Higher Education, Language and New Nationalism in Finland: Recycled Histories [1st ed.] 9783030609016, 9783030609023

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-x
Introduction: Conceptualizing Language Policy, Higher Education and New Nationalism (Taina Saarinen)....Pages 1-34
Language and Long Nation Building in Finnish Higher Education (Taina Saarinen)....Pages 35-58
The Short and Intense Post-Nationalist Period in Finnish Higher Education (Taina Saarinen)....Pages 59-86
Language and New Nationalism in Higher Education (Taina Saarinen)....Pages 87-116
New Nationalism and Higher Education (Taina Saarinen)....Pages 117-139
Back Matter ....Pages 141-145

Citation preview

Higher Education, Language and New Nationalism in Finland Recycled Histories Taina Saarinen

Higher Education, Language and New Nationalism in Finland

Taina Saarinen

Higher Education, Language and New Nationalism in Finland Recycled Histories

Taina Saarinen Finnish Institute for Educational Research University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland

ISBN 978-3-030-60901-6 ISBN 978-3-030-60902-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60902-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of doing research in a community of higher education and language education policy researchers and historians over a ten-year period. Working with brilliant and enthusiastic colleagues at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, the Language Campus, RECLAS Research Collegium for Language in Changing Society and the Finnish Institute for Educational Research, all at the University of Jyväskylä, has made this book possible. I would like to most warmly thank especially the following colleagues, friends and co-authors for cooperation in the work that I have discussed in this book: Johanna Ennser-Kananen, Eeva-Leena Haapakangas, Mia Halonen, Pasi Ihalainen, Teija Kangasvieri, Kerttu Kibbermann, Sofia Kotilainen, Erja Kyckling, Petteri Laihonen, Laura McCambridge, Tarja Nikula, Pirkko Nuolijärvi, Sari Pöyhönen, Heidi Rontu, Josep Soler, Peppi Taalas and Heidi Vaarala. Special thanks are due to my sushi gang Petteri and (Jo)Hanna for excellent comments on the first draft on a really short notice. I am infinitely thankful to Hanna and Mia, with whom we met regularly for data crunching, article writing, WhatsApping, YouTube playing, and eating and drinking (syyään eka!). It was in this group that I first talked about this book. You helped me more than you—or I—can imagine. The WhatsApp Group with a Changing Name (currently Wordiness of All Ages, but who knows), i.e. Mia, Peppi and Hanna provided a space for academic airing out at its best! v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research behind this work has been funded by the Academy of Finland (project number 138287 in 2011–2013), Svenska Kulturfonden (project number 139723 in 2018–2020), the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the RECLAS Collegium, University of Jyväskylä (2016–2019). A generous grant from Suomen tietokirjailijat ry enabled taking time off from other duties in the spring of 2020 so I could finalize the work. I am extremely grateful to Cathy Scott, Hemapriya Eswanth and Shukkanthy Siva at Palgrave for their professionalism and patience at the different stages of production, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and critical comments both on the proposal and the final manuscript. I have always been suspicious of people who thank their families for enduring their absences and absentmindedness during a long work process, thinking that they don’t sound like people I’d like to have in my family. And now I find myself being that person. Tiina-Leena, thanks for making the last hectic stages of finalizing the manuscript so good, and for the surprise questions (“so who are you citing?”) along the way. I dedicate this book to my dad who passed away as I was about to start writing it. The topic would have tickled him pink, but I luckily got to have several discussions with him in my head during the process. Kiitos isä ja äiti!

Contents

1

Introduction: Conceptualizing Language Policy, Higher Education and New Nationalism 1.1 Multi-Sited, Contingent and Historically Layered Language Policies 1.1.1 Language Indexing and Co-Constituting Politics 1.1.2 Politics and History as Contingent 1.1.3 Messy Methodologies 1.2 Why Language in Higher Education? 1.2.1 Universal and National Universities 1.2.2 Language Policies in Higher Education 1.3 Concepts of Nations and Nationalisms 1.3.1 Language and Fuzzy Nationalisms 1.3.2 Post-Nationalism, Neoliberal Governance and Language 1.3.3 New Nationalism and the Political Backdrop in the 2010s 1.4 Finnish Language Policy 1.4.1 Finnish Language Legislation: A Brief History 1.4.2 Constitutional Bilingualism 1.4.3 Minoritized Languages in Language Legislation References

1 3 4 5 7 8 9 10 12 12 16 18 20 21 22 23 25

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CONTENTS

Language and Long Nation Building in Finnish Higher Education 2.1 Higher Education Policies in Nation-Building Times 2.2 Language Policies in Nation-Building Times 2.3 Language in (Higher) Education from Early Nineteenth Century Until Independence 2.3.1 From Latin to Swedish as Language of Education 2.3.2 Fennomans and Finnish National Romanticism 2.4 Language, Higher Education and Nationalism in the Interwar Years 2.4.1 Role of Language in Setting Up New Universities 2.4.2 “True Finnish” Nationalist Activism at Universities 2.5 National and International in Pre- and Post-World War II Years 2.5.1 International Politics and Higher Education 2.5.2 Language Education Policies in the Post-War Period 2.6 Recycled Nationalist Discourses 2.6.1 Discourse of Oppressed Majority 2.6.2 Discourse of Swedish (Speakers) as Economic, Educational and Political Elite 2.6.3 Discourse of Swedish and (Other) Minorities References The Short and Intense Post-Nationalist Period in Finnish Higher Education 3.1 Higher Education Policy Coming into the Post-National Era 3.2 Language Policies in Post-National times 3.3 Internationalization and Language Policies of Higher Education 3.3.1 Internationalization as Catalyst for Language Policies 3.3.2 Internationalization and Default English 3.4 National and International Intertwined

35 36 38 41 41 42 44 44 46 48 48 50 51 52 53 54 55

59 61 62 64 65 67 71

CONTENTS

National Interests Promoted with Internationalization 3.4.2 Post-Nationalist Hierarchies of International 3.5 Minoritized Languages in Post-Nationalist Higher Education 3.6 Recycled Post-Nationalist Discourses 3.6.1 Discourse of Celebratory Multilingualism 3.6.2 Discourse of National Benefits of Internationalization 3.6.3 Discourse of Default English References

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3.4.1

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Language and New Nationalism in Higher Education 4.1 Higher Education Policy Developments in the New Nationalist Period 4.2 Language Policy Developments Leading to New Nationalist Era 4.3 Concern for National Languages in Higher Education 4.3.1 Complaints on “Killer English” Emerging in Higher Education Policy 4.3.2 Swedish Gradually Losing Ground 4.3.3 Debate on the Declaration of Finnish Language Board 2018 4.3.4 National, Autochthonous and Allochthonous Languages 4.4 Internationalization of Finnish Higher Education and New Nationalism 4.4.1 Changing Forms of Transnational Mobility and Internationalization 4.4.2 International Students, Local Languages and New Nationalism 4.4.3 Whose Language Counts? 4.5 Recycled Discourses of Nation in Higher Education 4.5.1 Discourse of Frozen Constitutional Bilingualism 4.5.2 Discourse of Economic Nationalism 4.5.3 Discourse of Oppressed Majority and Political Elites 4.5.4 Discourse of Killer English References

71 74 76 79 79 79 80 80 87 89 91 92 92 95 96 100 102 102 104 106 108 108 109 109 110 111

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CONTENTS

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New Nationalism and Higher Education 5.1 What’s New About New Nationalism? 5.2 Finnish New Nationalisms 5.2.1 Educational Nationalism 5.2.2 Economic Nationalism 5.2.3 Epistemic Nationalism 5.3 Global Scenarios 5.3.1 International Student Flows and New Nationalism 5.3.2 English and New Nationalism 5.3.3 Who Is National and International, Anyway? 5.4 Future of Finnish Higher Education 5.4.1 “Constitutional Nationalism” and Its Alternatives 5.4.2 Different Finnish Nationalisms 5.4.3 Alternate Futures 5.4.4 It’s Never (Just)About Language References

Index

117 118 119 120 122 123 124 125 126 128 129 129 131 132 134 135 141

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Conceptualizing Language Policy, Higher Education and New Nationalism

Abstract This chapter outlines higher education language policies as historically and politically layered and contingent. I will first discuss the way in which I understand language both as a proxy for policies and ideologies and as a means for construing those policies and ideologies. My focus is on the layered and intertwined nature of history, politics, language and nation. The subchapter closes with a methodological discussion of “looking beyond” language—i.e. the ways in which we can take our focus from language to the underlying societal structures. I will then present the higher education context and the role of language in higher education. From there, a discussion of the main concepts related to nations, nationalisms and language follows. The chapter concludes with the contextualization of Finnish language policy. Keywords Nationalism · Higher education · Finland · History · Constitutional language policy · Recycled discourses

This book analyses universities as sites of nationalist, post-nationalist and new nationalist language policy construction. The historical trajectory ranges from the mid-nineteenth century, continuing to the postnationalist period of the 1980s and 1990s, and finishing in the 2010s, when new nationalist and populist policies have emerged in higher education and elsewhere not just in former colonial powers such as the UK and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Saarinen, Higher Education, Language and New Nationalism in Finland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60902-3_1

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the USA (see Mathies and Weimer 2018 on USA and Great Britain), but also in the different contexts of Western Europe (Eger and Valdez 2015), sub-Saharan Africa (Kersting 2009) and, somewhat belatedly also Finland, with the rise of populist and nativist politics in the 2010s (Lähdesmäki 2019). Finland, with two constitutional national languages (Finnish and Swedish) within the borders of one state, does not look like the obvious choice to study the (one) language and (one) nation state ideologies. Nonetheless, the Finnish context gives me a chance not just to problematize the often simplified links between “language” and “nation”, but also to analyse alternate histories and futures (Wenzlhuemer 2009) in a context where several languages operate hierarchically. While the book focuses on Finland as an example of a Nordic country, peripheral from the Anglo-American perspective, the themes of nationalism, post-nationalism and new nationalism in language policy and higher education are thoroughly international, as language ideological discourses “fluctuate between the nationalising and the globalizing poles” (Soler and Gallego-Balsá 2019, p. 154). An analysis of recent post-nationalist (Heller 2011; Holborow 2015) and neo-nationalist (Lee 2017) language policies in Finnish higher education is one way of understanding the intertwined roles of the nation state and globalization (see Buckner 2017), in higher education as well as societally. The Finnish historical and political developments will be reflected particularly against Nordic and Baltic contexts (see, for instance, Hult and Källkvist 2016; Soler 2019; Soler et al. 2018; Hultgren 2014), but also other non-Anglophone contexts (see Lee et al. 2016 for East-Asia; Lee 2017 for South Africa; Kersting 2009 for sub-Saharan Africa). The Baltic states make for an interesting comparison as “nationalizing” post-Soviet states, with Estonia and Latvia first orienting towards protecting and empowering the nation, and then subsequently becoming more assimilationist and culturalist (Brubaker 2011). Eastern Asia provides contexts with relatively similar ethnolinguistic developments after World War II and decolonization (see Kamusella 2018). The phenomenon of “protecting” national languages easily lends itself to new nationalism(Lee 2017; Kelly 2018). The book is thus not only relevant for Finland; with the rise of political populism and new nationalism worldwide, research is needed that examines whether and how new national interests permeate different societal contexts, with potentially very material consequences for these societies and for the lives of individuals.

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Empirically, this book depicts the 100-year trajectory of Finnish constitutional bilingualism from the viewpoint of university language policies and is thus positioned in the terrains of higher education policy and language policy. It gives an empirical example of the study of language indexing and co-constituting political developments by beginning with the emerging Finnish nation state language policies and the first Constitution of 1919, and linking these developments to larger societal and higher education policy developments. It is clear that the increasing concern (particularly) for Finnish and Swedish in higher education does not only have new nationalist but also learning and knowledge construction implications (Kuteeva and Airey 2014). These, in turn, are linked to the basic tasks of universities as providers of knowledge and professionals for the nation state (Buckner 2017), making the ostensibly neutral knowledge production function of higher education also an exercise in nation state higher education policy. The new nationalist turn now calls for further analysis both inside universities and in relation to societal developments, in the case of this book in education, migration, economy and labour policies. The book opens with a theoretical and methodological framing of language, politics and history in a higher education context, continuing to a discussion of different nationalisms and the higher education and language policy context. Chapter 2 focuses on the historical trajectory of language and nationalism in Finnish higher education from mid-nineteenth century to post-World War II years. Chapter 3 outlines the post-nationalist, post-Cold War period from 1990s to early 2000s. Chapter 4 presents the new nationalist period from around 2010s, as a concern for the position of Finnish from the threat of English took over from the traditional language ideological tensions between Finnish and Swedish. The book closes with a discussion (Chapter 5) that summarizes the main results and presents some future outlooks for Finnish and international higher education.

1.1 Multi-Sited, Contingent and Historically Layered Language Policies The study of situated and contemporarily emerging language policies, such as the higher education language policies in the first decades of the twenty-first century, makes visible larger developments that characterize Western societies. In this book, I analyse the emerging and existing

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new nationalist developments in higher education by considering historically and politically intertwined, layered and (re)cycled language policy discourses. I will next explain the theoretical approach. 1.1.1

Language Indexing and Co-Constituting Politics

We are accustomed to saying and thinking that language is political, often implying that language reflects political and ideological structures. However, the relationship is stronger than that—language not only reflects or mirrors, but construes and co-constitutes those structures (Gal 2006). As Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) argue, study of language ideology provides a bridge between language and social theory. Language and languages are not ideologically neutral (even if they are politically often presented as such), but are intertwined with the political, economic, social and cultural structures which they “cloak in linguistic terms”’ (Baloˇckaite˙ 2014, p. 42). We should not let “language” divert us from acknowledging the political, demographic, social, economic or even natural environment factors in the “sociolinguistic ecology” of a community (Spolsky 2018). What do we, then, talk about when we think we talk about language? Language is an easy proxy for, among other things, ethnicity, which in turn is an equally easy proxy for national identity (Blommaert 2006). However, when talking about language and nationalism, we, in fact, eventually talk about speakers (Halonen 2012; Flores and Chaparro 2018) and the political and social hierarchies(Gal 2006; Ennser-Kananen et al., Forthcoming) that structure our societies. This book expands on the current language policy research by applying and developing an approach that acknowledges the multi-sited nature of language policy (Halonen et al. 2015). A multi-sited conceptualization means that the temporal, spatial and material features of language policy need to be taken into account; in other words, the assemblages of policy texts, language policy discourses, and historical trajectories of human actors and physical spaces need to be considered, thus crossing the macro-meso-micro levels of language policy (see Hult 2015; Halonen et al. 2015; Fox and Alldred 2015).

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Politics and History as Contingent

While we may accept that there is a physical reality that is not always observable to us, our knowledge of that reality is always dependent on our viewpoints and is historically, socially and culturally situated (Archer et al. 2016). Understanding this assemblage of constructed and material policies is relevant for our understanding (also) of language policies as historically and politically contingent. Politics is generally defined as activities intended to promote change in form of action or ideology, while exerting power over others. A narrow definition of politics would be this kind of activity taking place in institutional settings. A broad definition, in turn, is that politics implies use of, or submission or resistance to, power in any field of life, as long as the goal is to have an impact on individual or society. Policy, then, is the direction of courses of action that leads us to those ideological and power-related decisions (Palonen 2003). Research problems in the area of language policies and social structures are typically phenomenon-based “wicked problems” that take place in a complex setting of social, economic, ethnic, political, environmental, health, security or learning contexts. Focusing only on formal policies and structures inevitably fails to take into account the temporally and spatially fluctuating networks and contacts between human or institutional actors. The problematic and often taken-for-granted relationship between structures like macro-meso-micro is, in fact, a major problem in sociological understanding of human structures (Byrne 1998; Byrne and Callaghan 2013) as they tend to (over-)simplify the multi-sited issues involved (Hult 2010; see Saarinen 2017). The view of policy as linear and dichotomous has been criticized elsewhere in the field of education, as reviewed concisely by Kauko and Wermke (2018), or in the field of higher education, as Marginson and Rhoades (2002) discuss in their glonacal agency heuristic—i.e. in a GLObal, NAtional and LOcal constellation. Dale and Robertson (2009) have particularly criticized the research practice of extending the macromeso-micro view of societal structures to the global sphere, which simplifies globalization (as a global network of production, culture, and power, see Castells 2000) and internationalization (as the ways in which higher education institutions respond to globalization, see Cantwell and Maldonado-Maldonado 2009) into merely adding another level on top

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of the local and national structures of education policy. Language policy is not an exception in its methodological and empirical nationalism. What we should, then, do is challenge the ways in which we understand the mechanisms behind the linear and dichotomous structures of global-national-local. Through the lens of globalization, we have come to criticize the essentialist nature of “nation”, “state” and “education” as fixed and absolute (Saarinen 2017). Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) further point out that nation state makes us take for granted certain kinds of ahistorical assumptions about the national discourses and agendas. It seems that a turn towards theorizing higher education policy as temporal and spatial is taking place, helping us move on from previously dominant structural theories (Saarinen and Ursin 2012). While the story of a nation is traditionally told as a linear one, it does not mean that it could not be told in another way; the Eastern European states have told and retold their stories several times over the twentieth century alone (Brubaker 2011) in the cycles of independence and occupation. Stories of nation states are typically told as inevitable stories of the emergence of a nation that seeks (and often after struggle gains) independence. The story of a nation (Hobsbawm 1992) leaks also into the story of the “new nation”. These need to be told as a story in order to have the desired effect in nation building and nationalism, but the story might not always be the same (Stråth 2016). Here lies the main paradox of this book: the story of nation is needed to build a hegemonic understanding of a nation state, but when we unpack the hegemonic discourses, we find not one but many nationalisms. Nationalisms are a collection of often competing and overlapping ideologies, policies, social processes and historical trajectories—in other words, different nations. Stråth (2016), while writing about historical utopias of Europe, points out this need for shared histories, but also discusses the dangers in homogenizing them. Comparative history (Ihalainen 2017) provides one helpful tool to unpack the deterministic, linear, self-evident looking national(ist) histories and national(ist) stories behind them that are inevitably recycled also in new nationalist contexts. It will be useful to consider themes of historical layeredness (Välimaa 2019), historical contingency (Stråth 2016) and counterfactual histories (Wenzlhuemer 2009; Rodwell 2013) to distance ourselves from the unproblematized and sometimes self-evident looking national histories. The hegemonic stories need to be discussed against subversive (Ewick and Silbey 1995) national stories in order to challenge their taken-for-grantedness.

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Messy Methodologies

Analysing language policies in a way that appreciates their political (Byrne 1998) and historical (Ihalainen 2017) contingency calls for an approach that acknowledges their complex and messy nature. Consequently, my treatment of language and higher education in this book is characterized by an attempt to, for want of a better term, unfocus —that is, an attempt to see differently, to challenge the existing ways of thinking and writing about language in higher education (inter)nationalization. This is a wider analytical challenge. We as researchers have been trained to focus and to treat anything that hinders that focus with suspicion. The benefit of, but also problem with any methodology is that they enable us to look directly at what we want to look at, while at the same time making us miss what we do not look at. A politically and historically complex topic, on the other hand, requires approaches that help take our eyes off the focus at times, in order to enable a bigger picture. Otherwise, we easily just continue to reproduce the taken-for-granted views of whatever it is we are studying. A particular kind of unfocus has been found to have benefits for creativity of focus group work by Franz (2011), who uses unfocus simply in the meaning of “substantive discussion on topics not directly tied to the goals of the project” (p. 1380). A more helpful metaphor (although not definition) is provided by Pillay (2017) who talks about focus and unfocus as serving different purposes, focus providing the “close and narrow beam” and unfocus being the “beam reaching far and wide, enabling … peripheral vision”. There are approaches that specifically attempt to do this, such as ethnographies or nexus analytical approaches, where the process, rather than the questions, directs the research (e.g. see Aarnikoivu 2020). It is the peripheral vision or “corner of the eye” vision that I am interested in here. In discussing new nationalism in Finnish higher education from the point of view of language, I want to enhance my peripheral vision by looking behind language (what we talk about when we think we talk about language), behind politics (what are the non-linear links between different policies) and beyond history (what are our contingent and counterfactual possibilities of seeing history from new perspectives). A combination of these allows me to unpack some of the taken-for-granteds in understanding new nationalism in higher education contexts. Flyvbjerg (2006), discussing the usefulness of case studies, urges us to ask ourselves

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“what is this case a case of”. By this, he means that the study should leave out the possibility to be “different things to different people” (p. 238)— i.e. not trying to tell the story as an omniscient narrator, but to give space for the different interpretations and different readers. Tollefson’s (2015) historical-structural analysis is useful in studying a historically and politically complex topic such as the one in this book. The constitutional language policy and language legislation of higher education, the ideological constructs such as institutional bilingualism as naturalized and commonsensical, and the recycling of particular language ideological discourses of Finnish constitutional bilingualism (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015; Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015; Saarinen 2020) are analysed against each other. In a 100-year trajectory, the picture is necessarily big, but sometimes we need to “fuck nuance”, as Healy (2017) puts it in his call for theorizing by cutting through complexity rather than hiding our difficulty of seeing the big picture in the first place with more complexity. Healy calls for a new habit of thought; his critique of our conceptual framework closing our view from “disconfirmation” from the world is particularly useful. In this book, the not-so-nuanced big picture theorization of language, higher education, nationalism and history (this chapter) gives a space for a bigger and messier picture of the role of language and higher education in understanding nationalism historically and politically. The time for nuance comes in the empirical sections (Chapters 2, 3 and 4), and the discussion and conclusion (Chapter 5) take us back to the big picture and to the implications of language both as proxy for political structures, as well as language policies and ideologies mutually constituting each other.

1.2

Why Language in Higher Education?

Universities have often had important roles in (re)negotiating national identities in the past 200–300 years (Adriansen and Adriansen 2018). In the Finnish case, a major part of that renegotiation has taken place through negotiations of university language policies. They have historically been significant sites for construction of Finnish constitutional bilingualism and the related political and ideological tensions against larger historical and societal developments (Engman 2016; Meinander 2016; Lindström and Sylvin 2014).

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Universal and National Universities

Language has had a topical role in the political and cultural nationbuilding processes particularly since the nineteenth century (see Chapter 2 for a more thorough discussion). Consequently, the analysis of language and its political role in higher education is useful in teasing out the dynamics between the nation state-oriented and the international and global roles of higher education in the society. The description of universities as international on the one hand and national on the other is one of the taken-for-granteds in higher education (see Scott 2011). Universities are, indeed, international or universal in their disciplinary basis (see Clark 1983 for a discussion of the fundamental nature of disciplines; Becher and Trowler 2001 on the differences between disciplines), which implies that disciplinary affiliations would overcome national borders. Yet, as Torres-Olave (2012) points out, this kind of conceptualization assumes “a unidimensional view of culture and identity”, reducing also academics into representatives only of their disciplines rather than nationality or ethnicity, and ignoring their belonging into several social groups. An analysis of new nationalism may also give us a chance to dismantle this apparently self-evident (Western, Eurocentrist or Anglo-centrist) universalism (Díaz 2018). In addition to their universal nature, universities are also strongly national institutions, having had significant roles in nation building particularly in early and mid-nineteenth century (Anderson 1991; Välimaa 2019 on the Finnish situation; Mortensen and Haberland 2012 on the Danish history). The first periods of massification (i.e. larger shares of age cohort entering higher education) in the 1800s tied universities more closely to the nation states and their knowledge needs, in the Finnish case also leading into a process of standardizing the Finnish language. Universities are thus as much results of their disciplinary universalism as their organizational nationalism (Saarinen 2017). The dynamic nature of the national and international roles of higher education is not just a post-1980s development but a historical one. For instance, Vares (2020a, b) points out this relationship in the founding of the University of Turku immediately after Finnish independence, and the continued dynamic between the national and international roles throughout its history. Having had intertwined national and global roles throughout history, universities should be analysed based on the dynamics

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of their historical layeredness rather than their historical linearity (Välimaa 2019). 1.2.2

Language Policies in Higher Education

Language has traditionally occupied three roles in higher education: as medium of teaching; as a means of archiving knowledge in different text depositories like books and libraries; and as an object of theoretical study (Brumfit 2004). Brumfit additionally presented two challenges for this understanding: English as the default language of international communication and the technology of the Internet. Higher education policy research has tended to discuss languages mainly from Brumfit’s first category of medium of teaching perspectives; language political issues have largely been under-examined in higher education policy research. (See Saarinen [2017] for a review.) In applied language studies, in turn, language in the context of higher education has mostly been dealt with either from the perspective of the use of English as language of tuition or from various learning perspectives, with occasional exceptions such as Phillipson’s treatment of linguistic imperialism in higher education (for instance, Phillipson 2015). Recently, research has emerged on the political (Doiz et al. 2013) or conceptual and knowledge construction (Kuteeva and Airey 2014; Díaz 2018) aspects of languages in higher education. Since the 2010s, non-Anglophone countries such as the Nordic ones have initiated explicit language policies, usually catalysed by internationalization (Lauridsen 2013). The Nordic cases typically revolve around the discussion of the local language and the language of internationalization, most often English (for Nordic examples, see articles in Dimova et al. 2015; Hultgren et al. 2015). Particularly in Scandinavian contexts, the concept of domain loss has been used to illustrate this phenomenon. Domain loss refers to a concern for the apparently decreasing usability of local languages and has been problematized by, for instance, Hultgren (2016) for its implicit and unchallenged assumption of the one-onone correspondence between nation state and language, for its role in protecting linguistic privilege and for being an easy proxy for nation state centrist and protectionist language policies. Recent research tries to expand the relatively narrow focus of internationalization as English Medium Instruction (see articles in Kuteeva et al. 2020). For instance, the role of not the hegemonic but other local

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languages in language policies (Källkvist and Hult 2020); the researchers’ knowledge production activities in a predominantly multilingual academic world with monolingual publication practices (Hynninen and Kuteeva 2020); and the relationship between university branding and language (Soler 2020) are examples of this. Policies of internationalization, knowledge society and knowledge economy within higher education are a result of larger higher education policy changes since the 1970s, leading to policies of decentralization and accountability (Saarinen 2017). Demands for mobility of people, goods, money and ideas, particularly in the European Economic Area(St John 2018), have resulted in requirements for political transparency. These higher education policy developments, leading to systematized mobility and convergence of publishing practices, are also potentially language related. Consequently, language in higher education has in recent years increasingly also been analysed from a social and sociolinguistic perspective (see Soler and Gallego-Balsá 2019). The literature on language policies of higher education has increased also outside the Nordic countries, focusing on both formal policies and more informal ones, with examples, for instance, from the Basque Country (Doiz et al. 2013), Japan (Rose and McKinley 2018) and Estonia(Soler 2019), to name just a few. Hughes (2008) discusses particularly the role of English from an economic commodity perspective, analysing the advantage of Anglophone countries in the international study markets (Saarinen 2017). In the analysis of neo-nationalism in South African higher education (Lee 2017), language operates in identification as insider or outsider in the community. Language policies of Finnish higher education have been studied increasingly in the last couple of years (Saarinen 2012; Saarinen and Rontu 2018; Ylönen 2015; Lindström and Sylvin 2014). Moring et al. (2013) took a structural policy approach to language policies. Historical development of Finnish higher education language policies has been touched upon in histories of what is now the University of Helsinki(Klinge et al. 1987, 1989), and histories of Finland-Sweden in the nineteenth (Engman 2016) and twentieth (Meinander 2016) centuries.

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1.3

Concepts of Nations and Nationalisms

I will next look into concepts of nations and nationalisms, moving then to post-nationalism and new nationalism, linking the concepts to language ideologies. 1.3.1

Language and Fuzzy Nationalisms

Nationalism—and, consequently, new nationalism—is not a simple and undisputed concept in any way. Nationalism manifests itself in different ways, and language is often—but not always—part or the equation (Kamusella 2018). Hobsbawm, while considering nationalism a fuzzy concept, nonetheless gave a classic but also problematic definition that “nationalism is primarily a principle which holds that political and national unit should be congruent” (Hobsbawm 1992, p. 16); that is, political units (states) should be based on a national identity or essence. What makes this problematic is the difficulty of defining a nation in the first place, making Hobsbawm’s definition somewhat circular. Hobsbawm also suggests that it is nationalisms that make nations, not the other way round. This view is repeated by Blommaert (2006, pp. 238–239) who defines nation as the “result of the ideology of nationalism, which is a very specific political and ideological process”. Ideas of nations have been based on, for instance, ethnicity (descent of citizens); culture (shared traditions); or civic arguments (performing the civic activities of the citizen). All these ideas of nation are also necessarily hegemonic in their exclusive nature, creating hierarchies based on ethnicity (having the “right” ancestry or longer bloodline), culture (some traditions deemed “better” than others) or civic performance (hierarchies of criteria for being a “good” citizen). Nevertheless, national identification does not exclude or override other sets of identifications, and national identification can change. National identity is thus not fixed, but fluid (Hobsbawm 1992; Häkli 2008). Language has been a convenient proxy for nation in terms of ethnicity, culture or citizenship, and ultimately a marker of national identity (Hobsbawm 1992; Anderson 1991; Blommaert 2006; Kamusella 2018; Gal 2006). One language may be essentialistically linked with one ethnic group, suggesting that the link between language and ethnicity is natural and there would be no overlap with others. Gal (2011), however, gives

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an alternative example of multilingualist nationalisms, where the monolingual ideal was construed as a consequence of nationalism and not the other way round. Equally, a particular language or linguistic form may be linked to a particular understanding of culture, again essentializing the notion of culture into something that pre-exists the members identifying with the group. Particularly in Central Europe, we still see quite a number of what Kamusella (2018) calls isomorphic nation states—i.e. tight spatial and discursive overlapping of language, nation and state (p. 163). May (2018), in turn, reminds us that globally, in about 40% of states, there are “at least five or more statistically and / or politically significant ethnic groups”, and in about a third of the states, the largest national group is not a majority. In other words, “the idea of a homogeneous nation state is a social and political fiction” (May 2018, p. 242). What, then, is a nation? Nation seems to escape definitions even more, as Hobsbawm’s definition (1992, p. 15) implies: “As an initial working assumption any sufficiently large body of people whose members regard themselves as members of a “nation”, will be treated as such”. Thus, his thinking of nation is based on a shared understanding of group belonging. A familiar definition is that of Anderson (1991), of nations as imagined communities, consisting of people who perceive themselves as members of those communities. Hobsbawm further distinguishes between nationalism from above (the technologies that “make a nation”) versus nationalisms from below (the individual’s need to belong), and then goes on to describe nation as “an artefact, invention, social engineering”. Nationalism is a way of understanding belonging, and the basis for that understanding can vary (Kamusella 2009). The views of homogeneous nations have also been criticized heavily (Gal 2006), and not only in recent years. Already Ernest Renan, in his 1882 lecture What is nation? (Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?), presents a discussion of nationalism that is still relevant today. He dismantled ideas of nations based on attributes like race, language, culture or religion, arguing that they were based on non-existing categories that cannot be used as basis for nation. Instead, he suggested that nations are communities of interest, a definition somewhat related to Hobsbawm’s later one: “A nation is therefore a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make”. Renan’s definition is closely related to the liberal democracy view of nineteenth-century nationalism as a modern political and economic movement, characterized by representative liberal democracy (Hearn 2007).

