This article, written by Olli Tammilehto, is based on the presentation he gave in PEACE, NATURE & COOPERATION IN THE BALTIC AND ARCTIC REGIONS -conference in St. Petersburg 21.9.2024. You can republish it in English or in any other language but you should first inform the author.

How Finland became a vassal state of the USA and how the movement against this process was defeated

On the 1^st of July this year the Finnish parliament approved the so called Defense Cooperation Agreement or DCA between Finland and the USA. Only one of the 200 members of the parliament opposed it. The agreement allows the USA to build 15 military bases in Finland. One of them will be in Lapland near the main Russian nuclear submarine base. The DCA gives US troops free entry to Finland without any permission or control by the Finnish authorities. Troops can move and exercise anywhere on public and private lands. They get many privileges, for example in practice they are above the Finnish criminal law and they don't have to pay any taxes. Many observers have commented that this is clearly a capitulation agreement.

In normal circumstance states do not capitulate to a foreign power without a war. Besides this obvious fact there were many other excellent arguments against the DCA. The agreement was claimed to increase Finnish security but the opposite is true: By increasing the tension between two nuclear super powers, the DCA endangers the security of Finland and the whole world.

If Mexico would allow Russia to build a military base on the US boarder, obviously it wouldn't increase Mexican security but on the contrary. This is a case of the principle of indivisible security which was earlier widely accepted in the western world. In fact most European countries, Canada and the USA adopted in 1990 the Charter of Paris for New Europe which is based on this principle. In the charter it is stated that “security is indivisible and the security of every participating State is inseparably linked to that of all the others.”

Especially neighboring countries have logically common security interests even if their other interests and aspirations were far apart.

How on earth could these excellent arguments against the DCA be ignored? It's not that the Finnish power wielders hadn't heard of them. Practically all the Finnish peace organizations and groups joined forces and started a campaign against DCA in summer 2023. Arguments against DCA were spread in social media, in magazines and in letters to the editor of newspapers. Articles of dangers of DCA were sent many times directly to the mailboxes of every MP and many of them confirmed having received them. A special campaign newspaper was produced with print run of 80 000 and spread all over Finland.

However, the mainstream press gave very little publicity for the DCA in spite of the vast ramifications of the agreement. There was practically no discussion on the treaty in the media and no public DCA debate among or within political parties. A couple of times a letter to the editor written by a peace activist got published in a big newspaper. Yet there were no reactions to our excellent arguments against DCA. It seemed that politicians and bureaucrats promoting the DCA were afraid of discussion because in a public debate they would have been defeated.

In the absence of publicity and public debate on the DCA, it was difficult to get the movement against it to grow. The snow ball effect necessary for movement growth worked only very slowly.

Although the mainstream media did not make a lot of propaganda for the DCA directly, it did it indirectly on a grand scale. During many years almost daily dose of propaganda created a conscious or subconscious association between everything Russian and everything dangerous. On the other hand it created association between everything military and everything secure. Therefore rational arguments were not needed for politicians and ordinary voters to accept the DCA.

Finland boasts to be a democratic state, but the decision process concerning the DCA was very authoritarian. President Niinistö organized private briefings with every party chairperson and told them about the necessity of the DCA. The members of the parliament were given secret information on the DCA in a special room inside the parliament house called “bunker” where it is difficult to eavesdrop.

But why in the first place did president Niinistö and other leading figures in the Finnish power elite begin to promote the DCA that is clearly against the interests of Finland? The key for answering this question is that a big part of the Finnish elite identify themselves so strongly to the US led system that they cannot see that US interest are often contradictory to the Finnish interests. And of course the DCA furthers the interests of the US imperial state and its military industrial complex.

The methods used in integrating a part of the power elite to the US interests were many: a hundred years of cultural influence through films, academic exchange, text books etc., special education programs in the US for young politicians, making the leading Finnish think tank, Institute of International Affairs to produce only material favorable to the US, opening career opportunities for politicians and bureaucrats in transnational organizations furthering US interests. The list goes on and on.

All this may drive any Finnish peace activist to despair. But the world system is in a turmoil. It is possible that peace movements in many countries can use the turmoil as a leverage to increase their strength so that they would be able to counter war propaganda. Then the natural instinct of ordinary people to have peaceful relations between nations would start to dominate and threat of wars would recede.

10/03/24

You can send comments on this article to

Back to the beginning of Olli Tammilehto's homepage (http://www.tammilehto.info/english.htm)

Olli Tammilehdon kirjoituksia

Suomeksi/In Finnish

Search on this site:

How Finland became a vassal state of the USA and how the movement against this process was defeated

Lisää kommentti

Comments (1)