respectively, for 21 and 28 percent in 1985. The
greatest change was the decline of the economically active population
employed in agriculture and forestry, from approximately 50 percent in
1950 to 10 percent in 1985. The exodus from farms and forests provided
the manpower needed for the growth of other sectors.
Studies of Finnish mobility patterns since World War II have
confirmed the significance of this exodus. Sociologists have found that
people with a farming background were present in other occupations to a
considerably greater extent in Finland than in other West European
countries. Finnish data for the early 1980s showed that 30 to 40 percent
of those in occupations not requiring much education were the children
of farmers, as were about 25 percent in upper-level occupations, a rate
two to three times that of France and noticeably higher than that even
of neighboring Sweden. Finland also differed from the other Nordic
countries in that the generational transition from the rural occupations
to white-collar positions was more likely to be direct, bypassing manual
occupations.
The most important factor determining social mobility in Finland was
education. Children who attained a higher level of education than their
parents were often able to rise in the hierarchy of occupations. A
tripling or quadrupling in any one generation of the numbers receiving
schooling beyond the required minimum reflected the needs of a
developing economy for skilled employees. Obtaining advanced training or
education was easier for some than for others, however, and the children
of whitecollar employees still were more likely to become white-collar
employees themselves than were the children of farmers and bluecollar
workers. In addition, children of white-collar professionals were more
likely than not to remain in that class.
The economic transformation also altered income structure. A
noticeable shift was the reduction in wage differentials. The increased
wealth produced by an advanced economy was distributed to wage earners
via the system of broad income agreements that evolved in the postwar
era. Organized sectors of the economy received wage
hikes even greater than the economy's growth rate. As a result,
blue-collar workers' income came, in time, to match more closely the pay
of lowerlevel white-collar employees, and the income of the upper middle
class declined in relation to that of other groups.
The wage structure of the 1980s contrasted sharply with that of 1900.
At the turn of the century, the pay of a senior government official was
many times greater than that of an industrial worker, and households
headed by professionals customarily employed servants. By the 1980s, the
household of a university-educated professional had an average income
not quite twice that of a manual worker in the farming or forestry
sector. According to the Central Statistical Office of Finland, if the
average household income is measured at 100 in 1984, that of a
professional household is 169; of a salaried employee, 118; of a
construction worker, 112; and of an ordinary service sector employee,
104. Among households with incomes below the average are those of farm
and forestry workers, with an average income measured at 92; those
receiving unemployment benefits at 73; and those retired at 44.
Despite a more even distribution of income, Finnish government
statistics showed that a considerable portion of taxable income was
earned by small segments of the population. In 1985 the top 10 percent
of taxpayers earned 26.9 percent of taxable income, and the top 20
percent earned 43.7 percent of income. The bottom 10 percent of
taxpayers earned only 0.5 percent of taxable income; the bottom 20
percent, only 3 percent. These figures had remained stable since at
least the late 1970s, and they were unlikely to change greatly by the
early 1990s, as Finnish taxes remained relatively modest compared with
those of other West European countries. Although Finland's income
distribution was the most unequal of the five Nordic countries, it did
not differ greatly from its neighbors. Sweden, for example, had the most
equal distribution, with the top 20 percent earning 38.1 percent of
taxable income, and the bottom 20 percent, 5.3 percent.
Finland - Class Structure
For centuries Finnish society consisted of the nobility, clergy,
burghers, and peasants. The nineteenth century saw the eclipse of the
nobility and clergy and, with the coming of industrialization, the
formation of socially significant entrepreneurial and working classes.
The civil war and subsequent periods of repression helped to create
hostile relations among labor, land, and capital, and in the interwar
period Finland was a country marked by deep social fissures along class
and language lines. The common national goals of World War II closed
some wounds, but it was not until the coming of consensus politics in
the second half of the 1960s that constructive relations among competing
social groups became possible. An unprecedented prosperity, widely
distributed through incomes agreements and a Nordic-style welfare
system, served to integrate all groups into society; a more open
education system, coupled with the internationally pervasive consumer
culture of the postwar era, planed away many differences of taste and
conduct related to class.
Finnish scholars have examined the composition of the new consensus
society, and their varied findings have prompted serious discussions of
its class makeup. Among many issues debated have been the definition of
the working class, the extent to which it has been affected by a process
of "embourgeoisement," and the constitution of the ruling
elite, if any, that has steered the country. One noted Finnish
sociologist, Matti Alestalo, familiar with academic studies in these
areas, divided Finnish society of the 1980s into six classes: farmers,
working class, petite bourgeoisie, lower middle class, upper middle
class, and upper class.
For Alestalo, the two most striking changes in Finland's class
structure after World War II were the steep drop in the size of the
farming population and the great expansion of the lower middle class.
During the early 1950s, the number of those working in agriculture
actually increased, but thereafter it fell steadily. By 1980 the sector
was about one-quarter of its size thirty years earlier, and it consisted
almost entirely of farm owners and their families because the number of
hired agricultural workers had dwindled. The farmers who remained
enjoyed a higher standard of living because it was the smaller and
poorer farms that had been abandoned. Another reason for farmers' new
prosperity was that they were a highly organized and homogeneous class
that successfully lobbied for government policies that benefited them.
Farmers differed from other classes in that they were, to a far higher
degree, self-recruiting; about 80 percent of farmers were the offspring
of farmers. The rationalization of agriculture made small businessmen
out of most farmers, but farmers differed from other owners of small
enterprises in that they passed on to their children something that was
more a way of life than a business.
Alestalo classified as a worker anyone employed for primarily manual
work, and he included in this class some white-collar wage earners whom
others judged to belong to the lower middle class. According to his
calculations, the working class had accounted for about 50 percent of
the economically active work force during the entire postwar period, but
the sectors in which it was employed had changed. The share of workers
employed in agriculture and forestry had dropped from 22 to 4 percent by
1980, while the share active in manufacturing and services had increased
to 60 and to 26 percent, respectively. Workers' living standards had
improved greatly--more than those of other groups-- since the war, but
even in the 1980s workers still had poorer health and less job security
than other classes. They were also housed more poorly, and one of their
primary concerns was to acquire homes of their own. By the 1980s,
Finnish workers had become much more integrated into society than they
had been in the immediate postwar period, but they still identified
strongly with their labor unions and with the parties that had
traditionally represented them. Although workers no longer lived in the
isolated enclaves of the interwar period, Alestalo believed it would be
premature to say that they had become part of the middle class.
Finland's petite bourgeoisie of shopowners and small entrepreneurs
had never been an economically important class. It had declined slowly
in size, beginning in the 1950s, until by 1980 it accounted for only 5
percent of the work force. Many small shops operated by this class had
closed because of the growth of large retail firms. Many small grocery
stores, for example, had gone out of business. There was little
intergenerational stability in this class because many of its members
came from outside it.
Alestalo divided the large group engaged in nonmanual, whitecollar
occupations into a lower middle class and an upper middle class.
Educational level, recruitment criteria, complexity of tasks, level of
income, and commitment to the organization were among the factors that
determined to which of these two classes a person belonged. Both classes
had grown since the war, doubling in size between 1960 and 1980, but the
lower middle class share of the total work force in 1980 amounted to 24
percent, making it the second largest class in Finland and dwarfing the
8 percent of the upper middle class. Both levels of the middle class had
many members born in other classes, but the lower-middle-class had more,
one-third having a farming background and another third coming from the
working class. Women dominated in the lower middle class, constituting
60 percent of its membership in 1960 and 70 percent in 1980, an
indication of their heavy employment in lower-level service-sector
positions such as those of office workers, elementary school teachers,
and nurses.
According to Alestalo, the country's upper class accounted for about
1 percent of the economically active population; it was made up of the
owners, directors, or managers of large industrial concerns, banks, and
commercial institutions in the private sector, as well as the heads of
large state companies and agencies, and senior civil servants in the
public sector. Some members of the country's upper class inherited their
wealth or position. In the postwar era, however, most appeared to be
hired professionals. Much of the membership of the upper class came from
the upper reaches of Finnish society, but several factors resulted in
its having a more heterogeneous composition than earlier--the coming to
power of socialist parties with leaderships from a various classes, the
common practice of politicizing senior civil service appointments, and
the greater importance of state institutions.
Finland - FAMILY LIFE
Attitudes toward marriage have changed substantially since World War
II. Most obvious was the declining marriage rate, which dropped from 8.5
marriages per 1,000 Finns in 1950 to 5.8, in 1984, a decline great
enough to mean a drop also in absolute numbers. In 1950 there were
34,000 marriages, while in 1984 only 28,500 were registered, despite a
growth in population of 800,000. An explanation for the decline was that
there was an unprecedented number of unmarried couples. Since the late
1960s, the practice of cohabitation had become increasingly common, so
much so that by the late 1970s most marriages in urban areas grew out of
what Finns called "open unions." In the 1980s, it was
estimated that about 8 percent of couples who lived together,
approximately 200,000 people, did so without benefit of marriage.
Partners of such unions usually married because of the arrival of
offspring or the acquisition of property. A result of the frequency of
cohabitation was that marriages were postponed, and the average age for
marriage, which had been falling, began to rise in the 1970s. By 1982
the average marriage age was 24.8 years for women and 26.8 years for
men, several years higher for both sexes than had been true a decade
earlier.
