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From Finland to Iceland

I HAVE A PERSONAL CONNECTION WITH FINLAND: MY MOTHER worked there as an English teacher for the British Council in the 1950s, learned Finnish and Swedish, and made some friendships that lasted for the rest of her life. She lived for two years in a town called Nokia, whose principal employer was a factory making rubber boots. It wasn’t until the 1980s that it branched out into mobile phones and became a little better known.

So when I took my mother on a visit to Helsinki in the late 1990s, the first time she’d been back there in more than forty years, she was naturally excited at the prospect of seeing some of the places she remembered. On a whim, she decided to go and see her old Finnish teacher Aune, with whom she had corresponded until about 1980 but then lost touch. We hailed a taxi and when the driver asked for the address, my mother realized that she didn’t know it. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I think I can remember the way.” We drove for more than an hour to the distant leafy suburbs of Helsinki, my mother directing the driver in what sounded like very confident Finnish, and ended up in front of a little wooden house in a quiet leafy street.

At this point I’d realized that this story could only end sadly, since according to my calculations Aune must be well over a hundred, but it was too late to say anything as the taxi had gone and my mother was ringing the bell. After a moment, a spry-looking elderly lady opened the door, and without the slightest surprise or hesitation, said in perfect English, “How lovely to see you, Joan! Do come in. I was just making tea.”

Somehow, this captured everything I had ever believed about the Finns. By the time we’d finished tea and cakes, had the kind of catch-up you need after forty years, not to mention politely declining to join Aune in the sauna, it was getting late and we had to get back to Helsinki.

When we got back, the city had taken on a distinctly less welcoming appearance. We had made the mistake of arriving on May 1, which as any Finn will tell you, is Vappu, the day that Finland celebrates International Workers’ Day in its own inimitable style. On Vappu, anybody who ever went to university celebrates their graduation by wearing a white sailor’s hat, and everybody who didn’t wears one too, just for solidarity. The entire population then spends two days assiduously getting blind drunk, wears outrageous clothing, and behaves disgracefully.

I still remember my mother bravely trying to look tolerantly amused as we walked to the hotel, past elderly people her own age, who certainly should have known better, throwing up in the street, and young people relieving themselves into municipal recycling bins, ATMs, and phone booths. To avoid one very noisy group heading toward us and obviously determined to include us in their party whether we liked it or not, we slipped into a supermarket, where on an impulse I bought a can of bear (bear, not beer). I could never summon up the courage to open it, kept it for years, and finally threw it away last year.

I wish I could find a more flattering word for it, but there is a touch of lunacy in the Finnish soul. It’s only a touch, but it’s critical since it’s the element which prevents the Finns from becoming boring and smug; it’s what stops their quality of sisu (a legendary stubbornness) from being mere pigheadedness, and what gives greatness to the Finns’ industriousness and thoroughness. It is also, in my view, the quality which most usefully distinguishes the Finns from their Scandinavian neighbors. The Finnish madness is also a kind of badness, a curious darkness of the soul which prevents the Finns from being merely pious Scandinavians.

When I think of the “badness” of the Finns, I think of Bad Badtz-Maru, a bad-tempered penguin, who despite the fact that he seems to get out of bed on the wrong side every morning, is one of the most popular of the Sanrio characters, inspiring more passionate fans even than his megastar stablemate, Hello Kitty. His classic pose is sticking out his tongue and blowing a raspberry at the world.

It seems to me that the Finnish character has the distinctive triple assets of simplicity, honor, and madness. These three qualities add up to a remarkable degree of effectiveness: the Finns are enormously good at getting things done. The madness provides a spark of insight or creativity or imagination and an unshakable belief that nothing is impossible; the simplicity provides a no-nonsense, unpretentious practicality, a powerful competence, and the gift of clear-sightedness; the honor ensures that nothing matters more than the successful execution of the project, however much hard work this might entail.

These qualities are the reason one can truthfully say: when you need results, you need a Finn. So my suggestion for Finland wasn’t a series of initiatives or policies, but a product. It was a way for the unique and helpful genius of the Finns to be bottled and distributed on a grand scale. It was a way to fix the curse of meetings, forever.

Meetings—and especially meetings between people from different countries—are hardly ever as enjoyable, effective, or productive as they could be, as they should be, and as they desperately need to be. Everyone agrees that countless hours are wasted in meetings, and everyone smiles about the certainty of nothing happening as a result of them—but nobody seems able or willing to do anything about it.

