* * *

When intellectual historian Ron Eyerman refers to the “intelligentsia”, he means the historically specific stratum that

The concept of “intelligentsia” was formed in Eastern Europe (Russia and Poland) in the early nineteenth century, and the state was its ally. But since then the concept has had many variations.Footnote ⁷

In Finland, university-based intellectuals and the state have lived in symbiosis to an extraordinary extent. This relationship is illustrated more clearly than perhaps in any other country on Helsinki's Senate Square: the university and the Senate are situated opposite each other in similar buildings, the only difference being the university's Ionic colonnade as Hellas and the Senate's Corinthian colonnade as Rome. Another symbol of this alliance in the University of Helsinki can be found inside the university building. On the wall of the Great Hall hangs a painting depicting the inaugural procession of the university in July 1640 in Turku, where the university was located until 1828. The central figure in the picture is not a university man, but a representative of the government: Count Per Brahe, the true founder of the university, who at that time was governor-general of Finland. Power and learning have, in other words, traditionally been closely allied in Finland. University professors dominated not only the intellectual but also the political field in Finland until the Second World War.Footnote ⁸

Although the link between elites and the stratum of intelligentsia is not automatic, cultural, political, bureaucratic and other elites can be conceived as composing part of a whole called the intelligentsia.Footnote ⁹ In this essay, I discuss the role of Finnish intellectuals from the viewpoint of student and other intellectual activism in the twentieth century. I look at intellectuals both from the phenomenological point of view, i.e. the self-understanding and perceptions of the individuals who conceived of themselves as intellectuals, and from the structural point of view, which takes as its starting point an objective, observable position in the social structure.Footnote ¹⁰ “Objective”, of course, means meeting the standards of a given historical society. In any case, my emphasis is on the latter approach.Footnote ¹¹

I am particularly interested in the making of the Finnish intelligentsia and its relation to the state and the nation. I look at the emergence of the intelligentsia in the context of nationalism, (cultural) modernism and radicalism in the development of the public sphere. The aim is not, however, to provide a full account of Finnish intellectual history, but to extract a few examples of the longue durée of the relationship between Finnish university intellectuals and the state through historical turmoil. My main source will be the student magazine Ylioppilaslehti (Student Magazine),Footnote ¹² which is not just “any student paper”, but a Finnish institution that has seen most of Finland's cultural and political elite pass through its editorial staff in the twentieth century.

THE SNELLMANIAN PATRIMONY

The role of intellectuals in society is dependent on the possibilities and the constraints provided by both tradition and context. Social conditions and political beliefs, as well as relations to wider social movements, shape intellectuals in different cultures and in different times.Footnote ¹³ In Finland, the tradition of the intelligentsia has been especially subject to the influence of one person, J. V. Snellman (1806–81). In his early career, the philosopher and statesman was himself deeply influenced by the main philosophical trend of the 1840s, Hegelianism. Snellman laid the intellectual foundations of the Finnish state in his Lärän om Staten (The Idea of the State) of 1842, in which he promoted the idea of the authority of the state at the expense of a more liberal civil society.

Snellman absorbed Hegelian ideas about the superiority of the state and patriotism through his teacher, J. J. Tengström, in the 1830s. Tengström went even further than his master Hegel by stating that selfish individuality, even when produced by Weltgeist according to Hegelian thinking, is bad for the status quo and for tradition. Tengström emphasized instead the role of civil servants, who were expected to be rational, ethical (sittlich) and devoted to citizens and the fatherland. The lectures of Tengström had far-reaching consequences for Snellman and other Finnish followers of German idealism because this construction provided the groundwork for the Finnish intelligentsia to identify with the state. Following the ideas of Tensgström, Snellman emphasized national cultural identity and linguistic nationalism as the essence of a sovereign state. In that sense, he also built upon the ideas of J. G. von Herder, especially in placing emphasis on language in the making of the nation. For Snellman, language—especially its vocabulary—was not just an external medium for people to communicate their thoughts to each other, but something to express the common experience of a nation and a specific way of understanding the world. As a one example of his view, he claimed that the Grand Duchy of Finland, which was a part of the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1918, was on a higher developmental level than the independent state of Switzerland, where the national spirit seemed to be sleeping due to the multiethnic, multilingual character of that country. We can also find the influences of the philosopher of language Wilhelm von Humboldt in Snellman's thinking.Footnote ¹⁴

Bildung (education) was also an essential concept in Snellman's thought and action. His conception of the university depended upon this idea: the university was both for advancing science and for training in moral and ethical living. The aim of a university education was not just to provide degrees, offices or salaries. In this sense, the views of Snellman have been seen in the classical Humboldtian or neo-humanistic frame of reference in which the freedom of research, teaching and studying is a central, intrinsic value.Footnote ¹⁵ But this academic freedom of the university, especially after Snellman finally became a professor in 1856, developed into a tool for organizing the functions of the state. Schools in his view should educate people for civil society, and the university, again, for service to the state. But the university could not be just like any school. For Snellman, the essence of academic studies was the pursuit of knowledge and the ethical life that arises from recognition of the rights of self-consciousness. This is Snellman's justification for the principle of academic freedom. As a Hegelian, he believed, more than did his master, actually, that the ethical life of the state is mediated by subjectivity. In Snellman's thinking, a citizen's loyalty should be, in the first place, loyalty to the nation as the framework in which the individual personality could achieve fulfilment.Footnote ¹⁶