The overwhelming majority of Finns did marry, however. About 90
percent of the women had been married by the age of forty, and
spinsterhood was rare. A shortage of women in rural regions, however,
meant that some farmers were forced into bachelorhood.
While the number of marriages was declining, divorce became more
common, increasing 250 percent between 1950 and 1980. In 1952 there were
3,500 divorces. The 1960s saw a steady increase in this rate, which
averaged about 5,000 divorces a year. A high of 10,191 was reached in
1979; afterwards the divorce rate stabilized at about 9,500 per year
during the first half of the 1980s.
A number of factors caused the increased frequency of divorce. One
was that an increasingly secularized society viewed marriage, more often
than before, as an arrangement that could be ended if it did not satisfy
its partners. Another reason was that a gradually expanding welfare
system could manage an ever greater portion of the family's traditional
tasks, and it made couples less dependent on the institution of
marriage. Government provisions for parental leave, child allowances,
child care programs, and much improved health and pension plans meant
that the family was no longer essential for the care of children and
aged relatives. A further cause for weakened family and marital ties was
seen in the unsettling effects of the Great Migration and in the
economic transformation Finland experienced during the 1960s and the
1970s. The rupture of established social patterns brought uncertainty
and an increased potential for conflict into personal relationships.
Finland - Status of Women
After examining the position of women around the world, the
Washington-based Population Crisis Committee reported in 1988 that
Finland, slightly behind top-ranked Sweden and just ahead of the United
States, was one of the very best places in which a woman could live. The
group reached this conclusion after examining the health, educational,
economic, and legal conditions that affect women's lives.
When compared with women of other nations, Finnish women, who
accounted for just over 50 percent of the population in the mid1980s ,
did have a privileged place. They were the first in Europe to gain the franchise, and by the
1980s they routinely constituted about one-third of the membership of
the Eduskunta (parliament) and held several ministerial posts. In the
1980s, about 75 percent of adult women worked outside the home; they
made up about 48 percent of the work force. Finnish women were as well
educated as their male counterparts, and, in some cases, the number of
women studying at the university level, for example, were slightly ahead
of the number of men. In addition to an expanding welfare system, which
since World War II had come to provide them with substantial assistance
in the area of childbearing and child-rearing, women had made notable
legislative gains that brought them closer to full equality with men.
In 1972 the Council for Equality was established to advise lawmakers
on methods for realizing full legal equality for women. In 1983
legislation arranged that both parents were to have equal rights for
custody of their children. A year later, women were granted equal rights
in the establishment of their children's nationality. Henceforth any
child born of a Finnish woman would have Finnish citizenship. After a
very heated national debate, legislation was passed in 1985 that gave
women an equal right to decide what surname or surnames they and their
children would use. These advances were capped by a law that went into
effect in early 1987 forbidding any discrimination on the basis of sex
and providing protection against it. Once these laws were passed,
Finnish authorities signed the United Nations Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, in 1986.
In a number of areas, however, the country's small feminist movement
maintained that the circumstances in which Finnish women lived needed to
be improved. Most striking was the disparity in wages. Although women
made up just under half the work force and had a tradition of working
outside the home, they earned only about two-thirds of the wages paid to
men. Occupations in which women predominated, such as those of retail
and office personnel, were poorly paid in contrast to those in which men
constituted the majority. Despite the sexes' equal educational
attainments, and despite a society where sexual differentiation played a
smaller role than it did in many other countries, occupational
segregation in Finland was marked. In few of the twenty most common
occupations were the two sexes equally represented. Only in occupations
relating to agriculture, forestry, and school teaching was a rough
parity approached, and as few as 6 percent of Finns worked in jobs where
40 to 60 percent of workers were of the opposite sex. Studies also found
that equal educational levels did not--in any category of
training--prevent women's wages from lagging behind those paid to men.
Women tended to occupy lower positions, while males were more often
supervisors or managers. This was the case everywhere, whether in
schools or universities, in business, in the civil service, or in
politics at both the local level and the national level.
In addition to their occupying secondary position in the workplace,
women had longer workdays because they performed a greater share of
household tasks than did men. On the average, their workweek outside the
home was several hours shorter than men's because a greater portion of
them were employed only parttime or worked in the service sector where
hours were shorter than they were in manufacturing. Studies have found,
however, that women spent about twice as much time on housework as men--
about three hours and forty minutes a day, compared with one hour and
fifty minutes for men. Men did twice as many household repairs and about
an equal amount of shopping, but they devoted only one-third to
one-fourth as much time to cleaning, cooking, and caring for children.
Given that the bulk of family chores fell to women, and that they were
five times more likely than men to head a single-parent family, the
shortcomings of Finland's child day-care system affected women more than
it did men.
The Equality Law that went into effect in 1987 committed the country
to achieving full equality for women. In the late 1980s, there was a
timetable listing specific goals to be achieved during the remainder of
the twentieth century. The emphasis was to be equality for everyone,
rather than protection for women. Efforts were undertaken not only to
place women in occupations dominated by males, but also to bring males
into fields traditionally believed to belong to the women's sphere, such
as child care and elementary school teaching. Another aim was for women
to occupy a more equal share of decision-making positions.
Finland - MINORITY GROUPS
The oldest known inhabitants of Finland are the Lapps, who were
already settled there when the Finns arrived in the southern part of the
country about 2,000 years ago. The Lapps were distantly related to the
Finns, and both spoke a non-Indo- European language belonging to the
Finno-Ugric family of languages. Once present throughout the country,
the Lapps gradually moved northward under the pressure of the advancing
Finns. As they were a nomadic people in a sparsely settled land, the
Lapps were always able to find new and open territory in which to follow
their traditional activities of hunting, fishing, and slash-and-burn
agriculture. By the sixteenth century, most Lapps lived in the northern
half of the country, and it was during this period that they converted
to Christianity. By the nineteenth century, most of them lived in the
parts of Lapland that were still their home in the 1980s. The last major
shift in Lapp settlement was the migration westward of 600 Skolt Lapps
from the Petsamo region after it was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1944.
A reminder of their eastern origin was their Orthodox faith; the
remaining 85 percent of Finland's Lapps were Lutheran.
About 90 percent of Finland's 4,400 Lapps lived in the municipalities
of Enonteki�, Inari, and Utsjoki, and in the reindeer herding-area of
Sodankyla. According to Finnish regulations, anyone who spoke the Lapp
language, Sami, or who had a relative who was a Lapp, was registered as
a Lapp in census records. Finnish Lapps spoke three Sami dialects, but
by the late 1980s perhaps only a minority actually had Sami as their
first language. Lapp children had the right to instruction in Sami, but
there were few qualified instructors or textbooks available. One reason
for the scarcity of written material in Sami is that the three dialects
spoken in Finland made agreement about a common orthography difficult.
Perhaps these shortcomings explained why a 1979 study found the
educational level of Lapps to be considerably lower than that of other
Finns.
Few Finnish Lapps actually led the traditional nomadic life pictured
in school geography texts and in travel brochures. Although many Lapps
living in rural regions of Lapland earned some of their livelihood from
reindeer herding, it was estimated that Lapps owned no more than
one-third of Finland's 200,000 reindeer. Only 5 percent of Finnish Lapps
had the herds of 250 to 300 reindeer needed to live entirely from this
kind of work. Most Lapps worked at more routine activities, including
farming, construction, and service industries such as tourism. Often a
variety of jobs and sources of income supported Lapp families, which
were, on the average, twice the size of a typical Finnish family. Lapps
also were aided by old-age pensions and by government welfare, which
provided a greater share of their income than it did for Finns as a
whole.
There have been many efforts over the years by Finnish authorities to
safeguard the Lapps' culture and way of life and to ease their entry
into modern society. Officials created bodies that dealt with the Lapp
minority, or formed committees that studied their situation. An early
body was the Society for the Promotion of Lapp Culture, formed in 1932.
In 1960 the government created the Advisory Commission on Lapp Affairs.
The Lapps themselves formed the Samii Litto in 1945 and the Johti
Sabmelazzat, a more aggressive organization, in 1968. In 1973 the
government arranged for elections every four years to a twentymember
Sami Parlamenta that was to advise authorities. On the international
level, there was the Nordic Sami Council of 1956, and there has been a
regularly occurring regional conference since then that represented--in
addition to Finland's Lapps-- Norway's 20,000 Lapps, Sweden's 10,000
Lapps, and the 1,000 to 2,000 Lapps who remained in the Kola Peninsula
in the Soviet Union.
Finland - Swedish-speaking Finns
The largest minority group in Finland was the Swedish- speaking
Finns, who numbered about 250,000 in the late 1980s. The first evidence
of their presence in the country, dating from the eighth century, comes
from the Aland Islands. After the thirteenth century, colonization from
Sweden began in earnest, and within two centuries there was a band of
territory occupied by Swedish speakers that ran along the western and
the southern coasts and had an average width of about thirty kilometers.
