National Colors

On Sunday, I went running in the nearby woods with my wife, only the second time since last summer. 

When I say “running”, I mean “jogging”, at a pace that would barely qualify as a brisk walk, until my lungs can’t stand it anymore and I am forced to walk for a bit until I can manage to “run” again, all the while my wife, just to keep her pulse up, runs (actual runs) back and forth past me, like a deft crow again and again swooping past a slow gliding hawk.

She likes the company, I suppose, though I am by no means the ideal running companion.

This half-an-hour of cardiovascular hell was nicely timed to finish just as Finland’s latest matchup in the World Hockey Championship got underway, although I had to spend the first ten minutes of the game recovering on the porch collapsed in our Adirondack chair before I could come in to watch.

When I did, I immediately started rooting for the wrong team. I cursed when an aggressive attack by some strong skaters failed to score against…Finland. What? Huh? 

Credit: realismadder

It took me a few moments to realize it wasn’t the Slovakian goalie who was working mightily in front of the goal to keep the puck from going in. It was the Finnish. I was confused, and not only because my senses were dulled by my near-death experience on the running path.

The reason for my mistake was the color of their jerseys. On the TV screen before me were two teams whizzing over the ice at supersonic speeds, one in white jerseys, one in blue, both national colors of Finland. I’m somehow more used to Finland wearing white jerseys, but in this game the team wearing white was Slovakia, a country which shares Finland's national colors, in addition to one other, namely red. As in red, white and blue. On closer inspection, I could make out a small red stripe on Slovakia’s jerseys, hardly noticeable.

Of course, both teams have the right to wear the colors of blue or white on their uniforms. Still, with three colors to choose from, unlike Finland, I’m curious why Slovakia didn’t use red uniforms instead. Why use a color that could also be used by the opposing team when you have another color all your own? (And, yes, I do have too much time on my hands.)

I’ve noticed the same when Finland plays the USA. I don’t recall Team USA charging out on the ice in mostly-red jerseys. I think they’re usually blue.

Anyway, this got me thinking about why the colors red, white and blue are used by so many countries, some 30 in fact, including such diverse nations as Chile, Taiwan, France, or for that matter, Cuba, Russia, and North Korea.

The list also includes many of the Commonwealth nations such as Australia and New Zealand (neither of which, I’m told, is an exceptional powerhouse in ice hockey), nations that apparently came to use the red, white and blue national colors in the same way as America did – they adopted them from the Mother Country.

It’s kind of funny when you think about it. It appears the leaders of the American Revolution weren’t so revolutionary when it came to colors. They could have broken with the past completely and created an entirely new color scheme for a completely new nation, say, orange, green and yellow. Instead, while they did go for a radically different flag design, they retained the old colors of the hated enemy Britain. Go figure.

The Bolsheviks did much better. Seizing control of the Russian government in the October Revolution and installing a government of “workers, solider and peasants”, the followers of Lenin tossed the historic red-white-blue flag of Tsarist Russia onto the dustbin of history.

To replace it, they created, in the vein of centuries-old socialist tradition, a simple red flag, with some tasteful Communist symbols in yellow -- the flag of the Soviet Union. It was a clear signal that this was no longer your dedushka’s Russia. Of course, that didn’t last.

I can’t finish without making a snarky observation about some other anti-establishment political hijinks that are much more recent. The most unavoidable symbol of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been his “Make America Great Again” cap. Trump, no slouch when it comes to marketing and branding, dreamed up this Average Joe headwear early in his run for the White House as a way to spread his insipid campaign slogan.

The caps seem to come in only two colors, red and white, no blue. (Okay, there’s also a camouflage version, but that’s just seems to be an afterthought.) The omission of blue has led someone in the media, maybe John Oliver or just some random Internet wag, to speculate that Trump is confused in thinking that he’s running for president of Canada. Or Japan. Or some other red-and-white country. Poland, maybe? Indonesia?

Why no blue? Does Trump have something against blue states, perhaps? Could be. Or maybe Trump, in a rush to cash in on a campaign that was never meant to last, simply forgot about the color blue when ordering up a consignment of chauvinistic merchandizing. I doubt we’ll ever know.

One quick aside: a Finnish correspondent in the US has reported that he was unable to order a Trump cap for himself because he is a foreigner. That seems to be true, as customers aren’t “buying” a cap, but rather “contributing” to a campaign (for which they get a cap), something that only citizens or legal residents can do.

Illegal residents are, therefore, excluded from buying a Trump cap of their very own. Presumably Muslims, as such, still can.

I can’t imagine either one of those groups would want to anyway. I know I wouldn’t. 

Trump in his cap, showing his colors (no blue!).
Photo: Gage Skidmore

Cry Me A War

Back in the mid 1980s, my wife and I took a bicycling tour around a very scenic and isolated group of islands that sits between the Finnish mainland and Sweden, an amazing spot at the crossroads of the Baltic Sea.