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As Häkli (2008) reminds us, nation states are not solely defined by state borders. He discusses national identities from a geopolitical and spatial viewpoint, pointing out that the meaning of Finnishness (as any national identities) is historically contingent and the boundaries between “us” and “them” have been regularly redrawn. While the stereotypical Herderian (Gal 2011) idea of a state implies that the sovereign “state” is also “a nation”, “nation” and “state” are not synonymous. Nationalism is an idea(l), a construct, and as such, it has very concrete effects on the people who live within the political unit that is defined based on some definition. The construct of a nation also materialized in physical spaces, borders and markers of belonging. National identities have been blurred also because people within the national borders occupy different social worlds. Thus, even if the nation states can be defined (in the civic or statist definition) by the borders surrounding the area, for the population the question of identity and belonging is more complex. Based on the above, then, nationalism can be understood as a civic or social contract, aiming at some kind of political unit (“nation”), based on solidarity to some political and community rule (“law”) that does not overrule individual and universal (human) rights. Not only citizenship (belonging or not belonging in nation), but the act of being a good citizen, may be linked to language skills that are operationalized either as language tests (Khan and McNamara 2017) or as hegemonic understandings of what is an acceptable way of speaking (Ramjattan 2019). Wright (2016, pp. 51–52) presents three functions for language in a nation state. First, it has a utilitarian role as language of communication, enabling participation in civic and community activities. Second, it is a means of societal and cultural cohesion, which also gives it the function of enabling inclusion (or, if refused, grounds for exclusion). Third, having a common language can be used to argue for the existence of and treatment as a separate nation. Wright’s classification is useful also in the analysis of new nationalist trends in society. Language can be used to create symbolic boundaries between, for instance, ethnic and religious groups (Weng 2020, p. 76). However, as Weng points out, seeing the European vernacularization as a normative development to rise of bourgeoisie and market capitalism is an Eurocentric view on nationalism. Elsewhere, in turn (see, for instance, Eastern Asia in the turn of the twentieth century, according to Weng 2020), changes were more abrupt, usually “as a reaction to Western expansionism”. In

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a post-colonial setting, the processes of making a particular language the language of a wider community are often violent. Adejunmobi (2004) has an alternate view from a West-African postcolonial setting, arguing that languages are “not destined to become languages of wider communication” (p. 166). In other words, there is no property of the language to make it the foundation of a nation state, as is often imagined in the ethnolinguistic ideal (for a discussion of the ethnolinguistic assumption, see Blommaert et al. 2012). For the understanding of language policy, and for the purposes of this book then, it is important to understand that nation states do not emerge around a language, but the other way round. The need for (standard) language emerges from a nationalist need to create language policies that help fulfil the political need for a nation state (see Blommaert 2006; Gal 2006). Similarly, as Renan reminds us: “Languages are historical formations that imply nothing in regards to those who speak them”. That is, language does not define race and nation. In the Finnish case, genetic research has shown that linguistics and genetics do not align; for instance, while the Finnish language is of Eastern origin as a Fenno-Ugric language, particularly Western Finnish population is genetically Western (Onkamo 2017). When “nation” and “nationalism” are defined from an ethnolinguistic single language state perspective, nationalism will focus on the majoritized position (see Gal 2006 for a discussion of nationalism and language standardization; Laihonen and Halonen 2019 for a discussion of majority and minority as construed) of the hegemonic language. As language groups were split many ways with the new post-World War I and World War II borders, the hegemonic ruling elites tended to encourage single language policies. However, the relational position of languages and the groups they represented was always dependent on the context—a language that was in a hegemonic position in one state may have been minoritized in another, because the speakers of the language and their intersecting societal properties were different. Typically, allochthonous minorities have rarely occupied a hegemonic position. In Finland, the first Republican Constitution of 1919 introduced two national languages, but while this debate included constructions of both Finnish and Swedish as minorities under threat (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018), it completely ignored the

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existing autochthonous and allochthonous minorities, depicting the instability and fluidity of hegemonic positions (Ennser-Kananen and Saarinen, Forthcoming). Väistö (2017) defines Finnish nationalism particularly though its dynamics with Russia and Soviet Union on the one hand, and Sweden and the Swedish language on the other. In times of foreign policy crises, Finland has tended to turn to the West, which has also cooled the language tensions between Finnish and Swedish. An example of this is provided by the pre-World War II period when the language situation was still very explosive until the tense global situation turned Finnish attention to the West and relieved language tensions (Väistö 2017, p. 27). Another example takes place in the 1960s and the Cold War, when the comprehensive reform made the “second national language” (for most pupils Swedish) compulsory to all, partly for foreign policy reasons, but also laying ground for a new criticism of Swedish, in the form of the pakkoruotsi debate (mandatory Swedish or” Forced Swedish”) (Väistö 2017). In study of higher education, the fluidity of the definitions of nation and nationalism is shown in the global mobility flows and the ensuing combination of motivations for students to be mobile. This mixes the understanding of nation and nationalism even more, as international study is becoming less and less a temporary period in the students’ life and increasingly a part of more complex combination of study, labour and other migration (Robertson 2013). 1.3.2

Post-Nationalism, Neoliberal Governance and Language

While the legitimation project of nation states more or less ended in the Western parts of Europe with World War II, the nation continued to be seen as the natural, social and political form of modern world, or as the “constant unit of observation through all historical transformations” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, p. 305). While a world divided into discrete and autonomous nation states had been taken more or less for granted (p. 301), new forms of global cooperation emerged and were often seen as contradictory to nation states. Post-nationalism, or the economic, political and cultural global and cross-national reorganizations that started to gradually develop since World War II and particularly since the 1970s, coincides with developments that affected the nation states strongly. Most obvious examples are the end of the Cold War and the

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ensuing reallocation of global power balance, as well as economic and cultural globalization. A post-national nation state is based on the ideal of governmentality—i.e. on the idea of people allowing themselves to be governed and participating in their own governance (self -governance). This is further based on governing mechanisms (for instance, administration, education, statistical ordering) and classifications (of belonging in different groups), ultimately leading to ordering and control (see, for instance, Rose 1996). The centralized, controlling and regulative nation state emerges as the collective actor with legitimate power over a geographical area; anything that disrupts this unity (such as different languages that do not fit the national categories) leads to disorder and consequently to societal exclusion of the others (Nikula et al. 2012). Flores (2013) discusses this kind of dynamic in terms of nation state/colonial governmentality, referring to the mechanism that at the same time tries to make governmentalizing processes more inclusive, while failing to challenge the underlying colonial perspectives at the “root of marginalization of language-marginalized populations” (p. 264). Political calls for deregulation and “freedom” have, however, the flipside of controlling those who do not adhere to the particular kind of neoliberal freedoms; who do not have the possibility to choose; who are mobile in a wrong way. Here, the post-national politics easily repeats and replicates the nation state-centred policies. The post-nationalist language policies are an example of celebratory multilingualism (Nikula et al. 2012). The 1990s saw an increase in supranational policies aimed at regulating the position of minoritized languages in Europe (see, for instance, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1992) or national regulations (constitutional recognition in Finland of some autochthonous minorities such as Sámi, Romani and sign languages, but not all). Below the level of these regulations, there is a complex and messy reality, including detailed categorizations of different languages in an attempt to govern and control the diversity. Following Hélot and De Mejía (2008), bilingualism is presented both as something that may bring advantages, prestige and power, and as something that can give rise to problems and disadvantages, both societally and individually (Blommaert et al. 2012). The advantages and disadvantages of multilingualism may take the form of increased societal diversification, construed either as “cultural richness” enriching society or as “political problems of societal incohesion”, ultimately dangerous for a nation

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state struggling to maintain its identity (Nikula et al. 2012). For individuals, the outcome may be the construction of multilingualism either as a personal resource or as an obstacle to entering some societal trajectories (Blommaert et al. 2012; Nikula et al. 2012). As there is always a speaker behind the language (Halonen 2012), the speakers will not always fit the social, political and cultural structures in the same way. Language and language-based belonging often play the role of gatekeeper, linking also the post-nationalist commodified societies to ethnolinguistic discourse cycles (see also Gal 2006). 1.3.3

New Nationalism and the Political Backdrop in the 2010s

In Held and McGrew’s models of global politics (2007), nation statecentred and nationalist practices are linked with statist, protectionist and neoconservative politics. It is useful to distinguish between globalization as the historical process that has started, depending on different societal modernization theories, somewhere between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, creating “a growing network of long-distance dependencies and co-operation”; and globalism, as the ideological view that accepts globalization, including its power structures, as “natural and welcome and certainly unavoidable” (Haberland 2009, pp. 18–19). The critique of the post-national ideal of globalism, rather than globalization itself, is one of the defining features of new nationalism. All this has been observable in the 2016 US presidential campaign of Trump or the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum in the same year (Weimer and Barlete 2020; Ramswell 2017). New nationalism is thus often linked to right-wing, populist and anti-immigrant policies (Eger and Valdez 2015). As nationalism, also new nationalism can take different forms. Depending on the context, it can refer to the Western and European reorganization of national identity in global competition, or East Asian ideologies of national distinctiveness and social boundaries in a regional context, reinforced by negative attitudes towards those lower in a global hierarchy(Lee et al. 2016). Kersting (2009), discussing African new nationalism, quotes Ake (1996) who defined new nationalism as a second wave of decolonization, linked with internal xenophobia, whereas the first wave had been directed against outside threats and other countries. In other words, the inclusion that was needed for national cohesion in the beginning is replaced by exclusion of some social groups.

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Nationalism is often conflated with populist and authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes, but these are also reflected in definitions of new nationalism. Mudde (2019) has drafted a historical typology of definitions of left and right since the French revolution, which is helpful also in the study of where different understandings of nationalisms can be placed. Nationalism tends to be linked with right-wing politics, market economy, religious ideologies and authoritarianism, whereas internationalism is linked with leftist politics, the state’s role in economy, secular ideologies and libertarianism. In the heart of the emergence of new nationalism in Finnish higher education are politics of internationalization and globalism, represented on the surface by increased use of English in the academic communities (Hiidenmaa 2003; Hakulinen et al. 2009). New nationalist developments are a phenomenon brought at least partly by global migration flows (see review in Halonen 2012 from a language ideological perspective). Coming to the 2000s, we can see that Brumfit’s (2004) concerns for the default nature of English in internationalization are relevant, but also simplified: while the role of English remains strong in, for instance, international publication, we also see developments that seem to challenge English. Examples of this could be, for instance, multilingual conceptual and knowledge construction practices of higher education (Kuteeva and Airey 2014) or the problematization of the self-evident advantage of Anglophone countries in internationalization of higher education (McCambridge and Saarinen 2015; Brenn-White and van Rest 2015). The increase in support of populist movements has created growing tensions particularly on the position of Swedish in Finland, while the recent backlash against English appears largely motivated by the ideological protection of Finnish rather than the constitutional bilingualism as such (Saarinen 2014, 2020). The increase in support of the Finns Party (earlier referred to as True Finns, a direct translation of their Finnish name Perussuomalaiset ) is a major political indication of rise in (new) nationalist ideologies. Following the emergence of the Finns Party during the last 10 years into the political elite of parliamentary decision-making, a discussion of Finnishness has also emerged. The Finns Party that identifies as having “patriotic and Christian social values” is not explicitly ethnonationalist, but refers to an intuitive understanding of Finnishness in its party programme. The main party officials talking about “good migration and bad migration”, and discussing the limits of migration (Uusi Suomi 16 July 2019), racialize the party politics. Stressing patriotic values,

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prioritizing nation state centrist politics and citing a combination of “language, history, customs, values, and symbols” behind Finnishness on their website (www.perussuomalaiset.fi) place the Finns Party in the populist new nationalist field (see also Lähdesmäki 2019).

1.4

Finnish Language Policy

Finland is constitutionally bilingual, with two equal national languages. Finland has been represented in some ways as something of a model bilingual society (McRae 2007; Salo 2012), but this reputation is contested. Particularly, the relationship of the two national languages, Finnish and Swedish, has at time been tense. Finland’s constitutional bilingualism has been both applauded and criticized (see Salo 2012 for a discussion of the dynamics) for giving a minority of less than 10% (at the time of independence in 1917 about 11%, in 2019 approximately 5.5%) a legislative status beyond the share of the population. In addition, the constitutional bilingualism has often worked to hide other, both autochthonous and allochthonous, languages from the language policy scene (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018; Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015) making different minorities language politically invisible until the mid-1990s, and still, particularly in higher education, largely invisible and non-existent. Following major public media and parliamentary debates shows that the discourse of constitutional bilingualism is strong. Swedish is a national language, with equal position to that of Finnish (see Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015), but it is still de facto a minority language, spoken by approximately 5.5% of the Finnish population. About 7.5% of the 5.5 million population spoke a mother tongue other than Finnish or Swedish in 2019, making Finnish speakers still an overwhelming majority in the population. The altogether nine Sámi languages have in the North Calotte area according to different estimates 60,000–100,000 speakers, out of which about 10,000 speakers of three Sámi languages live in Finland. The largest language populations outside Finnish, Swedish and Sámi speakers in 2019 were Russian (almost 82,000), Estonian (almost 50,000) and Arabic (32,000) speakers. The practice of allowing only one language in the official registries makes it difficult to estimate speakers of autochthonous languages such as Romani or Karelian. Approximately 30,000 people are estimated to speak Karelian in Finland (www.kot us.fi), and approximately a third of the total of 10,000–12,000 Romani population are estimated to speak the language.

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Finnish Language Legislation: A Brief History

A typical feature of Finnish societal bilingualism is that it relies relatively heavily on legislation and is constitutional by nature. As Finland became a Russian Grand Duchy in 1809, the Swedish legislation from late eighteenth century was observed until the first Constitution of 1919. The Swedish legislation not only acted in general as a safeguard against Russification in the turn of the twentieth century, but also decreed that even under the Russian rule of 1809–1917, the official language of the Grand Duchy of Finland was Swedish and, from 1863, Finnish, rather than Russian (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015; Lähteenmäki and Pöyhönen 2015). Consequently, also in higher education, the long Swedish period was prolonged during the nineteenth century. Deciding on a constitution with two national languages took place in the intersection of various political debates (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018; Engman 2016). From a language ideological viewpoint, the bilingual constitution was also in part an outcome of the nineteenth-century nationalistic discourses idealizing the Herderian ideology of people, continuing to a construed link between a language and a political unit (Hobsbawm 1992). This ideology manifested itself in the postindependence constitutional debates of 1919 as the dominant discourse of “two languages, one nation”, and the alternate discourses of “two languages, two nations” and “one language, one nation”. Discourses on language and ethnicity, economic and political class distinctions, and certain active politicians came together in the parliamentary debate (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018), which was further reinforced by the bloody and traumatic Civil War that took place right after independence in the spring of 1918. One of the constant language ideological discourses on Finnish and Swedish has revolved around social backgrounds of different language groups. While both major language groups included populations from different societal cohorts, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the political, economic and cultural elites were overwhelmingly Swedish speakers, despite their small share in the society (Engman 2016). The ruling and hegemonic classes in the nineteenth century being more Swedish than Finnish speakers led to the assumption that all Swedish speakers were upper class, and Swedish language (rather than the Swedishspeaking political elite) started to become synonymous with power and oppression. Class conflict caused by population growth, industrialization

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and the rise of a labour movement also unearthed some of the social tensions between different language groups, which were then reflected in the polarized political discourses between the “elites” and “common people” (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018), still recycled in today’s language policy discourses (Ihalainen et al. 2011; Saarinen 2020). 1.4.2

Constitutional Bilingualism

Finnish language policy is peculiar in three ways. First of all, in contrast to other Nordic countries, language legislation in Finland is constitutionally defined and exceptionally binding (Saarinen and Taalas 2017). Finland has separate language legislation that is not self-evident even in multilingual states, but reflects the legalistic Finnish society. Second, Finland is constitutionally a bilingual country, and this bilingualism has been resolved as the equal status of the two national languages and not, for example, with minority decrees. Finland thus differs from some other Nordic and Baltic countries, such as Estonia, with one single state language (Soler 2019), or Sweden, with Swedish as the official language alongside several minority languages (Lainio 2015). In turn, Danish is the official language of Denmark only de facto as there is no formal language legislation, and Norway has two official languages, Nynorsk and Bokmål. Third, Finnish constitutional bilingualism covers the whole country, with a few regional exceptions such as the Åland Islands and some Sámi language regulations in the Sámi homeland. Finnish bilingualism is, thus, not mainly regional, as, for example, in Canada or Switzerland (Latomaa and Nuolijärvi 2002; Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015). The kind of bilingualism promoted in the constitution is societal rather than individual. This has led to a system where institutions, rather than individuals, are regulated. This includes also universities, which are either Finnish, Swedish or bilingual. The ideological construct, aiming at protecting monolingual institutions to preserve the minority language has been dubbed Taxell’s paradox after a long-term chair of the Swedish People’s Party and government minister Christoffer Taxell (Liebkind and Sandlund 2006; Boyd and Palviainen 2015). The reasoning behind Taxell’s paradox is that monolingual institutions and organizations lead to maintenance of societal bilingualism, while bilingual institutions lead to a monolingual use of Finnish (Boyd and Palviainen 2015; From and Sahlström 2019). Consequently, separate institutions for both languages

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are needed. A similar argument for parallel monolingualism (Heller 2006) has been presented in francophone Canada. The consensus among the ruling political elite on Finland’s constitutional bilingualism has been since independence historically fairly consistent (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015), and it has not been seriously challenged by a major parliamentary party until 2017 and the ideological turn in the Finns Party’s politics with the election of a hardliner party chair. The popular opinion is, however, more divided. Several opinion polls have in recent years been commissioned by actors that in themselves have ideological positions on the matter, such as Suomalaisuuden Liitto (Association of Finnish Culture and Identity), promoting a strengthening of the position of Finnish language in Finland, or Ajatushautomo Magma (Think tank Magma), working around Swedish and bilingualism in Finland. The results, produced by the same market research institution Taloustutkimus, have indicated that approximately 50–63% of the population are in favour of voluntary Swedish in education—Suomalaisuuden Liitto asking whether Swedish should be voluntary (63% of the respondents in favour of this) and Magma, in turn, whether it should be compulsory (50% of respondents favouring this) (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015). The debate on Swedish has usually revolved around compulsory school Swedish. The constitution does not stipulate that Finnish languages, i.e. Finnish or Swedish, must be compulsory in education, but this is determined by education legislation. The constitution provides for the right to use one’s “own language” (Finnish or Swedish) with the public authorities; this has been solved by requiring everybody working in public positions to demonstrate a certain amount of knowledge of the other national language, usually Swedish. While the issue could have been resolved in an alternate way, it has in practice been implemented by including the studies of the second domestic language to all levels of education, so as not to limit anyone’s access to public employment. Thus, basic education has an effect on later levels of education, working life and citizenship, even if both national languages in education are not a constitutional requirement. 1.4.3

Minoritized Languages in Language Legislation

Because of the above-described historical development, Finland had two established languages at the time of independence in 1917, while other

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minority languages were marginalized and only educated upper classes had access to “foreign” languages or lingua francas such as Latin, German, French and English. Ideologically, the representatives of both Swedish and Finnish speakers referred to Swedish as a minority language, but with very different undertones. A minority legislative status for Swedish was not discussed in the constitutional debate of 1919, but the debate on the bilingual constitution revolved around the rights of the Swedish-speaking minority population. Thus, the constitution can be seen as a set of minority provisions intended to secure parliamentary and societal normalcy after a political crisis of Civil War in 1918, but the minority provisions provided only to the formerly politically hegemonic Swedish, rather than other minority languages spoken in Finland at the time of independence (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018). Minority languages, specifically the Sámi languages, Romani, Sign Language and Karelian, began to receive formal recognition only in the 1990s. Sámi, Romani and Sign languages were added to the Constitution in an amendment in 1995 and kept in similar form in the renewed Constitution of 1999. Additionally, Karelian was named as a minority language in 2009 following the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1992—a status which has no legislative but rather a symbolic effect in Finland. All the above are generally referred to as “minority languages”, although their status is not based primarily on language policy arguments, and Finnish legislation does not as such include minority provisions. The three Sámi languages spoken in Finland derive their rights from their indigenous status. Romani is mentioned in the constitution among “other groups” who are granted the right to maintain their language and culture, and Sign Language rights are derived from their users’ disability rights, rather than referring to individual Finnish or Swedish Sign Languages. The Sámi Language Act was accepted in 2003 and the Sign Language Act in 2015. However, the position of minority languages, particularly the Romani and Karelian language as well as some Sámi languages, remains vulnerable, with little support and low status within education. While the constitution recognizes also the rights of “other languages”, Finnish language legislation is primarily a policy of protecting Finnish and Swedish in a parallel monolingual manner (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015; Laihonen and Halonen 2019).

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CHAPTER 2

Language and Long Nation Building in Finnish Higher Education

Abstract The chapter discusses the nation-building period of Finnish higher education. After presenting a short introduction to higher education and language policy developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I will analyse the role of language in Finnish higher education from mid-nineteenth century to Finnish independence in 1917. I will then move on to the interwar years and discuss language and nationalisms in the process of founding new universities and the particular case of the bilingual University of Helsinki in the 1920s and 1930s. The interweaved nature of nationalisms and internationalisms is discussed from the perspective of international politics in general and the post-World War II years in particular. The chapter closes by presenting the recycled discourses of threatened national languages, oppressed Finnish speakers, Swedish speakers as elite and Swedish as minority. Keywords Nationalism · Finland · Nation building · Language policy · Higher education

Language policy and language education policy have more often than not been intertwined with the construction of the nation state and the national narrative; however, this has not been a linear process but one where the construction of a nation, the related nationalisms, and the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Saarinen, Higher Education, Language and New Nationalism in Finland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60902-3_2

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language, culture or ethnicity arguments have been intertwined and coconstituted. This has been true especially in the late modern era since the mid-nineteenth century and particularly in European contexts, which has tended to fade out other, non-Western contexts from the debate (Johnson 2013; Kamusella 2018; Gal 2006; Blommaert 2006). This chapter discusses nationalism in Finnish higher education since the mid-nineteenth century. I will analyse the links between the nation state and language in Finnish higher education until the post-World War II massification (Trow 2007) and the beginning of state-regulated systematic development of higher education in the 1960s and 1970s that marks the beginning of a Welfare state higher education system (Jalava 2012; Välimaa 2019).

2.1

Higher Education Policies in Nation-Building Times

Although the first Finnish university was not established until the seventeenth century with the Royal Academy of Turku (Kungliga Akademien i Åbo) in 1640, the roots of Finnish higher education are in the medieval European universities where Finnish students were educated at that time. This was the time when the principles (or “convictions”, Välimaa 2019, p. 52) that formed the basis of universities’ activities were shaped: belief in human dignity, conviction in the organized universe, conviction in the control of one’s environment, acceptance of critical thinking and attitude, and emphasis on the public nature of knowledge. When these convictions were accompanied by a collegiality-based model of organization, the outcome was an institution that was able to adapt to and manage in different social contexts over the centuries. The need for a university in Finland, at the time a part of the Swedish Empire, became evident at the time of the Reformation and the birth of a centralized Swedish state. However, the reason for this was not just the needs of the Swedish imperial unification policy, although this is usually mentioned as the main motivation. The formation of the Royal Academy in 1640, as the Swedish Empire was about to reach its height, was influenced by various factors related to politics, the training needs of officials, the motives of the authorities, and needing to raise the level of education in Finland, the eastern part of the Empire divided from Sweden by the Baltic sea (Välimaa 2019).

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At the turn of the nineteenth century and following the Swedish defeat in the war of 1808–1809, a part of Napoleonic Wars in Northern Europe, Finland became a Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire. In 1809, the Royal Academy of Turku was renamed the Imperial Academy of Turku (Impepatopcka akademi Abo), but after a devastating fire in 1828, was moved to Helsinki and renamed Imperial Alexander University (Impepatopcki Alekcandpovcki ynivepcitet). The transfer to Helsinki had been only a matter of time, since the government offices had already been relocated to Helsinki earlier, Turku being politically and spatially too close to Sweden and too far from the Russian capital St Petersburg (Klinge et al. 1989; Välimaa 2019). Until the turn of the twentieth century and Independence, University of Helsinki remained the only multidisciplinary university in Finland. In the early nineteenth century, Finland was still mainly a Russian province, though privileged as such, as Swedish legislation remained the foundation of the society and was being applied in the Finnish Grand Duchy, instead of the Russian one. The change around mid-century towards a more structured autonomy and state structure is also reflected in the development of higher education, with professors from the Imperial Alexander University engaging in social and cultural debate. The teaching task of the university began to accumulate the tasks of civil society and nation building (Välimaa 2019). Jalava illustrates convincingly the labour market role of the university since the seventeenth century and how this role in the labour market on particular and society in general has changed over the centuries during different higher education reforms. While the seventeenth-century Royal Academy of Turku was a school for clergy and civil servants, in the eighteenth century labour market needs begun to dictate the educational role of universities. The nineteenth century brought with it the cultural needs of nation building, and the twentieth century rebooted the debate on the societal mission of higher education (Jalava 2012), this time from the perspective of entrepreneurial and, since the 2015 European refugee crisis, also service learning perspectives (Vaarala et al. 2017). After Finland gained independence from the dissolved Russian empire in December 1917, a bloody and traumatic Civil War broke. The first two decades after Finland gained independence can, consequently, be characterized as the era of White Finland, after the winning side of the Civil War of 1918 (Välimaa 2019) or “The First Republic” (Alasuutari 2017). This was a time of new political and educational structures being built,

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including legislation on compulsory education and a system of higher education with new universities being founded to strengthen the new nation’s educational, cultural and economic cohesion. After the end of World War II, Finland having lost the war, the period of rebuilding the economy and resettling the 450,000 Karelian evacuees, started the period of “Second Republic” (Alasuutari 2017). While the pre-war Finland was still characterized by an elite system and limited participation in higher education, the post-war period brought with it increased participation in education and an expansion of the higher education system (Välimaa 2019; Kivinen et al. 1993).