Cycles of Finnish and Swedish assimilation have changed the linguistic
makeup of this strip of land. In Ostrobothnia, for example, the area of
Swedish settlement extended inland as much as sixty kilometers and still
existed in the late 1980s, while other areas had eventually reverted to
being once again overwhelmingly inhabited by Finnish speakers. By the
end of the nineteenth century, the areas of Swedish settlement had
shrunk to basically what they were in the second half of the 1980s:
Ostrobothnia, the Aland Islands, and a strip along the southern coast
that included the capital. The settlers from Sweden gradually lost
contact with their relatives in the old country and came to regard
Finland as their country. They were distinguished from other Finns only
by their language, Swedish, which they retained even after hundreds of
years of separation from Sweden.
Although most Swedish-speaking Finns worked as farmers and fishermen,
for centuries they also made up the country's governing elite. Even
after the country was ceded to Russia in 1809, the aristocracy and
nearly all those active in commerce, in the courts, and in education had
Swedish as their native language. The country's bureaucracy did
virtually all its written work in Swedish. Finnish speakers who desired
to enter these groups learned Swedish. Only the clergy used Finnish on a
regular basis, for they dealt with the bulk of the population who, for
the most part, knew only that language. There were no campaigns to force
Swedish on Finnish speakers however, and the problem of language as a
social issue did not exist during the period of Swedish rule.
Swedish retained its primacy until the second half of the nineteenth
century, when, as a result of budding nationalism, it was gradually
displaced by Finnish. A good many of the strongest advocates of Finnish
nationalism were Swedish speakers who used their own language in the
patriotic pamphlets and journals of the time because few of them could
write Finnish. By the end of the century, the nationalist movement had
been successful in fostering the birth of Finnish as a written language
and in bringing about the formation of an educated Finnish-speaking
elite. Numbering 350,000 and constituting 13 percent of the country's
population in 1900, Swedish-speaking Finns were still disproportionately
influential and wealthy, but they were no longer dominant in the country
of their birth.
Independent Finland's new Constitution protected the Swedish-
speaking minority, in that it made both Finnish and Swedish national
languages of equal official status, stipulating that a citizen be able
to use either language in courts and have government documents relating
to him or her issued in his or her language, and that the cultural and
economic needs of both language groups be treated equally. The Language
Act of 1922 covered many of the practical questions engendered by these
constitutional rights. Despite these legal provisions, however, there
were still currents of Finnish opinion that wished to see a curtailment
of the Swedish-speaking minority's right to protect its cultural
identity. Attempts at Finnicization failed, however, and the advent of
the national crisis of World War II submerged disagreements about the
language issue. Since the war, there have been occasional squabbles
about practical measures for realizing the minority's economic and
cultural rights, but none about the inherent value of the policy of
equality.
The Language Act of 1922, and its subsequent revisions, arranged for
the realization of the rights of the Swedish- speaking minority. The
basic units for protecting and furthering the exercise of these rights
were the self-governing municipalities. After each ten-year census,
Finland's nearly 500 municipalities were classified as either unilingual
or bilingual with a majority language. In the 1980s, there were 461
municipalities: 396 Finnish-speaking; 21 bilingual with a
Finnish-speaking majority; 24 Swedish-speaking; 20 bilingual with
Swedish as the majority language. A municipality was bilingual if the
number of speakers of the minority language exceeded either 3,000 or 8
percent of its population. If a municipality had been classified as
bilingual, it could not revert to unilingual status until the minority
population declined to less than 6 percent.
Language classification had important consequences for the
inhabitants of a municipality, for it determined which language was to
be used for government business. In bilingual municipalities, all
documents affecting the general public--tax forms, for example--had to
be published in both languages. In addition, national and local
government officials had to be bilingual--a requirement not always met,
however--and public notices and road signs had to be in both languages.
In unilingual communities this was not the case. Documents relating
directly to an individual case could be translated, but otherwise
official business was transacted in the municipality's language. If
someone were involved in a court case, however, and did not know the
prevailing language, translation would be provided.
The method used to classify municipalities had to be regarded as
successful because, although the overwhelming majority of municipalities
were unilingual Finnish-speaking communities, only 4 percent of the
Swedish-speaking minority lived in municipalities where their language
was not used. Finnish- speaking Finns fared even better, for less than 1
percent of them lived where their language was not used officially. Some
of the Swedish speakers who lived apart from their fellows did so
voluntarily because they had management positions at factories and
plants in regions that were nearly entirely Finnish-speaking areas.
Because they were educated, these managers knew Finnish. They were also
representatives of the tradition of "brukssvenskar"
(literally, "factory Swedes"), and were sometimes the only
Swedish speakers their brother Finns knew.
On the national level, all laws and decrees had to be issued in both
languages, and the Swedish-speaking minority had the right to have
Swedish-language programs on the state radio and television networks.
Swedish-language schools had to be established wherever there was a
sufficient number of pupils. There were several Swedish-language
institutions of higher learning, and a specified number of the
professorial chairs at the University of Helsinki was reserved for
Swedish speakers, as was one brigade in the army. A drawback for the
Swedish-speaking minority, though, was that because of its small size,
the national government could not, for practical reasons, publish in
Swedish all parliamentary deliberations, committee reports, and official
documents.
The Swedish-speaking minority was well represented in various sectors
of society. The moderate Swedish People's Party (Svenska
Folkpartiet--SFP) got the votes of most Swedish speakers, with the
exception of workers who more often than not voted for socialist
parties. The SFP polled enough support to hold a number of seats in the
Eduskunta that usually matched closely the percentage of Swedish
speakers in the country's total population. It very often had ministers
in the cabinet as well. An unofficial special body, the Swedish People's
Assembly (Svenska Finlands Folkting), representing all members of the
minority, functioned in an advisory capacity to regular governing
institutions. Most national organizations, whether economic, academic,
social, or religious, had branches or separate equivalents for Swedish
speakers. Because of its long commercial and maritime traditions, the
Swedish-speaking minority was disproportionately strong in some sectors
of the financial community and the shipping industry. In general,
however, with the exception of the upper middle class, where there were
more Swedish speakers than usual, the class distribution of the minority
matched fairly closely that of the larger community.
The size of the Swedish-speaking minority increased fairly steadily
until 1940, when it numbered 354,000 persons, or 9.6 percent of the
country's total population. Since then it has declined, dropping to
296,000, or 6.1 percent of the population, in 1987. In relative terms,
however, it has been in decline for centuries, dropping from 17.5
percent in 1610, and it was expected to go below 6 percent by the end of
the twentieth century. The decline stemmed from a variety of factors: a
slightly lower birth rate than the rest of the population during some
periods; a greater rate of emigration to the United States before World
War I; a large loss of some 50,000 persons who settled permanently in
Sweden in the decades after World War II; and frequent marriages with
Finnish speakers.
By the 1980s, more than half the marriages of Swedish- speaking Finns
were to persons from outside their language group. In urban areas,
especially in Helsinki, the rate was over 60 percent. This was not
surprising because the members of the minority group were usually
bilingual, and there were no legal constraints (although there were
sometimes social and familial constraints) against marrying those
speaking the majority language. The bilingualism of the minority was
caused by compulsory schooling in the majority language from the third
school year on, and from living in a society where, with the exception
of some rural areas, speaking only Swedish was a serious handicap
because the majority group usually had a poor knowledge of Swedish,
despite compulsory study of it for several years. Swedish-speaking Finns
were easily able then to cross from one language group to another.
However highly they valued their mother tongue and their group's
cultural identity, they were not bound by them when selecting friends or
spouses. A survey of the late 1970s found, for example, that
Swedish-speaking natives of Helsinki felt they had more in common with
natives of their city who did not speak their language than they did
with Swedish speakers from other regions. More often than not, Swedish-
speaking Finns married outside their group. These marriages posed a
danger to their language community in that the resulting offspring were
usually registered as speakers of the majority language, even when they
were truly bilingual. Thus the Finnish practice of counting speakers of
a language by the principle of personality, that is on an individual
basis, rather than by the principle of territoriality, as was done only
for the Aland Islands, was leading to a decline in the size of the
Swedish- speaking minority.
Finland - Gypsies
Gypsies have been present in Finland since the second half of the
sixteenth century. With their unusual dress, unique customs, and
specialized trades for earning their livelihood, Gypsies have stood out,
and their stay in the country has not been an easy one. They have
suffered periodic harassment from the hands of both private citizens and
public officials, and the last of the special laws directed against them
was repealed only in 1883. Even in the second half of the 1980s,
Finland's 5,000 to 6,000 Gypsies remained a distinct group, separated
from the general population both by their own choice and by the fears
and the prejudices many Finns felt toward them.
Finnish Gypsies, like gypsies elsewhere, chose to live apart from the
dominant societal groups. A Gypsy's loyalty was to his or her family and
to Gypsies in general. Marriages with nonGypsies were uncommon, and the
Gypsies' own language, spoken as a first language only by a few in the
1980s, was used to keep outsiders away. An individual's place within
Gypsy society was largely determined by age and by sex, old males having
authority. A highly developed system of values and a code of conduct
governed a Gypsy's behavior, and when Gypsy sanctions, violent or not,
were imposed, for example via "blood feuds," they had far more
meaning than any legal or social sanctions of Finnish society.
