The topic is current -- the day is December 6th. The choice is somewhat arbitrary: the Finnish Senate (the then government, as it was during the days of the Grand Duchy) issued a declaration of independence on the 4th and the Parliament voted in its favour on the 6th. However, to have the declaration be worth anything more than the piece of paper it was written on, it needed Russian approval, and the interm government of Soviet Russia accepted the declaration on the 31st. Through January, several other great powers followed, since with Russia's blessing it would not be interference in their affairs, and so the matter was established de facto and de jure. The stage was then set for the Civil War to begin in earnest, but that's another blog post.
In any case, the date is arbitrary, as any of those dates would be a viable day to celebrate our independence. Picking the sixth highlights the role of the Parliament, which I suppose is a good rhetorical choice for a parliamentary republic. Late November and early December is an interesting time in terms of anniversaries, because the Winter War, a conflict that has been incorporated into Finnish mythology as Our Finest Hour, began on November 30th 1939. This brings us to the matter of war.
When Finland celebrates its independence, it doesn't really pay any attention to those stodgy senators and MPs and their antics in 1917. What they focus on is The War, fought from November 1939 to March 1940. The details of this conflict are not really relevant per se and I'm sure most readers will be familiar with it, or run off to Wikipedia to read up on it anyway. At the very least you have probably seen this:
We love talking about the Winter War so I'm going to skip it as best as I can. After all, we have the Continuation War right after that. The Continuation War was of course the campaign to reclaim territory lost to the Soviets, launched as a "co-belligerent" (this becomes important later on) of Germany in synch with the Barbarossa offensive in June 1941. It lasted for three years, until a hasty armistice was signed with the Soviet Union in the late summer of 1944 right before the Finnish frontier was about to give away.
In many ways, Finland got an amazing lucky break when it got away with the Continuation War with just some modest territorial losses in the east, war reparations and a long period of kow-towing to the Soviet Union, which would have been likely even without the war, considering the geopolitics of the Cold War.
What's more significant in terms of the topic at hand is that the Continuation War problematized war for Finns. The Winter War was a heroic war of defence, a valorous fighting retreat, with amazing victories earned through the use of force multipliers like mobility, the weather, and familiarity with the terrain. The Continuation War, on the other hand, was at the end of the day a war of aggression; it was certainly launched with a valid casus belli, considering the losses of the Winter War, but a war of aggression nonetheless, and a strategic defeat on top -- never mind the political problem of having allied with Nazi Germany, the great devil itself. Finland only got away with not being treated like any of the Axis countries by having agreed to a pact of cooperation through the personage of President Ryti, which meant that Finland was able to juridically squirm out of the agreement and the worst penalties by having Ryti resign and serve time as a war criminal.
The Continuation War and the political climate of the Cold War meant that treating either of the Finnish wars with anything but harsh criticism and denounciation was frowned upon and politically impossible. Veterancy as a concept is very different in Finland with a different political and conceptual history as in the United States. There's also the fact that almost the entire adult male population served in both wars, which meant that veterancy as an experience was not in any way unique, or special, or a sign of a particular sacrifice for one's country. The war dead, certainly, were afforded full honours and respect during and after the war, but the veterans not as much.
My old history teacher claimed that it was the Cold War and the political climate that made veterancy a silent matter of life, but I believe it was because so many men were veterans, it wasn't in any way special. It was a common shared experience. It's also doubtless had a tremendous impact on the Finnish (male) psyche, with many households having a father or a grandfather who would wake up in sweat screaming at night, or who would be emotionally inert.
Veterancy and the celebration of veterans didn't really become a public matter until the mid-eighties, when the first generation born after the war, the baby boomers (yes, we have those as well) reached middle age. By that time veterans weren't as common, and the concept of raising money for veterans and honouring them reared its head. The amount of spare wealth sloshing around in that decade probably contributed. Before this trend, the most that had been done to the veterans had been the construction of "front soldier houses", affordable housing for demobilizied soldiers and their families. Of course, the fact that the country needed to accommodate hundreds of thousands of Karelian evacuees was a more pressing issue.
