The cornerstone of unity

CIVIL SOCIETY
14 THE PROMISED LAND OF ASSOCIATIONS 
There are now about 100,000 registered associations founded by citizens in Finland. They range from small 
clubs, societies, and other associations active locally to larger organisations active nationally and internationally. 
They include many organisations with social, human rights, environmental, political, or similar goals. Only such 
associations are called NGOs (non-governmental organisations) in general usage and the media in English-
speaking countries, but some government officials and sociologists use the term NGO to refer to any association 
founded by citizens.
Citizens are not required to register an association they found, but most choose to do so to enjoy the financial 
benefits accorded to non-profit associations and because registration incorporates the association. Incorporation 
enables the association to sign contracts, get bank loans, and own property, for example, and it shields the 
association's members and leaders from personal liability for the association's actions.
About 80% of Finns are members of at least one registered association, and many are members of several. 
In both respects, Finns and people from the other Nordic countries are among the world's most active 
participants in civil society, and the trend is rising. More than 53,000 new associations were founded in Finland 
from 1996 to 2016.
Members of inactive associations often forget to deregister them. Due to the new Associations Act of 2016, 
the Finnish Register of Associations was authorised to remove associations that have been inactive for more 
than 20 years, and more than 35,000 were deregistered at the beginning of 2017. Many of them were political 
associations, local branches in dying villages, associations of disappearing professions and trades, and 
associations of hobbies that are no longer popular and have been replaced by new trends.
The tradition of citizens founding many associations can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century 
and even earlier times. Progressive groups such as the temperance movement and labour, youth, and co-
operative movements made participation in associations a self-evident way of fighting for a variety of causes and 
defining one’s own identity. These movements combined the efforts of intellectuals to construct a nation and a 
state on the one hand and the gradual formation of separate social classes in a, compared to other countries, 
relatively egalitarian population.
As political democracy was thin on the ground, the associations assumed political functions, becoming the 
mouthpieces of different groups and regulating their relationships. After achieving universal suffrage in 1906, 
Finns created a political party system and developed entire associational subcultures. Numerous associations, 
including women’s groups, youth and children’s clubs, senior associations, temperance and cultural movements, 
theatre associations, choirs, sports clubs, and trade unions affiliated themselves to local branches of political 
parties, especially those of the Agrarian or Centre Party, the Social Democratic movement, and later also the 
people’s democracy movement. 
Of course not all associations were attached to the big ideological groupings, but these certainly determined 
the world of associations and NGOs until the 1960s and 1970s. Between the World Wars, workers not only 
voted for their own parties but also engaged in most other activities in organisations and companies affiliated to 
their political parties, for example when singing, acting, reading, buying everyday supplies, and depositing their 
savings. 
After the Second World War, similar organisations arose affiliated to the people’s democratic movement. 
Even in the 1960s and ’70s, many socio-political issues and international questions were crystallised in voluntary 
organisations. Hundreds of left-wing organisations, youth associations, critical culture organisations, 

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international friendship associations, and development country NGOs were founded every year. 
This class and group-based organisational field started to collapse in the 1970s. And in the 1980s, Finns 
actively founded associations which united individuals or enthusiasts in a certain field without any reference to 
great ideological ideals. This tendency strengthened in the 1990s. 60% of the organisations founded since the 
mid-1990s are cultural, sports, or free-time associations, and people commit themselves to these organisations 
only partially, not with their whole personality as was the case with the ideologically-inclined associational 
subcultures. Associations for new types of sports, motor clubs, or international pedigree dog or cat associations, 
for example, are part of “private” culture, as opposed to agrarian-oriented youth organisations or ideological 
women’s associations, which link their members to a wider ideological context. They rarely arrange member 
recruitment campaigns or join a national umbrella organisation, but rather tend to base their activities on 
international or their own models, which have been created by an inner circle. These organisational models are 
not learned from a larger group of associations or social networks, but are directly adopted from the media. In 
comparison to older associations, these new ones do not perceive their activities as permanent. They are also 
smaller, have weaker bonds, and are based on individual consumption or lifestyle rather than industrial 
production and a common position in the labour market. The great majority of them strive to change their 
individual members’ worlds, not the world around them. 
This development is making associations more apolitical. As people commit only a small part of their 
personality to associations, such organisations no longer promote comprehensive political participation. 
Membership in a volleyball association does not exclude membership in a trekking association, whereas 
belonging to the scouts excluded belonging to the pioneers. It is easier to become estranged from other people’s 
problems when one gets no experience of being in contact with them, as happened in associations in the past. 
Nonetheless, in this promised land of associations, associations still have political potential. They are not only 
the main way that Finns collaborate, but they generate, harbour, and transform critical culture and elements for 
new kinds of politics. Many of the so-called alternative movements and lifestyles have founded registered 
associations. But a sign of a new era may be that many critical movements have not done so. This phenomenon 
both underlines the current apolitical trend and also questions the tradition of registered associations in collective 
action. Instead of representative action, the essence of these movements consists of individualist campaigns 
and loose forms of organisation.
In the 21st century, online networks enable virtual voluntary organisation as a new kind of alternative to 
traditional associations. Such forms of organisation as well as the demonstrations organised by them perhaps 
illustrate the difficulty of forming fixed collective identities. They may also indicate that we are moving from a 
foreseeable corporatism based on associations to an unpredictable civil society and political system that will 
produce political and social fluctuations.
The future will show if these virtual voluntary organisations will become a sub-group of innovative NGO 
activities. 
Risto Alapuro & Martti Siisiäinen 
– Professors emeriti of sociology,
universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä