Why Sanna Marin and her cabinet weren't all that

Earlier this year, Finland had a very miserable election. Our prime minister, Sanna Marin of the social democrat party, had become an international celebrity, but her party lost the election, and she is stepping down as party leader. This has surprised people around the world, because she cut a very progressive and popular figure. Sadly, I'm here to tell you that she was not exactly a great prime minister.

First, there was our pandemic policy. Finland had a world-class response to Covid and we were doing a great job suppressing the virus - until we quit. In September 2021, Marin and her cabinet decided to lift practically all suppressing measures, including things like mask recommendations. Since then, thousands of people have died. I did another post on the subject, with the statistics. So when people say Marin's cabinet handled the pandemic well, I don't entirely agree. They did, until they decided to stop.

Another failure was the Sami parliament act. Finland has been reprimanded several times by the UN for our failure to implement proper representation for the Sami indigenous people, whose lands Finland continues to colonize. The Marin government was supposed to change that with a new bill on the Sami parliament. However, the cabinet allowed the agrarian party, which resists indigenous rights, to sabotage the bill, and it failed to pass. This is absolutely disgraceful.

The most colossal disappointment of the Marin cabinet, though, was their environmental policy. It was sold to us as a "climate cabinet". What they did was the total opposite.

We can start with peat. Finland produces approximately 5% of our energy by burning peat, which accounts for 10% of our greenhouse emissions, while peat extraction is immensely destructive. It's an incredibly dirty and wasteful fuel. So obviously it receives huge government subsidies and tax breaks into the hundreds of millions of euros.

In 2021, the end result of a huge budget battle with the obstructionist agrarian party was that the Marin cabinet handed 70 million euros of additional subsidies to peat production (IL). 

Later that same year, the social democrat minister for communications, Timo Harakka, called a new motorway "a climate act" in a tweet. The same minister oversees domestic flights, which have received additional subsidies of tens of millions of euros during his time in cabinet. There's so little demand for the flights, that some have flown with single passengers, or even empty (Yle).

When the invasion of Ukraine made electricity prices spike, our government rushed to subsidize households by dropping the tax on electricity. Most of the subsidies are going to well-off households that spend large amounts of energy (Yle). Similarly, when fuel prices rose, the government was there to subsidize diesel fuel (Yle).

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Marin's cabinet spent millions upon millions of extra euros subsidizing fossil fuel consumption, sometimes in the stupidest possible ways, propping up tiny, moribund industries like peat, or ridiculous boondoggles like flights with no passengers on them.

It just so happens I've taught the 1973 oil crisis quite a few times already. Finnish Wikipedia has quite a nice list of energy-saving measures the government of the time implemented, which ranged from regulating indoor temperatures to shop window lighting. The prime minister was also a social democrat, by the way: Kalevi Sorsa. Fifty years later, it did not apparently even for a moment occur to his successor that something like this could be done. Instead, as with every other crisis and policy question, Marin's answer was subsidies for fossil fuels.

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I've lived in Finland for almost 40 years, and the media persecution of Sanna Marin was like nothing I have ever seen before. The misogyny was absolutely hysterical. One of the main precepts of Finnish journalism is that no criticism of it can ever be justified, so there will be no post-mortem, as it were. All our major medias are busy reassuring each other that they did a great job. This is deeply depressing, especially since we all know full well that they're going to spend the next several years worshipping the ground the new right-wing government walks on.

We also suffer from the same disease as Britain, as explained by Professor Simon Wren-Lewis: our media doesn't understand macroeconomics at all, and believes the right's austerity fairy-tales. This was also painfully obvious in this year's election, which was dominated by all our major medias and the ministry of finance battering us into submission with their austerity agenda of billions of euros of cuts.

However, two things can be true at the same time: Marin can be the victim of concerted misogynist media persecution, and a terrible disappointment as a prime minister. Her cabinet let thousands of people die needlessly in the pandemic, cheerfully trampled over indigenous rights, and faced the escalating climate and biodiversity crisis with millions upon millions of subsidies to fossil capitalism. Yes, misogyny was a large reason why her party lost the election. But so was the fact that the policies of her cabinet were absolutely terrible.

The decline of Christianity in Finland

I was looking for a cute graph of the fall in church membership in Finland, to go with this tweet, and decided I had to make it myself. That led into a little bit of reading and organizing my thoughts, and I've collated the results here.

It was fully illegal to not be Christian in the Kingdom of Sweden. From 1634 onward, your choices were either to be Lutheran or leave the country. Some practical exceptions were made for Orthodox Karelians living in the eastern provinces, and I don't know to what extent individual people were persecuted, but basically the law said you belonged to the state church and that was that. They later allowed some other Christian denominations, mainly for foreigners: Swedish subjects weren't allowed to convert.

What got me reading was that I was curious as to what the status of Jews in Sweden was, and I learned that they were entirely prohibited from moving to most of the kingdom, including the Finnish provinces. In 1802 Sweden banned the immigration of Jews altogether, and although the law was soon repealed in Sweden, the Finnish provinces were lost to Russia in the war of 1808-09 and the law not only stayed on the books here, but was enforced until independence. I never knew that the Grand Duchy of Finland was so ferociously antisemitic. Jewish citizens only gained full civil rights in 1917.

So the religious situation in Finland at independence was basically that the law forced the entire population to be Lutheran. There was a small Orthodox minority, along with tiny Jewish and mostly Tatar Muslim communities, as well as some other, vanishingly small Christian churches. So officially, something like 98-99% of the population was Lutheran.

This only begins to change in 1923, when the first ever law on the freedom of religion is passed. Now, for the first time, it's possible to found new religious organizations and freely join or leave them, and even not belong to one at all. Full freedom of religion this ain't: the Lutheran and Orthodox state churches maintain their privileged positions, Christian churches get special tax exemptions, and the process for registering new religious denominations only recognizes religions that are Christian or broadly similar to Christianity. This is how the law still works: the Finnish wicca community, for instance, have been denied religious status because, among other reasons, they lack a holy book. This is a totally absurd criterion for a religion, but it's still the law.

The law came into force in 1924, so that was the first year Finnish citizens were allowed to leave the church. Since then, if I recall correctly, overall church membership has only gone down: there has never been a year in Finnish history since when the church had more members than in the previous year. Membership now stands at something like 68% and is continuing to fall.

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So what happened? Why is church membership collapsing?

A new religious freedom law was passed in 2003, which made leaving the church easier. Earlier, for instance when I quit the church, you had to actually go to a church office in person, fill out a form and talk to a priest, and if they couldn't talk you out of it, a month later your papers were transferred to the civil registry. The 2003 law made it possible to quit the church through a simple letter, which could be sent electronically. That same year, the Tampere "free-thinkers" atheist organization opened a website, eroakirkosta.fi, where you could input your personal details and they would take care of the process. As of this writing, they were coming up on 800 000 people having used the service, which you have to admit is a little bit impressive in a country of five million. But if you look at the overall graph, it's not like the trend started in 2003.

While the membership decline has been fairly steady, it's been given tremendous momentary boosts by both the church itself, of which more later, but also various public scandals involving religion. Several of those have involved Finnish Christian conservative politician Päivi Räsänen, a disgusting bigot who hates everyone different from her, and has consequently but presumably inadvertently done more to eradicate Christianity from Finland than anyone, up to and including the national hero who murdered a bishop with an axe. Whenever she shows her face on TV, there's a spike at eroakirkosta.fi. Lutherans sometimes complain about this, but the effect is real.

In my opinion, the fundamental reason behind the collapse of church membership is that the vast majority of people leaving the church were never Christians to begin with. We have no real information on how many people were actually Christian back when it was illegal not to be, because they didn't do a lot of polling back then, but also because the poll question would literally have been "do you confess to treason against God and your King".

What we do know is that in several surveys done by the church in the 21st century, the Finnish population divides into three approximately similarly sized groups. One is Christian and believes more or less what the church teaches; one believes in some kind of higher power or whatever, but not in the sense taught by the church; and one believes in nothing at all. So you could say that while some 70% of the population belongs to a Christian denomination, only about 30% say they're Christians. Suddenly the graph becomes a lot easier to understand, I think.

This also seems to be the mechanism behind the various Christian conservative-inspired brouhahas causing people to quit the church: if you don't actually believe in what the church teaches, and you see these odious bigots declaiming their hatred without any real pushback from the church, I think it's easy to see that this can lead quite a few people to ask themselves why, exactly, are they paying money to stay affiliated with this kind of activity.

As a point of interest, we have no compelling reasons to think that number of Christians was ever much higher. It may have been, but it may not have been; we have no direct way of knowing, but we can make some guesses. Until at least the 19th century, everyone in Finland had to pass an examination on the catechism to be confirmed into the church. It was never a particularly difficult examination, but in large parts of the country, people legitimately suffered with it and many were almost certainly being confirmed without passing it. This doesn't exactly make you think the average person was deeply devout.

Similarly, Finnish folk religion persisted well into the 20th century, and was only really wiped out by the elementary school system. While it incorporated lots of Christian language and ideas, it was still fundamentally a pagan belief system which the church tried to eradicate for centuries - in vain. Despite considerable efforts, the church also failed to impose Christian systems of gender and sexuality on the broader population; homophobia and strict bourgeois gender roles only became anything like universal in the 20th century through public education and conscription.