Unlike the Lapps, who lived concentrated in a single region, the
Gypsies lived throughout Finland. While most Lapps wore ordinary
clothing in their everyday life, Gypsies could be identified by their
dress; the men generally wore high boots and the women almost always
dressed in very full, long velvet skirts. Like most Lapps, however,
Gypsies also had largely abandoned a nomadic way of life and had
permanent residences. Gypsy men had for centuries worked as horse
traders, but they had adapted themselves to postwar Finland by being
active as horse breeders and as dealers in cars and scrap metal. Women
continued their traditional trades of fortune telling and handicrafts.
Since the 1960s, Finnish authorities have undertaken measures to
improve the Gypsies' standard of life. Generous state financial
arrangements have improved their housing. Their low educational level
(an estimated 20 percent of adult Gypsies could not read) was raised, in
part, through more vocational training. A permanent Advisory Commission
on Gypsy Affairs was set up in 1968, and in 1970 racial discrimination
was outlawed through an addition to the penal code. The law punished
blatant acts such as barring Gypsies from restaurants or shops or
subjecting them to unusual surveillance by shopkeepers or the police.
Finland - Jewish and Muslim Communities
Religion was a part of public life in a variety of ways. The
celebration of the gaining of Finnish independence on December 6 had a
religious component, as did the annual opening of the Eduskunta. There
were three religious holidays when public entertainments were not
permitted. The state churches kept the official records of their
members' civil status, and the vast majority of marriages were performed
in the state churches and had the same legal status as a civil ceremony.
Church members paid a church tax that was collected and paid to the
churches by state authorities. Persons wishing to leave one of the state
churches had to do so formally, and records of this decision were
maintained. Religious instruction was a regular part of the schools'
curricula, and children wishing to be excused from it had to request the
right to take a substitute course. The armed forces had chaplains, the
highest of whom was a bishop, and their services were, in practice,
usually obligatory for recruits. Chaplains' salaries were paid by the
state, as were those of the higher clergy of the two state churches. The
oath generally used in court had a religious content, though
nonbelievers had the right to one that made no reference to a deity and
instead was only a solemn affirmation of the truth of their testimony.
Although it was rarely invoked, there was a Finnish law against
blasphemy. Numerous religious programs and services were broadcast on
the country's state radio and television networks.
Much of this religious influence was based in Finland's past,
however, and did not correspond with attitudes of most Finns, because by
the 1980s the country had become a highly secularized society. Polls
revealed, for example, that about 70 percent of the population believed
in God, a good deal fewer than the 90 percent who belonged to the state
churches. About 40 percent of the population believed that the best
place to find God was in the Bible, but only about 10 percent read it at
least once a week, striking figures for a Protestant country. Frequent
church attendance was unusual. Surveys conducted during the 1980s found
that perhaps as few as 4 percent went to church every Sunday, about 12
percent went once a month, and 43 percent went at least once during the
course of a year.
These figures did not give a complete picture of Finnish religious
life, however. Finland's pietist traditions meant that there was much
private prayer as opposed to public worship; about one-third of Finns
under the age of thirty-five and more than half of those above this age
reportedly prayed every week. In addition, the Lutheran Church touched
the lives of many Finns through its considerable social work and
counseling, although these activities were often not strictly religious
in nature.
The role the state churches played in life's key moments made them,
for reasons of tradition, important to most Finns, even to those who
were not religious. More Finns were baptized, married, and buried with
church rites than were members of the churches. A very important rite of
passage for adolescents was confirmation, which signified a coming of
age even for those from freethinking families. For this reason, more
than 90 percent of 15-year-olds were confirmed, despite the several
weeks of lessons this entailed. Although church membership was a routine
affair for many, polls conducted in the 1970s and the 1980s consistently
found that only about 10 percent of those interviewed had given any
serious thought to leaving a state church, even though freedom from the
church tax would mean a small financial gain. For many Finns, leaving
their church would be too great a break with family and community
traditions. In addition, some of the values that churches had
traditionally stood for had been internalized. Observers noted, for
example, that although Finland had undoubtedly become more secularized
since World War II, particularly in the urban areas, the traditional
Lutheran virtues of hard work and self-discipline, inculcated over the
centuries, were still evident in the lives of most Finns.
Finland - Lutheran Church of Finland
Religious life in Finland since the Protesrant Reformation has been
dominated by the Lutheran Church of Finland. For most of this period,
almost all Finns belonged to it. In the late 1980s, about 90 percent of
the population were members, and an even greater number participated in
its rituals. During the time of Swedish rule, the church was the
country's state church, and it was part of the national government,
subordinate to the Swedish king. Even when headed during the nineteenth
century by Russian tsars of the Orthodox faith, the Lutheran Church
remained a state church. Since 1809, however, it has had to share this
distinction with the Orthodox Church, which had followers in the eastern
province of Karelia.
The Ecclesiastical Law of 1869 gave the Lutheran Church a measure of
independence from the state by allowing it a representative body, the
Synod, that could decide many important church matters on its own. When
Finland became independent, the church gained a greater degree of
autonomy, although it still was subject to state supervision. The
president, for example, decided who was to become a bishop, using a list
of three candidates submitted by the Lutheran Church. In 1943 the
formation of its own central administration, separate from the Ministry
of Education, meant the church was largely self-sufficient. Some
practical matters, such as levels of church taxes, salaries and
pensions, or reorganization of church districts, were still decided by
the government or required its approval, but in many other matters the
church set its own course.
A study commission of 1977 recommended a greater separation of church
and state as a goal for Finnish society. The next decade's discussion of
abolishing the presidential selection of bishops was one example of
efforts to realize this goal. The gradual movement away from the
national government meant that the Lutheran Church of Finland, although
still a state church, was more independent than the other Lutheran
churches of the Nordic region. This independence was so marked that
students of religion commonly regarded it not so much as a state church,
but as a folk church that served all Finns, members and nonmembers
alike.
Finland - Revivalist Movements Within the Lutheran Church
Another characteristic of the Lutheran Church of Finland that
distinguished it from the other Lutheran churches of the Nordic
countries was the strong tradition of revivalism that flourished within
it. Elsewhere, revivalists left the state churches and founded their
own. Although Finnish revivalist movements at first seemed a threat to
the state church, ecclesiastical authorities came to learn that these
new currents of religious feeling could enrich the church rather than
diminish it. Since the nineteenth century, about half a dozen distinct
movements had found a secure and enduring place within the established
church. This meant that the Lutheran Church in Finland did not
experience recurring splits caused by members dissatisfied for reasons
of doctrine or temperament. The enthusiasm and the fervor of the
revivalists were a frequent tonic to the state church, and their
presence within it allowed the church closer ties to the whole of the
Finnish people than would otherwise have been possible.
The revivalist movements remained distinctly Lutheran; they adhered
to the doctrine of justification by faith alone as the center of
preaching and teaching, and made clear demarcations between the Kingdom
of God and the material world. Worldly pleasures were generally decried,
with a varying degree of emphasis being placed instead on abstinence,
faith, abnegation, and prayer. The faithful could go to God directly
without the church and clergy as intermediaries. Priestly intervention
was not necessary in the spiritual realm. In the material world,
however, there was secular government with a justified civil authority
worthy of obedience. The movements also followed the traditional
Lutheran insistence on giving ritual a smaller place than it enjoyed in
Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. Hence, there were only two
sacraments--baptism and Holy Communion-- retained as symbols to
strengthen faith, for Lutherans felt that they had no inherent
redemptive value.
In the late 1980s, the five or six main movements had well over
100,000 members and each movement was vigorous enough to have a central
organization, newspaper, or magazine. Each held a summer convention that
could attract tens of thousands of the devout. Though the movements
might on occasion disagree with positions adopted by the Lutheran Church
as a whole, they could protest them, or could actually prevent their
adoption at the church's democratically arranged meetings and forums.
The earliest of the movements was The Awakened. Its most important
leader, Paavo Ruotsalainen (1777-1852), was an uneducated peasant who
attracted a substantial following by appealing to the poor and the
oppressed through his emphases on Divine greatness and on human
wretchedness and helplessness. Man, he proclaimed, was inept and could
never succeed; only God redeemed and healed. Man's duties, then, were to
abandon his own works and to trust only in God. Followers of The
Awakened held religious services at their homes to supplement those of
the church. Unlike the Laestadians, who belonged to a movement founded
somewhat later, followers of The Awakened were tolerant; they did not
call attention to themselves as believers to whom grace belongs, in
contrast to the rest of the world, which was unrepentant. In the late
1980s, the movement was strongest in the eastern Savo region and in
Ostrobothnia, and it attracted between 30,000 and 40,000 to its summer
meetings.
The Laestadian Movement, named after its founder, Lars Levi
Laestadius (1800-61), a Swedish preacher in Lapland, was perhaps the
strongest of all the revivalist movements; even in the 1980s, it could
attract 100,000 of the faithful to its mass meetings. One reason for its
large gatherings was the importance the movement attached to the visible
congregation and to the absolution given to its members after
confession. The movement's services were often marked by ecstatic
outbursts. Laestadians were somewhat intolerant, as they stressed the
certainty of salvation for Christians and the probability of damnation
for nonbelievers. This adamancy caused occasional rifts within the
movement. Laestadians continued to have their stronghold in northern
Finland, where the movement had originated.
