Towards a Nordic competition state? Politico-economic transformation of statehood in Finland, 1965–2005

Abstract

We live in an era of rapid transformation of the European states, which are taking new forms rather than disappearing or being hollowed out. This transformation inescapably touches upon the question of the interaction between a state and its territory. Since there is a growing need to conceptualize this change in statehood from a historical perspective on various margins of Europe, this paper aims at providing a context-sensitive theorization of the gradual transformation of the spatiality of the Keynesian welfare state in Finland. The arguments presented are authenticated by reference to documents on Finnish public investment policy as evidence of the changes in state strategies from the 1960s onwards. The paper concludes that the change from “regimes of security political survival” to “regimes of survival in international economic competition” has inevitably influenced the relationship between the Finnish state and its territory. It also suggests, however, that inertia caused by the embedded spatial culture of the welfare state has hindered the development of a truly international competition state characterized by economic efficiency rather than territorial and social equalization. We therefore conceptualize the contemporary condition of Finnish statehood as spatially promiscuous, in that the Finnish state is becoming an increasingly complex combination of the marketplace model (the glocal state) and one nation politics (territorial integrity).