Why don’t international meetings work? Partly it’s cultural differences and cultural insensitivity, partly it’s national stereotypes getting in the way of people’s appreciation of each other’s personal qualities, partly it’s impatience and intolerance and not enough listening, but mainly it’s because nobody has ever brought sufficient skill, determination, or resources to bear onto this critical problem in order to resolve it, once and for all.

And yet the world runs on meetings. Business is global, politics is global, and the age is dominated by global problems. Unfortunately, no progress can ever be made on any of these matters without international meetings, so our failure to make them work properly isn’t any kind of joke. If you can change the way meetings are done, you can change everything.

So, codename Finnux 2010 was my suggestion for the Finns to develop a piece of revolutionary humanware, an entirely new operating system for twenty-first-century international cooperation which would productize that uniquely Finnish combination of inspiration, effectiveness, and sheer bloody-minded dedication, and donate it to every international institution, corporation, crisis team, conference, parliament, board, delegation, high command, trade round, and summit.

Finnux 2010 would help the world work together more efficiently, more happily, more productively. It would be Finland’s gift to the world.

Kraków

Cultural relations are the most effective form of improving a country’s international standing that I’ve ever come across, and it doesn’t even cost much money. It’s quite slow, but it often seems to work in the end.

All a country needs to do is diligently, creatively, persistently, over decades and generations, ensure that its culture is shared with as many people as possible around the world. Art, music, literature, dance, sculpture, poetry, architecture, design, theater, film, television: these are the ways in which we meet, get to know, and finally learn to love and respect other peoples around the world. Once you’ve become familiar with another nation’s culture, it hardly matters how they behave in the future: you can hate what they do, but it’s very hard to hate them.

Cultural relations, unlike most forms of national promotion, have a unique characteristic: they are almost always trusted as the true voice of the country. Unless they are obviously propagandistic in tone and intent, people usually assume that what they say about the country is the truth. For this reason, cultural relations have more power to persuade people about a country or city than almost any other activity.

In Kraków, the birthplace of Chopin, the theme of cultural relations emerged, not for the first time, as a key factor in my investigations and recommendations.

The joy of culture isn’t in consuming it but in participating in it. If a country has the courage to allow its own culture to be mixed with other cultures, and to co-own the amazing consequences, then it will be doing cultural relations a hundred times more productively than any country that spends millions on simply projecting its cultural glories on the world. “Communications” can occasionally penetrate the brain, but only art can penetrate the soul.

After closing time one evening in the museum at Kraków, I was allowed to play a brief duet with a talented young pianist from Kraków’s Academy of Music on Chopin’s own piano. It didn’t sound great (mainly my fault, but partly because the piano is very old and isn’t often tuned), but it’s a memory we might both retain for the rest of our lives. I certainly will. If I’d simply walked through the museum and looked at the piano, sooner or later, the memory would have disintegrated or become inseparable from the thousands of similar memories of museums I’ve seen during my life.

This is what the British Council calls mutuality: the reciprocal exchange of cultural experiences. In some way, sharing your culture through mutual experiences (it doesn’t necessarily have to involve thousands of foreigners banging on Chopin’s priceless piano, of course) is so much more respectful, more enjoyable, more memorable, more impactful, and more effective than doing what so many countries do in the name of cultural relations: rolling the best of their culture into a ball and firing it at foreigners. If you’re China, India, Japan, France, Russia, Egypt, Austria, Britain, Italy, Greece, or Mexico, you can probably get away with it, because the world’s demand for your heritage is insatiable, but for the majority of countries whose cultural production is more modest, sharing and co-creating is the only way.

Culture is more than just high culture: it’s also society, architecture, recent history. The following day, I visited a perfectly preserved Soviet-era apartment block in the Kraków suburb of Nova Huta, near the steelworks. I was driven there in a vintage Trabant car, apparently made of green cardboard, operated by a very enterprising young company that had spotted the opportunity of peddling Soviet nostalgia to tourists. The experience was oddly touching. Together with a small group of mainly German and French visitors, we shuffled slowly around the tiny green-painted apartment with its bust of Lenin in every room, and after a very short tour (there wasn’t much to see), we ended up in the tiny green-painted kitchen, where we were offered a shot of Wódka Wyborowa. We drank to each other’s health and to the new Europe and murmured pious platitudes about how awful it must have been to live there under socialism and how lucky we were to be living in the European Union in the twenty-first century, while all the time I was indulging in a weird and intense fantasy about hiding in the broom closet so that when everybody else left, I could stay and live there on my own forever and be completely forgotten.

It might have been the vodka, and possibly the lurid green paint (it’s surely a pretty strong warning signal when a regime thinks that the color of fresh radioactive waste is a nice choice for the inside of people’s homes). But it did make me think: the Soviet regime was one of the most cruelly oppressive in human history, but I doubt it would have lasted quite as long as it did through coercion alone.

There must have been some aspects of life under the Soviet regime that people liked enough to make it minimally bearable from day to day, and I think what I’d just understood was the sense of security one felt in knowing that everybody was in the same situation, nobody (at least nobody you were ever likely to meet) was above you or below you, and your worries were small worries: will there be toilet paper in the stores this week? To be an almost invisible, insignificant unit in a vast machine, despite the privations and the discomfort and poverty, to know that nothing could ever change, that one’s place in life was fixed from birth to death, was somehow so easy—and to know that somebody somewhere else, thousands of kilometers away in Moscow, was looking after everything, was oddly reassuring, even though or perhaps because you knew you counted for nothing. In that tiny apartment, just for a moment, I felt safe.

It was a ludicrous fantasy, of course. Knowing me, I’d have enjoyed the illusion of safety for about four hours, and then have been one of the first to rebel and get myself sent to Siberia or executed.

A dinner was held for me that night by the mayor of Kraków in a vast chamber in the Wieliczka salt mine, a thousand feet below the city. Happily, claustrophobia is not one of my neuroses, but as I sat surrounded by dignitaries and prominent citizens, the eerie sense of having uncountable billions of tons of rock poised a few feet above my head was decidedly present throughout the evening.

Whether to feel scared or to feel safe is always our choice, although it doesn’t always seem that way. We all tend to place far too much emphasis on the power of the world outside our skulls to influence our state of mind, and far too little on developing our own power to respond as we choose. Perhaps it’s because the outside world is more readily observable than the mysterious, often hidden workings of our own mind. Yet it’s our response to external factors that almost always makes more of a real difference to our lives than those factors do themselves.

Some days, I feel very strongly that we should all take much more trouble to monitor, to understand, and ultimately to govern the universe we can control—the universe of our own perceptions and reactions to events and circumstances—and perhaps waste a little less time and effort trying to influence the universe we can’t control: the behaviors of others, the way the world works. It’s so much more useful to exercise more mastery over the three pounds of soft stuff inside our head, than scratch feebly at the billions of tons of rocks poised above it.

Then again, I did choose to be a policy adviser and not a psychotherapist, even if the two jobs do have something in common.

Iceland

There’s a parallel here with the way that countries work: many of the politicians and citizens I’ve met firmly believe that it’s pointless to try to achieve influence over a vast global system, and far better to work on getting one’s own house in order. Not one’s own mind, but one’s own country. And of course they’re not wrong, but what I have always hoped to show is that setting a priority between the two is a false and dangerous dichotomy. It is both possible and necessary to treat them, and work on them, as one: as the two halves of the duty of governance.

The idea that countries need to sort out their own problems before worrying about the rest of the world is an important part of the reason for the mess we’re in today. It’s an illusion, because at no stage does a country ever conclude that it has reached a point of development where it feels able to contribute as much to the world outside its borders as within—nor is it necessarily welcomed by other countries if it starts exerting too much influence on the (shared) world outside.

That’s why governments need to adopt a change of perspective as much as a change of behavior: a real sense of the continuity between their local issues and the global issues that ultimately drive the local ones. In this sense, climate change is proving to be a useful experience for humanity, in that it is gradually teaching all of us, in the starkest way imaginable, that the distinction between “home” and “abroad” is illusory.

In Iceland, I witnessed a dramatic example of how utterly powerless even a prosperous, stable, confident, modern democracy can be against the gigantic forces unleashed by globalization. In this case the forces were economic, but it could equally well have been migratory, climatic, pandemic, volcanic, tectonic, or social forces that so nearly overwhelmed this precarious island state.

By the time I started work in Iceland, my approach to working with governments had started to take the form it follows today: a minister I worked with years ago jokingly referred to it as the Anholt Process, and the name stuck. The Anholt Process is based on a series of what I call conversazioni: the conversazione is an informal collegiate discussion about a nation’s future role in the international community. Each one usually lasts two or three hours. I use the Italian word as I find it is widely understood to convey a relaxed but civilized dialogue: a special and memorable encounter that might actually produce something new, unlike meetings, which are all too often synonymous with wasting time and feeling bored.