As scholars of nationalism have stated, nationalism can be seen as “civic religion” for a young, “ahistorical nation.” It has also been a suitable ideology for the elite to persuade common people to identify with a modern state.Footnote ¹⁷ In this tradition, Finland belongs to Western rather than Eastern Europe, where nationalism has more often been a liberating force for oppressed peoples.Footnote ¹⁸

EDUCATING STATE BUREAUCRATS FOR THE GRAND DUCHY OF FINLAND

The Finnish view of university education was, however, unlike that of the former mother country, Sweden.Footnote ¹⁹ The Swedes acknowledged, in the spirit of moderate liberalism, that people have many rightful orientations, which are not commensurable, but compete with each other. By contrast, in the Grand Duchy of Finland, circumstances in the nineteenth century favoured consensus. The Finnish intelligentsia had to concentrate on the development of the state in ways different from those of older European nation states, in which mental resources could be directed to multiple orientations. Especially in its difficult political situation as a part of absolutist Russia, the Finnish university system could not fully provide a free forum for intellectual activity.

Yet Finland was, under Russian rule, allowed to retain most of its important institutions. First of all, local government—the Imperial Senate of Finland since 1816—remained much as it had been under Sweden, although its powers became rather circumscribed. Another important institution, the university, was reformed and named Imperial Alexander University after the tsar once it moved from Turku to Helsinki in 1828.Footnote ²⁰ The Senate effectively took education under its wing, and the university became first and foremost an institution to educate bureaucrats to serve the state. The Finnish settlement was not unique in Russian history,Footnote ²¹ but Finland maintained its special status and was able to develop political and cultural autonomy during the nineteenth century which resulted in full independence after the Russian Revolution.

Alexander I, who declared that Finland should take its place “in the rank of nations, governed by its own laws”, including religion and customs, was considered a liberal in the climate of contemporary Europe. His successor, Nicholas I, was more of a paternal autocrat than a spiritual and intellectual tsar. He put an end to the autonomy of several areas, including Poland in 1830, but Finland was able keep its autonomy partly due to Finnish loyalty. However, his successor, Alexander II, “the good tsar”, was a real reformer, and Finland became sort of a laboratory to test his reforming ideas. Actually, in the late nineteenth century Russia was economically backward when compared to Finland. When the emperor granted relatively wide freedom for its “overdeveloped” province,Footnote ²² most of the benefit accrued to Finland. Especially for the growth of the forest industry—the footing for the Finnish economy until the late twentieth century and the rise of Nokia and other high-tech clusters—big Russian markets were extremely important. Alexander II established Finland's own currency and liberated business, but also encouraged Finns to elevate Finnish to a national language.

However, Russians allowed Finnish bureaucrats to work relatively independently only insofar as Finland offered a model for efficiency and good administration for the rest of Russia. When situations changed in the mid-nineteenth century, along with rising nationalism in Europe and in the Russian provinces, the new generation of Finnish elites, including Snellman, started to forge Finnish statehood in a different manner. This did not mean revolution, as in Poland, but new manoeuvres behind the scenes to win the emperor's approval. For instance, in the European revolutions of 1848, which arose from a wide variety of causes linked to modernization (new ideologies, technological change and urbanization), students went to barricades in Central Europe, but Finnish students spent their spring day celebration by hurrahing for the emperor. Historically, Finns have been relatively moderate in protesting. In addition, demonstrations and protest marches have characteristically been orderly and organized.Footnote ²³ Overall, what is historically somewhat unusual is that activists in a nationalistic movement were, in Finland, actually coopted into the state bureaucracy.

MODERN INTELLECTUALS AND THE STATE

On the other hand, Finland was experiencing slow modernization during almost the entire nineteenth century. When modernization is rapid, the arenas of society and culture diverge from each other and lay the groundwork for an oppositional intelligentsia. In fact, the whole concept of the “intellectual” is a child of Enlightenment and of reaction, supporting or opposing modernism.Footnote ²⁴ The modern concept of the intellectual entered European culture in connection with the so-called Dreyfus affair at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁵ To be an intellectual meant autonomy or distance from the corridors of power. But by then, intellectuals were already divided into two camps. In addition to the liberals in defence of Dreyfus, there were also conservative defendants of national values, the army, and established social hierarchy. In universities particularly, this division was defined as the degree to which individuals were bound to legitimate social structures within and outside university. Some, mostly representing humanities and modernism, were more autonomous and generally chose the universalist liberal camp, while those more attached to traditional sciences and dependent more on the state went to the conservative camp. All in all, the Dreyfus affair helped to solidify intellectuals as a social group called the intelligentsia. Now they could function as a distinct stratum in society with a moral mission that placed them in an antagonistic relationship with established authority.Footnote ²⁶

