North-South exchange
between the Seas Finland has been very multicultural during the centuries of Swedish reign and when it was an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. This heritage has given Finland two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. Moreover, this heritage has made Finland a crossroads between the East and the West, as well as between the Catholic, Lutheran and the Greek Orthodox churches. In the 20th century, Finland was for a long time a country of emigration, with an important part of the population migrating to the US and to Sweden. This emigration created transnational links so as to claim that the shared memory of most Finnish families has a story of those family members who have moved abroad. The end of the Second World War brought changes to the national landscape: the re-drawing of borders made people from the area of Karelia, brought under the Soviet rule in the peace accords, need to find new home on the ‘mainland’. The dismantling of the Soviet Union opening the ‘ethnic emigration’ and a different refugee crisis around the globe turned Finland from a country of emigration to that of immigration during the 1990s. The realization of this has engendered much of debate and research focussing on the ‘new’ multicultural face of Finland, thereby rendering also elder national minorities – the indigenous Sami, the Roma, the Tatars and the Jews – more visible. Intercultural dialogue in Finland has been two-fold, focusing on one hand on the folklore and arts (classical and popular
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music, visual arts) and, on the other hand, on the politics of multi-culturalism, of which inter-religious dialogue is an important element especially in the 21st century. This has been demonstrated by the increasing interest in Islam in Finland, both as the religion of the Tatar minority, of the new migrant groups (especially the Somalis, but also people from Southern Mediterranean countries, the Middle East and Iran, among others), and of Finnish converts to Islam. For several reasons, cultural dialogue with the Mediterranean world has been essential for Finland during last millenaries and centuries. Almost everything we have – from Latin letters and Arabic numbers through all Middle Eastern monotheism – comes from the Mediterranean. In the Middle Ages, there were very few, but still some known direct contacts between Finland and the Mediterranean. Our relations accelerated from the second half of the 18th century until the 1950s. Finnish scientists and artists traveled to the Mediterranean world, the birth of Finnish sociology in Morocco, for instance, and numerous Finnish painters from that period are good examples of this interface. The first ever Finnish cultural institute was created in Rome in the early 1950s and then the second established in Athens much later. Finnish cultural relations with the Mediterranean developed slowly until the 1990s. The joining of the European Union created new possibilities for Finland to develop her cultural interaction with the Mediterranean. Today we have a multitude
By Tuomo Melasuo & Anitta Kynsilehto
of different forums and activities within the cultural events, forums and festivals in the Mediterranean and in the North. To give a couple of examples, The Tampere Film Festival has invited many guests from the Arab world, and many Raï concerts are held in Helsinki. The performance of Finnish opera in Cairo is other side of the same coin. The Euromed intercultural dialogue concerns, first of all, ordinary Finns and our everyday life. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Finns spend a few weeks in the Mediterranean as tourists. This is a very important method of communication, the cultural importance of which is not really known, and which remains rather controversial. Besides, migration from the Mediterranean world to Finland is important when creating concrete family ties between the South and Extreme North.: The number of Finns whose grandparents are living on the Southern shore of the Mediterranean is increasing rapidly. All in all, the importance of this concrete cultural exchange can be seen, for instance, in culinary evolution and you might be offered a ‘reindeer couscous’, which is competing with the National Pizza of Finland (ham and pineapple, what an invention!). Dr. Tuomo Melasuo is Docent and Member of the Anna Lindh Foundation Advisory Council, and Anitta Kynsilehto is Research Fellow. They are Coordinator and Vice-Coordinator respectively, of the Tampere Peace Research Institute, TAPRI Mediterranean Studies Project, at the University of Tampere, which is the Head of the Finnish Network of the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures.