You are essentially right and essentially wrong .. Yes Finns and British are different in almost everything , if you look from within, and yet for a person who live in Bangladesh or China they are almost , incomprehensibly identical. For Europeans who have lived through the age of enlightmeht and creation of national states it is so important to see the difference between, let us say ,Germans and French , and yes they are different , but their cultural affinity is enormous. One can talk about the differences between Germans and Dutch for hours , but if the situation calls for it they end up on the same side of the barricade.adnan wrote:Are you kidding me?! I've good experience with both countries, and I can tell you, with 100% confidence, that Finland and the UK are extremely different countries with extremely different cultures.foca wrote:thus stating that a Finn living in Uk adds to "multiculturalism" (in political aspect of that term) is essentially wrong.
Wow, where should I start? The food, drinking habits, folklore, history (recent, modern, pre-modern, all the way a 1000 years ago), the public's psyche towards every single social issue, world influence, intentionality, Jesus.. the language (6 f*cking branches up the classification tree), social manners, approach to politeness, and I could go on and on for an hour! And that's only England! Let's not talk about the rest of the UK which is so so different from England itself.
So, no, no no no no, absolutely not. You cannot through a deeply misinformed statement like that (borderline disinforming) and expect everybody to just pass by it like nothing has happened.
A Finn in the UK is indeed bringing a great deal of cultural difference, and a Brit in Finland is bringing a very new cultural perspective.
P.S. I have no clue why people confuse integration with loss of identity and believe that you can either have your national identity or be integrated, but not both. You can maintain your identity while conforming to pretty much every social aspect in your host country. Then again, some people believe in angels.. so, yeah.
Finns are somewhat late addition to the European picture, but their culture and to some extent their traditions have become similar to swedish (since not only knights and lords moved to Finland , but swedish peasants too) and do not take me wrongly it is not an attempt to revive the overlords complex in Finns , it is just stating simple facts. Having accepted (and assimilated and changed ) foreign culture and confession , Finns have emerged as distant cousins of Normans and are accepted as such by the rest of Europe (even if in their own perception they might view themselves differently).
A Finn in uk would bring a cultural difference within a certain accepted norm (that norm includes a hectic spaniard , a frozen sweed, and a champagne drinking french etc) , he/she would not change the picture by introducing an alien vision of the world . In a second or third generation a Finn would lose his/hers specific peculiarity in England, irrespective of the fact if he/she maintains the language.
Multiculturalism in its political sense , if brought to the utter line, calls for unexptable : for creation a society governed by separate sets of rules for people of different cultures living in one country for the sake of maintaining of separate ethnic identities , which , in turn leads to further separation of cultural and civic identities of the populace.
