FINLAND HAS BEEN on Europe's periphery, both physically and socially, for almost all its history. It is still Europe's northernmost country, with a quarter of its area above the Arctic Circle. By the late 1980s, however, modern means of communication had substantially reduced its physical remoteness from the rest of Europe. Modern technology also had lessened winter's hold on the country. Finns lived comfortably, and they moved about freely the whole year. In the social realm, Finland had left its traditional poverty and backwardness behind. Since World War II, it had become one of the world's most advanced societies. Its citizens enjoyed prosperity and meaningful employment, as well as benefits from the social measures they had forged, which guaranteed everyone a decent and humane share of the prosperity.

During the course of their history, Finns have always moved about, both within their country and abroad. The years after World War II saw, however, an unprecedented population shift away from the countryside to the increasingly more urbanized south. New industries and a rapidly growing service sector meant that the work force not only relocated, but also changed in character. Agriculture's and forestry's combined share of the work force declined from about 50 percent in 1950 to about 10 percent in 1980. Industry's share remained unchanged at about 20 percent, while that of the service sector doubled from 9 percent to 18 percent. Between 1950 and 1980, the number of students and pensioners quadrupled, going from 6 to 24 percent, reflecting a wealthier and healthier society.

Personal relationships also changed. Families became smaller; divorce became more common. A growing public sector meant that many tasks previously managed by the family could now be entrusted to the state. Lessened dependence on the family also meant greater freedom for women. This was reflected in new legislation that gave women greater equality with men. Traditional habits persisted, however, and in the late 1980s Finland's women still had a secondary place at home, in the workplace, and in politics.

Finland was a remarkably homogeneous country. It had no racial minorities. The largest minority group, the Swedishspeaking Finns, was so well assimilated with the majority that there were fears it would eventually disappear. In fact, the group's share of the country's population had dropped from 12 percent to 6 percent in the twentieth century. Two very small minorities, the Lapps (or Sami) and the Gypsies, remained apart from the majority. They still suffered from some discrimination and from poor living standards, but legislation and more open attitudes on the part of the majority were improving their lot.

Finland was virtually free of the religious divisions that bedeviled many other societies. One of the two state churches, the Lutheran Church of Finland, had nearly 90 percent of the population as members. Religious freedom was guaranteed by law, and Finns also belonged to several dozen other churches. Because Finnish society had become increasingly secularized, differences of opinion about moral issues caused less friction than they had in the past.

Finns maintained their traditional respect for education. Education had gradually become more accessible, and an ever greater number of Finns were studying at all levels. The old system, which excluded many, had been replaced by one that attempted to meet individual schooling needs and to keep open as many options for further training as possible; no one went without education for lack of money.

Finland, like its Nordic neighbors, had created a system of public welfare measures that was among the most advanced in the world. Through a steady progression of legislation, Finns came to be protected from many of life's vicissitudes. Coverage was virtually universal, and it was seen as a right rather than as charity. Income security measures guaranteed Finns a livelihood despite age, illness, or unemployment. The state also provided many services that assisted Finns in their daily life, such as child care, family counseling, and health care. Although some social problems persisted, the quality of life for Finns overall had steadily and, in many instances, dramatically improved. Better medical care meant that Finns enjoyed improved health, while subsidized housing brought them better and roomier shelter. Efforts also were being made to protect the natural environment.

Finland - Population

Finland had 250,000 inhabitants in the sixteenth century. As a result of wars, the population did not reach the 1 million mark until 1810. Mortality remained high even in the nineteenth century. The famine of 1867 to 1868, for example, killed 5 percent to 10 percent of the population, and it was not until 1880 that there were 2 million Finns. In the last part of the century, improved living conditions began to lower the death rate, but a simultaneous fall in the birth rate and increased emigration retarded growth. As a result, shortly before World War I the country's inhabitants still numbered only 3 million. A short-lived "baby boom" in the first five years after the upheavals of World War II allowed the population to reach 4 million by 1950. Since then the country's population growth has been among the lowest in the world. Low birth rates coupled with heavy emigration resulted in a population of only 4,937,000 in 1987. The annual birth rate since the early 1970s has averaged fewer than 14 births per 1,000 persons, a rate that has caused demographers to estimate that Finland's population would peak at just under 5 million by about the turn of the century, after which it would decline.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Finland's average population density fourteen persons per square kilometer, was the second lowest in Western Europe, just behind Norway's, thirteen and ahead of Sweden's seventeen. Actual population density varied widely, however. The province of Lapland, covering 29.3 percent of the nation's area but containing only about 4 percent of its population, had a population density of about 2 persons per square kilometer, making it one of the earth's emptiest regions. Uusimaa, Finland's second smallest province, which contains the capital city, Helsinki, accounted for only 3.1 percent of the national territory; however, it was home for more than 20 percent of the country's inhabitants, who lived together at a density of 119 per square kilometer, a figure identical to that of Denmark. The provinces of Kymi, Hame, and Turku ja Pori in south-central Finland, which had a mix of rural and urban areas with economies based on both agriculture and industry, were perhaps more truly representative of Finnish conditions. During the 1980s, their population densities ranged from thirty to forty persons per square kilometer.

Demographic movement in Finland did not end with the appearance of immigrants from Sweden in the Middle Ages. Finns who left to work in Swedish mines in the sixteenth century began a national tradition, which continued up through the 1970s, of settling in their neighboring country. During the period of tsarist rule, some 100,000 Finns went to Russia, mainly to the St. Petersburg area. Emigration on a large scale began in the second half of the nineteenth century when Finns, along with millions of other Europeans, set out for the United States and Canada. By 1980 Finland had lost an estimated 400,000 of its citizens to these two countries.

A great number of Finns emigrated to Sweden after World War II, drawn by that country's prosperity and proximity. Emigration began slowly, but, during the 1960s and the second half of the 1970s, tens of thousands left each year for their western neighbor. The peak emigration year was 1970, when 41,000 Finns settled in Sweden, which caused Finland's population actually to fall that year. Because many of the migrants later returned to Finland, definite figures cannot be calculated, but all told, an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 Finns became permanent residents of Sweden in the postwar period. The overall youthfulness of these emigrants meant that the quality of the work force available to Finnish employers was diminished and that the national birth rate slowed. At one point, every eighth Finnish child was born in Sweden. Finland's Swedish-speaking minority was hard hit by this westward migration; its numbers dropped from 350,000 to about 300,000 between 1950 and 1980. By the 1980s, a strong Finnish economy had brought an end to large-scale migration to Sweden. In fact, the overall population flow was reversed because each year several thousand more Finns returned from Sweden than left for it.

However significant the long-term effects of external migration on Finnish society may have been, migration within the country had a greater impact--especially the migration which took place between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s, when half the population moved from one part of the country to another. Before World War II, internal migration had first been a centuries-long process of forming settlements ever farther to the north. Later, however, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century with the coming of Finland's tardy industrialization, there was a slow movement from rural regions toward areas in the south where employment could be found.

Postwar internal migration began with the resettlement within Finland of virtually all the inhabitants of the parts of Karelia ceded to the Soviet Union. Somewhat more than 400,000 persons, more than 10 percent of the nation's population, found new homes elsewhere in Finland, often in the less settled regions of the east and the north. In these regions, new land, which they cleared for farming, was provided for the refugees; in more populated areas, property was requisitioned. The sudden influx of these settlers was successfully dealt with in just a few years. One of the effects of rural resettlement was an increase in the number of farms during the postwar years, a unique occurrence for industrialized nations of this period.

It was, however, the postwar economic transformation that caused an even larger movement of people within Finland, a movement known to Finns as the Great Migration. It was a massive population shift from rural areas, especially those of eastern and northeastern Finland, to the urban, industrialized south. People left rural regions because the mechanization of agriculture and the forestry industry had eliminated jobs. The displaced work force went to areas where employment in the expanding industrial and service sectors was available. This movement began in the 1950s, but it was most intense during the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, assuming proportions that in relative terms were unprecedented for a country outside the Third World. The Great Migration left behind rural areas of abandoned farms with reduced and aging populations, and it allowed the creation of a densely populated postindustrial society in the country's south.

The extent of the demographic shift to the south can be shown by the following figures. Between 1951 and 1975, the population registered an increase of 655,000. During this period, the small province of Uusimaa increased its population by 412,000, growing from 670,000 to 1,092,00; three-quarters of this growth was caused by settlers from other provinces. The population increase experienced by four other southern provinces, the Aland Islands, Turku ja Pori, Hame, and Kymi, taken together with that of Uusimaa amounted to 97 percent of the country's total population increase for these years. The population increase of the central and the northern provinces accounted for the remaining 3 percent. Provinces that experienced an actual population loss during these years were in the east and the northeast--Pohjois-Karjala, Mikkeli, and Kuopio.

One way of visualizing the shift to the south would be to draw a line, bowing slightly to the north, between the port cities of Kotka on the Gulf of Finland and Kaskinen on the Gulf of Bothnia. In 1975 the territory to the south of this line would have contained half of Finland's population. Ten years earlier, such a line, drawn farther to the north to mark off perhaps 20 percent more area, would have encompassed half the population. One hundred years earlier, half the population would have been distributed throughout more than twice as much territory. Another indication of the extent to which Finns were located in the south was that by 1980, approximately 90 percent of them lived in the southernmost 41 percent of Finland.

The Great Migration was also a process of urbanization. Mechanization of agriculture and forestry meant fewer jobs in these sectors that had traditionally taken the bulk of Finland's work force. Redundant workers found new employment in the economically burgeoning south. Just before World War II, three out of four Finns lived in rural areas; it was not until 1969 that more than half the population had come to live in urban communities. The trend continued, and by the early 1980s some 60 percent of Finns lived in urban areas. The largest urban settlement in Finland was greater Helsinki, which, with a population of about 950,000 in the 1980s, contained one-fifth of the country's total population. Two of Helsinki's suburbs, Espoo (established in 1963) and Vantaa (dating only from 1972), were, by a wide margin, the country's fourth and fifth largest cities. The greater urban areas of the cities of Tampere and Turku each contained about 250,000 inhabitants.

The economic and political transformations that Finland has experienced since the last decades of the nineteenth century have radically altered the country's social structure. In the first phase of this transformation, industrialization expanded the economy, created hitherto unknown occupational groups, and forced the old bureaucratic and clerical elite to share power and prestige with a new entrepreneurial class. The political transformation established a democratic republic in which parties representing workers and farmers successfully contended for the highest public offices. After World War II, the two processes of transformation quickened. In one generation, the manner in which Finns lived and earned their livelihood changed in an unprecedented way. An essentially rural society moved to the city; farmers, for centuries the most numerous class, ceded this position to white-collar workers; and prosperity replaced poverty.

Finland - Occupational and Wage Structure

Finland's export-dependent economy continuously adapted to the world market; in doing so, it changed Finnish society as well. The prolonged worldwide boom, beginning in the late 1940s and lasting until the first oil crisis in 1973, was a challenge that Finland met and from which it emerged with a highly sophisticated and diversified economy, including a new occupational structure. Some sectors kept a fairly constant share of the work force. Transportation and construction, for example, each accounted for between 7 and 8 percent in both 1950 and 1985, and manufacturing's share rose only from 22 to 24 percent; however, both the commercial and the service sectors more than doubled their share of the work force, accounting, respectively, for 21 and 28 percent in 1985. The greatest change was the decline of the economically active population employed in agriculture and forestry, from approximately 50 percent in 1950 to 10 percent in 1985. The exodus from farms and forests provided the manpower needed for the growth of other sectors.

Studies of Finnish mobility patterns since World War II have confirmed the significance of this exodus. Sociologists have found that people with a farming background were present in other occupations to a considerably greater extent in Finland than in other West European countries. Finnish data for the early 1980s showed that 30 to 40 percent of those in occupations not requiring much education were the children of farmers, as were about 25 percent in upper-level occupations, a rate two to three times that of France and noticeably higher than that even of neighboring Sweden. Finland also differed from the other Nordic countries in that the generational transition from the rural occupations to white-collar positions was more likely to be direct, bypassing manual occupations.

The most important factor determining social mobility in Finland was education. Children who attained a higher level of education than their parents were often able to rise in the hierarchy of occupations. A tripling or quadrupling in any one generation of the numbers receiving schooling beyond the required minimum reflected the needs of a developing economy for skilled employees. Obtaining advanced training or education was easier for some than for others, however, and the children of whitecollar employees still were more likely to become white-collar employees themselves than were the children of farmers and bluecollar workers. In addition, children of white-collar professionals were more likely than not to remain in that class.

