(SANITIZED) SECURITY CONCERNS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88T00146R000300250005-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 9, 2008
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: December 19, 1983
• Content Type: MEMO

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FINLAND
COMPLICATED
COEXISTENCE
"Finlandization" has become an epithet,
but the Finns have remained
remarkably free while reaching
accommodation with the Russians
t
NOT MANY COUNTRIES have acquired
the status of metaphor. But Finland
has-or, at least, had: in truth, "Finlan-
dization" has been less a metaphor than
an epithet, used by people who knew lit-
tle about Finland to describe policies
they disliked. The eminent German po-
litical scientist Richard Lowenthal is gen-
erally credited with having invented the
term in the early 1960s, but there is little
agreement on what it means, since the
purposes of those who have used it have
been more polemical than analytical.
If the term means anything, it means
a state's anticipatory accommodation to
the interests of a powerful state near-
by-in the case of Finland, the Soviet
Union. The rub, of course, is that weak
states inevitably have to make some ac-
commodation to strong states in their
neighborhood, like it or not. One man's
realpolitik is another man's trimming
sails to the Soviet wind. To complicate
matters, writers such as Walter La-
queur began talking in the mid-seventies
of "self-Finlandization," a term picked
up by Zbigniew Brzezinski when he was
President Carter's assistant for national-
security affairs. For Brzezinski, the tar-
get of the epithet was Western Europe,
especially West Germany under Chan-
cellor Helmut Schmidt. But the term is
THE ATLANTIC, Dec. 1983
at best redundant, because any notion of
Finlandization implies anticipation by
the weak state more than actual coercion
by the strong.
Charges of Finlandization have been
hurled across the Atlantic less frequent-
ly in the past several years. The acces-
sion to power in West Germany of the
Christian Democrats, under Helmut
Kohl, has been reassuring to official
Washington, at least temporarily. But
more important, the issues facing the
United States and its allies in Western
Europe-the intermediate-nuclear-force
deployments, for example-are so seri-
ous that gratuitous name-calling has be-
come too damaging to contemplate. Nev-
ertheless, it seems worth looking at how
"Finlandization" applies to the country
itself. The occasion for my recent visit
was a conference in Helsinki on nuclear
weapons and Nordic security, especially
the prospects for a nuclear-free zone in
the Nordic area.
The end of President Urho Kekkonen's
long (1956 to 1981) tenure in office has
not meant a change in Finnish policy to-
ward the Soviet Union. His successor,
Mauno Koivisto, was quick to identify
himself with the postwar policy devel-
oped under Finland's two previous presi-
dents-the so-called Paasikivi-Kek-
konen line. Although the Soviet-Finnish
Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and
Mutual Assistance (FCMA) still had five
years to run, at a Moscow summit last
June Koivisto and Yuri Andropov ex-
tended it by twenty years, in large part
to commit themselves personally to it.
Koivisto, a Social Democrat, had not
been regarded as the Soviets' favorite
candidate. Nevertheless, he has pledged
to continue the intense diplomacy with
Soviet leaders that Kekkonen made a
tradition.
Accommodating the Soviet Union has
allowed the Finns a surprising amount of
internal discretion. The country has a
stable parliamentary democracy and a
free press. Eighty percent of its econo-
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my is privately owned, a much higher
figure than those for many nations in
Western Europe. Its per capita income is
well into the worlds top twenty. Finland
shows very few signs of Soviet cultural
influence, but has trappings of the
West-Scotch, jeans, and Burger King.
It bears almost no resemblance to an
Eastern European state. It is perhaps
unsurprising that few Finns oppose ex-
isting arrangements with the Soviet
Union. A 1974 poll, for example, found
that 80 percent of Finns thought the So-
viet-Finnish friendship treaty was favor-
able to their international position, and
only 4 percent thought it was unfavor-
able.
Yet the approval derives from a shared
awareness of how few options Finland
has and the memory of the consequences
of other attitudes. Most Finns regard
Finland's near-arrogance toward the So-
viet Union between the world wars as a
grave error, one for which they paid
dearly, both in the Winter War of 1939-
1940 and in the so-called "continuation
war" of 1941-1944. In the armistice end-
ing the latter, Finland lost parts of its
eastern region, Karelia, a loss that en-
tailed the evacuation of hundreds of
thousands of refugees. As one Finnish
analyst put it to me years ago: You have
to understand, we tried fighting them
and we lost; you can't blame us for trying
some other approach.
SOME OF THE costs of Finland's pecu-
liar ties to Moscow are plain enough.
Despite its need, Finland refused Mar-
shall Plan aid after Moscow signaled that
accepting would be considered a hostile
act. Finland's arrangements with the
Common Market are balanced by paral-
lel links to Comecon-which were made
largely for cosmetic reasons-and its
policy of neutrality rules out full mem-
bership in the Common Market. Political
refugees from the East are normally re-
turned. The FCMA treaty obliges Fin-
land to cooperate with Moscow if the
Soviet Union is attacked through Fin-
land, though the Finnish interpretation
holds that mutual consent would be re-
quired for Soviet troops to enter Fin-
land. There are treaty limits on Finnish
military forces. Although those forces
are well trained and some are deployed
in the north, they are inadequate to de-
fend the Soviet harder. Finland spends
on defense less than half the percentage
of GNP spent on it by Sweden or Nor-
way. Finland buys major arms from the
Soviet Union, though many of its Soviet
items, such as aircraft, have been modi-
fied with Western electronics. Large
purchases from the West, such as the re-
cent acquisition of American anti-tank
missiles, are balanced by comparable
purchases from the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union provides virtually
all of Finland's oil and natural gas, and
two thirds of its total energy. Before the
energy crisis of 1973, Finland was able
to keep its trade with the Soviet Union
at its target of one fifth of all trade, but
that share has since risen: exports to the
Soviet Union, primarily of manufactured
goods, reached 27 percent of total trade
in 1982, with imports from the Soviet
Union, mostly of raw materials, at 25
percent. Since the trade is conducted on
a kind of barter basis, Finland's large
"surplus" with the Soviet Union means
that it must either sell less or look for
more to import. There is no question,
however, that Finns regard the trade ar-
rangements as beneficial. Though the
Finns look to a recovery in the West to
reduce their reliance on trade with the
Soviet Union, that trade has cushioned
the impact of the global recession on Fin-
land.
The marks of deference to the Soviet
Union on Finland's politics and public life
are harder to find. Certainly Pravda and
Izvestia do not refrain from expressing
opinions about Finnish politics, and
Finnish analysts are devoted Kremlinol-
ogists, seeking tiny clues to Soviet atti-
tudes. To exert influence on Finnish poli-
tics, the Soviets use the pro-Soviet
faction of the Finnish Communist Party,
which has frequently been part of post-
war coalition governments. (In practice,
43
however, Communists are excluded from
the diplomatic service and the officer
corps.)
In 1973, the Finnish parliament ex-
tended President Kekkonen's term by
four years, and two years later all politi-
cal parties announced that they would
support him in 1978. Both actions re-
flected Finnish sensitivity to Soviet indi-
cations that better relations between
Finland and Western Europe would be
acceptable only if a firm hand remained
on the rudder-leading one observer to
call Finland "Kekkoslovakia." Yet in the
1982 elections the candidate preferred
by the Soviets was rejected by Kekkon-
en's own Center Party, despite signals
from Pravda. The ultimate winner, Koi-
visto, is a man without strong ties to the
Soviet Union-a lack that was interpret-
ed as contributing to his victory.
Self-restraint sometimes borders on
self-censorship. Kekkonen successfully
pressured Finnish publishers not to is-
sue a local edition of Gulag Archipela-
go-though a Finnish translation was
published in Sweden and distributed in
Finland. Finnish leaders seldom criticize
the Soviet Union, especially about "do-
mestic" matters like human right: (they
seldom criticize the U.S., either), and
the press follows suit. The silence re-
flects the wide consensus, in and out of
government, that existing arrangements
ought not to be jeopardized. Thus, while
the Finnish trade surplus with the Sovi-
et Union will be noted, it will be played
down, lest it be embarrassing to Moscow
and complicate future trade negotia-
tions. One government source says that
in discussions of the communique to ac-
company the prolongation of the bilater-
al treaty in June, the Soviets pressed for
stronger language concerning the Finn-
ish media. Finland resisted, the source
says, holding to a vague formulation ac-
knowledging the "responsibility" of the
press not to provoke tensions.
Many of Finland's current problems
are shared by other industrial countries.
Economic growth will be slight this year,
unemployment remains high, and infla-
tion, at 9 percent last year, threatens to
gain momentum. A previously impres-
sive growth in exports-led by metal
and engineering goods, which had come
to equal exports of traditional wood
products-halted in 1982, despite the in-
creased trade with the Soviet Union.