2.2

Language Policies in Nation-Building Times

Finnish had been used aside Swedish gradually since the sixteenth century in religious contexts, early education and local administration, although Swedish continued to be the official language of the Grand Duchy until mid-nineteenth century, Latin being the language of higher levels of education. The Language Act of 1863 was given during a time of relatively liberal reforms in the Russian Empire, and stated that within a transition period of 20 years, Finnish would become equal to Swedish in all administrative matters (Hakulinen et al. 2009). From there, the legislative regulation and formal language policy gradually developed towards institutionalizing bilingual Finnish-Swedish language policy in education as well as local and national administration. In practice, Swedish maintained its dominant position in administration and higher education until Independence. The constitutional debate of 1919 took place in a historical situation where the dispute between a monarchist and republican constitution was still unsettled, and the Civil War of 1918 was still a fresh wound in the society, causing tensions between different classes and language groups (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018). After a heated debate on whether the Finnish and Swedish speakers were members of one or two people or nations, a bilingual constitution was accepted in the summer of 1919. The outcome of the debate was not only dependent on language ideologies about different populations, but also on the German defeat in World War I and the subsequent collapse of monarchist aspirations with the Swedish People’s Party. The national bilingualism was explicated in the Language Act of 1922, and reflected in the language regulation of the bilingual University of Helsinki (but see Sect. 2.4 on the ensuing “language feuds”

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at the university). The need to build national cohesion on the one hand between the two language groups and between the winners and losers of the Civil War on the other hand was reflected in the post-independence politics of cohesion of the new nation (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015). This created the discursive construct of elite political support for societal bilingualism in Finland (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018), in Kamusella’s (2018, p. 57) words “disqualifying Finland from the exclusive club of ‘true’ ethnolinguistic nation-states”. When Finland became independent, the share of Swedish-speakers in the population had decreased to about 12% and was still declining (Väistö 2017). The political and societal debates were already conducted mainly in Finnish, although the influence of Swedish speakers remained significant, especially in the fields of education, business, land ownership and culture (Ihalainen et al. 2019; Engman 2016). Minority languages had no place in the constitution or other language policy regulation, proving right for Finland what Heller has concluded about linguistic minorities “being created by nationalisms which exclude them” (Heller 2006, p. 7). In the case of Finland, in addition to the two competing nationalisms there was a third one; the Finnish and Swedish nationalisms were complemented in by a third version of “two languages, one nation”, a sentiment often attributed to nineteenth-century author, historian and politician Zachris Topelius, but reflecting the formal constitutional language legislation. Either way, none of the post-independence nationalities left room for other minority languages (Ennser-Kananen and Saarinen, Forthcoming), although Swedish speaking Finns were already being represented in the League of Nations minority Commission. After the constitutional debate of 1919, language policy remained high on the political agenda long into the 1930s, in higher education in particular and the society in general. Building and supporting an idea of national unity required not only a Constitution construing a bilingual nation, but a new educational system, with the ideal of a pure standardized (Gal 2018) language, with well-defined boundaries, suiting the idea of a pure nation state. This is also illustrated by the traditional definition of nationalism as a union of national and political entities (Hobsbawm 1992), where the proxy for national was often language (see Gal 2006; Kamusella 2009 for a critique). The Constitution of 1919 and the Language Act of 1922 were compromises that pleased the moderates on both sides: Finnish speakers for making Finnish politically, legally and socially equal with Swedish,

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and Swedish speakers for the equal national language status instead of a minority status. This also illustrates different understandings of minority in Finland, as Swedish-speaking Finns continued to be represented as a minority at the League of Nations. Radicals on both sides, on the other hand, were not pleased with the situation which meant that the language debates continued until World War II (Meinander 2016, pp. 30–31; Ihalainen et al. 2019). This applies particularly to universities and political movements close to them. After the language politically turbulent years of 1920s and 1930s, the language policy scene quieted down somewhat during World War II, where Finland initially fought the Soviet Union independently in the Winter War 1939–1940 and then with Nazi Germany in Continuation War in 1941–1944, finally changing sides to the Allies against former German allies in Lapland in 1944–1945. The years immediately after World War II with the ensuing resettlement of approximately 450,000 Karelian evacuees from territories lost to the Soviet Union, or 10% of the population at the time, was also a language policy issue, triggering again calls for national cohesion and internal security. This led on the one hand to a strengthening of the position of Swedish (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015) and on the other, to further assimilation of Sámi and Karelian speakers (Lehtola 2012; Sarhimaa 2017). During the resettlement of the evacuees, the Swedish People’s Party feared Finnishization of their territories, and was opposed to the resettlement of Karelian evacuees to Swedish speaking areas. (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015) The Karelian evacuees, who were for the most part Finnish speakers of the Karelian dialect, and to a smaller part Karelian language speakers, were resettled around Finland, effectively assimilating and erasing the Karelian language from Finnish territory (Sarhimaa 2017). The Sámi assimilation, in turn, had taken off more slowly than the Karelian assimilation after independence and the relatively positive postWorld War I atmosphere towards minorities (Ruiz Vieytez 2001). During the Cold War, tensions in the Northern parts of Fennoscandia (North Calotte) increased, resulting in an effective and active assimilation of the Sámi into Finnish culture (Lehtola 2012). Since the 1960s until the 1990s, language policies revolved around international cooperation and migration, but also the reorganization of regional administration since the 1970s particularly when it came to the

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position of Swedish. In many ways, the post-World War II years strengthened the role of Swedish both as occupying a national language role in the constitution, as well as taking the role of the minority language in the society, simultaneously obscuring the view for other minorities (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015; Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015).

2.3

Language in (Higher) Education from Early Nineteenth Century Until Independence

The path of Finnish to become a language of higher education was not simple or straightforward in the nineteenth century, even with increasing pro-Finnish Fennoman politics and national romantic sentiments. As today, also the nineteenth-century language policy developments were linked to developments in political autonomy and relations with Russia, economic structures, and other social and cultural developments, recycling language policy discourses from different historical times and political sites (see Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018). In this context, Finnish language gradually begun to advance in the latter part of the nineteenth century. During the end of the nineteenth century, use of Finnish in the academia increased gradually. A 1894 statute declared that all applicants for university teaching positions had to prove knowledge of Finnish. A short-lived Panslavist backlash in the turn of the twentieth century strengthened Russification in all of the Russian Empire; consequently, use of Russian was required in public offices and administration, including the university (Saarinen 2012). The periods of Russification were, however, too short for the (Swedish speaking) Finnish elite to switch to Russian (Coleman 2010). For the remainder of the period of Autonomy, the official languages of the Grand Duchy of Finland were Finnish, Swedish and Russian (Hakulinen et al. 2009). 2.3.1

From Latin to Swedish as Language of Education

Latin had a long history not just in Finland but elsewhere (Mortensen and Haberland 2012) as the language of higher education, demonstrating that higher education provided systematically in the national languages has a relatively short history (Klinge et al. 1987). Mauranen (2011) has suggested that Latin’s strong lingua franca status may have been a result of there being no mother tongue speakers, i.e. Latin was not seen as a living threat to local languages. Consequently, Latin may have been

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viewed more neutrally than languages such as French, German or English that were already politicized in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Additionally, in the Grand Duchy of Finland that had only a few decades ago been part of the Swedish Empire, Latin would have been more neutral than Swedish as a language of tuition (Saarinen 2012). Before the mid-nineteenth century, Swedish and Latin were the languages of higher education in Finland, especially the further up the educational ladder one climbed. Latin remained a language of higher education in Finland into early nineteenth century, but Swedish started gradually to take over in the age of Utility and Enlightenment in mideighteenth century, as for instance economics started gradually to be taught in Swedish at the Academy of Turku (Välimaa 2019). This does not mean that the students would have been monolingually Swedish, or later Finnish (Välimaa 2019). The Imperial Alexander University remained Swedish dominant long into the nineteenth century, feeding into the 1920s and 1930s language feuds of the University of Helsinki. The position of the Finnish language began to strengthen as the Herderian idea of nationality began to gain momentum, and these developments naturally amplified each other, politicizing language of education. 2.3.2

Fennomans and Finnish National Romanticism

The national Romantic Movement in Finland was particularly strongly carried by the Swedish speaking political and cultural elite, resulting in the formation of a Fennoman political movement. Ultimately, as a counter development, also a Svecoman movement was born, causing the nineteenth-century party political field ultimately to form along a language divide between Finnish and Swedish (Engman 2016; Meinander 2016; Ihalainen et al. 2019; Välimaa 2019). According to Välimaa, while some steps were taken towards granting Finnish an official status in the then Imperial Alexander University, the university remained a relatively conservative institution. Passive and conservative language policy was part of a larger political motivation of not wanting to get involved in European reform movements of the midnineteenth century. The students, in turn, took up resistance against this attitude, starting gradually to study Finnish language and culture (Huumo 2006). This, together with the gradual Finnishization of lower lever education started to create enough critical mass for a Finnish language student body gradually to develop (Välimaa 2019).

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In 1852, Swedish was allowed to be used aside with Latin in doctoral disputations, and in 1858, also Finnish was allowed (Klinge et al. 1989; Tommila 2006). Already at that time, however, more and more students were Finnish by mother tongue, although the first Finnish language kymnaasi (preparatory school for university) was not founded until 1858 (Klinge et al. 1989; Tommila 2006; Hakulinen et al. 2009). The language debates of the nineteenth century were linked to political feuds both within the Grand Duchy as well as in relation to the Russian Empire (Huumo 2006). The Imperial Alexander University and its professoriate aimed at staying loyal to the Grand Duchy (Välimaa 2019). The Russian rulers, on the other hand, did not view the more politically pro-Finnish Fennoman movement quite as positively, especially as the requirements for social reform, such as basic education and other social reforms did not fit the 1850s conservative politics of the Russian Empire. On the other hand, however, at least during the political turmoil of mid- nineteenth century, the Russian emperor supported the early Fennomans in an attempt to boost promotion of Finnish and a separation from Sweden (Välimaa 2019, p. 120). The situation changed relatively rapidly, as in the 1860s the first concrete political steps towards Finnish independence were taken in the form of strengthening civil society, renewing economy and industry, and setting up a public school system. The institutional bilingualism of the current Finnish Constitution from 2009 started to take form in education as well as municipal and state administration since the 1860s. Parallel bilingualism was gradually institutionalized also in postsecondary education since the 1860s, which in turn led to the setting up of Finnish medium teacher seminaries (Välimaa 2019). Swedish-language basic education was advanced in a similar way. The reforms resulted in tensions between the language groups and even a direct language dispute, where the language groups differed in their political attitudes towards Russia, pro-Finnish Fennomans being more lenient and pro-Swedish Svecomans more ready for direct confrontations (Ihalainen et al. 2019). The Finnish and Swedish right wing parties finally closed ranks as the left wing political movements, demanding land reform and workers’ rights, strengthened at the parliamentary reform of 1906. The developments culminated in a Civil War in 1918.

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2.4 Language, Higher Education and Nationalism in the Interwar Years The language debate in Finnish society continued to be intense in the interwar period. In an independent republic, language issues could be debated more openly than during the Russification periods in the Grand Duchy, when there were common interests to be defended. Shared memories of Russification periods, the balancing of the political system and economy after the Civil War, and the common experiences of the Winter War, on the other hand, curbed some of the linguistic confrontation. The political developments immediately after independence increased a need for national unity, but gaining independence also gave a space for more explicit language debates (Meinander 2016, p. 11; Ihalainen et al. 2019). Historically, the founding of Finnish and Swedish language universities in Turku immediately after independence, as well as the 1920s and 1930s language feuds of the University of Helsinki (Engman 2016; Meinander 2016), presents the main First Republic cases for universities as sites for construction of Finnish constitutional bilingualism (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018). 2.4.1

Role of Language in Setting Up New Universities

When Finland became independent, there was one multidisciplinary university in the country, i.e. the old Imperial Alexander University that was renamed University of Helsinki. In addition to this, there were also post-secondary establishments providing vocational education in agriculture, military studies, business and economy, and technical sciences that had been set up in the nineteenth century that gradually grew into higher education institutions (Välimaa 2019). During the first years of Independence, two new private universities were founded, both in Turku, and both at least partly motivated by language ideologies. There had been attempts to found a new, Finnish language university in Turku already before the independence, but in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Swedish medium Åbo Akademi University was founded first relatively rapidly with support by wealthy private donors (Meinander 2016). The foundation of Åbo Akademi University in 1918 was based on the need to ensure Swedish language education in the new republic (Välimaa 2019). The Finnish medium Turun yliopisto

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(University of Turku) was founded in 1920 after a combination of collection from private funders and a popular collection, in the end including over 20,000 private donors, and dubbed as “The gift of a free nation to free research” (Vapaan Kansan lahja vapaalle tieteelle). The story of a university with Finnish as the language of instruction being founded in Turku quickly became a part of the new narrative of the nation, the thinking being that the University of Helsinki was “becoming Finnish” either too quickly or too slowly, depending on which side of the language divide the person stood (Klinge et al. 1989). More recent research (Soikkanen 2012; Vares 2020; Välimaa 2019) indicates other, internal and external political, economic and cultural reasons. According to Soikkanen (2012), the original motivations behind the goals of founding of a Finnish medium university in Turku emerged already before independence as resisting the Russification aims of the authorities. Also the massive fund-raising for the university was intended to give it better protection against the Russian authorities, as Finland was still under Russian rule when the first plans for a Finnish university in Turku were drafted. Soikkanen (2012) also suggests that, contrary to earlier research (Jäntere 1942, cited by Soikkanen 2012), the attention turned to language questions only after the Panslavist Russian threat had been removed with Independence, and as the language questions of the University of Helsinki begun to be reflected in the founding of the new universities in the newly independent country. Vares (2020), in turn, describes the founding of the University of Turku as combination of language-based arguments with the need to increase the educational level of the population. This links the foundation of the university to the wider education policy goals of the early years of independence, as the perceived lacking educational level (or even moral character) of the Finnish speaking people was seen as a cause for succumbing to the political agitation of the Reds in the Civil War (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018). The idealistic notions of the Finnish speaking Herderian Volk (Gal 2011) were thus recycled in the founding of the University of Turku. However, as Vares also observes, while on the surface the new university was to have a “national” role in the building of the new national, “national” and “international” have been intertwined themes throughout the history of the university. In the foundation of the University of Turku, this “universal nature” of education was realized in a concrete action to increase the educational level of the people, and the models for this were

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taken from, in particular, Germany, Sweden and Britain. The dynamic of international and national in the setting up of the University of Turku emerged as a relationship between universal ideals and values of education and progress in a national context (Vares 2020, pp. 32–35). 2.4.2

“True Finnish” Nationalist Activism at Universities

The Constitution of 1919 declared Finland officially bilingual, and the University of Helsinki also formally retained its bilingual status. Russian was dropped both as language of administration and instruction. The new constitution of 1919 gave the University of Helsinki a special position that strengthened and confirmed its status as an autonomous entity, reflected later on other universities’ status as well, and giving University of Helsinki particular rights such as the representation of higher education in Government meetings. The first University Act during independence was given in 1923 after an intensive debate particularly on the language issue in the committee stages and in the Parliament. The languages of the University of Helsinki were to be Finnish and Swedish, but in practice, teaching still took place largely in Swedish, and the Swedish speaking students were overrepresented in the student population. In the University of Helsinki, a mismatch between student and teacher language background existed throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. According to Vares (2020, pp. 17–18), the share of Finnish speaking students rose between 1900 and 1915 from 58 to 80%, while the share of Finnish medium lectures was 30% and 42%, respectively. Yet, in spite of the gradual strengthening of the position of Finnish in the society and within the academic world, according to Tommila (2006), the first generation of Finnish speaking professors did not assume their seats until after the independence in the 1920s (Saarinen 2014). Additionally, the socio-economic status of the Finnish and Swedish speaking students was different, with the Swedish students mostly recruited from the capital bourgeoisie, and the Finnish ones from a more varied background (Meinander 2016). This would feed into the discourse of oppressed Finnish majority and the elite Swedish minority, linked with the stigma of Swedish speaking upper classes (Halonen and Vaattovaara 2017) until today. The language question of the University remained hot until the 1930s. The True Finnish movement (Aitosuomalaisuus ), active between the interwar years, was based on an ideology of protecting Finnish national

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identity, and it was active particularly among students at the University of Helsinki, aiming at decreasing the influence of the Swedish speaking professoriate and civil servants at the University and its administration. The student association Academic Karelia Society had its foundation in the same ideological ethnic nationalism, depicting in its name the assimilation of Karelian culture in the Finnish one, considering Karelians a Finnish tribe rather than an independent people (Välimaa 2019; Meinander 2016). The Academic Karelia Society demanded that the University of Helsinki should be made monolingually Finnish. The 1937 renewal of the University Act was a compromise aimed at “satisfying the legitimate demands of the Finnish speaking majority, while taking due account of fulfilling the cultural constitutional needs of the Swedish population”, as stated in Prime Minister Cajander’s Government Programme of 1937 (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015; Klinge et al. 1989). Finnish was declared the official language of the University, but with dictates on instructional and administrative bilingualism, and with a fixed quota defined for Swedish language professorships, to guarantee the rights of the Swedish speaking students, and undoubtedly also professors (Klinge et al. 1989; Tommila 2006; Välimaa 2019; Saarinen 2014). To this date, University of Helsinki remains a bilingual university, with a societal responsibility to educate specialists for the needs of the Swedish speaking population such as lawyers, medical doctors, dentists and agricultural experts (Saarinen 2020). The ruling on a Swedish language professors’ quota still stands. The Academic Karelia Society that had an active role in the University of Helsinki language settlements in the 1920s and 1930s was important not only because of its active role in the University of Helsinki and its student union, or as a breeding ground for national politicians in the 1920s and 1930s. The society also symbolizes the post-independence increased sense of national Finnishness and ideologies of “A Greater Finland” (Meinander 2016). The nationalist goals of the society were directed at banishing particularly Russian and Swedish elements from the academia (Salomaa 2013). While major right wing politics largely faded after early 1930s in Finland, racialized (Salomaa 2013) and anti-Semitic (Muir 2009) ideologies and actions took place also in Finnish universities.

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2.5 National and International in Pre- and Post-World War II Years As Stråth points out, European nationalism was “not one but many” (Stråth 2016). For instance the many Western European nationalisms, the Finnish one Finland included, derive from international and transnational sources and processes, such as the national-romanticist movement in nineteenth-century Europe (Häkli 2008). A different development emerged in the “frozen” nationalisms of Soviet bloc countries and for instance the Baltic nationalizing states, born after the dissolution of Soviet Union and end of the occupation (Brubaker 2011). As we speak of nationalism as a dynamic interplay between majority and minority and their different instantiations, it is thus also necessary to discuss nationalism against different forms of supranationalism, i.e. dynamics of different nationalisms and their supranational connections. As discussed in Chapter 1, higher education as the context of this book is by nature not just national, but also global or international, and these roles of higher education are intertwined in various ways. 2.5.1

International Politics and Higher Education

European academic mobility that had been a standard practice since the first medieval universities (Välimaa 2019, p. 52) came to a brief halt towards the beginning of nineteenth century with Latin gradually losing its usability as academic lingua franca with the emergence of national languages and national higher education systems. Mobility flows started increasing again towards the end of the nineteenth century, as particularly the numbers of Eastern European students in Western European universities started to grow. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Finland was a typical sending country in international mobility (Dhondt 2008, pp. 49–50). Towards the interwar period, there were more political push and pull factors such as numerus clausus, wars, language policies and other policy developments (Dhondt 2008, p. 50) that had an effect on transnational student mobility. German replaced Latin relatively quickly as the lingua franca for Finnish scholars towards the end of the nineteenth century (Tommila 2006). Germany lost its position as a major receiving country after World War I in Europe. The turbulent European politics in the 1930s turned the student flows less towards primarily study motivated and more towards

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forced mobility or migration because of rising anti-Semitism, wars and conflicts, and economic crises. Around this time, because of political developments in Europe, USA took the stage as receiving country; a position it still largely holds. Finland, on the other hand, retained culturally and politically strong ties with Germany, and the interwar period academic elite shared an admiration of Germany as a political and scientific model state. Germany’s defeat in World War I, and especially its political, cultural and economic collapse after World War II, led the Nordic countries to move more towards the Anglophone sphere, aided by the active cultural foreign policy of the USA, and leading to the filling of the vacuum left by Germany in Northern Europe (Saarinen 2014). As Finland only experienced German occupation in Lapland that was largely out of sight for the larger population, there was no dramatic turn away from German culture as was the case in the Netherlands or Nordic countries such as Norway or Denmark that had been occupied by Nazi Germany (Ihalainen et al. 2019). For Finland, Germany, having been Finland’s only ally in World War II, remained a popular destination for academic exchanges even after World War II. German also remained the most important foreign language for international relations in Finland until the strengthening of the position of the USA during the Cold War and as popular Englishspeaking culture took over the field from the 1960s. According to Jaakko Numminen (1987), a high-ranking and influential Ministry of Education Secretary General for over two decades since 1970, only five or six of the then approximately 100 full professors in Finnish universities spoke English in the late 1930s. The rest, according to Numminen, operated internationally in German. After the war, however, English gradually replaced German as the language of internationalization of Finnish academics. Even though Finland in 1947 first rejected Fulbright grants as well as Marshall aid (paying respect to Soviet concerns), Fulbright Finland was established in 1949 (see https://www.fulbright.fi/about-us/history-unlike-any-other) and a special ASLA scholarship scheme was created. Similar cultural foreign policy developments took place also in countries such as Japan or Denmark, as a part of the post-war Pax Americana (Haberland 2009).

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2.5.2

Language Education Policies in the Post-War Period

Changes in international politics during the twentieth century were also reflected in the language education policy pursued in Finland. Around the time of independence in 1917, Finnish, Swedish and to some extent Russian had more or less stabilized their status, whereas minority languages such as Sámi, Karelian, Yiddish and Tatar were marginalized or assimilated, and mostly the educated upper classes had access to so called foreign languages in the binary educational system (Ihalainen et al. 2019). After Finland’s independence, only a small Russian-speaking minority remained in the country; Russian teaching was practically abolished after independence, and German was the most widely spoken of the other languages, while French and English were studied less. When World War II broke, language feuds were to a large extent put aside both at the universities and in the society at large. The steady postwar massification of Finnish higher education culminated in the 1960s with the influx of the baby boom generations. New Finnish language universities were founded in Northern and Eastern Finland mainly on regional policy principles (Kivinen et al. 1993). Germany remained the most important “foreign language” at schools—and the international language of many disciplines—until the 1960s. Relations with the divided Germany remained strong even during the Cold War, as Finland, while formally neutral but heavily under Soviet influence politically, had close trade connections and bilateral academic exchanges with both the Eastern and Western sides. By the 1960s, English had become the most taught foreign language in Finnish schools (Ihalainen et al. 2019). The hottest language policy debates shifted after World War II from higher education to primary and secondary education, as the comprehensive school reform in the late 1960s introduced the so-called second national language or toinen kotimainen (for the biggest part of the population that would have been Swedish) as mandatory for the whole age cohort.1 Until then, it had concerned those in the selective tier of the 1 Educational regulation refers to both national languages as “the second national

language” (toinen in Finnish; andra in Swedish). Both toinen and andra are ambiguous in the sense that they can be translated either as second or other. I use the term second as that is the term used in the language policies of the universities as well as by educational authorities such as the National Board of Education and the Ministry of Education and Culture. The use of “second” implies that the language is the speaker’s second language

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two tier educational system. The post-war political requirement of social equality was also reflected in the requirement of educational equality. The debate on compulsory Swedish in Finnish medium schools during the comprehensive reform was particularly heated, while compulsory Finnish in Swedish medium schools did not become an issue. Compulsory second national language was promoted with foreign policy arguments (Nordic cooperation during the Cold War), history and tradition (Swedish societal cultural and historical heritage in Finland) and equality (providing the whole age cohort with equal possibilities to advance in civil service that required knowledge of both national languages) (Väistö 2017; Geber 2010; Ihalainen et al. 2019). Compulsory learning of Swedish was, on the other hand, opposed with pedagogical and political arguments, the former referring to the thinking that two so-called foreign languages would be difficult for the whole age cohort, and that Swedish, being the language of imperial Sweden, would work to continue what was construed as oppression (Saarinen et al. 2019). Since then, the compulsory learning of Swedish has been a central part of the Finnish language policy debates (Väistö 2017; Meinander 2016; Ihalainen et al. 2019). The constitutional bilingualism was, however, not challenged, even if the language tensions moved to other educational levels (Ihalainen et al. 2011).

2.6

Recycled Nationalist Discourses

As a result of historical developments, at independence, Finland had two established languages, Finnish and Swedish. The efforts to establish Russian as an official language of the Finnish Grand Duchy had in practice failed; other minority languages were marginalized, and world languages like German and French were mainly studied by the educated upper classes. Between the World Wars, the construction of the nation state and national identity materialized particularly at the University of Helsinki as the tensions between Finnish and Swedish language identifications. I will next formulate the main discourses that were and are still cycled and recycled in Finnish higher education language policy.

rather than a hierarchical order between the national languages. However, “toinen kotimainen” (second domestic) is often used in everyday speech to refer specifically to the teaching of mandatory Swedish (Saarinen and Rontu 2018).

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2.6.1

Discourse of Oppressed Majority

One of the most salient and long-term narratives in the new nationalist discourse is that of Finnish as an oppressed language and people. The discourse of oppressed Finnish has historically presented Finnish speakers and the Finnish language as oppressed by Swedish (in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), English (in the twenty-first century; see Chapter 4), and, on rarer occasions, Russian speakers (the turn of the twentieth century). The discourse of oppression has been framed as economic, political, cultural and educational. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the language ideological paradox was that while the narrative of oppression of the Finnish majority by the Swedish was overwhelming, at the same time the Swedish cultural, administrative and legal heritage was deemed useful and was utilized in linking Finland to the Western cultural and political traditions, in order to disconnect from Russia (Engman 2016, p. 14). Yet, most of the visible pro-Finnish politicians, authors and artists from the mid- nineteenth century had changed their linguistic affiliation from Swedish to Finnish, strengthening the image of the Swedish speaking upper class. During the Civil War of 1918, part of the Red violence was directed at the Swedish speaking upper classes, which in turn expressed its strong suspicion of the character of the Finnish speaking working class, emphasizing the “two nations with two languages” view. At the extremes, the Swedish speaking elites referred to the Finnish speaking working class as Mongols and Slavs, and to Swedish speakers as Vikings or Germans (Engman 2016; Meinander 2016; Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018; Ihalainen et al. 2019). The Civil War of 1918 left behind a split nation where not only political but also language divides and suspicions about languages and their speakers were abundant. The discourses of Swedish cultural elites on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the global Anglophone culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (see Chapters 3 and 4) have been recycled as examples of cultural oppression of Finnish.

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Discourse of Swedish (Speakers) as Economic, Educational and Political Elite

The economic discourse of oppression was developed from the discourse of wealthy Swedish speakers in the nineteenth and twentieth century or the discourse of global economic hegemony of English (Chapter 4) in the twenty-first century. A visible part of the economic elites discourse were the Swedish speaking cultural and political elites in the capital area in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while particularly the farming and fishing populations in Swedish speaking Ostrobothnia were not visible in this discussion. This helped draw the generalized conclusion that all Swedish speakers, rather than a particular elite segment of the population, were economically in a hegemonic position. Consequently, the hegemonic political position of Swedish speakers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was recycled into the discussions of political elites in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Particularly the debate on the first republican constitution in 1919 (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018) made visible the currents of discourses of the common people and the political elite that are still cycled in today’s media debates and political discourses (Ihalainen et al. 2011). The discourse of Swedish speakers as political elite has been reinforced by the fact that the Swedish People’s Party has participated in 52 of the 76 majority governments during independence. The discourse of educational oppression has a long history as all education (excluding teaching of religious texts by the church) was first Latin and then Swedish, limiting social mobility of Finnish speakers effectively and ultimately shifting to a popular suspicion of the language (Ihalainen et al. 2019). The discourse of educational oppression got traction first as Swedish hegemony in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the language debates of the University of Helsinki, then from debate on compulsory Swedish in the comprehensive reform. In the twenty-first century, the new nationalist discourse of oppression was targeted at use of English in higher education (Chapter 4) as a breach of constitutional right to use Finnish or Swedish. This discourse continues to be recycled in the nationalist and new nationalist arguments of Swedish speakers as oppressors and in construing teaching of compulsory Swedish as a hegemonic practice of the educational, political, cultural and economic elites (Ihalainen et al. 2011; Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018).

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2.6.3

Discourse of Swedish and (Other) Minorities

The problems of ethnolinguistic nation state thinking were encountered on a larger scale already after World War I, as the disintegration of the great empires left behind various linguistic minorities whose rights were guaranteed by international law administered by the League of Nations (Ruiz Vieytez 2001). This debate extended to the transnational level with Sweden’s concerns over the position of the Finland Swedish population, as the newly established League of Nations took in the case of the autonomous home rule of the Swedish speaking Åland Islands, promoting a solution where the demilitarized Åland Islands remained with Finland, but with monolingual Swedish language policies. In this political situation, discourses of oppression of Finnish were matched with the discourse of Swedish speakers as an oppressed minority. The nationalist discursive cycles revolved around the relationship between Finnish and Swedish, where, interestingly, both were presented under threat and as oppressed (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018), regardless of their popular majority (Finnish) or minority (Swedish) position. However, it seems that there was also a hegemonic order defining which languages got the attention and were given the status of minority language. Swedish was already a national language (rather than a minority language) with formally equal status with that of Finnish during the time of the Åland Island settlement described above. Yet, the League of Nations participation emphasized the status of Swedish as a minority language in Finland, and the discourses of Swedish as minority were echoed in the 1990s and 2000s Council of Europe discourses on European minorities. In the discourse of Swedish as minority, other minority languages (both autochthonous and indigenous ones, as well as allochthonous ones) were missing (Sámi, Karelian) or abolished actively (Russian). In the immediate national romantic period, other Fenno-Ugric languages spoken in Finland (i.e. Karelian and Sámi languages) were assimilated and appropriated as building blocks in the big story of Finnish nation building. The consequent racialization and assimilation of Karelian culture was foundational in building a history of Finnish civilization by exoticizing and nostalgizizing the indigenous and allochthonous languages and cultures in Finland (see Siivikko 2019 for a similar discussion of the Sámi). This is important for the understanding of the position of Sámi, Karelian and other

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languages later on: there was no space for these cultures and languages either in the universities or in the larger society. As a result, they were until the 1990s largely unregulated, unprotected by legislation, and not present as languages of tuition in higher education. In many cases (particularly Skolt Sámi, Inari Sámi and Karelian), these languages became under immediate danger of extinction. The discourse of Swedish as oppressed and threatened minority has, instead, since Independence been recycled in for instance Government programmes (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015) and language policy debates on the new constitution and language act in the 2000s (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015).