The economic transformation also altered income structure. A noticeable shift was the reduction in wage differentials. The increased wealth produced by an advanced economy was distributed to wage earners via the system of broad income agreements that evolved in the postwar era. Organized sectors of the economy received wage hikes even greater than the economy's growth rate. As a result, blue-collar workers' income came, in time, to match more closely the pay of lowerlevel white-collar employees, and the income of the upper middle class declined in relation to that of other groups.

The wage structure of the 1980s contrasted sharply with that of 1900. At the turn of the century, the pay of a senior government official was many times greater than that of an industrial worker, and households headed by professionals customarily employed servants. By the 1980s, the household of a university-educated professional had an average income not quite twice that of a manual worker in the farming or forestry sector. According to the Central Statistical Office of Finland, if the average household income is measured at 100 in 1984, that of a professional household is 169; of a salaried employee, 118; of a construction worker, 112; and of an ordinary service sector employee, 104. Among households with incomes below the average are those of farm and forestry workers, with an average income measured at 92; those receiving unemployment benefits at 73; and those retired at 44.

Despite a more even distribution of income, Finnish government statistics showed that a considerable portion of taxable income was earned by small segments of the population. In 1985 the top 10 percent of taxpayers earned 26.9 percent of taxable income, and the top 20 percent earned 43.7 percent of income. The bottom 10 percent of taxpayers earned only 0.5 percent of taxable income; the bottom 20 percent, only 3 percent. These figures had remained stable since at least the late 1970s, and they were unlikely to change greatly by the early 1990s, as Finnish taxes remained relatively modest compared with those of other West European countries. Although Finland's income distribution was the most unequal of the five Nordic countries, it did not differ greatly from its neighbors. Sweden, for example, had the most equal distribution, with the top 20 percent earning 38.1 percent of taxable income, and the bottom 20 percent, 5.3 percent.

Finland - Class Structure

For centuries Finnish society consisted of the nobility, clergy, burghers, and peasants. The nineteenth century saw the eclipse of the nobility and clergy and, with the coming of industrialization, the formation of socially significant entrepreneurial and working classes. The civil war and subsequent periods of repression helped to create hostile relations among labor, land, and capital, and in the interwar period Finland was a country marked by deep social fissures along class and language lines. The common national goals of World War II closed some wounds, but it was not until the coming of consensus politics in the second half of the 1960s that constructive relations among competing social groups became possible. An unprecedented prosperity, widely distributed through incomes agreements and a Nordic-style welfare system, served to integrate all groups into society; a more open education system, coupled with the internationally pervasive consumer culture of the postwar era, planed away many differences of taste and conduct related to class.

Finnish scholars have examined the composition of the new consensus society, and their varied findings have prompted serious discussions of its class makeup. Among many issues debated have been the definition of the working class, the extent to which it has been affected by a process of "embourgeoisement," and the constitution of the ruling elite, if any, that has steered the country. One noted Finnish sociologist, Matti Alestalo, familiar with academic studies in these areas, divided Finnish society of the 1980s into six classes: farmers, working class, petite bourgeoisie, lower middle class, upper middle class, and upper class.

For Alestalo, the two most striking changes in Finland's class structure after World War II were the steep drop in the size of the farming population and the great expansion of the lower middle class. During the early 1950s, the number of those working in agriculture actually increased, but thereafter it fell steadily. By 1980 the sector was about one-quarter of its size thirty years earlier, and it consisted almost entirely of farm owners and their families because the number of hired agricultural workers had dwindled. The farmers who remained enjoyed a higher standard of living because it was the smaller and poorer farms that had been abandoned. Another reason for farmers' new prosperity was that they were a highly organized and homogeneous class that successfully lobbied for government policies that benefited them. Farmers differed from other classes in that they were, to a far higher degree, self-recruiting; about 80 percent of farmers were the offspring of farmers. The rationalization of agriculture made small businessmen out of most farmers, but farmers differed from other owners of small enterprises in that they passed on to their children something that was more a way of life than a business.

Alestalo classified as a worker anyone employed for primarily manual work, and he included in this class some white-collar wage earners whom others judged to belong to the lower middle class. According to his calculations, the working class had accounted for about 50 percent of the economically active work force during the entire postwar period, but the sectors in which it was employed had changed. The share of workers employed in agriculture and forestry had dropped from 22 to 4 percent by 1980, while the share active in manufacturing and services had increased to 60 and to 26 percent, respectively. Workers' living standards had improved greatly--more than those of other groups-- since the war, but even in the 1980s workers still had poorer health and less job security than other classes. They were also housed more poorly, and one of their primary concerns was to acquire homes of their own. By the 1980s, Finnish workers had become much more integrated into society than they had been in the immediate postwar period, but they still identified strongly with their labor unions and with the parties that had traditionally represented them. Although workers no longer lived in the isolated enclaves of the interwar period, Alestalo believed it would be premature to say that they had become part of the middle class.

Finland's petite bourgeoisie of shopowners and small entrepreneurs had never been an economically important class. It had declined slowly in size, beginning in the 1950s, until by 1980 it accounted for only 5 percent of the work force. Many small shops operated by this class had closed because of the growth of large retail firms. Many small grocery stores, for example, had gone out of business. There was little intergenerational stability in this class because many of its members came from outside it.

Alestalo divided the large group engaged in nonmanual, whitecollar occupations into a lower middle class and an upper middle class. Educational level, recruitment criteria, complexity of tasks, level of income, and commitment to the organization were among the factors that determined to which of these two classes a person belonged. Both classes had grown since the war, doubling in size between 1960 and 1980, but the lower middle class share of the total work force in 1980 amounted to 24 percent, making it the second largest class in Finland and dwarfing the 8 percent of the upper middle class. Both levels of the middle class had many members born in other classes, but the lower-middle-class had more, one-third having a farming background and another third coming from the working class. Women dominated in the lower middle class, constituting 60 percent of its membership in 1960 and 70 percent in 1980, an indication of their heavy employment in lower-level service-sector positions such as those of office workers, elementary school teachers, and nurses.

According to Alestalo, the country's upper class accounted for about 1 percent of the economically active population; it was made up of the owners, directors, or managers of large industrial concerns, banks, and commercial institutions in the private sector, as well as the heads of large state companies and agencies, and senior civil servants in the public sector. Some members of the country's upper class inherited their wealth or position. In the postwar era, however, most appeared to be hired professionals. Much of the membership of the upper class came from the upper reaches of Finnish society, but several factors resulted in its having a more heterogeneous composition than earlier--the coming to power of socialist parties with leaderships from a various classes, the common practice of politicizing senior civil service appointments, and the greater importance of state institutions.

Finland - FAMILY LIFE

The profound demographic and economic changes that occurred in Finland after World War II affected the Finnish family. Families became smaller, dropping from an average of 3.6 persons in 1950 to an average of 2.7 by 1975. Family composition did not change much in that quarter of a century, however, and in 1975 the percentage of families that consisted of a man and a woman was 24.4; of a couple and children, 61.9; of a woman with offspring, 11.8; of a man and offspring, 1.9. These percentages are not markedly different from those of 1950. Change was seen in the number of children per family, which fell from an average of 2.24 in 1950 to an average of 1.7 in the mid-1980s, and large families were rare. Only 2 percent of families had four or more children, while 51 percent had one child; 38 percent, two children; and 9 percent, three children. The number of Finns under the age of 18 dropped from 1.5 million in 1960 to 1.2 million in 1980.

Attitudes toward marriage have changed substantially since World War II. Most obvious was the declining marriage rate, which dropped from 8.5 marriages per 1,000 Finns in 1950 to 5.8, in 1984, a decline great enough to mean a drop also in absolute numbers. In 1950 there were 34,000 marriages, while in 1984 only 28,500 were registered, despite a growth in population of 800,000. An explanation for the decline was that there was an unprecedented number of unmarried couples. Since the late 1960s, the practice of cohabitation had become increasingly common, so much so that by the late 1970s most marriages in urban areas grew out of what Finns called "open unions." In the 1980s, it was estimated that about 8 percent of couples who lived together, approximately 200,000 people, did so without benefit of marriage. Partners of such unions usually married because of the arrival of offspring or the acquisition of property. A result of the frequency of cohabitation was that marriages were postponed, and the average age for marriage, which had been falling, began to rise in the 1970s. By 1982 the average marriage age was 24.8 years for women and 26.8 years for men, several years higher for both sexes than had been true a decade earlier.

The overwhelming majority of Finns did marry, however. About 90 percent of the women had been married by the age of forty, and spinsterhood was rare. A shortage of women in rural regions, however, meant that some farmers were forced into bachelorhood.

While the number of marriages was declining, divorce became more common, increasing 250 percent between 1950 and 1980. In 1952 there were 3,500 divorces. The 1960s saw a steady increase in this rate, which averaged about 5,000 divorces a year. A high of 10,191 was reached in 1979; afterwards the divorce rate stabilized at about 9,500 per year during the first half of the 1980s.

A number of factors caused the increased frequency of divorce. One was that an increasingly secularized society viewed marriage, more often than before, as an arrangement that could be ended if it did not satisfy its partners. Another reason was that a gradually expanding welfare system could manage an ever greater portion of the family's traditional tasks, and it made couples less dependent on the institution of marriage. Government provisions for parental leave, child allowances, child care programs, and much improved health and pension plans meant that the family was no longer essential for the care of children and aged relatives. A further cause for weakened family and marital ties was seen in the unsettling effects of the Great Migration and in the economic transformation Finland experienced during the 1960s and the 1970s. The rupture of established social patterns brought uncertainty and an increased potential for conflict into personal relationships.

Finland - Status of Women

After examining the position of women around the world, the Washington-based Population Crisis Committee reported in 1988 that Finland, slightly behind top-ranked Sweden and just ahead of the United States, was one of the very best places in which a woman could live. The group reached this conclusion after examining the health, educational, economic, and legal conditions that affect women's lives.

When compared with women of other nations, Finnish women, who accounted for just over 50 percent of the population in the mid1980s , did have a privileged place. They were the first in Europe to gain the franchise, and by the 1980s they routinely constituted about one-third of the membership of the Eduskunta (parliament) and held several ministerial posts. In the 1980s, about 75 percent of adult women worked outside the home; they made up about 48 percent of the work force. Finnish women were as well educated as their male counterparts, and, in some cases, the number of women studying at the university level, for example, were slightly ahead of the number of men. In addition to an expanding welfare system, which since World War II had come to provide them with substantial assistance in the area of childbearing and child-rearing, women had made notable legislative gains that brought them closer to full equality with men.

In 1972 the Council for Equality was established to advise lawmakers on methods for realizing full legal equality for women. In 1983 legislation arranged that both parents were to have equal rights for custody of their children. A year later, women were granted equal rights in the establishment of their children's nationality. Henceforth any child born of a Finnish woman would have Finnish citizenship. After a very heated national debate, legislation was passed in 1985 that gave women an equal right to decide what surname or surnames they and their children would use. These advances were capped by a law that went into effect in early 1987 forbidding any discrimination on the basis of sex and providing protection against it. Once these laws were passed, Finnish authorities signed the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, in 1986.

In a number of areas, however, the country's small feminist movement maintained that the circumstances in which Finnish women lived needed to be improved. Most striking was the disparity in wages. Although women made up just under half the work force and had a tradition of working outside the home, they earned only about two-thirds of the wages paid to men. Occupations in which women predominated, such as those of retail and office personnel, were poorly paid in contrast to those in which men constituted the majority. Despite the sexes' equal educational attainments, and despite a society where sexual differentiation played a smaller role than it did in many other countries, occupational segregation in Finland was marked. In few of the twenty most common occupations were the two sexes equally represented. Only in occupations relating to agriculture, forestry, and school teaching was a rough parity approached, and as few as 6 percent of Finns worked in jobs where 40 to 60 percent of workers were of the opposite sex. Studies also found that equal educational levels did not--in any category of training--prevent women's wages from lagging behind those paid to men. Women tended to occupy lower positions, while males were more often supervisors or managers. This was the case everywhere, whether in schools or universities, in business, in the civil service, or in politics at both the local level and the national level.

