Developing State Agencies and Centralizing International Cultural Relations

Abstract

In 1968, Kalervo Siikala sent the Finnish Minister for Education Johannes Virolainen a long plaidoyer for a state-funded cultural policy with an ambitious international outreach. He emphasized the developments that had happened since the war in Finland’s international contacts and criticized what he saw as a Finnish cultural field still locked under hierarchical, conservative private cultural organizations, dominated by conservative elites, old-fashioned institutions, and defiance towards the Eastern bloc. Siikala wanted a new, dynamic, open and democratic cultural policy, with a stronger role for the Finnish state to coordinate private organizations and steer their activities towards the country's official foreign policy line and the goals of Finland's developing welfare state. It had to emphasize the interest of the youth and young people, who wanted to get rid of old hierarchies, and adapt cultural policy to a geopolitical context dominated by Soviet influence. Siikala stopped short of proposing a fully state-controlled cultural field, but demanded better instruments to coordinate private initiatives by public resources: “cultural life has to develop its own organic way and find its own direction”, he wrote, although it had to do so “in those limits set by the possibilities and needs of society and economic life”. In an environment dominated by ideas of cultural reform and the influence of a new radical left, the Ministry of Education should be given the possibility to lead the cultural field. The problem was also political: to maintain good relations with the USSR demanded stronger state coordination also in cultural matters.