References Alasuutari, Pertti. 2017. Tasavalta. Sodan jälkeisen Suomen kaudet ja trendit. Tampere: Vastapaino. Blommaert, Jan. 2006. Language policy and national identity. In An introduction to language policy. Theory and method, ed. Thomas Ricento, 238–254. Oxford: Blackwell. Brubaker, Rogers. 2011. Nationalizing states revisited: Projects and processes of nationalization in post-Soviet states. Ethnic and Racial Studies 34 (11): 1785–1814. Coleman, Michael C. 2010. ‘You might all be speaking Swedish today’: Language change in 19th-century Finland and Ireland. Scandinavian Journal of History 35 (1): 44–64. Dhondt, Pieter. 2008. Difficult balance between rhetoric and practice: Student mobility in Finland and other European countries from 1800 to 1930. In Students, staff and academic mobility in higher education, ed. Mike Byram and Fred Dervin, 48–64. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Engman, Max. 2016. Språkfrågan: Finlandssvenskhetens uppkomst 1812–1922. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Ennser-Kananen, Johanna, and Taina Saarinen. Forthcoming. Challenging constitutional bilingualism with “what if…”: Counterfactual histories and at-risk minorities in Finland. In Vulnerabilities, challenges and risk in applied linguistics, ed. Clare Cunningham and Chris Hall. Multilingual Matters. Gal, Susan. 2006. Language, its stakes, and its effects. In The Oxford handbook of contextual political analysis, ed. Robert Goodin and Charles Tilly, 376–391. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2011. Polyglot nationalism. Alternative perspectives on language in 19th century Hungary. Langage et Société (2): 31–54. ———. 2018. Visions and revisions of minority languages. In Standardizing minority languages. Competing ideologies of authority and authenticity in the

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global periphery, vol. 30, ed. Pia Lane, James Costa, and Haley De Korne, 222–242. London: Routledge. Geber, E. 2010. Den obligatoriska svenskan i Finland. En historisk analys. Helsingfors: Magma. Haberland, Hartmut. 2009. English–the language of globalism. Rask. Internationalt Tidsskrift for Sprog Og Kommunikation 30: 17–45. Häkli, Jouni. 2008. Regions, networks and fluidity in the Finnish nation-state. National Identities 10 (1): 5–20. Hakulinen, Auli, Jyrki Kalliokoski, Salli Kankaanpää, Antti Kanner, Kimmo Koskenniemi, Lea Laitinen, Sari Maamies, and Pirkko Nuolijärvi. 2009. Suomen kielen tulevaisuus. kielipoliittinen toimintaohjelma. Helsinki: Kotimaisten kielten keskus. Halonen, Mia, and Johanna Vaattovaara. 2017. Tracing the indexicalization of the notion “Helsinki s”. Linguistics 55 (5): 1169–1195. Heller, Monica. 2006. Linguistic minorities and modernity: A sociolinguistic ethnography, 2nd ed. London: Continuum. Hobsbawm, E.J. 1992. Nations and nationalism since 1780. Programme, myth, reality, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huumo, Katja. 2006. Perkeleen kieli. Suomen kieli ja poliittisesti korrekti tiede 1800-luvulla. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopisto. Ihalainen, Pasi, Pirkko Nuolijärvi, and Taina Saarinen. 2019. Kamppailua tilasta ja vallasta : Kieli- ja kielikoulutuspolitiikan historiallisesti kierrätetyt diskurssit. In Kieli, koulutus, politiikka: Monipaikkaisia käytänteitä ja tulkintoja, ed. Taina Saarinen, Pirkko Nuolijärvi, Sari Pöyhönen, and Teija Kangasvieri, 27–59. Tampere: Vastapaino. Ihalainen, Pasi, and Taina Saarinen. 2015. Constructing “language” in language policy discourse: Finnish and Swedish legislative processes in the 2000s. In Language policies in Finland and Sweden, ed. Mia Halonen, Pasi Ihalainen, and Taina Saarinen, 29–56. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Ihalainen, Pasi, Taina Saarinen, Tarja Nikula, and Sari Pöyhönen. 2011. Aika kielipolitiikassa. Päivälehtien nettikeskustelujen historiakäsitysten analyysi. Kasvatus & Aika 5 (3): 18–38. Jalava, Marja. 2012. The university in the making of the welfare state: The 1970s degree reform in Finland. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Johnson, David Cassels. 2013. Language policy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kamusella, Tomasz. 2009. The politics of language and nationalism in modern central Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. Nationalism and national languages. In The Oxford handbook of language policy and planning, ed. James Tollefson and Miguel Pérez-Milans, 163–182. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kivinen, Osmo, Risto Rinne, and Kimmo Ketonen. 1993. Yliopiston huomen: Korkeakoulupolitiikan historiallinen suunta suomessa. Helsinki: Hanki ja jää.

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Klinge, Matti, Rainer Knapas, Anto Leikola, and John Strömberg. 1987. Helsingin yliopisto 1640–1990, osa I: Kuninkaallinen Turun Akatemia 1640 – 1808. Helsinki: Otava. ———. 1989. Helsingin yliopisto 1640–1990, osa II: Keisarillinen Aleksanterin yliopisto 1808–1917 . Helsinki: Otava. Lehtola, Veli-Pekka. 2012. Saamelaiset suomalaiset. Kohtaamisia 1896–1953, vol. 1896–1953. Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura. Mauranen, Anna. 2011. Englanti yliopiston kielenä. Tieteessä Tapahtuu 29 (1). Meinander, Henrik. 2016. Nationalstaten: Finlands svenskhet 1922–2015. Helsingfors and Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Mortensen, Janus, and Hartmut Haberland. 2012. English—The new Latin of academia? Danish universities as a case. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 216: 175–197. Muir, Simo. 2009. Anti-semitism in the Finnish academe: Rejection of IsraelJakob Schur’s PhD dissertation at the University of Helsinki (1937) and Åbo Akademi University (1938). Scandinavian Journal of History 34 (2): 135– 161. Numminen, Jaakko. 1987. Yliopistokysymys. Helsinki: Otava. Pöyhönen, Sari, and Taina Saarinen. 2015. Constructions of bilingualism in Finnish government programmes and a newspaper discussion site debate. Current Issues in Language Planning 16 (4): 392–408. Ruiz Vieytez, Eduardo Javier. 2001. The protection of linguistic minorities: A historical approach. International Journal on Multicultural Societies 3 (1): 5–14. Saarinen, Taina. 2012. Internationalization of Finnish higher education—Is language an issue? International Journal of the Sociology of Language 216: 157–173. ———. 2014. Language ideologies in Finnish higher education in the national and international context: A historical and contemporary outlook. In English in Nordic universities: Ideologies and practices, ed. Anna Kristina Hultgren, Frans Gregersen, and Jakob Thogersen, 127–146. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ———. 2020. Tensions on Finnish constitutional bilingualism in neo-nationalist times: Constructions of Swedish in monolingual and bilingual contexts. In Language perceptions and practices in multilingual universities, ed. Maria Kuteeva, Kathrin Kaufhold, and Niina Hynninen, 85–111. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Saarinen, Taina, and Heidi Rontu. 2018. University language policies: How does Finnish constitutional bilingualism meet the needs for internationalisation in English. European Journal of Language Policy 10 (1): 97–119. Saarinen, Taina, Merja Kauppinen, and Teija Kangasvieri. 2019. Kielikäsitykset ja oppimiskäsitykset koulutuspolitiikkaa linjaamassa. In Kieli, koulutus, politiikka:

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Monipaikkaisia käytänteitä ja tulkintoja, ed. Taina Saarinen, Pirkko Nuolijärvi, Sari Pöyhönen, and Teija Kangasvieri, 121–148. Tampere: Vastapaino. Saarinen, Taina, and Pasi Ihalainen. 2018. Multi-sited and historically layered language policy construction: Parliamentary debate on the Finnish constitutional bilingualism in 1919. Language Policy 17: 545–565. Salomaa, Ilona. 2013. “I devote myself to the fatherland”: Finnish folklore, patriotic nationalism, and racial ideology. In Finland’s holocaust. Silences of history, ed. Simo Muir and Hanna Worthen, 69–94. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Sarhimaa, Anneli. 2017. Vaietut ja vaiennetut - karjalankieliset karjalaiset suomessa. Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura. Siivikko, Niina. 2019. Finnish media representations of the Sámi in the 1960s and 1970s. In Undoing homogeneity in the Nordic region: Migration, difference and the politics of solidarity, ed. Suvi Keskinen, Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir, and Mari Toivanen, 50–65. London: Routledge. Soikkanen, Timo. 2012. Wenäjän varjo. Turun suomalaisen yliopiston juurilla. Turku: Aurora. Stråth, Bo. 2016. Europe’s utopias of peace: 1815, 1919, 1951. Europe’s legacy in the modern world, 1st ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Tommila, Päiviö. 2006. Research and the origins of research policies (1809– 1917). In Research in Finland–A history, ed. Päiviö Tommila and Aura Korppi-Tommila, 47–69. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press and the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. Trow, Martin. 2007. Reflections on the transition from elite to mass to universal access: Forms and phases of higher education in modern societies since WWII. In International handbook of higher education, ed. James J.F. Forest and Philip Altbach, 243–280. Dordrecht: Springer. Vaarala, Heidi, Eeva-Leena Haapakangas, Erja Kyckling, and Taina Saarinen. 2017. Finnish higher education institutions’ reactions to the 2015 asylum seeker situation. Motives, goals and future challenges. Apples - Journal of Applied Language Studies 11 (3): 143–165. Väistö, Janne. 2017. Toinen kotimainen toisen tasavallan suomessa: Ruotsin kieli pakolliseksi aineeksi peruskouluun vuonna 1968. Turku: Åbo Akademi. Välimaa, Jussi. 2019. A history of Finnish higher education from the middle ages to the 21st century, vol. 52. Higher Education Dynamics. Dordrecht: Springer. Vares, Vesa. 2020. Turun yliopiston historia. Kansallinen tehtävä 1920–1974. Turku: Turun yliopisto.

CHAPTER 3

The Short and Intense Post-Nationalist Period in Finnish Higher Education

Abstract This chapter presents the transition from a nationalist to post-nationalist period since the 1980s as the increasing systematic mobility and European cooperation as well as the fall of the Soviet Union turned Finnish higher education towards Western cooperation. The new internationalization strategies first aimed at founding mobility programmes for higher education and then particularly English medium study programmes. Post-national nation state emerges in the analysis mainly as an actor on the global economy. The discourses of competition and success in the global markets are interwoven with discourses of protection of the nation state. The use of English as an ostensibly selfevident and unquestioned lingua franca in the society increases, breaking the link between protection of “national” interests and national language. Keywords Post-nationalism · Neoliberalism · Internationalization of higher education · Language policy · Minority languages · Finland

Internationalization after World War II had very Nordic orientations in Finland, reflecting the old political dynamics of Finland positioned between Russia /Soviet Union and Sweden and the Cold War period need to associate with the West. Post-Cold War global developments also had an effect on language policies. Global cultural and social diversification has emphasized the role of language in post-industrial networked © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Saarinen, Higher Education, Language and New Nationalism in Finland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60902-3_3

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societies, characterized by diversified forms of immigration (see Vertovec 2007 on the notion of super-diversity); more language-intense working life that Heller (2011) illustrates as a change from workforce to wordforce; and new communication and information technologies (Castells 2000). Towards the 1970s, and particularly 1980s and the end of the Cold War, policies of multilingualism and plurilingualism were construed in order to govern and manage the apparently complex linguistic realities that did not seem to fit within traditional nation states (Nikula et al. 2012). Multilingualism and plurilingualism emerged both as celebrated policy ideals and as desired individual knowledges and skills, required in global cooperation and economy (Pérez-Milans 2015; Flores 2013; Beacco 2007). This reflects a commodification of language (Pujolar 2017), making language an economic asset rather than a marker of national identity (Pujolar 2017, p. 501) and creating problems for national institutions geared at managing monolingualism rather than multilingualism (Blommaert et al. 2012). The development is demonstrated by European language policies being needed to manage the diversity of “ours” and “theirs”, “small” and “big”, “majority” and “minority”, and about 30 other categories of languages in European Union language policy, in order to maintain the social cohesion (i.e. nation state culture and ideology) in European societies (Nikula et al. 2012). In Finland, the shift to discourses of celebratory multilingualism went side by side with discourses of maintaining Finnish official bilingualism as “richness and resource” (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015), construing Swedish as both a hegemonic national language and a potentially oppressed minority language in need of protection. This discourse combines nation state monolingual ideals, i.e. the equal status of two parallel national languages and societal bilingualism, with the postnational ideal of multilingualism. The end of Cold War status quo enabled Finland to join Western European organizations (e.g. the Council of Europe) and brought domestic legislative changes that lead to de facto recognizing of certain linguistic minorities, such as the Sámi languages or Finnish and Finland Swedish Sign language (see Laihonen and Halonen 2019). Also Finnish as a second language was gradually recognized in the margins of education, together with allochthonous and autochthonous heritage languages, although particularly the position of the home or heritage languages has remained poor (Kyckling et al. 2019). Tensions between societal and individual multilingualism and the values attached to

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different kinds of multilingualism provide the backdrop for the discussion of language in post-national Finnish higher education. Not all languages nor their speakers have equal societal value in the post-national society based on economic ideals.

3.1 Higher Education Policy Coming into the Post-National Era The late twentieth century was characterized by tensions between expansion and massification, but also both harmonization and differentiation of national higher education systems (Välimaa 2019). Particularly since the 1960s, national higher education policies were systematized and institutionalized in Western countries with arguments of equality and the mobilization of knowledge reserves. In Finland, this led to the expansion of the research university network, although examples of more professionally oriented binary systems were available in, for instance, Germany or Great Britain. Jalava (2012) explains this choice with massification (the baby boom generations entering higher education) but also by the fact that, unlike in many other countries, the expansion of the Finnish system coincided with the growing importance of human capital theory in the 1960s. This linked the expectation of economic growth with expansion of education. Another political motivation was promotion of social equality—the same elements that were visible in the discussion of the comprehensive school reform (see Chapter 2). Austerity pressures and a renewed debate on the public mission of universities changed the higher education scene since the 1970s. The liberal fiscal politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the consequent overheating of the economy, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the resulting decline in Soviet trade combined with problems with international trade were a massive hit to the Finnish society (Välimaa 2019; Saarinen 2020). The 1980s also witnessed a decentralizing change in steering of higher education systems, as the principles of New Public Management introduced market-like mechanisms in higher education (Kivinen et al. 1993). This transformation of higher education policy is related to intersecting global, national and local developments. A neoliberal turn (see, for instance, Rhoades and Slaughter 2006) in higher education policy brought with it an emphasis on global markets of intellectual capital; competitive international funding schemes; comparative and global ethos of excellence, exemplified by standardized quality

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assurance and international league tables; and a formal de-politicizing and outsourcing of higher education to intergovernmental and transnational policy networks. In Finland, this has meant introducing methods of open consultation and crowdsourcing, moving decision-making outside the parliamentary procedure and thus ostensibly democratizing political decision-making but, at the same time, making the political process opaque. Thus, while formal ex ante budget and other steering regulation have laxed, ex post regulation has increased in the form of required external assessment and reporting (Haapakorpi and Saarinen 2014). A new Universities Act was implemented in 2010 and met with, for the Finnish context, relatively high level of criticism and opposition by the academic community. The act increased powers of academic leaders and introduced a heavier level of managerialism in the administration, which downplays the traditions and practices of collegiality and collegial decision-making (Välimaa 2019, p. 289). The act also stipulated that universities may charge tuition fees of students outside the European Economic Area—a change that had already been made as an amendment in the old Universities Act and implemented only in experiments that the Finnish universities and polytechnics did not participate in very eagerly (Weimer 2013). Fees for international students were suspected to open the door for a general policy of tuition fees for all Finnish universities.

3.2

Language Policies in Post-National times

From the perspective of language legislation, the post-war years were quiet until the 1990s. This does not mean, however, that there were no language political debates or developments. The national language policy discourses, as depicted in the government programmes (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015), shifted from a post-war discourse of national cohesion to securing and protecting minority rights (minority being construed mostly as Swedish rather than other minorities), and finally, in the 2000s, to managing and both celebrating and protecting official bilingualism (Nikula et al. 2012; Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015). In higher education degrees, the compulsory learning of Swedish (formally, a national language; see Chapter 2) was politically tied to legislative requirement of civil servants needing to certify competence to serve in both national languages. This meant that both national languages were required for recruitment in public offices and civil service, a main

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employment market for higher education graduates. Since the comprehensive reform in the 1960s, the whole age cohort has studied at least one so-called foreign language and the second national language (Finnish or Swedish). In addition to English, also German and French were relatively widely studied until early 2000s, when changes in curricula and time allocation, municipal economies, and situation of individual schools and supply of languages caused numbers of language learners to drop (Kangasvieri et al. 2011). Additionally, choosing languages at comprehensive school is also socially segregated. Russian has had a particular position in Finnish medium education as the potentially important language of trade and economy, but also having been branded as the language of the “eternal enemy” (Ihalainen et al. 2011), and has remained relatively little studied in Finnish compulsory schooling. By the end of the twentieth century, transnational cooperation intensified in many ways. At the same time, the notion of the nation and its essence became the subject of debate and renegotiation. A mainstreamed view of language as a situated and functional resource coincided with the individualistic and decentralized education policies that took place since the 1990s—a trend familiar from other Western countries as well. Educational policy decision-making was brought closer to municipalities and schools, and students—or their parents—have had a greater choice of school since the mid-1990s. This has been realized in Finnish medium education, for example, as regionally differentiated language choices or the use of language classes and schools as a socio-economic basis for school choice (Kosunen 2014; Kosunen et al. 2018). Both the constitution (1999) and the Language Act (2003) were renewed in the turn of the millennium without extensive public media debates (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015). An interesting thread in the constitutional debates was that of individualization. A focus on language as marker and tool for identity appeared in the Finnish debates, as opposed to the first Language Act in Sweden a bit later, where the role of language as societally complete (Samhällsbärande, literally “maintaining the society”) was prominent (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015). Regardless of the inclusion of Sámi, Romani and sign languages in the constitution, Swedish was discursively construed both as a national language and as a minority language in the debate, representing interests of all minorities, thus also taking up space from (other) minority languages in the language policy debate. In the Language Act reform of 2003, Jews and Tatars were seen by the Constitutional Committee as national and ethnic minorities

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in accordance with the definition of the Council of Europe, but were nonetheless excluded from the Act, unlike similar minorities in Sweden (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015). Russians were recognized as a minority by the Committee, but not as a “national” one. Sámi Language Act was drafted in 2003 and the Sign Language Act in 2015. Romani and Karelian are still without explicit Acts of their own. Discursively, the constitutional and language act debates were examples of consensus building, where the governing conservative political elites discursively construed a consensus on a common language policy, characterized by celebratory constitutional bilingualism (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015). The new legislation was actually seen as having a role in “educating people” on the benefits of multilingualism (i.e. societal bilingualism) rather than regulating on a societal situation. In the parliamentary debate, media was, in turn, construed more as a problem than as representing public opinion. In the Finnish constitutional and legalist tradition, also in the constitutional and language act debate, the “constitutional argument” appeared as highest authority (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015).

3.3

Internationalization and Language Policies of Higher Education

The view of multilingualism as celebratory rather than as dangerous (Blommaert et al. 2012) is reflected in higher education language policies particularly since the 1980s. Increasing global cooperation and systematic student and staff mobility started to increase first as a means to improve labour mobility particularly within the European Union. This made the divides between major Central European languages (German, French and English), smaller and marginal ones (such as Finnish or Dutch), autochthonous languages (in the Finnish case, for instance, Sámi languages or Karelian) and allochthonous languages (for instance, Arabic, Somali or Dari) more pronounced. This leads particularly after the 1990s expansion of the European Union and the early 1990s minority language regulations of the Council of Europe into drafting of Europeanlevel supranational language policies and regulations (Nikula et al. 2012; Beacco 2007). The role of English as a lingua franca strengthened in political structures that promoted multilingual policies and practices, such as the European Union (Chríost and Bonotti 2018).

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Internationalization as Catalyst for Language Policies

In Finland, increased European cooperation and the systematization of mobility with European cooperation also affected higher education language policies. Finland joined the Council of Europe in 1989 as the last Nordic country, negotiated membership of the European Economic Area in early 1990s and joined the European Union in the beginning of 1995 together with Austria and Sweden. In this political situation, internationalization and processes related to it challenged Nordic higher education from the fundamental perspective of higher education institutions as national institutions, providing a public service in a globalizing world (Välimaa 2019; Jalava 2012; Saarinen and Taalas 2017). The increase in English Medium Instruction, systematically implemented in non-Anglophone countries particularly in Northern Europe, has been a typical example of a post-national market ethos policy (Mortensen and Haberland 2012). Nordic and European universities have since the 1990s produced EMI degree instruction to overcome what Hughes calls the “Anglophone asymmetry” in the international student markets (see Hughes 2008), where four English-speaking countries that host almost half of international students have had a long-time advantage in developing dominant position. In 2013, USA and UK alone hosted 41% of international students globally (Weimer and Barlete 2020). As Hughes (2008) points out, this is an issue of both intellectual and economic equality and equity, as the Anglophone countries dominate the markets by attracting largest numbers of international students and by being able to charge the highest fees (Saarinen 2012a). Language has become a primary mode of operation in “knowledge societies” where language is a commodity among other economic commodities (Holborow 2015), and central to the functioning of global economy and markets. Internationalization of higher education is part of this larger “knowledge society” development (Välimaa and Hoffman 2008). Here, post-nationalism meets neoliberalism, exemplified, for instance, in the notion of “foreign accents” as hindering success in the US higher education system (Ennser-Kananen et al., Forthcoming), or in Vietnamese universities using EMI to navigate neoliberal demands (Nguyen et al. 2016). The kind of multilingualism that is being praised in celebratory policies of, for instance, the European Union language policies, is also a powerful homogenizing process where language is part of

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a neoliberal process of transnational flow of “people, capital, goods and services” (Flores 2013). Finnish higher education institutions have initiated internationalization programmes in the form of staff and student exchanges since the 1980s as a response to both domestic and European policies. By the 1990s and particularly 2000s, internationalization had become a strategic, macro-political issue also for Nordic countries in the global economy (Haapakorpi and Saarinen 2014). Nordic higher education language policies appear to be motivated and driven mainly by these internationalization processes (Lauridsen 2013; Saarinen and Taalas 2017; Saarinen and Rontu 2018). The internationalization processes have been depicted by both a steady rise in the number of international students (see Nordic Council of Ministers 2013) and an increased systematic European mobility since the Bologna Process. As recent studies on Nordic and Baltic higher education show, these countries have solved the issues of internationalization and language policies of higher education in different ways, resulting in different kinds of dynamics (Soler 2019; Saarinen and Taalas 2017; Airey et al. 2017; Kibbermann 2017). In Finland, higher education language policies reflect Finland’s constitutional bilingualism. The 13 universities and 23 universities of applied sciences are by legislation either monolingual (Finnish or Swedish) or bilingual (Finnish and Swedish). Since the 2004 and 2009 higher education legislation reforms, however, language steering at Finnish institutions has gradually been decentralized. Higher education institutions can now independently decide on the language of tuition and degrees. This trend is opposite to that in the other Nordic countries where language regulation of universities has gradually become tighter as a reaction to the increasing use of English in higher education (Saarinen and Taalas 2017). Finland has, thus, been relatively slow in reacting to English in higher education when compared to other Nordic countries, where the legislation—where it exists—has generally tended to protect the local or national languages, particularly against the effects of extensive English usage (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015; Saarinen and Taalas 2017; Saarinen and Rontu 2018). On the other end of the Nordic continuum, Denmark has not had an explicit language legislation, which has, according to Siiner (2012), led to a policy practice where national-level steering is based on covert input from different sectors, such as migration and primary education sectors. Sweden only got her first Language Act in 2009, when it was

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first regulated that Swedish was the official language, together with minority provision for several languages. Iceland has introduced an Act on the Icelandic language and Icelandic sign language in 2011. The bilingual (Nynorsk and Bokmål) Norway has a Language Act for the use of languages in public service, as well as an act on the rights of the Sámi language users (Saarinen and Taalas 2017). Formal language policies of Nordic higher education institutions may also at least partly result from the Declaration on a Nordic Language Policy (Nordiska Ministerrådet 2007). While not legally binding, the Declaration encourages Nordic higher education institutions to develop language strategies under the ostensibly practical but problematic concept of parallel language use (Airey et al. 2017), originally introduced by Davidsen-Nielsen (2014) in 2002. In order to manage the tensions between national languages and English, the idea was that the local language and English were to be treated as languages, used pragmatically in different situations. However, Hultgren (2014) found that at least in the Danish case, applying a “parallel language policy” tended to emphasize Danish on the state level and English on the institutional level. Fabricius et al. (2017) further argue that the concept of parallel languages potentially homogenizes the language landscape in higher education into monolingual spaces, where internationalization takes place in English and “non-international” education is conducted in local or domestic languages, undermining the ideal of internationalization (2017, p. 592). The Finnish case has been very similar, the constitutional bilingualism adding just another monolingual space in formal policies (Saarinen and Rontu 2018). University language policies and strategies inevitably promote the kind of language skills that are valued, the language in which higher education is organized, who can study and where and with what kind of employment (Saarinen 2018). They are, in essence, a policy measure of the post-national society and in many cases lead to an explication of national interests in internationalization of higher education (Soler and Gallego-Balsá 2019), demonstrating the overlapping nature of national, post-national and new national. 3.3.2

Internationalization and Default English

Transnational mobility has throughout its history been a tool for cultural foreign policy (Dhondt 2008; Haberland 2009). From an economic

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commodity viewpoint, international study is a major source of national income in countries such as Australia (Marginson 2006). From an epistemic perspective, internationalization in English seems to be a tool for harmonization and convergence, rather than diversification, as Fabricius et al. (2017) have argued when discussing the paradoxes of the celebratory and practical aspects of internationalization, criticizing internationalization policies for their homogenizing effects (Saarinen 2020). As noted in the previous section, internationalization of Nordic and particularly Finnish higher education has tended to be operationalized as international recruitment and mobility of students in EMI degree programmes. This makes English the default, if not always explicitly mentioned, language of international branding of higher education (Saarinen and Rontu 2018; see also Soler 2020 for an example of international branding in English in the Baltic states), although other languages were also present in the political discourse earlier. Language centres had been founded in Finnish universities during the degree reform in the late 1970s, and language skills were on the political level deemed important. However, Ollikainen and Honkanen (1996, p. 72) argue that while languages featured relatively high in the internationalization discourse of the early 1990s, they were referred to mechanistically or instrumentally (Saarinen and Nikula 2013). Coming to the 1980s and 1990s, national-level language policies began to be linked explicitly with internationalization, mobility and migration (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015). It seems that while international contacts have increased and there is evidence of informal multilingual practices in higher education (Mortensen and Haberland 2012), formal language use has converged towards increased use of English (Chríost and Bonotti 2018). In higher education policies, English started to self-evidently be conflated with “language” and internationalization consequently with EMI; Saarinen 2012b; Saarinen and Rontu 2018). I will next demonstrate the naturalization of English as the (only) language of internationalization. For an earlier article (Saarinen 2012b), I looked into the short marketing texts of the so-called foreign language degree programmes of four Finnish universities and four polytechnics, as found on their website front pages. I specifically looked into mentions of language in these 73 cases in texts that were on average 100 words long. In the analysis, four categories in relation to languages emerged.

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In an overwhelming majority of the cases (N = 40), no languages or culture was not explicitly mentioned. This implies that language in general is taken for granted, and that English is construed as the default language of tuition in these “foreign language” degree programmes in Finland. This is somehow reminiscent of the role of Latin in Danish universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Latin was apparently so obviously the language of instruction that it was not mentioned (Mortensen and Haberland 2012). The strong position of English, dubbed as “the third domestic language” (Leppänen et al. 2011), further made it unnecessary to name the language specifically as English (Saarinen 2012b). The second biggest group of descriptions (N = 21) made implicit or explicit reference to mere participation in the study programme giving language skills or intercultural skills. This was not mentioned as a pedagogical skill, but rather as a self-evident outcome of international study. Very few programmes made any reference to “foreign languages”, and even fewer to any particular language in this phase (Saarinen 2012b); only in the 2010s did Finnish explicitly emerge as a desired language for transnational students, mainly for purposes of labour market integration (see next subchapter). Seven of the programmes mentioned languages and/or communication and/or intercultural skills specifically as programme contents. Only five of the 73 mentioned knowledge of English as a basic and necessary entry qualification—in itself a problematic notion, as this knowledge is further operationalized as a particular kind of hegemonic, inner circle (Kachru 1997) knowledge of English (Saarinen and Nikula 2013) (see next subsection). In the internationalization policies in the turn of the 2000s, thus, language appears invisible, and the default position of English is taken for granted as the language of commodified internationalization. While the languages of scientific publication are outside the scope of this work, an example of languages of dissertations provides a glimpse into the role of English in Finnish higher education and research (see also Hiidenmaa 2003; Hakulinen et al. 2009). It would seem that English has not taken up so much space from Finnish as from other languages. Historically, the main language of internationalization seems to have changed from German to English in the 1950s (Saarinen 2014; Ylönen 2015). Figure 3.1 describes the development of dissertation languages during between 1920 and 2018.

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100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Finnish

English

German

Swedish

LaƟn

Russian

French

Other

Fig. 3.1 Language of doctoral dissertations 1920–2018 (Source Fennica – The Finnish national bibliography https://www.kansalliskirjasto.fi/fi/node/161)

Pyykkö (2011, p. 26) has, along the same lines, written about the invisibility of language in Finnish innovation policy, where language has in neoliberal terms been hidden behind words like cooperation, interaction and communication. This may reflect the communicative turn in language studies, but it also hides multilingualism or conflates it with English. In Baltic contexts, Estonia has witnessed relatively similar developments (Soler 2019). In Latvia, in turn, the large Russian speaker population has caused different dynamics, resulting in conceptualizing “EU languages” (rather than English) as a way of avoiding talk of Russian, but on the other hand investing in Russian language private tuition programmes while marginalizing Russian in the public sector (Kibbermann 2017; Soler-Carbonell et al. 2017). In post-nationalist higher education, English has become both a catalyst (in its relationship with other languages) and a metaphor (for globalization and apparent loss of national distinguishing features) in its dynamic with other languages. Hultgren (2019) describes English as “red herring”, referring to the role of English as pulling our attention

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away from the more topical (societal) issues of power and (in)equality. English, rather than being the cause or the consequence of language dynamics, is mainly a veil that may hinder us from seeing the bigger picture, unless we specifically look behind it. Thus, it is counterproductive to talk about English alone, but to look behind the language at the societal, cultural, political, economic, and knowledge structures that all too often remain invisible when our focus is primarily on language (Saarinen and Ennser-Kananen 2020).

3.4

National and International Intertwined

Typically, the discourses of national or nation state and international or global are intertwined in higher education policies. This is, in itself, not surprising. When analysing language policies of higher education, the national interests and international demands on higher education and society at large also become apparent. In this chapter, I will first take a look at the nationalist aspects of internationalization by analysing three Finnish higher education internationalization strategies from the postnational era, from 1987, 2001 and 2009. Then, I will move on to discuss a case of EMI in Finnish higher education, where internationalization turns out to reinforce monoglot ideals of a particular kind of English. 3.4.1

National Interests Promoted with Internationalization

In the 1990s and especially 2000s, systematic internationalization policies of Finnish higher education turned from exchange programmes to developing “foreign language” study programmes, as initiated after the first internationalization strategy (1987). These degree programmes were first set up in polytechnics and after that in universities (Saarinen 2012a). Finland was in good company with Northern European small language areas (with Southern European Cyprus and Central European Slovakia breaking the pattern) that seemed to dominate the tables of nonAnglophone countries producing English Medium programmes in the 2010s. In a survey by Brenn-White and Faethe (2013), based on the data from StudyPortals.eu, Nordic countries were among the top ten European countries organizing English-speaking master’s programmes, both in terms of absolute numbers of programmes and in terms of rate of growth during the last few years (Brenn-White and van Rest 2015; Brenn-White and Faethe 2013; Saarinen and Taalas 2017). Similar developments took

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place in the Baltics, where in Estonia the political pressure to implement EMI programmes started to grow in the early 2000s, but soon faded first to demands for “foreign” and by 2014 language ceased to be mentioned (Soler 2019, pp. 154–155). Kibbermann (2017) mentions same development in Latvia, although also points out that at least part of the increase in EMI in Latvia was due to decreasing numbers of domestic students and a need to recruit internationally. The first Finnish internationalization strategy for higher education from 1987 couples internationalization with economic and educational (sivistyksellinen) success. This echoes the traditional Bildung function of Finnish higher education (Jalava 2012). In terms of language, the 1987 strategy was quite pragmatic, promoting the development of language education in higher education institutions, and linking languages with internationalization as a technical and self-evident requirement (Ollikainen and Honkanen 1996). The next strategy for internationalization of higher education came out in 2001, with almost 15 years between it and the first one, introducing the terminology of national competitiveness in internationalization of higher education. As the strategy coincided with the strengthening of the Bologna Process, it also stressed that universities were protected by national legislation. The 2001 strategy thus contrasted the national and international, assuring the protection of the national system, thus implying that the national systems were in need of protection in the first place (Saarinen 2014). Somewhat contrary to the discourse of protecting national systems, however, the 2001 strategy also explicitly referred to the “competitive edge” offered by English. Even if “English medium” programmes were referred to, most language references were about “foreign language” programmes. The 2009 strategy framed internationalization in general in terms of international relations, economic competitiveness, and crisis management and security (Hoffman et al. 2011), placing “internationalization” in the realm of international conflicts and crises rather than cooperation. In the specific context of higher education, internationalization was still very traditionally operationalized as mobility of students and staff. Also the 2009 strategy systematically refers to “foreign language” when English is meant. “English” is, in other words, clearly conflated (or euphemized even, as Lehikoinen 2004, indirectly suggests) into “foreign” (Saarinen 2014).

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The 2009 strategy additionally named higher education as a nationally significant export product. What makes this statement interesting is that at the time the strategy was drafted, Finnish higher education institutions did not charge fees from either domestic or international students, except in a few experimental cases. Thus, the reference to higher education as an export item was apparently not linked to direct revenues as in tuition fee charging Anglo-American contexts, but more implicitly to Finnish higher education as an ideal or a brand. This further linked internationalization to the 2010 Finnish Country Brand Delegation’s Mission for Finland and to the larger ethos of academic capitalism as market-like mechanisms in higher education. The discourse of foreign language on the one hand and English on the other reflects both the practical relationship to English as the current most commonly used lingua franca and the Finnish goal of promoting other “foreign languages”. However, linking English and foreign in this way fades out language from internationalization, presenting language— as self-evidently English—as a tool for promoting national interests in the global Anglophone economy (Saarinen 2012a); global languages such as Chinese do not emerge here, regardless of their economic potential. The protectionist nationalist discourse or promoting Finnish economic interests permeates the strategies, while simultaneously stressing the importance of internationalization for the economic commodification and success of higher education (Saarinen 2014). This protectionism does not, however, seem to extend to language, making English the default language of global cooperation and commodification, but without the actual material revenues for universities. This would suggest that the economic benefits to the nation are indirect and more long term, and English is the language with which national interests are promoted (Saarinen 2014). The links between post-nationalism and protection or support of national (economic) structures have also been noted elsewhere. Vihmalo (2017) finds in her study of national interests in internationalization discourses of Finnish business and industry that nationalist thinking about global structures is still a naturalized way of making sense of the world. Her conclusion that “despite the discourses of internationalization and intensifying globalization, people still understand the world in terms of the nation state, both socioculturally and spatially” (p. 10) is valid also for post-national higher education. Not only globalist but also nationalist interests motivated English Medium Instruction in the turn of the twenty-first century, at the height of the post-nationalist period.

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3.4.2

Post-Nationalist Hierarchies of International

In the turn of the 2000s, Finland was among the top providers of English Medium programmes in non-Anglophone Europe. The number of international programmes in Finnish higher education grew fast in the last years of the twentieth century. In 1996, there were approximately 75 English Medium programmes in universities and polytechnics; in 1999, the figure had almost doubled, and by the end of 2010 increased to 335. These programmes were overwhelmingly English; only two were run in the other national language Swedish, and five in “other” languages, meaning Finnish and Fenno-Ugric degree programmes offered for “foreigners” (Saarinen 2014). Measured by the share of English taught programmes against all programmes, Finland ranked second at the time in Europe after the Netherlands. Measured by the proportion of institutions providing English medium programmes, Finland ranked among top countries in Europe (Wächter and Maiworm 2014; Saarinen 2012b; Saarinen and Nikula 2013). Also in terms of international student mobility, numbers increased fast in the turn of the twenty-first century. Both the number of international degree students in Finland and the number of Finnish degree students abroad have doubled in 2006–2016 (see National Board of Education 2017). The policy of setting up parallel EMI programmes for the Finnish and Swedish medium ones is also an indication of a policy of “internationalization at home”, i.e. international interaction in one’s own university or environment (Nilsson 2000) in its goal of providing an internationalization experience for domestic students in English language master’s programmes. At the same time, internationalization was seen as an activity directed out of Finland, where English proficiency was a key skill. In an article together with Tarja Nikula (Saarinen and Nikula 2013), we analysed the way in which “language” and “English” were constructed particularly in entry requirements of 44 EMI programmes in Finnish universities and polytechnics. The 2009 strategy for internationalization of higher education (Ministry of Education and Culture 2009) very generally promoted the need to support the students’ abilities to function in multicultural societies and consequently the need of HE institutions to offer “foreign language degree programmes” (meaning in practice English). On the level of individual degree programmes, however, this general goal

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is simply operationalized into a requirement of sufficient, good, etc., knowledge of English (Saarinen 2015). According to the Study in Finland website and the universities’ own regulations, students could demonstrate sufficient language skills by passing a particular standardized test such as the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) or IELTS (International English Language Testing System) which is used to measure certain aspects of the linguistic performance of “non-native” English speakers. However, the test was not required of those with a secondary or bachelor’s education in English, obtained in an “English-speaking country”—but only, if that Englishspeaking country was one of Kachru’s (1997) inner circle countries (United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the USA or Anglophone Canada). The other variants, spoken mostly in the former colonies, are not accepted, regardless of their position in the educational systems of these countries. This hegemonic position of the inner circle variants is also being challenged by an ELF ideology (Seidlhofer 2005). To make situation more complex, some institutions also exempted students with degrees in English from the European Union or Nordic countries (Saarinen and Nikula 2013). While we acknowledge the de facto position of English as the commonly used lingua franca of academic communication and the need for international students to have some level of skills in English, emphasizing some variety of English, or EMI programmes in some countries over others, creates hierarchies of both students and higher education systems. Neither are language criteria; the first one is based on colonial hierarchies of English and the second on whether or not we trust an educational system granting English medium degrees. The operationalization of a general goal and requirement of “language skills” into particular hegemonic varieties of English turns an ostensibly linguistic requirement into a political or economic one (Saarinen and Nikula 2013). Similar developments have been seen elsewhere, as, for instance, in some US universities, so-called accent reduction or accent modification courses tend to perpetuate the othering and racializing of international students with the language ideological construct of some accents needing to be “modified” for study and labour market success (Ennser-Kananen et al., Forthcoming). These kinds of languagebased hierarchizations combine post-national neoliberal commodification of language with nativist and monoglot ideologies and motivations. Defining language criteria in recruitment of “international” students in “national” institutions is a precarious issue that potentially creates

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tensions between students and institutions. Educational authorities seek a balance in an attempt to embrace the benefits that international degree programmes bring, while attempting to maintain privileges and roles of universities and polytechnics providing nation state tasks. The struggle shows particularly in the shifting role of English from invisibility to necessity (Saarinen and Nikula 2013). Emphasizing a particular dominant variety of English over another produces categories of international students and hides the structural inequality behind the language requirements.

3.5 Minoritized Languages in Post-Nationalist Higher Education In post-nationalist times, the discourses of nation state are still very much recycled also in minority contexts. The discussion of “minority languages” is based on the modernist nation state-based monolingual idea of purity of languages and ethnolinguistic assumptions (Blommaert et al. 2012; Gal 2006) of unity. The international observation of the oppressed position of autochthonous languages (see Ruiz Vieytez 2001 for a historical review since the Peace of Westphalia 1648), and the consequent international recognition and regulation of those languages, has in some situations lead to an improved position of the speakers and of the languages in the societies in question. The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) of 1992 is a relatively recent example of the increasing interest in regulating minority rights and revitalizing indigenous languages under threat of extinction. In Finland, this meant the official constitutional recognition of Sámi, sign languages and Romani in the constitutional amendment of 1995 repeated in the 1999 constitutional reform, while others such as Karelian, Yiddish and Tatar were explicitly left out. In the parliamentary process of the Language Act of 2003, Romani and sign language users were similarly added to the discussion in addition to Sámi. Yiddish, Tatar and Russian, on the other hand, were left out also of the Language Act. None of the languages recognized in the new Finnish constitution were explicitly regulated based on their language status, but based on their status as indigenous people (Sámi), cultural group (Romani) or disability (sign languages). A relatively simultaneous Language Act process in Sweden resulted in a different result, with Swedish designated official language, and Finnish, Meänkieli, Yiddish, Sámi and Romani were given

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minority status (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015). In Finland, Karelian was the latest addition to the acknowledgement of minority languages in concordance with ECRML in 2009, giving the language a symbolic minority position, but not much explicit legislative enforcement. Paradoxically, the constitutional reform of 1999 not only made the autochthonous languages in Finland more specifically a part of the supranational ethnolinguistic discourse, but also emphasized the hegemonic nation state centrist ideal and produced different hierarchies of minoritized languages. As minoritized (migrant and other) languages were left under the general mention of “other groups” having a right to maintain and develop their own language and culture, they were not given the specified mentions that particularly Sámi, Romani and sign language speakers did. It seems that some minorities may function within the nation state legislation and language ideologies more comfortably than others (see Chríost and Bonotti 2018 for a discussion of autochthonous and allochthonous languages in post-Brexit UK). While autochthonous languages generally tend to be somehow explicated in language legislation (see Chríost and Bonotti 2018 for UK) or international agreements (Ruiz Vieytez 2001), the allochthonous languages are generally left out of legislation or lumped into a category of “all other languages”, which not only depicts their weak position in language regulation, but also marginalizes their speakers. In the first Finnish Education Act from 1921, it was stipulated that instruction should be given “in the language best mastered by the child, either Finnish or Swedish” (my translation), and thus, there was no obligation to provide instruction in autochthonous languages. For instance, the Sámi population was largely denied use of their language in education as late as until the 1970s, as exemplified by a practice of sending children to Finnish medium boarding schools to sever ties to the Sámi-speaking community and language. This not only resulted in linguistic erasure, but also in a way gradually led to empowerment of the Sámi to claim their rights in the Finnish society (Lehtola 2012; Nyyssönen 2019). Because of the non-existence of minoritized languages in legislation, a counterfactual approach (Wenzlhuemer 2009) of alternate histories proved useful (Ennser-Kananen and Saarinen, Forthcoming) in teasing out alternative possibilities for the position of allochthonous and autochthonous minorities in Finnish higher education. In a counterfactual scenario of Swedish having been declared a minority language, there might have been more space for other minorities as well in Finnish

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language policy. Taking into account the post-independence need for construing national cohesion, and post-World War II and Cold War foreign policies, it is still unlikely that the position of, for instance, Sámi or Karelian would have improved much in the end, in the society in general or higher education in particular. Taking the low number of speakers into account, a relatively positive development could, however, have led to use of the language in basic education and religion. With regard to higher education, minority languages could have been used as language of instruction in teacher training and to some extent in, e.g. theology, and regionally (e.g. tourism) significant disciplines. Since such a development did not take place in any of the Nordic countries before late 1970s, it would have been unparalleled.1 Language policies, while geared at securing language rights of minoritized speakers, are eventually also likely to perpetuate privilege: speakers of a language need to have some societal status, agency and visibility in order to get to be part of the hegemonic discourse. Languages have varying statuses in different situations and when in touch with different languages, thus also affecting the dynamic between them (see Hult 2004 for a discussion of multilingualism and minorities in Sweden). In other words, those whose languages are most endangered are most likely not to have a seat at the table where hegemonies are reshuffled, which reproduces a vicious cycle of side-lining (Ennser-Kananen and Saarinen, Forthcoming). In the historical reality, Finnish and Swedish occupied the centre stage until the 1990s, as mainstream language policy discussions mostly focused on these two languages. In other words, the languages with the most solid societal status (with the exception of Russian that had just dramatically lost its position in Finland), regardless of the constructions of their vulnerability at the time of drafting the first Constitution in 1919, ended up being most protected. This took place at a cost for languages that did not then and still do not possess the societal status that Finnish or Swedish had at the turn of the twentieth century (Saarinen and Ihalainen 2018; Ennser-Kananen and Saarinen, Forthcoming). The post-nationalist discourses of multilingualism thus largely recycled discourses of societal bilingualism in Finland.

1 I am grateful to Petteri Laihonen for making this point.

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Recycled Post-Nationalist Discourses

In the last section of this chapter, I will summarize the main recycled discourses in the post-national period. Market ideologies, branding of Finnish higher education as a commodity and individualistic education policies dominated the political transfer to favouring English Medium Instruction in internationalizing higher education. The main recycled discourses of the post-nationalist period consist of those of celebratory multilingualism, economic benefits of internationalization and default English. 3.6.1

Discourse of Celebratory Multilingualism

Multilingualism was presented in celebratory terms in higher education policies in the post-nationalist period. The Finnish version of celebratory multilingualism, i.e. the “richness and resource” discourse of constitutional bilingualism, was prominent in the 2000s and turning the one nation, two languages ideal of the post-independence period into an economic ideal while at the same time marginalizing other languages. State bilingualism continued to follow a “parallel monolingual” (Heller 2006) norm; that is, one can be a speaker of either Finnish or Swedish, but not formally and officially register as a speaker of both or others. In this process, Swedish took the role of representing other minorities and multilingualism in general. Autochthonous minorities are only now slowly improving their position in higher education and the society at large. Ideologically, English emerged as the self-evident lingua franca while protectionist concerns about the strength and competitiveness of national higher education systems were simultaneously being presented. Thus, national language was in a way detached from nation with the goal of national economic benefits, in contrast to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century understandings of language and nation as inseparable (Saarinen 2014). The discourses of multilingualism on the internationalization policy level narrow down to particular kinds of inner circle hegemonic Englishes. 3.6.2

Discourse of National Benefits of Internationalization

The discourse of English as providing national economic benefits started to emerge in the 1990s internationalization strategies as a form of a

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combination of globalist ideals of the “four freedoms” of the European Union and protecting national interests in the global economy. Internationalization was construed as beneficial for the nation state. In the process, English was naturalized as the lingua franca. The protectionist nationalist discourse or promoting Finnish economic interests permeates internationalization, turning economic commodification the main driver of higher education, but in the case of Finland in the sense of branding rather than revenue-based economization. Economic benefits for the nation state, provided by EMI in higher education, also break the naturalized link between language and nation state. In any case, globalization certainly did not signal the end of the nation state, but shifted the discourse on it. 3.6.3

Discourse of Default English

English, presented as self-evident, took over most of the language policy space in higher education policies in the turn of the 2000s, albeit implicitly. English was conflated with the values of cooperation, interaction and communication. It may also have provided a way of not talking about other languages, as in the Latvian case, where “EU languages” were spoken about in a collective as a way of avoiding talk of individual languages; talk of English would also have opened the door for Russian. In Finland, the post-national period for a short while hid the other languages from political discourse, also covering up the hierarchical relationships between different languages. Only towards 2010s did discourses of killer English begin to surface (Saarinen 2020), signalling transition to new nationalism.

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CHAPTER 4

Language and New Nationalism in Higher Education

Abstract This chapter discusses the emerging concerns for the national languages, in particular Finnish. English, previously seen in relatively positive terms in the Finnish society, begins to be construed as a threat to Finnish higher education and research, and to Finnish language at large. The chapter discusses developments since the new University Act 2009. The tension between English and the national languages develops at the same time with changes in the political climate and the rise of populist and (new) nationalist politics, both in Finland and globally. The chapter presents the recycled discourses of frozen constitutional bilingualism, economic nationalism, political elites and killer English. Keywords New nationalism · National higher education policy · Internationalization of higher education · English · Finnish · Swedish

As we saw in Chapter 3, the post-nationalist higher education operated on the surface on “internationalization” in default English, or rather the idea of “internationalization” without explicating language, backed largely with economic and labour market arguments. The self-evident nature of English worked hand in hand with policies of internationalization (Ljosland 2015). However, the big picture is not about the language itself, but what language signifies and what it co-constitutes. The global interdependency, depicted by the “four freedoms” of the European Union © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Saarinen, Higher Education, Language and New Nationalism in Finland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60902-3_4

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(i.e. freedom of mobility of goods, capital, services and labour, St John 2018) is the political backdrop of post-nationalism, but, reversely, also new nationalism. Economic (criticism of neoliberal global economies); political (criticism of old political elites); and cultural (criticism of globalist culture) developments provide the arguments for new nationalism. Thus, the post-national ideals of four freedoms emerge as new nationalist freedoms of the mobility of some people but not others, of some goods but not others, of some capital but not others and of some services but not others. Current new nationalist movements tend to feed particularly from economic protectionism of national interests, motivated by a sense of disappointment with global economics and with the often forced migration making its way to national political debates. These developments already begun in the 1990s, but since the early 2000s, the European economic crisis has further intensified the political tensions. The banking crisis of 2007–2009 and the subsequent financial crisis in Greece made national interest main headlines also in Finland again. Demographic and migration developments, linked with wars and ecological crises in the Middle East and North Africa, were equally framed in populist politics as dangerous for Finland. As the latest development, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has further put pressures on international mobilities and contacts, further intensified by the labelling of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” by politicians and media, and highlighting the political stigma of the pandemic (Budhwani and Sun 2020). The pandemic has also become a tool of international politics, surfacing, for instance, in the US presidential elections and in the European Union, where the recovery plan negotiations in the spring and summer of 2020 witnessed economic nationalism emerging. The COVID-19 pandemic may thus reinforce pre-existing nationalist dynamics globally in the form of increased biases against groups associated with the pandemic or the reduction of civil liberties by authoritarian administrations (Bieber 2020). In Finland, new nationalist discourses in higher education are exemplified by the complaints made to the Chancellor of the Justice’s office about the use of English in higher education starting from 2009; the parliamentary debates on tuition fees in 2009; the parliamentary questions about Aalto University’s English medium master’s programmes and the related media attention in 2013, and the declaration of the Finnish Language

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Board and the ensuing media debates in 2018. I will be using these as examples in this chapter.

4.1

Higher Education Policy Developments in the New Nationalist Period

Coming to the twenty-first century, Finnish higher education policy was conducted in a dual system of polytechnics1 and universities, bringing Finland closer to being a universal higher education system already in the 1990s—i.e. at least 50% of the age cohort in higher education. Politics of competition and commodification in the turn of the twenty-first century have challenged the relatively equal system—equal here referring to relatively low status hierarchies between different higher education institutions. However, politics of profiling and specialization has already started to differentiate the system in the first decades of the 2000s. The University Act from 2009 was an example of a post-nationalist legislation in its emphasis on international orientation and managerialism. It gave the universities a chance to charge fees for students from outside the EU—another example of post-national politics in the traditionally nofee Finnish system, but also an example of the overlapping nature of the post-nationalist and new nationalist periods, as the fees were supported with both neoliberal economic as well as nationalist and protectionist arguments. Since 2017, charging fees in so-called foreign language (in practice EMI) degree programmes for students outside the European Economic Area has been compulsory for higher education institutions, while Finnish and intra-EEA students are not required to pay fees. The effects of this on numbers of international students in Finland are still largely unanalysed, but there are nevertheless some developments. In 2018, there were slightly more than 21,600 international degree students studying at Finnish higher education institutions, which is about 7.4% of all students. However, not everyone studied in English-language programmes, and not everyone originally came to Finland to study, pointing to the fluid nature of internationalization and international student (Robertson 2013). Prior to the tuition fee for non-EU and non-EEA countries, which took effect

1 I use the term polytechnic in text for clarity; the institutions themselves prefer “University of Applied Sciences”.

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in 2017, around 8000 international students came from Asian countries, around 3500 from outside the EU and EEA, and 2500 from Africa. Since then, the total number has remained more or less the same, but the number of Asian degree students has increased (from 8000 to 9100) and the share of non-EU/EEA Europe (from 3500 to approximately 2800) and Africa (from 2500 to approximately 2000) has decreased. Another development within higher education in the 2010s that is also relevant for the discussion of new nationalism is the 2015 European asylum seeker situation, when more than 32,000 asylum seekers (almost nine times the number in the previous year) entered Finland applying for asylum. This caused then higher education institutions to set up new kinds of third mission activities and take up new societal roles (Vaarala et al. 2017). The Ministry of Education and Culture guidelines for internationalization published in March 2017 (MEC 2017) continued to refer to “foreign” languages and “foreign language” programmes, but this time also other languages in addition to English were mentioned by name in these guidelines. The document states that higher education institutions would offer their students the widest possible range of languages, “covering, for example, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese” (MEC 2017, p. 19), contextualizing these as “rare languages” and encouraging those “speaking the rare languages as mother tongues” to “utilize their language skills”. This interestingly breaks the silent hegemony of English (see this chapter) and can be interpreted as a continuation of neoliberal and post-nationalist celebratory and commodified multilingual ideals in framing the languages as utilizable individual skills and resources, as discussed in Chapter 3 (see Flores 2013). It is possible that the naming of languages that was not present in post-nationalist internationalization strategies (see Chapter 3) is a recognition of the dominant role of English that the emphasis very broadly on “foreign languages” leads to. It is noteworthy that in earlier strategy documents from 1987, 2001 and 2009, the protectionist discourse that permeates the economic dimensions of internationalization and the national competitiveness discourse does not seem to extend to language. In 2017, on the other hand, the importance of domestic languages in the context of internationalization also emerges (Saaarinen 2020), as the strategy highlighted the importance of domestic languages for international students and staff. Still, the 2017 strategy also made “a service promise” to provide services in English, to facilitate international students and professionals entering Finland. Both the formulation and the content of the statement

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have strong post-nationalist connotations, demonstrating the overlapping nature of different nationalisms.

4.2 Language Policy Developments Leading to New Nationalist Era All Nordic countries have, during the 2000s, introduced some kinds of national language strategies and declarations in order to somehow react to the pressures placed by globalization on the national language regulation. While the legislative situation in the Nordic countries differs, they all have found it necessary to define, systematize and ultimately secure the position of the national language(s) (Saarinen and Taalas 2017). The Finnish language syllabus (mother tongue + one “foreign” language + second national language) has remained the same since the comprehensive reform, although there have been some attempts to change the status quo (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015). In 2004, the second national language was removed from the compulsory subjects in the matriculation exam; of the then government parties, only the Swedish People’s Party opposed the reform (Ihalainen et al. 2011). Coming to the 2010s, language policy discourses started to include more complex arguments. The official, constitutional bilingual language policy was still reinforced by the political elites in the parliament and the government, but the position of Swedish was increasingly challenged in other policy sectors such as education and regional administration, as well as by popular opinion in the media. This seems to have made way for the official policies being eagerly challenged by individuals and political movements, first outside the political elites and then increasingly from inside them, as in the cases of major parliament parties such as the populist Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset ) and the youth organization of the liberal conservative Coalition Party (Kokoomus ) (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015). In essence, the Finns Party has moved inside the political elite that they have criticized, having established a relatively solid 17–19% support in parliamentary elections since 2011, and entering the government in 2015 until the 2017 split of the party as a more right-wing anti-immigrant fraction took over the Party leadership (Lähdesmäki 2019). In 2017, then, Finnish constitutional bilingualism was challenged for the first time by a major parliamentary party. The new Finns Party chair Jussi Halla-aho gave an interview after being selected, stating that Finland is not a bilingual country, moving the language debate from the compulsory school

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Swedish to the bilingual constitution (YLE 2017). Compulsory school Swedish has met more explicit challenges by, for instance, several citizen’s initiatives about changing the status Swedish into an elective or voluntary subject, one of them reaching the 50,000 signature threshold required to proceed to the parliament but overturned there.

4.3 Concern for National Languages in Higher Education In the beginning of 2010s, language became a mainstream political issue in Finnish higher education again, after some quieter decades since the University of Helsinki debates in the 1930s. While the public debate on the position of Swedish in Finland turned more heated after the parliamentary elections in 2011, the discussions about language in higher education revolved around English rather than the national languages. In the 1990s and 2000s, English merely seemed to add a third language to the combination in the spirit of parallel language use (Hult and Källkvist 2016), but gradually, attention turned towards English as a catalyst (Torres-Olave 2012) that fuelled the dynamics between different domestic and international languages as their positions were negotiated and contested (Saarinen 2020). The new nationalist discourses on protection of local languages were in place in other Nordic countries before Finland. The specific context of Finnish constitutional bilingualism may actually have delayed the “killer English” and “local language under threat” discourse, as in Finland, language policy pressures were mostly vented through compulsory school Swedish. This may not only have left other autochthonous languages in the shadows (Ennser-Kananen and Saarinen, Forthcoming) but averted the political gaze from English. It seems that while academic concern over the position of Finnish and Swedish has been presented on the national level (Hakulinen et al. 2009; Hiidenmaa 2003), the general public only started to react to the threat posed by English to Finnish. 4.3.1

Complaints on “Killer English” Emerging in Higher Education Policy

While English has long been seen in relatively neutral or positive terms in the Finnish society (Leppänen et al. 2011), it seems that from the late 1990s, English started emerging as a threat in public media. Leppänen

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and Pahta (2012) offer an interesting analysis of the discrepancy between the neutrally positive attitude of Finns on the one hand and the threat discourse emerging in the early 2000s on the other. Leppänen and Pahta’s analysis of English as an endangering language in the newspaper editorials and letters to the editor provides an interesting analysis of language ideologies during the shift from a post-national to new national period. They found the categories of English as intruder; English as destructive natural force; English as violent actor; English as morally wrong; English (used by Finns) as contaminated or wrong; (Finns’) English as excessive. Furthermore, English appeared to pose a danger to the native language; national identity; social equality; and acquisition of competences. Most of these discourses are also recycled in the higher education scene. The recent backlash against English, previously viewed in positive terms (Leppänen et al. 2011), appears largely motivated by the ideological protection of Finnish rather than of the constitutional bilingualism as such (Saarinen 2014). In early 2009, a Finnish student filed a formal complaint to the Office of the Chancellor of Justice about English medium tuition at the master level, appealing to his/her constitutional right to receive tuition in his or her own language (i.e. Finnish or Swedish). The Chancellor’s Office, while stating that the university had acted within its legal rights and thus ruling against the student (OKV/1001/1, 2010), also ruled that the university would need to be more explicit about their foreign language tuition. It seems that the students were not aware of their constitutional right, repeated in the University Act, that while the language of tuition and degrees could be decided by the university, the students still had the right to take examinations in Finnish or Swedish. The universities were expected to make sure the students were aware of this right (Saarinen and Taalas 2017). Another indication that English was taking the place of Swedish in the language ideological debates was the media attention during the first months of 2013 to Aalto University Business School offering only English medium master’s programmes (YLE 2013)—a situation that was old news but emerged only now in public media. In their news, the National Broadcasting Company YLE stated in strong terms that Aalto University is “abandoning Finnish” (Kauppakorkeakoulu hylkäsi suomen) and the rector of the University replied by linking the EMI programmes to internationalization with the goal of “a quality leap”, thus reproducing the post-national neoliberal ideal of a global university (see Chapter 3).