In addition to their occupying secondary position in the workplace, women had longer workdays because they performed a greater share of household tasks than did men. On the average, their workweek outside the home was several hours shorter than men's because a greater portion of them were employed only parttime or worked in the service sector where hours were shorter than they were in manufacturing. Studies have found, however, that women spent about twice as much time on housework as men-- about three hours and forty minutes a day, compared with one hour and fifty minutes for men. Men did twice as many household repairs and about an equal amount of shopping, but they devoted only one-third to one-fourth as much time to cleaning, cooking, and caring for children. Given that the bulk of family chores fell to women, and that they were five times more likely than men to head a single-parent family, the shortcomings of Finland's child day-care system affected women more than it did men.

The Equality Law that went into effect in 1987 committed the country to achieving full equality for women. In the late 1980s, there was a timetable listing specific goals to be achieved during the remainder of the twentieth century. The emphasis was to be equality for everyone, rather than protection for women. Efforts were undertaken not only to place women in occupations dominated by males, but also to bring males into fields traditionally believed to belong to the women's sphere, such as child care and elementary school teaching. Another aim was for women to occupy a more equal share of decision-making positions.

Finland - MINORITY GROUPS

Compared with many countries, Finland was quite homogeneous. There were few foreigners, and the ones who were present were usually white-collar employees required for commercial reasons. Very few persons of other races were seen on the nation's streets, and only a handful of refugees were granted asylum. Finns were open about their desire to avoid admitting workers from distant southern countries and hence to avoid the kinds of situations that had led to minor racial incidents in neighboring Sweden and Denmark, let alone those that had caused the serious social problems experienced by Britain.

Finland did have one significant minority, the Swedishspeaking Finns, who had been in the country for more than 1,000 years and who, for centuries, had been the source of its ruling elite. Nineteenth-century nationalism, some fierce struggles in the twentieth century, and changing demographic patterns had deprived this group of its traditional dominance, but law and compromise had allowed the Swedish-speaking Finns a secure and peaceful place within Finnish society. Two smaller minorities had not been successfully assimilated. One, the Lapps, was descended from the original inhabitants of the land; the other, the Gypsies, was a much later addition. The former lived mostly in the high north; the latter were found throughout the country. Neither group was a threat to Finnish society, but both occasionally posed problems for social workers, and their treatment at the hands of their fellow Finns was sometimes cause for regret. Also present in Finland were tiny Jewish and Muslim communities, both of which had roots going back into the nineteenth century.

The oldest known inhabitants of Finland are the Lapps, who were already settled there when the Finns arrived in the southern part of the country about 2,000 years ago. The Lapps were distantly related to the Finns, and both spoke a non-Indo- European language belonging to the Finno-Ugric family of languages. Once present throughout the country, the Lapps gradually moved northward under the pressure of the advancing Finns. As they were a nomadic people in a sparsely settled land, the Lapps were always able to find new and open territory in which to follow their traditional activities of hunting, fishing, and slash-and-burn agriculture. By the sixteenth century, most Lapps lived in the northern half of the country, and it was during this period that they converted to Christianity. By the nineteenth century, most of them lived in the parts of Lapland that were still their home in the 1980s. The last major shift in Lapp settlement was the migration westward of 600 Skolt Lapps from the Petsamo region after it was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1944. A reminder of their eastern origin was their Orthodox faith; the remaining 85 percent of Finland's Lapps were Lutheran.

About 90 percent of Finland's 4,400 Lapps lived in the municipalities of Enontekiö, Inari, and Utsjoki, and in the reindeer herding-area of Sodankyla. According to Finnish regulations, anyone who spoke the Lapp language, Sami, or who had a relative who was a Lapp, was registered as a Lapp in census records. Finnish Lapps spoke three Sami dialects, but by the late 1980s perhaps only a minority actually had Sami as their first language. Lapp children had the right to instruction in Sami, but there were few qualified instructors or textbooks available. One reason for the scarcity of written material in Sami is that the three dialects spoken in Finland made agreement about a common orthography difficult. Perhaps these shortcomings explained why a 1979 study found the educational level of Lapps to be considerably lower than that of other Finns.

Few Finnish Lapps actually led the traditional nomadic life pictured in school geography texts and in travel brochures. Although many Lapps living in rural regions of Lapland earned some of their livelihood from reindeer herding, it was estimated that Lapps owned no more than one-third of Finland's 200,000 reindeer. Only 5 percent of Finnish Lapps had the herds of 250 to 300 reindeer needed to live entirely from this kind of work. Most Lapps worked at more routine activities, including farming, construction, and service industries such as tourism. Often a variety of jobs and sources of income supported Lapp families, which were, on the average, twice the size of a typical Finnish family. Lapps also were aided by old-age pensions and by government welfare, which provided a greater share of their income than it did for Finns as a whole.

There have been many efforts over the years by Finnish authorities to safeguard the Lapps' culture and way of life and to ease their entry into modern society. Officials created bodies that dealt with the Lapp minority, or formed committees that studied their situation. An early body was the Society for the Promotion of Lapp Culture, formed in 1932. In 1960 the government created the Advisory Commission on Lapp Affairs. The Lapps themselves formed the Samii Litto in 1945 and the Johti Sabmelazzat, a more aggressive organization, in 1968. In 1973 the government arranged for elections every four years to a twentymember Sami Parlamenta that was to advise authorities. On the international level, there was the Nordic Sami Council of 1956, and there has been a regularly occurring regional conference since then that represented--in addition to Finland's Lapps-- Norway's 20,000 Lapps, Sweden's 10,000 Lapps, and the 1,000 to 2,000 Lapps who remained in the Kola Peninsula in the Soviet Union.

Finland - Swedish-speaking Finns

The largest minority group in Finland was the Swedish- speaking Finns, who numbered about 250,000 in the late 1980s. The first evidence of their presence in the country, dating from the eighth century, comes from the Aland Islands. After the thirteenth century, colonization from Sweden began in earnest, and within two centuries there was a band of territory occupied by Swedish speakers that ran along the western and the southern coasts and had an average width of about thirty kilometers. Cycles of Finnish and Swedish assimilation have changed the linguistic makeup of this strip of land. In Ostrobothnia, for example, the area of Swedish settlement extended inland as much as sixty kilometers and still existed in the late 1980s, while other areas had eventually reverted to being once again overwhelmingly inhabited by Finnish speakers. By the end of the nineteenth century, the areas of Swedish settlement had shrunk to basically what they were in the second half of the 1980s: Ostrobothnia, the Aland Islands, and a strip along the southern coast that included the capital. The settlers from Sweden gradually lost contact with their relatives in the old country and came to regard Finland as their country. They were distinguished from other Finns only by their language, Swedish, which they retained even after hundreds of years of separation from Sweden.

Although most Swedish-speaking Finns worked as farmers and fishermen, for centuries they also made up the country's governing elite. Even after the country was ceded to Russia in 1809, the aristocracy and nearly all those active in commerce, in the courts, and in education had Swedish as their native language. The country's bureaucracy did virtually all its written work in Swedish. Finnish speakers who desired to enter these groups learned Swedish. Only the clergy used Finnish on a regular basis, for they dealt with the bulk of the population who, for the most part, knew only that language. There were no campaigns to force Swedish on Finnish speakers however, and the problem of language as a social issue did not exist during the period of Swedish rule.

Swedish retained its primacy until the second half of the nineteenth century, when, as a result of budding nationalism, it was gradually displaced by Finnish. A good many of the strongest advocates of Finnish nationalism were Swedish speakers who used their own language in the patriotic pamphlets and journals of the time because few of them could write Finnish. By the end of the century, the nationalist movement had been successful in fostering the birth of Finnish as a written language and in bringing about the formation of an educated Finnish-speaking elite. Numbering 350,000 and constituting 13 percent of the country's population in 1900, Swedish-speaking Finns were still disproportionately influential and wealthy, but they were no longer dominant in the country of their birth.

Independent Finland's new Constitution protected the Swedish- speaking minority, in that it made both Finnish and Swedish national languages of equal official status, stipulating that a citizen be able to use either language in courts and have government documents relating to him or her issued in his or her language, and that the cultural and economic needs of both language groups be treated equally. The Language Act of 1922 covered many of the practical questions engendered by these constitutional rights. Despite these legal provisions, however, there were still currents of Finnish opinion that wished to see a curtailment of the Swedish-speaking minority's right to protect its cultural identity. Attempts at Finnicization failed, however, and the advent of the national crisis of World War II submerged disagreements about the language issue. Since the war, there have been occasional squabbles about practical measures for realizing the minority's economic and cultural rights, but none about the inherent value of the policy of equality.

The Language Act of 1922, and its subsequent revisions, arranged for the realization of the rights of the Swedish- speaking minority. The basic units for protecting and furthering the exercise of these rights were the self-governing municipalities. After each ten-year census, Finland's nearly 500 municipalities were classified as either unilingual or bilingual with a majority language. In the 1980s, there were 461 municipalities: 396 Finnish-speaking; 21 bilingual with a Finnish-speaking majority; 24 Swedish-speaking; 20 bilingual with Swedish as the majority language. A municipality was bilingual if the number of speakers of the minority language exceeded either 3,000 or 8 percent of its population. If a municipality had been classified as bilingual, it could not revert to unilingual status until the minority population declined to less than 6 percent.

Language classification had important consequences for the inhabitants of a municipality, for it determined which language was to be used for government business. In bilingual municipalities, all documents affecting the general public--tax forms, for example--had to be published in both languages. In addition, national and local government officials had to be bilingual--a requirement not always met, however--and public notices and road signs had to be in both languages. In unilingual communities this was not the case. Documents relating directly to an individual case could be translated, but otherwise official business was transacted in the municipality's language. If someone were involved in a court case, however, and did not know the prevailing language, translation would be provided.

The method used to classify municipalities had to be regarded as successful because, although the overwhelming majority of municipalities were unilingual Finnish-speaking communities, only 4 percent of the Swedish-speaking minority lived in municipalities where their language was not used. Finnish- speaking Finns fared even better, for less than 1 percent of them lived where their language was not used officially. Some of the Swedish speakers who lived apart from their fellows did so voluntarily because they had management positions at factories and plants in regions that were nearly entirely Finnish-speaking areas. Because they were educated, these managers knew Finnish. They were also representatives of the tradition of "brukssvenskar" (literally, "factory Swedes"), and were sometimes the only Swedish speakers their brother Finns knew.

On the national level, all laws and decrees had to be issued in both languages, and the Swedish-speaking minority had the right to have Swedish-language programs on the state radio and television networks. Swedish-language schools had to be established wherever there was a sufficient number of pupils. There were several Swedish-language institutions of higher learning, and a specified number of the professorial chairs at the University of Helsinki was reserved for Swedish speakers, as was one brigade in the army. A drawback for the Swedish-speaking minority, though, was that because of its small size, the national government could not, for practical reasons, publish in Swedish all parliamentary deliberations, committee reports, and official documents.

The Swedish-speaking minority was well represented in various sectors of society. The moderate Swedish People's Party (Svenska Folkpartiet--SFP) got the votes of most Swedish speakers, with the exception of workers who more often than not voted for socialist parties. The SFP polled enough support to hold a number of seats in the Eduskunta that usually matched closely the percentage of Swedish speakers in the country's total population. It very often had ministers in the cabinet as well. An unofficial special body, the Swedish People's Assembly (Svenska Finlands Folkting), representing all members of the minority, functioned in an advisory capacity to regular governing institutions. Most national organizations, whether economic, academic, social, or religious, had branches or separate equivalents for Swedish speakers. Because of its long commercial and maritime traditions, the Swedish-speaking minority was disproportionately strong in some sectors of the financial community and the shipping industry. In general, however, with the exception of the upper middle class, where there were more Swedish speakers than usual, the class distribution of the minority matched fairly closely that of the larger community.

The size of the Swedish-speaking minority increased fairly steadily until 1940, when it numbered 354,000 persons, or 9.6 percent of the country's total population. Since then it has declined, dropping to 296,000, or 6.1 percent of the population, in 1987. In relative terms, however, it has been in decline for centuries, dropping from 17.5 percent in 1610, and it was expected to go below 6 percent by the end of the twentieth century. The decline stemmed from a variety of factors: a slightly lower birth rate than the rest of the population during some periods; a greater rate of emigration to the United States before World War I; a large loss of some 50,000 persons who settled permanently in Sweden in the decades after World War II; and frequent marriages with Finnish speakers.

By the 1980s, more than half the marriages of Swedish- speaking Finns were to persons from outside their language group. In urban areas, especially in Helsinki, the rate was over 60 percent. This was not surprising because the members of the minority group were usually bilingual, and there were no legal constraints (although there were sometimes social and familial constraints) against marrying those speaking the majority language. The bilingualism of the minority was caused by compulsory schooling in the majority language from the third school year on, and from living in a society where, with the exception of some rural areas, speaking only Swedish was a serious handicap because the majority group usually had a poor knowledge of Swedish, despite compulsory study of it for several years. Swedish-speaking Finns were easily able then to cross from one language group to another. However highly they valued their mother tongue and their group's cultural identity, they were not bound by them when selecting friends or spouses. A survey of the late 1970s found, for example, that Swedish-speaking natives of Helsinki felt they had more in common with natives of their city who did not speak their language than they did with Swedish speakers from other regions. More often than not, Swedish- speaking Finns married outside their group. These marriages posed a danger to their language community in that the resulting offspring were usually registered as speakers of the majority language, even when they were truly bilingual. Thus the Finnish practice of counting speakers of a language by the principle of personality, that is on an individual basis, rather than by the principle of territoriality, as was done only for the Aland Islands, was leading to a decline in the size of the Swedish- speaking minority.

Finland - Gypsies

Gypsies have been present in Finland since the second half of the sixteenth century. With their unusual dress, unique customs, and specialized trades for earning their livelihood, Gypsies have stood out, and their stay in the country has not been an easy one. They have suffered periodic harassment from the hands of both private citizens and public officials, and the last of the special laws directed against them was repealed only in 1883. Even in the second half of the 1980s, Finland's 5,000 to 6,000 Gypsies remained a distinct group, separated from the general population both by their own choice and by the fears and the prejudices many Finns felt toward them.

Finnish Gypsies, like gypsies elsewhere, chose to live apart from the dominant societal groups. A Gypsy's loyalty was to his or her family and to Gypsies in general. Marriages with nonGypsies were uncommon, and the Gypsies' own language, spoken as a first language only by a few in the 1980s, was used to keep outsiders away. An individual's place within Gypsy society was largely determined by age and by sex, old males having authority. A highly developed system of values and a code of conduct governed a Gypsy's behavior, and when Gypsy sanctions, violent or not, were imposed, for example via "blood feuds," they had far more meaning than any legal or social sanctions of Finnish society.

Unlike the Lapps, who lived concentrated in a single region, the Gypsies lived throughout Finland. While most Lapps wore ordinary clothing in their everyday life, Gypsies could be identified by their dress; the men generally wore high boots and the women almost always dressed in very full, long velvet skirts. Like most Lapps, however, Gypsies also had largely abandoned a nomadic way of life and had permanent residences. Gypsy men had for centuries worked as horse traders, but they had adapted themselves to postwar Finland by being active as horse breeders and as dealers in cars and scrap metal. Women continued their traditional trades of fortune telling and handicrafts.

Since the 1960s, Finnish authorities have undertaken measures to improve the Gypsies' standard of life. Generous state financial arrangements have improved their housing. Their low educational level (an estimated 20 percent of adult Gypsies could not read) was raised, in part, through more vocational training. A permanent Advisory Commission on Gypsy Affairs was set up in 1968, and in 1970 racial discrimination was outlawed through an addition to the penal code. The law punished blatant acts such as barring Gypsies from restaurants or shops or subjecting them to unusual surveillance by shopkeepers or the police.

Finland - Jewish and Muslim Communities

In the 1980s, there were about 1,300 Jews in Finland, 800 of whom lived in Helsinki and most of the remainder of whom lived in Turku. During the period of Swedish rule, Jews had been forbidden to live in Finland. Once the country became part of the Russian Empire, however, Jewish veterans of the tsarist army had the right to settle anywhere they wished within the empire. Although constrained by law to follow certain occupations, mainly those connected with the sale of clothes, the Jewish community in Finland was able to prosper, and 1890 it numbered about 1,000. Finnish independence brought complete civil rights, and during the interwar period there were some 2,000 Jews in Finland, most of them living in urban areas in the south. During World War II, Finnish authorities refused to deliver Jews to the Nazis, and the country's Jewish community survived the war virtually intact. By the 1980s, assimilation and emigration had significantly reduced the size of the community, and it was only with some difficulty that it maintained synagogues, schools, libraries, and other pertinent institutions.

The Muslim community in Finland was even smaller than the Jewish community; it numbered only about 900, most of whom were found in Helsinki. The Muslims first came to Finland from Turkey in the mid-nineteenth century and have remained there ever since, active in commerce. Like their Jewish counterparts, Finnish Muslims have had difficulty maintaining all the institutions needed by a social group because of their small number.

Finland - RELIGION

The right to worship freely is guaranteed by Article 8 and Article 9 of the Constitution of 1919 and by the Freedom of Religion Act that went into effect in 1923. In the 1980s, there were about thirty registered religions in the country, all of which met the minimum requirement of having at least thirty followers. Despite this wealth of religions, the country's religious life was dominated by one of its two state churches, the Lutheran Church of Finland, which had nearly 90 percent of the population as members. The other state church, the Orthodox Church of Finland, had a membership of about 1 percent of the population. The remaining churches or religions had 2 percent of the people in their congregations. Followers of the smaller churches included Jews, Muslims, Roman Catholics, a variety of Protestants, Mormons, Christian Scientists, and converts to eastern religions. Seven percent belonged to no church.

Religion was a part of public life in a variety of ways. The celebration of the gaining of Finnish independence on December 6 had a religious component, as did the annual opening of the Eduskunta. There were three religious holidays when public entertainments were not permitted. The state churches kept the official records of their members' civil status, and the vast majority of marriages were performed in the state churches and had the same legal status as a civil ceremony. Church members paid a church tax that was collected and paid to the churches by state authorities. Persons wishing to leave one of the state churches had to do so formally, and records of this decision were maintained. Religious instruction was a regular part of the schools' curricula, and children wishing to be excused from it had to request the right to take a substitute course. The armed forces had chaplains, the highest of whom was a bishop, and their services were, in practice, usually obligatory for recruits. Chaplains' salaries were paid by the state, as were those of the higher clergy of the two state churches. The oath generally used in court had a religious content, though nonbelievers had the right to one that made no reference to a deity and instead was only a solemn affirmation of the truth of their testimony. Although it was rarely invoked, there was a Finnish law against blasphemy. Numerous religious programs and services were broadcast on the country's state radio and television networks.

Much of this religious influence was based in Finland's past, however, and did not correspond with attitudes of most Finns, because by the 1980s the country had become a highly secularized society. Polls revealed, for example, that about 70 percent of the population believed in God, a good deal fewer than the 90 percent who belonged to the state churches. About 40 percent of the population believed that the best place to find God was in the Bible, but only about 10 percent read it at least once a week, striking figures for a Protestant country. Frequent church attendance was unusual. Surveys conducted during the 1980s found that perhaps as few as 4 percent went to church every Sunday, about 12 percent went once a month, and 43 percent went at least once during the course of a year.

These figures did not give a complete picture of Finnish religious life, however. Finland's pietist traditions meant that there was much private prayer as opposed to public worship; about one-third of Finns under the age of thirty-five and more than half of those above this age reportedly prayed every week. In addition, the Lutheran Church touched the lives of many Finns through its considerable social work and counseling, although these activities were often not strictly religious in nature.

The role the state churches played in life's key moments made them, for reasons of tradition, important to most Finns, even to those who were not religious. More Finns were baptized, married, and buried with church rites than were members of the churches. A very important rite of passage for adolescents was confirmation, which signified a coming of age even for those from freethinking families. For this reason, more than 90 percent of 15-year-olds were confirmed, despite the several weeks of lessons this entailed. Although church membership was a routine affair for many, polls conducted in the 1970s and the 1980s consistently found that only about 10 percent of those interviewed had given any serious thought to leaving a state church, even though freedom from the church tax would mean a small financial gain. For many Finns, leaving their church would be too great a break with family and community traditions. In addition, some of the values that churches had traditionally stood for had been internalized. Observers noted, for example, that although Finland had undoubtedly become more secularized since World War II, particularly in the urban areas, the traditional Lutheran virtues of hard work and self-discipline, inculcated over the centuries, were still evident in the lives of most Finns.

Finland - Lutheran Church of Finland

Religious life in Finland since the Protesrant Reformation has been dominated by the Lutheran Church of Finland. For most of this period, almost all Finns belonged to it. In the late 1980s, about 90 percent of the population were members, and an even greater number participated in its rituals. During the time of Swedish rule, the church was the country's state church, and it was part of the national government, subordinate to the Swedish king. Even when headed during the nineteenth century by Russian tsars of the Orthodox faith, the Lutheran Church remained a state church. Since 1809, however, it has had to share this distinction with the Orthodox Church, which had followers in the eastern province of Karelia.

The Ecclesiastical Law of 1869 gave the Lutheran Church a measure of independence from the state by allowing it a representative body, the Synod, that could decide many important church matters on its own. When Finland became independent, the church gained a greater degree of autonomy, although it still was subject to state supervision. The president, for example, decided who was to become a bishop, using a list of three candidates submitted by the Lutheran Church. In 1943 the formation of its own central administration, separate from the Ministry of Education, meant the church was largely self-sufficient. Some practical matters, such as levels of church taxes, salaries and pensions, or reorganization of church districts, were still decided by the government or required its approval, but in many other matters the church set its own course.

A study commission of 1977 recommended a greater separation of church and state as a goal for Finnish society. The next decade's discussion of abolishing the presidential selection of bishops was one example of efforts to realize this goal. The gradual movement away from the national government meant that the Lutheran Church of Finland, although still a state church, was more independent than the other Lutheran churches of the Nordic region. This independence was so marked that students of religion commonly regarded it not so much as a state church, but as a folk church that served all Finns, members and nonmembers alike.

Finland - Revivalist Movements Within the Lutheran Church

Another characteristic of the Lutheran Church of Finland that distinguished it from the other Lutheran churches of the Nordic countries was the strong tradition of revivalism that flourished within it. Elsewhere, revivalists left the state churches and founded their own. Although Finnish revivalist movements at first seemed a threat to the state church, ecclesiastical authorities came to learn that these new currents of religious feeling could enrich the church rather than diminish it. Since the nineteenth century, about half a dozen distinct movements had found a secure and enduring place within the established church. This meant that the Lutheran Church in Finland did not experience recurring splits caused by members dissatisfied for reasons of doctrine or temperament. The enthusiasm and the fervor of the revivalists were a frequent tonic to the state church, and their presence within it allowed the church closer ties to the whole of the Finnish people than would otherwise have been possible.

The revivalist movements remained distinctly Lutheran; they adhered to the doctrine of justification by faith alone as the center of preaching and teaching, and made clear demarcations between the Kingdom of God and the material world. Worldly pleasures were generally decried, with a varying degree of emphasis being placed instead on abstinence, faith, abnegation, and prayer. The faithful could go to God directly without the church and clergy as intermediaries. Priestly intervention was not necessary in the spiritual realm. In the material world, however, there was secular government with a justified civil authority worthy of obedience. The movements also followed the traditional Lutheran insistence on giving ritual a smaller place than it enjoyed in Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. Hence, there were only two sacraments--baptism and Holy Communion-- retained as symbols to strengthen faith, for Lutherans felt that they had no inherent redemptive value.

In the late 1980s, the five or six main movements had well over 100,000 members and each movement was vigorous enough to have a central organization, newspaper, or magazine. Each held a summer convention that could attract tens of thousands of the devout. Though the movements might on occasion disagree with positions adopted by the Lutheran Church as a whole, they could protest them, or could actually prevent their adoption at the church's democratically arranged meetings and forums.

The earliest of the movements was The Awakened. Its most important leader, Paavo Ruotsalainen (1777-1852), was an uneducated peasant who attracted a substantial following by appealing to the poor and the oppressed through his emphases on Divine greatness and on human wretchedness and helplessness. Man, he proclaimed, was inept and could never succeed; only God redeemed and healed. Man's duties, then, were to abandon his own works and to trust only in God. Followers of The Awakened held religious services at their homes to supplement those of the church. Unlike the Laestadians, who belonged to a movement founded somewhat later, followers of The Awakened were tolerant; they did not call attention to themselves as believers to whom grace belongs, in contrast to the rest of the world, which was unrepentant. In the late 1980s, the movement was strongest in the eastern Savo region and in Ostrobothnia, and it attracted between 30,000 and 40,000 to its summer meetings.

