The dominoes rise : Official and unofficial foreign policies of Finland with regard to the restoration of independence of the Baltic States

Abstract

The three Baltic States Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were independent republics in the interwar period, to be absorbed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1940, during World War II. Finland, a neighbour, remained independent. By the 1980s, the USSR was under-going considerable problems in its economy, problems that President Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to address through economic reform and human rights reform. The three Baltic States took the opportunity of addressing these issues from their own perspective, that of states that had lost their independence. Centrally, this research addresses the issue of the visible predictability of independence re-established, on the basis of daily collected newspaper articles from a politically wide spectrum of Finnish newspapers, from right-wing Kokoomus/Coalition Party newspapers (Uusi Suomi, Aamulehti), through non-aligned (Centre Party) papers (e.g. Keskisuomalainen, Savon Sanomat) to the extreme left-wing communist Tiedonantaja. There was a distinct dichotomy to be observed in Finland in the official and unofficial versions of policy towards the Baltic States, the press being most supportive, while the official policy was indifferent. No previous research has been done on any larger scale along a timeline demonstrating the seemingly inevitable momentum of the process. The goal for the research has been to show the inevitability of the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to the re-establishment of the independent Baltic States. Methodologically, the study applies text linguistics to the area of the social sciences. The findings were that the final result was predictable: the re-establishment of Baltic independence was inevitable. The use of a com- prehensive volume of data can be used to predict important future developments. The Finnish press has had a significant role in the re- establishment of the independence of the Baltic States, so significant it merits recognition on a national scale in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.