Although the French case was unique, explained by the tradition and the structure of the Parisian elite, the same kind of movement can be found in other parts of Europe as well. In Finland, the modernization process forged ahead in the late nineteenth century. One of its features was that the traditional social order of the four estates and the ecclesiastic regulation system started to shatter. Traditional customs and mores, as well as the attributes of social status, were called into question. If we approach this development from the point of view of subjective modernity and consider not only linear goal orientation but also multidimensional fragmentation, it meant changes in the identity of individuals. Selfhood and identity became relatively loose, and “self” was now seen as a reflexive project. But still, this process occurred within the tradition of German idealism. As the Finnish intellectual historian Marja Jalava, who has studied this change through the Finnish liberal moral philosopher Rolf Lagerborg, has put it, the main question and problem concerned the relationship between Sittlichkeit (morality) and Sinnlichkeit (sensuality) and their “reconciliation” (Versöhung).Footnote ²⁷ Lagerborg was distinctively a Swedish-speakingFootnote ²⁸ university intellectual, an aristocrat who was not only liberal but also internationally oriented. But internationality and liberalism attracted the Finnish-speaking intelligentsia as well.

The period in question aroused liberalism, but also cultural criticism and the first Finnish modernists in literature. Especially after the nationalistic Fennoman movementFootnote ²⁹ divided in two, the liberal writers of this group of “Young Finns” wanted to “open windows” to Europe. For the first time, the Finnish intelligentsia became centred around circles of artists, men of letters, and journalists instead of students or politicians. Especially men of letters (authors, poets, writers, journalists), such as Juhani Aho and Eino Leino, who later became the “great men” of Finnish literature, resembled the archetypical intellectuals of France. They were academic, peripatetic, multilingual individuals, virtual Renaissance figures who moved in art circles and were interested in social, political and cultural topics of different kinds. The resemblance to French intellectuals was not accidental, however, since Juhani Aho even wrote articles about the Dreyfus affair at that time.Footnote ³⁰

Those Finnish international liberals ran into trouble after Nicholas II came into power in 1896. He initiated processes that have been called “the Russification of Finland”. Especially after General Nikolay Bobrikov became governor-general of Finland, Nicholas II started a reform movement aimed at controlling Russian's western borderland. This meant the strengthening of his own powers, the integration of the armed forces, the abolition of separate customs and monetary systems, and the introduction of Russian into the Senate, civil service and schools. This policy, established in 1899 and often referred to as the “February Manifesto”, eventually became known (in contemporary and subsequent literature Finnish) as the beginning of the first “icy times” and “oppression” (1899–1905). Borbikov was assassinated by Eugen Schauman, a nationalist and nobleman, in 1904. Later there was another Russification period (1908–17) which lasted until the Russian Revolution.

The Young Finns, who separated from the more conservative Finnish Party, strongly opposed Russification on a constitutional basis. The roots of the movement were in the art circles of the late nineteenth century. Besides Aho and Leino, other major cultural figures of the “golden age of Finnish Art” included authors Minna Canth and Ilmari Kianto, painters Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Pekka Halonen, and the composer Jean Sibelius. From these circles the newspaper Päivälehti emerged. One of the founders and later the editor-in-chief and the owner of the paper, Eljas Erkko, who was also the founder and leader of the Young Finns Party, was exiled by Bobrikov and spent the years from 1903 to 1905 in the United States and Cuba. Meanwhile, Päivälehti was disbanded after it published positive accounts of Schauman's assassination, but it started again as Helsingin Sanomat in the same year.Footnote ³¹ Later in independent Finland, Erkko worked as a minister for two Finnish governments. Of the other Young Finns politicians,Footnote ³² the third president of Finland (1931–7) P. E. Svindhuvud was exiled to Siberia during the First World War because he refused to obey the rules requiring the replacement of Finnish officials with Russians.

Hence if we look at the relationship of certain factions of Finnish intellectuals with mother Russia in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, we see that loyalty to a superior state was broken. Compliance politics were questioned amid the wider unrest in the Russian Empire. This development led to the declaration of independence (1917) and the Finnish Civil War (1918).Footnote ³³ The Finnish Civil War had a crucial influence on all intellectual activity in Finland, especially during the interwar period. For the major faction of young intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, the Civil War was a “formative experience”.Footnote ³⁴

THE ERA OF STUDENT NATIONALISM

One of the fora for these Finnish-speaking liberals was the magazine Nuori Suomi (Young Finland) published between 1905 and 1907. It was a sort of predecessor for Ylioppilaslehti, which was established in 1913. During its first years, Ylioppilaslehti was mainly a “professional magazine for students”, and it reflected the general, non-political sentiments of the student world. However, the situation changed in the 1920s. The activities of university students became concentrated in the Academic Karelian Society (AKS), which took over Ylioppilaslehti in 1923.Footnote ³⁵ The AKS was an extreme right-wing student movement founded in the previous year. The organization was unfavourable to liberalism, pluralism, socialism and communism, stock-jobbing, foreigners, urbanity and “snobbery.” It had a strong generational hegemony among university students, especially in the 1930s.

