Agile small state agency: heuristic plays and flexible national identity markers in Finnish foreign policy

Abstract

Studies of small state foreign policy tend to draw relatively bleak conclusions when it comes to small state agency. However, I will examine alternative and more positive modalities of small state agency. One such modality is agility, the strategic maneuverability to take advantage of a chancy environment. Besides leading to dangerous rigidities and biases, particular types of foreign policy imageries and heuristics may also facilitate experimental and agile agency. In studying this possibility, Finland is chosen as an illustrative case because historically Finland has faced a particularly constraining geopolitical context and because it has managed to adapt to multiple upheavals and to different geopolitical contexts. The emphasis is on the heuristic dynamics inherent in Finnish foreign policy culture that have allowed it to actively meet the emerging challenges. Instead of taking a detailed historical approach, I seek to understand the role of the relatively flexible and combinable embodied cultural models, i.e. thick images. They allow for agency-related experimentation that may bring added value that allows Finland to exceed the constraints of the brute geopolitical position. After reviewing multiple embodied foreign policy images, I will use them to analyse New Year's speeches by the Finnish Presidents Ahtisaari and Halonen in order to see how the fickle present is made to resonate innovatively with the known, commonplace, and mythical.

Keywords:

• small state agency
• Finland
• foreign policy
• memory images

Notes

See Barnett for explication of the problems posed by using “images” in foreign policy research.

E.g. Raimo Väyrynen (“Stability and Change in Finnish Foreign Policy” 30) states the following: “The multiplicity and variety of Finland's ties with her environment creates problems in defining the reference group with which Finland should be associated. […] These peculiar features of the Finnish non-aligned or neutral role make it difficult to place her with certainty in any predefined reference group.”

“[In the Post Cold War context], westernizing discourses have been the most successful in coping with the problem of systemic change and dealing with the issue of how to orient Finland to the new situation” (Browning, “From “East-West” to “New Europe-Old Europe” 11).

See Joenniemi (98) on the different perceptions how the Nordics constitute a special grouping that challenges the ordinary realism of the international relations.

E.g. Teija Tiilikainen (“Finland Guided the EU into the New Millennium” 32) states that “The successful lead of the common European project has hopefully helped Finland to get rid of its old feeling of inferiority stemming from its Cold War identity as an outsider – a peripheral small state all on one's own.”

For Finnish crisis decision making see e.g. Forsberg and Pursiainen.

More on Ahtisaari's foreign policy positions see Harle, Martti Ahtisaari.