The Laestadian Movement, named after its founder, Lars Levi Laestadius (1800-61), a Swedish preacher in Lapland, was perhaps the strongest of all the revivalist movements; even in the 1980s, it could attract 100,000 of the faithful to its mass meetings. One reason for its large gatherings was the importance the movement attached to the visible congregation and to the absolution given to its members after confession. The movement's services were often marked by ecstatic outbursts. Laestadians were somewhat intolerant, as they stressed the certainty of salvation for Christians and the probability of damnation for nonbelievers. This adamancy caused occasional rifts within the movement. Laestadians continued to have their stronghold in northern Finland, where the movement had originated.

The Evangelical Movement was an offshoot of The Awakened. Its founder, Fredrik Gabriel Hedberg (1811-93), believed that an obsession with wretchedness detracted from the assurance of salvation that a Christian has through his faith in Christ's righteousness. The movement stressed infant baptism, as its adherents believed the whole of salvation was given through this sacrament. It also was noted for its missionary work abroad.

The smallest of the old revivalist groups was that of the Supplicationists, founded by Henrik Renqvist (1789-1866), an early advocate of the temperance movement. Supplicationists believed in frequent and fervent prayer and in meetings at which all remained on their knees. Supplicationists were active mostly in southwestern Finland. Quite conservative in their outlook, they were not especially successful in attracting young converts.

Revivalism has also seen the formation of newer groups. One of these was the Fifth Revival, dating from shortly before World War II. It stressed missionary work and evangelism. In the 1970s Charismatics also began to be active within the Lutheran Church of Finland.

Finland - Organization and Duties of the Lutheran Church

The Lutheran Church was divided into eight dioceses, each headed by a bishop. An exception was the diocese of Turku, which was headed by an archbishop. Although he had no legal power over the other bishops, the archbishop was regarded as the first among equals and was the country's most prominent clergyman. He presided over important church meetings and was frequently the church's spokesman. One of the dioceses, that of BorgA, did not have a primarily territorial basis, but ministered to the Swedish-speaking members of the church throughout the country. For administrative purposes, each diocese had a chapter, consisting of the bishop, three other clergymen, and a jurist. The chapter also functioned as a court to resolve disputes and to answer appeals against church decisions. Appeals against chapter decisions were handled by higher state courts. The highest subdivision of the diocese was the deanery, an administrative entity no longer of much importance. The seventy-odd deaneries were divided into parishes. In the late 1980s, there were just under 600 of these core units of the church. The 600 parishes varied widely in both the number of their parishioners and their geographic extent. In the sparsely populated north, for example, a parish could have more square kilometers within its jurisdiction than it did parishioners, while there were nearly three dozen parishes in Helsinki alone.

The Lutheran Church of Finland employed about 18,000 persons in 1987, some 10,000 of whom worked full-time. There were about 1,400 ministers, enough to meet the church's needs. They received their training at two institutions, one in Helsinki and the other in Turku. The first women priests were ordained in 1988. Until that time, women had been limited to the secondary role of lector, with duties that encompassed teaching, pastoral work, and administering Holy Communion.

The highest body of the church was the Synod, which met twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall. The 108-member body consisted of the 8 bishops, 1 military bishop, 2 high judges, 1 representative of the government, and 96 elected delegates--64 of whom were laymen and 32 of whom were clergymen. The number of delegates that the individual diocese sent to the Synod depended on its population, but each diocese sent at least six delegates, two of whom were clergymen. Chaired by the archbishop, the Synod had a number of responsibilities, including deliberating on legislative questions, directing disbursement of the resources of the central church fund, supervising Bible translations, discussing the nature of relations with other religious organizations, and resolving fundamental and highly divisive issues.

Two other central bodies were the Ecclesiastical Board and the Bishops' Conference. The former was a permanent body, chaired by the archbishop, that oversaw the church's administration and finances and prepared matters for discussion at the Synod. The latter, consisting of the bishops and eight other church officials, met twice a year to discuss, in an unbinding way, issues of concern to the dioceses.

The church placed great emphasis on congregational life. Despite the apparent episcopal nature of the church organization, parishes were quite independent. They made most of their decisions on their own and had only to observe the constraints of ecclesiastical law. By means of democratically elected councils and boards, they chose their own pastors, church musicians, and administrative personnel and, to some degree, set their own salaries. Every adult member of a parish had the right to vote, and he or she had the possibility of winning a place on the council or board, which meant that the laity had much say about how its parish was run.

Parishes were financially independent, for it was to them that the national government paid the church tax, equal to about 1 percent of the taxable income of parishioners. Corporations within a parish were also obliged to pay the church tax and, altogether, this tax represented about 75 percent of the Lutheran Church's income. Some of the religious and social services that a parish managed yielded income, too, as did the 1 percent of the nation's forests that were in church possession. An elected administrative board and an executive council managed parish finances, although in urban areas parishes sometimes banded together to handle such practical details. Parishes were obliged, however, to pay about 6 percent of their income to a fund, used by the church as a whole, to help poorer parishes and to pay for other activities like missionary work.

The historical role of the Lutheran Church as a state church was reflected in the services managed by the parish that in other countries were the concern of secular government. For instance, it maintained the official population records for all of its members. Those of nonmembers were kept by local government. Parishes managed graveyards. In an area where there was no alternative cemetery, nonmembers or nonbelievers could be buried in one belonging to the church. Weddings performed by the parish had the same value as civil services, provided both the bride and groom were Christians.

Parishes did not limit themselves to regular religious services and to other activities such as Sunday schools or study groups. They often organized a specifically Finnish religious meeting, the seurat, which had its origins in the revivalist tradition and was a mixture of hymns and addresses by both clergy and laymen.

Parish personnel also offered services of a secular nature that supplemented social services provided by the state. Church law required that each parish have a deacon or deaconess who had many of the responsibilities of a state social worker. Often trained as nurses, deaconesses ministered to the sick, aged, and handicapped and coordinated their work with state agencies. Since World War II, the church has been active in providing personnel and facilities to youth programs, such as summer camps.

Finland - Orthodox Church of Finland

The other state church was the Orthodox Church of Finland. Although it had a much smaller membership than the Lutheran Church of Finland, only 56,000 in 1987, it enjoyed the same legal status and rights as the larger church. The state paid it the church tax it had collected from its parishioners, and the Orthodox Church kept parishioners' official demographic records. Although the state had some control over its activity, the Orthodox Church was largely independent. It also was a distinctly Finnish church, for although it rites and practices were Slavic, in accordance with Orthodox doctrine, it had been using the Finnish language in its services since the second half of the nineteenth century. After Finland became independent, the Orthodox Church of Finland broke with the Russian Orthodox Church, and after 1923, it belonged to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the leader of which was its nominal head.

Before World War II, most members of the Orthodox Church lived in the province of Karelia. After much of the province was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944, most Finns living in the annexed areas fled westward. Some 70 percent of the members of the Orthodox Church were therefore dispersed throughout Finland, and many settled in regions where before there had been only Lutherans. By the 1980s, there were twenty-five parishes in the country. In 1980 a third diocese was created in northern Finland to minister better to Orthodox Christians living in that region and to make the Orthodox Church eligible to become fully autonomous, or in Orthodox terminology, autocephalous.

The highest official of the Finnish church was the archbishop of the diocese of Karelia, with its seat at Kuopio. Two other bishops, or metropolitans, headed the other two dioceses, those of Helsinki and Oulu. The church's highest governing body was the Church Assembly, which met every third year unless more frequent meetings were necessary. It consisted of thirty-four voting members, seventeen of whom were laymen. Routine administration was managed by the Church Council. The Bishops' Synod approved the doctrinal decisions of the assembly. Local administrative practices were democratized, and mirrored the power and influence of the laity seen in the Lutheran Church.

Finland - Smaller Registered Churches

In the 1980s, there were more than two dozen other registered religions in Finland, but none of them enjoyed the legal status of the two state churches. The largest single group in the second half of the 1980s consisted of several Pentecostal churches that drew on the revivalist strains always present in the Finnish religious tradition. Pentecostal churches had a total congregation of about 40,000, distributed in a number of organizations. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) had some success and had about 4,000 followers. Roman Catholics numbered about 4,000, distributed in 5 parishes presided over by a bishop. Most of the score of priests were foreigners, and Roman Catholic Finns who desired ordination had to study abroad. So successful had the Protestant Reformation been in extirpating Roman Catholicism from Finland that for more than three centuries no Finn had become a Roman Catholic priest until one was ordained in Paris in 1903. The Jewish community of 1,200 persons was located in southern urban areas. It was so small that it was having trouble sustaining itself and had to seek its rabbi abroad. Finland's tiny Muslim community dated from the nineteenth century and numbered about 900. As in other Western countries, eastern religions and sects had received some attention in Finland in recent decades. The most successful of them was the Bahai Society of Finland with just over 300 followers.

Finland - EDUCATION

Finland has had a strong tradition of literacy since the Protestant Reformation. The Lutheran Church aimed at widespread literacy to enable the common man to read the Bible. In the next century, proof of literacy became a requirement for the right to marry. By the second half of the nineteenth century, legislation was in place for a general system of elementary education, although the tsarist regime did not allow its realization. After independence, a Comprehensive Education Act was passed in 1921 that met the state's constitutional requirement to provide "universal compulsory education," including elementary education, at no cost. Legislation also stipulated that Finnish citizens had a duty to be educated.

In the postwar period, the basic goal of Finnish education authorities has been to create a system that would provide equal educational opportunities for everyone, would guarantee the country a populace able to meet the technological challenges of the international marketplace, would encourage democratic values, and would allow each person the fullest realization of his or her potential. Work to realize this goal has led since the 1960s to profound changes in the organization of the country's school system. The old elementary school system that determined at an early age whether pupils were to follow a general or an academic course of studies was replaced by a uniform comprehensive system that postponed this decision until the mid-teens and that, even then, did not bar anyone from higher training at a later time. Secondary education was broadened and reformed to allow a greater range of choices and opportunities. University education was expanded and distributed more equally across the country, its control was democratized, and access to it was widened.

The School System Act, passed in 1968, abolished the twotrack elementary school system and replaced it with a single comprehensive school with a nine-year course of studies. The new school was uniform throughout the country and was compulsory for all children between the ages of seven and sixteen. Children in Finland began school at a later age than those in many other countries because of the distances some of them had to travel in sparsely settled areas. Private schools also were gradually incorporated into the system, which was fully in place by the late 1970s.

The school program was broken into two stages: a lower level for the first six grades and an upper level for grades seven through nine. In some areas there was a voluntary tenth year. The school year began in the second half of August and ended in early June, with a two-week break at Christmas and a one-week break both in the winter and at Easter. The pre-school system was directed by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. In the mid-1980s, this system was able to accommodate only onethird of the children of the relevant age group.

Instruction at comprehensive schools was free, as were books, a daily hot meal, transportation, and even lodging for those students who lived too far from a school to manage a daily commute. Efforts were made to ensure that the quality of instruction did not vary and that children in Lapland were as well instructed as those in Helsinki. In bilingual communities, children had the right to instruction in their own language. Children also had the right to classes in their own religion, unless there were too few students of a particular religion to make this practicable, or they could be excused from religious instruction. If at least five students had no religion, an alternative nonreligious course was obligatory. Schools were not divided according to sex.

After graduation from a comprehensive school, students continued their educations at either vocational schools or the more demanding vocational institutes, or at the academically oriented secondary schools. During the 1980s, a slight majority of students chose vocational training to prepare them for one or more of several hundred commercial and technical occupations. Some 60 percent of these students attended two-year to three-year courses at vocational schools, while the remainder enrolled in four-year to five-year courses at vocational institutes that led to careers in highly skilled fields or to management and planning positions. Students at the academic high schools had to pass an examination, after three years of study, before they could attend a university. Fewer than half passed this examination, and only about one-fourth of those successful managed to secure places at universities. Although the academic high school was the most common route to a university in the 1980s, an increasing number of places there were being held for graduates of vocational institutes.

The schools' curricula were set by law, and their content was determined at the national level by the Ministry of Education, the National Board of General Education, and the National Board of Vocational Education. Local authorities, however, had some say about how they would be taught. Language instruction accounted for one-third of teaching time in comprehensive schools and for somewhat more in secondary schools. In the third grade, children began taking a second language, usually Finnish for Swedish speakers and English for the others. Sciences and mathematics accounted for about 30 percent of teaching time at the comprehensive level and for somewhat less at academic schools at the secondary level, while social and humanistic courses accounted for 12 percent in the former and 18 percent in the latter. Comprehensive schools spent one-fourth of their time on art, physical education, and related courses, while secondary schools accorded them a little less than one-fifth of their time. The courses vocational schools offered varied greatly because of the wide variety of material taught. After the first year of general courses, most instruction was connected directly with the chosen specialty.

