THE SECURITIZATION OF IMMIGRATION POLICY : THE CASE-STUDY OF FINLAND

Abstract

In the last decades of the 20th century large-scale migration had a deep influence on the sociopolitical processus all over the world. It became the catalyst of serious changes in sphere of mass consciousness, social structure, political culture, institutionally-legal bases of the state. Simultaneously migration became a subject of political discussions devoted to the protection of the domestic stability, structuring the public order within the welfare state. A key point running through these discussions was that migration became a threat to the national security of the state. The «other» was found within. In such eschatologically simplified world migration became a new subject for the internal security field, a key-issue facilitating the social structuring of the state, overlapping and binding the national security logic with emerging cultural challenges of the welfare state. Migration became a floating signifier, a meta-issue within the european political discourse.

In this relation, Finland is no exception. Refusing the policy of forced assimilition prospered during the 20th century, but leaning on historically shaped institutes of the state, to accelerate the process of integration of new ethnic minorities, the government of Finland influenced by the supranational European politics began to implement the politics of controlled inclusion, called as political strategy of multiculturalism.

Such process occurred through the securitization of migration makes it possible to suppose, that securitization became an instrument to control the ethnocultural management, to structure the rationality and the logic of modern welfare state.