Progress or Perish by Sandra Wallenius-Korkalo Aini Linjakumpu

Author:Sandra Wallenius-Korkalo, Aini Linjakumpu [Sandra Wallenius-Korkalo, Aini Linjakumpu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409492566
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2012-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

The East/West Narrative

The decisive steps in the ideological transformation of the Agrarian League into a modernist, third-way party (since 1965, the Centre Party) were taken during the 1950s and 1960s. ‘National planning’ and ‘regional and community planning’ were two priorities of a party programme that was released in 1962, and that declared economic growth and the utilization of natural resources to be key policy goals with the following proviso:

In order to achieve this, it is vital to implement beforehand and continually a sufficient amount of research and planning. Scientific and scientific-technological research on resources based on our country’s natural attributes must be boosted, as well as the co-ordination between national planning institutions and other organs that utilize the said research, in order to organize the use of the whole territory of the country for production and other purposes in the best possible way. Particular attention must be paid to investigating the opportunities for production in various parts of the country. (Agrarian League 1962)

Such formulations are evidence of an at least tacit consensus that was reached by the early 1960s among leading Finnish politicians on the desirability of continuous growth and the need to strengthen the country’s position in the international economic race. As Pekka Kuusi, a social scientist close to the social democrats, put it in his well-known proposal for a comprehensive social policy: ‘There is no return to the woods. Not even a chance to stand where we are now. If we want to continue our life between Sweden and the Soviet Union, two nations conscious of the need to grow and able to grow, we are forced to grow’ (Kuusi 1961: 34). In addition to growth, Kuusi strongly recommended the extension of social welfare policy as a means to distribute the fruits of growth justly and to ensure the availability of a trained workforce.

Progress understood as modernization of society and economy and the increase of welfare (measured by indicators such as GNP per capita, life expectancy in years, and access to higher education) was a standard view in Western Europe during the 1960s. Arguably, this also was the golden age of state intervention by social engineering as well as the policy relevance of academic social scientists. Following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev’s significantly more liberal line, it was believed that the sheer force of economic facts would initiate reforms in the Soviet Union, too, that would gradually narrow the gap between the socialist and capitalist world. As the American scholars Zbiegniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington (1964: 428) argued, the ‘laws of physics, of strategy, of engineering, and even of industrial management and economics are universally true and eventually must be respected as such by all modern societies.’ The general view that historical progress would lead towards increasingly similar economic and political arrangements all across the globe was known as the theory of convergence.

Finland’s geographical position between the Soviet Union and Western Europe had hitherto been considered challenging, if not an outright handicap. After

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