Some may wonder why NIGD is organizing the visit to Finland of a Peruvian rock band La Sarita. Let me write a couple of lines to explain why rock tour can enhance global democratization.

The visit of La Sarita is organized in the spirit that for global democratization it is important that the “developed” countries of the North are not simply conceived as possible futures for the “developing” countries of the South. In some issues (like hybridization of cultures, growth of the informal sector or the increasing power of credit-rating agencies to condition economic policies), it can be that “developed” countries like Finland have started to resemble countries like Peru, rather than vice versa. The songs of La Sarita deal with various of these issues.

I would argue that we need a radical rethinking, or deconstruction, of the traditional pedagogies of development whereby Europeans automatically assumes the adult-like role of instructing non-Europeans how to develop. This by no means implies that we should disregard the huge material inequalities that exist between the North and the South. Whereas one of the main motivations for the emergence of classical development theories has been the desire to overcome the North-South material divide, it is very difficult to overcome it unless we reject theories in which the poor in the South are essentially considered child-like.

The questions related to what I would like to call the ‘Peruvianization’ of Finland occurred to me for the first time at the beginning of the 1990s. Returning to Finland after several months in Peru, I suddenly felt as though I had in some sense discovered aspects of possible futures that were emerging in Finland. I had seen both creativity and domination created by confrontations between different cultures that coexisted and intermingled in Peru. I realized that learning from these experiences would be useful to a country like Finland, which at the time was facing a significant increase in immigration. I had studied the so-called informal sector, or ‘grey economy’, of Peru, and a similar phenomenon was emerging in Finland amidst a sudden increase in mass unemployment and the partial decay of social security networks. I had studied the influence of transnational credit-rating agencies in conditioning the economic policies of Peru, an area in which the Finns were also gradually becoming aware of those key issues that had already been well-known for quite some time amongst the Peruvians.

Many aspects of the possible Peruvianization of Finland may seem to be negative, something to be prevented. When I was giving a lecture on the topic at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of the Journalists of Peru in July 1996, the Chairman showed himself to be in accordance with the majority of my arguments, but also expressed a particular concern. For him, my concept of ‘Peruvianization’ had a negative connotation, comparable to the term ‘Libanization’ used in the 1980s or ‘Balcanization’ in the 1990s (or perhaps even ‘Finlandization’ in earlier decades). However, although my examples about the Peruvianization of Finland do have highly problematic aspects, they could also open up new possibilities. Both positive and negative assessments can be made about the effects of the growing informal sector, or of the cultural hybridization, in Finland. For the purposes of my main argument, however, this assessment is, for the time being, a secondary issue.

If it can be established that in the past experiences of countries like Peru, there are lessons to be learned for the possible futures of countries like Finland, this would have significant implications for the pedagogy of global power, irrespective of whether these elements are deemed negative or positive.

As an example of Peruvianization, I will now very briefly refer to three processes that became increasingly evident in Finland during the 1990s, and that have been present in Peru and other parts of the ‘underdeveloped’ South for much longer. Traditionally, at least during Independence, Finns have to a large extent considered themselves a culturally homogeneous people. Even if this idea of homogeneity has always been partially misleading, new challenges have particularly been brought about by the significant increase in migration since the early 1990s. Several urban centers of Finland have become increasingly cosmopolitan, and transcultural human relationships have increased. The number of Latin Americans in Finland quadrupled  in the 1990s, and the largest immigrant groups, notably the Somalis, Russians and Estonians, have became much more visible.

In this context the notion of the ‘Peruvianization of Finland’ does not primarily refer to the increasing influence of Peruvians or Latin Americans in Finland, but more generally to an integral transformation of the Finnish identity whereby the myth of cultural homogeneity is being dispelled. The increasing hybridization and mixing of cultures is only one dimension of the Peruvianization, or Latinamericanization, of Finland.

Another dimension can be found in the discussions about the ‘grey economy’, also referred to as the ‘informal sector’. These debates, and the phenomenon itself, increased in Finland, like in many other parts of Europe, during the 1990s. The exact definitions of the term vary, but it is usually employed to designate work that is not officially reported to the public authorities. This generally means tax evasion and breach of other official regulations.

It is possible that the informal sector will continue to significantly expand in Finland, and elsewhere in Europe, in the coming years, especially if the unemployment problem is not successfully addressed. The decay of the welfare state’s traditional support networks also contributes the growth of the informal sector. It is possible that those marginalized from formal work will become less and less likely to enjoy the social entitlements traditionally offered by the Nordic states. If this should be the case, it is only natural that these people will have to find new ways to survive.

In Latin America, there has been a long tradition of experimenting with such survival mechanisms. Across the region, there has a rapid growth of the informal sector in the last few decades, and especially after the second half of the 1980s, it has generated heated political and theoretical debate. As I have argued elsewhere in more detail, analyzing these discussions could help Finns to learn more about our possible futures and alternatives.

Another emerging phenomenon in Finland in the 1990s was the growing political importance of transnational financial institutions. Iiro Viinanen, Minister of Finance in the early 1990s, particularly started to legitimize and justify Finnish economic policies by referring to the conditions imposed by transnational credit-rating agencies. Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, the European Central Bank and foreign pension funds gradually became increasingly important actors influencing Finnish economic policy, and external debt became one of the most important points of reference in the new political rhetoric.

From the Latin American viewpoint, this situation did not seem particularly novel. The role of transnational financial institutions in conditioning the policies of formally sovereign countries has been one of the most studied and debated themes in Latin American social sciences for decades. Some of the debates that had emerged decades earlier in Latin America suddenly seemed to hold a sense of renewed validity for the analysis of Finland in the 1990s.

In this context, I believe that a visit by a Peruvian rock band to Finland can be useful for global democratization.

Teivo Teivainen

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