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A parliamentary question on the position of Finnish as the language of the academia (Suomi tieteen kielenä) was presented, symbolically on Kalevala day, 28 February 2013, by the Finns Party Member of Parliament Jussi Niinistö to the Social Democrat Minister of Education and Culture, Jukka Gustafsson. Niinistö made reference to the “previous battles fought” to make Finnish the language of academia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, explicating that the accomplishment is worth treasuring, and echoing the national cultural heritage views of the Finns Party (Lähdesmäki 2019). He went on to claim that Finnish higher education should make it possible to study in “the own language of Finnish students”. The Minister based his answer largely on the earlier Chancellor of Justice’s resolution from 2010 (OKV/1001/1, 2010). The parliamentary debates on the new University Act (2009) and Polytechnics Act (2013) repeated the arguments of English medium master’s programmes taking up resources from Finnish students, presented also in Jussi Niinistö’s parliamentary question in 2013. In the parliamentary debates, tuition fees were proposed as one solution to this question. The specific concern of EMI degrees taking up resources from Finnish language students and degree programmes links the Finnish parliamentary debate on tuition fees to a larger critique of globalism and increased political populism, intertwined in the discourse of prioritizing, supporting and protecting Finnish institutions, labour market and language. The remaining language arguments in the parliamentary debates on the University Act focused on the recycled discourses of language reserves and the discourse of the quotas for Swedish speakers framed as unfair in comparison with those of Finnish speakers. The language reserves argument (kielivaranto) refers to a thinking where the individual’s linguistic repertoires produce a public commodity and resource to be utilized, in addition to the individual, by the society in export industry and service sectors (Piri 2001; Pöyhönen et al. 2019), placing the concept firmly in the neoliberal and post-national realm of language policies. In the Finnish case, however, the language reserves argument also has nationalist repercussions, as it fuels the recycling of discourses (see Chapters 2 and 3) of pedagogical difficulty and of Swedish taking up space from other languages important for the nation and its economic interest.

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Swedish Gradually Losing Ground

The new nationalist turn typically makes concerns about the position of the local language (and consequently the people speaking it) visible to larger audiences. In Finland, societal bilingualism creates a particular dynamic that prompts differences between Finnish and Swedish to emerge, making the tension between the local languages and English different from contexts where there is one societally dominant language, such as Sweden or Denmark. Swedish seems to have started to struggle first as bilingual Finnish–Swedish universities such as University of Helsinki and Aalto University (Saarinen and Rontu 2018; Lindström and Sylvin 2014) or the monolingually Swedish Åbo Akademi University (Saarinen 2020) have redesigned their language strategies and practices to include English as a second or third language. The bilingual universities attempt to operate in three languages, but Swedish is often lost in the process (Lindstöm and Sylvin 2014; Saarinen and Rontu 2018). Equally interesting is the situation of the formally Swedish medium Åbo Akademi University that operates in the Nordic region, causing interesting effects on uses of Finnish and English in the formally monolingual ÅAU. As students in Swedish medium programmes are increasingly bilingual, and international students appear more motivated to develop their Finnish rather than Swedish knowledge, the position of Swedish appears increasingly jeopardized in bilingual contexts. It also seems that Swedishspeaking students may be left to look after their language rights by themselves and tend to turn to Swedish-speaking personnel in their matters (Sylvin 2017). This may not, however, be directly related to Finnish, as Taxell’s paradox would appear to suggest, but to English (Saarinen 2020; Saarinen and Rontu 2018), as the following example demonstrates. As the national profile of Åbo Akademi University is not only to educate Swedish-speaking experts, but also, in general, Nordic cooperation, this has had unexpected consequences for the language practices at ÅAU. Staff recruited purposefully from Nordic countries, while able to use Swedish, lacks an adequate knowledge of Finnish to operate in particular teaching and local cooperation situations. This has caused, unintentionally, the language in some situations to switch to English (Saarinen 2020). At the bilingual University of Helsinki, student recruitment from the Finnish-speaking population into the bilingual Finnish–Swedish medium programmes, combined with an increasing use of English, also seems

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to have challenged Taxell’s paradox of parallel monolingual institutions. Traditional uses of Swedish in the university context operationalized as “each using their own language” are challenged by bilingual and multilingual practices as well from the increasing use of English. This practice has made visible the relatively fragile position of Swedish in Finnish higher education (Saarinen 2020). The Finnish situation resembles in this respect other contexts where pressure on medium-sized or small minority languages increases in globalization of higher education (see articles in the special issue on Language policies and practices in the internationalization of Higher education on the European margins, edited by Cots et al. 2014). At least part of the language policy pressures at University of Helsinki are related to the size of the Swedish-speaking population, as Swedish language student intake would not be adequate in itself, and the bilingual programmes in part help keep some study programmes alive. Similar developments related to student cohorts have also prompted Estonian and Latvian higher education institutions to offer EMI and, in the Latvian private sector, also fee charging Russian language programmes to compensate for the demographic gap in local student population (Kibbermann 2017). It appears, however, that the University of Helsinki bilingual programmes are not important just because of the particular disciplinespecific language that the students learn in both Finnish and Swedish, or the number of bilingual experts they produce to the labour market. They are deemed important, according to interviews with staff and students (Saarinen 2020) because they appear to have a positive effect on the attitudes towards majority and minority languages. For the Finnish-speaking students, the programme integrates language with substance, thus easing the difficulty of fitting extra language courses in the already tightly packed bachelor’s degrees. Swedish becomes a language of a community, not merely an extra course in an already busy schedule. For the Swedishspeaking students, the programme gives a sense of value to their own language. The bilingual programmes may lower the threshold of language use both for students and for staff. 4.3.3

Debate on the Declaration of Finnish Language Board 2018

The formal language policies have also in the 2010s focused on the position of the national languages, as exemplified the strategy for the national

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languages (Kansalliskielistrategia, 2012) and the work for a renewed strategy in 2020. In addition, there have been two major declarations that have concerned the position of the Finnish language and languages in Finland in the 2000s, both initiated from within the academic elites of the Finnish Language Board at the Institute for the Languages of Finland. The first one was a proposal for an action plan on the position of Finnish, published in 2009 (Hakulinen et al. 2009) and titled Suomen kielen tulevaisuus (The Future of the Finnish Language). The report was mainly written by professors (of Finnish and language technology) at the University of Helsinki and researchers at the then Research Institute for the Languages of Finland. Professor Emerita of Finnish Auli Hakulinen, who was also the then chair of the Finnish Language Board, chaired the group. The recommendations that dealt with academia and higher education focused on (1) requiring language policies that guaranteed Finnish language instruction, (2) suggestion that master’s thesis was to be written in the national languages, or at least with an extensive summary in either, (3) suggestion that researchers publish also in Finnish and (4) evaluation of research should also take into account Finnish language publications in their rankings. The suggestions presented in the 2009 proposal were partly taken under consideration in higher education policy. Higher education institutions have been required to draft language policy documents already since 2007, but there has been no political incentive or sanction for that (Saarinen and Taalas 2017). As to the other recommendations, the results have been more vague. Very few Finnish or Swedish language journals in each field are ranked highest in a four-tier (0–3) Publications Forum (Julkaisufoorumi) ranking of academic journals. While the 2009 declaration got little media attention, the 2018 declaration made major media headlines in October 2018. The 2009 action plan was a 250-page report with data on the various aspects of uses of Finnish in the society. The 2018 declaration Suomi tarvitsee pikaisesti kansallisen kielipoliittisen ohjelman (Finland urgently needs a national language policy programme), in turn, was a two-page declaration with very general background framing and a very urgent tone of the national languages in danger and under threat. The declaration also presented a concern for other languages spoken in Finland, but the main bulk of the text was dedicated to a strongly worded concern for the Finnish language, in particular in fields of education and research. The chair of the board, professor of Finnish Jaakko Leino, was interviewed on the day of the

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publication of the declaration for the main national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. In the interview, he repeated the strong concern of the board, referring to the years of danger” (vaaran vuodet)—a very strong metaphor, taking back to post-war years when the fear of Soviet occupation was imminent and one that Finns would recognize as referring to imminent danger of annihilation of the Finnish nation (HS 2018). I will next analyse one section of the declaration that deals with the role of language (“mother tongue”, implying Finnish in the whole context of the declaration) in knowledge production: Kielen riittävyys kaikille tiedon ja tieteen aloille voidaan varmistaa vain käyttämällä kieltä siellä, missä inhimillisen ymmärryksen rajoja siirretään yhä uusille alueille. Äidinkielen rooli ymmärtämisen ja tiedon tuottamisen välineenä on myös korvaamaton, ja sen syrjäyttäminen vieraalla kielellä heikentää tietotyön huippusuoritusten edellytyksiä. The adequacy of language of language in all domains of knowledge and research can only be ensured by using language where the boundaries of human understanding are being pushed to new areas. The role of the mother tongue as a tool for understanding and producing knowledge is also invaluable, and to replace it with a foreign language weakens the conditions for excellence in knowledge work. (my translation)

The view of languages needing to be usable in different contexts and domains is not hard to agree with. Keeping individual languages as living languages of research, arts, self-expression and societal activity is most likely in everyone’s interest. Additionally, knowledge production and knowledge dissemination do not necessarily take place in the same language. Research may take place in local languages or multilingually and is context dependent (see, for instance, Bretxa et al. 2016). The quote above makes an epistemic and epistemological claim that the “mother tongue” is “invaluable” in knowledge production. This creates interesting implications about nation statist knowledge production and challenges the thinking that knowledge production could be multilingual or take place in languages other than the “mother tongue” of the researcher. Often, the notions of “national studies” or “national disciplines” are brought in this debate, with the thinking that particular fields are specifically national in nature and available exclusively to those who master the language and are aware of the cultural intricacies (Kamusella 2019). Palló (2012) has discussed “scientific nationalism”

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that, in his definition, stands for both nationalism occurring within science and nationalism based on science. This, however, is an empirical explanation of nation state-based science that does not go very far in explaining the kind of epistemic nationalism demonstrated in the thinking that “mother tongue” is needed for knowledge production. While language does have a role in knowledge construction (see, for instance, Kuteeva and Airey 2014 for language and disciplinary differences), the understanding that it has to be a particular language reinforces monolingual and monocultural practices (García and Wei 2014). Instead of understanding language as meaning making and negotiation, a “mother tongue” ideology of knowledge production perpetuates nation state centrist epistemologies. As Díaz (2018) argues in her discussion of the geopolitics of knowledge reproduction, current language policies serve to position language diversity as a deficit that needs to be fixed in order to perpetuate dominant monolingual (in this case nation state centrist) knowledge production practices. In knowledge production discourses, the problem is that when we link national languages (or an ideologically highly problematic notion like “mother tongue”; see Chapter 3) to knowledge construction, we also open the door for nation centrist political arguments and oppressive epistemologies. Teaching and education in Western nation states are generally organized in the local language in order to constitute and construe the state and the public space. The meaning of “local” may vary, but the development coincides and emerges from the motivation to standardize the language of education for purposes of nation state construction, thus contributing to the thinking that states are inherently monolingual (see Pujolar 2007; Kamusella 2009). However, saying that a monolingual state mother tongue is needed for knowledge construction turns correlation into causation: because knowledge production has in nation states (often but not always) been conducted for nation state building purposes in the national language, the assumption has been made that national language is actually required. Nevertheless, a growing body of research discusses the different aspects and complexities of multilingual knowledge production, challenging the monolingual assumption and practices in knowledge production, for instance, from the perspectives of multilingual interaction (Gajo and Berthoud 2018) or translanguaging practices in academic teaching and learning contexts (Canagarajah 2011). Kuteeva and Airey (2014) discuss language policies from the point of view of knowledge production as a disciplinary matter, concluding

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(following Basil Bernstein’s ideas of horizontal and hierarchical disciplinary knowledge structures) that there are disciplinary differences in the use of language for knowledge production purposes. For humanities, language is part and parcel of the knowledge production process, making it horizontal—i.e. where knowledge is produced through multiple interpretations. For natural sciences, they argue, the process is hierarchical; that is, knowledge is produced cumulatively, based on an agreed “language” and terminology. It would thus seem that knowledge production in humanities (and, partly, social sciences) would require use of language for negotiation, dialogue and interpretation. To sum up, it seems that the discourse of mother tongue in knowledge construction policies does not take into account the complex relationships between the local and international or disciplinary and organizational processes in knowledge production, let alone the different kinds of ways in which we construe knowledge. To conflate the question of the language of research and knowledge production into a mother tongue issue is simplistic. 4.3.4

National, Autochthonous and Allochthonous Languages

As discussed earlier, Swedish discursively appears in Finnish language policy either as a national language or as a minority language, depending on the debate at hand. At the same time, it also occupies the discursive space for (other) minority languages (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015; Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015). For Swedish, this dual position is both a cause and an outcome of language policy changes, illustrating their layered nature. Finnish and Swedish have throughout Finnish independence been presented language ideologically as the only mother tongues (although termed as “languages of one’s own” rather than “mother tongues”) in Finnish legislation. When minorities are actually mentioned in national policies, it is the Swedish-speaking population that is discursively operationalized as the minority, either in “need of protection” (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015; Boyd and Palviainen 2015) or as Finland being constructed as the model country of multilingualism where “minorities” are given a strong constitutional position. Of autochthonous minorities, currently, Sámi (as regional minority), Swedish (as the less widely used national language), Romani, Russian, Tatar, Yiddish, Karelian, Estonian and sign languages (non-territorial minorities) are reported in the follow-ups of ECRML by the Finnish government.

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Nowadays, Sámi language primary and secondary education is available in the Finnish Sámiland—i.e. the northernmost three municipalities in Finland. In higher education, the role of the minoritized languages varies. There is currently no Sámi language higher education institution in Finland, although Sámi language and literature can be learned as a subject discipline at universities of Oulu, Lapland and Helsinki. The University of Oulu in addition hosts the Giellagas Institute (Giellagas-instituhtta) with the national responsibility to organize and provide Sámi language and cultural studies and research at an academic level; the Institute is the only subject teacher education provider for Sámi languages in Finland. The Sámi University of Applied Sciences (Sámi allaskuvla) established in 1989 and located in Guovdageaidnu in the Norwegian Sámiland serves the Sámi communities in all four Sápmi countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia). Bull (2012) has discussed the notion of language and internationalization in Sámi allaskuvla from the point of view of the rationale of the university. Her conclusion is that the Sámi allaskuvla profiles as international rather than global, meaning it identifies (with English as lingua franca) with an international indigenous community, as opposed to other Scandinavian universities offering EMI programmes marketed for “international students” functioning within a global knowledge-based economy ideal. Sign languages can be learned at a master’s level at the University of Jyväskylä, and bachelor’s level at two polytechnics, HUMAK and DIAK. Romani language has since 2009 been taught as minor language and since 2013 at the Open University at the University of Helsinki. Karelian has been taught at the University of Eastern Finland also since 2009, and the Karelian Institute at the University of Eastern Finland, established in 1971, currently hosts research on different aspects of Karelian culture and politics. Yiddish and Tatar can be learned at basic level at the University of Helsinki. It seems that at least some autochthonous languages (in the Finnish case Sámi, Karelian, sign languages and Romani) are constitutionally and language ideologically further up in the hierarchy of languages (see also Nikula et al. 2012). Allochthonous minority languages (migrant languages) and some autochthonous ones (such as Tatar and Yiddish) are, however, not in the same situation. Lemmetyinen (2015) has shown that the most avid proponents of the Karelian language in the parliament have been MPs from the Finns Party, Social Democrats and the Centre

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Party. The reasons for this may be regional, as the MPs proposing Karelian initiatives have often been from the Northern Karelia region. The MPs also may have a Karelian evacuee background, or they may have had a role in the Karelian Association, an association promoting the cause of Karelian evacuees (Lemmetyinen 2015). On a national level, autochthonous languages feature little in higher education policy. The hierarchical positions of different minorities draw their root causes from different sources, not all of which are linked to nationalist arguments, but rather from a combination of societal characteristics of their speakers. Language plays a part in this hierarchization, but is not always the cause of it.

4.4 Internationalization of Finnish Higher Education and New Nationalism As in neo-racism where the focus is averted from race to “cultural differences” (Lee 2017), in new nationalism the place of nationality or ethnicity is taken by language—i.e. who speaks it and who does not, whose language is important and whose is not; and ultimately, who belongs and who does not. In this perspective, new nationalism hits most obviously at internationalization and mobility patterns globally, but it also affects policy making in the nation states. In both contexts, a look at and particularly behind language makes visible the naturalized nationalist policies, veiled by an exterior coating of language requirements, medium of higher education instruction and language of research and publication. 4.4.1

Changing Forms of Transnational Mobility and Internationalization

The idea of international mobility has changed in recent decades. “International student” is still generally defined as those having crossed borders for the purpose of study, who are not residents of their country of study, or who have received their secondary education in another country (OECD 2013). This is, however, a relatively one-dimensional and inadequate construct. In recent years, international mobility has begun to be seen both as part of international labour market mobility and as its predecessor (Robertson 2013). It is thus no longer clear that the student will return to their home country, let alone stay there permanently. Student employment opportunities can be diverse; the student may take up employment in their

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country of origin, during or after the studies in the country where they studied, or in a third country. Robertson (2019) suggests that instead of categorizing migrants based on their legal migrant category, it would be more useful to look at “status-making”—i.e. the intersections of not just legal and regulative categories of migration, but also social categories like race, class, gender, age or ethnicity. In the Finnish case, these students that EMI programmes are marketed for are expected to enter the programme with (a particular kind of) English and are then represented as needing Finnish in the labour market, as also Swedish medium higher education institutions seemed to prioritize Finnish (Saarinen et al. 2016; Saarinen 2020). However, nation statebased categories and monoglot language ideologies do not hold when the students do not fit the binary categories of “native” and “non-native”— highly problematic and discriminatory categories in themselves (see the discussion on inner circle Englishes in Chapter 3). The language repertoires and multi-literacies of students applying for higher education from the Finnish education system are becoming more heterogeneous. As Kuteeva (2014) finds in her analysis of the development of academic literacies in Sweden, the native speaker norm is detrimental to the development of academic literacy in English as the categories are not compatible: settling academic English proficiency goals should not be based on standard native English norms. All this also challenges EMI master’s programmes as their existence is based on an understanding of language as gatekeeper. Post-nationalist arguments of global commodification and (new) nationalist arguments of national interests overlap in the discourse. The question remains: How do universities prepare for multilingual student body with various ethnic, racial, national, linguistic, cultural, religious and other backgrounds, when their structures and practices are still nation centrist and largely (parallel) monolingual? On a global level, the flows of students seem to be diversifying. The post-World War II decolonization, linked with education of large numbers of students in the former colonial universities, also had language consequences and reproduced and perpetuated social hierarchies that still exist. These hierarchies were labelled with language, but are based on the origin of students (Lee and Rice 2007; Saarinen and Nikula 2013; Lee et al. 2016). Dismantling of colonial empires in the twentieth century both intensified setting up national higher education systems in the newly independent states in Africa and Asia, and fundamentally affected student

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flows as the new states needed higher education that the local institutions could not satisfy (Scott 2011). Other factors in the international dynamics of student mobility were the post-World War II massification, the Cold War and the ensuing global ideological struggle for transnationally mobile students, and the competitive struggle to demonstrate technological and innovative superiority on both sides—the last one exemplified by the so-called Sputnik shock in the USA, as the Soviet Union was the first to put a satellite in orbit in 1957. A third turn has been the entrepreneurial one (Montesinos et al. 2008), as higher education started turning into a global commodity (see Chapter 3). The historical linguistic, geographic, cultural and historical “push” and “pull” factors (Dhondt 2008) are still very much in place, producing a heterogeneous body of students that is not so easy to label as homogeneously “international” (see Murphy-Lejeune 2008; Robertson 2013). Current global mobility flows continue to favour Anglophone countries, but regions in Asia and continental Europe increasingly offer EMI programmes with more affordable tuition than the Anglophone ones. The above developments did not follow each other in a linear but rather layered manner (Scott 2011; Välimaa 2019). The latest layer, somewhat related to the Cold War ideological competition, is the intertwined phenomena of global (involuntary) mobilities of war, climate and pandemic refugees. With the 2020s political and ecological developments, there is no knowing what kind of a balance the transnational mobility flows will seek (Bieber 2020). Most Nordic countries have now introduced fees for transnationally mobile students, with the exception of Norway, which still offers university tuition for all students without fees. It is quite possible that one of the divides in the new market of international study will go along the lines of Anglophone–non-Anglophone EMI supply, which might eventually impact the position of Anglophone vs. non-Anglophone higher education institutions in the global education markets (Hughes 2008; Marginson 2006) as well (McCambridge and Saarinen 2015). 4.4.2

International Students, Local Languages and New Nationalism

The employment of international students in the Finnish labour market has become one of the central internationalization goals of Finnish higher

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education over the past 30 years. According to the 2017 International Student Barometer, almost half of the international students would like to stay in Finland after graduation, and non-EU students were more eager to stay than EU students (NBE 2018). In fact, almost 60–70% of international students stay in Finland after graduation, but their labour market situations vary (Mathies and Karhunen 2019). Language skills are often assumed as one of the primary factors in migrant employment and integration, but this is a simplistic interpretation of their role (Pöyhönen et al. 2019). Migrants are not a homogenous group, and several structural factors in the labour market also have an effect on their employment. While knowledge of national languages (Finnish and Swedish) seems to be necessary, especially when integrating into the labour market, language practices vary from sector to sector (Shumilova et al. 2012). The study requirements for local languages are also university and sector specific. For example, in the field of health care, a high level of language skills is required in domestic languages, and the reform of the Health Care Professionals Act in 2016 allowed Valvira, the national agency in charge or supervision of social and healthcare areas, to review the language skills of those who studied abroad when applying for professional rights. National languages were previously taught relatively occasionally to international students (Garam 2004). Since the Bologna reform and the introduction of three-tier degrees, however, compulsory language courses in Finnish degrees were placed at the bachelor level. Consequently, international undergraduate students studying at bachelor’s programmes at polytechnics are more likely to have Finnish or Swedish courses in their studies than international master’s students at universities. According to our study (Saarinen et al. 2016), there are differences between polytechnics and universities in the extent and level of language studies. The higher the level of studies, the less Finnish courses are included in the degree requirements. International doctoral students are in general not required to study Finnish or Swedish (Saarinen et al. 2016, p. 93). Most of the courses for international students are at the moment at the lowest level of survival or basic skills, while there would be more demand, but less supply for intermediate-level courses (Saarinen et al. 2016). European degree programmes have tended to solve the relationship between local language and English in three different ways (Alexander 2008), depending on their use of the “foreign” (usually English) language. The replacement type refers to English being used systematically throughout the programme by students and staff alike; the Finnish EMI

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programmes have since the 1990s represented this type. In the additional type, the “foreign” language is used to facilitate the students’ transition to courses in the local language; Germany is mentioned as an example. In the cumulative type, the use of the “foreign” language increases gradually, as proficiency is assumed to improve simultaneously. According to Alexander (2008), the Polish higher education system represents this type. The increase in English medium master’s degrees in Finland suggests that also Finland is moving into this category (Saarinen and Nikula 2013), as bachelor’s degrees are generally provided in the national languages. In practice, therefore, it seems that the objectives of the master’s programmes and internationalization policy are in conflict in Finland: at the national level, students are politically encouraged to stay, but the language training of the master’s programmes does not provide enough the kind of language education in the national languages that the students’ versatile needs would require; one size definitely does not fit all here. This mismatch apparently also reflects a change in politics more generally: the post-national discourses of international labour mobility through English have been replaced by a new nationalist need to serve the national labour market in the local language, most often Finnish. This, together with the increasingly heterogeneous student population, means that the traditional language education does not match the needs of the students or the society (Saarinen et al. 2016). 4.4.3

Whose Language Counts?

In Finnish primary and secondary schools, migrant background pupils may be directed to Finnish as second language teaching when they enter the educational system, in order to facilitate language learning and adaptation to education, and with the intention of boosting language learning and giving support when needed. It is possible to graduate from the upper secondary matriculation exam with Finnish as second language. A recent case from the spring of 2020 shows that Finnish or Swedish as second language can, in fact, be an obstacle for migrant background students, and consequently, L1 (Finnish or Swedish) matriculation exam emerges as gatekeeper. While the lowest acceptable matriculation grade approbatur in Finnish language and literature (Finnish as “mother tongue”) was sufficient to prove adequate language skills for university entry, Finnish as second language learners were required a magna cum

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laude approbatur—i.e. 3rd highest grade on a seven-stage grade, practically making the already low acceptance rate for migrant background students even lower. This change was very recent in the exceptional circumstances of spring 2020 and the changes that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to higher education entry examinations, and it was heavily contested and criticized. While the decision to take Finnish as first or second language is principle with the parents, teachers and schools have a great influence in who chooses Finnish as second language, especially in the case of already otherwise marginalized migrant groups. This may lead to random and even racialized selection of students in Finnish as second language classes (even with apparently good language knowledge, Airas et al. 2019). Turning our gaze from hierarchization of Finnish speakers to that of English speakers, they also tend to be evaluated and observed in terms of their (inner circle) “nativeness” or “non-nativeness”. While only approximately 400 million people of the 1.5–2 billion global speakers of English speak it as a first language, native speaker ideologies still dominate the discourse both inside and outside the Anglophone sphere. Also in Finland, the discussion of English speakers can turn to one of “us” and “them”, where “us” refers to the Finnish staff and students, whose English, while not native-like, is still represented as superior to that of the international students with a lower hierarchy version of English (see Chapter 3). In other words, not only is a clear divide between “natives and non-natives” observed, but also within the (heterogeneous) group of non-native English speakers different hierarchies emerge, as “our” lingua franca English is construed as better than “theirs” (Saarinen 2014; McCambridge and Saarinen 2015). International students are a heterogeneous group, hierarchized in many ways based on criteria ostensibly about language, but in reality based on ethnicity, origin, nationality, educational background or race (Saarinen and Nikula 2013; Ennser-Kananen et al., Forthcoming). The policies and ideologies of internationalization are hierarchized and Western-centred in their focus on a particular kind of Anglo-centrism (McCambridge and Saarinen 2015). In the post-national higher education language policy, English had a particular role in the knowledge society internationalization. While, for instance, the Bologna Process never explicated priority of English language, the position of English became stronger based on implied and indirect arguments, as Ljosland (2015) shows in her study of language

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policies of Norwegian higher education and their multi-layered motivations. The same is true of Finland: while English was never explicitly named the language of higher education internationalization, it took that place gradually. In the 2020s, Swedish appears to be becoming invisible in language political debates where it had previously been a contested entity. In a way, it seems that marginalization is even more harmful to Swedish than being at the centre of a language debate (Saarinen 2020).

