Vocabularies of citizenship and gender: Finland

Abstract

Citizenship has not been among the most popular objects of social and political theory in Finland during the last decades. However, historically it has been a central concept. It was only during the post-war welfare state development that debates on citizenship started to lose their earlier importance. One might assume that the Nordic welfare state model succeeded in solving some of the struggles around citizenship, both those based on class conflicts and those based on gender conflicts. To understand the present-day situation and the new debates emerging on citizenship in the 1990s it is important to look at the history of the formation of Finnish citizenship. My argument is that there is a Finnish- Nordic language of citizenship that does not stem directly either from liberalism or from civic-republicanism.