Détente, Finlandization, and Resistance – Finnish Churches and the Helsinki Process in Transnational Perspective.

This article reconstructs the full range of Finnish church opinion regarding the Helsinki Process from a range of contemporary private correspondence and institutional archives, the religious press and oral history sources. It shows that alongside the celebratory official discourse focused on détente and confidence building, the Helsinki Process occasioned vigorous and protracted contestation throughout Finnish civil society, including in the churches. This was the case particularly regarding the nature of the human rights to be protected under Basket III of the Helsinki Final Act. On this issue, the Finnish church’s ecumenically-minded leadership divided fundamentally from the evangelical neo-Pietists that formed the bulk of their church’s active churchgoers. With much of the rest of the ecumenical movement, the former opted for a socially progressive agenda for the CSCE/OSCE that aspired to a convergence of the two competing economic systems and de-emphasised religious freedom in favour of ‹social human rights›. The latter, on the other hand, rejected détente and confidence building and became interested in the Helsinki Process only as a means of advancing their own goals of religious freedom in Soviet-controlled lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]