4.5 Recycled Discourses of Nation in Higher Education Much of the new nationalist discourses are recycled from the nineteenth century and (early) twentieth century, but in new political, economic, social and cultural contexts that differ from the earlier ones. These recycled discourses relate to constitutional bilingualism, economic nationalism, oppressed minorities and majorities, and killer English. As new nationalism is often linked to criticism of global(ist) and European politics and has supranational features, national discourses simultaneously play a part in the local contextualization of new nationalism. 4.5.1

Discourse of Frozen Constitutional Bilingualism

In Finland, the earlier higher education language debates have revolved around the delicate balance between the national languages, Finnish and Swedish. Finnish and Swedish occupied the centre stage until the 1990s, as the discussion of risks and vulnerabilities mostly focused on these two languages instead of other minoritized languages until the end of the twentieth century (see Chapter 3). An alternate narrative could have included a constitutional recognition of other minoritized populations and languages, such as Sámi, Russian or Karelian (Ennser-Kananen and Saarinen, Forthcoming). With several languages possessing a minority status, as is the case in Sweden now, Finland might have looked very different with possible regional autonomous areas in Western, Northern and Eastern Finland. Considering other historical developments, however, it is still likely that with the status that Sámi and Karelian possessed at independence and the economic as well as internal and foreign policy developments after World War II and the Cold War, only Swedish might have gained a significant status in higher education, retaining a pocketed regional status even in

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new nationalist times. Yet, even an alternate imaging of (a few) minoritized speaker groups in Finland does not begin to address how migrant languages might and should factor into this equation. With the absence of a documented or recognized historical presence, their status was and remains the most vulnerable. The discourse of constitutional bilingualism has focussed on the conflicting discourses of two equal national languages and Swedish simultaneously as a minority. The discourse of constitutional bilingualism as richness and resource has frozen into the relationship of two national languages. 4.5.2

Discourse of Economic Nationalism

A part of the (new) nationalist discourses was the critique of global economy and related globalist ideologies. Language arguments such as the economic benefits of languages other than Swedish, and the need to charge tuition fees for students other than Finnish ones are intertwined with discourses of nation state interests and the dangers of Swedish and English to those nation state interests. Additionally, Swedish has been discursively placed in the role of occupying the “language reserves” space from other, ostensibly economically more significant languages. The discourse of English, in turn, possessing a role or presenting a danger to Finnish labour markets complements the economic discourses, thus demonstrating the complex nature of the language policies. Economic arguments emerged in the form of not just economic benefits of some languages for labour market success, but also as arguments to charge tuition fees from international students in order to compensate for them taking the place from Finnish students. In that, the economic argument is mixed with a “Finland first” rhetoric of placing domestic students before others. 4.5.3

Discourse of Oppressed Majority and Political Elites

The role of Swedish has been constituted around discourses of an oppressed or elite minority, a representative of all minorities in policy discourses and a dominant national language. As the political situation has changed, the same discourses are still recycled, but with different effect in the new circumstances. Since around 2000s, increasing critique of political (Palonen and Saresma 2019) and academic elites (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015) has

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been entangled with the discourse on Swedish. The discourse of (elíte) quotas for Swedish speakers in higher education is related to earlier discourses of Swedish-speaking educational elites and has been framed as politically unfair in comparison with those of (majority) Finnish speakers. The discourse of difficulty of Swedish in the University Act and Polytechnics Act parliamentary debates is, in turn, a recycled pedagogical discourse from the 1960s comprehensive reform. Since the comprehensive reform, Swedish was represented by the political elite as “difficult” for the masses (masking an elitist ideological argument into a pedagogical one). Now, the populist Finns Party has appropriated that elitist discourse, as was apparent in the debate on new University Act in 2009 and Polytechnics Act in 2013. Paradoxically, the Finns Party has been part of the political elite for the last ten years, with consistently 17–19% of the votes and seats in parliamentary elections, and a place in centre-right coalition government in 2015–2017. This repeats a feature of populist new nationalism, i.e. claiming to speak for the people against the elite that they themselves in the end constitute, and homogenizing the discourse of “oppressed common people” (see, for instance, Lähdesmäki 2019 on the rhetoric of the Finns Party). What is interesting is that the discourse of Swedish-speaking elites is still strong even if Finnish has become the dominant language in the society. The discourses of Finnish language and nation under threat, as well as those of the generations of hard work in creating that position for the language, are still recycled in the new nationalist period, but this time in relation to English. 4.5.4

Discourse of Killer English

The discourse of killer English is relatively new, having emerged as one of the dominant discourses in early 2000s that challenged the hegemony of constitutional bilingualism. The post-nationalist discourse of English as a self-evident requirement met the critique of English as overpowering and all consuming killer language, converging into the discourse of English as taking over many of the professional domains originally reserved for the local languages. This first emerged in the higher education policy level around 2009 with the University Act debates and the complaints to the Chancellor of Justice’s office, as both the language (occupying domains of Finnish) and speakers (occupying the study places reserved for Finnish students). Thus, in higher education, we see at least the discourses of

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English as destructive natural force; English as violent actor; and English as excessive (Leppänen and Pahta 2012). The killer English discourse acted as catalyst to tease out different hierarchies of languages in Finnish higher education. Fear for Finnish has forced hierarchical views of languages to emerge in a way that fear for Swedish did not, and the hegemonic bilingual policy, supported by the political elites, has paid little attention to. In the end, English now seems to occupy the space in the centre of higher education language debates, and Swedish has been marginalized from it.

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Cots, Josep M., Enric Llurda, and Peter Garrett. 2014. Language policies and practices in the internationalisation of higher education on the European margins: An introduction. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 35 (4): 311–317. Dhondt, Pieter. 2008. Difficult balance between rhetoric and practice: Student mobility in Finland and other European countries from 1800 to 1930. In Students, staff and academic mobility in higher education, ed. Mike Byram and Fred Dervin, 48–64. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Díaz, Adriana. 2018. Challenging dominant epistemologies in higher education: The role of language in the geopolitics of knowledge (re) production. In Multilingual education yearbook 2018. Internationalization, stakeholders & multilingual education contexts, ed. Indika Liyanage, 21–36. Cham: Springer. Ennser-Kananen, Johanna, Mia Halonen, and Taina Saarinen. Forthcoming. “Come join us, and lose your accent!” Accent modification courses as hierarchisation of international students. Journal of International Students. Ennser-Kananen, Johanna, and Taina Saarinen. Forthcoming. Challenging constitutional bilingualism with “what if…”: Counterfactual histories and at-risk minorities in Finland. In Vulnerabilities, challenges and risk in applied linguistics, ed. Clare Cunningham and Chris Hall. Multilingual Matters. Flores, Nelson. 2013. The unexamined relationship between neoliberalism and plurilingualism: A cautionary tale. Tesol Quarterly 47 (3): 500–520. Gajo, Laurent, and Anne-Claude Berthoud. 2018. Multilingual interaction and construction of knowledge in higher education. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 21 (7): 853–866. Garam, Irma. 2004. Ulkomaisille vaihto- ja tutkinto-opiskelijoille annettava suomen kielen opetus ja sen kehittämistarpeet. CIMO: Helsinki. García, Ofelia, and Li Wei. 2014. Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. New York: Palgrave. Hakulinen, Auli, Jyrki Kalliokoski, Salli Kankaanpää, Antti Kanner, Kimmo Koskenniemi, Lea Laitinen, Sari Maamies, and Pirkko Nuolijärvi. 2009. Suomen kielen tulevaisuus. Kielipoliittinen toimintaohjelma. Helsinki: Kotimaisten kielten keskus. Hiidenmaa, Pirjo. 2003. Suomen kieli-who cares? Helsinki: Otava. HS. 2018. Poikkeuksellinen kannanotto: “Suomen ja ruotsin kielen asema uhattuna”. Helsingin Sanomat, 26 October. https://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/art-200 0005877448.html. Hughes, R. 2008. Internationalisation of higher education and language policy: Questions of quality and equity. Higher Education Management and Policy 20 (1): 102–119. Hult, Francis, and Marie Källkvist. 2016. Global flows in local language planning: Articulating parallel language use in Swedish university policies. Current Issues in Language Planning 17 (1): 56–71.

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Ihalainen, Pasi, and Taina Saarinen. 2015. Constructing “language” in language policy discourse: Finnish and Swedish legislative processes in the 2000s. In Language policies in Finland and Sweden, ed. Mia Halonen, Pasi Ihalainen, and Taina Saarinen, 29–56. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Ihalainen, Pasi, Taina Saarinen, Tarja Nikula, and Sari Pöyhönen. 2011. Aika kielipolitiikassa. Päivälehtien nettikeskustelujen historiakäsitysten analyysi. Kasvatus & Aika 5 (3): 18–38. Kamusella, Tomasz. 2009. The politics of language and nationalism in modern Central Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. The fallacy of national studies. In Identities in-between in EastCentral Europe, ed. Jan Fellerer, Robert Pyrah, and Marius Turda, 11–44. Routledge. Kibbermann, Kerttu. 2017. Responses to the internationalisation of higher education in language policies of Estonia and Latvia. Eesti Ja Soome-Ugri Keeleteaduse Ajakiri. Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics 8 (1): 97–113. Kotus. Suomi tarvitsee pikaisesti kansallisen kielipoliittisen ohjelman. 2018. Available from https://www.kotus.fi/ohjeet/suomen_kielen_lautakunnan_ suosituksia/kannanotot/suomi_tarvitsee_pikaisesti_kansallisen_kielipoliitti sen_ohjelman. Kuteeva, Maria. 2014. The parallel language use of Swedish and English: The question of ‘nativeness’ in university policies and practices. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 35 (4): 332–344. Kuteeva, Maria, and John Airey. 2014. Disciplinary differences in the use of English in higher education: Reflections on recent language policy developments. Higher Education 67: 533–549. Lähdesmäki, Tuuli. 2019. European culture, history, and heritage as political tools in the rhetoric of the Finns Party. In European memory in populism. Representations of self and other, ed. Chiara De Cesari and Ayhan Kaya, 191–209. Routledge. Lee, Jenny J. 2017. Neo-nationalism in higher education: Case of South Africa. Studies in Higher Education 42 (5): 869–886. Lee, Jenny J., Jae-Eun Jon, and Kiyong Byun. 2016. Neo-racism and neonationalism within East Asia: The experiences of international students in South Korea. Journal of Studies in International Education 21 (2): 136–155. Lee, Jenny J., and Charles Rice. 2007. Welcome to America? International student perceptions of discrimination. Higher Education 53 (3): 381–409. Lemmetyinen, Anne-Mari. 2015. Karjalan kielen taival ei-alueelliseksi vähemmistökieleksi suomessa [E Journey of the Karelian Language to a NonTerritorial Minority Language in Finland]. MA Thesis, University of Eastern Finland. Leppänen, Sirpa, and Päivi Pahta. 2012. Finnish culture and language endangered—Language ideological debates on English in the Finnish press from 1995 to 2007. In Dangerous multilingualism: Northern perspectives on order,

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purity and normality, ed. Jan Blommaert, Sirpa Leppänen, Päivi Pahta, and Tiina Räisänen, 142–175. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Leppänen, Sirpa, Anne Pitkänen-Huhta, Tarja Nikula, Samu Kytölä, Timo Törmäkangas, Kari Nissinen, Leila Kääntä, Tiina Räisänen, Mikko Laitinen, Päivi Pahta, Heidi Koskela, Salla Lähdesmäki, and Henna Jousmäki. 2011. National survey on the English language in Finland: Uses meanings and attitudes. Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English. Helsinki: Varieng. Lindström, Jan, and Jenny Sylvin. 2014. Local majority and minority languages and English in the university: The University of Helsinki in a Nordic comparison. In English in Nordic universities: Ideologies and practices, ed. Anna Kristina Hultgren, Frans Gregersen, and Jakob Thøgersen, 147–164. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ljosland, Ragnhild. 2015. Policymaking as a multi-layered activity. A case study from the higher education sector in Norway. Higher Education 70 (4): 611– 627. Marginson, Simon. 2006. Dynamics of national and global competition in higher education. Higher Education 52 (1): 1–31. Mathies, Charles, and Hannu Karhunen. 2019. Suomeen valmistumisen jälkeen jääneet tutkinto-opiskelijat tilastojen valossa. Helsinki: TEM. McCambridge, Laura, and Taina Saarinen. 2015. “I know that the natives must suffer every now and then”: Native / non-native indexing language ideologies in Finnish higher education. In English-medium instruction in European higher education, ed. Slobodanka Dimova, Anna Kristina Hultgren, and Christian Jensen, 291–316. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. MEC. 2017. Yhteistyössä maailman parasta: Korkeakoulutuksen ja tutkimuksen kansainvälisyyden edistämisen linjaukset 2017–2025. Ministry of Education and Culture Helsinki. Montesinos, P., J.M. Carot, J.-M. Martinez, and F. Mora. 2008. Third mission ranking for world class universities: Beyond teaching and research. Higher Education in Europe 33 (2–3): 259–271. Murphy-Lejeune, Elizabeth. 2008. The student experience of mobility. A contrasting score. In Students, staff and academic mobility in higher education, ed. Michael Byram and Fred Dervin, 12–30. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. NBE. 2018. Facts express 6B/2018: What brought students to Finland, how do they find studying here? Helsinki: National Board of Education. Nikula, Tarja, Taina Saarinen, Sari Pöyhönen, and Teija Kangasvieri. 2012. Linguistic diversity as a problem and a resource – multilingualism in European and Finnish policy documents. In Dangerous multilingualism. Northern perspectives on order, purity and normality, ed. Jan Blommaert, Sirpa

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Leppänen, Päivi Pahta, and Tiina Räisänen, 41–66. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. OECD. 2013. Education indicators in focus 2013/5, July. https://www.oecd. org/education/skills-beyond-school/EDIF%202013--N%C2%B014%20(eng )-Final.pdf. Palló, Gábor. 2012. Scientific nationalism: A historical approach to nature in late nineteenth-century Hungary. In The nationalization of scientific knowledge in the Habsburg empire, 1848–1918, ed. Mitchell Ash and Jan Surman, 102–112. Palgrave Macmillan. Palonen, Emilia, and Tuija Saresma. 2019. Kansallinen ja ylirajainen populismi: Eliitinvastaisuutta, anti-intellektualismia, EU-kriittisyyttä ja naisvihaa. In Vapiseva Eurooppa: Mitä seuraa eurooppalaisen politiikan kaaoksesta? ed. Antti Ronkainen and Juri Mykkänen, 111–125. Tampere: Vastapaino. Piri, Riitta. 2001. Suomen kieliohjelmapolitiikka: Kansallinen ja kansainvälinen toimintaympäristö. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto. Pöyhönen, Sari, Minna Suni, and Mirja Tarnanen. 2019. Kieli kotouttamispolitiikan ytimessä–aikuiset maahanmuuttajat matkalla työelämään. In Kieli, koulutus ja politiikka.monipaikkaisia käytänteitä ja tulkintoja, ed. Taina Saarinen, Pirkko Nuolijärvi, Sari Pöyhönen, and Teija Kangasvieri. Tampere: Vastapaino. Pöyhönen, Sari, and Taina Saarinen. 2015. Constructions of bilingualism in Finnish government programmes and a newspaper discussion site debate. Current Issues in Language Planning 16 (4): 392–408. Pujolar, Joan. 2007. Bilingualism and the nation-state in the post-national era. In Bilingualism: A social approach, ed. Monica Heller, 71–95. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Robertson, Shanthi. 2013. Transnational student-migrants and the state: The education-migration nexus. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. Status-making: Rethinking migrant categorization. Journal of Sociology 55 (2): 219–233. Saarinen, Taina. 2014. Language ideologies in Finnish higher education in the national and international context: A historical and contemporary outlook. In English in Nordic universities: Ideologies and practices, ed. Anna Kristina Hultgren, Frans Gregersen, and Jakob Thogersen, 127–146. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ———. 2020. Tensions on Finnish constitutional bilingualism in neo-nationalist times: Constructions of Swedish in monolingual and bilingual contexts. In Language perceptions and practices in multilingual universities, ed. Maria Kuteeva, Kathrin Kaufhold, and Niina Hynninen, 85–111. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Saarinen, Taina, and Heidi Rontu. 2018. University language policies: How does Finnish constitutional bilingualism meet the needs for internationalisation in English. European Journal of Language Policy 10 (1): 97–119.

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Saarinen, Taina, Heidi Vaarala, Eeva-Leena Haapakangas, and Erja Kyckling. 2016. Kotimaisten kielten koulutustarjonta kansainvälisille korkeakouluopiskelijoille. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto, Soveltavan kielentutkimuksen keskus. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-6632-4. Saarinen, Taina, and Peppi Taalas. 2017. Nordic language policies for higher education and their multi-layered motivations. Higher Education 73 (4): 597–612. Saarinen, Taina, and Tarja Nikula. 2013. Implicit policy, invisible language: Policies and practices of international degree programmes in Finnish higher education. In English-medium instruction at universities: Global challenges, ed. Ainzane Doiz, David Lasagabaster, and Juan Sierra, 131–150. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Scott, Peter. 2011. The university as a global institution. In Handbook on globalization and higher education, ed. Roger King, Simon Marginson, and Rajani Naidoo, 59–75. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Shumilova, Yulia, Yuzhuo Cai, and Elias Pekkola. 2012. Employability of international graduates educated in Finnish higher education institutions. Helsinki: VALOA-Project, Career Services, University of Helsinki. St John, Sarah K. 2018. The struggle for power in education: The nation-state versus the supranational in the evolution of European Union education policy, 1945–1976. University of Glasgow. Sylvin, Jenny. 2017. Helsingfors universitet – en tvåspråkighet i förändring. Kieli, koulutus ja yhteiskunta 8 (5). https://www.kieliverkosto.fi/fi/jou rnals/kieli-koulutus-ja-yhteiskunta-lokakuu-2017-2/helsingfors-universiteten-tvasprakighet-i-forandring. Torres-Olave, Bianca. 2012. Imaginative geographies: Identity, difference, and English as the language of instruction in a Mexican university program. Higher Education 63 (3): 317–335. Vaarala, Heidi, Eeva-Leena Haapakangas, Erja Kyckling, and Taina Saarinen. 2017. Finnish higher education institutions’ reactions to the 2015 asylum seeker situation. Motives, goals and future challenges. Apples - Journal of Applied Language Studies 11 (3): 143–165. Välimaa, Jussi. 2019. A history of Finnish higher education from the middle ages to the 21st century, vol. 52. Higher Education Dynamics. Dordrecht: Springer. YLE. 2013. Kauppakorkeakoulu hylkäsi suomen - maisteriopinnot vain englanniksi. February 16, 2013. Available from https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-6494336. ———. 2017. Halla-aho korostaa kansallismielisyyttä eikä irtisanoudu vanhoista blogiteksteistään – “Afrikan sarven ihmissaasta” ei ollut hänestä loukkaavaa kieltä. June 11, 2017. Available from https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-9663454.

CHAPTER 5

New Nationalism and Higher Education

Abstract This book closes with a discussion of new nationalism and the future of Finnish higher education from a language policies viewpoint, in the meeting points of the different national and global spheres. I will first discuss the nature of “new” nationalism. Then, the main discourses of educational, economic and epistemic nationalisms will be discussed. The next section presents global scenarios from the perspective of the intertwined nature of national and international. I will finish with a look into the future of Finnish higher education and the implications of current new nationalist trends for language policies, nationalism, alternate futures and the role of language in all this. Keywords Finland · Epistemic nationalism · Educational nationalism · Economic nationalism · Recycled discourses · Internationalization of higher education

New nationalism, understood as right-wing, populist and anti-immigrant policies or criticism of globalism (see Chapter 1), have increasingly gained traction. In higher education, it has been analysed especially in relation to transnational student mobility (see, for instance, Lee et al. 2016; Lee 2017; Mathies and Weimer 2018). The wider phenomenon of new nationalism, however, has not been extensively studied in higher education. What looks like an obvious explanation would be that the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Saarinen, Higher Education, Language and New Nationalism in Finland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60902-3_5

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phenomenon is relatively new, and Finland has seemed to follow other Nordic and European countries in new nationalist and populist political developments. Looking back at the historical developments in Finland, however, this does not seem to be the case. Rather than there being a historical moment when “nationalism” turned to “post-nationalism” and again to “new nationalism”, the process seems to be more complex, as historically layered discourses are cycled and recycled in the political developments. This chapter summarizes the main outcomes of the book. I will first discuss the analytical value of new nationalism. I will then move on to its specifically Finnish features. After summarizing the main global scenarios, I will finish with a look into the future of Finnish higher education and the implications of current new nationalist trends to it.

5.1

What’s New About New Nationalism?

The overlapping, layered and recycled discourses of nation prompt the question: Is there something “new” about “new nationalism” in higher education? The concept of new nationalism itself is problematic and its analytic value has been questioned. Schanz (2018) criticizes the notion of new nationalism and argues that it is both unnecessary and misleading, as it is used synonymously with various loaded political concepts such as right-wing populism or authoritarianism. He bases this point on Smith’s (1995) critique of Hobsbawm: nationalism cannot be reduced to the cultural unit being congruent with the political unit, because a lot of vital aspects are lost in the process. Nation state and nationalism are not homogeneous, but porous, hierarchical and produced by layered ideologies. As pointed out in Chapter 1, there is no one nationalism, but a collection of competing and overlapping ideologies, policies, processes and histories. As nationalist ideologies and politics are re-emerging and realigning in the higher education policies, also their contemporary national and international motivations as well as their historical trajectories are gaining new traction. Discourses of “national” and “international” or “global” have been recycled in Finnish higher education during the last 150 years, picking up elements from current events and recycling old and new discourses. In Finland, what is new is that English has since the 2010s largely replaced Swedish in the higher education policy debates as a “killer language” that threatens national languages and reshuffles their position

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in higher education. The development, while familiar also from other relatively similar European contexts (see articles in Cots et al. 2014), reveals a complex dynamic of different local and international, majoritized and minoritized languages, as their positions are negotiated and contested (Torres-Olave 2012) in the “internationalizing” universities. The current concern for Finnish language in higher education includes both concerns for the threatened position of the language itself next to English and the concern for national education and research threatened by English language education and knowledge production, stressing the importance of local languages (or “mother tongues”) in knowledge production and learning (see Kuteeva and Airey 2014). However, knowledge production is not ideologically innocent or neutral either, as shown in the analysis of knowledge production discourses and epistemic nationalism in Chapter 4. The brief post-nationalist period around the turn of the 2000s lasted relatively shortly in Finland compared to, for instance, Hungary (Ferenc et al., Forthcoming) or other post-Soviet European countries such as Estonia (Soler 2019) or Latvia (Kibbermann 2017). After that, the debate turned back to nationalism, but this time not in the meaning of construing the inner cohesion of a nation, but construing a hegemonic majority and a national language under external threat (Chapter 4). We see examples of this in smaller (Finland) and bigger countries (the USA) alike (Goldmacher 2016).

5.2

Finnish New Nationalisms

The official policies and legislation on Finnish bilingualism have not changed considerably during the Finnish independence, with the exception of the inclusion of minority languages in the constitution after some European pressure in the 1990. The policy discourses have tended to focus on the protection of constitutional bilingualism, while public debates have occasionally surfaced, exemplified, for instance, by the societal language ideological feuds of the 1930s or the comprehensive school reform of the 1960s (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015). The increasing use of English as an unchallenged lingua franca in society politicized post-nationalist language policies, concretizing the intertwinedness of national and international, as the link between “national language” and “national interests” ostensibly broke (Chapter 3). In the 2000s, “internationalization in English” started

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to turn towards internationalization and (but not in) local languages for purposes of employment (Saarinen et al. 2020); criticism of English as a predator language (Saarinen 2020); and increasing opposition to Swedish not just as a compulsory language in education but also as criticism against Finland’s bilingual constitution. If nationalism were, in the end, about construing a nation, the question would be about whose or what nation we were talking. From independence in 1917 until the 1990s and end of Cold War, the language ideological discourses constituted mostly of discourses of the ethnolinguistic nation state and its inner cohesion and protection (Väistö 2017; but see also Kamusella 2009 and his framing of bilingual Finland as not an ethnolinguistic nation state). New nationalism in higher education, at least from the Finnish perspective as a small non-Anglophone Northern European country, appears to be about the construction of the hegemonic nation and language as being under threat from the outside. The historically recycled discourses of nation states, combined with global political, economic and demographic changes, created a breeding ground for new kind of nationalism. This new nationalism took shape as a recycled discourse of Finnish as the oppressed (although) hegemonic majority threatened by outside forces. Discourses of English represent the external threat to Finnish language and nation. In all this, English is not merely a proxy or catalyst, but it brings out political factors about hierarchization of students and higher education systems that participate in the co-constitution of unequal higher education structures. Table 5.1, modified from Saarinen (2012) and Bull (2004, cited by Mortensen and Haberland 2012), presents a historical summary of language policies in higher education over the centuries. I will next discuss the new nationalist debates from an educational, economic and epistemic perspective. All these circulate the discourses of Finnish as a threatened majority and of Finnish(ness) in danger, and all are entangled with higher education language policies. 5.2.1

Educational Nationalism

(New) nationalism and higher education are entwined, from language perspective, in several ways. First, the medium of higher education instruction is a result of a struggle for linguistic hegemony in a given state. In Finland, the national languages, Finnish and Swedish, have been the ones appearing hegemonic

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Finnish higher education language policies since seventeenth

Language policy period

Language of instruction

Language of internationalisation

Motivation for language policy

c. 1640–1850 (pre-national higher education) c. 1800–1900 (national awakening)

Latin

Latin

Latin => Swedish => Finnish Finnish Swedish Finnish Swedish

Latin => German

Universal education Nation state building

c. 1900–1930/1940 (domestic language tensions) c. 1950–1980 (regional policy and Anglo-American reorientation) c. 1990—(post-nationalism)

c. 2010—(new nationalism)

Finnish Swedish => English Finnish (Swedish) English

German German => English English

English

Internal cohesion Turning Westwards Globalism and knowledge society Protection of (mainly) Finnish against external threat

throughout the time span of this book, as major language ideological debates and conflicts have taken place until the 2010s between these languages (Chapter 2). Second, the layeredness of language hierarchies, where a language may appear oppressed from one perspective and hegemonic from another, reshuffles the relative positions of (other) autochthonous languages, or any of the allochthonous languages spoken in Finland during the time of this study. In higher education, the autochthonous minorities have been marginal at best, and mostly non-existent, as Finnish and Swedish have in their historical turns also occupied the space for contested and threatened languages, Finnish from the educational and political elites, and Swedish as a de facto minority with 5–6% population. Particularly Swedish provides an interesting viewpoint into the relative hegemonies of different languages in higher education as it participates in several of the recycled discourses of majorities and minorities and of hegemonies and oppression, showing the fluidity of these conceptualizations (see Chapters 2–4). Third, mother tongue and native speaker ideologies continue to be strong in higher education. Latest example of this was provided in the

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spring of 2020, as students of Finnish as second language in the matriculation examination were required a higher grade for higher education entry than students with so-called mother tongue examination (see discussion in Chapter 4). Regardless of the problems with entry to and exit from Finnish as second language teaching, and with the racialized categorization of applicants that this requirement leads to, the reform was implemented on such a short notice that it affected migrant background students’ entry to higher education, revealing the oppressive effect of the practice. 5.2.2

Economic Nationalism

Finnish language policy discourses are linked to different societal discourses in several ways, which have historically been guided by nationstated values of the times (Ihalainen et al. 2011, 2019). The current discourses on economic benefits of different languages, recycled from the post-nationalist period, are quite nationalistic in their emphasis of nation state economic interests. This illustrates the prevalent nature of nation state-centred economic arguments and the historical layeredness of higher education internationalization and language policies. Charging study fees for international students is a typical feature of economic nationalism in higher education around the world. In Finland, tuition fees before the degree reform of the 1980s were modest (Välimaa 2019) compared to the average of 12,000 e that international masters’ programmes currently charge. No tuition fees were, in fact, charged until the trial tuition fee experiment in early 2010s, the results of which were mixed and participation in tuition fee experiments low (Weimer 2013). Regardless of the higher education institutions’ lukewarm response to charging tuition (and possibly due to the Finnish political practice of making experiments permanent, see Välimaa 1994), the tuition fees were finally established in 2017, changing at least on the short term the flow of transnationally mobile students, not so much by numbers but by country of origin. Tuition fees as such are a feature of “academic capitalism” (Rhoades and Slaughter 2006) or neoliberal economies in Finnish higher education. The new nationalist twist comes from the parliamentary debates on the University Act with the discourses of “putting Finnish students first”—i.e. charging students in EMI degrees to compensate for the resources spent on “foreign” rather than “Finnish” students.

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The economic arguments behind many recent calls for an added emphasis on national languages are related to the goal of employing international graduates in the Finnish labour market, conflating employability with Finnish language and erasing various other factors which have proven to have an effect on the Finnish job market. While language is frequently cited as a main factor in participation in the labour market, its role is more complex. Reasons for Finnish skills not having an effect on employment may range from differences between employment sector and employer (Shumilova et al. 2012) to structural discrimination based on ethnic or racial background of the worker or the kind of employment available (Ahmad 2020). It is thus possible that even excellent Finnish skills do not guarantee employment, even if that is often presented as a prerequisite. Interestingly, in the employment discourses, also Swedish institutions prioritize Finnish as an assumed prerequisite for the labour market, challenging the earlier policy of bilingual institutions protecting societal bilingualism best (see Chapter 1 on Taxell’s paradox). This has put teaching of particularly Finnish on the agenda for universities again, making language requirement a hierarchizing gatekeeper. Evaluation of language skills is inevitably also evaluation of the speakers (Halonen 2012) and teaching Finnish to international students with the expectation of employment may fall short of its promise. 5.2.3

Epistemic Nationalism

A typical argument in defending the use of national languages in higher education brings up the role of language in learning and knowledge construction (Chapter 4). This epistemic nationalism is one of those arguments that seem to make perfect political sense and hence get imported in political debates. As, for instance, Kuteeva and Airey (2014) point out in their work on disciplinary differences in the use of English, academic disciplines have different knowledge production practices that are also reflected in their use and choice of language. Their conclusion is that a “one-size-fits-all” language policy will fail because of this. The Finnish discussion of the role of Finnish in knowledge production is interesting in that it starts from an assumption that “mother tongue” knowledge production is essential to the advancement of academic knowledge. This perpetuates an outdated view of the role of language in knowledge production (see Chapter 4) first, by implying that knowledge production is monolingual and takes place within boundaries of

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a national language and a nation state (see Díaz 2018 for a discussion of language and knowledge reproduction). Second, this suggests that concept is needed before conceptualization and construction. Finally, this implies that in Finland, the language of knowledge production should be Finnish. Combined with the alarmist nature of the declaration, the discourse that emerges from the declaration of the Finnish Language Board and the consequent media attention feeds into the new nationalist discourses of external global threat to the nation state and ignores more recent understanding on the intertwined relationship of multilingual and multimodal knowledge production processes. While the forms of national and global cooperation have varied during the long history of the university (Välimaa 2019), knowledge has never stopped at national or linguistic borders.

5.3

Global Scenarios

We are accustomed to thinking that national confines within nation states, and that post-national or neoliberal dynamics operate in global networks. These naturalized dichotomies have been challenged before, and for good reason: they do not work as analytical tools, but rather as metaphors for the viewpoints we take. Domestic politics (for instance, UK Brexit or US migration policies under the Trump administration) are, in themselves, a result of complex global and national factors and international politics, constituting an intertwined web of policies. From a language policy point of view, this would analogically mean that the way in which languages are conceptualized as territorially bounded is, in fact, unhelpful in teasing out the dynamics between the national (in the case of Finland) and official languages against the view of English as a language of globalization. The relationship is more complex than that of binary juxtaposition. Both the national and the transnational fields are, following Häkli, “uneven, hierarchical and porous” spatialities (Häkli 2013, p. 353). New nationalism is global in its spread, reach and ideologies, and, in turn, policies that are post-national at the core may, in many ways, have very particular nation state motivations.