Since the late 1970s, all teachers in the comprehensive and secondary schools have been obliged to have a university degree. Two art academies and eight universities provided teacher education. Vocational teachers, given the wide variety of courses they taught, could sometimes substitute occupational experience for university training. Teachers of the first six years of comprehensive school functioned as class teachers rather than as subject specialists and were required to have a Master of Education degree, while their colleagues in the upper levels needed a master's degree in the subject they had chosen to teach. Although selection criteria for places in teacher training were stringent (only 10 percent of applicants were accepted), Finland had enough teachers to allow classes in the comprehensive system to average about 30 pupils; classes in the secondary schools averaged about 20 pupils. In sparsely populated areas, however, it was sometimes necessary to form classes with pupils of different ages and grade levels.

Special education generally was accomplished within regular schools. This practice was in consonance with the overall policy of avoiding "tracking," which was seen to limit a pupil's range of educational opportunities by placing him or her at a particular level of instruction. An attempt was made to keep all members of a class together and to address special needs through individual counseling and tutoring. This principle reflected the overriding goal of having an open and flexible school system that matched individual qualities and aspirations.

Finland - Higher Education

In the late 1980s, Finland's system of higher education consisted of ten universities--each with at least several different faculties--seven one-discipline institutions with such specialties as technology or business administration, and three art academies. The largest, the University of Helsinki, was founded in 1640. The remainder date from the twentieth century; the newest, the University of Lapland at Rovaniemi, from 1979. During the mid-1980s, there were about 90,000 students at institutions of higher education. Competition for acceptance for university-level study was intense, and fewer than one out of four applicants obtained a place. There were no private universities in Finland.

By the late 1980s, institutions of higher learning were granting three degrees: a master's degree that required from four to six years of study; a graduate degree, the licentiate, requiring another two years of study; and the doctorate, awarded usually after four years or so of graduate study. A candidate did not have to obtain the licentiate to be awarded the doctorate.

Like the country's primary and secondary schools, Finnish universities were free. To help with living expenses, however, students who were enrolled in secondary schools and at universities were entitled to financial aid by the Study Allowances Act of 1972. By the 1980s, more than half the student body at these institutions received aid in the form of allowances or low-interest loans.

Institutions of higher learning had about 7,000 instructors altogether in the 1980s. Academic freedom was ensured through a tenure system that protected most of this number from dismissal. The institutions themselves were under the overall direction of the Ministry of Education, but they enjoyed considerable internal autonomy. The autonomy of the University of Helsinki was even guaranteed by the Constitution of 1919. The trend toward greater internal democracy had also touched Finnish universities, and by the late 1980s professors were sharing much of their former power with other faculty members, university staff, and students.

An area of future growth in Finnish education was expected to be that of supplementary education at the university level. No degrees were to be granted, but much greater access to university resources was to be offered to those wishing to deepen their knowledge of a particular field either for professional reasons or for personal pleasure. It was estimated that, by the early 1990s, one-tenth of university teaching would occur in an openuniversity -like forum.

Finland - Adult Education

Finland had a long tradition of adult education, and by the 1980s nearly one million Finns were receiving some kind of instruction each year. Forty percent of them did so for professional reasons. Adult education appeared in a number of forms, such as secondary evening schools, civic and workers' institutes, study centers, vocational course centers, and folk high schools. Study centers allowed groups to follow study plans of their own making, with educational and financial assistance provided by the state. Folk high schools were a distinctly Nordic institution. Originating in Denmark in the nineteenth century, folk high schools became common throughout the region. Adults of all ages could stay at them for several weeks and take courses in subjects that ranged from handicrafts to economics.

Finland - PUBLIC WELFARE

In the late 1980s, Finland had one of the world's most advanced welfare systems, one that guaranteed decent living conditions for all Finns. Created almost entirely during the first three decades after World War II, the system was an outgrowth of the traditional Nordic belief that the state was not inherently hostile to the well-being of its citizens, but could intervene benevolently on their behalf. According to some social historians, the basis of this belief was a relatively benign history that had allowed the gradual emergence of a free and independent peasantry in the Nordic countries and had curtailed the dominance of the nobility and the subsequent formation of a powerful right wing. Finland's history has been harsher than the histories of the other Nordic countries, but not harsh enough to bar the country from following their path of social development.

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Finnish social policy had as its goal a lessening of class friction. The few existing pieces of social legislation addressed the needs of specific groups rather than of society as a whole. After the Civil War, little was accomplished in welfare legislation. A woefully insufficient national pension plan was set up in 1937, as were measures to aid needy mothers. It was only after World War II that Finnish social policy acquired the characteristics that in the next decades made it similar to other Nordic systems of social welfare.

According to Finnish sociologist Erik Allardt, the hallmark of the Nordic welfare system was its comprehensiveness. Unlike the welfare systems of the United States or most West European countries, those of the Nordic countries covered the entire population, and they were not limited to those groups unable to care for themselves. Examples of this universality of coverage were national flat-rate pensions available to all once they reached a certain age, regardless of what they had paid into the plan, and national health plans based on medical needs rather than on financial means. In addition, the citizens of the Nordic countries had a legal right to the benefits provided by their welfare systems, the provisions of which were designed to meet what was perceived as a collective responsibility to ensure everyone a decent standard of living. The Nordic system also was distinguished by the many aspects of people's lives it touched upon.

The Finnish welfare system differed from those of other Nordic countries mainly in that its benefits were lower in some categories, such as sickness and unemployment payments; otherwise, the Finnish system fit into the Nordic conception of social welfare. Finnish social expenditures constituted about 7 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) in 1950, roughly equal to what Sweden, Denmark, and Norway were spending. By the mid-1980s, Finland's social expenditures had risen to about 24 percent of GDP, compared with the other countries' respective 35, 30, and 22 percent. Less than 10 percent of these expenditures was paid for by Finnish wage earners; the remainder came roughly equally from the state and from employers. Until the second half of the 1970s, Finnish employers had paid a higher share of social outlays than had their counterparts in the other Nordic countries. In response to the slowdown of the world economy after 1973, there was some shifting of social burdens to the state, which made Finnish companies more price competitive abroad.

Finland's welfare system also differed from those of its neighbors in that it was put in place slightly later than theirs, and it was only fully realized in the decade after the formation of the Red-Earth government in 1966. Just after World War II, the Finns directed their attention to maternal and child care. In 1957 the government established an improved national pension plan and supplemented it in the early 1960s with private pension funds. Unemployment aid was organized in 1959 and in 1960, and it was reformed in 1972. Legislation of the 1950s and the 1960s also mandated the construction of a network of hospitals, the education of more medical personnel, and, from 1963 to the early 1970s, the establishment of a system of health insurance. The housing allowance system expanded during the 1960s to reach everwidening circles of the population. Health-care officials turned away from hospital care in the 1970s, and they began to emphasize the use of smaller local clinics. By the 1980s, the Finnish welfare system was up to Nordic standards and had the support of most Finns. All major political parties were committed to maintaining it, and its role in Finnish society seemed secure for the coming decades.

Finland - Organization of the Welfare System

In the late 1980s, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health directed the welfare system through five departments: social insurance, social welfare, health care, temperance and alcohol policy, and labor. According to Finland's administrative tradition, it is the task of a ministry and its departments to determine policy, which is then administered by central boards. In the case of social policy, there were three central boards for social welfare, health, and labor protection. An exception to this administrative division was the Social Security Institute, which supervised the national pension plan and health insurance for the Eduskunta and the Council of State.

The actual supplier of social care was local government--the municipality--supervised by authorities at the provincial level who had to approve the administrative plans of municipalities before these local governments could receive funds from the state. In the early 1980s, funds from the state made up about 30 percent of the monies spent on all social services and pensions, while employers supplied about 40 percent; local governments, 15 percent; and the recipients of services, the remainder.

Finland - Income Security Programs Classified as Social Insurance

Finland's first national old-age pension plan dates from 1937, but it was so poorly funded that a new National Pensions Act was put into effect in 1957. In the late 1980s, this law, somewhat reformed, was still the basis of Finland's National Pension Plan, which was open to all residents over the age of sixteen, even to those who had never paid into it. Even those foreigners not from the Nordic countries were entitled to this pension if they had resided in Finland for at least five years. Those who left for residence in a country outside Nordic Europe, even those who were Finnish citizens, could receive the pension for only one year. The flat-rate national pension could be paid as an old-age pension, once a person reached the age of sixtyfive ; as an invalidity pension (either full or partial) to those between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four who were no longer able to work; or, in some cases, to the long-term unemployed who were in their late fifties or early sixties. In addition to these classes of beneficiaries, survivors of those eligible for national pensions who were not themselves eligible for the pensions could receive pensions under the terms of the Survivor's Pension Plan. Also tied to the National Pension Plan were payments for handicapped children living at home and for some combat veterans of World War II.

Payments of the national pension were uniform for everyone; in the mid-1980s, they amounted to Fmk334 a month. To this amount were added the assistance payment, which varied according to a pensioner's marital status, the cost of living in his or her locality, and other pensions that he or she received. Other supplementary payments could be made for dependent children, for degree of disability, and for housing costs, as well as for veterans of the Civil War and of World War II. In the mid-1980s, the supplemental payment to a single pensioner could range from Fmk1,362 to Fmk1,436 a month. The supplement for each child amounted to Fmk181, and housing supplements varied according to housing costs but could amount to as much as approximately Fmk1,000. Helplessness supplements could be worth up to about Fmk400, depending on the age and the physical state of the pensioner. National pensions were indexed, and they increased in value each year. Since reforms of the early 1980s, national pensions were not taxable if they were the sole source of income. Pensions were no longer affected by a spouse's earnings or pension income, and the national pension could only be reduced by income from other pensions. The National Pension Plan was funded by the beneficiary's own contributions, about 2 percent of his or her locally taxable income, and by employer contributions of 4 to 5 percent of the insured person's wages.

Finland - National Pension Plan

The Employees' Pensions Act was passed in 1961 to supplement the National Pension Plan which, while adequate for Finns living in the countryside--a majority of the population until the 1960s- -did not provide enough benefits for city dwellers. During the next decade, other compulsory wage-related pension plans were enacted into law for temporary employees, for national and local government employees, for those working for a state church, and for the self-employed. At the end of the decade, a supplementary plan was created for farmers as well. Seamen had had an incomebased plan since 1956, and, as of 1986, those active in freelance professions such as acting and writing also obtained coverage. These employment pension plans were completely funded by the employers, private or public, who paid contributions, equal on the average to about 10 percent of a worker's earnings, into funds managed by seven large insurance companies or who set up funds on their own. Self-employed persons had to choose a fund. The Central Pension Security Institute was responsible for keeping records about employment and benefits.

The normal age of pensionable retirement was sixty-five, and the pension paid was based on the average earnings one had received in the last four years of work ending two years before retirement. One could receive up to 60 percent of private-sector earnings and up to 66 percent of public-sector earnings. The average wage-related pension in the mid-1980s was about Fmk1,000 per month. Older employees, at work before these pension plans became effective, were guaranteed a minimum pension of at least 29 percent if they retired before 1975, and 37 percent if they retired after this date. Like the national pension, wage-related pensions were indexed, and they increased each year. In addition, there were provisions relating to disability, early or late retirement, and survivors' benefits similar to those in effect for the National Pension Plan.

Finland - Employee Pension Plans

The Employees' Pensions Act was passed in 1961 to supplement the National Pension Plan which, while adequate for Finns living in the countryside--a majority of the population until the 1960s- -did not provide enough benefits for city dwellers. During the next decade, other compulsory wage-related pension plans were enacted into law for temporary employees, for national and local government employees, for those working for a state church, and for the self-employed. At the end of the decade, a supplementary plan was created for farmers as well. Seamen had had an incomebased plan since 1956, and, as of 1986, those active in freelance professions such as acting and writing also obtained coverage. These employment pension plans were completely funded by the employers, private or public, who paid contributions, equal on the average to about 10 percent of a worker's earnings, into funds managed by seven large insurance companies or who set up funds on their own. Self-employed persons had to choose a fund. The Central Pension Security Institute was responsible for keeping records about employment and benefits.

