‘What’s going on?’ in Finland: Employing Stuart Hall for a conjunctural analysis

The Finnish paradox

Let me, then, start with a paradox: In the 2014 European elections, in Finland the conservative National Coalition Party on its own garnered more votes than the Finnish Left parties put together. ⁴ The Social Democrats and Left Alliance, who (or their predecessors) had the leading role in building the Nordic welfare state in Finland in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, now had less combined support than the conservative party, the very party that had traditionally tried to restrain and slow down erecting the Nordic model in the country. The Finnish 2014 European election results were unprecedented in a country where, after the Second World War, the Left had been among the strongest in Western Europe. ⁵

The paradox here is that while Finns have largely turned their backs on the Left, they still widely support the welfare state policies and values historically advocated by the very same Left. To give just one example: the Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA (a think-tank of national employers’ organization) published a survey in 2009 on the values and attitudes of Finns (EVA, 2009). According to the report, only 29% of Finns trust in capitalism while 28% do not and 43% have no explicit stand. The report reveals that 59% of Finns trust big business only to a limited extent; 70% say that the contemporary society is not safe since one can lose one’s job at any time; 80% want the current way of living to be more human; 52% think that economic well-being cannot be increased without this causing an increase in mental queasiness. ⁶

The Finnish paradox seems, then, to be that while Finns continue to support welfare state values, an increasing percentage of them support at the polling booths neoliberal globalizers or populist neo-nationalists. ⁷ How is this possible? Why do not pro-welfare state values and attitudes of Finns present themselves as support for the Left? Why is the Finnish Left incapable of grasping the popular ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) in order to ‘challenge the forms of neo-liberalism (and conservatism), to articulate the multiplicities of struggles and popular expressions against them in order to create another future’ (Grossberg, 2014: 8)?

In this article I explore and try to make meaning out of this paradox by using Stuart Hall’s thoughts on articulation, conjuncture and identification. They enable me to ask: How do ‘economy’, ‘politics’ and ‘culture’ form such a complex whole in contemporary Finland that allows the process of neoliberalization to proceed – albeit with uneven results? What is the role of ‘cultural’ identifications in this whole? As a smallish Northern European country with just 5.4 million inhabitants, Finland may appear somewhat peripheral to those outside the Nordic region. Nevertheless it has diagnostic value for those interested in the uneven application of neoliberal economic, political and cultural objectives in a society with strong welfare traditions as well as in the inability of the Left to prevent such developments. ⁸

Uneven neoliberalization

There has not been any comprehensive systematic conjunctural analysis of the changes in Nordic countries during last 20 or 30 years. What follows is hence necessarily assembled from available bits and pieces. ⁹

From the 1960s onwards, the ‘Nordic region’ came to be associated with a specific form of state capitalism, involving epithets such as social democracy and the welfare state, characterized by a solidaristic, universalistic and de-commodifying welfare. ¹⁰ From the 1980s on, however, this political rationality has been challenged but not entirely replaced by ‘neoliberal’ political rationalities. The aim has been to build attractive spaces for globally roaming capital through the provision of extensive infrastructure and low taxes. This has been accompanied by focusing the operations of corporations in ‘core fields’ so that they could realistically pursue the position of a global market leader or at least that of a noteworthy global player. ¹¹ Abandoning the limitations on foreign ownership in 1992 led quickly to a point where two-thirds of the ownership of Finnish exchange-listed companies were in non-Finnish hands. The collapse of Soviet Union and joining the European Union (EU) and the European Monetary Union (EMU) in 1995 have further produced pressures on public policies, for example in the form of tight fiscal policies and cuts in public expenditure.

Time and again, however, neoliberal objectives have clashed in Finland with traditionally strong efforts to distribute socioeconomic capacities in a balanced way – both regionally and between different strata of the population. Hence neoliberal policies in Finland have proceeded as ‘little neoliberal adjustments’, which nonetheless have accumulated over time and are gaining ground gradually as the Finnish political field has shifted to the Right since the recession of the early 1990s.

Economically, the material resources of the country have increased quite considerably. Whereas resources more than tripled in OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries between 1950 and 2000, in Finland, a country that was industrialized relatively late, resources grew almost fivefold during that period. The crisis of financing the welfare state hit Finland later than most OECD countries, namely during the recession at the beginning of the 1990s. In economic terms, the real income of all Finnish population groups has increased over the past 40 years, but those with the highest incomes have enhanced their share of this bigger whole faster than anyone else. On top of the rich becoming filthy rich, middle-income people have become considerably wealthier than have low-income people. ¹² In other words, the relatively well-off are better off than before, whereas the not particularly well-off are relatively worse off than earlier. At the same time, the resources of the welfare state in Finland are currently only at the average EU level. In the period 1990–96, the public sector was privatized to a greater extent than in any other OECD country.

Politically, the Finnish state has slowly but definitively been turned into a competitive unit. The key objective of the competition state has been to harness various areas of the society (such as education, research, culture or social policies) to support the country’s capability to attract and maintain economically successful entrepreneurship. Political parties have largely abandoned their class-based ideologies and have turned instead to the goal of becoming ‘overall parties’ appealing to ‘average voters’, especially the growing middle class.

Culturally, the upwardly mobile middle classes have been inclined to perceive themselves as the vanguard of modernity. The ideal middle-class ‘us’ consists of people who consider themselves to be broadminded, law-abiding and industrious citizens and who, at the same time, are also active but responsible consumers. The ‘us’ refers to modern people who are committed to traditional virtues, but who also have ‘the capacity to be forward-looking, innovative and entrepreneurial’ (Clarke and Fink, 2008: 231). The flip side of this middle-class ‘us’ seems to be those who find themselves unable to identify with such ideals and currently tend to give their political support not to the Left but to neo-nationalists.

Conjunctural analysis

The Nordic welfare model has been undermined in Finland since the 1980s. From 2008 on, however, the financial crisis has challenged the premises of the marketization and commodification of Finnish society (Kallinen et al., 2011). The uneven neoliberalizing project of Finnish society is in crisis, but (at least so far) there are no serious (Leftist) alternatives to it. Certainly, there are currently a number of ‘economic’, ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ struggles concerning the future of Finnish policies, but they have not produced an overall Leftist alternative to neoliberal programmes.

How, then, to analyse all this in terms of conjunctures and articulations? One way to approach the task is to compare conjunctural analysis with what Raymond Williams (1977: 120–1) called ‘epochal analysis’ (see also Clarke, 2010: 340). An ‘epochal analysis’ would use ‘neoliberalism’ as an overall explanation. In epochal analyses various phenomena would probably be interpreted as ‘neoliberal economy’, ‘neoliberal politics’ or ‘neoliberal culture’. From a Cultural Studies perspective, instead of focusing attention on ‘grand designs’, there is a need ‘to look at how grand designs get translated into politics, policies and practices’ (Newman and Clarke, 2009: 18). Whereas an epochal analysis would explain phenomena as ‘neoliberal’, an authentic historical analysis would, instead, study how ‘neoliberal’ objectives are formed, how they are or are not implemented, what opposing forces they meet and how the ‘neoliberalizing’ forces and their adversaries are – via struggles and negotiations – part of the current conjuncture. From this point of view, the task of Cultural Studies researchers would be to analyse how the ‘economic’, ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ aspects of the complex whole are articulated with each other and how these articulations produce the current conjuncture.

For Stuart Hall (Hall and Massey, 2012: 55; see also Hall, 2012, 2013), a conjuncture is a ‘period when different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society and have given it a specific and distinctive shape come together, producing a crisis of some kind’. As Hall (2012: 55) puts it, ‘history moves from one conjuncture to another rather than being an evolutionary flow’. What drives history forward is usually a crisis, when the contradictions that are always at play in any historical moment are condensed: ‘Crises are moments of potential change, but the nature of their resolution is not given’ (Hall, 2012: 55).

For John Clarke (2010: 341), a conjuncture is a site where multiple temporalities ‘become condensed, entangled and co-constitutive of crisis’. According to Clarke, the idea of conjuncture marks a ‘moment of condensation: an accumulation of tendencies, forces, antagonisms and contradictions’ that ‘produces a point of uncertainty and possibility’. Clarke (2010: 342) suggests we should ‘think of the conjuncture as a point where different temporalities – and more specifically, the tensions, antagonisms and contradictions which they carry – begin to come together’.

These concepts of Cultural Studies – articulation and conjuncture – highlight the connections of studied phenomena with other phenomena. For Hall (1977: 48), articulation:

marks the forms of the relationship through which two processes, which remain distinct – obeying their own conditions of existence – are drawn together to form a ‘complex unity’. This unity is therefore the result of ‘many determinations’, where the conditions of existence of the one do not coincide exactly with that of the other …

The concept of articulation hence provides tools ‘to think of how specific practices (articulated around contradictions which do not all arise in the same way, at the same point, in the same moment), can be nevertheless thought together’ (Hall, 1986: 45).

The theory and concept of articulation do not take for granted that modern societies are divided by some natural law into the distinct spheres of ‘economy’, ‘politics’ and ‘culture’. The economic, the political and the cultural are, instead, seen as aspects of all social practices. While the theory of articulation sees that such spheres are ‘real’ in the sense that they have material and discursive effects, it is interested in how the spheres are produced and how they mutually determine each other. Hall (1997: 226) writes:

Culture is constitutive of the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’ just as the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’ are, in turn, constitutive of, and set the limits for, culture. They are mutually constitutive of one another – which is another way of saying that they are articulated with each other.

Conceptually, ‘articulation’ and ‘conjuncture’ are closely linked. ‘Articulation’ refers to how various processes, practices and meanings are connected and tied to each other. Etymologically, ‘articulation’ as connecting is near ‘conjuncture’ as something that has been joined together. English conjuncture means the action of joining together; the fact or state of being joined together (Oxofrd English Dictionary, s.v. conjuncture). Its roots are Latin con (together) and iungo (join). ¹³ The idea of articulation underlines acts of joining together, whereas the concept of conjuncture highlights mutual relations and effects.

According to Hall (1977, 48) articulation ‘marks the forms of the relationship through which two processes, which remain distinct – obeying their own conditions of existence – are drawn together to form a “complex unity”’. Lawrence Grossberg (2010: 21) defines studying articulations as the ‘practice or work of making, unmaking, and remaking relations and contexts, of establishing new relations out of old relations or non-relations, of drawing lines and mapping conventions’.

Hall on Thatcherism

Perhaps the best known conjunctural analysis in Cultural Studies has been produced by Stuart Hall. ¹⁴ In the late 1970s and 1980s, Hall tried to understand Thatcherism that he (1979) characterized as ‘authoritarian populism’. According to Hall, a block seeking a hegemonic position aimed at winning people’s consent, harnessing discontents in its own support, neutralizing opposing forces, dissolving the opposition and incorporating some elements of popular opinion in its own project. Already before Margaret Thatcher became the prime minister, Hall (1979) underlined that Thatcherism had to be understood in its historic specificity.

For Hall (1979: 14), the ‘swing to the Right’ could not be explained as ‘the corresponding political bedfellow of a period of capitalist recession’. Such a position was ‘predicated on a notion of a social formation as a simple structure in which economic factors will be immediately and transparently translated to the political and ideological levels’. Hence the ‘economic’ explanations of the phenomenon took for granted what needed to be explained. Hall’s conjunctural analysis of Thatcherism differed from such analyses in that it did not explain the phenomenon on just one basis. For Hall, Thatcherism was a multiple phenomenon where ‘economic’, ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ elements were articulated to each other. The new affective reactions, that is, meeting the ‘economic’ crisis via bitter petty bourgeois ideological imageries, did not for Hall simply reflect the ‘economic’ crisis, but were, instead, independent factors that influenced how the crisis was understood and what solutions for it were offered. Those explanations that reduced the ‘swing to the Right’ to a matter of the economy did not consider the conjoined, albeit distinct, contradictions that developed at various speeds but whose condensation determined the conjuncture at hand. The ‘economic’ and ‘ideological’ crises did not proceed at the same pace as each other. Thatcherism underlined ‘social market values’. Competition and personal responsibility had to be restored. According to Hall (1979: 17), Thatcherism was able, by highlighting the nation, family, duties, authorities, requirements and self-confidence, to produce a populist common sense which increased the popularity of the kind of economic thinking that stressed cutting the state’s expenses. Here Thatcherism could also lean on ordinary citizens’ experiences of the state as a strong bureaucratic machinery. In the ‘rich mixture’ of Thatcherism, such traditional conservative themes as nation and duty were articulated with selfishness, competition between individuals and anti-statist sentiments. A new bloc, consisting of certain parts of the ruling and ruled classes, came into being. This reconfiguration of forces changed the material bases of classes, occupational limits, ethnic and gender composition, political cultures and social imageries (Hall, 1988, 5).

For Hall, hegemonic relations do not form a consistent or tight whole. Hegemonic relations do not necessarily imply a general will that would fade out differences between people and their viewpoints. Hegemonic relations are rather an uneven process where contradictory elements are translated into some kind of a working whole (Hall, 1995: 69). As Hall (1988: 7) wrote, hegemony implies the struggle to contest and dis-organize an existing political formation and the winning of a strategic measure of popular consent.

Three Finnish ‘parties’

Britain in the late 1970s and the 1980s is not Finland in the 2010s. Hall’s analyses of Thatcherism cannot be transported as such from one spatio-temporal conjuncture to another. However, his analyses give a whiff that a conjunctural analysis of the ‘now’ at hand would mean analysing the specificities of the current historical moment as mesh of multiple formations and tendencies (cf. Clarke, 2010: 340). As Lawrence Grossberg (2013: 83) says of conjunctural analysis:

Our job is to listen to the whole thing, take it apart, put it together, see its relations and articulations between the political, the cultural and the economic, the social, in all of its complexity, and then to try to describe it to tell a better story.

What consequences would all this have for the Finnish Left? Is there anything the Left might gain by taking the conjunctural approach seriously? In the last part of this text, I approach these questions by looking with conjunctural tools at the formation of the contemporary Finnish middle classes, the phenomenon of Finnish populist neo-nationalism and the crisis of the Finnish Left.

The issue of winning a strategic measure of popular consent for the ‘ruling bloc’ seems to have a key role here. The question of consent is, however, somewhat complicated in a country where there is currently not one hegemonic bloc that would resemble Thatcherism in Hall’s analysis. In general, there seem to be three alternative ‘parties’ in Finland vis-à-vis modernization: neoliberal globalizers, the defenders of the welfare state legacy and neo-nationalists (Lehtonen and Koivunen, 2010). Neoliberal globalizers seem to think that there are no alternatives to market-led globalization. According to them, Finland and the Finns have to do their best to mould themselves into whatever shape will bring success in the global competition. This entails that the state must provide enterprises with the best possible conditions, promote innovations and educate those workers who have internalized economic profit as their personal goal. The defenders of the welfare state legacy seem to acknowledge that the market is the best means to increase national wealth. Instead of neoliberal individualism, however, they underline equality, communality and joint responsibility. They see that the state and civil society have a significant role here. Populist neo-nationalists seem to resist market-led globalization and think that defending the traditionally understood ‘national interests’ is also the best way to defend their individual interests. The three ‘parties’ are ideal constructions, produced by Anu Koivunen and me in order to highlight the multiple temporal and other logics at play in the current definitional struggles in Finland. The ‘parties’ are ideological interpellations that call on Finns to recognize themselves in them and identify with them. They are alternative forms of common sense that compete in various walks of life. Put together, however, these three ‘parties’ form a mechanism that produces willing or reluctant consent and, at the same time, marginalizes effective Leftist alternatives.

Why is it so that the most resounding interpellations appear to come from the neoliberal globalizers and the populist neo-nationalists, while the defenders of the welfare state legacies gather so little support?

Of the three, the interpellations of neoliberal globalizers seem to reach the new middle classes best. As the vast majority of the population has received not only a basic education but also at least some further training, the Finnish ideal ‘us’ tends, in the general public, to be identified with the middle classes. The publicly constructed ‘us’ consists of active citizens capable of governing their lives by themselves, whereas ‘them’ is seen to build up of those populations that require interventions from the authorities in order to adapt to the prevailing order. As hedonistic consumers with mature tastes and quality lifestyles, the ‘us’ group can identify themselves with western modernity and upward mobility. As responsible citizens, the very same ‘us’ can see themselves as parts of a national whole who, even though they are undeniably pleasure-seeking consumers, do not think only of instant gratification of their desires but are also capable of thinking of their own long-term interests, as well as the interests of society as a whole. Neoliberal globalizers are a mix of multiple temporal logics and social interests. There traditional authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing ideologies meet hedonistic urban cosmopolitanism and produce a specific ideal of dynamic modern Finnishness.

