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INTELLECTUALS AND THE STATE: THE FINNISH UNIVERSITY INTELLIGENTSIA AND THE GERMAN IDEALIST TRADITION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2014

JUKKA KORTTI
JUKKA KORTTI*
Affiliation:
Department of Political and Economic Studies, Section of Social Science History, University of Helsinki E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This essay examines the making of the Finnish intelligentsia and its relation to the state and the nation. The problem is analysed primarily from the perspective of student activism in the twentieth century. The formation of the intelligentsia is viewed in the context of nationalism, (cultural) modernism and radicalism in the development of the public sphere. The main source for the article's findings is the student magazine Ylioppilaslehti (Student Magazine), which is not just “any student paper” but a Finnish institution that saw most of Finland's cultural and political elite pass through its editorial staff in the twentieth century. The essay demonstrates the importance of German idealism, as theorized by the Finnish statesman and philosopher J. W. Snellman, in the activities of the Finnish university intelligentsia well into the twenty-first century, and particularly in linking these activities to nation building.

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Articles
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , August 2014 , pp. 359 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

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20 The Finnish Diet recognized Tsar Alexander I as grand duke.

21 The Baltic provinces also retained some of their former institutions, and in 1815 the Congress of Vienna agreed to the formation of a kingdom of Poland with internal autonomy under Russian sovereignty. But later in the nineteenth century Poland was treated as an occupied territory and the Baltic provinces were incorporated into the Russian system of government.

22 Only Croatia, Bohemia and the Polish parts of Russia could be compared to Finland as relatively overdeveloped countries in the contemporary Russian Empire. Nairn, Tom, The Break-up of Britain (London, 1977), 120Google Scholar.

23 See Alapuro, Suomen älymystö Venäjän varjossa, 28–54.

24 Jalava, J. V. Snellman, 47–48; Eyerman, Between Culture and Politics, 27; Koivisto, Hanne, “Ihmisryhmä, jossa moraali ja äly yhtyvät: intellektuellin käsitteestä”, in Rossi, L. and Koivisto, H., eds., Monta tietä menneisyyteen (Turun yliopisto, 1995), 107–34Google Scholar.

25 The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and early 1900s. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent, had been falsely declared guilty of leaking security information to Germans. When Emile Zola, man of letters, reproached the government for denying Dreyfus his right to justice, several public figures supported him. The term “intellectual” appeared a couple of days later in a newspaper article referring to Zola and his associates. “Intellectual” became a term in popular use, but had sarcastic connotations at first. See e.g. Eyerman, Between Culture and Politics, 53–67.

26 Pekka Sulkunen, “The Formation of Intellectuals as Social Group”, in Kauppi and Sulkunen, Vanguards of Modernity, 7–15, 9; Eyerman, Between Culture and Politics, 38.

27 Jalava, Marja, Minä ja maailmanhenki: Moderni subjekti kristillis-idealistisessa kansallisajattelussa ja Rolf Lagerborgin kulttuuriradikalismissa n. 1800–1914 (Helsinki, 2005), 463Google Scholar (English summary).

28 The Swedish-speakers started to move to the west coast of Finland in the Middle Ages. Finland became part of the kingdom of Sweden in the twelfth century. The original mother tongue of people living in Finland was Finnish, except for the Swedish-speakers on the coast. However, Swedish became the language of the administration and a great many inhabitants of Finland adopted Swedish as their cultural language, and the upper classes also spoke Swedish at home. After Finland became a grand duchy of the Russian Empire in 1809, Swedish remained the official language of the country.

29 The Fennomans were the most important political movement in the grand duchy of Finland in the nineteenth century. The movement pushed to raise the Finnish language and Finnic culture from their peasant status to the position of a national language and national culture, and to distance them from Swedish or Scandinavian culture.

30 Koivisto, “Ihmisryhmä, jossa moraali ja äly yhtyvät”, 120–21.

31 Nowadays Helsingin Sanomat is the biggest newspaper in the Nordic countries.

32 The movement also provided a background for two other later Presidents of Finland, K.J. Ståhlberg (1919–25) and Risto Ryti (1940–44).