So we have no real reasons to believe Christianity was ever particularly popular or widespread in what later became Finland, in terms of things people actually believed in, whatever their nominal (compulsory) allegiance was. Again, I feel like this makes the decline in membership seem like a return to normality.

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Finally, there is a core reason for the collapse in church membership that it's considered taboo to really talk about. It's that what the church teaches is complete nonsense. The Bible is, in parts, an interesting collection of books with some historical value. As an actual guide to organizing your life or thinking about, well, anything germane to living in the 21st century, for the vast majority of us, it is useless. The Finnish Lutheran church officially expounds doctrines like the Trinity, which is pseusophilosophical garbage, and the resurrection, which is a very silly fairy tale. The question isn't really why people are leaving an organization that professes to believe in this blather, but rather why anyone would join it in the first place once they're no longer being forced to by state violence.

Education in what is now Finland was a church monopoly until the 1860s, and the modern school system was founded in the 1920s. I don't think it's a coincidence that as the quality of secular education improves, membership in organized superstition declines. Or in other words, when the church loses access to the coercive power of the state, and critical thinking skills become more widespread, church membership begins to collapse. Obviously it is a more complex social phenomenon or series of phenomena than just this, but if we're going to pretend that broadening access to high-quality education doesn't matter at all, well, that's a pretty big choice to make.

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So what will happen in the future? Who knows. A fellow theology freshman told me in 2012 that maybe god will send a new reformation to Finland. Who am I to argue?

Most commentators, even from the church, reckon that the membership decline will continue. If you think that the previously cited figure of 30-ish percent of the population being Christians will stay that way, then maybe church membership will drop to around that number.

A church with a membership around 30% will be quite a different organization from the state religious bureaucracy it is today. At that point, the church will probably no longer be able to discharge its remaining public functions, like burial services, and considerable state subsidies to a minority religion will hardly be a sustainable solution. As with schools, at some point in the not so distant future, the public sector will have to reclaim the rest of the public services the church has monopolized.

Even now, with a declining membership and massive pension burdens, the church is in a somewhat perilous financial position. They also have great swathes of real estate that may prove somewhat difficult to unload; who do you sell a cathedral to in Finland? The state already directly subsidizes the church to the tune of over a hundred million euros a year, not without controversy. There are those who think that the church is headed for financial collapse; I remember a panel at the faculty of theology where one provocative participant told the attending students that none of us would ever retire from the church, because it will have gone bankrupt by then. He may not be wrong.

The church may also collapse because there will no longer be any demand for it. So-called mainline protestantism has been in a global decline for quite a while, and the same seems to be happening in Finland. Roughly speaking, as more and more people are leaving organizes religion, the influence of the extremist bigots in churches is increasing. Maybe the most spectacular instance of this is the way white USian Protestants are rallying around, of all people, Dolan fucking Trump. The more influence these fanatics gain over their denominations, the more repulsive they will appear to the general population.

The strategy of the Finnish Lutheran church has been to sit on the fence as long as possible. They triggered one of the bigger waves in membership loss by their uncompromising opposition to women in the priesthood in the 1980s, and went on to resolve the issue in such a stupid way that clerical misogyny is rampant to this day. They're now doing a similar thing with same-sex marriage, which is accepted by the state and not the church, and the church's homophobic bigotry is one of the main reasons members are quitting. At the same time, the opposite side of the culture war professes to believe that the church has sold out to cultural Marxism or whatever they're calling it now, and bigots are also leaving the church.

It's easy, and not entirely wrong, to say that the church is choosing the worst possible alternative by equivocating. The truth may be that there's simply no position they can take without potentially catastrophic consequences. If the church came out in favor of gay marriage, against racism and inequality and so on, they would not only alienate quite a large portion of their members, but according to what we know about their opinions, most of their staff. Similarly, for the church to come down even more firmly on the right of the culture war would be a complete disaster for them in terms of not only popular support but potentially even their official position as a state church. So it's not at all clear that they can actually do any better.

The final dilemma for the church may be that there just isn't any real demand for a national mainline Lutheran denomination. When both the liberal and fundamentalist believers are minorities in a large church, they can coexist. It's the middle between them that's falling out of the church, and if this keeps up, it'll be just the extremes left. Who, at that point, is the former state church for?

Anyway this is all premised on current trends continuing, so if something new and unexpected happens, all bets are off.

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So this is the kind of thing that happens when I'm working and in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave where it's impossible to do anything except lie down in front of a powerful fan. I hope you've enjoyed these random thoughts on the Finnish state church and their membership problems.

Sipilänomics VI: Unwrecking the universities?

Two years ago, I wrote about our current cabinet's plan to wreck Finland's universities. Just last week, though, we were told that that very same cabinet was making massive investments in science and education (Yle). Really?

Well, hardly. Let's look at some numbers.

To start with, in 2016 student benefits were cut by 122 million euros (IS). Now, our glorious leader is introducing a "family subsidy", which totals 75 million euros. So students are left 48 million euros poorer.

I concentrated on the universities before, but massive cuts were made to vocational training, where 190 million € was cut last year (IL). Now the government is investing 80 million euros into revamping vocational training. So they're still 110m€ behind.

As part of Sipilä's cuts, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation (Tekes) lost 138m€ (source). Now, though, the three bandits cabinet is giving them 70 million euros of additional funding, which leaves them at -68m€. Similarly, the Academy of Finland is getting 50 million more - which doesn't redress more than half of the 100m€ cuts to university funding (Acatiimi).

So you see how this goes. First the government makes gigantic cuts to education. Then they turn around and make headlines with their "investments in education and research" - which in reality don't compensate at all for the previous cuts.

It's also worth noting that in one respect, this additional funding continues a longer trend: money is being taken away from the universities and given either to funders like the Finnish Academy or to political boondoggles like the government's "flagship ventures". This means that universities and researchers have less freedom, and need to spend even more time negotiating a massive public bureaucracy to get funding for their work. Finnish research is being methodically reshaped into a planned economy, where the government centrally directs what research areas get funded. We have no reason to think that this is going to work any better than any other planned economies.

There are two observations to be made about this. Firstly, the Finnish media is so thoroughly in thrall to the government that they're swallowing this hook, line and sinker. So the government can pull this back-and-forth act and actually use it in the next elections to claim that they're not wrecking education.

Secondly, as I explained earlier, the Sipilä government is failing to meet its fiscal goals. This farce should give you some notion of why. The Sipilä notion of public economy is to make cuts, and then undo many of the cuts, so that things are getting objectively worse but no real savings are made. I don't understand how anyone can possibly approve of running an economy like this.

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The Sipilä gang, of course, claim that they're reaching their goals. As I predicted, they're largely accomplishing this by lying. Key to their claimed billions of savings is a ridiculous notion that the healthcare disaster is going to cost three billion euros less than some imaginary alternative.

Meanwhile, the racist "Finns party" was destroyed in the municipal elections, and is currently debating whether to elect a fascist or a fascist as its chairman. One of the fascists is more rude than the other, so the other two parties in government are pretending that if the rude one is elected, there will be a crisis. This is probably also a lie.

But on the whole, then, Sipilänomics rolls on much like the Trump administration: the country is being run by idiots who want to destroy it, but they're constantly tripping over their own incompetence. Despite this, both their actions and their inactions continue to do very real damage.

Sipilänomics V: Competitiveness boogaloo

I first posted about Sipilänomics, or Finland's fake austerity in September 2015, followed by further posts on unit labor costs, the healthcare reform and the wrecking of the universities. That's almost two years ago. So how's it going?

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This January, the Economic Policy Council released a report on just that. With regard to the deficit, under the headline "Fiscal policy targets will not be reached" in the summary, the report states the following:

The prolonged recession has had serious consequences for public sector finances. Despite the spending cuts by the current and the previous governments, general government gross debt has increased from 32.7% of GDP in 2008 to 64.3% of GDP in 2016. Debt will continue to grow, the general government deficit is projected to be 2.4% of GDP at the end of 2016. According to current forecasts the deficit will still be 1.5% of GDP in 2019. In fact, the deficit is projected to increase during 2017 due to tax concessions adopted in connection with the competitiveness pact.

So, while the recovery of the Finnish economy, no longer technically in recession, is expected to eventually start eating into the budget deficit, for the moment, debt will continue to go up. This is still nothing even remotely like austerity. In fact, as the report notes, the 2017 budget is being submitted at a value of 55.2 billion euros, which is 800 million more than the 2016 budget, and two billion more than the 2015 budget submitted by the previous cabinet. So just as before, central government expenses continue to rise, and the deficit is getting worse, not better. The key message of the Economic Policy Council report is that the Sipilä government is highly unlikely to meet the goals it set for itself. They've made massively destructive cuts to public spending, yet that spending has continued to increase. By their own standards, they have thoroughly failed.

