Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen at the Urho Kekkonen centenary seminar at the House of Estates September 3, 2000
Many of us here today were contemporaries of Urho Kekkonen. Our relationship with him ranged from opponents to close collaborators, from distant observers to colleagues. We are still too close, as Dr Henrik Meinander points out, but we are far enough away to try to free ourselves from being subjective, or at least to admit our own subjectivity.
Urho Kekkonen was a great statesman in the true meaning of the word. He recognized the realities, though he used them to shape his own policies. Under his leadership Finland became a country with influence in Europe, involved in shaping great power relations.
The aim of Finland?s active policy of neutrality - as Kekkonen, not the Soviet Union, understood it was to strengthen Finland?s international standing. Good relations with the USSR prepared the way for consistent integration into cooperation between the Western democracies.
The free trade agreement with the EEC, which I as a Social Democrat played an active part in promoting, was Kekkonen theory in practice at its best.
Even during the CSCE period in 1975, we were living in a Cold War world. Afterwards, for instance, the Soviet Defence Minister proposed we should hold joint military manoeuvres. This showed Moscow was still thinking in terms of spheres of interest. Kekkonen rejected the proposal, just as we reject similar efforts today.
Finland was neither an outpost of the West nor a cat?s-paw of the Soviet Union. When certain Western commentators saw fit to cast aspersions about us in conversation, I couldn? t help asking what exactly their own countries did in 1940.
Talk of Finlandization is justified, but in the case of foreign policy it?s valid to ask which did better, the cat or the mouse. Finland came out on top in the Cold War.
More than anything, Kekkonen is criticized for the way he went about things. He was consciously Machiavellian: the end justified the means. Professor Jukka Nevakivi believes Kekkonen often ventured out onto very thin ice, and it was only success that saved him.
I. m not saying there was any likelihood of impeachment but your present Prime Minister?s action in the Austrian affair pales by the side of Kekkonen?s arbitrary conduct in foreign policy.
Certainly there is good cause for criticism. The offence taken by some of his supporters might well be lessened if it was acknowledged that much criticism of Kekkonen applies equally to his contemporaries.
Despite the CSCE and the way the world had changed, a tradition of extreme caution concerning foreign policy was built up in Kekkonen?s time which was to live on far into the future. One example is that Finland?s application for membership of the Council of Europe was deferred. The country?s political elite also shied away from the European Community because they felt it was a "bloc". It was pleasant to visit London or Moscow. It was left to businessmen to catch the 7 o?clock plane to Frankfurt and down their morning beer or brandy.
If he?d wanted to, Kekkonen could have used his great prestige to halt the game of domestic politics that developed around foreign policy in the mid ?70s, at the latest. He didn?t want to,but that was also partly the fault of the system itself, the neo-worship of the old man.
In the power struggle that went on in the ?70s, the Social Democrats tried to neutralize Kekkonen, as it were, by already proposing in 1975, three years before the next election, an extension of his Presidency. We thought we were being clever, but his focal significance just grew. It was a humiliating experience to stand there in a line at the Presidential Palace listening to Kekkonen talking about a state of emergency.
Every politician had to be in Kekkonen?s pocket. Those who didn?t want to be there were made to suffer for it. But times were changing. The ingredients of tragedy were at hand.
In spring 1981 I was pondering what should be done about Kekkonen. The President could well be ill - nobody really knew - but as long as he was in office, it was impossible to do anything about it. The President was interfering in the action of the Prime Minister and the Government in a way that was totally unacceptable.
If Kekkonen fell into a depression because the Prime Minister refused to resign, that was just regrettable. The neo-worship and concentration of power that had grown up around the old man kept him in office too long. On the other hand, maybe Kekkonen himself knew no other way of life, and would have been unable to resist interfering in things as ex-President.
There is still a lot of work for Kekkonen scholars to do. Only when all the material has been made public and equally available to all historians can we expect to get a "definitive biography". And for that we would need a research project involving several scholars.