The normal age of pensionable retirement was sixty-five, and the pension paid was based on the average earnings one had received in the last four years of work ending two years before retirement. One could receive up to 60 percent of private-sector earnings and up to 66 percent of public-sector earnings. The average wage-related pension in the mid-1980s was about Fmk1,000 per month. Older employees, at work before these pension plans became effective, were guaranteed a minimum pension of at least 29 percent if they retired before 1975, and 37 percent if they retired after this date. Like the national pension, wage-related pensions were indexed, and they increased each year. In addition, there were provisions relating to disability, early or late retirement, and survivors' benefits similar to those in effect for the National Pension Plan.

Finland - Sickness Insurance

The Sickness Insurance Act of 1963 introduced health insurance to Finland in two stages. First, beginning in 1964 it provided payments when wages were lost because of illness or maternity leave and payments for the cost of treatment and medicine. Three years later, it began paying doctors' bills as well. Until the act went into effect, only a small minority of the population, generally those employed by large firms, had medical insurance.

All persons resident in Finland for more than a short time were eligible for benefits. Foreigners had to register with the local health authorities to receive payments. In the 1980s, the daily payment made to make up for losses of income due to illness averaged about 80 percent of a typical wage and could last for as many as 300 workdays. Highly paid individuals received less. Hospital care in public hospitals was generally free, and other compensation amounted to 60 percent of doctors' fees, 75 percent of laboratory expenses, and 50 percent of medicine costs. In the mid-1980s, dental care was free for anyone born after 1961, but for others it was paid only if dental problems had to be treated to cure a disease. Maternity leave payments amounted to about 80 percent of income for about one year, and could begin five weeks before the estimated date of the birth. Fathers could take some of this time, with a corresponding cut in the days allowed to the mother. Sickness insurance was funded by the recipients themselves through their payment of about 2 percent of their locally taxable income, by employers who paid a contribution of about 1 percent of the employee's wages, and by the state.

However generous these benefits appeared in an international context, medical fees had increased in the 1970s and the 1980s, and government compensation rates had not kept pace. Rates increased by 25 percent in 1986, but not enough according to some critics. Those who pressed for government relief believed it necessary even though public medical care, which constituted the bulk of medical care in Finland, was already highly subsidized and hence rather cheap compared with many other countries.

Finland - Unemployment Insurance

The Unemployment Security Act of 1984 reformed the unemployment assistance system that had been gradually worked out to deal with the persistent problem of unemployment in Finland. The act arranged for coverage of all unemployed between the ages of seventeen and sixty-four, resident in Finland, whose income came from wages earned doing work for another person or legal entity. A person had to be in need to receive payments under the terms of the act and could be disqualified because of a spouse's earnings. The self-employed, full-time students, and people receiving pensions or maternity allowances were not eligible, nor were those who were unemployed because of illness, injury, or handicap, or who had quit work voluntarily, who had lost work because of labor disputes, or who had refused to accept employment.

In the mid-1980s, those eligible for unemployment benefits received them in two ways. A basic daily allowance of Fmk70 went to any person looking for employment. This allowance was meanstested , and the income of a spouse could disqualify a potential beneficiary. The allowance lasted as long as the recipient was unemployed. Those unemployed who were members of an unemployment fund (80 percent of Finns were) and who had worked for at least 26 weeks in the preceding 2 years were eligible for more substantial benefits amounting to the daily basic allowance plus 45 percent of the difference between their daily wage and the basic allowance. After 100 days the payment was reduced by 20 percent. Beneficiaries of the income-related allowance could receive it for 500 days in a 4-year period. Workers in their late fifties and older who had been unable to find work could be granted an unemployment pension equal to a disability pension until they reached the age when they would be eligible for an old-age pension. Unemployment benefits were administered by the Social Security Institute. The basic allowance was completely financed by the state. Employers and the state funded equal shares of 95 percent of the income-related payments and the beneficiary was responsible for the remaining 5 percent.

Finland - Workmen's Compensation

An employee who suffered work-related injuries was financially protected through payments that covered medical and rehabilitation expenses and fully matched his or her wages. If injuries resulted in permanent disability, the worker could receive payments amounting to 85 percent of his or her wages for total disability. Survivors were eligible for pensions, as well as a sizable funeral grant. This compulsory program was entirely funded by the employer.

Finland - Income Security Classified as Welfare

In addition to the above benefits that were classified as income security in the form of social insurance, there were income security programs classified as welfare. One of the differences between the two classes of social programs was that the welfare measures were financed mostly through taxes, whereas social insurance programs were paid for by employers and employees. This second category of income security also consisted of payments to those eligible. The most important and expensive class of these benefits involved payments to families with children. Other programs assisted those who had suffered war injuries and their dependents, provided financial aid to those called up for military service and to their families, made payments to the handicapped that helped them earn their living, and provided living allowances that were the last resort of those unable to earn their way.

Finland - Family Aid

Financial aid to families with children came in the form of child allowances, child care and maintenance allowances, and maternity benefits. Child allowances dated from the 1930s, and they were one of the oldest parts of the welfare system. The law in force in the late 1980s was the Child Allowance Act of 1948, which arranged for payments to parents for all children under the age of sixteen and resident in Finland, regardless of the wealth or nationality of the parents. By the mid-1980s, payments for the first child were a little more than Fmk2,000 a year, with payments increasing to Fmk4,800 for the fifth and additional children. Another payment of about Fmk1,200 was made for children under the age of three. Child-care allowances had been paid since the 1970s to those parents who stayed at home to care for small children or who had engaged someone else to do so. A child maintenance allowance of as much as approximately Fmk400 a month was paid when a court-ordered maintenance payment for a child of divorced parents was not being paid. A maternity benefit, based on legislation of the 1930s, was paid for each pregnancy. It came either as a grant of about Fmk500 or as a much more valuable set of materials needed to tend a child. It was withheld if the mother did not visit a clinic by the fifth month of pregnancy.

Finland - Welfare Services

In addition to the above measures that involved financial payments to achieve social ends, the system of social care provided welfare services. By the mid-1980s, some 90,000 state and local employees were using about 5 percent of Finland's gross national product (GNP) to deliver a wide variety of social services under the overall direction of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. The expansion of the welfare system in the 1960s and the 1970s had caused the number of social workers roughly to triple between 1970 and 1985. Since 1981 workers entering the field had been required to have university training.

National government subsidies of from 30 to 60 percent of costs had the goal of making social services uniform throughout the country, so that residents of even the most isolated community had the same range of services as were offered in Helsinki, though this aim was not always met. Social services were usually free, and they were available to anyone who wanted them, irrespective of the recipient's income. Information furnished to social workers was confidential and could not be released, even to another government agency. The ultimate aim of welfare services was to increase the quality of life and the independence of the client so that welfare services were no longer needed.

The Social Welfare Act of 1982 replaced some older laws; it charged local government with providing such social services as general and family counseling and with making housing available to those needing it, most notably the aged and the infirm, troubled youth, and alcoholics. The law detailed local responsibilities for assigning specialists to assist persons living at home but no longer fully able to take care of themselves and for maintaining institutions for persons, be they aged, mentally handicapped, or addicted, whose afflictions were so serious that they could no longer live at home.

Finland - Child-Care Services

A law with far-reaching effects was the 1973 Child Day Care Act, which stipulated that all local governments were to provide good child day care for all families that desired it. The care for children up to seven years of age could be given either in day-care centers, sometimes private but generally run by local governments, or by accredited baby-sitters, either at the child's home or outside it. Although the number of places for day care had more than doubled to 100,000 by the mid-1980s, it would have had to double again to meet total needs. A 1985 law set the goal of being able to allow, by 1990, all parents of children up to the age of three the choice between home-care payments or a place for their child in a day-care center. One parent could also take unpaid employment leave until the child's third birthday. The Child Welfare Act of 1983 enjoined local governments to look after children, and it empowered them to take a variety of measures if a child was being seriously neglected or abused. In the mid-1980s, about 2 percent of Finnish children were affected by this law. Another 1983 law made the corporal punishment of children illegal, as it was in the other Nordic countries.

Finland - Services for the Disabled

The Welfare of the Disabled Act of 1946 set the responsibilities for treatment of the physically handicapped. The institutions that offered housing, occupational training, sheltered working environments, and physical rehabilitation were overseen by the National Board of Social Welfare, while about a score of schools for handicapped children unable to attend ordinary schools was supervised by the National Board of Schools. Special equipment, like prostheses, was supplied at no cost, as were such services as the adaptation of living areas. In the late 1980s, there were some 30,000 mentally handicapped Finns, 10,000 of whom received welfare ranging from living accommodations in an institution to day-center care or jobs in sheltered workshops. There were not enough places to accommodate all the mentally disabled properly, so some were placed in private homes or in retirement homes.

Finland - Services for Substance Abusers

The Welfare for Intoxicant Abusers Act of 1985 dealt mainly with alcoholism, as it was the only serious problem of substance abuse in Finland in the late 1980s. Finnish society had traditionally not seen alcohol as a part of daily life, but rather as something consumed on special occasions and then to the point of intoxication. Medical evidence of this harmful habit was that the Finnish incidence of death by acute alcohol poisoning was seven times that of Sweden and twenty times that of Denmark. Because of its troubled relationship with alcohol, the country enforced prohibition from 1919 to 1931. A later measure against alcohol consumption was a 1976 law that banned liquor advertisements in most publications. Another measure increased the cost of alcohol by taxing it heavily, so much so that by the mid-1980s liquor taxes were an important out source of state revenues.

In the 1980s, there were still many abstainers in Finland who had moral objections to alcohol use, in contrast to the small minority of drinkers who accounted for more than half of total national consumption. In the late 1960s, a relaxation of the rules for the purchase of alcohol had as its goal a lessening of drink's glamorous appeal because it was, in a sense, forbidden. This policy may have backfired when sales of beer in grocery stores and the availability of hard liquor at more restaurants caused alcohol consumption to more than double within a decade. Since the mid-1970s, however, analysts of Finnish alcohol use have seen consumption rates level off and drinking habits become more moderate. Although the number of abstainers had dropped sharply in the postwar period, causing some sociologists to refer to Finns who became adults in the 1950s and the 1960s as "the wet generation," alcohol was gradually coming to take a more ordinary place in everyday life.

The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health had a special department concerned with substance abuse, the Department of Temperance and Alcohol Policy, that formulated welfare plans and directed the State Alcohol Monopoly responsible for the manufacture, importation, and sale of alcohol. Local authorities provided a variety of facilities for alcoholics--including clinics, half-way houses, and emergency housing open twenty-four hours a day that offered withdrawal treatments. When necessary, alcoholics could be confined against their will, but this practice was less common in the late 1980s than it had been previously. State welfare was supplemented by private and voluntary associations, such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

Finland - Health System

By the second half of the 1980s, Finns enjoyed a standard of health fully comparable to that of other highly developed countries. If health standards did not match those of Finland's Nordic neighbors in all areas, it was because Sweden, Denmark, and Norway were the world's leaders in health care. Finland had made remarkable progress, however, and was rapidly catching up. In one major area, the prevention of infant mortality, Finland led the world in the mid-1980s: it had the world's lowest infant mortality rate.

Since becoming an independent state in 1917, Finland has managed to deal with the "traditional" health problems. The most important cause of death in the nineteenth century, pulmonary tuberculosis, was brought under control by means of a network of tuberculosis hospitals built between the world wars. Smallpox and pneumonia have also ceased to be serious problems. With the aid of the vaccination law passed in 1952, the fight against communicable diseases was largely won. In 1980, for example, there were no deaths from common diseases of this type. By the mid-1980s, no cases of diphtheria had been registered in Finland for several decades, and, with the exception of a mini-epidemic of seven cases in 1983-84, poliomyelitis also had disappeared. An emphasis on hospital construction in the 1950s and 1960s brought the ratio of hospital beds per capita up to international norms, and new medical training centers more than doubled the number of physicians between 1970 and the mid-1980s. The passage of the Sickness Insurance Act in 1963 and frequent expansion of its coverage meant that good medical care was available to everyone. Later legislative measures, such as the Primary Health Care Act of 1972, or the Mental Health Act of 1978, aimed at moving health care from large centers, increasing the amount of preventive treatment at smaller local facilities, and favoring out-patient care when possible. Finnish health authorities believed, even in the late 1980s, that care of this kind could be more flexible, humane, and effective and could also check cost increases. Despite this policy innovation, however, social expenditures on health had increased ten-fold in real terms since the early 1950s.

