| Summary: | Over the past few years, there have been some noticeably problematic trends threatening the place of the Other in Finland. Globalisation, as theorised in neo-liberal paradigms, calls for the opening up of markets, as well as a mobile citizenship able to meet the needs of economies underpinned by competition and innovation. This has led to a state of affairs in which hundreds of millions of people feel insecure about their place in both the employment market and wider society, with the Other as the most visible manifestation of this fear. Finland continues to have particular difficulties in adjusting to this situation owing to a specific journey towards nationhood, in which its public education system was given the twin tasks of engendering a national ethos and social equity. It is contended in this thesis that nation-building stories always carry the potential for ethnocentrism as they must — of necessity — define who belongs to the nation and who does not. This relationship between the national ethos and equity has never seriously been critiqued, and Finland’s growing far-right movement has thus been able to posit consensus and a culturally homogenous state as solutions to the challenges of neo-liberal globalisation. This thesis aims to understand the contemporary difficulties in the relationship between Finnishness and the Other, and is grounded in the disconnect between rhetoric and what can be observed on a daily basis. Finland has been framed as a tolerant nation with no history of racism or colonialism, and yet the anti-immigration Finns Party won the second largest number of seats during the last parliamentary election, there is still some debate as to whether the Finnish ‘n’-word is offensive or not, and successive administrations have pursued assimilationist policies towards the Sami and Roma minority populations. The thesis provides a holistic picture of the problematic discourses delineating the relationship between Finnishness and the Other. The epistemological and ontological assumptions here are ...
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