33 The Finnish Civil War between the revolutionary Red Guards and Civil Guards started on 27–8 January and ended on 15 May 1918. The war can be seen as part of both the Russian Revolution and the First World War. After Finland won its independence from Russia in 1917, the radical faction of the Social Democrats started a revolution. The Reds were supported by the Russian Soviet Republic, whereas the non-socialist Whites received military assistance from the German Empire. The Whites saw the war first and foremost as the liberation from Russia. The Whites finally won the bloody and bitter war, but the traumatic and controversial shadows of the war have followed the Finnish people from generation to generation.

34 The idea of “formative experience” comes from the German sociologist and generation theorist Karl Mannheim. According to him, the age of seventeen is important for later development, and he states, “The possibility of really questioning and reflecting on things only emerges at the point where personal experimentation with life begins.” Mannheim, Karl, “The problem of generations”, in Altbach, P.G. and Laufer, R. S., eds., The New Pilgrims: Youth Protest in Transition (New York, 1972)Google Scholar, 101–38, 115. Most of the young Finnish activists of the interwar period were born around 1900.

35 The association emerged from the revenge-spirited Karelian idea. The original idea was to get back the Eastern Karelian territory ceded to Soviet Russia in the “Shame Treaty” of Tartu. According to the treaty, Finnish troops were to be withdrawn from two large border parishes of Eastern Karelia, Repola and Porajärvi, which had been occupied by Finnish troops since 1918—after Finland became independent from Russia in 1917.

36 Unlike Sweden, for example, Finland almost completely lacked a cultural left in the interwar period—mainly because the Communist Party was illegal in Finland until 1944.

37 See Alapuro, Risto, Akateeminen Karjala-Seura: Ylioppilasliike ja kansa 1920-ja 1930-luvulla (Helsinki, 1973)Google Scholar.

38 In the 1860s and the 1870s, their propaganda also led to the establishment of the Swede-Finn national movement, which already included at that time the idea of giving Swedish speakers their own separate national identity. The Finnish national movement gradually evolved into a class movement, reflecting the division of the Diet into four estates: nobility, clergy, burghers and peasants. Finnish speakers had an edge over clergy and peasants. Swedish was first and foremost the language of the upper class. See e.g. Liikanen, Ilkka, Fennomania ja kansa: Joukkojärjestäytymisen läpimurto ja Suomalaisen puolueen synty (Helsinki, 1995)Google Scholar; Liikanen, Ilkka and Kemiläinen, Aira, Finns in the Shadow of the “Aryans”: Race Theories and Racism (Helsinki, 1998), 107–28Google Scholar. On radical nationalism among Finnish university students in the late nineteenth century see particularly e.g. Klinge, Matti, K.T.P:stä jääkäreihin: Ylioppilaskunnan historia II, 1872–1917 (Helsinki, 1978)Google Scholar.

39 The language struggle was in fact one of the two dominating topics in Ylioppilaslehti in the 1930s, the other one being relations with Estonia based on the “kindred spirit”—the idea of one big Finno-Ugric nation. One of its concrete operational forms was to have active Estonian relations. The whole concept of a kindred spirit was in fact created within Ylioppilaslehti. See Kortti, Jukka, “Ylioppilaslehti and the University's Language Struggle in the 1920's and the 1930’s”, Kasvatus ja aika, 3/4 (2009), 7–73Google Scholar; Kortti, , “Ylioppilaslehti and Estonia before World War II”, in Alenius, K., Honkala, A. and Wunsch, S., eds., On the Eastern Edge of the Baltic Sea II: Borders and Integration in the History of the Fenno-Baltic Region (Rovaniemi, 2009), 105–21Google Scholar.

40 Ylioppilaslehti, 21 (1928), 409.

41 Koivisto, “Ihmisryhmä, jossa moraali ja äly yhtyvät”, 107–8. However, Tulenkantajat was not actually opposed to the AKS, because some of the intellectuals operated in both movements. Actually, the group disbanded partly due to political conflicts, as some members ended up being strictly on the left while some openly promoted the values of the AKS in the 1930s.