On the map, the Åland Islands (Ahvenanmaa, in Finnish) appear like a galaxy of thousands and thousands of islands, skerries (rocky islets), and reefs that are collectively bulging outward from Finland, straining toward Sweden.

Åland is, in fact, closer to Finland’s western neighbor than to mainland Finland itself, with only 17 miles of completely open water separating the archipelago from Sweden, though geologically speaking it is still much more firmly connected to Finland.

I even daydreamed some years ago about attempting to kayak to Sweden, island hopping through the Åland archipelago before making the longer, final crossing westward until I hit the Scandinavian peninsula. Maybe it’s just as well that this particular adventure never got off the drawing broad. 

The remains of Bomarsund.
Photo by Tomisti.

The bike trip we took in 1986 was a much less ambitious and no doubt more pleasant affair. (And I was lucky enough to sell a travel piece about it to The San Francisco Examiner.)

With our camping gear, we arrived at Mariehamn, Åland’s capital, on one of the giant ferries that makes a port call there on its way from Turku to Stockholm. We rented two bikes the next day and headed out on the mostly deserted two-lane roads. After some twenty miles of pedaling, somehow always against the wind, we stopped for the night near the site of a ruined Russian fort on the eastern edge of the Åland “mainland”.

Here, overlooking a narrow strait, Finnish history and the recent troubling events on the Black Sea intersect. At least, that’s one way to look at it.

Not much is left now of the fortress of Bomarsund; the stone walls that still stand there overlooking grassy fields are massive, which speaks to the amount of firepower that must have been needed to demolish this lonely outpost of the Russian Empire.

Positioned as it is, the Åland archipelago almost blocks the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia, guarding access to that major arm of the Baltic Sea (the other arm being the Gulf of Finland that ends at St. Petersburg). In the early 1800s, it was an obviously strategic spot for Imperial Russia to defend its newly acquired province of Finland.

Though started 22 years earlier, the Bomarsund fortress, was far from completed in September of 1854, when Russia’s competition with France over which country should be the protector of Christians in the Turkish Ottoman Empire led to French and British allies invading Russia’s Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea.

Just before that campaign, which gave its name to the Crimean War (in English-speaking countries at least), Bomarsund had been already been attacked and defeated by another British-French expeditionary force, leaving the ruins that you can still see today. (The following summer, the western allies bombarded Sveaborg – now called Suomenlinna – in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Russian stronghold guarding the entrance to Helsinki’s harbor.) One of the allies' demands after Russia lost the war was that Åland would remain demilitarized, which it has except for a brief incursion by Sweden a hundred years ago.

Playing a role in the previous Crimean conflict isn’t the only feature Åland shares with the Russian-speaking enclave on the Ukrainian coast.

The bombardment of Bomarsund during the Crimea War.

Like Crimea today, Åland is an autonomous province. The archipelago has its own tiny parliament, flies its own flag, and issues its own postage stamps. I use to joke with my wife about whether we needed passports to visit there.

It is also inhabited by speakers of a minority language. Ninety-five percent of Ålanders are Swedish speakers, compared to only some 5% for the Finnish population as a whole, and Swedish is the only official language in the archipelago. (By comparison, it seems that Russian speakers make up nearly 80% of Crimeans, compared to 25% for all of Ukraine).  

Also, like the present-day Crimea, Åland has sometimes been a bit of a gray-area in international affairs. The archipelago, along with the rest of Finland, was ceded by Sweden to Imperial Russia in 1809. With Åland’s close linguistic and cultural ties to Sweden, this was surely an even less happy arrangement for the islanders than for the Finns.

When Finland saw its chance to achieve independence during the Russian Revolution, Åland likewise saw the opportunity to ask to be annexed by Sweden, partly out of a fear of discrimination by Finnish-speakers.

It seems that Sweden never seriously considered absorbing its fellow svenska talare from across the water, but did send a naval force to Åland for possible evacuation of the Swedish-speaking inhabitants, despite the archipelago’s status as a demilitarized zone. This sounds a bit similar to Russia's incursion into Crimea that now dominates news around the world.

One of the concrete legacies that remain from the mostly forgotten League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations, was a decision in 1921 that Åland should remain part of Finland and that its status as a DMZ should continue. Today, there is no military presence in the islands, and Ålanders are even exempted from compulsory service in the Finnish Army.

That makes Åland quite different, of course, from the heavily militarized Crimea, and makes the archipelago an even more peaceful corner of Finland for bike touring. After Bomarsund, my wife and I continued cycling through the farmland and scattered villages of the islands for three more sunny days, though always against the wind no matter which direction we were headed. 