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A large part of this failure is the ludicrously idiotic "competitiveness pact" mentioned in the quote above. The pact, negotiated between the government, the labor unions and the employers' organizations after massive public dramatics, shifts some pension payments from employers to employees, and lenghtens working hours by six minutes every day. Yes, really. Both of these measures mean that employers are paying less for labor, and workers get less pay. To offset this pay cut, the government introduced sweeping tax cuts that, we were promised, would mean that employees ended up with as much money in hand as before.

According to the Economic Policy Council, the pact is expected to generate no new jobs, but the tax cuts add 900 million to the deficit (p. 105). The best-case estimate is that in the long term, the competitiveness pact will be cost-neutral; in other words, at best the new jobs or additional value generated will compensate for the tax cuts. The only thing that we can be sure of is that the pact represents yet another transfer of wealth to employers, at the expense of workers and the state. Its impact on the deficit looks set to be at best minimal, if it doesn't actually make things worse.

As I explained before, the whole notion of competing through lower unit labor costs isn't supported by any data. This doesn't seem to deter our right-wingers, whose vision of the future for our country is basically a massive sweatshop. One sure way to get closer to that is to de-educate the population, and that's actually happening: according to the statistics, my age group will be the first in Finnish history to end up less educated than our predecessors. The Sipilä government, of course, has made massive cuts to education, accelerating brain drain even further with entire research teams quitting the country. Not only is this policy well in line with the prime minister's Trumpian contempt for education and expertise, it also serves the right's objective of de-education.

Once again, if you believe in national competitiveness, then declining education levels and overall human capital are a much bigger issue than six minutes more work per day. Joseph Stiglitz called this "robbing from your children".

In the face of the broad criticism the government's education and research cuts evoked, they commissioned a report from the OECD on Finnish research and development. Judging from the Helsingin Sanomat article on the report, the way it's being spun is that the government should give more money to corporations. Surprise!

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The competitiveness pact is almost certainly going to be a catastrophic failure. Massive amounts of time, effort and political capital were expended to create a deal that cements the baroque corporatist collective bargaining system in place, transfers money to corporations and at best does nothing to reduce the deficit. Or I don't know, maybe people working an extra six minutes per day will cause an explosion of innovation and productivity. I wouldn't bet on it. The people running our country are.

The Sipilä cabinet took power on a mandate of decisive masculine leadership that would fix our economy. It has done no such thing. On the contrary, so far the administration has made massively destructive cuts that are wreaking havoc on our future and dismantling what little remains of the welfare state, only to squander most of the money saved on wealth transfers to corporations, and boondoggles like the "key projects" and the fiasco that is the Talvivaara mine, a combined financial and economic disaster with few, if any parallels in our history. But don't worry, many corporate shareholders, including the Prime Minister's family, are doing quite nicely out of it. You might think that sounds like corruption, but we don't have corruption in Finland so it can't be. I'm really not qualified to correct a Nobel laureate, but when Stiglitz said this administration is robbing from its children, I disagree: to be specific, they're robbing other people's children and distributing the spoils to their own.

The Economic Policy Council estimates that in order to reach the fiscal goals they set for themselves, the Sipilä cabinet needs to come up with at least a billion euros' worth of cuts on top of everything they've already done. Reaching their long-term goals would require another billion. So in theory, their choices are to either start making even more massive cuts at huge political cost, up to and including the cabinet breaking up and a new election being called, or jettison their goals and admit to the nation that they failed. As Sipilä famously promised that he would either get results or get out, either alternative should mean that we'll finally be rid of him.

This is all well and good in theory. In practice, however, you have to remember that we're dealing with what is almost certainly the most incompetent cabinet in Finnish history, led by a complete moron who is as belligerently ignorant of politics or the economy as he is unable to tolerate the slightest criticism or dissent. We may think there are two choices before them. Somehow, they'll find a third way that's even worse. It's what they've done so far. Sipilä already appeared before Parliament in February, where he lied about the deficit and lied about long-term unemployment, which may give us some pointers on what's to come.

The lesson in all this? Don't elect an ignorant jackass to run your country just because he acts butch and claims to be rich. My heartfelt condolences to the Americans. We can't seem to get rid of ours either.

The year that was 2016

In September, neo-Nazis killed a guy on the street, next to the railway station. His name was Jimi Karttunen. I walk by there every day when I go to university. There had been a neo-Nazi rally outside the station; members of the so-called Finnish resistance movement had paraded with their flags and challenged passersby. One of them talked back, and spat at the nazis' feet. They killed him. A nazi ran up and kicked him. He fell, injured himself badly, and later died. It's 2016, and nazis killed a man on the street in my hometown for disagreeing with them.

A photo posted by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on Sep 19, 2016 at 5:36am PDT

Everyone thought things like this didn't happen, couldn't happen, any more. People were genuinely shocked. A sea of candles and tributes grew around the lamp-post he fell next to. You couldn't pass the railway station without noticing them. I saw them every morning, and I couldn't not think that that could have been me. If a nazi had accosted me on the street, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't like what I think. Have we become a country where you have to ask yourself if my opinion is going to get me killed? Several people, at least, didn't want that. Over twenty thousand of us marched in Helsinki, with hundreds in other cities, demanding a stop to racism and violent neo-Nazism.

A photo posted by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on Sep 24, 2016 at 6:16am PDT

After this massive demonstration, the prime minister promised immediate action against neo-Nazi extremism. Committees were founded, reports were commissioned, statements were made. And nothing was done. Politicians wrung their hands and told us that this was all very terrible, but there wasn't really anything they could do. So they did nothing. Never mind that the so-called "resistance movement" already breaks several Finnish laws just by existing. Never mind that a far-right member of parliament proudly posed for photos with the murderer and his organization, and continues to participate in their activities. His party remains in cabinet. Politicians from every party happily sit on committees with him. On independence day, the Nazis marched through Helsinki under heavy police protection, trashed the Hietaniemi cemetery and defaced the peacekeepers' memorial.

Nobody in power gives a shit that an innocent man was murdered on the street and that the Nazis who did it hold triumphal marches in our capital. The rest of us are wondering who will be next.

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As if this wasn't bad enough, midsummer also brought us Brexit. I have an unpleasantly vivid memory of the vote. Since it was midsummer, we were out in the country, being plagued by wasps. One of the fuckers stung me, having decided for reasons of its own to fly into my armpit. I remember checking Twitter before going to sleep on the night of the election, and seeing Nigel Farage concede. While I slept, as someone put it on Twitter later, Farage unconceded, reconceded and reunconceded. I remember waking up and making my way toward breakfast, wondering why on earth people on my Twitter feed were talking about Brexit as if it was happening. Eventually I figured out that it was because they'd voted Leave.

2016, however, wasn't done with us yet. Over a hideously drawn-out year that felt like a fucking decade, the American people, or at least a minority of them, saw fit to elevate Donald Trump from reality television clown to Republican presidential nominee and eventually, unthinkably, President.

A number of myths need to be dispensed with. Trump's supporters were not "working class". Like Brexit voters, they were not economically disadvantaged. Neither were they oppressed by political correctness or victimized by neoliberalism. They didn't even care about free trade. What they were for the most part was racist authoritarians. In other words, fascists. And they voted for a fascist.

During his primary and presidential campaigns, the nature of Trump's game became abundantly clear. Not content with the usual Republican dog-whistling, he consistently ran on a platform of racism and white supremacy. He boasted of sexually assaulting women. He showed no comprehension of any political issues whatsoever, but deployed lies, hate and demagoguery in spades. He is literally a Nazi rapist. All of this was enough to boost a Democrat candidate with a historically low favorable rating to one of the most popular presidential candidates in US history; despite both a massive FBI media blitz and a sustained Russian disinformation campaign against her, she won the popular vote by a considerable margin. The American people voted for Hillary Clinton to be their president. However, the electoral college, supposedly an institution designed to stop a demagogue from capturing the presidency, has now elevated the most buffoonish rabble-rouser to ever aspire to that office to it over the will of the people.

The United States of America are founded on violent white supremacy, an ideal that to this day is enforced by the police forces that so many white Americans seem to worship. Trump's fascist presidency, however, is something altogether different. As if his election wasn't shocking enough, it's also been amazing to watch the speed at which the entire American political right seems to be collapsing into full fascism. The Trump cabinet, so far, consists of generals and billionaire businessmen, resembling nothing so much as an eighties fever dream of a future corporate-fascist America brough to lurid reality television life. We may have thought cyberpunk was the future; it turns out JG Ballard was much more on the money.

Trump and Brexit have several things in common. Both the Leave camp in Britain and the Trump campaign compulsively told childishly stupid lies. They were openly contemptuous of fact-checking, indeed of journalism, and in both countries, the media accomodated them. In Trump's case it was abjectly terrifying that seemingly no matter what he said or did, the news cycle rolled on regardless, and within a week, all was forgotten. Both campaigns falsely represented themselves as the champions of the economic worries of "ordinary people", a strategy they share with our home-grown fascists. Both employed prominent racists and drew freely on racist iconography and tropes. Both were energized by the most obdurately illiterate conspiracist thinking, where people who read one "news item" of dubious providence are willing to defend it to their grave because it accords with their prejudices. It remains one of the bitterest ironies of our new facism that its proponents relentlessly preach a critical thinking that they are in fact completely incapable of. Any information that would challenge their deeply stupid convictions is simply dismissed outright as whatever the euphemism of the day happens to be for a Jewish plot. Both are strongly supported by Russian special services, who relish their chance at taking apart the Western coalition that defeated them in the Cold War.