The Evangelical Movement was an offshoot of The Awakened. Its
founder, Fredrik Gabriel Hedberg (1811-93), believed that an obsession
with wretchedness detracted from the assurance of salvation that a
Christian has through his faith in Christ's righteousness. The movement
stressed infant baptism, as its adherents believed the whole of
salvation was given through this sacrament. It also was noted for its
missionary work abroad.
The smallest of the old revivalist groups was that of the
Supplicationists, founded by Henrik Renqvist (1789-1866), an early
advocate of the temperance movement. Supplicationists believed in
frequent and fervent prayer and in meetings at which all remained on
their knees. Supplicationists were active mostly in southwestern
Finland. Quite conservative in their outlook, they were not especially
successful in attracting young converts.
Revivalism has also seen the formation of newer groups. One of these
was the Fifth Revival, dating from shortly before World War II. It
stressed missionary work and evangelism. In the 1970s Charismatics also
began to be active within the Lutheran Church of Finland.
Finland - Organization and Duties of the Lutheran Church
The Lutheran Church was divided into eight dioceses, each headed by a
bishop. An exception was the diocese of Turku, which was headed by an
archbishop. Although he had no legal power over the other bishops, the
archbishop was regarded as the first among equals and was the country's
most prominent clergyman. He presided over important church meetings and
was frequently the church's spokesman. One of the dioceses, that of
BorgA, did not have a primarily territorial basis, but ministered to the
Swedish-speaking members of the church throughout the country. For
administrative purposes, each diocese had a chapter, consisting of the
bishop, three other clergymen, and a jurist. The chapter also functioned
as a court to resolve disputes and to answer appeals against church
decisions. Appeals against chapter decisions were handled by higher
state courts. The highest subdivision of the diocese was the deanery, an
administrative entity no longer of much importance. The seventy-odd
deaneries were divided into parishes. In the late 1980s, there were just
under 600 of these core units of the church. The 600 parishes varied
widely in both the number of their parishioners and their geographic
extent. In the sparsely populated north, for example, a parish could
have more square kilometers within its jurisdiction than it did
parishioners, while there were nearly three dozen parishes in Helsinki
alone.
The Lutheran Church of Finland employed about 18,000 persons in 1987,
some 10,000 of whom worked full-time. There were about 1,400 ministers,
enough to meet the church's needs. They received their training at two
institutions, one in Helsinki and the other in Turku. The first women
priests were ordained in 1988. Until that time, women had been limited
to the secondary role of lector, with duties that encompassed teaching,
pastoral work, and administering Holy Communion.
The highest body of the church was the Synod, which met twice a year,
once in the spring and once in the fall. The 108-member body consisted
of the 8 bishops, 1 military bishop, 2 high judges, 1 representative of
the government, and 96 elected delegates--64 of whom were laymen and 32
of whom were clergymen. The number of delegates that the individual
diocese sent to the Synod depended on its population, but each diocese
sent at least six delegates, two of whom were clergymen. Chaired by the
archbishop, the Synod had a number of responsibilities, including
deliberating on legislative questions, directing disbursement of the
resources of the central church fund, supervising Bible translations,
discussing the nature of relations with other religious organizations,
and resolving fundamental and highly divisive issues.
Two other central bodies were the Ecclesiastical Board and the
Bishops' Conference. The former was a permanent body, chaired by the
archbishop, that oversaw the church's administration and finances and
prepared matters for discussion at the Synod. The latter, consisting of
the bishops and eight other church officials, met twice a year to
discuss, in an unbinding way, issues of concern to the dioceses.
The church placed great emphasis on congregational life. Despite the
apparent episcopal nature of the church organization, parishes were
quite independent. They made most of their decisions on their own and
had only to observe the constraints of ecclesiastical law. By means of
democratically elected councils and boards, they chose their own
pastors, church musicians, and administrative personnel and, to some
degree, set their own salaries. Every adult member of a parish had the
right to vote, and he or she had the possibility of winning a place on
the council or board, which meant that the laity had much say about how
its parish was run.
Parishes were financially independent, for it was to them that the
national government paid the church tax, equal to about 1 percent of the
taxable income of parishioners. Corporations within a parish were also
obliged to pay the church tax and, altogether, this tax represented
about 75 percent of the Lutheran Church's income. Some of the religious
and social services that a parish managed yielded income, too, as did
the 1 percent of the nation's forests that were in church possession. An
elected administrative board and an executive council managed parish
finances, although in urban areas parishes sometimes banded together to
handle such practical details. Parishes were obliged, however, to pay
about 6 percent of their income to a fund, used by the church as a
whole, to help poorer parishes and to pay for other activities like
missionary work.
The historical role of the Lutheran Church as a state church was
reflected in the services managed by the parish that in other countries
were the concern of secular government. For instance, it maintained the
official population records for all of its members. Those of nonmembers
were kept by local government. Parishes managed graveyards. In an area
where there was no alternative cemetery, nonmembers or nonbelievers
could be buried in one belonging to the church. Weddings performed by
the parish had the same value as civil services, provided both the bride
and groom were Christians.
Parishes did not limit themselves to regular religious services and
to other activities such as Sunday schools or study groups. They often
organized a specifically Finnish religious meeting, the seurat,
which had its origins in the revivalist tradition and was a mixture of
hymns and addresses by both clergy and laymen.
Parish personnel also offered services of a secular nature that
supplemented social services provided by the state. Church law required
that each parish have a deacon or deaconess who had many of the
responsibilities of a state social worker. Often trained as nurses,
deaconesses ministered to the sick, aged, and handicapped and
coordinated their work with state agencies. Since World War II, the
church has been active in providing personnel and facilities to youth
programs, such as summer camps.
Finland - Orthodox Church of Finland
The other state church was the Orthodox Church of Finland. Although
it had a much smaller membership than the Lutheran Church of Finland,
only 56,000 in 1987, it enjoyed the same legal status and rights as the
larger church. The state paid it the church tax it had collected from
its parishioners, and the Orthodox Church kept parishioners' official
demographic records. Although the state had some control over its
activity, the Orthodox Church was largely independent. It also was a
distinctly Finnish church, for although it rites and practices were
Slavic, in accordance with Orthodox doctrine, it had been using the
Finnish language in its services since the second half of the nineteenth
century. After Finland became independent, the Orthodox Church of
Finland broke with the Russian Orthodox Church, and after 1923, it
belonged to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the leader of
which was its nominal head.
Before World War II, most members of the Orthodox Church lived in the
province of Karelia. After much of the province was annexed by the
Soviet Union in 1944, most Finns living in the annexed areas fled
westward. Some 70 percent of the members of the Orthodox Church were
therefore dispersed throughout Finland, and many settled in regions
where before there had been only Lutherans. By the 1980s, there were
twenty-five parishes in the country. In 1980 a third diocese was created
in northern Finland to minister better to Orthodox Christians living in
that region and to make the Orthodox Church eligible to become fully
autonomous, or in Orthodox terminology, autocephalous.
The highest official of the Finnish church was the archbishop of the
diocese of Karelia, with its seat at Kuopio. Two other bishops, or
metropolitans, headed the other two dioceses, those of Helsinki and
Oulu. The church's highest governing body was the Church Assembly, which
met every third year unless more frequent meetings were necessary. It
consisted of thirty-four voting members, seventeen of whom were laymen.
Routine administration was managed by the Church Council. The Bishops'
Synod approved the doctrinal decisions of the assembly. Local
administrative practices were democratized, and mirrored the power and
influence of the laity seen in the Lutheran Church.
Finland - Smaller Registered Churches
The School System Act, passed in 1968, abolished the twotrack
elementary school system and replaced it with a single comprehensive
school with a nine-year course of studies. The new school was uniform
throughout the country and was compulsory for all children between the
ages of seven and sixteen. Children in Finland began school at a later
age than those in many other countries because of the distances some of
them had to travel in sparsely settled areas. Private schools also were
gradually incorporated into the system, which was fully in place by the
late 1970s.
The school program was broken into two stages: a lower level for the
first six grades and an upper level for grades seven through nine. In some areas there was a voluntary tenth year. The school year
began in the second half of August and ended in early June, with a
two-week break at Christmas and a one-week break both in the winter and
at Easter. The pre-school system was directed by the Ministry of Social
Affairs and Health. In the mid-1980s, this system was able to
accommodate only onethird of the children of the relevant age group.
Instruction at comprehensive schools was free, as were books, a daily
hot meal, transportation, and even lodging for those students who lived
too far from a school to manage a daily commute. Efforts were made to
ensure that the quality of instruction did not vary and that children in
Lapland were as well instructed as those in Helsinki. In bilingual
communities, children had the right to instruction in their own
language. Children also had the right to classes in their own religion,
unless there were too few students of a particular religion to make this
practicable, or they could be excused from religious instruction. If at
least five students had no religion, an alternative nonreligious course
was obligatory. Schools were not divided according to sex.
