Finnish History Textbooks in the Cold War 249
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The Cold War andthePoliticsofHistory The ColdWar The Cold War and the Politics of History explores selected themes on the role of history, historians and historical The Cold War debates during the Cold War, and the ways in which the Cold War still influences present day politics and our views of the past 20th century. and the Politics The authors of the volume look at how people from various countries and contexts viewed the conflict as of History history at the time and how history influenced their views of the conflict itself. They analyse how the Cold War was and still is present in symbols, popular representations and acts of commemoration in different parts of Europe, from Berlin to Budapest, from Tallinn to Tampere. The contributors of the book are leading scholars of contemporary European and international history and politics. The book is published on the occasion of Professor Seppo Hentilä’s, Chair of Political History at the University of Helsinki, 60th birthday. Edited by University of Helsinki Juhana Aunesluoma Department of Social Science History and Pauli Kettunen ISBN 978-952-10-4637-7 The Cold War and the Politics of History The Cold War and the Politics of History Edited by Juhana Aunesluoma & Pauli Kettunen Edita Publishing Ltd University of Helsinki Department of Social Science History Helsinki 2008 Edita Prima oy, Helsinki 2008 ISBN 978-952-10-4637-7 © 2008 authors and the Department of Social Science History Layout and cover: Klaus Lindgren Contents Preface 7 Pauli Kettunen and Juhana Aunesluoma: History in the Cold War and the Cold War in the Present 9 I THE COLD WAR IN THE PRESENT Pilvi Torsti: Why do History Politics Matter? The Case of the Estonian Bronze Soldier 19 Poul Villaume: Confronting the‘Small State Syndrome’: Danish Post-Cold War Foreign Policy and the Use of Cold War History 37 Katalin Miklóssy: Shadows of the Communist Past: The Consolidation Project of the Hungarian Left – Transitional Identity and the Demarcation of History 61 Hannes Saarinen: Symbolic Places in Berlin before and after the Fall of the Wall 81 Joni Krekola: Lenin Lives in Finland 107 II HISTORY IN THE COLD WAR Aappo Kähönen: ‘Loser’s History’: Legitimacy, History Politics and Ideological reforms in the Soviet Union 129 Tauno Saarela: Otto Ville Kuusinen Commemorated 151 Wilfried Loth: German Historians and the German Question in the Cold War 169 Manfred Menger: On the Constitution of the Science of History in the GDR During the Cold War years: Developments in Greifswald 189 Heino Nyyssönen: Commemorating Two Political Anniversaries in Cold War Finland: Independence and the Beginning of the Winter War 207 Raimo Väyrynen: A Perspective on Finnish-Soviet-German Relations, 1945–1955 227 Sirkka Ahonen: Finnish History Textbooks in the Cold War 249 III LESSONS OF HISTORY? Kimmo Rentola: President Urho Kekkonen of Finland and the KGB 269 Timo Soikkanen: The FCMA Treaty: Who Fathered It? 291 Dörte Putensen: The Marshall Plan and Finland 307 Jussi M. Hanhimäki: The Ambiguous Henry Kissinger: Professor, Policymaker, Historian 319 Heinrich August Winkler: Forced Democratization? Some Lessons from Postwar Germany 335 Literature 349 Authors 379 Index of names 381 Preface The Cold War, the role of historians and historical debates during it and the political uses of Cold War history in the present, have been among Professor Seppo Hentilä’s main interests for a long time. This collection of articles is published to celebrate his 60th birthday on 10 April 2008. It explores Cold War history politics in different times, countries and contexts, and looks at the various ways in which the Cold War infl uenced history writing, public debates and popular representations about the past. Most importantly, it looks at how Cold War history still plays an important role in the politics of the present world. Seppo Hentilä began his academic career as a researcher of the history of socialist labour movement. In his theoretically ambitious doctoral thesis (1979), he explored the early developments of Swedish social democracy. His great merits in labour history include the three-volume history of the Finnish labour sport movement (1982, 1984, 1987). Since the early 1990s, his prolifi c research activity has focused on Cold War history. It has resulted in several important and highly esteemed historical works on the divided Germany and the relationships between Finland and the two Germanies, including the recently published book Neutral zwischen den beiden deutschen Staaten. Finnland und Deutschland im Kalten Krieg (2006). In his analysis on ‘divided history in the divided Germany’ (Jaettu Saksa, jaettu historia, 1994), Hentilä excellently combined his historiographical interest and expertise with research on Cold War Germany. A crucial subject in his monographs and articles on German and German-Finnish Cold War history has been history culture and history politics, i.e. the cultural and political presence of the past. He has also infl uentially contributed to scholarly and public debates on approaches and concepts in this very topical fi eld of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Hentilä has taught political history at the University of Helsinki since 1971, where he has held a chair of political history since 1998. He has also authored several popular textbooks that are widely used at schools and universities, not only in Finland but also in many other countries. 