Europe and Finland

Defining the Political Identity of Finland in Western Europe

Teija Tiilikainen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429855405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1998, this volume asked the question, what is Europe?. What is Finland's position in Europe?. The author tries to give an answer to these questions by defining first Europe in terms of its key political traditions and then locating Finland into this map of historical ideas. The ultimate purpose of this analysis of historical ideas is very pragmatic as it tries to find an answer to the core problems of European unification. Why are different European countries at differing levels of readiness as far as the project of unification is concerned?. The answer can be found again in political traditions.

PART I

EUROPE

1 Introduction: The Historical Study of Political Ideas

In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of ‘human nature ’.

C. Wright Mills¹

Introduction

One of the key questions of the present integration project is the question of the nature of the Europe that is being constructed. The question reaches in a strange way into the core of European political culture. The very putting of the question is an expression of European unity and of the relativity connected with it. There is that much of a common political culture and identity in Europe that it makes sense to talk about, or even to plan seriously, a Europe that would be politically united under common institutions of power. The constraints on the common culture are revealed when the question is put about the nature of this united Europe. That there is no automatic answer to this question, which would at the same time be articulated as a demand for the political unity of Europe, is significative of European culture. Political diversity is itself a key characteristic of European unity.

The purpose of this book is to approach the reasons for this diversity in unity and to make it more concrete through one example. The first argument of the study is that differences in views concerning European political unity can be explained through differences in political culture and traditions. The second argument is that these differences again are of historical origin.

In the following chapters I will thus mainly have to do with what I have called political cultures and traditions. I will try to point out the divisions in European political culture that are decisive with respect to the present integration project. The analysis is limited to Western Europe, including Northern Europe, because the roots of the project are there. My conception about the historical origin of cultural divisions and differences reflects itself in the general structure of the book as well as in its individual chapters. Western European cultures are first analysed as far as their general relationship to the idea of political community is concerned. Thereafter the idea of a united Europe is brought into focus, first in its earlier phases and then, in the fourth chapter, in its present form. In the latter part of the book, more careful attention is paid to Finnish political culture and to the way Finland has related to the idea of a united Europe.

The idea that cultures, and underlying meanings in general, are of key value as far as knowledge about societies and social life is concerned can be linked to a particular humanist tradition in social sciences. One of the main orientations of this tradition starts from history and historical analysis as the focal instrument in the explanation of culture and cultural differences. This approach, which constitutes also the theoretical framework of this study, is usually known as the history–of–ideas approach. In the first chapter, it is my intention to introduce this theoretical framework and to define the position that the present study takes within it, that is, to explicate its theoretical arguments.

The History–of–Ideas as a Scientific Discipline

The approach of this study relays the message of Romanticism in Europe. By Romanticism, I mean the tradition that brought the idea of the particular qualities and capacities of the human being into the Western notion of science. It placed itself against the Enlightenment conception of a unitary science and put forth the demand that as an object for science, humanity should be distinguished from other parts of nature. The element that was seen as raising the human being above other creatures was the human mind and the meaning-giving role of the human being. Romanticism created the whole field of the humanities and raised the question of identity in social sciences that, on the whole, were a product of the Enlightenment.

The history–of–ideas approach is constituted of two arguments about reality which can be identified as its humanist core and its history core. These arguments have constituted the critical dimensions of the approach until our day. The humanist argument starts from the idea that societies are human creatures, they are made by the human being and they shall be studied as such. This view can be connected, above all, with the historical German Verstehen school, one of the key figures of which was Wilhelm Dilthey². The Verstehen school demanded a particular method for the examination of human societies and it is recognised as being the starting-point of hermeneutic science. Its argument against the natural sciences was that in contrast to nature, the essence of all social forms is that they express human creativity. Understanding the actions, events and artifacts that are the expression of human spirituality and creativity requires grasping the place, the significance they have within human life³.

The humanist argument implies that ideas, meanings and linguistic practices are raised into a key position in the study of human societies. The difference between this and the Enlightenment ‘naturalist’ position of reality becomes evident through the character accorded to these structures of meaning and language. Instead of being treated as reflections of reality, mental structures appear as constituents of it⁴. Societies have, for instance, appeared as parts of a Hegelian world spirit on its way to self-fulfilment, as Weberian networks of meaningful action or as Skinner’s illocutionary acts⁵. The humanist argument connects the study of societies with the capacities of the human mind. Its message is that it is not possible to explain the structure and functioning of human societies without paying attention to the webs of meaning with which human beings organise the world⁶.