These people cannot, in my experience, be persuaded or reasoned with. They're not interested in arguments or reason. On the contrary, they will in all seriousness present "arguments" that can be thoroughly debunked in unit minutes with a search engine. Doing this, however, will make no difference. The people who support fascism are animated by privilege and hatred, energized by their communities and empowered by the nods and winks of politicians and the spineless complacency of the media. They're directly supported by the secret police of both the United States and Russia. They will not just go away or give up. They need to be fought and defeated. They will certainly not scruple to do the same to everyone who disagrees with them. They've already started killing people.

**

I live in Finland. Why am I bothered if the Americans elect a fascist and Britain decides to leave the EU? Obviously both elections are going to have their impacts on the economy, for starters. The downturn or at least prolonged recession will almost certainly be real, and in the case of Trump, if he manages to pass anything even remotely like his lunatic tax plans, he's setting up the US for a huge bust in the future. None of this bodes well for the supply-side lunacy of our right wing, so it's very likely that the racist idiocy of both British and American voters will also have profound economic consequences for the rest of us.

Other consequences may end up being more serious. To the extent that Trump had any discernible foreign policy views when campaigning, they were disastrously idiotic. Trump was openly supported by the Russian government's disinformation operations, most notably by Wikileaks, and he reciprocated that support with a warm bromantic adoration of Vladimir Putin. The main animating idea of the Trump campaign, racism, also informed his foreign policy anecdotes, from the puerile fantasy of the miraculous border wall and the xenophobic diatribes against Mwxican immigrants and refugees from the Middle East, to his childishly ignorant view of world trade as a zero-sum game and the denigration of America's allies as freeloaders profiting off US naïvete. In openly embracing dictators and mocking US alliances, Trump effectively campaigned on a full-scale assault on the structures of Western collective security.

One of the best things I've read on the twin disasters of 2016 was David Runciman's essay in the London Review of Books. I quote:

That is what the vote for Trump has in common with Brexit. By choosing to quit the European Union, the majority of British voters may have looked as if they were behaving with extraordinary recklessness. But in reality their behaviour too reflected their basic trust in the political system with which they were ostensibly so disgusted, because they believed that it was still capable of protecting them from the consequences of their choice. It is sometimes said that Trump appeals to his supporters because he represents the authoritarian father figure who they want to shield them from all the bad people out there making their lives hell. That can’t be right: Trump is a child, the most childish politician I have encountered in my lifetime. The parent in this relationship is the American state itself, which allows the voters to throw a tantrum and join forces with the worst behaved kid in the class, safe in the knowledge that the grown-ups will always be there to pick up the pieces.

Looking at the profound shock that the eminently predictable results of Brexit seem to be causing in the UK, and the shape that the Trump administration seems to be taking, this really does seem to be the case. Both countries are heading into economic disaster, and we're all going to suffer for it. Similarly, it seems inconceivable that anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with foreign and security policy could possibly believe that either Brexit or Trump could in any way lead to anything good. It seems eminently believable, though, that people simply didn't understand that they'd lead to anything really bad, either.

We may be witnessing the birth of the post-Cold War international order. History obviously didn't end with the Cold War, and if the rise of fascism in the west is a harbinger of things to come, then the years between the Berlin Wall and the Trump Wall may well turn out to have been a brief interregnum before the world splits along new ideological lines. If Trump really ushers in some kind of alliance with Putin, things don't look very good for those of us who are first in line to be dealt away at a new Yalta. Worse, he may inadvertently start a major war. Trump has already demonstrated his spectacular ineptitude in starting a pointless diplomatic spat with China. The idea of an idiot like Trump - a self-proclaimed "smart person" who believes he doesn't need intelligence briefings - being called upon to exercise command of the world's most powerful armed forces in a time of crisis is terrifying. Even without going that far, there's simply no way that either Trump or Brexit can possibly make the world a more peaceful, stable or predictable place.

**

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, the wrecking of the Finnish economy continues. Prime minister Sipilä eventually managed to wrangle the unions into a "competitiveness agreement", in which he traded away the threat of larger pay and benefit cuts for an agreement to make each working day six minutes longer. I am not joking. Health care reform remains a complete mess. The university cuts were, of course, carried out, and this past fall has been by far the most chaotic I've ever experienced at our university. To give you an idea of what it's like: our professors were polled by the professors' union. Of the professors at our university, half were not satisfied with their possibilities for research, and 70% didn't trust university administration. According to the government broadcaster, university professors basically agree that recent changes at our universities have been decisively for the worse. What's at stake here is certainly my professional future, but also the wider societal issue of human capital. We remain committed to competing through cheap labor, and the government is working on destroying our education system to achieve it.

A particularly ugly political phenomenon that's been raising its head here has been the cult of the entrepreneur as a "value producer". This hit an absurd high note in a television shouting match on job creation, when several rich white men tried to shout down a politician by demanding to know how many companies she had founded. A more popular manifestation of this is a recurring meme where people look at the amount of income tax paid by high earners, and use this to claim that the rich are actually paying for everything in society and everyone else is just living off their work. This line was enthusiastically echoed by a racist sports personality, who was fired for homophobic tweets and later found to have actually paid no taxes whatsoever himself. So as you can see, we have our own little Donald Trumps everywhere. The idea that we have some kind of Randian hero-entrepreneurs who conjure value out of thin air in splendid isolation but are unjustly forced to share it with the ungrateful howling mob is monstrously, ludicrously idiotic, but it works as a bizarre rhetorical device to allow the very people who complain the most about taxes to use the fact that they pay them as a tool to dehumanize the majority of the population. As a potentially terrifying sign of things to come, our politicians have elected a woman to head our social security apparatus who dreams of replacing it with forced labor.

I quit blogging about all this last year, because there didn't seem to be any point. Our major media continue to toe the government line. For example, our largest daily printed outrageous lies about the number of jobs available, in a transparent effort to support the government's view that unemployment is caused by laziness and entitlement, rather than by the fact that there aren't enough jobs to go around. We have two major yellow afternoon papers; one is run by a facist sympathizer, the other demanded our universities be turned into research and development faciliies for Finnish businesses. But lest someone be concerned by actual issues like the economy, our biggest daily's weekly supplement helpfully incited a ridiculous media conflagration by completely misrepresenting new teaching guidelines on gender. Oh, and do you think there was critical discussion about racism and neo-Nazism in the wake of the murder? Of course not. A few days later, we were right back to inventing wildly overblown headlines about crazy bureaucrats banning whatever. The few times someone tries their hand at investigative journalism not convenient to the government, they get harassed and driven out of their job; our glorious leader managed to get denounced by Reporters without Borders for suppressing media coverage of his financial ties to the disaster that is the Talvivaara mine. Those stupid foreigners just don't understand his masculine Christian leadership.

So in short, everything in Finland is like it was, but worse. The overwhelming weight of the media is behind our government's right-wing fantasies of oppressive bureaucracy and the shiftless hordes of the unemployed. Any and all discussion of actually existing racism in our society has been completely stifled. Whenever a right-wing populist blurts out something exceptionally hateful, there will be a momentary kerfuffle over it, but nothing ever happens. Our most overtly racist party seem to have destroyed about half of their support through complete idiocy, but the others are more than happy to carry on their policies without them, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. Murderous neo-Nazis march on our streets, protected by the police.

Mutatis mutandis, I believe what David Runciman wrote about Trump applies completely to Finland as well. If there's one characteristic of Finnish culture that I think is ingrained and widespread enough to qualify as "national", it's an almost childlike belief in the state. Outside progressive leftist Twitter and the vanishingly minute number of liberals, notions like a critique of police violence are completely unfathomable. The police cannot be wrong. They are the nice men who protect us. The blind faith of Finns in the state lets them mount their childish tantrums against "bureauslavia", "the immigration business", "multiculturalism", "the bloated public sector" or whatever the righteous fury buzzword of the day is, sanguine in the belief that no matter how hard they try to undermine and straight up burn down the structures of the welfare state, somehow it will still be there to look after them in the end. We don't seem to understand that the institutions and well-being we take for granted were built by people, and they can be broken by people. If our current policies of privileged resentment and deliberate wrecking go on, they will be.

No wonder, then, that educated people are fleeing the country. Personally, I'd be more than happy to join them. The level of public hostility to science and education in Finland is at an amazing high, and because of the massive cuts, the situation at our universities is becoming intolerable. I find it very difficult to see any kind of academic career happening for myself here, or much of any other kind of career either. There's also next to no chance of a change, so what the future has in store is almost certainly more cuts, public mockery and outright hatred. The question isn't why we're leaving; the question is why any of us would stay.

**

I don't know if this is true or not, but I've come to at least entertain the hypothesis that over the quarter-century since the end of the Cold War, we've become so secure in our well-being that far too many of us have genuinely forgotten what the point of politics is. It's been allowed to devolve into a completely irrational symbolic game, a culture war where people are positively encouraged to be as irrational and emotional as they possibly can, and care for nothing except their own particular shade of righteous resentment. Millions of Americans will vote for a Nazi rapist to spite whoever on earth they imagine they're spiting, completely unmindful of the fact that everything he has promised he'll do will make the lives of the people he purports to represent so much worse. Finnish right-wingers incessantly bleat about how we need to reform the corrupt and bloated state, and cheerfully support an utterly incompetent Finnish Trump who enriches his own family through corruption while entrenching the worst aspects of the agrarian-corporatist state and wrecking everything he ideologically despises. Or, worse, they vote for completely empty-headed demagogues with no discernible policies except racism. The British people have voted to destroy their economy in order to poke the elites in the eye - as if it were those elite who will suffer from, say, wrecking the NHS. Meanwhile, far too many of our purported intelligentsia disdain such ideas as actually engaging in some way with the rise of fascism and the destruction of the welfare state, but rather fulminate on how politics is all a game and surely nothing bad can possibly happen to anyone because it's all just talk.

We've forgotten that politics isn't just talk and symbols. That it isn't simply a public arena where the best performance wins, but also where decisions that genuinely affect our lives are made. Because we think it's a game and we refuse to take it seriously, actual fascism is back, and it's deliberately targeting the very institutions that have given so many of us the basic well-being that's brought us up to think that politics don't matter. The destruction that fascism and the cynical profiteers riding its coat-tails wreaks will, obviously, be blamed on the existential enemies the fascists claim to oppose. Your healthcare is being wrecked by shameless right-wing profiteering, but here are the Daily Mail and Ilta-Sanomat to tell you that it's the immigrants' fault somehow. We're making gigantic cuts to education while pouring hundreds of millions into "infrastructure projects" that are a bewildering combination of utter ineptitude and naked graft, but the reason the school system is collapsing is obviously multiculturalism and political correctness. And so on. Meanwhile, the major media outlets have either become so entranced by their own Olympian "objectivity" that they've completely lost touch with any discernible reality, or have openly sided with the fascists.

It's one of the brutal ironies of patriarchy and white supremacy that in the wake of both Brexit and Trump, major newspapers castigated "identity politics", but obviously not the childish racist resentments of the privileged, which is what got us into this whole mess in the first place.

We're going to look back on the brief interregnum following the Cold War and wonder how on earth we fucked this up so badly. It barely took us twenty years to go from the "end of history" - the final victory of liberal democracy - to the rise of 21st century fascism, complete with actual Nazis in the White House. I think we've forgotten that politics is about real things. I'm afraid we're going to be painfully reminded.

**

To sum up, then, 2016 was a uniquely horrible year in my lifetime. Fascism is with us again. No longer just a specter haunting Europe, it has become horrifying flesh among us. In Britain, fascism marches in the hate crimes and petty bigotry of Brexit, and the terrifying rehabilitation of Enoch Powell. In Finland, it leers in our brutally inhuman immigration policies, dreams forced labor fot the "unfit" and spills blood on our streets. A fascist dictator directs the Russian military in its slaughter of innocents in both the Ukraine and Syria. His ideological comrade is taking up residence in the White House.

The lights are going out all over the world. In the heady days around the turn of the millenium, even if we didn't believe that it was the end of history, so many of us thought that the lights of human rights, tolerance and reason would burn brightly in our lifetimes. Now they're going out; not blotted out by any external threat, but deliberately switched off by one country after another falling prey to their darkest impulses. Fifteen years ago, it would have seemed unthinkable that the US and far too many European countries would rush headlong to embrace fascism. But here we are.

What are you going to do about it?

Sipilänomics, part 4: Wrecking the universities

In my previous Sipilänomics posts, I've looked at the current Finnish government's economic policies in general, and more specifically at their attempts to cut unit labor costs and restructure health care. It's high time to take a closer look at another great controversy of the Sipilä administration: higher education.

This is going to be a bit more personal than my previous Sipilänomics posts, quite simply because it's the closest to my everyday life. I graduated from the University of Helsinki with a Master's degree in political history this October, and my plan was to apply to a doctoral program there in the spring. So not only have I had a front-row seat for much of this process, but it very directly affects my future as well.

**

The current administration's attitude to the Finnish university system has been made abundantly clear. The current minister of finance and head of the coalition party, Alexander Stubb, has publicly declared that he has no interest in "the concoctions of docents", and prefers reports from civil servants to academic research. Last summer, when the Sipilä cabinet's swingeing education cuts were announced, he mocked university professors by making fun of their three-month summer vacations.

Here I'd like to interrupt with a personal anecdote. I wrote my master's thesis during that same summer, supervised by one of these afore-mentioned professors. We had a long meeting on my thesis in Midsummer week, after which he took his annual vacation. Our next meeting was when he had returned from vacation and had time to read my thesis in its then-latest incarnation. This was at the very beginning of August. It may seem slightly worrying that a former prime minister and current financial minister thinks that the distance from Midsummer to the beginning of August is three months, but on the other hand, math skills of that caliber would explain many of his fiscal policies.

This same attitude was put into slightly more practical form by minister for education Sanni Grahn-Laasonen in an astonishing open letter to the universities. She accused the universities of a "sleeping contentment", maintaining that Finnish tertiary education doesn't suffer at all from a lack of resources, but rather from gross inefficiency. If politicians have been at fault, she says, it's been because they've trusted the universities too blindly in giving them too many resources. Now other countries are "running faster", accomplishing more with less, because of our universities' lackadaisical approach.

Jouni Tilli, currently of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, has presented an excellent analysis of the minister's rhetoric, pointing out its reliance on scapegoating, and connecting it to the similar blame and atonement rhetoric of prime minister Sipilä's televised speech.

So the thinking behind the massive education cuts seems to be clear: the government has done everything to provide for the universities, but they have become entitled and inefficient, resting on past laurels, and are therefore falling behind in international competition. A more vulgar version of these notions can be seen in the comments to just about every news article on higher education: universities are entitled, politicized, left-wing wastes of money.

Is any of this true?

**

There are several rankings that compare different universities to each other; one of the most prominent is the Academic Ranking of World Universities, generally known as the Shanghai ranking. In the latest iteration, the University of Helsinki is reckoned the 67th-best university in the world. It's also the only Finnish university to crack the top 300, although I'm not sure if that accurately respects the achievements of some portions of the Aalto university conglomerate. So we're doing extremely well globally, but then again, so are the rest of the Nordic countries. In fact, the top universities in the Scandinavian countries rank higher than ours. Are we falling behind? Not on the Shanghai ranking, where the University of Helsinki has improved its position. Similarly, in 2015 Helsinki cracked the top 100 in the Times Higher Education ranking for the first time, so not only is Helsinki very highly ranked, but its position has also been improving. As far as my alma mater is concerned, minister Grahn-Laasonen's accusations seem completely unfounded.

How inefficient is the system, though? The University of Helsinki may be ranking very high, but what about the system as a whole?

One way of assessing this is through the Universitas 21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems. It ranks 50 countries' higher education systems in Resources, Connectivity, Output and overall performance. In terms of resources, Finland is well-ranked, showing we do make - or have made - a considerable national investment in tertiary education.

What are we getting in return? Simply put, one of the highest outputs of any higher education system in the world.

In the overall ranking, ours is reckoned the fourth-best tertiary education system in the world.

In pure monetary terms, as one of my former teachers, Juhana Aunesluoma, points out, the University of Helsinki is competitive in world rankings with universities that have a larger budget than the entire Finnish university system, fully bearing out the findings of the U21 report. So there's really no two ways about it: the notion that the Finnish university system is inefficient is ludicrously false.

**

Minister Grahn-Laasonen has responded to some of the criticisms of her letter. One of the points she addresses is the complaint that actual research is becoming more and more difficult to do because of the constantly growing administrative demands on researchers. The minister sympathizes with this, and calls on universities and researchers to innovate ways to focus more clearly on research.

This is either fantastically dishonest or deeply ignorant - as usual, take your pick. The reason for this burgeoning bureaucracy is the minister's own Coalition party. As Jouni Tilli pointed out in his analysis, the Finnish university system went through extensive reforms in 2010, initiated by Vanhanen agrarian-coalition cabinet, which made universities nominally independent. What this meant in practice was that they remained dependent on government funding, but all research staff became increasingly preoccupied with constantly searching for funding. The following Katainen-Stubb coalition cabinet not only cut that funding, but introduced a "strategic research council" to assess research projects and distribute funds, leading directly to hundreds of doctoral work-hours wasted on drawing up funding requests for government bureaucrats. It's amazing for a minister to completely ignore the political decisions that have led to this situation and demand the people being regulated "innovate" around the regulations put in place by her party. Again, in the rhetoric of the Finnish right wing, the consequences of their decisions can be blamed on the people who suffer from them. Looking at their track record with science and education policy, the only innovation that would seem to have real consequences would be getting rid of the Coalition party.

