Tag: Multiculturalism

Finnish identity on one’s own terms

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

One of the matters that has turned me off about Finland for a long time is that I haven’t been allowed to embrace my Finnishness on my terms.  By my terms I mean defining what Finnish identity means personally to me.

If people who define Finnish identity in narrow terms had their way, many Multicultural Finns, expats, immigrants and minorities could possibly suffer a similar fate as the Romany minority in this country. Constant exclusion and prejudice would follow them around like a dark shadow. Even if that shadow excludes them from society, it protects them from some of its hostility.

Some Finns who define Finnish culture and identity on their narrow-minded terms and aggressively impose it on everyone else, are always ready to give a quick reason why a person is not a Finn. You are too dark they may claim, or you look too “foreign,” you act strange and speak different from us.

The fact that some give more reasons to exclude others than include them in our society says a lot about us as a nation.

For a person like me, a Finn with a multicultural background,these excuses must be challenged and banished.

I have a lot of questions to ask those who claim to be “pure” Finns.  For one, they could explain where is the Garden of Eden in this country since Finns are a “pure” ethnicity that never mixed with anyone. They could tell us as well how our culture was not influenced by over 700 years of Swedish and Russian rule. What about those 1.2 million Finns that emigrated from this land between 1860 and 1999? How did you erase them from our history?

Is a great part of your denial of who you are only a tool to build a social-ethnic construct of yourself? Is this the reason why the spiteful message of PS MPs like Jussi Halla-aho appeals to so many of us? Was that one of the reasons why 19.1% voted for the PS in April?

In many respects I am fortunate that I grew up abroad instead of in Finland despite my Finnish background. If I’d grown up in this country in the 1960s and 1970s, I would have never been able to develop a strong sense of myself and my otherness.

Would living in such a Finland been worth it?

Fortunately matters have changed for the better in this country.  Slowly but surely we are learning to see our culture as rich and diverse.  In that new diverse Finland that some want to destroy at all costs today, we can all be Finns on our own terms. Immigrants are included in this group.

Building such an inclusive society in this century is certainly worth living and fighting for!

Thank you for making Migrant Tales what it is today

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

My personal gratitude goes to all the bloggers that have made Migrant Tales “a voice for those immigrants and minorities whose views and situation are understood poorly and heard faintly by the media, politicians and public.”

Our latest recognition comes from Aleksandr Shatravka, who we met thanks to this blog. Thanks to that meeting, I was able to publish in Apu magazine one of Finland’s first-ever comprehensive stories about what happened to Soviet refugees when they were caught by Finnish Border Guards and returned to the USSR.

I had waited over 25 years to meet one of these former Soviet refugees.

Shatravka has now published a book in which he cites Migrant Tales.

Migrant Tales has been mentioned elsewhere as well: Here is a link to Dunia Magazine that published a column by yours truly. Migrant Tales has got attention from some important news publications. In the spring I got a call from a journalist from “Deutschlandradio”, the National German Radio, it was mentioned on Time Magazine right after the April 17 election, and recently I got a call from the BBC. is another Twitter publication that picks up our blog entries as well as other ones like The Finns Daily.

I am very pleased that what we write on Migrant Tales gets noticed in and out of Finland.

Our success would not have been possible without you!

The magic word is acceptance, acceptance and mutual acceptance!

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

A crucial term like acceptance is still very little used in Finland when debating about our culturally diverse society. Another key term is equal opportunity.Politicians, public officials, the general public, including immigrants, should use these terms in everyday speech when speaking about our society.

Former President Martti Ahtisaari suggested on Thursday that those Finns should invite immigrants to a cup of coffee. This is a very nice gesture. Culturally it would be the Finnish way to accept another person.

The coffee-drinking ritual in Finland rarely if ever is done between people who dislike each other. When we drink coffee together we strengthen our friendship and knowledge of each other through casual talk.

Since integration and acceptance are a two-way process, all of us have to tame our prejudices and do our part in being more acceptant of others. This is important because it helps create a better-functioning society.

When we are acceptant of others we cease to be the problem arising from our own racism and prejudice.

Three important key words are needed to be heard more in Finnish society: mutual acceptance, respect and equal opportunities.


Migration patters among Jews – Finland

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: The first Jew to receive a permanent residence to live in Finland in 1832 was Jakob Weikaim, a tinsmith who moved from Latvia in 1799 at the age of 14.He was the first Jew that was allowed to move to Finland without converting to Christianity.