Despite the fact that AKS activists were on the winning White side of the Civil War, the leaders of the movement still wanted to integrate the working population into their ideal society in the 1920s. The situation changed when the movement split and the remaining faction started flirting with fascism in the 1930s. After that, the workersFootnote ³⁶ had no role in the movement. AKS joined with the fascist-minded People's Patriotic Movement (IKL), which was run by older academic intellectuals.Footnote ³⁷

In any case, radical nationalism was nothing new among university students. The core idea of the Fennoman movement, which came into existence from within the Swedish-speaking elite in the early nineteenth century, was to educate the nation, inspire nationalism among educated people and promote the status of the Finnish language. By the 1840s, Snellman had already become the great master of the Fennoman students.Footnote ³⁸

Among university students, the ethno-linguistic conflict had become stalemated during the first years of the twentieth century. However, the situation changed after Finland won its independence. The topic which troubled the University of Helsinki the most in the 1920s and 1930s was the language struggle, the issue of “Finnicizing” the university.Footnote ³⁹

The ethno-linguistic conflict was on the whole a significant national issue during the restless childhood years of Finnish democracy. The conflict had great political importance, as it was directly linked to the struggles among political parties, the position of Swedish speakers, and the rise of nationalism and right-wing radicalism. It penetrated Finnish society extensively during the interwar decades: the Swedishness of economic life was regarded as a far-reaching drawback. Finnicizing the army officers, among other issues, developed into an important point of controversy, and all levels of education had to take positions on these questions.

The great university student demonstration around the statue of J. V. Snellman on November 1928 became one of the crucial mass events in the university's language struggle. As part of the demonstration, a delegation of students delivered to the Council of State a petition about the university's “Finnicization” signed by 90 per cent of the student population of the University of Helsinki. Ylioppilaslehti published, in connection with the petition, a special issue with the platform of the petition on its cover. The issue was written in a highly declamatory style, appealing to history from the very first line: “During those centuries, of which history knows to tell, the Finnish nation has constantly lived under guardianship . . . Each country's greatness can be said to depend, for the most part, on the abilities of its intelligentsia.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Besides, Ylioppilaslehti was an essential actor in collecting the signatures of the petition.

The struggle continued during the entire decade of the 1930s. An additional parliamentary session was suggested as a solution in January 1935. In the parliament, the passing of a Language Act was delayed by filibustering, including marathon speeches by nationalists that were often written by university students. The additional parliamentary session was not a success, and the situation stood still for a few years. A solution was reached only in 1937.

However, in the 1920s, there were additional opportunities for the AKS to organize among the cultural intelligentsia. For instance, the main task of the group called Tulenkantajat (“the Flame Bearers”) was to find a way to take Finland from a so-called “backwoods” culture to the new, modern European level of literature. One of the main critics of the AKS and other radical right-wing groups among the Finnish cultural intelligentsia during the 1930s was Matti Kurjensaari, who can be described as archetypically of the French-model independent and “outsider” intellectual.Footnote ⁴¹ The Finnish minor left intelligentsia of the 1930s, who had to operate mostly underground, heavily criticized the AKS. They did not, by the way, consider AKS members to be part of the intelligentsia, although the AKS was, at its core, an academic movement. The left wanted to distinguish the academic educated class from intellectuals, who did not necessarily need any degrees or diplomas to assume this status. Most significantly, an intellectual had to be in the vanguard of progress and outside power elites. The main virtues of an intellectual were intellectual integrity and the pursuit of truth and justice.

The University's “Finnicization” project was clearly an issue that penetrated the public's consciousness on a national scale. University students’ idealism and politicizing in Ylioppilaslehti had garnered national attention even before the Second World War. After the war, it was hoped that the paper might regain this role in more or less the same way, and partly with the help of the same people as before. The objectives of the right-wing students were reminiscent of what Jürgen Habermas calls the public sphere of republican models of democracy.Footnote ⁴² The republican tradition stresses the political participation of active citizens. It is particularly interested in rational choice or political ethos. Indeed, many of the student activists of the 1920s, such as editor-in-chief of Ylioppilaslehti (1927–8) Urho Kekkonen, eventually became national politicians in the 1930s. Later, Kekkonen became the eighth president of Finland (1956–82).

POST-WAR CULTIVATION OF HIGH CULTURE

After the Second World War, Ylioppilaslehti had to separate itself from the right-wing nationalistic tones that had permeated the student activist movement before the war. The solution was to concentrate on high culture. This was also official state policy, a kind of mental war reparation agenda. Ylioppilaslehti started to follow this idea in an organized way, and it soon became a major arena for Finnish cultural criticism. Many of the most important Finnish authors, writers and critics of the post-war era contributed to Ylioppilaslehti in the 1950s and 1960s, and many of the editors of the paper later ended up in top positions in Finnish cultural institutions.

In the 1930s, underlining Finnish culture also involved rejecting other cultural influences and closing the window on the sprouting trans-European modernism of the 1920s. After the Second World War, in the so-called “second republic” of Finland, the political struggle concerned the soul of the nation. In this clash, high culture (art, literature, theatre, music, architecture and film) played a significant role. Despite the juxtapositions, a very literary liberal and independent intelligentsia began to emerge in Finland in the 1950s. People were motivated by “an immense hunger for culture” after the war. Basically, this tendency applied to all of post-war Europe, including the German student circles which experienced a Hunger nach Kultur.Footnote ⁴³