I guess that’s to be expected when you’re on a remote stretch of sea at the crossroads of empires. 

Red Carpet Finland

Nations, like people, don’t get to choose when they’re born.  If they did, I’d wager Finland would have opted for a birth in summertime, a season made for celebrations outside in the sunshine.  It all comes down to an accident of history, of course.  Americans can be thankful that the Founding Fathers suffered through the sweltering heat of a Philadelphia summer to finally put the finishing touches on our Declaration of Independence just in time for the 4^th of July. 

Finland’s birth in 1917 was not so well-timed.  Already with the overthrow of Czar Nicholas II earlier that year, Finland – an autonomous part of Russia – set its sights on even more autonomy.  During the pleasant months of summer, chaos ensued in Russia and civil war erupted in Finland.  The tumult finally came to a head in the dreary days of November, when the Bolsheviks ignited the second Russian revolution of that year and the Soviet Union was born.  Finland took that opportunity to rush for the exits, declaring its independence on December 6^th. 

 

Pekka Haavisto, parliament member and Green Party 

presidential candidate, with his partner at last year's party.  

The result is a national day of celebration at the bleakest and less fun time of the year.  Grilling hotdogs outside in freezing rain or snow during the mere six hours of near-twilight that passes for daytime in November is no one’s idea of fun.  It’s not for nothing that marraskuu, Finnish for “November”, derives from a word that means death. 

It’s not due to the weather alone that Itsenäisyyspäivä is a more solemn affair than Fourth of July.  The fact that people died in a bitter civil war at the birth of modern Finland is still a harsh reality nearly within living memory.  One way the holiday is celebrated is by somber candle-lit marches along dark streets.  More common is the custom, followed almost without exception, of every home placing a lit candle on a windowsill from precisely six to eight in the evening to commemorate those who died, 94 years ago and since, to ensure Finland's independence. 

But it’s not all gloom.  In fact, the real centerpiece of the holiday is the president’s ball, a festive tradition hard to underestimate for its power to captivate the Finnish nation, especially the female portion.  It is, in some sense, the Finnish equivalent to the hoopla surrounding the Oscars.  The basic idea, which never varies, is that the president and his or her spouse stand for two hours at the head of a reception line, shaking the hands of a couple of thousand guests, who slowly file along a red carpet into a stately ballroom while a military band provides a constant background of sedate, semi-martial music. 

 

Eija-Riitta Korhola, EU parliament member, 

at last year's party.

The lucky invitees include all parliament and cabinet members, high-ranking government and military officials, foreign diplomats, and captains of Finnish industry (such as, this year, the marketing genius behind Angry Birds).  Also, invited are sports and entertainment personalities who have been especially successful during the year.  The guests move slowly along the red carpet accompanied by their spouses or dates, which – befitting liberal Finland – also nowadays include same-sex couples. 

The entire procession of dignitaries is televised by YLE, the state-run TV station, with off-camera presenters explaining who the most notable guests are and – in true red-carpet fashion – commenting on their fashion.  The more stunning evening gowns are examined in close-up shots and replayed in slow motion.  These will also be featured in the pages of the next day’s tabloids, along with other highlights from the party. 

 

Champion figure skater Laura Lepistö, in 2010.

After greeting the president, all the guests wait, packed almost sardine-like, in the ballroom watching the procession until the last honored guests, always the former presidents, have been greeted by the first couple.  Refreshments then follow, with the most distinguished guests joining President Halonen in the "Yellow Salon" for coffee and dessert and polite conversation (also televised). 

This is also when the TV hosts begin on-air interviews with notable partygoers.  A popular target for the reporters this year was Olli Rehn, the current EU economic and finance commissioner, who had taken a break from trying to avert the complete collapse of the eurozone to fly in from Brussels just for the party. 

After coffee, the dancing starts, with President Halonen and her husband kicking off the first waltz.  As the evening progresses, the military band ups the tempo with slightly more contemporary tunes, while cadets stand by to dance with any female guest who doesn't have a date.  The dance floor is so crowded that couples can hardly move, but I’ve heard that after the television cameras shut off, the room  quickly clears out except for those who just want to dance. 

Parliament member Tanja Karpela at last year's ball.

Before the night is through, the celebration moves to after parties located at various Helsinki nightspots, some with television crews on hand to capture the action.  Television coverage continues the next day when one of the commercial stations airs its own condensed version of the previous night’s festivities.  

For all the self-conscious showiness of the party, it is genuinely considered an honor to be invited and probably a lot of fun, not to mention popular to watch – about half the population is estimated to have tuned into last night's ball.  And why shouldn’t Finns put on a little glitz and party down (after a fashion) in front of the cameras.  You could say they’ve won the right to choose how to celebrate the independence of their nation – despite weather outside that might, just might, tempt some to forsake it for one with a bit more sunshine.