The one relevant statistic Grahn-Laasonen could quote to support her position was an OECD finding, according to which Finland was spending more on tertiary education than some comparison countries and getting less in return. As I hope the previous section demonstrates, this is gravely misleading. But if there are inefficiencies in the Finnish university system, where are they?

Professor Roope Uusitalo of the University of Jyväskylä had a fascinating post over at Akateeminen talousblogi, on university policy in Finland. It's generally known that university admissions have increased considerably over the last half-century; a perfectly natural and necessary consequence of transitioning from an agrarian to a service and high-tech economy. But where has the growth taken place? Here's a graph he made, which I stole:

The overall number of university students in Finland has quadrupled over the last 50 years or so. However, what's striking is that the University of Helsinki has barely grown at all. Instead, the growth of university education has mostly taken place outside of Helsinki, for reasons of area politics. Minister Grahn-Laasonen has also pointed to the proliferation of regional universities as a key inefficiency of the system: with limited resources, we can't do everything everywhere. However, the Sipilä government's cuts specifically target the University of Helsinki. If the point of the reforms is supposedly to make the system more efficient, why are the largest cuts being targeted at the best-performing university in the country? Again, because of area politics. No agrarian administration will tamper with the regional universities. For Coalition politicians to talk about there being too many universities is completely dishonest, because they know perfectly well that they're in a cabinet that will never under any circumstances see this as a problem.

As professor Petri Mäntysaari of Hanken puts it, Finnish higher education policy as a whole is based on thinking that the ruling parties would never countenance in any other sector of society. Instead of encouraging competition and individual effort, the universities and their researchers are being choked with bureaucracy, and their funding is being increasingly placed in the hands of government bureaucrats. Minister for economic affairs Olli Rehn just announced that they will seek tighter controls on assessing university research, again increasing bureaucracy.

It remains utterly hypocritical that a government that claims to be liberalizing the Finnish economy and society is monomaniacally dedicated to bringing every single aspect of university research under tighter and tighter bureaucratical control. Their talk of consolidating the universities and eliminating inefficiencies is complete nonsense when they make the heaviest cuts to the best-performing institution. The key values of Finnish university politics are bureaucracy, government control and area politics.

**

Last week, Alexander Stubb spoke at an event at our university, and was met by a massive demonstration. I wish I could have been there. Stubb has since apologized for the education cuts, because they've made people at universities feel bad. As Janne Saarikivi says in the previous link, this is the worthless rhetoric of a politician: supposedly feeling sorry for decisions you've made, but not actually doing anything about them. It's also part of a deeply pernicious political trend of framing all discussions as emotional speech. I was absolutely appalled by the Finnish researchers' union's response to Grahn-Laasonen's epistle; the title they went with was "Minister's letter feels insulting to university people". Feels insulting? Feels? I've tried to go to some lengths here to demonstrate that the picture the minister gave of Finland's university system is in many ways completely false, and at best seriously misleading and dishonest when compared to the policies it's defending. And the best that the researchers' union can come up with is to comment on how it makes them feel? With unions like these, do we even need the right to wreck the universities?

The response of the University of Helsinki has also been thoroughly disappointing. Despite an unprecedented frontal assault on the universities by the cabinet, the university still meekly invites the ministers in charge of gutting its finances and mocking it in public to speak at its events, and deploys the staff these same politicians want to see sacked to wrestle for the doors to auditoriums to keep the poor ministers from hearing student protests. Their only conception of university autonomy seems to be which direction to roll over in when kicked. For those of us evaluating the University of Helsinki as a potential future employer, it's painfully clear that the university administration is not going to fight our corner.

In general, the mood among my demographic is captured perfectly by Sophy Bergenheim in her blog. None of us have at any point been under the illusion that pursuing an academic career of any description would be easy. However, the actions of the previous administration, followed directly by this current one, make us wonder whether there's any point any more. We've gone from a country that saw education as a key component of nation-building and competitiveness to one where universities are the targets of savage cuts and public derision. Certainly none of us expect young academics to be hailed as heroes, but an atmosphere that celebrates anti-intellectualism and vilifies science and research as socialist lies is deeply depressing. The financial and general working realities of postgraduate study in the humanities and social sciences are miserable enough today, and are constantly getting worse. Anyone considering postgraduate study now has to deal with the fact that there will be unprecedented layoffs that will still be glutting the job market when they graduate, and university funding as well as research funding in general will be at record lows, locked away behind a planned economy of byzantine bureaucracies. What's the point?

I don't have an answer to that.

**

As the excellent Soh Wan Wei puts it, the tertiary education cuts have no economic basis. My goal here has been to demonstrate that the view of the university system that they are based on is completely wrong. As I've explained before in the context of unit labor costs, there is no reasonable economic philosophy that considers stripping a national economy of its human capital to be a way toward growth. Instead, what the Sipilä government is doing can more accurately be characterized as a project to undevelop the Finnish economy.

If the current administration's economic and education policies make no sense, why are they doing all this? It's not because they're stupid or evil, at least in any more significant sense than politicians and people in general are. It's because the Sipilä administration's policies are essentially a performance designed to pander to a certain segment of voters. Their overall economic policy is designed to give a false impression of "austerity", while channeling money to the government parties' main supporters. The focus on reducing unit labor costs was similarly designed to give an impression of creating competitiveness while actually sacrificing it in favor of short-term benefits. The great health and social services reform project masqueraded as savings and rationalization while entrenching a massively expensive system of area subsidies. In sum, the main policy of the Sipilä administration is to pretend to reform the Finnish economy. The cabinet poses as rational business administrators making tough decisions and fighting a bloated, lazy, entitled public sector.

In the context of this grand narrative, it doesn't matter that the university system is none of these things. The kind of Audi-driving engineer with A Real Job who passionately supports the Sipilä administration knows that the universities are corrupt, stagnant pools of left-wing social justice warriors leeching on public funds, and the administration is putting into effect an education policy designed specifically to pander to him. The universities are convenient scapegoats, not only as examples of the supposedly gigantic and wasteful public sector, but especially for the failures of previous administrations' educational policies. This is manifestly obvious in the ways in which minister Grahn-Laasonen demands that universities innovate around the difficulties created by her party, as if the problem wasn't stupid and short-sighted policy but rather researchers' failures to think up ways to get around it. Facts don't matter; responsibility doesn't exist. The only coin of the realm is the public image of the cabinet parties as stalwart warriors fighting entitled fatcat professors with three-month summer holidays.

In pursuing this image, the current administration is doing deep and long-lasting damage to one of the best university systems in the world. As so many other aspects of the Sipilä cabinet's policies, their university policy poses as tough thinking on long-term problems, but is actually cheap populism of the worst kind, which sacrifices the long-term health of the economy and the entire country to score cheap political points by pandering to voters' prejudices.

Sipilänomics, part 3: Health zones and falling cabinets, oh my

Last Thursday, Finland suddenly found itself in a crisis when prime minister Juha Sipilä threatened to dissolve his cabinet. There was high drama until around 1 am Saturday, when we were told that the situation had been resolved. The crux of the argument was sote: the social and health services reform. To explain what this is all about, we need a short lesson in Finnish administrative history.

**

For most of Finnish independence, there were three main administrative tiers in the country: the municipality, the province and the state. Of these, the Finnish municipality in its current form dates back to the 1865 decree of municipalities, passed when Finland was still a grand duchy of Russia. At this time, a secular local administration separate from the church parish was created. Some of the responsibilities of the state were devolved to the municipalities, and municipal councils started to be established. Another 19th-century development was municipal taxation. These laid down the basis for the municipality as a local unit with theoretically independent finances and a large and growing array of responsibilities to provide services for its inhabitants. In the 21st century, the constitution guarantees municipalities autonomy.

Over time, two things happened. First, with the general growth of the state, municipal responsibilities also mushroomed. Contributing to this was the decline of the provinces. Back in 1996, there were still twelve provinces in Finland:

Coming into the 2000s, that number dropped to five, until the agrarian-led second Vanhanen cabinet abolished the provinces entirely in 2010. The weakness and eventual disappearance of this intermediate level of administration meant that Finnish municipalities ended up being saddled with a huge number of responsibilities. Finland is almost unique in Europe in having practically no intermediate level of government whatsoever between the municipality and the state.

Secondly, continuing urbanization made the municipal structure unviable. Because the original municipalities were based on parishes, there were a lot of them. Below is a map of Finnish municipalities in 2007:

That's a total of 432 municipalities. Today, that number is 317. The financial autonomy of the municipalities was never really possible, and all kinds of co-operative arrangements were created between municipalities to produce services more economically. With the continuing movement from the countryside into the cities, the state of municipal finances became so dire that several grand local government reforms have been attempted since the 1960s. Real progress only started to be made under agrarian and coalition administrations in the 2000s, but municipal reform has been a constant battleground between parties and areas.

With healthcare forming such a large part of overall state and local expenditures, the bewildering array of administrative arrangements created to provide them has been identified as a prime target for rationalization ages ago. Back in 2005, a working group comprised of all parliamentary parties forged an agreement to centralize healthcare and social services in five national "social and health" (sote) areas. The actual implementation of this was delayed in the general clusterfuck that was the Katainen/Stubb administration, but when prime minister Sipilä took office on his messianic mission to rescue the Finnish economy, it was clear from the get-go that the sote reforms would be a key project.