I'm told my grandfather, a veteran himself, didn't really see the fuss, and was generally distasteful towards the militarism and beat-your-chest patriotism that followed from the birth of the "support the troops" type of veterancy discourse. Unfortunately I never got to discuss this with him myself, since he died a year before I was born.
This almost jingoist patriotism has also idolized the character of General Mannerheim, who stands tall in the Finnish pantheon as its Swedish-speaking Finn, noble-born everyman chief deity and god of war. Mannerheim usually gets trotted out in the Independence Day festivities in some way; one year he was popularly proclaimed the Greatest Finn To Have Ever Lived in one of those dreary TV productions with phone-in votes (postcard if you're feeling cantankerous).
By a very long detour I'm trying to get the topic back to Independence Day. The defining moment of the veterancy revival was the invitation of the greatest war heroes, the Knights of the Order of the Mannerheim Cross, into the Independence Day Ball. (Finland, peculiarly, has an institution of knightly orders despite being a democratic republic for all its life.) These guys are the hardest core, equivalent to Medal of Honor recipients in the US or Victoria Cross recipients in the UK and Commonwealth. Yes, Simo Häyhä got one, of course he did. The gesture, of course, was symbolic at best, because the Independence Day Ball is actually a public spectacle where no one watching really cares who the veterans are, merely that it's good that they're there. What they're watching it for are the celebs and the dresses.
See, in the US you might have something like the Oscars, a place for celebrities to dress up and go show themselves to TV cameras. Something to define who is who in the great hierarchy of celebrity, as well. Here, that hierarchy is controlled by the President, who gets to invite whoever she likes to the Ball, with only MPs, the cabinet and certain officials and dignitaries receiving an automatic invitation. So the President invites the celebrities that have caught her eye in some way during the year, and then we have a weeks long marathon of news stories about who got invited and who didn't, who is the avec of that single female cabinet minister, who is going to wear what, what's going to be worn this year (a particularly hilarious example is the annual topic of "will they dress down so as to not appear frivolous in face of the recession?").
What stands out with this charmingly parochial institution is that it is inexplicably, maddeningly popular. There are 5.4 million Finns, and without exaggeration almost half of them tune in to watch the proceedings on television. Every year. I used to watch it just because my parents did and it was on; nowadays it's difficult to see the point. The Ball seems to enjoy that same kind of bizarre popularity as the Presidency as an institution -- people just like to have it around. Maybe it reminds them of something, maybe they're nostalgic, or maybe it just serves a social purpose that no other broadcast or event does. It's a unifying event, in a way, and something that certainly exemplifies the Finnish psyche, if you posit one.
And of course the recent trend of globalization and rising social inequality has stamped its mark: over the past few years, a demonstration in protest has been organized outside the Presidential Palace, called the "party crashing", although lately the popularity of this act of defiance seems to have gone down with the latest demonstration in 2009 being just a few guys and a placard. I guess we just can't do civil disobedience very well. At least there's still the Independence Day Ball of the Poor, an annual food aid event organized by a charitable foundation since the eighties.
TL, DR: Every Independence Day there's a fancy dress ball thrown by the President, and for some strange reason a full half of the entire population watches it every year.
PS. I forgot the atrocities and the alcohol. I think the alcohol was something to do with veterans and alcoholism. The atrocities are the fact that we set up concentration camps for Russian refugees and soldiers during the Continuation War and treated them terribly; something that wasn't really looked into until the 2000s, because of the taboo of saying anything bad about the veterans or The War. I feel like this should be brought up in contrast to the oft stated fact that the Finnish front was the only Axis front with field synagogues. And it's not like we didn't deport Jews, either: we deported several dozens of them, never to be heard of again.
Happy Independence Day!