Until 1809, when Finland was still a part of Sweden, its former ruler promulgated a number of laws that permitted Jews to only settle in the following Swedish cities: Stockholm, Gothenburg and Norrköping.  

The size of the Jewish community of Finland has always been small. In 1870 there were 460 in the country and today it totals under 2,000.

Sounding much of the arguments used by some parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) today,  Finnish-language newspaper Uusi Suometar wrote in 1833 that Finland’s Jewish population would reach half a million within a hundred years due to high birth rates.

One of the most uncomfortable relationships that affected the Finnish Jewish community during the Continuation War (1941-44) was when Finland aligned itself with Nazi Germany. Even though Jews fought in the Finnish army sometimes alongside the Germans, it was pretty clear to some what would happen to them if the Nazis would have won the war. 

While persecution of Jews in Finland was a far cry from Germany of the 1930s, there was anti-Semitism.  Another factor that kept matters from escalating on this front was the fact that there were so few Jews.  As in other parts of Europe,  Jewishness was not encouraged.

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Finland’s Jewish community is small, but active. Its small size and unique characteristics allow us to understand the migratory patterns of this community and to use the data to extrapolate the migration patterns in Finland to larger Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Finland aligned itself with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union 1941-1944. Finnish Jews fought in the Finnish army, occasionally side by side with the Germans.

Read whole story.

Exposing the language of anti-immigration groups in Finland and Europe

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

One of the most surprising factors behind the hate speech of anti-immigration groups is that it is never portrayed as hatred. Racists never admit in public they are racists nor do far-right groups claim that they are extremists.

Deciphering the language of groups like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party may be difficult for some. The language they use to label immigrants and minorities has nothing to do with fairness nor our values found in the spirit of our laws.

Take for instance the far-right Suomen Sisu association wing of the PS led by MP Jussi Halla-aho and their loathing of the term “multiculturalism.”

Migrant Tales bloggers know that multiculturalism is a Canadian social policy used to integrate immigrants and promote cultural diversity. There are only three multicultural (social policy) countries in the world: Canada, Australia and Britain.

In Finland, multiculturalism is used to mean ethnic and cultural diversity with some sprinkles of Canada’s multicultural social policy.

If we look at the PS and other populist and far-right parties in Europe, multiculturalism means a totally different thing. For these groups, multiculturalism is a shady concept or policy that permits Muslims and Africans from moving to Europe and Finland. When these groups commonly speak of “uncontrolled immigration” they mean that too many or no Muslims and Africans should be allowed to move to Europe.

In the same way they have definied mulituclturalism to fit their political agenda, they have soiled the good name of immigrants and refugees.

Certainly the usual language of racism will be used to justify their loathing of these groups. One of their favorite arguments is that these people “are so barbaric that they can never adapt to our society.” Thus their racism and hatred is justified because a certain group is so different from us.

But the big hole in their argument of groups like the Counter-Jihadists is that they don’t have any solutions on how to make diversity work. Their solution is a constant whining about “ghettos” and “maladapted” immigrants when in fact the grand majority of these people have jobs, pay taxes and lead normal lives.

Moreover, if European society is already culturally diverse how do they plan to make it less diverse? What do they plan to do with the millions of Muslims and other minorities living in Europe?

The fact is that anti-immigration groups don’t have any answers. The only answers they will give you in public is blatant bigotry that flirts with your stereotypes and racism.

If you ever meet up with a representative or a person who loathes immigrants and other minorities in Europe, why not ask him or her what they plan to do with these people.

The answer they may give may shock you.

Far-right thinking and the cold war in Finland and the PS

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

The rise of far-right thinking and nationalism in Finland seen through the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party is nothing new in the face of Finland’s long cold war isolation. Finnish-Soviet relations were not the only one that were under close scrutiny by the state, but how we interpreted our history and ourselves as a nation. That is now changing thanks to the reemergence of our ever-growing diversity as a nation.

The rise of the PS could be seen as a counterforce to that diversity and openness we are seeing in Finland today after living under the shadow of the former Soviet Union for over four decades.

Any serious student of Finnish society can tell you that we have always been a culturally diverse society: we were under Swedish and Russian rule for about 700 years and Finland produced 1.2 million immigrants between 1880-1999.

Here is an interesting analysis (in Finnish) of cultural diversity in Monday’s Helsingin Sanomat and the myth that we are somehow a homogenous nation.  An important matter to keep in mind is that the anti-immigration far right in the PS  have noidea what multiculturalism is and only see it as a policy that permits Muslims and Africans from moving to Finland.