So the Sipilä administration inherited an agreement on five sote zones, based on expert consensus. The coalition party had set a maximum of twelve sote zones in their electoral program coming in, as this had been identified as the maximum viable number. Despite this, the prime minister demanded that the Coalition party agree to a system of eighteen zones. Experts condemned this as completely unworkable, but the prime minister insisted that it was either eighteen zones or he would dissolve cabinet.

Why? What happened?

**

As Sipilä explained in his dramatic live press conference last Friday, his aim is not only to provide healthcare and social services efficiently. Instead, the agrarian party has hijacked the sote reform, and instead of creating healthcare and social service zones, they are now insisting that the reforms produce comprehensive, autonomous local government units that will combine a far wider variety of administrative powers.

Whether it's left-wingers occupying the universities or an agrarian local government scheme, the definition of autonomy in Finland is that a group of people decide what they want to spend money on, and make someone else pay for it. What Sipilä is doing is taking a healthcare reform project with almost universal parliamentary support, and turning it into an agrarian pork-barrel scheme to funnel endless streams of money into what they are pleased to call "area politics".

After the Second World War, Finland was still largely an agrarian economy. By the 1960's, the mechanization of agriculture and forestry work made the small farmer's life largely untenable, and a wave of urbanization started, leading to the evolution of Finland from an agrarian to a high-tech and service economy. The simplest way to explain what prime minister Juha Sipilä's agrarian party stands for is to say that they are doing their best to stop this evolution from happening. At their most demented, they condemn urbanization as an artificial, politically created process that can be reversed, in a sort of Finnish agrarian version of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

The raison d'être of the agrarian party is the pork barrel. Under the guise of farm subsidies, area subsidies and the wonderful euphemism "area equality", the Finnish state dumps billions of euros every single year into what is called "keeping all of Finland inhabited". It's difficult to comb through the various state budgets to figure out exactly how much money is being spent on various area subsidy schemes; it becomes a herculean task to estimate how much money is constantly being wasted in retarding the development of the Finnish economy. The chimera of "area equality" is almost certainly the most colossal waste of resources by the Finnish government. Dispensing with it would fix the deficit immediately, and make life better in this country for everyone. Maintaining it, on the other hand, creates this:

That right there is a map of Finland with each municipality color-coded by the party that got the most votes there in the 2015 parliamentary elections. Guess who's dark green.

This scheme, where the agrarian party makes sure the money keeps flowing from the state and the cities into the countryside and the voters keep on voting, is the machine that powers Sipilä's party. Because it gets dressed up in various nationalistic notions of food autarky, the exceptional purity of Finnish food and other ridiculous mirages, it's politically very difficult to oppose openly anyway, but to the agrarian party, it's absolutely crucial. Crucial enough that healthcare reform and even the entire Sipilä cabinet can be laid on the line to safeguard it.

**

At the time of this writing, the word was that a compromise had been reached: there would be 15 sote zones and 18 autonomous administrative areas. This sounds like a terrible compromise, and a decisive defeat for the Coalition party, who effectively surrendered to Sipilä's blackmail. At worst, it will be ruinous for the nation. Compared to the more reasonable four- or five-area model, the Sipilä scheme is at least a billion euros more expensive. A billion.

Sipilä's sote project will take a system of healthcare and social services that was supposed to save money by centralizing services and turn it into a permanent pork-barrel system of autonomous local administrations, whose actual task will be to keep this political machine running in perpetuity. So what is being sold to the public as a scheme to cut the deficit is, in fact, again, the opposite. This is entirely in line with the Sipilä cabinet's fake austerity policies in general, and their project to undevelop the Finnish economy.

So the headline you may have seen, that says health care reform is bringing down the Finnish government, is dead wrong. Sipilä's insistence on turning health care reform into a pork barrel electoral machine and sacrificing his cabinet to make it happen is what caused this crisis, and the Coalition party's capitulation means it's being resolved in the worst possible way. If the government really wanted to reform healthcare, it wouldn't be this hard. To paraphrase Lenin, it's not what the mouth says, it's what the hands do. As ever for the Sipilä cabinet, these are two completely different things.

My thesis: Forests, nationalism and Finnish armored doctrine

For those of you that read Finnish, my master's thesis in political history should now be available for download at the University of Helsinki digital repository. The title is "Onko hyökkäysvaunuilla mitään tulevaisuutta meillä?" Suomalainen panssariajattelu ja puolustusvoimien maastokäsitys 1919-1939; roughly translated: "Do tanks have any future with us?" [the title of a 1924 article]: Finnish armored thought and the armed forces' conception of Finnish terrain, 1919-1939. I use the term "armored thought" to capture the fact that the way the military sees the potential use of the tank influences more than just tank doctrine proper, but also anti-tank weapons and organization, and the whole role of both friendly and enemy tanks in battle.

The starting point for my thesis was a question: what happened to the Finnish armored force? In 1919, the newly founded Finnish government brought a stack of surplus war materiel from France, including some thirty Renault FT tanks. These were organized into what was officially called the Tank Regiment, but was actually a battalion. At the time, this gave Finland the largest armored force in Northern Europe, and that distinction was maintained for several years; Finnish armor outnumbered and outclassed the Soviets well into the 1920's. However, by the time the Winter War rolls around, the main strength of the Finnish armored forces is still those same Renaults. They were dug in as armored strongpoints and destroyed in battle. The Vickers 6-ton tanks that should have replaced them were bought too late; only a handful of them saw combat, and most were lost. At the same time, the rest of the army was suffering terribly from a complete neglect of anti-tank defenses that had only begun to be remedied when war broke out.

So what happened? How did the Finnish army go from being at the forefront of armored warfare in North Europe to facing the mechanized Soviet onslaught in 1939 with a handful of completely obsolete World War I tanks and desperately improvised anti-tank weapons? Why did we drop the ball on this so spectacularly? That's what I aimed to find out.

**

Previous research held that Finland's ex-czarist officers were to blame for the neglect of armored warfare. In the years before the Second World War, the Finnish army officer corps basically consisted of three groups. There were some older Finnish officers who had served in the Imperial Russian Army when Finland was a part of Russia. Their political opponents were the Jäger officers, who as young activists had left Finland covertly during the First World War and enlisted in the German army. The third group were some youg officers who had joined up during the Finnish civil war in 1918, and those joining up through the Finnish army itself. This last group were obviously very junior in the 1920s, but their influence would naturally grow.

The accepted story of Finnish armor has been that the ex-czarist officers were hostile to armored warfare and were convinced that tanks couldn't be used at all in Finland's forests. The trouble is that this claim is very poorly sourced. The better histories of the Finnish army tend to all refer to the same sources on this, chief among which is a 1924 article in Suomen Sotilasaikakauslehti, a military periodical. Written by a young lieutenant in the Tank Regiment, it obliquely refers to a general notion that tanks are unusable in Finnish terrain. The more specific claim that czarist officers were responsible can be found in the armored corps' histories, and most directly in the memoirs of Aarne Sihvo, the highest-ranking of the Jäger officers and a bitter enemy of the "czarists".

These sources aren't very persuasive, and there is also evidence against them. Moreover, in the "Jäger revolt" of 1924, the Jäger officers effectively staged a coup in the army and had the majority of the "czarist officers" thrown out. If the ex-Russian Army officers were to blame for the neglect of armor and the notion of the unusability of tanks, surely things would change when they were sidelined. But they didn't. So there are several problems with the accepted story.

My goal was to find out how Finnish officers thought about armored warfare between the world wars. Interwar armored doctrines are interesting because they're a great showcase for the relationship between technology and doctrine: technology sets a framework for doctrine (the tanks can only go so fast, for instance), but different armies with access to the same technology will create very different doctrines. I started from Elizabeth Kier's idea of an army's culture determining what doctrinal options it "sees". Did the Finnish army not see tanks as viable weapons of war in Finland? If so, why not, and why did their opinion change?

As material I used articles published in Finnish military periodicals from 1919 to 1939 dealing with armored warfare. When it became obvious that I was dealing with a wider matter than armor, I also looked at articles that dealt with the military geography of Finland. My method was discourse analysis. I wasn't all that interested in what the articles were saying about armored warfare, but rather how they were saying it: what kind of arguments were being used, what was not being said, and so on. My main perspective was the history of ideas. Military thought is often quite wrongly segregated from the rest of society. Especially the majority of earlier studies on Finnish doctrine tend to view the development of doctrine as simple, apolitical, technical problem-solving, where field regulations neatly succeed one another. I wanted to see if Finnish military thought and even armored doctrine could be linked to broader Finnish politics and culture of the era.

Another perspective I used was critical geopolitics. Critical geopolitics maintains that concepts of terrain and geography in general aren't objective reconstructions of natural facts, but rather ideological and political constructs. Geographical ideas are created for various reasons, and they both influence and are influenced by culture and politics. In this case, the Winter War did demonstrate rather conclusively that tanks could indeed be used in Finnish terrain. So why would Finnish officers think differently?

