March 01, 2008
Helsinki: Walls or Windmills?
I just arrived this morning in Helsinki for a week-long globalization conference sponsored by Hanasaari, the Swedish-Finnish Cultural Center. The conference brings together a dozen Americans with a group of Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Swedes, and even a person or two from Iceland. I'll be speaking Wednesday on the government and the internets.
I'm always fascinated traveling overseas and seeing how other governments operate and how America is viewed from other perspective. One speaker today rounded up the Finnish view of Americans as "Three S's": Stetsons, shotguns, and SUVs.
The sessions are off-the-record so I can't say exactly who said what, but I will say that the panel was mostly ambassadors and diplomats to Finland. The challenge today, the speakers concluded, was that Europe and the Nordic countries often see more differences with the U.S. than similarities. Throughout the Cold War, a common enemy united Europe and the U.S. and so the differences weren't as visible but today without that common enemy we appear to have very different belief systems and worldviews. One major difference is that Europe has an ethos that says that government is part of the solution to any major societal problem, whereas the U.S. has an ethos that the government is more likely than not only not part of the solution but just as likely to be the problem itself. Now I firmly believe this isn't the case—"The First Campaign" argues strongly that government has a huge role in protecting the American economy from the challenges wrought by globalization's free markets, but I can certainly identify from the sentiment.
A speaker today had an interesting point—he tried to translate a saying roughly as "There are two kinds of people react when the wind blows, those who build walls and those who build windmills." The context actually came up today in the sense of the Danish commitment to renewable energy and conservation—the country has managed to have a 25 percent growth in its GDP without any gain in its energy use—but it made me think of the U.S.'s whole approach to the world today. I can't help but think that since 9/11 we've been building too many walls and not enough windmills at home and around the world.