The history argument emanates from the same doctrinal basis of the Counter-Enlightenment and has as its key source, the idea that humanity is not a stable phenomenon. The origins of this approach can be found in Romanticist Humanism, the core ideas of which were already developed in the early eighteenth century by the Neapolitan Giambattista Vico. Vico was among the first to give a new meaning to humanity as he claimed that there was no stable phenomenon called human nature which was the same regardless of times and places. According to Vico, cultures are unique partly because the questions that preoccupy an age or culture are not constant⁷. The conception of reality derived from history pits its Romanticist theory of humanity against the Enlightenment theory which is based upon the idea of permanent essences. As humanity expresses itself through the human mind and as it is not a stable phenomenon, historical knowledge is argued as being the only means to human self-knowledge. At the basis of the Romanticist view of humanity a new meaning was already being demanded for history and historical knowledge in the nineteenth century⁸. It was, however, R.G. Collingwood in this century who put the demands into a more systematic form. According to him, the understanding of history as the history of the human mind develops its meaning from the revelation of historical particularities only. Collingwood stated that:

The body of human thought or mental activity is a corporate possession, and almost all the operations which our minds perform are operations which we learned from others who have performed them already. Since mind is what it does, and human nature, if it is a name for anything real, is only a name for human activities, this acquisition of ability to perform determinate operations is the acquisition of a determinate human nature. Thus the historical process is a process in which man creates for himself this or that kind of human nature by re–creating in his own thought the past to which he is heir⁹.

Historical knowledge shall, according to Collingwood, be understood as knowledge of what mind has done in the past and as such it is seen to reveal to the historian the powers of his own mind¹⁰. This position has begun to be called the individualist position of history and has become one of the main divides of the history–of–ideas approach.

The history–of–ideas approach can be claimed to be constituted by the humanist and the history argument and the mutual relation of these arguments has led to the drawing of one of the main dividing lines within the approach. The approach can thus be divided into a hermeneutical tradition and into a history tradition in accordance with how the emphasis falls on the two constitutive parts. The hermeneutical tradition starts from human existence as the primary mode of being. Representatives of this tradition argue that it is impossible to treat the past independently of the present because that would presuppose that the examiner could place himself outside history and time. Because people are all said to belong to history before they belong to themselves, history is argued as disappearing in the sense of an independent past and is argued as being significant only when in fusion with the present¹¹. Hermeneutics has thus turned from the methodological hermeneutism of the nineteenth century into an ontological argument about meaning and understanding as a collective form of being¹².

The history tradition can be seen as a continuance of the position that was already represented by Collingwood. This position is, in contrast to the collectivism of the hermeneutical tradition, based upon an individualist interpretation of history. J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner and John Dunn are famous for their recent support of the history position. They start like Collingwood from the idea that past thought and ideas shall be understood in their own historical contexts, that is, in those historical circumstances in which they were once formulated. They thus do not accept the idea of perennial questions, fusion of horizons or autonomy of texts, but argue instead that understanding past meanings implies that the ‘historian’ distances himself from the meanings and understandings of his own time and passes the gap to the relevant historical period. Using the terms of Quentin Skinner:

Historical understanding is a product of learning to follow what Hacking has called different styles of reasoning; it is not necessarily a matter of being able to translate those styles into less outlandish ones¹³.

The individualist position of the history tradition finds expression in the fact that past meanings are believed to reveal themselves to the historian in instances of individual acting. Collingwood started from reflective acts as the subject–matter of history and argued for the re–enactment of these as the historical method¹⁴. Pocock, Dunn and Skinner all approach past meanings in terms of linguistic action and situate the real meaning in the intentions of a speaker¹⁵.

One of the main recent debates upon the identity of the history of ideas approach has dealt with its epistemological commitments. In this debate, representatives of the hermeneutical tradition have vigorously called into question the idea of authorial intention as the ultimate source of meaning. They have emphasised the social and dynamic capacities of texts and languages and the possibilities connected with them of taking on meanings that could not possibly have been intended by the authors¹⁶. The commitment to authorial intention has been argued as leading to historical antiquarianism and to political and social conservatism. Ian Shapiro makes this accusation more precise by connecting the approach of the ‘history tradition’ with, what he calls, a conventionalist view of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART 1 EUROPE