Integration, Disintegration and Transformation

The Helsinki team focuses on the relationship between West European integration, Eastern disintegration and Finland’s economic, technological and industrial structural transformation in the 1980s.

These developments led to a change in domestic goal-setting at the end of the Cold War and to a fundamental revision of Finland’s foreign policy. The main question is how the disintegrative processes in the East and the integration processes in the West created a temporal space, where a fundamental realignment of Finland’s domestic economic and political decision-making institutions and its international orientation took place.

To what extent was the change facilitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rapid development of the European Community towards a single market and by an increasingly central economic and political actor especially from the mid-1980s onwards? What was the role played by the upheavals in global economy, spurred by market liberalization and accelerating technological development? The subproject charts this incremental but radical transition starting from the early 1980s, with special interest in the Nordic countries and the Baltic region. Besides looking at the structural economic level, the subproject also traces the trajectories of ideational change and the shifting order of priorities among actors.

The Helsinki team is located in the Network for European Studies (NES) where Dr. Aunesluoma has been Director since 2010. NES is a multidisciplinary research and training centre reaching into all faculties and campuses of the university. Since its creation in 2002, NES has funded and hosted a large number of research projects and groups in EU- and European studies.