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Soriek  7mo ago (text post)   922 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 20

Happy 20 TTs guys.

I’ll be trying something new with this one and changing the format so the top level post only contains an explanation of the thread, like we do with Wellness Wednesdays and Fun Fridays. The country-specific coverage will be placed in separate comments where people can respond to them directly, or start their own threads as separate comments. This is part of my hope that long term this will become more of a permanent thread that sustains beyond me, because I likely won’t be around long term. In the short term as well, I’ve been trying to produce a lot of the user content but there will be weeks where I'm too busy, and it would be nice to have a stickied thread where people who want to can still chat foreign policy without me.

So:

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. In the past I've noticed good results from covering countries that users here live in, and having them chime in with more comprehensive responses. In that spirit I'll probably try to offer more snippets of western news (but you'll still get a lot of the global south). I don't follow present day European politics all that much so you'll have to fill in the blanks for me.

But also, no need to use the prompts here, feel free to talk about completely unmentioned countries, or skip country coverage entirely and chat about ongoing dynamics like wars or trade deals. You can even skip the present day and talk about IR history, or just whatever you’re reading at the moment - consider it very free form and open to everyone.

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Finland:

Much of the Finnish political debate this week was focused on the situation in Sweden regarding gang crime, but a locally notable affair was several Church of Finland parishes criticizing the government's various cuts.

THE CHURCH TAKES SIDES: The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Finland shares certain features with the labor movement, discussed in the last post. (Heretofore I’m going to just call it “the Church,” as it is usually called in Finland, even if this annoys those belonging to smaller churches, like me.)

Like the labor movement, it continues to command a high level of membership, even if this has been falling and most of that membership is not particularly committed, to put it mildly. Like the labor movement, it is bonded from the hip to the society and the state – more of a spiritual facet of a general concept of Finnish nationality than a religious movement, at least at times. Finns often naturally expect the Church to follow whatever social trends society decides to follow.

Now, it has demonstrated another concurrence with the unions; a willingness to criticize the new government. At least some of the parishes have made quite explicit appeals for the government to stop its austerity, calling out politicians by name. While it’s been known that the Church’s doctrine on economic issues would tend more to the left than towards the right, it’s still exceptional for church institutions to make a direct reference to the govt like this. Luther’s Two Kingdoms doctrine still looms large in Finnish consciousness, even if many of Luther’s other ideas have implicitly or explicitly been junked.

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