As a curiosity, I happened to read James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State while working on this thesis, and it definitely had an influence. Military doctrine is also a product of "state sight"; the war of the future that doctrine is created to fight is necessarily imaginary, and based on theoretical abstractions. For a cadre conscript army like Finland's, even most of the army's own formations only exist in theory before actual mobilization. What my thesis ended up being was a look at one abstract model: the Finnish army's changing concept of the military geography of Finland.

**

I found that the accepted view of the ex-czarist officers' hostility toward tanks is almost certainly wrong. While these officers ran the army high command, the Tank Regiment featured in their wartime planning. Hell, they're the ones who bought the damn things in the first place! In the early- to mid-1920's, there are several articles on mechanization, machine warfare and armor in the periodicals, expressing a variety of views from a Fulleresque obsolescence of the infantry to a dogmatic rejection of armor as unsuitable to Finland. Several young officers from the armored regiment took to the pages to defend their branch of service. It's also at this time that Sihvo adapts the French 1919 tank regulations to Finnish use, publishing several books on the subject. There were both pro- and anti-tank views being aired, as it were.

By contrast, after the "Jäger coup", this discussion dies down. A consensus forms that tanks can't be used in Finnish terrain at all, and both the armored corps and anti-tank defences are completely neglected. It's paradoxical that the Jägers, many of whom strongly identified as a young, dynamic force sweeping away the old, stagnant "Russians" and their outdated military thinking should have been so hostile to modern warfare. During the civil war, Sihvo had called the ex-czarist officers the "men of the retreat system", as opposed to the fervently offensive-minded Jägers. Elsewhere in Europe, young, dynamic revolutionary movements often went together with a modernist cult of the machine and the future; it's no accident that J.F.C. Fuller was a Fascist, or that armored doctrine was developed in such forward-looking ways in Germany and the Soviet Union. In Finland, by contrast, a system of military thought developed that almost harked back to the attaque á outrance of early World War I days. Why?

The key is terrain. Finnish officers formulated a view of Finnish terrain as diametrically opposite to Central Europe. One writer compared it to a photograph and a negative: compared to Finland, Central Europe had exactly the opposite proportion of forests. Central European tactics and organization were developed for this open environment, while Finnish tactics and doctrine had to work in the Finnish forests. The officers of the 1920's held that positional and machine warfare were impossible in the forests, as the dramatically reduced visibility drastically favored the offensive, and the tree cover effectively neutralized artillery, both by detonating the shells too high and early, and making resupply so difficult that sustained barrages couldn't be fired. Tanks couldn't be used in the woods at all, so neither armor nor anti-tank defences were necessary. So in effect, in the Finnish forests it would be as if the First World War had never happened.

This view is quite extraordinary, and completely wrong. Below is what a Finnish forest looks like after heavy artillery fire in the Winter War (SA-kuva):

Tanks were also used by both sides, and en masse by the Soviets. Both the Winter and Continuation wars saw prolonged periods of positional warfare, and the deployment of the entire conventional arsenal of machine warfare. While the war to the north of the Ladoga was very much forest fighting, in the crucial theater of the Karelian Isthmus, a brutal battle of attrition was fought that was exactly the kind of warfare Finnish officers of the late 1920's and early 30's had considered impossible.

I believe there are several reasons why they thought this. One was a lack of funding in the 20's, and a lack of ambition by officers, which led to most marches being carried out over roads and most battle exercises being fought over exercise grounds. There were very few large-scale manoeuvres. So it seems likely that many officers actually had very little practical experience of forest fighting. Similarly, practical knowledge of the effects of modern artillery fire on Nordic forests was in short supply.

Bizarrely, what little practical evidence there was contradicted the notion of the military exceptionality of the Finnish forest and the unique ability of the Finns to operate in it. In the Finnish civil war, both sides had effectively been restricted to the roads for both movement and combat, since poorly trained Finnish troops were entirely unable to operate effectively in the woods. The Renault tanks of the Tank Regiment had not only been tested in the terrain of the Karelian Isthmus and found usable, but the regiment had regularly toured Finnish military bases, demonstrating the tanks' ability to function in all environments. Yet this practical experience was ignored.

More importantly, though, there is a long tradition of Finnish thought (pdf) that identifies the Finns as "people of the forest", as opposed to Swedish-speakers or Russians. The unique nature of Finnish terrain has been synonymous with the uniqueness of the Finnish people, and still is: in his unprecedented televised address last month, Finland's current prime minister appealed to Finns' "unique relationship to nature". Finnish army officers, after all, weren't just concerned with training conscripts for war. The Finnish nation had only very recently been invented, and one important reason why Parliament had chosen a cadre system of conscription over several other alternatives was that a centralized national army would be more effective in indoctrinating conscripts into a proper Finnish nationalism. In order to achieve this, army officers used nationalist writings from the 19th century, which were steeped in the mythology of "forest Finland". The majority of the officers, especially the Jägers who stayed in the army after the civil war, were fanatical nationalists. Most of them also had at best a rudimentary military education.

Like I explained earlier, in order to formulate doctrine, a model of the terrain and forces involved has to be created. In the mental model of the Jäger officers, their Finnish conscripts were natural forest fighters, and the Finnish landscape was composed almost exclusively of impassable forests where "Central European" tactics and machine warfare wouldn't work at all. This "mental forest" was one where tanks simply couldn't operate. It was this that led to the idea often expressed in the late '20s and early 30's in the periodicals that tanks were unusable in Finland. So far from the former Imperial Russian officers being to blame, it was in fact the nationalist ideology of the Jägers that gave rise to the "anti-tank fallacy" of the interwar period.

**

Previous research has maintained that Finnish thinking on armored warfare changed in the 1930's, when Finland's military attaché in Moscow, Aladár Paasonen, reported on the growing mechanization of the Soviet army. In response to Paasonen's report, trials were arranged in the Karelian Isthmus, which demonstrated that tanks could, after all, be used in Finnish terrain. This caused a complete shift in Finnish doctrine, but the re-equipping of the army was still a work in progress when the Winter War broke out.

Again, this is at best partially true. The shift in thinking had actually started earlier, because the decade of neglect for the armored corps ended in 1933 when field trials were arranged to determine the successor of the obsolescent Renault FTs. Similarly, an anti-tank regulation - a translated Soviet manual! - had been published, along with a program of anti-tank training for the infantry. On the other hand, it's puzzling why it took the Finnish army so long to react to Soviet mechanization, which had started in 1928. While Finnish periodicals had actively followed international discussions on tank doctrine in the earlier 1920s, by the time of the internationally influent Salisbury Plain experiments in 1928-29, the Finnish defence press was ignoring tank warfare.

What we do know is that in the early 1930's, there was a cultural shift in the Finnish army. The Finnish army had been massively influenced by Germany, both through the military training of the Jägers and the numerous German army officers who acted as consultants in the early years of the Finnish army. Interestingly, Sihvo was a prominent critic of the German influence: he felt that the Finns were nothing but expendable colonial troops to the Germans. His biographer believes this is the main reason why Sihvo, an illustrious public figure at the time, was forced into resigning from the army in 1919. In the early 30's, concerns similar to Sihvo's were given official acceptance in a memorandum drafted by the army high command, under two successive Jäger chiefs of staff. The memorandum decried the fact that more than a decade after independence, Finland still didn't have its own army, but rather a force created to serve the needs of a foreign power. I believe that this reorientation gives rise to the change in Finnish military thought in the 1930's in general. Later in the decade, the first actual large-scale trials of forest fighting demonstrated that the Finnish army regimental organization was unsuitable to forest warfare. It was also found that the effectiveness of artillery in the forest was far greater than had previously been assumed.

This general shift in thinking seems to also have led to the armor question being re-examined. This didn't actually mean that any new information was produced. The 1934 trials in the Isthmus were held using some new Vickers tanks and the single Carden-Loyd tankette in Finland - but the majority of the tanks were Renaults. Effectively, the Finnish armored corps demonstrated in 1934 what they had already demonstrated in 1920 and the following decade: that Renault FTs could be used in Finnish terrain. What was unacceptable in the 1920's became acceptable in the 1930's, and Finnish armored thinking changed.

**

The fact that practically identical trials in 1920 and 1934 had opposite effects on Finnish doctrine highlights the way in which military thought cannot be seen as simple, technical problem-solving. As Elizabeth Kier said, understanding military culture is crucial to understanding the development and change of doctrine. Specifically, an examination of the army's conception of Finnish terrain through critical geopolitics and the history of ideas is crucial to understanding how the army saw the useability of tanks and the necessity of anti-tank defenses. To understand what doctrines armies arrive at, we have to understand how they see.

And that, in brief and unscientific form, was pretty much my master's thesis. It clocked in at 97 pages, and was both incredibly stressful and incredibly rewarding to write. The whole project took off in a completely unexpected direction by the time I found myself reading articles on the effectiveness of various kinds of artillery munitions in forests, but it was worth it. Overall, though I'm very much a fan of new military history, I feel that my thesis also demonstrates that re-examining topics of "old military history" like doctrine and tactics with a cultural studies approach and apparatus can be worthwhile, at least in providing new perspectives.