After graduation from a comprehensive school, students continued
their educations at either vocational schools or the more demanding
vocational institutes, or at the academically oriented secondary
schools. During the 1980s, a slight majority of students chose
vocational training to prepare them for one or more of several hundred
commercial and technical occupations. Some 60 percent of these students
attended two-year to three-year courses at vocational schools, while the
remainder enrolled in four-year to five-year courses at vocational
institutes that led to careers in highly skilled fields or to management
and planning positions. Students at the academic high schools had to
pass an examination, after three years of study, before they could
attend a university. Fewer than half passed this examination, and only
about one-fourth of those successful managed to secure places at
universities. Although the academic high school was the most common
route to a university in the 1980s, an increasing number of places there
were being held for graduates of vocational institutes.
The schools' curricula were set by law, and their content was
determined at the national level by the Ministry of Education, the
National Board of General Education, and the National Board of
Vocational Education. Local authorities, however, had some say about how
they would be taught. Language instruction accounted for one-third of
teaching time in comprehensive schools and for somewhat more in
secondary schools. In the third grade, children began taking a second
language, usually Finnish for Swedish speakers and English for the
others. Sciences and mathematics accounted for about 30 percent of
teaching time at the comprehensive level and for somewhat less at
academic schools at the secondary level, while social and humanistic
courses accounted for 12 percent in the former and 18 percent in the
latter. Comprehensive schools spent one-fourth of their time on art,
physical education, and related courses, while secondary schools
accorded them a little less than one-fifth of their time. The courses
vocational schools offered varied greatly because of the wide variety of
material taught. After the first year of general courses, most
instruction was connected directly with the chosen specialty.
Since the late 1970s, all teachers in the comprehensive and secondary
schools have been obliged to have a university degree. Two art academies
and eight universities provided teacher education. Vocational teachers,
given the wide variety of courses they taught, could sometimes
substitute occupational experience for university training. Teachers of
the first six years of comprehensive school functioned as class teachers
rather than as subject specialists and were required to have a Master of
Education degree, while their colleagues in the upper levels needed a
master's degree in the subject they had chosen to teach. Although
selection criteria for places in teacher training were stringent (only
10 percent of applicants were accepted), Finland had enough teachers to
allow classes in the comprehensive system to average about 30 pupils;
classes in the secondary schools averaged about 20 pupils. In sparsely
populated areas, however, it was sometimes necessary to form classes
with pupils of different ages and grade levels.
Special education generally was accomplished within regular schools.
This practice was in consonance with the overall policy of avoiding
"tracking," which was seen to limit a pupil's range of
educational opportunities by placing him or her at a particular level of
instruction. An attempt was made to keep all members of a class together
and to address special needs through individual counseling and tutoring.
This principle reflected the overriding goal of having an open and
flexible school system that matched individual qualities and
aspirations.
Finland - Higher Education
In the late 1980s, Finland's system of higher education consisted of
ten universities--each with at least several different faculties--seven
one-discipline institutions with such specialties as technology or
business administration, and three art academies. The largest, the
University of Helsinki, was founded in 1640. The remainder date from the
twentieth century; the newest, the University of Lapland at Rovaniemi,
from 1979. During the mid-1980s, there were about 90,000 students at
institutions of higher education. Competition for acceptance for
university-level study was intense, and fewer than one out of four
applicants obtained a place. There were no private universities in
Finland.
By the late 1980s, institutions of higher learning were granting
three degrees: a master's degree that required from four to six years of
study; a graduate degree, the licentiate, requiring another two years of
study; and the doctorate, awarded usually after four years or so of
graduate study. A candidate did not have to obtain the licentiate to be
awarded the doctorate.
Like the country's primary and secondary schools, Finnish
universities were free. To help with living expenses, however, students
who were enrolled in secondary schools and at universities were entitled
to financial aid by the Study Allowances Act of 1972. By the 1980s, more
than half the student body at these institutions received aid in the
form of allowances or low-interest loans.
Institutions of higher learning had about 7,000 instructors
altogether in the 1980s. Academic freedom was ensured through a tenure
system that protected most of this number from dismissal. The
institutions themselves were under the overall direction of the Ministry
of Education, but they enjoyed considerable internal autonomy. The
autonomy of the University of Helsinki was even guaranteed by the
Constitution of 1919. The trend toward greater internal democracy had
also touched Finnish universities, and by the late 1980s professors were
sharing much of their former power with other faculty members,
university staff, and students.
An area of future growth in Finnish education was expected to be that
of supplementary education at the university level. No degrees were to
be granted, but much greater access to university resources was to be
offered to those wishing to deepen their knowledge of a particular field
either for professional reasons or for personal pleasure. It was
estimated that, by the early 1990s, one-tenth of university teaching
would occur in an openuniversity -like forum.
Finland - Adult Education
In the last years of the nineteenth century, Finnish social policy
had as its goal a lessening of class friction. The few existing pieces
of social legislation addressed the needs of specific groups rather than
of society as a whole. After the Civil War, little was accomplished in
welfare legislation. A woefully insufficient national pension plan was
set up in 1937, as were measures to aid needy mothers. It was only after
World War II that Finnish social policy acquired the characteristics
that in the next decades made it similar to other Nordic systems of
social welfare.
According to Finnish sociologist Erik Allardt, the hallmark of the
Nordic welfare system was its comprehensiveness. Unlike the welfare
systems of the United States or most West European countries, those of
the Nordic countries covered the entire population, and they were not
limited to those groups unable to care for themselves. Examples of this
universality of coverage were national flat-rate pensions available to
all once they reached a certain age, regardless of what they had paid
into the plan, and national health plans based on medical needs rather
than on financial means. In addition, the citizens of the Nordic
countries had a legal right to the benefits provided by their welfare
systems, the provisions of which were designed to meet what was
perceived as a collective responsibility to ensure everyone a decent
standard of living. The Nordic system also was distinguished by the many
aspects of people's lives it touched upon.
The Finnish welfare system differed from those of other Nordic
countries mainly in that its benefits were lower in some categories,
such as sickness and unemployment payments; otherwise, the Finnish
system fit into the Nordic conception of social welfare. Finnish social
expenditures constituted about 7 percent of the country's gross domestic
product (GDP) in 1950, roughly equal to what Sweden, Denmark, and Norway
were spending. By the mid-1980s, Finland's social expenditures had risen
to about 24 percent of GDP, compared with the other countries'
respective 35, 30, and 22 percent. Less than 10 percent of these expenditures was paid
for by Finnish wage earners; the remainder came roughly equally from the
state and from employers. Until the second half of the 1970s, Finnish
employers had paid a higher share of social outlays than had their
counterparts in the other Nordic countries. In response to the slowdown
of the world economy after 1973, there was some shifting of social
burdens to the state, which made Finnish companies more price
competitive abroad.
Finland's welfare system also differed from those of its neighbors in
that it was put in place slightly later than theirs, and it was only
fully realized in the decade after the formation of the Red-Earth
government in 1966. Just after World War II, the Finns directed their
attention to maternal and child care. In 1957 the government established
an improved national pension plan and supplemented it in the early 1960s
with private pension funds. Unemployment aid was organized in 1959 and
in 1960, and it was reformed in 1972. Legislation of the 1950s and the
1960s also mandated the construction of a network of hospitals, the
education of more medical personnel, and, from 1963 to the early 1970s,
the establishment of a system of health insurance. The housing allowance
system expanded during the 1960s to reach everwidening circles of the
population. Health-care officials turned away from hospital care in the
1970s, and they began to emphasize the use of smaller local clinics. By
the 1980s, the Finnish welfare system was up to Nordic standards and had
the support of most Finns. All major political parties were committed to
maintaining it, and its role in Finnish society seemed secure for the
coming decades.
Finland - Organization of the Welfare System
Finland's first national old-age pension plan dates from 1937, but it
was so poorly funded that a new National Pensions Act was put into
effect in 1957. In the late 1980s, this law, somewhat reformed, was
still the basis of Finland's National Pension Plan, which was open to
all residents over the age of sixteen, even to those who had never paid
into it. Even those foreigners not from the Nordic countries were
entitled to this pension if they had resided in Finland for at least
five years. Those who left for residence in a country outside Nordic
Europe, even those who were Finnish citizens, could receive the pension
for only one year. The flat-rate national pension could be paid as an
old-age pension, once a person reached the age of sixtyfive ; as an
invalidity pension (either full or partial) to those between the ages of
sixteen and sixty-four who were no longer able to work; or, in some
cases, to the long-term unemployed who were in their late fifties or
early sixties. In addition to these classes of beneficiaries, survivors
of those eligible for national pensions who were not themselves eligible
for the pensions could receive pensions under the terms of the
Survivor's Pension Plan. Also tied to the National Pension Plan were
payments for handicapped children living at home and for some combat
veterans of World War II.
Payments of the national pension were uniform for everyone; in the
mid-1980s, they amounted to Fmk334 a month. To this amount were added
the assistance payment, which varied according to a pensioner's marital
status, the cost of living in his or her locality, and other pensions
that he or she received. Other supplementary payments could be made for
dependent children, for degree of disability, and for housing costs, as
well as for veterans of the Civil War and of World War II. In the
mid-1980s, the supplemental payment to a single pensioner could range
from Fmk1,362 to Fmk1,436 a month. The supplement for each child
amounted to Fmk181, and housing supplements varied according to housing
costs but could amount to as much as approximately Fmk1,000.
Helplessness supplements could be worth up to about Fmk400, depending on
the age and the physical state of the pensioner. National pensions were
indexed, and they increased in value each year. Since reforms of the
early 1980s, national pensions were not taxable if they were the sole
source of income. Pensions were no longer affected by a spouse's
earnings or pension income, and the national pension could only be
reduced by income from other pensions. The National Pension Plan was
funded by the beneficiary's own contributions, about 2 percent of his or
her locally taxable income, and by employer contributions of 4 to 5
percent of the insured person's wages.
Finland - National Pension Plan
The Sickness Insurance Act of 1963 introduced health insurance to
Finland in two stages. First, beginning in 1964 it provided payments
when wages were lost because of illness or maternity leave and payments
for the cost of treatment and medicine. Three years later, it began
paying doctors' bills as well. Until the act went into effect, only a
small minority of the population, generally those employed by large
firms, had medical insurance.
All persons resident in Finland for more than a short time were
eligible for benefits. Foreigners had to register with the local health
authorities to receive payments. In the 1980s, the daily payment made to
make up for losses of income due to illness averaged about 80 percent of
a typical wage and could last for as many as 300 workdays. Highly paid
individuals received less. Hospital care in public hospitals was
generally free, and other compensation amounted to 60 percent of
doctors' fees, 75 percent of laboratory expenses, and 50 percent of
medicine costs. In the mid-1980s, dental care was free for anyone born
after 1961, but for others it was paid only if dental problems had to be
treated to cure a disease. Maternity leave payments amounted to about 80
percent of income for about one year, and could begin five weeks before
the estimated date of the birth. Fathers could take some of this time,
with a corresponding cut in the days allowed to the mother. Sickness
insurance was funded by the recipients themselves through their payment
of about 2 percent of their locally taxable income, by employers who
paid a contribution of about 1 percent of the employee's wages, and by
the state.
However generous these benefits appeared in an international context,
medical fees had increased in the 1970s and the 1980s, and government
compensation rates had not kept pace. Rates increased by 25 percent in
1986, but not enough according to some critics. Those who pressed for
government relief believed it necessary even though public medical care,
which constituted the bulk of medical care in Finland, was already
highly subsidized and hence rather cheap compared with many other
countries.
Finland - Unemployment Insurance
The Welfare for Intoxicant Abusers Act of 1985 dealt mainly with
alcoholism, as it was the only serious problem of substance abuse in
Finland in the late 1980s. Finnish society had traditionally not seen
alcohol as a part of daily life, but rather as something consumed on
special occasions and then to the point of intoxication. Medical
evidence of this harmful habit was that the Finnish incidence of death
by acute alcohol poisoning was seven times that of Sweden and twenty
times that of Denmark. Because of its troubled relationship with
alcohol, the country enforced prohibition from 1919 to 1931. A later
measure against alcohol consumption was a 1976 law that banned liquor
advertisements in most publications. Another measure increased the cost
of alcohol by taxing it heavily, so much so that by the mid-1980s liquor
taxes were an important out source of state revenues.
In the 1980s, there were still many abstainers in Finland who had
moral objections to alcohol use, in contrast to the small minority of
drinkers who accounted for more than half of total national consumption.
In the late 1960s, a relaxation of the rules for the purchase of alcohol
had as its goal a lessening of drink's glamorous appeal because it was,
in a sense, forbidden. This policy may have backfired when sales of beer
in grocery stores and the availability of hard liquor at more
restaurants caused alcohol consumption to more than double within a
decade. Since the mid-1970s, however, analysts of Finnish alcohol use
have seen consumption rates level off and drinking habits become more
moderate. Although the number of abstainers had dropped sharply in the
postwar period, causing some sociologists to refer to Finns who became
adults in the 1950s and the 1960s as "the wet generation,"
alcohol was gradually coming to take a more ordinary place in everyday
life.
The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health had a special department
concerned with substance abuse, the Department of Temperance and Alcohol
Policy, that formulated welfare plans and directed the State Alcohol
Monopoly responsible for the manufacture, importation, and sale of
alcohol. Local authorities provided a variety of facilities for
alcoholics--including clinics, half-way houses, and emergency housing
open twenty-four hours a day that offered withdrawal treatments. When
necessary, alcoholics could be confined against their will, but this
practice was less common in the late 1980s than it had been previously.
State welfare was supplemented by private and voluntary associations,
such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
Finland - Health System
By the second half of the 1980s, Finns enjoyed a standard of health
fully comparable to that of other highly developed countries. If health
standards did not match those of Finland's Nordic neighbors in all
areas, it was because Sweden, Denmark, and Norway were the world's
leaders in health care. Finland had made remarkable progress, however,
and was rapidly catching up. In one major area, the prevention of infant
mortality, Finland led the world in the mid-1980s: it had the world's
lowest infant mortality rate.
Development of the Health System
Since becoming an independent state in 1917, Finland has managed to
deal with the "traditional" health problems. The most
important cause of death in the nineteenth century, pulmonary
tuberculosis, was brought under control by means of a network of
tuberculosis hospitals built between the world wars. Smallpox and
pneumonia have also ceased to be serious problems. With the aid of the
vaccination law passed in 1952, the fight against communicable diseases
was largely won. In 1980, for example, there were no deaths from common
diseases of this type. By the mid-1980s, no cases of diphtheria had been
registered in Finland for several decades, and, with the exception of a
mini-epidemic of seven cases in 1983-84, poliomyelitis also had
disappeared. An emphasis on hospital construction in the 1950s and 1960s
brought the ratio of hospital beds per capita up to international norms,
and new medical training centers more than doubled the number of
physicians between 1970 and the mid-1980s. The passage of the Sickness
Insurance Act in 1963 and frequent expansion of its coverage meant that
good medical care was available to everyone. Later legislative measures,
such as the Primary Health Care Act of 1972, or the Mental Health Act of
1978, aimed at moving health care from large centers, increasing the
amount of preventive treatment at smaller local facilities, and favoring
out-patient care when possible. Finnish health authorities believed,
even in the late 1980s, that care of this kind could be more flexible,
humane, and effective and could also check cost increases. Despite this
policy innovation, however, social expenditures on health had increased
ten-fold in real terms since the early 1950s.
Organization of the Health System
Health care was directed by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health
and was administered by the National Board of Health. In accordance with
government practices, the ministry decided policy, and the national
board determined how it would be administered. Actual delivery of care
was the responsibility of local government, especially after the Primary
Health Care Act of 1972, which stipulated that the basis of medical
treatment should be the care offered in local health clinics.
Previously, the emphasis had been on care from large regional hospitals.
The 1972 law resulted in the creation of about 200 local health
centers each of which served a minimum of 10,000 persons. As
municipalities varied greatly in size, small ones had to unite with
others to form health centers, while about half the centers were
operated by a single municipality. Centers did not necessarily consist
of a single building, but encompassed all the health facilities in the
health center district. With the exception of some sparsely settled
regions, people were usually within twenty-five kilometers of the center
charged with their care.
A basic aim of the 1972 law was to give all Finns equal access to
health care, regardless of their income or where they lived. Because
most services of health centers were free, subsidies from the national
government were required to augment the financial resources of
municipalities. The subsidies varied according to the wealth of the
municipality and ranged roughly from 30 to 65 percent of costs. By the
mid-1980s, about 40 percent of the money spent on health went for
primary care, compared with 10 percent in 1972.
Health care centers were responsible for routine care such as health
counseling, examinations, and screening for communicable diseases; they
also provided school health services, home care, dental work, and child
and maternal care. Most health centers had at least three physicians and
additional staff at a ratio of about eleven per physician. Because of
the high level of their training, nurses performed many services done by
physicians in other countries. Most centers had midwives, whose high
competence, combined with an extensive program of prenatal care, made
possible Finland's extremely low infant mortality rate, the world's best
at 6.5 deaths per 1,000 births.
Once it was established that a health problem could not be treated
adequately at a center, patients were directed to hospitals, either to
one of about thirty local hospitals with some degree of specialization,
or to one of about twenty hospitals, five of which were university
teaching hospitals, that could offer highly specialized care. In
addition, there were institutions with a single concern, such as the
sixty psychiatric hospitals, and others that dealt with orthopedics,
epilepsy, rheumatism, or plastic surgery. Given the great drop in the
incidence of tuberculosis in Finland, the country's dozen sanatoria were
gradually being taken over for other purposes. Hospitals were usually
operated by federations of municipalities, as their maintenance was
beyond the power of most single municipalities. By the mid-1980s, the
country's public hospitals had about 50,000 beds, and its 40-odd private
hospitals had roughly 3,000. There were another 20,000 beds for patients
at health centers, homes for the elderly, and other welfare
institutions.
Health Problems
By the late 1980s, Finland's health problems were similar to those
affecting other advanced countries. The most common causes of death in
Finland were, first, cardiovascular diseases, followed by neoplasms
(malignant and benign), accidents, poisonings, trauma from external
causes (including suicides), and, lastly, diseases of the respiratory
system. The mortality rate from cardiovascular diseases was among the
world's highest for both sexes, but it was especially high for
middle-aged males. A national diet rich in fats was seen by medical
specialists as a cause of the prevalence of coronary illnesses.
Despite its location on the periphery of Europe, Finland was also
affected by the spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS),
but not to a serious degree. As of late 1988, only 32 cases of AIDS had
been reported, and 222 persons had been found to be infected with the
human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), although health officials believed
there might be as many as 500 HIV-positive cases in all of Finland.
Reasons for the slight presence of this health problem were the low
frequency of drug use and prostitution, an aggressive and frank public
education campaign, and the trust Finns felt for the national health
system, which led them to adopt practices it recommended.
The most striking of all Finnish health problems was the high average
mortality rate for males once they reached adulthood, which contributed
to an average longevity in the mid-1980s of only 70.1 years compared
with 73.6 years for Swedish males. In the second half of the 1970s,
Finnish males over the age of twenty were one-third more likely to die
by their sixty-fifth birthday than their Swedish neighbors.
Cardiovascular diseases struck Finnish men twice as often as Swedish
men. The three other chief causes of death were respiratory illnesses at
twice the Swedish rate, lung cancer at three times the Swedish rate, and
accidental or violent death at a frequency 50 percent higher than the
Swedish figure. Health authorities have attributed the high mortality
rates of the Finnish male to diet, excessive use of tobacco and alcohol,
disruption of communities through migration, and a tradition of
high-risk behavior that is particularly marked in working-class men in
eastern Finland.
Mortality rates for Finnish women, with the exception of women over
sixty-five, compared well with those of the other Nordic countries. A
reason for this discrepancy between Finnish and other Nordic older women
was the higher Finnish incidence of coronary problems, which occur later
in women than in men. In the mid-1980s, Finnish women lived an average
of 78.1 years, compared with 79.6 years for Swedish women. Except for
coronary illnesses, of which Finnish women died 50 percent more often
than their Swedish counterparts, the other causes of Finnish female
mortality matched those of Sweden. In some cases, cancer and respiratory
diseases for example, Finnish women had an even lower rate of incidence.
National efforts to improve living habits have included campaigns
against smoking, restraints on the consumption of alcohol, and better
health education in schools. One program that has been widely studied by
international health officials was one implemented in the province of
Pohjois-Karjala that aimed at reforming dietary habits in a region
particularly hard hit by coronary illnesses. Finland was also a
participant in the World Health Organization's program Health for All by
the Year 2000 and was its European reporting nation.
Finland - LIVING CONDITIONS
Although Finland had a very low population density and was famed for
its many areas of nearly untouched nature, it had not been spared
environmental pollution. Some of this came from neighboring countries,
such as the dose of radiation it received after the accident at the
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union in 1985. In this case,
there was little damage because the radiation fell too far south to harm
reindeer herds and fell too early to contaminate grasses and vegetables
that have a late growing season because of Finland's long winter.
Domestic sources also contributed significantly to the country's
problems with environmental pollution. The exceptionally strong growth
rate of an economy based to a considerable degree on energy-intensive
industries was a factor, as were the fertilizer-dependent agricultural
sector and the wood-processing plants that, between them, contributed
much to the pollution of Finnish rivers and groundwater. By the 1980s,
Finland registered considerably higher sulfur and nitrogen emissions
than other West European and Nordic countries, and its discharge of
oxidizable matter into water was three times the average of the members
of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Finnish efforts to protect the environment began in the 1920s with
the Nature Conservation Act of 1923, which allowed the establishment of
nature preserves if they were needed. Since then there have been many
laws covering different aspects of environmental protection, including
water purity, control of poisons and pesticides, establishment of an oil
pollution fund, waste management, prevention of marine and air
pollution, and reduction of noise.
An attempt to protect the environment more thoroughly was evident in
the formation of a ministry specifically pledged to this task.
Established in 1983, the Ministry of Environment had four departments,
employing about 250 persons in all. One department dealt with
administrative matters, while the other three were concerned with
environmental protection and nature conservation, physical planning and
building, and housing. In 1986 the National Board of Waters with its
1,400 employees was renamed the National Board of Waters and the
Environment and was placed under the new ministry.
In the mid-1980s, Finns were concerned about the environment, and a
study found that only 11 percent of them would place economic growth
above protection of the environment. Many believed ecological conditions
were worsening. A 1983 poll found that only 31 percent of those
questioned--compared with 57 percent in 1973--believed their country's
environment to be very good or excellent. Another indication of Finns'
concerns was the birth in the early 1980s of a new political party, the
Greens, which was remarkably successful in elections. Commitment to
pollution control also was seen in the portion of research money going
to environmental research, which compared well with that spent by other
countries. Despite these measures, there were observers in the late
1980s who contended that Finnish efforts in this area needed further
improvement.
An OECD study published in 1988 held that, despite improvements,
Finland still did not have an adequate environmental program. There was
still no single law relating to the environment, and different
ministries often did not consult sufficiently with one another about the
ecological impact of their plans. Despite the existence of excellent
statistics about damage to the environment, decision makers were often
not well informed about them. Also lacking, according to the OECD
report, was a sufficient assessment, when making plans for economic
development, of the real costs of pollution. Recommended for a more
economical defense of the environment were an exact consideration of
these costs and an increased use of the "polluter pays" and
"user fees" principles. The report noted, too, that many local
authorities lacked the expertise to deal properly with ecological
decisions; moreover, because they were suspicious of the power of
provincial-level and national-level officials, they were reluctant to
cooperate fully with them.
Finland - Housing
As part of its overall responsibility to supervise the nation's
environment, the Ministry of Environment was charged with overseeing
what kinds of buildings and housing Finns worked in and lived in,
arranging remedies for existing deficiencies, and guaranteeing adequate
conditions in the future. Two of the ministry's four departments, the
Physical Planning and Building Department and the Housing Department,
were created specifically for these tasks. In addition, the National
Board of Housing, which had been created in 1966 to organize the state's
administration of housing, was made subordinate to the ministry in 1986.
Efforts to improve the housing of workers began in the nineteenth
century, as did arrangements for low-interest mortgages. The 1920s saw
the passage of the Housing Corporation Act and the establishment of the
Housing Mortgage Bank. It was only after World War II, however, that
significant measures were undertaken to subsidize housing through what
is known as Arava legislation. These laws were brought together in 1953
by the Housing Production Act, which became the basis of housing policy
and which helped to foster the tremendous construction surge of the next
two decades.
By the 1980s, it was estimated that about 75 percent of Finnish
residential dwellings of all types had been constructed since World War
II. For some types of dwellings the figure was even higher. For example,
some 70 percent of apartments were built after 1960. Migration, whether
voluntary or not, and an upsurge in population growth had made this
construction necessary. Population movements during the economic boom
caused the first half of the 1970s to be the period of peak
construction, when as many as 70,000 units were built in a single year.
By the first half of the 1980s, about 48,000 units were built
annually. In addition to a decline in building activity, the kinds of
dwellings constructed changed. In the economic boom years, about
two-thirds of new dwellings were apartments, and the remainder were
free-standing houses or row houses. By 1980 the ratio was reversed. In
addition, by the 1980s much construction work was for renovation, and
government plans called for the number of buildings restored each year
to climb from 15,000 in 1980 to 60,000 by the end of the 1990s.
The construction boom meant that Finns were housed better than
before. The number of dwelling units increased from 1.2 million in 1960
to 1.8 million in 1980 and gave them more room. Finnish dwellings were
still rather small, however. In the 1980s, their average size was
sixty-nine square meters, nine square meters more than in 1970. Much
poor standard housing had disappeared during the boom years. The new
dwellings had modern conveniences; by 1980 nearly three-quarters of
them--compared with only one-half a decade earlier--were fully equipped
with hot water, indoor plumbing, central heating, and sewer connections.
Although Finnish housing was still somewhat poorer than that of the
other Nordic countries, it ranked well by world standards.
About 60 percent of Finns owned their dwellings, and Finns spent, on
the average, about 18 percent of their income on housing. Government
housing allowances helped people of low income to keep housing
expenditures within 10 to 20 percent of this income. Government housing
aid came in a number of forms, and it helped people in all income
brackets. Housing allowances were paid to low-income groups and to
pensioners living either in their own homes or in rental units.
Low-interest loans were available to people earning modest incomes who
desired to own their own homes. Better-off Finns benefited from tax
relief if they had mortgages.
Not all government housing policies were so popular as subsidies,
low-interest loans, and tax relief, for some had unfortunate results.
The housing program's most serious failure was seen in the often sterile
and boring apartment house complexes and even whole suburban
developments and towns that were designed and built in the postwar
period to meet pressing housing needs. Some planned towns were
internationally famed for the beauty of their design. An example was
Tapiola, located on the outskirts of Helsinki. Many others, however,
provided an ugly and inhumane environment for those obliged to live in
them. Often situated far from needed services and lacking softening
amenities, the bleak dormitory villages were desolate shelter for newly
uprooted migrants from the countryside, and they fostered antisocial
behavior, family problems, and illnesses. In later decades, authorities
applied resources to these ill-conceived residential areas with the hope
of making them more hospitable.
Another problem, less serious, was a shortage of rental units. Some
observers held that state rent-control policies had reduced the profits
earned by landlords and hence had caused a scarcity of rental
properties. The lack of available rental housing particularly affected
young people, generally not yet able to purchase their own homes.