42 Habermas, Jürgen, “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research”, Communication Theory, 4 (2006), 411–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Habermas also wants to make a distinction between this model and the concept of the deliberative-democracy model, which was central to the concept of the normative public sphere. In short, the deliberative-democracy model is the formation of considered public opinions. It is interested in the epistemic function of discourse and negotiation.

43 Krönig, Waldemar and Müller, Klaus-Dieter, Nachkriegsemester: Studium in Kriegs- und Nachkrigzeit (Stuttgart, 1990)Google Scholar, quoted in Kolbe, Laura, Sivistyneistön rooli: Helsingin yliopiston ylioppilaskunta 1944–1959 (Helsinki, 1993), 320Google Scholar.

44 The Finnish People's Democratic League was a political organization with the aim of uniting the Finnish left outside the Finnish Social Democratic Party. The Finnish People's Democratic League used to be one of the largest leftist parties in Western Europe, with its main member party, the Communist Party of Finland, being one of the largest communist parties west of the Iron Curtain.

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50 The VAL was established in 1950, when it was possible to breathe more freely in Finland again. The nationalist motives of the organization included not only anti-communism but also aspirations to push the arts out of the way of politics in student activities.

51 Carpén, Jussi, “Taistelu ylioppilaista”, Ylioppilaslehti, 6 (1952), 3Google Scholar; Kolbe, Sivistyneistön rooli, 366.

52 For more about Ylioppilaslehti and the Finnish public sphere of the 1950s see Kortti, Jukka, “Building the New Cultural Finland: The Student Magazine Ylioppilaslehti, the public sphere and the Creation of the Finnish Cultural Elite in the Post-war Era”, Scandinavian Journal of History, 36/4 (2011), 462–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 The circulation numbers of the paper doubled in the 1950s, from approximately 10,000 to 20,000. At the same time, the circulation of Finnish cultural periodicals peaked at a few thousand at the most. The circulation of Ylioppilaslehti expanded even faster in the next decade, with a circulation of 60,000 in 1970, which equalled that of national newspapers.

54 Viikari, Auli, “Ei kenenkään maa: 1950-luvun tropologiaa”, in Makkonen, A., ed., Avoin ja suljettu: Kirjoituksia 1950-luvusta suomalaisessa kulttuurissa (Helsinki, 1992), 30–77Google Scholar, 72–4.

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57 Finland's economic growth in the post-war period was extraordinary. The average annual rate of real national product growth by country was 5 percent in Finland in the 1960s and about 3.3 percent in, for instance, Sweden, Denmark and Norway during the same period.

58 On the year 1968 in Finland see Kolbe, Laura, “From Memory to History: Year 1968 in Finland”, Scandinavian Journal of History, 4 (2008), 366–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Caute, David, Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Kurlansky, Mark, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

60 Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), 398, 403, 407Google Scholar.

61 On the ideological themes of the movement and the reasons behind the drastic turn see Relander, Jukka, “From Flowers to Steel: Development of the Leninist Mind in Finland 1968–1972”, Scandinavian Journal of History, 33/4 (2008), 464–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Ibid., 467.

63 Virtanen, Matti, Fennomanian perilliset: poliittiset traditiot ja sukupolvien dynamiikka (Helsinki, 2001), 380Google Scholar–81; Kolbe, Laura, Eliitti, traditio ja murros: Helsingin yliopiston ylioppilaskunta 1960–1990 (Helsinki, 1996), 10–11Google Scholar.

64 E.g. Paletschek, Sylvia, “Die Erfindung der Humboldtschen Universität: Die Konstruktion der deutschen Universitätsidee in der erste Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Anthropologie, 10 (2002), 183–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Kolbe, “From Memory to History”, 375.

66 Aarnio, Pekka, Böök, Mikael, Kasvio, Antti, Toikka, Kari and Viikari, Matti, Johdatus uuteen yliopistoon (Helsinki, 1970)Google Scholar.