The communists, who had been banned in Finland in the 1930s, now resurfaced and regrouped themselves. The intellectual Raoul Palmgren, former student activist of the radical social democratic student organization ASS (the Academic Socialist Society), who had formulated the concept of the intelligentsia of the left in the 1930s, became a major voice in defining the cultural policy of the 1950s left. Palmgren also composed the culture policy programme for the newly founded Finnish People's Democratic League (SKDL),Footnote ⁴⁴ which was the first of its kind in Finland. In general, leftist cultural views went through a formative period for some time after the war. Leftist intellectuals believed that culture should become the property of the people as a whole, and that artists should be supported financially by state grants and awards. A striking detail was the fact that Palmgren, whose essay anthology referred to Snellman and other Fennoman thinkers,Footnote ⁴⁵ emphasized national culture while the communist movement was otherwise striving to rid itself of nationalist characteristics. Despite the fact that he wanted the working class to lead the way culturally, Palmgren's thinking was nevertheless based on the bourgeois notion of cultural Finnishness that first arose in the nineteenth century. He believed, however, that the nationalism of the so-called “first republic” of Finland (1919–44) had corrupted cultural Finnishness. And Palmgren's modernist state-centred planning programme for science and culture became reality in the ensuing decades. In 1947, however, the traditionalist forces still prevailed.Footnote ⁴⁶ Palmgren, as a “Finnish dissident”, should be seen in the tradition of “Western Marxism” introduced by Perry Anderson,Footnote ⁴⁷ insofar as Palmgren focused on cultural phenomena and “superstructure” whilst the Finnish post-war communists emphasized economic and class struggle. Because of his views, Palmgren's political career ended in a split in the leadership of the Communist Party as early as 1952.Footnote ⁴⁸

In the late 1930s, academic L. A. Puntila, who belonged to the middle generation of the AKS, had already planned an extensive cultural/political programme that he intended to be put into practice through the University of Helsinki. The plan moved ahead during the Second World War when Puntila, who served as the commander of the State Information Bureau during the war, was inspired by the culture of the front lines, where the soldiers dwelt in dugouts and entertained themselves. This experience strengthened his vision that cultural activities would flourish after the war and its fruits ought to be gathered in the spirit of Snellmanian national revitalization. Naturally, he considered students best equipped for this task. The media, including the press, publishing companies and radio stations, were supposed to play a part in the process. As such, the foundation of Puntila's vision was similar to Palmgren’s: the educated classes, students, youth and popular education inspired by the Fennoman movement.

Even though the statue of Snellman, the Fennoman movement's great man, was visited by the Academic Socialist Society of left-wing students in 1945, it was the vision of Puntila which actually emphasized the Snellman cult more and did so in the spirit of the AKS. The aim of the AKS was to strengthen Greater Finland, both externally and internally. Now after the war it was time to build a “Mentally Greater Finland.” Puntila worried about the possibility of student youth falling under the influence of the People's Democrats.Footnote ⁴⁹

As in Finnish society in general, the leftists did not manage to gain power among the university intelligentsia after the post-war formative period. The post-war identity of Ylioppilaslehti, too, remained anti-communist, although it did not embrace any particular political views. Rather, it was balanced between different sides and avoided joining forces with any one camp. Soon the demands of “student-as-citizen” thinking were expressed as well. The Academic Federation for Freedom (VAL), which in a way continued the anti-communist traditions of the AKS, specifically aimed to push Ylioppilaslehti in a more “ideological” direction.Footnote ⁵⁰ According to the VAL, culture signified “Finnish national culture”, and Ylioppilaslehti was defending a “travesty of a student” who lived in an ideological vacuum: “living in an organized society entails that the members of society adapt to certain limits—individuality has its limits”, as the secretary of the VAL wrote in early 1952. This “warped individuality” presented itself, for example, in the idealization of “the ordinary student”, from whom, in the spirit of the individualism advocated by Ylioppilaslehti, nothing could be demanded.Footnote ⁵¹ The VAL insisted, however, that students were needed in particular among the elite.

It was evident that “individualists” referred to the new generation of modernist critics, whose important forum turned out to be Ylioppilaslehti in the 1950s.Footnote ⁵² On the whole, art criticism rose to prominence in the 1950s. The poems and essays of modernist aesthetics reached beyond the so-called “birchbark culture” (ethnological national issues) of Finland, out into the international arena. All in all, there were a considerable number of different debating groups and literary circles formed after the war. The best known of these, the Eino Leino Society, was formed in 1947. It was named after the great Finnish poet and included most of the critics contributing to Ylioppilaslehti in the 1950s. After the left wing was no longer able to pose a threat to the cultural conservatives, a more comfortable juxtaposition developed between the independent liberal cultural intelligentsia and conservatives.

Due to its pronounced cultural status, Ylioppilaslehti became an ever more significant actor within the Finnish cultural community in the 1950s, and in the process also generated increasing visibility for its ideas amongst the public at large. The cultural arena ranked high in the post-war hierarchy of Finland's public sphere. The cultural media, such as the cultural press, have been important public institutions throughout modern Finnish history. Nonetheless, cultural magazines have often been marginalized and acted as alternative public forums. The post-Second World War period was, however, exceptional in the sense that, during that time, a “professional journal” like Ylioppilaslehti managed to have an impact on the entire public sphere at the national level. Of course, the paper has a relatively wide circulation for a cultural publication, reaching not only students but also a wide readership outside academia.Footnote ⁵³

Yet the young critics of Ylioppilaslehti were by definition part of the historic legacy of the Finnish intelligentsia, where intellectuals, despite their ostensible radicalism, were close to the Snellmanian nation state—or at least did not work outside it as they did, for example, in southern Europe. This group of young modernists, who later became a central part of the national elite, certainly brought with their modernism something new to Snellmanian ideology by breaking down and rebuilding national attributes. This was mainly done by restoring the idea of the fatherland and the Finnish language to the level of private experience.Footnote ⁵⁴ Snellman (and German idealism) was critical for the Young Finns in the early twentieth century, but more in terms of individuality. The same educational programme was carried out by the film critics. Ylioppilaslehti had a central role in creating a new intellectual cinema culture, which involved essayistic literature on cinema and cinema club activities.