Growing government deficits are not yet
a problem on the scale of that in the
U.S., but they will nevertheless compel
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unpleasant and politically divisive cut-
backs in social spending.
More important over the long term,
there are signs of cracks in Finland's re-
markable political and social consensus.
With four operating nuclear reactors,
(two supplied by the Soviet Union), Fin-
land has managed to produce a high pro-
portion of its domestic electricity from
nuclear energy. There is growing opposi-
tion to a plan for a fifth reactor, which is
nonetheless attractive to Finnish indus-
try: buying another big-ticket item from
the East means selling more back. Most
politicians I spoke to predicted that the
reactor will never be bought. Finnish
"Greens" (radicals, environmentalists,
and anti-nuclear activists) captured two
seats in parliamentary elections this
year. The Greens are beginning to have
effects on internal politics-especially
on the previously impressive unity of the
Social Democrats-that are reminiscent
of dissension in West Germany, one
right-wing Finnish Social Democrat ex-
plained to me. Some of his colleagues, he
said, are tempted to try to co-opt sup-
port for the Greens by moving left on is-
sues like nuclear power and budget-cut-.
ting.
T HE CONFERENCE ON a Nordic nucle-
ar-free zone was a good chance to ob-
serve Finland's internal politics and its
relations with neighbors. The conference
commemorated the twenty-fifth anni-
versary of the proposal for the zone,
which was supported by Kekkonen in
1958. It is not a very good idea. The Nor-
dic countries already constitute a de
facto nuclear-free zone, since Sweden
and Finland have forsworn nuclear
weapons, and the Nordic NATO mem-
bers, Norway and Denmark, do not per-
mit them to be stationed within their
boundaries in peacetime. The Nordic re-
gion is adjacent to the Kola peninsula,
which is the base for an enormous array
of Soviet conventional and nuclear weap-
ons, including a large fraction of the So-
viet nuclear-missile-carrying submarine
fleet. The Nordics hope and trust that
the missiles are intended to go over their
heads to the United States. Still, it
would be hard to pretend that they did
not exist during any negotiations over a
nuclear-free zone. The Soviets, who are
quite content with the idea of a nuclear-
free zone that does not include them,
have hinted that they might make con-
cessions to accommodate one. These
would probably mean some constraints
on shorter-range systems on the Kola.
But even given Soviet concessions, there
would remain great problems in defining
and negotiating a nuclear-free zone in
the Nordic region. Merely ratifying the
existing state of affairs would gain the
Nordics little, and doing so would be
awkward for Norway and Denmark, be-
cause it would separate them still fur-
ther from NATO's nuclear umbrella.
Yet not all ideas are useful primarily
for their substance. I sensed that many
Nordics who support the idea while it is
under discussion would not like to see it
become a reality, for the reasons sug-
gested above. Discussing the nuclear-
free zone has increased consultation
among the Nordic countries on security
matters-indeed, at the conference I
sometimes felt as if I were listening
through a keyhole to a private discus-
sion. One Finnish political scientist could
not resist the temptation to play to the
Soviet gallery, by suggesting that the
Soviet-Finnish friendship treaty could
serve as a model for a nuclear-free-zone
agreement. He embarrassed most of his
Finnish colleagues, but it is helpful to
Finland to keep the idea alive.
The best capsule description of Fin-
land's attitude toward the Soviet Union
that I have heard was provided by a for-
eign diplomat: It's not courageous but
it's effective. And, Finns would add, the
costs of courage are too high for a coun-
try of 4.8 million people. Maybe, one
Finn said, we will be able to afford other
options when the Soviet Union disinte-
grates into fifteen semi-independent re-
publics, but we can't now.
Finlandization has little value as a
metaphor. Finland derives impressive
benefits even as it incurs costs. Its ap-
proach is the product of too many singu-
lar facts; bedfellows make peculiar poli-
tics. If Finland as a model has any
relevance, it is not to the West but to the
East. Turmoil in Eastern Europe may
one day force Moscow to contemplate
giving the nations there something like
Finland's autonomy in domestic, eco-
nomic, and political affairs-provided
they show special deference to Soviet se-
curity needs. No doubt Eastern Europe
would be more than happy to be Finlan-
dized in that way.
-Gregory F. 7 everton
44
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