67 Kari Toikka, “Akateeminen kasvastus ja akateeminen vapaus”, in Aarnio et al., Johdatus uuteen yliopistoon, 107–51, 133.

68 Koivusalo, Veikko and Kallinen, Timo, ed., Pitkä 70-luku: Valokuvia ja muistikuvia (Helsinki, 2000), 177Google Scholar.

69 The term, still controversial among the Finnish historians, was used to describe the influence of a powerful country on the policies of a smaller neighbouring country. It originated in West German political debate, chiefly by Franz Josef Strauss, in the late 1960s and 1970s. See e.g. Kirby, David, A Concice History of Finland (Cambridge, 2006), 245CrossRefGoogle Scholar–6, 267.

70 Lipset and Basu, “The Intelligentsia and the Intellectuals”, 144.

71 Klaus Mäkelä, “Kansallinen kutsumus on kahlinnut kansalaiskeskustelua”, Helsingin Sanomat, 24 Dec. 1988, quoted in Katarina Eskola, “Women and the Media-Related Intellectual Public Sphere”, in Kauppi and Sulkunen, Vanguards of Modernity, 146–64, 150.

72 Götz, Norbert, “Century of Corporatism or Century of Civil Society? The Northern European Experience”, in Götz, Norbert and Hackmann, Jörg, eds., Civil Society in the Baltic Sea Region (Burlington, 2003), 37–48Google Scholar.

73 Eyerman, Between Culture and Politics, 11.

74 Götz, “Century of Corporatism or Century of Civil Society?”, 45.

75 Kettunen, Pauli, “The Tension between the Social and the Economic: A Historical Perspective of a Welfare State”, in Ojala, Jari, Eloranta, Jari and Jalava, Jukka, The Road to Prosperity: An Economic Hiastory of Finland (Helsinki, 2006), 285–313Google Scholar.

76 On the “democratic corporatist model” in media systems see Hallin, Daniel C. and Mancini, Paolo, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (Cambridge, 2004), 73–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Alapuro, Suomen älymystö Venäjän varjossa.

78 Jenni Stammeier, “Berliini: taiteilijakuvia jaetusta kaupungista”, part 1, Historiasarjoja, YLE Radio 1, 29 Sept. 2010.

79 Hyvärinen, Matti, Viimeiset taistot: Taistolainen opiskelijaliike, kertomus ja retoriikka (Tampere, 1994), 333Google Scholar.

80 See Pasi Saukkonen, “Intellekuaalinen rooli ja kansallinen identiteetti”, in Karkama and Koivisto, Älymystön jäljillä, 332–47.

81 Keijo Rahkonen and J. P. Roos, “The Field of Intellectuals: The Case of Finland”, in Kauppi and Sulkunen, Vanguards of Modernity, 107–25, 122.

82 Lipponen, Paavo, Järki voittaa: Suomalainen identiteetti globalisaation aikakaudella (Helsinki, 2008)Google Scholar.

83 The most famous example of the dispute is from the early 1960s, when the British intellectuals scientist-turned-novelist C. P. Snow and literary critic F. R. Leavis had a public intellectual conflict between competing visions of Britain's past, present and future. See e.g. Ortolano, Guy, The Two Cultures Contorversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar. However, the dispute between arts and sciences could be found in other parts of post-war Europe as well, such as in Finland in the 1950s.

84 The degree reform was a part of the emergence of modern Western science policy created in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A “system of higher education” paralleled a new conception of science as a productive power, contributing to economic growth as well as to the knowledge base. This conception was closely related to the heightened importance of applied science and technology as a means of boosting productivity and competitiveness in the world shadowed by the Cold War. Marja Jalava, “Cultural Revolution or Bureaucratic Jargon: The Finnish Degree Reform of the 1970s”, paper presented at the European Social Science History Conference ESSHC 2008.

85 Kimmo Henriksson, “Professori Matti Klinge: Kurssimainen opiskelu näivettää” Helsingin Sanomat, 13 Feb. 1983.