All in all, Ylioppilaslehti follows Habermas's concept of the normative public sphere because it was vital to the formation of a deliberative, bourgeois intellectual elite. It is also possible to discern similarities with Habermas's liberal model of democracy, as its issues reveal a preference for the liberties of private citizens. It must be stressed, however, that Habermas's notion is based above all on the tradition of political engagement, whereas the Finnish modernists of the 1950s stressed their non-political nature. Indeed, for the most part, the modernism found in the pages of Ylioppilaslehti in the 1950s dealt with culture. Still, the Finnish modernists embodied the European post-war concept of independent intellectuals, although they were not as radical as Jean-Paul Sartre and others. The situation changed in the late 1950s, when politics returned. But in the context of the Cold War, the modernists did not rebel against the state. Instead, they started to line up behind Urho Kekkonen, the president of Finland.

THE RADICAL LEFT AND THE STATE

In the 1960s, Ylioppilaslehti sympathized more and more with the left, which was due to the changing demographics resulting from the flood of baby boomers into the universities. The expansion of educational opportunities made higher education more common in industrialized societies. The ideal of the normative public sphere that Ylioppilaslehti had followed so far was challenged by the increased internationalism brought on by the media, and especially television. Single-issue groups sprang up, and the New Left raised its head. Modernity was on the move, and the public sphere started turning towards what Chantal Mouffe calls “agonistic pluralism”,Footnote ⁵⁵ which is more receptive than the deliberative-democracy model to the multiplicity of voices that a pluralist society encompasses. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that this dialogue was, and still is, governed by the elite.

The movements of the 1960s were anti-authoritarian. This was also the case in Finland if one looks at the organizations the young Finnish intelligentsia established in the mid-1960s. Most of them, such as the Sadankomitea (Committee of One Hundred) pacifist peace organization, relied on non-alignment thinking, albeit with close ties to the social democrats. Many of the activists studied social and political sciences, fashionable modernist disciplines of the 1960s, but also medicine. Before 1968, Finnish student activism was mostly in the hands of liberal and left-wing radicals. But when the Western New Left started to build a “collective intellectual”, a framework independent of party, state and university,Footnote ⁵⁶ the Finnish New Left took another direction. As in Finnish society in general during the extremely rapid modernization process of the 1960s,Footnote ⁵⁷ the student activists also had strong faith in political parties, state politics and the Scandinavian type of social welfare policy. Another Finnish peculiarity in the context of international student activism of the 1960s was the relation between the young intelligentsia and Finnish president Urho Kekkonen. Kekkonen, a former student radical, became the “great master” of the Finnish 1960s generation. While students in France and the USA bayed for their presidents to resign, the president of Finland invited young radicals to wine and dine (the famous so-called “Children's Parties”) at his residence. Kekkonen also supported the most visible and soon-to-become mythical Finnish action of 1968: the occupation of the Old Student House in Helsinki.Footnote ⁵⁸

All across Europe, the 1960s meant a “Revolution of the Intellectuals”, as in 1848. It has been stated that 1968—“the year of the barricades” and “the year that rocked the world”Footnote ⁵⁹—was particularly one of of the collision of traditions and institutions. Old World bourgeois “hegemony”, a fashionable term in 1968, was challenged. Both sociologists and left-wing youth politicians used the term. The entire decade of the 1960s was “the great age of theory”, as Tony Judt put it. The Western New Left exhumed the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci and other forgotten early twentieth-century Marxists, who were accompanied by the rediscovery of Marx himself.Footnote ⁶⁰

But unlike in other Western countries after 1968, the Finnish intelligentsia for the most part chose the “old” Marx of Lenin: authorized democratic centralism and proletarian dictatorship. And the master was particularly Lenin, not, as in most other radical movements in the West at the time, Trotsky or Mao. So-called Taistoism was a Finnish version of the Stalinistic, orthodox communist movement of the 1970s, which started to take shape after the Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia in August 1968. This was a turning point after the radical left turned pro-Soviet. Another remarkable feature compared to other Western extreme left-wing movements of the time was that Taistoists joined the party (the Communist Party of Finland or SKP) right from the beginning. Although the Taistoists never had a majority anywhere—not even in the SKP, in which more of a Euro-communist faction had a majority—they had an influence on the Finnish public sphere, since they were a small but vocal minority among the cultural and academic elite, and they had a powerful ally, the Soviet Union, who had a habit of getting involved in Finnish internal affairs. Why the most progressive faction of the Finnish academic youth turned to the Leninist student movement in the 1970s is a major (and still comprehensively unstudied) phenomenon in the history of Finland.Footnote ⁶¹ This is also not the proper forum for analysing the topic thoroughly. However, in the context of the history of the Finnish intelligentsia, the activism of this movement is interesting.

