Word: finlandized
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...independence by what President Urho Kaleva Kekkonen, 60, has called the ability "to live on fine distinctions." Last week, in one of the Finns' finest distinctions yet, representatives of Western Europe's economic Outer Seven gathered in Helsinki's Smolna Palace to sign a treaty with Finland creating the Finland Association-a legal fiction that enables Finland to be a part of the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) and share in the benefits of its lower trade barriers without joining it, thus meeting the conditions of neutrality laid down by Big Neighbor Russia...
When Britain set up EFTA as the "Outer Seven'' to counter the Common Market's "Inner Six," Finland was eager to join and make it eight. President Kekkonen, wary of riling the Russians, at first refused to broach the subject to Moscow. Only when the Outer Seven put through the first mutual 20% tariff reductions and Finnish lumber and paper exporters began to lose sales to Swedish and Norwegian competition did Kekkonen speak up. Khrushchev came to Kekkonen's 60th birthday celebration last September, shared a private sauna with the Finnish President, emerged to give...
Through the Finland Association, Finland will be just that: a qualified member. Though timber products-Finland's biggest export-will be free to compete on an equal footing, Finland will not reduce tariffs as swiftly as the other EFTA countries on a range of Finnish specialties: varnishes, polishes, small electric motors, sauna whisks and birch twigs. To satisfy Russia, Finland will keep import quotas on those goods that Russia chiefly supplies, e.g., fuels and fertilizer. But as one former Finnish ambassador to Washington explains: "You cannot understand what EFTA means to us-it is our first formal link...
Ironically, the new economic agreement with the West has roused domestic opposition to President Kekkonen, the strongest personality in Finland. What rankled Finns was that Kekkonen felt compelled to ask Russian permission to join EFTA (while neutral Austria did not). Kekkonen previously obliged Russia by refusing to let the Social Democrats participate in a coalition government, a concession that Finns considered a galling interference in their domestic affairs. Said one U.S. diplomat: "It is a conditioning process. If the Finns are conditioned to thinking that they must consult Moscow at every step, it will be that much easier for Moscow...
...Whose fate, after reaching Finland, Western intelligence agencies have been unable to discover...