 |
FINNISH FIRST: Finland's tech boom has spread prosperity to other parts of the economy, like Piiroinen's furniture firm in Salo
|
Although he speaks fluent Finnish and is married to a Finn, Petri Viglione, a 33-year-old businessman from Naples, says he always felt like a "foreigner" in the snowy landscape of Finland. When he set up a wine importing business in 1993, Finns preferred vodka and he struggled to make ends meet. All that changed in 1995 when Finland joined the European Union. "Finland was like an island in Europe and the E.U. became a bridge to that island," Viglione says. Now Viglione's Winital sells 1 million bottles of wine annually to a country of only 5 million, and the market is growing at 15% a year. "The E.U. was Finland's salvation, it is changing everything," Viglione says.
Oh, what a change it is. During a three-week journey through the Nordic countries of Denmark, Sweden and Finland, I was constantly surprised to hear Europe being mentioned as if it were some new superglue cementing relations among diverse peoples. Even after Denmark rejected the euro, Danish farmers were happily selling their farms to Dutch immigrants because they helped drive up sale prices. For all its bureaucracy and lack of democracy, the E.U. is making inroads into just about every sphere of life.
To gauge just how important these changes are, I decided to bypass the capitals of Stockholm, Helsinki and Copenhagen and see instead how change is playing in the hinterland. Although there are pockets of resistance — the commune of Christiania in Denmark and the Åland Islands between Finland and Sweden are good examples of communities taking exception to E.U. rules — there are big changes afoot in even the remotest towns.
Just about everyone knows by now that mobile phones are a huge business for Sweden's Ericsson and Finland's Nokia. But how is that success affecting those countries? To find out, I traveled from Helsinki by high-speed train to the town of Salo, home to Nokia's mobile phone division, about 110 km away. "Nokia's success has been very important for every company in Salo," says Risto Piiroinen, managing director of a family furniture business. "In the early 1990s there was a depression in Finland. Nokia created 6,000 jobs here." And it's not just Nokia. The company has produced scores of executives, like Jorma Nieminen, who have left to set up their own firms. Nieminen created Benefon, a maker of specialist cell phones that function as global positioning receivers as well as handsets.
One of the more unusual parts of the E.U. has to be Åland, an archipelago of some 6,500 islands that lie between Finland and Sweden. The islands once belonged to Sweden, but, along with Finland, were lost to Russia in 1809. Finland declared its independence in 1917 and granted the islands autonomy in 1920. Although the people speak Swedish, watch Swedish television and read Swedish newspapers, the islands are part of Finland. Because of its long history of autonomy, Åland is often studied as a textbook example of how minority communities can survive without losing their identity.
What sets the islands apart is the fact that they are in the E.U. customs zone as part of Finland but outside the E.U.'s tax zone. The reason: shipping provides almost half of the islands' income and jobs, and most passengers who take the ferries between Finland and Sweden do so to load up on liquor, tobacco and other duty-free goodies sold on board.
When Finland joined the European Union in 1995, a special exception called the Åland Protocol gave the tiny islands the right to keep their duty-free business aboard ships. "We're 100% dependent on duty-free sales," says Nils-Erik Eklund, the managing director of Viking Lines, a locally owned operator of the giant ferries that ply between Sweden and Finland. I traveled on one, the Gabriella, between Finland and Åland and was amazed at the party atmosphere that prevails on the 10-hour voyage, filling discos, bars and casinos until the wee hours. Nursing their hangovers, most people disembarked clutching at least a case of beer.
To get a sense of how the hinterland of Scandinavia is adjusting to the challenges of the new economy, I flew to Luleå, Sweden's northernmost major seaport, on the Gulf of Bothnia, and Kiruna, which sits 145 km north of the Arctic Circle. The two towns have a long history together. Kiruna is the site of an iron mine which has been worked for 500 years, and over a century ago it was linked to the sea by railroad to carry iron ore to steel mills in Luleå. The steel industry in Luleå went bust in the 1970s, but since then steel companies like SSAB are reviving Luleå's reputation as a leader in Swedish steel.
Today, Luleå is not just a steel town, but also a center of communications technology. The cellular phone was born here, the brainchild of telephone company researcher Östen Mäkitalo who developed GSM, the standard that connects most of the world's mobile phones.
Luleå wouldn't be a technology center without a catchy name, so the town fathers decided to call the area Internet Bay. Tage Routuvaara, the head of the Internet Bay organization, says there are 3,600 people employed in the tech industry, a number growing by 25% a year. Some 406 companies were started last year.
At the core of the town's rapidly expanding Internet business is the Luleå University of Technology, which was established in 1971. "We work hand-in-hand with industry," says Mikael Börjeson, director of the University's Center for Distance Spanning Technology. "The idea is to close the gap between new technology and what's marketable." Example: Börjeson is himself chairman of a company called Marratech, which has produced a program called the Virtual Corridor that allows video conferences involving large groups to take place over the Internet.
Kiruna, meanwhile, has developed a special niche in the business of space exploration. An Institute of Space Physics was founded in the town in the 1950s to study the atmospheric phenomenon called the Northern Lights. And in the 1960s, in cooperation with what is now called the European Space Agency, the Swedish government built the Esrange launch and control facility 45 km from the town center.
Although it doesn't launch satellites or put men into orbit, it does launch about six rockets a year, which carry sensing equipment. When experiments are being prepared for a U.S. Space Shuttle launch, for example, scientists often test them first aboard an unmanned rocket at Esrange to see how they respond in weightless conditions. The space industry employs about 600 people in the town, a figure expected to double in the next five years.
MORE >>
PAGE 1 | PAGE 2
|
|
|
|
True North
Along the back roads and around the islands to find space researchers in the Arctic Circle and African asylum seekers in Denmark
Photo Gallery
Check out the photos from this leg of TIME's Fast Forward Europe voyage
Hard Times
The Sami people continue their reindeer-herding traditions despite setbacks
Prick Up Your Ears
How Finnish melancholy permeates the European pop charts
Magic Wand
Finnish telecommunications entrepreneur Pekka Sivonen shows off Helsinki's Virtual Village
House of Faith
A mosque created from a Stockhold electricity plant provides a focus for Sweden's Muslims
Greenland Comes In from the Cold
This isolated island in the North Atlantic is learning to cope with life in the 21st century
The Hippies Hit Their Golden Years
The residents of Christiania, where the 1970s never died, face a very modern problem: an aging population
Rock of Ages
Life's a blast on Iceland's Heimaey island
Life Among the Volcanoes
Heimaey Island may be a firecracker waiting to go off, but the locals like it
Running on Thin Air
Iceland is making its dream of a hydrogen economy come true
People To Watch: The Cajanders | Mart Laar | Kalle Lasn | Philip Diklev
|