What makes this interesting is that the AKS can be seen as a predecessor of the Taistoists even though the former came from the extreme right and the latter from the extreme left. Beside the fact that both movements arose from the deteriorating expectations for academics in the future—that is, the weakening of social positions, jobs and salaries—they both leaned on the “people” that they considered the hard-working core of society. AKS nationalists identified, in the context of the Fennoman movement, with the traditional peasantry, whereas Leninists gravitated to the ranks of the working class.Footnote ⁶² According to social scientist Matti Virtanen, who studied Finnish societal generations, the New Left movement and its radicalization went through different phases, but originated from within the Fennoman movement. On the other hand, historian of the Student Union of the University of Helsinki Laura Kolbe emphasizes that 1968 represented first and foremost a break with a long patriotic tradition.Footnote ⁶³

It is true that the same Snellman can be found in the writings of the academic Leninists. They too adopted the original Western Humboldtian idealsFootnote ⁶⁴ of higher education.Footnote ⁶⁵ This was expressed in the 1970 pamphlet Johdatus uuteen yliopistoon (Introduction to the New University).Footnote ⁶⁶ The pamphlet was linked to the university administrative reform of the time and demanded democratic, free Humboldtian university ideals instead of the technocratic monopoly and capitalistic politics of higher learning: Bildung durch Wissenschaft. The most interesting article in the pamphlet is that by Kari Toikka, in which he connected the Leftist lines and Snellmanian university ideals, including the unity of science, research and teaching, and the freedom of teaching and studying: “The division of defenders and demoralisers of the university as a consequence of ahistorical definitions of university circumstances is ideological and false—especially when professors and students are pitted against each other as different groups.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Toikka later noted that, through Snellman, they easily got their hands on the classical university idea. He thought that it was “a funny accident” that Snellman spoke very simply about the same ideas that they had, and the topic was linked to the Finnish university tradition.Footnote ⁶⁸ In addition, in the 1970s the academic Taoistoists rediscovered the essays by Raoul Palmgren from the 1940s.

Although President Kekkonen began to keep the radical left at arm's length in the 1970s, the radicals and Kekkonen shared a common enemy: old-school conservative patriots in the university and in foreign politics. The relations between Finland and the Soviet Union were crucial for Finland in many ways, including economic, domestic and cultural policy. The early 1970s, in particular, were difficult times for these relations, and Kekkonen did everything necessary to weaken the influence of conservative dissenters. On the other hand, the Taistoists were the first to contribute to the political “peace and friendship” between the Soviet Union and Finland, which was called Finlandisierung (Finlandization).Footnote ⁶⁹ Toadying to Russians consumed the entire Finnish political sphere in the 1970s, excluding minority right-wing and populist factions. As in the Fennoman policies of the era of the grand duchy in the nineteenth century, the relations with the eastern power were all-important. All in all, the principal themes of the Fennoman movement can be found in many of the activities of the Taistoists: loyalty to Russia, belief in a strong state, and the importance of education. Although the frame of reference for “the people” was different, Snellman was still there.

CONCLUSION: THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE (WELFARE) STATE AND POSTMODERN CHALLENGES

Although we would generally consider intellectuals to be individuals who deliberatedly set themselves apart from the dominant culture, the place of the intellectual in the broader society can never be entirely hostile. The intellectual's significance lies in his or her capacity to move away from interpreting the society surrounding him or her from a particular ideological angle or dogma. And this is particularly true for new nations.Footnote ⁷⁰ But Finland can be seen as a special case even in this context. The national vocation has fettered public debate in Finland. The contribution of the academic elite to nation-making was, in Finland, even more significant than in Europe's other new nations, and the professors were subject first and foremost to the state.Footnote ⁷¹

Now the crucial question arises: is this a problem? What harm could the close link between intellectuals and the state do to a country? One could claim that the strong state has ended up colonizing civil society. This argument refers to the fact that Nordic countries in general have been seen as corporatist societies and, therefore, at least from an Anglo-American point of view, could be seen as promoting the narrowing of liberal civil society. But as German historian Norbert Götz has pointed out,Footnote ⁷² the matter of civic involvement in state affairs has been just as important as the question of the state's autonomy. The relationship between the state and civil society is not simply oppositional, and we must take into consideration the complex intellectual and political traditions of the various Nordic countries.

Social movements are places where legitimate intellectual labourers can seek and gain recognition in new arenas. They are also places where intellectuals can be made.Footnote ⁷³ So-called popular movements (Protestant revivalism, the temperance movement, the agricultural movement and the labour movement, as well as sports, language and women's organizations) have been relatively strong and autonomous in most Nordic countries. However, this pattern does not actually apply to Finland, which has experienced a marked tradition of state control over civil society. The Finnish Law on Associations (26 May 1989), for example, requires official registration for all such associations. Although student activism as the genesis of “movement intellectuals”, especially in the 1960s, has often been seen as an attempt to question existing power structures, the link between the Finnish student elite and the state also remained strong in the latter part of the twentieth century.