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International Student Flows and New Nationalism

Currently, there is no adequate data that would allow for a live follow-up of international mobility flows. We know that over 5 million transnationally mobile students travel abroad yearly—a figure that has almost doubled since 2005.1 About a half of international student flows is directed at Anglophone countries. This, however, seems to be changing. The Anglophone five (USA, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand) still provide the core, but regional hubs are emerging (Barnett et al. 2016). Internationalization has been strongly defined by mobility, spurring language policies for higher education, but all that may now be changing. The student flows have changed significantly over the last decades (BrennWhite and van Rest 2015; Hughes 2008), and the whole category of international student is changing, as is the case for migration in general (Robertson 2013, 2019). Yet, without timely and comparable global data, a more nuanced analysis is difficult. Do the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing effects of climate change on travel indicate a change in this scenario? How does this affect nationalism and nation states? How do authoritarian politics and their different outlets in national contexts respond to developments in internationalization and global cooperation when nation state-centred politics are gaining traction? Political developments such as unwelcoming attitudes towards international students after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA or the COVID-19 pandemic have had their effects, which range from xenophobic attitudes at the host (Lee and Rice 2007; Barnett et al. 2016) to perceptions of safety by the mobile students (Ross 2020). This not only has an effect on the numbers of students but also the socio-economic, racial and other builds of the student body. The proposed visa restrictions by US administration for international students in the summer of 2020 were interpreted as indications of a nationalist higher education policies being enforced on US universities on the pretence of public health arguments imported to immigration policies (Cantwell and Lee 2020). Brexit may also change intra-European student flows, as European Union and EEA students may be encouraged to seek EMI degree programmes from outside the UK universities that no longer have to offer same tuition fees for EU/EEA students.

1 https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/1-4_growth_international_students.pdf.

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In Finland, universities and universities of applied sciences have been compelled to charge study fees since 2017 from students outside the European Union. In Finland, the development has been slow, but already signals of hierarchizations of international or migrant background students have emerged that restrict students from or with particular ostensibly linguistic backgrounds from participating in Finnish higher education. The results by Saarinen and Nikula (2013) of a particular kind of inner circle English or studies in English from a particular economic region (Finland, Nordic countries or European Economic Area) still appear to apply (see, for instance, STUDY.EU portal’s information on Finnish universities), producing discriminatory categories of international students. Interestingly, the Anglophone colonial traditions have found a niche in non-Anglophone higher education systems, regulating student flows by reproducing a colonial, inner circle understanding of English. This indicates a combination of neoliberal and post-national globalization on the one hand and nation state centrist monoglot language ideologies on the other, refuelled by new nationalist political developments that do not shy from categorizing students based on their origin. 5.3.2

English and New Nationalism

English is a great magnet that seems to dominate the internationalization discussions both in Anglophone and in non-Anglophonic contexts. English is construed as both a cause and a consequence in increased global cooperation: because of the spread of English, supranational policies ostensibly expand and transcend national borders, at the same time further strengthening and expanding the uses of English globally. This, though, is a narrow and polarized explanation of the role of English, showing that we tend to find our explanations where we look for them (Hultgren 2020). English has many purposes and roles in higher education, and neither reducing it to a neutral or even benevolent lingua franca or a predatory killer language is a fair description. English has institutional and individual uses and meanings that escape the dichotomy. It certainly is a language that draws a lot of its strength from its colonial past, but to reduce it to just language and ignore the social and political factors at play would not be productive. Institutionally, higher education uses English much in an unproblematized way as a lingua franca, while English participates in different kinds of power relations. The native speaker ideology is still

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strong, as seen in cases of English requirements in Finnish universities (Saarinen and Nikula 2013). Accent reduction in US universities, in turn, is an example of a deficit discussion of international students’ language skills (Ennser-Kananen et al., Forthcoming). Both are examples of racialized and nation state-based selection structures rather than of languages and language skills. Again, it is not just about English, but who the speaker is. Talking about English also easily hides the political structures behind it. Spolsky’s (2018) sociolinguistic ecology does not only refer to a language policy context, but to a mutually constitutive relationship between language and the political and ideological factors in the society. English provides an interesting and also a complex example (Hultgren 2020) as it may participate in the co-construction of new hegemonies while reinforcing old ones. The neoliberal global English agenda (Piller and Jinhyun Cho 2013) and the international hegemony of Anglo-American higher education systems are currently been challenged by protectionist (for instance, the USA) and nationalist (for instance, the UK) concerns (Mathies and Weimer 2018; Weimer and Barlete 2020). A look towards Eastern Asia reveals different dynamics between national language ideologies and English. Kamusella (2009) registers nine ethnolinguistic states in Asia, but these obviously have different histories and social and political contexts. Eastern Asian ethnolinguistic states such as Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam may have emulated the development of nation and nationalism from French monolingualizing nationalisms. Behind Japanese monolingual nationalism, in turn, might be the maritime isolation of the country (Kamusella 2009). Nonetheless, it seems implementation of EMI has been equally challenging in Japan (Chin Leong 2017), South Korea (Kang 2018) and in East Asia in general (Hamid et al. 2013). Interestingly, Lee et al. (2016) found evidence of hierarchized xenophobia in South Korean higher education, with Chinese students experiencing more discrimination than, for instance, Western ones. Post-colonial sub-Saharan African nationalisms, on the other hand, have apparently gotten traction from state nationalism or territorial nationalism as the newly independent states were drawn along colonially imposed, and from the point of view of ethnic nationalism, artificial borders. As the “old” African nationalism aimed at cohesion by inclusion of different social and ethnic groups, the “new” sub-Saharan African nationalism others those from other African countries (Kersting 2009).

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Nordic and Baltic cases also present different contexts. Most Nordic countries have language ideological dynamics that mostly involve one local language instead of two. In the Baltic cases, however, the post-Soviet nationalizing process (Brubaker 2011) has created language policies that particularly try to deal with the Russian language. All this shows the fluid and complex nature of new nationalism and the need to include historical layers in the analysis. Nation state interests are being protected in both the post-nationalist and new nationalist contexts with different arguments— why else would today’s killer English have presented itself only a few years earlier as a guarantor of national interests and benefits (Saarinen 2014)? In Finland, the increasing use of English has played, somewhat paradoxically, into the hands of new nationalist arguments, marginalizing Swedish in many higher education contexts. This may posit a new kind of challenge for the Swedish language, not only in Finnish higher education but to Finnish constitutional bilingualism in general (Saarinen 2020). 5.3.3

Who Is National and International, Anyway?

In a study of hierarchization of international students by so-called accent modification courses in the USA (Ennser-Kananen et al., Forthcoming), we looked at, among other things, the nation centrist thinking behind the accent reduction or accent modification courses offered to international students and their implications to international study (Chapter 4). These courses are commonly offered to “international” (usually nonEnglish L1 speaking) professionals (Blommaert 2009; Ramjattan 2019) and students at US higher education institutions (Ennser-Kananen et al., Forthcoming). They represent international students as deficient, in need of adjusting to a particular imagined standard in order to be more “understandable”, while at the same time these courses, while racializing the students, essentially turn a structural problem into an individual one. As the global student flows have increased and somewhat changed their form, the position of a nativist inner circle English is still strong. A particular kind of English becomes the symbol of belonging, while another one becomes a symbol of othering. The same may happen with a local language as the conflating of “mother tongue” with Finnish, or the higher requirements for Finnish as second language in university entry indicate (see Chapter 4). What these courses and selection practices do is, again, reinforce a monolingual understanding of students and higher education, and

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in addition to that, do it from an Anglo-centrist ideal. This thinking assumes that students would be unambiguously divisible into national and international ones. Nevertheless, as the linguistic background of university students in Finland and elsewhere has changed in recent years, for example due to acknowledgement of increased immigration, it is no longer easy to draw the line between local and international students.

5.4

Future of Finnish Higher Education

Language policies and ideologies have always been a part of larger political and societal developments, constituting and being constituted by them. Schiewe (2000) sees language change in the eighteenth century as tied with the change in the functions of the university, but the same applies to later times—also the current one—and to the larger society. While there have been periods of increased internationalization, it seems that the national role of higher education has never seriously been threatened. This seems to be true of other policy sectors as well: nations seem to, even in their most apparently global endeavours, always have the national interest at heart. This observation is quite naïve, and yet, it surprises us every now and then. Nationalism is not about the nation and nation state only, and never has been. 5.4.1

“Constitutional Nationalism” and Its Alternatives

Finnish constitutional bilingualism has been operationalized as societal rather than individual bilingualism. The national and local administration operates based on and for two groups of speakers, Finnish and Swedish, which are inherently represented as monolingual. Other autochthonous languages have rarely surfaced in the debates, with the exception of Sámiland regulations since the 1970s. Finnish language policy developments in the early 2000s were characterized by a relatively quick transition from a combination of nation state-based and post-national language policies to a new nationalist political scene. These developments have challenged celebratory views of Finnish constitutional bilingualism (Salo 2012) and brought Finland closer to new nationalist tendencies of the other Western European countries. The main debates on the position of Swedish in Finland during the past 100 years have mostly taken place from the perspective of educational and regional administration rather than that of constitutional bilingualism.

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The discourse of constitutional bilingualism has been strong on the level of political elites, but challenged in public debates in, for instance, the media, and recently also by political elites. The political debates have tended to be polarized (Pöyhönen and Saarinen 2015), thus making visible also to the larger audience the multiple policy arenas, while at the same time further marginalizing the minoritized languages outside the Finnish societal bilingualism. For Finland, a possible breach with Europe is a viable political direction in some political scenarios where the anti-European “Fixit” sentiments are being channelled particularly by the Finns Party. This might result in a situation where the dynamic between autochthonous minorities and national language or languages changes. It has been suggested (Chríost and Bonotti 2018) that Brexit will de-anchor the UK languages not only from European language regulation, but also from the ethno-linguistic diversity that the EU represents. This has interesting implications from the perspective of the autochthonous minorities in Finland; currently, their position has been strongly regulated from European perspectives. While the autochthonous languages of the UK would seem to be gaining from Brexit (Chríost and Bonotti 2018), there does not seem to be any expectation of official recognition of the allochthonous ones in the near future. This also reveals the nation state centeredness of our thinking of majority and minority languages, as well as different kinds of minoritized populations. International politics have provided a backdrop for the phases when nationalist politics have challenged in particular Swedish in Finland. In late 1980s and early 1990s, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, foreign policy tensions loosened, reducing the need to turn Westwards foreign politically. This turned attention to Swedish again in the form of the criticism of mandatory or “forced” Swedish (Chapter 3). Now, however, a combination of societal, higher education and language policy developments has challenged Taxell’s paradox—i.e. the idea of institutionally monolingual spaces best enabling and ensuring societal bilingualism (see Chapter 1). The recent higher education and language policies seem to have rendered Swedish somewhat marginal, not just in the Finnish language institutions but also to some extent in the Swedish language institutions. Thus, new nationalist discourses concern the position of Finnish rather than Swedish, making Swedish invisible in language political debates where it has previously been a contested entity. While Finnish is very prominently present in the new nationalist language ideological

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debates, Swedish, in turn, is torn between ideological and political views that would be somewhat willing to let go either of the bilingual constitutional or institutional practices and ones that wish to uphold both. In any case, it is highly likely that ethnolinguistic debates of Finnishness will return with future constitutional reforms. 5.4.2

Different Finnish Nationalisms

The core factor in Finnish nationalism and new nationalism seems to be the dynamic stemming from the dual role of Finnish and Swedish in the constitutional nationalism discussion debate, while autochthonous minorities are marginalized. They have historically been assimilated (Nyyssönen 2019) or made part of the Finnish national story, appropriated as part of Finnishness (especially Karelian) and simultaneously oppressed (Lehtola 2012; Sarhimaa 2017). What has remained a more or less permanent feature of Finnish higher education language policy is the lack of debate on the role of autochthonous and allochthonous minority languages in higher education. It seems, however, that international legislation has worked to provide some attention and protection to linguistic minorities, first as collectives and later from an individual human rights perspective in the cosmopolitan post-World War I Europe (Ruiz Vieytez 2001). Currently, allochthonous languages do not feature in higher education policies in any way, and while autochthonous minorities (particularly the Sámi languages and Finnish sign language, less so Karelian, Romani and Swedish sign language) have gradually received a role in the Finnish language legislation, both with a constitutional amendment and by European regulation, they have remained marginalized in higher education policies. One example of a potential alternate historical narrative might include a situation where higher education institutions would have been set up not within the bilingual but a monolingual constitution, which would have had spillover effects into higher education language policy. This might have had an effect on the position of Swedish, but it might not have made a significant difference to other autochthonous and particularly new allochthonous minority languages in Finland. In the end, minoritized languages will be devalued as long as the speakers are devalued (Flores and Chaparro 2018).

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The versatile use of Finnish and Swedish as historical languages in the society and in the lives of individuals is important and worth defending. However, the phenomenon of “protecting” national languages also opens doors for more populist and neo-nationalist discourses (Lee 2017; Kelly 2018). Any defence of domestic languages with the rhetoric of an external threat also provides weapons for various (new) nationalist outlets. At the same time, positioning other languages as a threat supports a policy that others those Finns whose first language is not Finnish or Swedish. 5.4.3

Alternate Futures

In a chapter on counterfactual Finnish language policies (Ennser-Kananen and Saarinen, Forthcoming), we argued for the need to dismantle language ideologies and language policies as predetermined and linear developments, as historical depictions are sometimes read. History does not repeat itself, and we are not deemed to repeat it. The way things happened does not mean that the development is unavoidable; the way that historical events seem to repeat themselves is not inevitable. History has alternatives. An analysis of alternate new nationalist political futures is not about predicting the future but imagining different futures. The field of counterfactual histories sets about to problematize and question deterministic historical assumptions that assume a particular historical causality. If we assume a historical development as a (causal) consequence of an alternate historical incident development, we have an opportunity to question our understanding of the history we have learned to take as granted; that the developments we have taken as causal have, in fact, been coincidental and not linked to each other (Wenzlhuemer 2009; Ennser-Kananen and Saarinen, Forthcoming). Thus, while we have witnessed predictions in recent years anticipating a repetition of the political developments of the 1930s with the rise of nationalist sentiments and consequent authoritarian regimes, this development is not predestined. There are examples of authoritarian nationalistic regimes on all continents around the world at the moment, but the development itself is not inevitable. Stråth’s (2016) ideas of post-war moments as triggers of utopian imaginaries may be helpful in imaging different possible types of nationalism for our times. The post-World War I authoritarianist nationalism has an alternative in nationalisms that align with democracy and cosmopolitanism,

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as is visible in his “Never again” post-crisis-type nationalisms, resulting in European unification rather than protectionist nationalism. For Stråth (2016, p. 7), democracy is not a clear cut project, and consequently, also different forms of nationalism are linked with the various forms of political organization. Over time, democracy, populism, authoritarianism and totalitarianism have been intertwined with equally varying understandings of (ethnic and state) nationalisms. The dynamics between nationalism and political democracy are also apparent in the analysis of future nationalisms in higher education, as discussed also in passing by Cantwell and Lee (2020). It is thus ahistorical and simplistic to assume nationalist developments based on historical comparisons to earlier global economic depressions, emergence of political authoritarianism, or rise of nationalist sentiments. We can, however, imagine three possible paths for global and international developments that would inevitably have an effect on the position also of Finnish language policies. The first scenario would include a cosmopolitan, but still Westerncentred internationalism emerging, with the USA re-entering the scene of global cooperation, and Brexit internally strengthening the European Union and its internal and external cooperation. This would likely increase transnational mobility, but the language policy scene would very likely remain Anglo-centrist. The second scenario is an authoritarian one, with USA continuing to withdraw from global cooperation, and Europe continuing a development where EU member states follow the authoritarian paths of Hungary or Poland. South American and Asian authoritarian regimes will equally thrive. The nation centrist policies would lead to a further hierarchization of international students and their mobility prospects. Language policing of particular language skills over others would further reproduce structural inequalities in transnational mobility. The third scenario includes a new kind of global polarization, with East Asia—particularly China—and South American countries leading the development. The role of English as a lingua franca would possibly change as it would not have an Anglo-American base in the internationalization flows. Different hubs based on other languages such as Spanish or Chinese may develop, creating new hierarchies and mobility patterns.

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5.4.4

It’s Never (Just)About Language

Language can be made a proxy for ethnicity, race, citizenship, social class, or knowledges, in a way that perpetuates social inequalities and social determinism. Yet, language is not merely a proxy, but materially co-constitutes and perpetuates (Gal 2006) societal structures such as belonging and othering, equality and inequality, that have very material effects in societies. Discussion about the protection of national languages gives space to phenomena that narrow the space for speakers of other languages. Ideological constructs such as “mother tongue” or “nativeness” traditionally signal a (monolingual) national identity: knowing a language indirectly becomes an indication of belonging in nation, and those who do not fit these categories are required to demonstrate belonging in different ways. By posing other languages as threat to Finnish intentionally or unintentionally others those whose first language is not Finnish. A counterfactual perspective can compel us to see differently the ways in which we normalize hegemonic and oppressive language policies. This requires that scholars of a social majority such as myself become aware of hegemonic processes that we are otherwise blind to, yet complicit in. The idealized notion of Finland as a model of bilingualism is one of the normalized discourses that require unpacking. Counterfactual histories may turn out to be a helpful tool for other contexts, too, to understand multilingualism and language policy making in our societies more fundamentally (Ennser-Kananen and Saarinen, Forthcoming). It is crucial to recognize that hegemonies are not stable, monodirectional or fixed. In the hegemonic narrative, those at risk today can exert risk for others tomorrow. When we think we talk about language, we inevitably talk about societal structures and inequalities. If we believe that language education must take multilingualism seriously, we must work to make society ready for it. Concern for language is ultimately an ideological concern for what the language represents. What does the recent concern for Finnish language in Finnish higher education stand for? Concern for Finnish may not be motivated primarily by new nationalist politics, but all concern for Finnish can be used to fuel those politics. Language is never just about language.

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Index

A Aalto University, 88, 93, 95 Åbo Akademi University, 44, 95 accent, 65, 75, 128 Act, 64, 67, 105 Language Act, 24, 38, 39, 55, 63, 64, 67, 76 Polytechnics Act, 94, 110 Universities Act, 46, 47, 62, 89, 93, 94, 110, 122 Åland Islands, 54 allochthonous, 15, 16, 20, 54, 60, 64, 77, 121, 130, 131 Anglo-American, 2, 73, 121, 127, 133 Anglophone, 11, 19, 49, 52, 65, 73, 75, 104, 107, 125, 126 Asia, Eastern, 2, 14, 127 assimilation, 40, 47, 54 authoritarianism, 19, 118, 133 autochthonous, 16, 17, 20, 54, 60, 64, 76, 77, 92, 100–102, 121, 129–131 autonomous, 16, 46, 54, 108

B bilingual bilingualism, 22, 38 bilingual university, 47, 95 constitutional bilingualism, 8, 19, 23, 66, 79, 92, 110, 129 societal bilingualism, 22, 64, 95, 123, 130 Blommaert, Jan, 4, 12, 15, 17, 18, 36, 60, 64, 76, 128 Bologna process, 66, 72, 107 Brexit, 18, 77, 124, 125, 130, 133

C Canada, 22, 23, 75, 125 celebratory multilingualism, 17, 60, 64, 65, 79 celebratory bilingualism, 17, 60, 79 Chancellor of Justice, 93, 94, 110 Chinese, 73, 88, 90, 127, 133 citizen, citizenship, 12, 14, 23, 92, 134 Civil War, 21, 24, 37–39, 43–45, 52

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Saarinen, Higher Education, Language and New Nationalism in Finland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60902-3

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142

INDEX

Cold War, 3, 16, 40, 49–51, 59, 60, 78, 104, 108, 120 comprehensive school, 61, 119 comprehensive reform, 51, 63 compulsory education, 38 constitution, 3, 21, 22, 24, 38, 39, 46, 53, 55, 63, 76, 92, 119, 120 constitutional bilingualism, 3, 8, 20, 22, 44, 51, 64, 67, 91, 93, 108, 109, 119, 128, 129 counterfactual history, 6, 134 alternate history, 77, 132 COVID-19, 88, 107, 125 cultural, culture, 4, 5, 9, 12–14, 16–18, 21, 24, 36–42, 45, 47, 49, 51–55, 59, 60, 67, 69, 71, 76, 77, 88, 94, 98, 101–104, 108, 118 D Danish, 9, 22, 67, 69 debate, parliamentary, 20, 21, 64, 88, 94, 122 degree Bachelor’s degree, 106 degree programme, 68, 74, 89, 94, 105 doctoral degree, 105 Master’s degree, 106 degree programme, 68, 69, 71, 74, 76, 125 Denmark, 22, 49, 66, 95 discourse, 2, 4, 6, 8, 20–22, 46, 51–55, 60, 62, 68, 71–73, 76–80, 88, 90–94, 99, 100, 103, 106–111, 118–120, 122–124, 130, 132, 134 discourse cycle, 18 historical discourse, 4, 6, 41, 109 diversification, 17, 59, 68 domains, 98, 110 domain loss , 10

E economic, 4, 5, 11, 13, 16, 17, 21, 38, 41, 42, 45, 49, 52, 53, 60, 61, 65, 67, 71–73, 75, 79, 80, 87–90, 108, 109, 120, 122, 123, 126, 133 economic interests, 73, 80, 122 economic nationalism, 88, 108, 109, 122 Educational nationalism, 120 elite, 15, 19, 21–23, 38, 39, 41, 42, 46, 49, 52, 53, 64, 88, 91, 97, 109–111, 121, 130 English, 3, 10, 11, 19, 24, 42, 49, 50, 52, 53, 63–76, 79, 80, 87–90, 92–95, 103, 106, 107, 109–111, 119–121, 123, 124, 126–128 as lingua franca, 64, 73, 75, 79, 80, 101, 107, 119, 126, 133 killer English, 80, 92, 110, 128 English Medium Instruction (EMI), 10, 65, 68, 71–75, 79, 80, 89, 93, 94, 96, 101, 103–105, 122, 125, 127 Engman, Max, 8, 11, 21, 39, 42, 44, 52 epistemic nationalism, 99, 119 Estonia, 2, 11, 22, 70, 72, 119 ethnic, 5, 12–14, 47, 63, 103, 123, 127, 133 ethnolinguistic, 2, 15, 18, 39, 54, 76, 77, 120, 127, 131 Europe, 2, 6, 13, 16, 17, 37, 48, 49, 54, 60, 64, 65, 74, 90, 104, 130, 131, 133 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML), 17, 24, 76, 77, 100 European Economic Area (EEA), 11, 62, 65, 89, 90, 125, 126

INDEX

European Union (EU), 60, 64, 65, 70, 75, 80, 87–90, 105, 125, 126, 130, 133 evacuees, Karelian, 38, 40, 102

F Fennomans, 41–43 foreign language, 49–51, 63, 68, 69, 71–74, 89, 90, 93, 98

G Gal, Susan, 4, 12–15, 18, 36, 39, 45, 76, 134 German, 24, 38, 40, 42, 48–52, 63, 64, 69, 121 global, 5, 6, 9, 16–19, 48, 52, 53, 59–61, 64–66, 71, 73, 80, 87, 88, 93, 101, 103, 104, 107, 109, 118, 120, 124–129, 133 globalization, 2, 5, 6, 17, 18, 32, 70, 73, 80, 91, 96, 124, 126 Government programme, 55, 62 Grand Duchy, 21, 37, 38, 41–44, 51

H Haberland, Hartmut, 9, 18, 41, 49, 65, 67–69, 120 Helsinki, University of, 11, 37, 38, 44–47, 51, 53, 92, 95–97, 101 Herderian, 14, 21, 42, 45 hierarchies, 4, 12, 18, 75, 77, 89, 101, 103, 107, 111, 121, 133 Hobsbawm, Eric, 6, 12, 13, 21, 39, 118 Hungary, 119, 133

I ideological, 5, 8, 12, 19, 22, 23, 47, 93, 104, 110, 127, 134

143

language ideological, 3, 8, 19, 21, 130 immigration, 60, 125, 129 independence, 6, 9, 20, 21, 23, 37, 40, 43–46, 50, 51, 53, 100, 108, 119, 120 indigenous, 54, 76, 101 integration, 69, 105

J Jalava, Marja, 36, 37, 61, 65, 72

K Kamusella, Tomasz, 2, 12, 13, 36, 39, 98, 99, 120, 127 Karelia, Karelian, 20, 24, 40, 47, 50, 54, 55, 64, 76–78, 100–102, 108, 131 knowledge construction, 3, 10, 19, 99, 100, 123 knowledge society, 11, 65, 107, 121 Kuteeva, Maria, 2, 3, 10, 11, 19, 99, 103, 119, 123

L labour policy, 3 language feuds, 38, 50 University of Helsinki, 42, 44 Lapland, 40, 49, 101 Latin, 24, 38, 41–43, 48, 53, 69, 121 Latvia, 2, 70, 72, 119 layered, layeredness, 4, 6, 10, 100, 104, 108, 118, 121, 122 League of Nations, 39, 40, 54 Lee, Jenny J., 2, 11, 18, 102, 103, 117, 125, 127, 132, 133 legislation, 21, 23, 24, 37, 38, 55, 64, 66, 72, 77, 89, 100, 119, 131

144

INDEX

language legislation, 22, 24, 66, 77, 131 Leppänen, Sirpa, 15, 17, 18, 60, 64, 69, 76, 92, 93, 111 lingua franca, 24, 41, 48, 73, 101, 119, 126

M market, 11, 14, 19, 23, 37, 61, 63, 65, 69, 73, 75, 87, 94, 96, 102–106, 109, 123 Meinander, Henrik, 8, 11, 40, 42, 44, 46, 47, 51, 52 migrant, 77, 101, 103, 105–107, 109, 122, 126 Ministry of Education and Culture, 50, 74, 90 minority, minorities, minoritized, 15–17, 20, 22, 24, 39–41, 46, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 60, 62–64, 67, 76–79, 96, 100–102, 108, 109, 119, 121, 130, 131 mobility, 11, 16, 48, 53, 64–68, 72, 74, 88, 102, 104, 106, 117, 125, 133 monolingual, 11, 13, 22, 24, 54, 60, 66, 67, 76, 79, 95, 96, 99, 103, 123, 127–131, 134 mother tongue, 20, 41, 43, 90, 91, 98–100, 106, 119, 121–123, 128, 134 multilingual, 11, 19, 22, 64, 68, 90, 96, 98, 99, 103, 124 multi-sited, 4, 5

N nationalism, 2–4, 6–9, 12–16, 18, 19, 36, 39, 47, 48, 80, 88, 90, 91, 98, 102, 108, 110, 117–121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131–133

national language, 2, 15, 16, 20–23, 40, 41, 48, 50, 51, 54, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67, 74, 79, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99, 100, 105, 106, 108, 109, 118–120, 123, 124, 127, 129, 130, 132, 134 native, 103, 107, 121, 126 non-native, 75, 103, 107 naturalized, 8, 73, 80, 102, 124 neoliberal, 17, 61, 65, 66, 70, 75, 88–90, 93, 94, 122, 124, 126, 127 non-Anglophone, 2, 10, 65, 71, 74, 104, 120, 126 non-EU, 89, 90, 105 Nordic, 2, 10, 11, 22, 49, 51, 59, 65–68, 71, 75, 78, 91, 92, 95, 104, 118, 126, 128 Norway, 22, 49, 67, 101, 104

P Pahta, Päivi, 93, 111 Palviainen, Åsa, 22, 100 parallel languages, 67, 92 parallellingualism, 67 parliament, 91, 92, 101 parliamentary debate, 88, 94, 110 politics, 2, 3, 5, 17–19, 23, 36, 39, 41, 43, 47, 48, 50, 61, 88, 89, 101, 106, 108, 118, 124, 125, 130, 134 polytechnics, 62, 68, 71, 74, 76, 89, 101, 105 post-independence, 21, 39, 47, 78, 79 post-national, 17, 18, 60, 61, 65, 67, 71, 73, 75, 79, 80, 88, 89, 93, 94, 106, 107, 124, 126 post-Soviet, 2, 119, 128 Pujolar, Joan, 60, 99

INDEX

R recycled discourses, 78, 79, 94, 108, 118, 120, 121 regional, 18, 22, 40, 50, 91, 100, 102, 108, 121, 125, 129 Romani, 17, 20, 24, 63, 64, 76, 77, 100, 101, 131 Russian, 20, 21, 37, 38, 41, 43, 45–47, 50–52, 54, 63, 64, 70, 76, 78, 80, 100, 108 Empire, 37, 38, 41, 43 language, 70, 96, 128 Russification, 21, 41, 44, 45 S Sámi, 17, 20, 22, 24, 40, 50, 54, 55, 60, 63, 64, 67, 76–78, 100, 101, 108, 131 Sámiland, 101, 129 Sarhimaa, Anneli, 40, 131 Soler, Josep, 2, 11, 22, 66–68, 70, 72, 119

145

Sweden, 11, 16, 22, 36, 37, 43, 46, 51, 54, 59, 63–66, 76, 78, 95, 101, 103, 108

T Taxell’s paradox, 95, 96, 123, 130 Turku, University of, 9, 45, 46

V Välimaa, Jussi, 6, 9, 10, 36–38, 42–45, 47, 48, 61, 62, 65, 104, 122, 124

W World War I, 15, 38, 40, 48, 49, 131, 132

Y Yiddish, 50, 76, 100, 101