Health care was directed by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and was administered by the National Board of Health. In accordance with government practices, the ministry decided policy, and the national board determined how it would be administered. Actual delivery of care was the responsibility of local government, especially after the Primary Health Care Act of 1972, which stipulated that the basis of medical treatment should be the care offered in local health clinics. Previously, the emphasis had been on care from large regional hospitals.

The 1972 law resulted in the creation of about 200 local health centers each of which served a minimum of 10,000 persons. As municipalities varied greatly in size, small ones had to unite with others to form health centers, while about half the centers were operated by a single municipality. Centers did not necessarily consist of a single building, but encompassed all the health facilities in the health center district. With the exception of some sparsely settled regions, people were usually within twenty-five kilometers of the center charged with their care.

A basic aim of the 1972 law was to give all Finns equal access to health care, regardless of their income or where they lived. Because most services of health centers were free, subsidies from the national government were required to augment the financial resources of municipalities. The subsidies varied according to the wealth of the municipality and ranged roughly from 30 to 65 percent of costs. By the mid-1980s, about 40 percent of the money spent on health went for primary care, compared with 10 percent in 1972.

Health care centers were responsible for routine care such as health counseling, examinations, and screening for communicable diseases; they also provided school health services, home care, dental work, and child and maternal care. Most health centers had at least three physicians and additional staff at a ratio of about eleven per physician. Because of the high level of their training, nurses performed many services done by physicians in other countries. Most centers had midwives, whose high competence, combined with an extensive program of prenatal care, made possible Finland's extremely low infant mortality rate, the world's best at 6.5 deaths per 1,000 births.

Once it was established that a health problem could not be treated adequately at a center, patients were directed to hospitals, either to one of about thirty local hospitals with some degree of specialization, or to one of about twenty hospitals, five of which were university teaching hospitals, that could offer highly specialized care. In addition, there were institutions with a single concern, such as the sixty psychiatric hospitals, and others that dealt with orthopedics, epilepsy, rheumatism, or plastic surgery. Given the great drop in the incidence of tuberculosis in Finland, the country's dozen sanatoria were gradually being taken over for other purposes. Hospitals were usually operated by federations of municipalities, as their maintenance was beyond the power of most single municipalities. By the mid-1980s, the country's public hospitals had about 50,000 beds, and its 40-odd private hospitals had roughly 3,000. There were another 20,000 beds for patients at health centers, homes for the elderly, and other welfare institutions.

By the late 1980s, Finland's health problems were similar to those affecting other advanced countries. The most common causes of death in Finland were, first, cardiovascular diseases, followed by neoplasms (malignant and benign), accidents, poisonings, trauma from external causes (including suicides), and, lastly, diseases of the respiratory system. The mortality rate from cardiovascular diseases was among the world's highest for both sexes, but it was especially high for middle-aged males. A national diet rich in fats was seen by medical specialists as a cause of the prevalence of coronary illnesses.

Despite its location on the periphery of Europe, Finland was also affected by the spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), but not to a serious degree. As of late 1988, only 32 cases of AIDS had been reported, and 222 persons had been found to be infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), although health officials believed there might be as many as 500 HIV-positive cases in all of Finland. Reasons for the slight presence of this health problem were the low frequency of drug use and prostitution, an aggressive and frank public education campaign, and the trust Finns felt for the national health system, which led them to adopt practices it recommended.

The most striking of all Finnish health problems was the high average mortality rate for males once they reached adulthood, which contributed to an average longevity in the mid-1980s of only 70.1 years compared with 73.6 years for Swedish males. In the second half of the 1970s, Finnish males over the age of twenty were one-third more likely to die by their sixty-fifth birthday than their Swedish neighbors. Cardiovascular diseases struck Finnish men twice as often as Swedish men. The three other chief causes of death were respiratory illnesses at twice the Swedish rate, lung cancer at three times the Swedish rate, and accidental or violent death at a frequency 50 percent higher than the Swedish figure. Health authorities have attributed the high mortality rates of the Finnish male to diet, excessive use of tobacco and alcohol, disruption of communities through migration, and a tradition of high-risk behavior that is particularly marked in working-class men in eastern Finland.

Mortality rates for Finnish women, with the exception of women over sixty-five, compared well with those of the other Nordic countries. A reason for this discrepancy between Finnish and other Nordic older women was the higher Finnish incidence of coronary problems, which occur later in women than in men. In the mid-1980s, Finnish women lived an average of 78.1 years, compared with 79.6 years for Swedish women. Except for coronary illnesses, of which Finnish women died 50 percent more often than their Swedish counterparts, the other causes of Finnish female mortality matched those of Sweden. In some cases, cancer and respiratory diseases for example, Finnish women had an even lower rate of incidence.

National efforts to improve living habits have included campaigns against smoking, restraints on the consumption of alcohol, and better health education in schools. One program that has been widely studied by international health officials was one implemented in the province of Pohjois-Karjala that aimed at reforming dietary habits in a region particularly hard hit by coronary illnesses. Finland was also a participant in the World Health Organization's program Health for All by the Year 2000 and was its European reporting nation.

Finland - LIVING CONDITIONS

By the 1980s, Finland enjoyed one of the highest living standards in the world. It ranked eighth in the world with regard to per capita GDP, just behind the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and slightly ahead of Canada. When measured against other countries, it almost invariably ranked among the world's best, whether economic, social, medical, educational, or political criteria were being applied. Finns were as surprised as they were pleased by this excellence, because for much of its history Finland had been poor and backward. Evidence of this could be found in the national anthem, which declared that Finland would always be poor.

However wealthy Finland had become since the 1960s, observers noted some shortcomings. In addition to the problem of relatively high mortality and the need for a more comprehensive child-care system, Finland faced serious environmental issues. Another longstanding problem was the standard of housing. Although improvements had occurred since the 1950s, thirty years later Finns were still not so well housed as their Nordic neighbors.

Finland - Protection of the Environment

Although Finland had a very low population density and was famed for its many areas of nearly untouched nature, it had not been spared environmental pollution. Some of this came from neighboring countries, such as the dose of radiation it received after the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union in 1985. In this case, there was little damage because the radiation fell too far south to harm reindeer herds and fell too early to contaminate grasses and vegetables that have a late growing season because of Finland's long winter.

Domestic sources also contributed significantly to the country's problems with environmental pollution. The exceptionally strong growth rate of an economy based to a considerable degree on energy-intensive industries was a factor, as were the fertilizer-dependent agricultural sector and the wood-processing plants that, between them, contributed much to the pollution of Finnish rivers and groundwater. By the 1980s, Finland registered considerably higher sulfur and nitrogen emissions than other West European and Nordic countries, and its discharge of oxidizable matter into water was three times the average of the members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Finnish efforts to protect the environment began in the 1920s with the Nature Conservation Act of 1923, which allowed the establishment of nature preserves if they were needed. Since then there have been many laws covering different aspects of environmental protection, including water purity, control of poisons and pesticides, establishment of an oil pollution fund, waste management, prevention of marine and air pollution, and reduction of noise.

An attempt to protect the environment more thoroughly was evident in the formation of a ministry specifically pledged to this task. Established in 1983, the Ministry of Environment had four departments, employing about 250 persons in all. One department dealt with administrative matters, while the other three were concerned with environmental protection and nature conservation, physical planning and building, and housing. In 1986 the National Board of Waters with its 1,400 employees was renamed the National Board of Waters and the Environment and was placed under the new ministry.

In the mid-1980s, Finns were concerned about the environment, and a study found that only 11 percent of them would place economic growth above protection of the environment. Many believed ecological conditions were worsening. A 1983 poll found that only 31 percent of those questioned--compared with 57 percent in 1973--believed their country's environment to be very good or excellent. Another indication of Finns' concerns was the birth in the early 1980s of a new political party, the Greens, which was remarkably successful in elections. Commitment to pollution control also was seen in the portion of research money going to environmental research, which compared well with that spent by other countries. Despite these measures, there were observers in the late 1980s who contended that Finnish efforts in this area needed further improvement.

An OECD study published in 1988 held that, despite improvements, Finland still did not have an adequate environmental program. There was still no single law relating to the environment, and different ministries often did not consult sufficiently with one another about the ecological impact of their plans. Despite the existence of excellent statistics about damage to the environment, decision makers were often not well informed about them. Also lacking, according to the OECD report, was a sufficient assessment, when making plans for economic development, of the real costs of pollution. Recommended for a more economical defense of the environment were an exact consideration of these costs and an increased use of the "polluter pays" and "user fees" principles. The report noted, too, that many local authorities lacked the expertise to deal properly with ecological decisions; moreover, because they were suspicious of the power of provincial-level and national-level officials, they were reluctant to cooperate fully with them.

Finland - Housing

As part of its overall responsibility to supervise the nation's environment, the Ministry of Environment was charged with overseeing what kinds of buildings and housing Finns worked in and lived in, arranging remedies for existing deficiencies, and guaranteeing adequate conditions in the future. Two of the ministry's four departments, the Physical Planning and Building Department and the Housing Department, were created specifically for these tasks. In addition, the National Board of Housing, which had been created in 1966 to organize the state's administration of housing, was made subordinate to the ministry in 1986.

Efforts to improve the housing of workers began in the nineteenth century, as did arrangements for low-interest mortgages. The 1920s saw the passage of the Housing Corporation Act and the establishment of the Housing Mortgage Bank. It was only after World War II, however, that significant measures were undertaken to subsidize housing through what is known as Arava legislation. These laws were brought together in 1953 by the Housing Production Act, which became the basis of housing policy and which helped to foster the tremendous construction surge of the next two decades.

By the 1980s, it was estimated that about 75 percent of Finnish residential dwellings of all types had been constructed since World War II. For some types of dwellings the figure was even higher. For example, some 70 percent of apartments were built after 1960. Migration, whether voluntary or not, and an upsurge in population growth had made this construction necessary. Population movements during the economic boom caused the first half of the 1970s to be the period of peak construction, when as many as 70,000 units were built in a single year.

By the first half of the 1980s, about 48,000 units were built annually. In addition to a decline in building activity, the kinds of dwellings constructed changed. In the economic boom years, about two-thirds of new dwellings were apartments, and the remainder were free-standing houses or row houses. By 1980 the ratio was reversed. In addition, by the 1980s much construction work was for renovation, and government plans called for the number of buildings restored each year to climb from 15,000 in 1980 to 60,000 by the end of the 1990s.

The construction boom meant that Finns were housed better than before. The number of dwelling units increased from 1.2 million in 1960 to 1.8 million in 1980 and gave them more room. Finnish dwellings were still rather small, however. In the 1980s, their average size was sixty-nine square meters, nine square meters more than in 1970. Much poor standard housing had disappeared during the boom years. The new dwellings had modern conveniences; by 1980 nearly three-quarters of them--compared with only one-half a decade earlier--were fully equipped with hot water, indoor plumbing, central heating, and sewer connections. Although Finnish housing was still somewhat poorer than that of the other Nordic countries, it ranked well by world standards.

About 60 percent of Finns owned their dwellings, and Finns spent, on the average, about 18 percent of their income on housing. Government housing allowances helped people of low income to keep housing expenditures within 10 to 20 percent of this income. Government housing aid came in a number of forms, and it helped people in all income brackets. Housing allowances were paid to low-income groups and to pensioners living either in their own homes or in rental units. Low-interest loans were available to people earning modest incomes who desired to own their own homes. Better-off Finns benefited from tax relief if they had mortgages.

Not all government housing policies were so popular as subsidies, low-interest loans, and tax relief, for some had unfortunate results. The housing program's most serious failure was seen in the often sterile and boring apartment house complexes and even whole suburban developments and towns that were designed and built in the postwar period to meet pressing housing needs. Some planned towns were internationally famed for the beauty of their design. An example was Tapiola, located on the outskirts of Helsinki. Many others, however, provided an ugly and inhumane environment for those obliged to live in them. Often situated far from needed services and lacking softening amenities, the bleak dormitory villages were desolate shelter for newly uprooted migrants from the countryside, and they fostered antisocial behavior, family problems, and illnesses. In later decades, authorities applied resources to these ill-conceived residential areas with the hope of making them more hospitable.

Another problem, less serious, was a shortage of rental units. Some observers held that state rent-control policies had reduced the profits earned by landlords and hence had caused a scarcity of rental properties. The lack of available rental housing particularly affected young people, generally not yet able to purchase their own homes.