Multiple Citizenship As a Current Challenge for Finnish Citizenship Policy

PAIVI HARINEN, PIRKKO PITKANEN, SILVAIN SAGNE AND JUSSI RONKAINEN MULTIPLE CITIZENSHIP AS A CURRENT CHALLENGE FOR FINNISH CITIZENSHIP POLICY The case of Finland is unique compared with many other European countries as for historical, geographical and socio-political reasons Finland has remained ethno culturally a relatively homogeneous country. Until recent years, public debate on citizenship has not gained as strong a position in Finland as in several other European countries. Rather, to be a Finnish citizen has been something that has been incontrovertible and taken for granted. (Anttonen, 1998: 355; Sabour, 2003: 87.) The growing international mobility of people is placing the basis and criteria for belonging to the Finnish nation-state in question. During the 1990s, the relative number of foreign residents increased more rapidly in Finland than in any other Western European state. An increase in ethnic and cultural diversity, together with Finland's participation in the EU and other international organisations, has created a necessity for rethinking rules and legislation for the attribution and acquisition of Finnish state membership, including the issue of dual / multiple citizenship (Lepola, 2000). This paper analyses how the politico-legal and social state memberships have been reshaped in Finland as the increase in trans-national mobility has brought about changes in the traditional relations between the state, the nation and the residents, in the light of citizenship. Our main concern is how Finnish citizenship practices, policies and legislation relate to multiple citizenship 1 and interrelate with immigrants' participation in the political, social, cultural and economic subsystems of Finnish society. In addition, the relationship of the current situation in Finland with European citizenship is discussed. THE FINNISH CONTEXT Finland is a sparsely populated Nordic state with only a few and rather small endogenous minorities.' The total number of inhabitants in Finland is approximately 5.2 million, the overwhelming majority being ethnically Finnish. In addition to the Finnish population, Swedish-speaking Finns form an officially recognised nationality. Furthermore, the Sarni people have an official status with linguistic and cultural rights within the Sarni territory. In relation to religion, over 86 per cent of the population belongs to the Lutheran Church. The Orthodox Church is historically well established in Eastern Finland but in fact less than D. Kalekin-Fishman, P. Pitkanen (eds.), Multiple citizenship as a challenge to European nation-states, 121-144. © 2007 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. PAIVI HARINEN, PIRKKO PTTKANEN, SILVAIN SAGNE & JUSSI RONKATNEN 60,000 people belong to it. Other groups are even smaller, among them the Catholics or the Jewish and Islamic congregations, Since World War 11, Finland has co-operated closely both with other Nordic countries and with the Soviet Union/Russia, In 1948, a Pact of Co-operation and Friendship was established between Finland and the Soviet Union, This collaboration continued until the breakdown of the USSR. More recently, Finland became a member state of the European Union in 1995. Since then, Finnish citizenship has also meant citizenship of the EU. When attitudes have been measured, researchers learned that European citizenship does not have very special meanings for Finns. But in the context of immigration citizenship of the EU surely is an important substantive issue and gives an extra value to Finnish citizenship from the point of view of an immigrant applying for citizenship of Finland. Traditionally Finland has been a country of emigration: after World War 11 nearly 700,000 Finns moved to Sweden, North America, Australia and other countries. During the late 1960s and early 1970s one-tenth of the so-called baby boom generation emigrated from the country. Currently there are over one million persons of Finnish descent, i.e., one-fifth of Finland's population, living abroad. Immigration to Finland has been very low compared to other Western European countries. For instance, when other Western European countries from the 1950s to the 1970s attracted labour migrants to their factories and later on into the service sector, very few were coming to Finland and Finns were moving away to Sweden and to lands more distant. Consequently, until the 1980s Finland was almost untouched by the immigration that was taking place in many other Western industrial societies. Only in the late 1980s and the early 1990s did Finland finally become a destination for immigrants; more people arrived in the country than left it. The backgrounds of immigrants also became more ethnically diverse (Paananen, 1999: 46). Migrants from other EU countries have very rarely found their way to Finland (around 18,000 to date), most of them coming from Sweden, Britain and Germany. The largest groups of foreigners are from the former Soviet Union: Russians (about 24,000) and Estonian citizens' (around 12,000). More than half of them are so called returning migrants who, according to the Finnish Aliens Act (378/1991), have the right to obtain a permanent residence permit in Finland (Statistics Finland, 2002; Forsander, 2002: 87). Foreign citizens constitute only two per cent of the population and that is still the lowest of any EU country. Although numbers of immigrants are still few in absolute numbers, the number of foreign citizens has now increased six-fold over the 7,000 that were counted in 1987, before the in-migration started to increase. The relative number of immigrants has increased especially rapidly in the Helsinki area: at the moment about half of all the newcomers have settled in the capital and in its surrounding area. The collapse of the Soviet regime and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Somalia and former Yugoslavia were the main contributing factors to this migration. Today the total number of foreign citizens living in Finland is around 103,500. (Lepola, 2000: 23-24, 375; Statistics Finland, 2003.) 122 .

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