In the Finnish case, Götz refers to the fact that the establishment of stable corporatist structures in the labour market did not succeed before the late 1960s.Footnote ⁷⁴ For me, the historical background of this Finnish peculiarity in the Nordic context, which could be seen as problematic in the context of the idea of civil society, is the legacy of the bloody Finnish Civil War and the geopolitical situation of Finland. However, the histories of Nordic welfare states include three different ideological elements: the idealized heritage of the free independent peasants, the spirit of capitalism and the utopia of socialism. To achieve this goal of the welfare state, the process has demanded not only state-centrism but wide consensus, involving collective agreements among different political parties.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although the process was extraordinarily rapid from the 1960s to the 1980s, Finland was a latecomer among Nordic countries in building its welfare state. Yet one can still find all the same ideologies within the intellectual activism discussed above. The “Nordic corporatist model” has meant the building of welfare states with certain social policies (public social services and so on), but it has also affected all institutions, including media and universities.Footnote ⁷⁶

Finnish intellectual history—in fact all of Finnish history—must be seen in relation to Russia, and later the Soviet Union, as well as in a Nordic context. As the Finnish historical sociologist Risto Alapuro has stated,Footnote ⁷⁷ the Finnish intelligentsia has lived “in the shadow of Russia.” Most of the time this has meant that “state intellectuals” have been forced to come to terms with the neighboring superpower. There are periods when the Finnish intelligentsia has had an opportunity to question Russian rule, on one hand, as well as to blindly obey its politics, on the other. Nevertheless, Finns have never really given up the Snellmanian ideas of the state and Bildung.

According to Snellmanian thinking, should we then talk about the “educated class” (Finnish sivistyneistö, German Bildungsbürgertum, and French classe cultivée) rather than “intellectuals” or “intelligentsia?” Although many languages make a distinction between the two, these terms are often used interchangeably. It is obvious that habitually those whom we call intellectuals are actually “intellectual labourers”, although intellectuals are not a class in the economic sense, but a social category, or perhaps a social stratum.

East German poet and author Rainer Kirsch told a Finnish journalist recently that “intellectual” was a curse word in the DDR.Footnote ⁷⁸ In a way, the same claim applies to Finland since the 1970s, when the Finnish intelligentsia started to lose its significance. When the national public sphere meant first and foremost the bourgeois public sphere (Bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit) for the radical left, a large group of Finnish intellectuals retreated to writing for each other within their own community. That is why none of the young Finnish intellectuals could achieve the independent role of a “public” intellectual in Finland or in Europe more generally.Footnote ⁷⁹ There are two historical paradoxes in this development. First, when the left finally occupied the Finnish intelligentsia, its importance diminished. Second, when the Finnish political atmosphere started to become free of “Finlandization” in the post-Kekkonen era in the 1980s, the whole idea of an intellectual came under scrutiny.

It is no coincidence that this development follows the rising and waning in importance of Ylioppilaslehti in the Finnish public sphere. In the 1980s, the essentials for the existence of the intelligentsia had changed, along with the institutionalization of the university system and changes in the media. The development of postmodernism impugned and even made ridiculous the whole idea of a Finnish intellectual. In postmodern times, intellectuals have typically offered categorical truths about the diminishing significance of the intelligentsia, and thus have undermined the validity of their own argument.Footnote ⁸⁰

This tendency became evident in 1989, for instance, when Finnish sociologists organized an inquiry in collaboration with cultural editors of the leading Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat about who is who in the Finnish intelligentsia. The original idea and pattern for the research came from the French review Lire from 1981 and French sociologist Pierre Bourdieus's critique of it. One of the findings was that a typical Finnish intellectual is employed by the state (including the university) or financed by a government grant. As the sociologists who conducted the research noted,

In fact, the critique by Erno Paasilinna mentioned in the introduction was based on the results of this inquiry. It seems that this strong link between the intelligentsia and the state in Finland makes the idea of a Finnish intellectual an easy target, not only for ironic and sarcastic columnists but for the “common people” as well. The latest debate on the topic, which occasioned public statements such as “there are no real intellectuals in Finland” and other sarcastic comments in the press, occurred when former prime minister Paavo Lipponen listed the names of Finnish intellectuals in his book on Bildung published in 2008.Footnote ⁸² Again, it was proved not easy to be a Finnish intellectual because your very existence is repeatedly up for question.

Another, more universal, threat to Finnish intellectual culture is the rise of technocracy, which is embedded in current international university reforms. There are signs recalling the post-Second World War controversy of “the two cultures”.Footnote ⁸³ The conflict between humanities and “hard sciences” seems to rear its head during each round of university reforms. When the long-running Finnish degree reformFootnote ⁸⁴—including the American-style system of measuring studies in credit points—finally came to an end in the early 1980s, the university historian and humanist Matti Klinge emphasized that society should understand the disadvantages of educating students only to a job: “If we have an uncritical intelligentsia around the year 2000, democracy is in danger.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Despite a few Finnish intellectual dissidents, Klinge's fear has come true in the 2000s, although, looking back on the history of the Finnish intelligentsia, there has never really been an effective, lasting or noteworthy intellectual stratum opposed to the state. Yet if universities are seen only in terms of efficiency, commerce and (technological) innovation, any residue of a critical intelligentsia is in danger of becoming extinct—not only in Finland, but in all of the Western world.