7 Hentilä has been in charge of several successful research projects, especially on Cold War history, supervising and educating numerous young researchers and creating an inspiring research milieu and networks of lively international collaboration. For their part, the articles of this book, written by Hentilä’s colleagues and previous students, indicate his achievements in researcher training and international research cooperation. As editors of this book, we wish to thank all contributors for good cooperation in realising our aim of an interesting and thematically coherent scholarly anthology. We also wish to thank Klaus Lindgren, Ohto Rintala and Marjo Marin for their valuable assistance in various phases of the publication process. On behalf of all those who have contributed to the making and publishing of this book, we wish to convey our warm congratulations to Seppo Hentilä on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Helsinki, March 2008 Juhana Aunesluoma Pauli Kettunen 8 History in the Cold War and the Cold War in the Present P AULI KETTUNEN AND J UHANA AUNESLUOMA This book is on the Cold War and the politics of history. It is a multidimensional subject. On one hand, it concerns the different roles of history in the confrontations called the Cold War. The topic includes, on the other hand, the many-faceted presence of Cold War experiences, interpretations and conclusions in post-Cold-War politics. The very concept of the Cold War should be seen as a historical interpretation that has varied and changed over time. The way in which it has been periodized in post-1990 historical research obviously differs from the ways people between the late 1940s and the late 1980s conceived of their experiences and expectations. For many of them, ‘the Cold War’ was a concept referring to certain phases of the East-West confrontation rather than to this confrontation itself. The Cold War proper had started with the breakdown of the wartime Grand Alliance in the mid-1940s, reached its high point during the Korean War 1950–53, and ended in the so-called fi rst détente in the mid-1950s. As people saw it, the crises of 1958–62 from Berlin to Cuba had brought the world on the brink of an actual war. Then there were phases in which one spoke about a return to the Cold War, or ‘the Second Cold War’, as Fred Halliday provocatively entitled his book in 1982 on the increased tensions in the late 1970s and early 1980s between the United States and the Soviet Union.1 1 F. Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War. London: Verso 1983. 9 Pauli Kettunen and Juhana Aunesluoma For many contemporaries, the East-West confrontation, as such, gradually came to represent a mode of existence of the present and future world that was, more or less, taken for granted. The term ‘war’ in ‘the Cold War’, with its inherent notion of temporal emergency condition, does not meet such an experience of normalcy in the bipolar world. On the other hand, the metaphorical ‘war’ in the current usage of the concept of ‘the Cold War’ may ignore the unique fatality that was associated with the next world war, nuclear war, in people’s minds and fears during the so-called ‘balance of terror’ and ‘mutually assured destruction’. Further, there have appeared historical interpretations about the epochal change around 1990 for which the ‘the end of the Cold War’ is far too limited an expression. In the aftermath of the revolutionary upheaval in East and Central Europe in 1989 the historian Tony Judt, highlighting the resurgence of populism, nationalism, anti-Semitism and other counter-Enlightenment movements in the post-communist societies, declared 1989 not only the end of the Cold War, but also as the end of the Enlightenment era.2 In a similar vein, the theses on ‘the end of history’ have suggested that the epoch then reaching its end was much longer than just the one of the post-Second World War international confrontation. Two main variants of the end of history -interpretation exist. The most famous one is the Hegelian thesis that Francis Fukuyama developed with support from Alexandre Kojève, claiming that through the victory of liberal capitalism and political democracy in the Cold War, history had reached its goal.3 Another variant, drawing from the anti-Hegelian critique of ‘historicism’ by Karl Popper, argues that as the outcome of Cold War, the ideologies based on the view on History with capital H, i.e.