In 1920, for example, we had 3.5 times more foreigners living in the country than in 1970, when there were about 7,000. The biggest group of foreign nationals that lived in Finland at the time were Finns who had become naturalized Swedes.

Finland was geopolitically near-isolated as well from Western Europe. Due to our special relationship with Moscow, we could never join the EU never mind the Council of Europe because it was too outspoken on human rights violations in the USSR.

In all respects the cold war era changed the mindset of Finland radically. By almost killing our diversity we ushered in a very exclusive, nationalistic and even racist way of seeing ourselves. We started to look and think so much alike that we actually believed we lived in a perfect society reinforced by our myths, stereotypes and lack of critique.

Since diversity almost became extinct in these parts in the cold war, people who came to Finland had funny names. In the 1980s, for example, foreigners were called aliens not immigrants. Refugees from the Soviet Union were never called that. They were known as people who “skipped the country (loikkari).”

It shouldn’t come to any surprise that living in a country that has done so much to destroy its diversity willingly or unwillingly never had the basic tools to seriously debate what happened during the cold war after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because this did not happen in earnest, it is now taking place through the rise of parties like the PS, who are attempting to awaken — or keep asleep — cold war Finland with the full arsenal of anti-EU and anti-immigration rhetoric.

Unfortunately for the PS and fortunately for Finland, diversity is here to stay.

Accepting and encouraging it will be the best guarantee of developing a healthy and strong Finland in the future.

Migrant Tales Arts: Toiveeni – niin kaukana, niin lähellä 23.8-3.9 (Malmitalo, Helsinki)

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Enrique Tessieri

Toiveeni – niin kaukana, niin lähellä

Valokuvanäyttely kertoo Suomessa asuvien maahanmuuttajien unelmista ja toiveista uudessa kotimaassaan.

Avoinna arkisin ma–pe 9–20, la 9–16.

Enrique Tessieri’s photography exhibition of some of the dreams and hopes that immigrants may have in their new homeland.

Open Mon–Fri from 9 am to 8 pm, Sat from 9 am to 4 pm.

Fotografiutställning av Enrique Tessieri om några invandrares drömmar och önskemål beträffande sitt nya hemland.

Öppet vardagar må-fr 9–20, lö 9–16.

The New York Review of Books: Toleration and the Future of Europe

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment:  Anders Behring Brevik imagined the defeat of the Ottoman armies at Vienna in 1683 as an important date to mark the war that Europe will wage in the twenty-first century against the Muslim takeover.

Writes the New York Review of Books:   “It is unsurprising that what Breivik has to say about European history is trivial. The plagiarism of his manifesto recalls Hannah Arendt’s point that those who do great evil may themselves be incapable of cultural creation. The superficiality of his worldview recalls her notion that the greatest of evils has no roots, and therefore has no bounds.”

There is no such thing as selective hatred or xenophobia. That is only a pipe dream. If you are on the war path against one group, everyone is involved. One of the big issues and challenges in Europe as it races into the depths of the new century is accepting and learning to live with its cultural diversity.

“One twentieth-century solution, exemplified by Nazi Germany, was to attempt to build state power by eliminating the diversity,” writes The New York Review of Books “. This involved racist mass murder, and it also brought failure; failure that Breivik’s mass murder recalls both in its barbarity and in its self-destructiveness.”

If denial of who we are gets the best of us, what will it imply for Europe? Economic decline? Ever-growing social problems? The rise of the far right? Loss of civil rights? War?

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Timothy Snyder

In Anders Breivik’s manifesto, the ostensibly Christian defeat of the Ottoman armies at Vienna in 1683 is the central historical event. He imagines a European rebirth in 2083, four hundred years later, and names the Polish king Jan Sobieski, whose troops were crucial to raising the Ottoman siege, as one of his heroes: “John III Sobieski and the Holy League successfully defended Europe against an army of more than 150,000 Muslims.” Breivik thinks Europe today is again under siege from Muslims, and that Europeans must resort to “atrocious, but necessary” violence to defend it. 

Read whole story.

A model for cultural diversity in Finland

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

While the term multiculturalism means many things to many people and groups, Finland is not officially a multicultural country. Nowhere in our laws will you find that magic adjective, multicultural. But taking that big leap from the perception of being a monolithic ethnic society from one that is multicultural like Canada is a tall order for any country. Even so, Finland needs today best practice models and values that promote and encourage inclusion and acceptance of our ever-growing cultural diversity.

For far-right Couner-Jihadists like Perussuomalaiset (PS) MP Jussi Halla-aho and his followers, multiculturalism is a left-wing policy that facilitates the entry of Muslims and non-European immigrants like Africans to this continent. For Migrant Tales, multiculturalism is a Canadian social policy to integrate immigrants.

There are only three countries in the world that are officially multicultural, according to Peter Kivisto. These are: Canada, Australia and Britain.

A good synonym for multiculturalism is cultural diversity.

When looking at Finland in the twenty-first century, one of the biggest challenges facing us now is how to make cultural diversity work and how to raise that magic word, acceptance, to the same level of importance as equality (tasa-arvo).

While there are a lot of good intentions and real efforts in Finland to foster greater acceptance of our growing cultural diversity, many are still much in the fog about the big picture. The PS, which uses the Nuiva manifesto as its benchmark for immigration policy, is in my opinion the furthest from a successful integration policy because it is based on assimilation.

Defined in the simplest way possible, assimilation is one-way integration. Another reason why the Nuiva manifesto would be a failure if ever implemented is that it only expresses the subjective views of  a small group of people, who are anti-immigration to start with, on how they’d want immigrants to adapt to Finland.

Since the world has changed radically from 1917, when Finland became an independent nation, langauge, surname as well as physiological features played key roles in forging the Finnish prototype.

No matter what your background was after independence, everyone was essentially accepted as a Finn as long as that person was white, practiced an accepted religion like the Lutheran faith, spoke one or two of the official languages and had a Finnish, Swedish or Germanic surname. Acceptance happened by erasing one’s foreigness.

Historical circumstances, however, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, World War II and the Cold War discouraged newcomers from moving to Finland. This forced the foreign population to drop to 7,000 by around 1970.

Can the same model that was used in the 1920s and 1930s to mold Finns work in the 2010s? I don’t think so and if ever applied it would have a limited impact.

One good model that could work would be based on three premises: mutual acceptance, respect and equal opportunities.

Acceptance means accepting a group’s or individual’s right to lead the lifestyle he or she prefers. One of the greatest matters about our society, and which we have fought for so long, are civil liberties and equality.

Chapter 2 Section 6 of the Constitution sums it up well: No one shall, without an acceptable reason, be treated differently from other persons on the ground of sex, age, origin, language, religion, conviction, opinion, health, disability or other reason that concerns his or her person.  Children shall be treated equally and as individuals and they shall be allowed to influence matters pertaining to themselves to a degree corresponding to their level of development.

In many respects, and in line with the spirit of our laws, society should be like a clothing store. Instead of purchasing clothes we can try out and use different lifestyles that suit us the best at that moment in life.

Mutual acceptance is a key factor for that clothing store to succeed and respect further icing on the cake of acceptance. For the latter to occur we must have equal opportunities to access employment and education in order to make our dreams/lifestyles possible.

If we want in Finland to get a view of the big picture of immigration, it must look way past petty debates like if immigration is good or bad.  We have to implement models that foster “us” as opposed to “them.”

The society that will do that successfully is based on mutual acceptance, respect and equal opportunities.

Spiegel Online International: European Right Under Pressure in Wake of Attacks

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: The fallout of Anders Behring Breivik’s outlandish killings in Norway on Friday has been felt by anti-immigration groups across Europe. Some very vociferous anti-Islam parties like the English Defense League and Freedom Party of Austria have condemned and distance themselves from the attacks.

One of the consequence of living in a post-22/7 Europe for far right and right-wing populist parties means closer public and police scrutiny of these groups. 

While the Spiegel Online International story states “European right-wing populist parties do not as a rule encourage violence,” their verbal attacks on immigrants and Muslims have an impact on society.  Fuelling racism and prejudice by demonizing a group is a form of violence.

Writes the German online newsmagazine: “Europe’s right-wing populists, it has become apparent this week, are not used to being on the defensive. For years, they have seen public support for their causes grow and are in parliament in several countries. Furthermore, as integration and demographics have risen to the top of worry lists in several countries on the Continent, the populists saw little reason to tone down their attacks.”

Do you believe that the tables have been turned for Europe’s far right and right-wing populist parties? How have matters changed for them?

________________

By Charles Hawley

Europe’s right-wing populists are not used to being on the defensive. But the perpetrator of last Friday’s horrific attacks in Norway was steeped in their anti-immigration, Muslim-skeptical ideology. They now find themselves in an uncomfortable position.

Read whole story.