The attractiveness of populist neo-nationalist interpellations appears to be based on various ‘economic’, ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ factors with various temporary trajectories. Neo-nationalist interpellations seem to come mostly from the populist party, True Finns, which won a huge victory in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary elections. ¹⁵

One ‘economic’ factor contributing to the popularity of the populist neo-nationalism is the influence of ‘globalization’ in the Finnish production structure. Many European researchers of populism stress that populist parties gain support especially among the so-called net losers of ‘globalization’ (e.g. Bjørklund and Andersen, 2002; Minkenberg, 2000). In Finland, such a reading may explain the support for the True Finns, especially in south-eastern parts of the country, where the paper industries have been run down and traditional workers’ communities have disintegrated. The idea of populism as a protest of the net losers of ‘globalization’ would not, however, explain why so many of those who have suffered have chosen populism as the channel of their protest. Such an idea would also be problematic because it does not meet with the average profile of the supporters of the True Finns (of which more below).

Of the ‘political’ factors, noteworthy here is, first, the crisis of the traditional Finnish political system. The supporters of the True Finns characterize the party with such epithets as ‘outspokenness’, ‘honesty’ and ‘simplicity’ that, according to them, the traditional ruling parties do not have (Rahkonen: 2010, 550). What matters for the supporters of the True Finns is not only what values the party says it is representing but also what values it does not represent (Rahkonen, 2010: 550–1).

A second noteworthy ‘political’ factor here is the crisis of the traditional Left. Judging by its constituency, the True Finns are a workers’ party. Of the supporters 35% are in an employee (worker) position. Of the supporters of the Left Alliance 36% and of the supporters of the Social Democrats 34% are in a similar position (Rahkonen, 2010: 552.) Those who vote for the True Finns may be thought to shun the traditional Leftist parties since these parties do not, in their eyes, seem to represent an alternative to the kind of middle-class modernization that they want to resist. (More on this below.)

A third ‘political’ factor in the attractiveness of the populist neo-nationalist interpellations is the change in the relations between the ‘elite’ and the ‘people’ and the accompanying affectivization of politics. In the predominant discourses there has been a shift from the welfare state ideologies that stressed ‘us’ to the world of individuals where everyone has a right to their opinion merely on the basis of the opinion being his/her own. ‘Right or wrong, this is my opinion’ (Lehtonen, 2010.) The citizens of the welfare state have become consumers of politics. At the same time, the trust of these consumers towards the political elites is being eroded. In this situation, voting for the True Finns may seem to many a justified expression of anger. As has been said, the support for the party seems to be based as much on what it is not as on what it is. The party has been said to be a ‘party of angry men’ (Rahkonen, 2010: 551) and ‘a party of workers’ protest’ (Rahkonen, 2011).

‘Cultural’ factors explaining support for neo-nationalist interpellations include, from a conjunctural perspective, the presentation of the upwardly mobile ‘us’ of the globalizing Finland in the general discourses as a norm of Finnishness (cf. Lehtonen and Koivunen, 2010, 2011). The voters for the True Finns seem not to identify with this lot. They rather seem to embody such things as pragmatism, entrepreneurship and certain working-class values, plus conservative values (Rahkonen, 2011: 430).

Another ‘cultural’ factor explaining the support for the True Finns is the changes in the gender relations – the party being predominantly one of men. The educational level of Finnish women has risen and the so-called middle-class professions have become more and more populated by women. The supporters of the True Finns represent otherwise average Finns (albeit with a certain working-class tinge) except in their gender. Two-thirds of the True Finns’ supporters are male. The men voting for the True Finns do not, in other words, necessarily identify with the current Finnish gender system. For them, the middle-class ‘us’ may seem to be a feminized ‘us’ that excludes such men.

A third cultural factor contributing to the support of the True Finns may be the inability of ‘official’ Finland to present interpretations of the problems related to immigration that do not reproduce the juxtaposition of the ‘elite’ and the ‘people’, and do not make members of the ‘people’ feel guilty if they experience immigration as a problem. For many members of the elite, immigration may present itself as a phenomenon that mainly enriches their lives (in the form of food culture, music, etc.). Official Finland seems to think that xenophobia must be fought against by traditional popular enlightenment from above. There are, however, some Finns who meet problems they interpret as being caused by immigration (for example, unemployed people who see Russian or Estonian construction workers or Somali bus-drivers taking over their jobs). The official discourses disregards the (real or imagined) experiences and interpretations of these people at the same time as the trade unions cannot fight effectively for the rights of both ‘native’ and ‘immigrant’ workers. The views of those Finns who find immigration problematic when thinking of their future are moralized in the official discourses. All this opens up space for the seeding of anti-immigration hatred.

A fourth ‘cultural’ factor contributing to the support of the True Finns is the changes in the way political participation and commitment are practised. As people’s belief in the political system and traditional political parties falters, they may be more inclined than before to short-term spurts of activism that are connected with certain affective processes and events. Indifference may hence increase together with strong torrents of dalliance around specific issues (Thrift, 2008: 240).

From a ‘cultural’ perspective, support for the True Finns could be analysed, all in all, as a ‘no’ to the European middle-class ‘us’. The supporters of the True Finns are not necessarily as worried about immigration as they are often said to be (even though there are also explicitly racist strata among the party and its supporters). According to some researchers (e.g. Rahkonen, 2010: 548), the supporters are first and foremost worried about the future of the ‘Finnish way of life’ under the pressures of globalization. From this perspective, support for the True Finns could be analysed as a critique of cosmopolitan middle-class modernization.

In a conjunctural analysis, Finnish populist neo-nationalism would not be analysed as one coherent formation. It would not be reduced to a single ‘economic’, ‘political’ or ‘cultural’ factor. Populism would be seen as something consisting of many different elements and temporary logics, and as having plural bases whose articulation produces the phenomenon. In other words, the premise would not be that Finnish populist neo-nationalism has an essence or core, or that it would on the whole form one consistent unity. The analysis would not start from what Finnish populist neo-nationalism ‘is’ but on ‘what it has to do with everything else’ – all that makes it possible and how it builds up in its entire plurality. In other words, populism would have to be produced in all its plurality and inconsistency as a result of the analysis.

What is to be done?

To return to the paradox I started with: the middle classes cannot identify with the Left since the Left does not seem to be able to present itself as a plausible modern political alternative to the neoliberal globalizers. Those who do not identify with European middle-class modernization also cannot identify with the Left since the Left does not seem to be able to present itself as an alternative to neoliberal modernization. ¹⁶ How could Left, then, represent itself as a true alternative to neoliberal globalization and populist neo-nationalism?

It is, to quote the title of Hall’s book on Thatcherism, a hard road to renewal. As Hall (1988: 281) writes: ‘The stubborn truth is that social interests are contradictory. There is no automatic correspondence between class location, political position and ideological inclination. Majorities have to be “made” and “won” – not passively reflected.’ For Hall (1988: 7), gaining a hegemonic position implies:

the struggle to contest and dis-organize an existing political formation; the taking of the ‘leading position’ (on however minority a basis) over a number of different spheres of society at once – economy, civil society, intellectual and moral life, culture; the conduct of a wide and differentiated type of struggle; the winning of a strategic measure of popular consent; and, thus, the securing of a social authority sufficiently deep to conform society into a new historic project.

This is not the place to develop a new hegemonic initiative for the Finnish Left. From what has been said above, however, it is clear that building such an initiative should include, among others, the following questions:

First: How to remake the national common sense by questioning parochial and selfish forms of nationalism? How to redefine the ‘national interests’ by re-articulating them with building an alternative modern world order?

Second: How to dissolve seeing the ‘economy’ in Finnish politics as the unquestionable basis for and goal of all social and cultural activities? How to fight the project of neoliberalization in the state apparatus, social policies, education and so on?

Third: How to broaden the Leftist understanding of politics in order to produce new arenas to contest the currently prevailing order – related to ‘questions about moral conduct, about gender and sexuality, about race and ethnicity, about ecological and environmental issues, about cultural and national identity’, as Hall (1988: 8) put it?

Fourth: How to renew the Left itself? How to build democratic forms of organizing resistance and alternatives that would be a genuine alternative to the current crisis-ridden political system? How to create, in practice, faith in people’s ability to shape the future (cf. Grossberg, 2010: 62)?

There are no easy answers to these and other such vital questions. This is, however, no excuse to avoid looking for and testing complex and time-consuming solutions. The neoliberal globalizers and populist neo-nationalists gain their support through various mechanisms of (positive or negative) identification. Hence perhaps the most vital question for the Finnish Left is: How to articulate the current crisis of the neoliberal project with the trust of Finns in welfare state policies and ideals, and their concern about the common good and their individual welfare, to build up an alternative political project of global and national solidarity? ¹⁷