Over the years, I found it added greatly to the quality of the Process if I set certain rules for the conversazioni. First of all, the setting is crucial: it’s important they are held in an imaginative and inspiring location of historical or cultural significance. Meeting rooms, hotels, and offices just don’t produce the right state of mind. The atmosphere I always try to create is a sense that history might be made in these sessions, that it might just be the most important thing anybody does that year.

In Iceland we held our conversazioni in the old wooden house at Thingvellir, close to the continental divide between the Americas and Europe, to which only the prime minister had the key. This was where the national parliament of Iceland, the oldest in the world, was founded in 930 (not 1830, 1530, or even 1030: that’s zero nine-thirty), and held its sessions there until 1798, when it moved to Reykjavik.

The main strategy group is usually about six or seven people, and never more than ten (once you have more than ten people in the room it turns into the General Assembly of the United Nations and you can wave goodbye to building anything coherent, courageous, creative, or convivial). Most of the attendees are ministers, and one is the head of state or head of government, but as I described earlier, there’s usually also a “wild card” to ensure that the conversation doesn’t get political or boring, and we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We need the maximum possible variety of gender, age, race, and educational background in the group (this is a real challenge in most countries, such is the makeup of most governments), and also a mix of people with power, people with ideas, people with experience, and people with energy.

Rooms with fluorescent lighting are avoided; phones and note takers are forbidden. The participants can take notes if they want to, but having note takers sitting around the edge of the room and not participating in the conversation is off-putting for the participants and demeaning for the note takers. Frankly if we can’t remember what we’ve concluded in each session, then it’s probably too complicated and we’ve failed. Ties, which restrict the supply of oxygen to the brain and reduce intellectual capacity, are not allowed. I also discourage suits, and unless people are arriving directly from some more formal commitment, I try to encourage them to wear what they’d feel most comfortable wearing at home.

If the session is a long one, we have a walk together after lunch. (I have a lovely photo on my desk of the whole Iceland group trudging through the snow from North America to Europe after a hearty lunch of whale meat, black bread, and fresh salmon.) Sometimes we even sing together at the end of the session, but this depends a bit on the culture. The Georgians, Chileans, Icelanders, and Faroese loved it, while the Mexicans, Austrians, and especially the Italians absolutely hated it. (The Italians are also the only participants who flatly refused to dress informally.) I never even dared to mention singing to the Dutch or the British. In Iceland, we discovered that the prime minister, Geir Haarde, had a really good tenor voice which he’d obviously never appreciated, and when I bumped into him at Heathrow Airport a year or two after he’d left office, I was delighted when he told me he was having lessons and at last taking his singing seriously.

All of this may sound a little whimsical, even frivolous, but the elaborate arrangements are there for a reason. If people are to take their tasks seriously—and few things are more serious to a country than its role in the world—then I think it is essential that the importance of those tasks is fully felt by everyone and fully communicated. The usual methods for communicating importance and gravity in our modern world—portentous phrases in boring documents passed around in dull offices—are singularly ineffective. All they usually produce, not surprisingly, are boring conclusions that nobody objects to and that change precisely nothing. What starts out as a fine intention to come up with the thing that everyone loves ends up as a frantic, eleventh-hour scramble to come up with the thing that nobody minds.

So instead I turn to the techniques which our (in some ways) wiser forebears employed when it was necessary to make things feel important: ritual, ceremony, poetry, and even a little hocus-pocus.

Tall Tales from the North

Iceland has moved forward so far, and in so many ways, in just a generation or two. From the novels of Halldór Laxness I had a vivid picture of the squalid, brutal, futile struggle of everyday life that many Icelanders experienced within living memory.11 To see the humorous, internationally educated, confident Icelanders of today boldly planning their takeover of this or that global financial sector seemed a miracle of progress. Their confidence and their impatient ambition, which had something swashbuckling and almost feverish about it, impressed and alarmed me in equal measure.

The first thing I noticed when I met the president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, was that he was unusually tall—far taller anyway than my elegantly compact five feet seven inches. (This height thing is all very unfair, I have to say: I was five foot eight when I was eighteen, then the average height of an adult male in the United Kingdom. Nowadays it seems to be the height of the average eleven-year-old in most countries I visit. And no, I do not have a complex about this.)

Being asked for advice by much taller men has been a recurring theme in my career, far too often for it to be mere coincidence. It is a well-documented fact that political and business leaders are on average taller than the people they order around. Indeed, in my personal opinion, the above-average height of certain heads of state and heads of government—I shan’t say which ones except that none of them are mentioned in this book—is their only real qualification for the job.

At home, I have an amusing collection of photographs of myself standing alongside some of the presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs I have worked with over the last two decades, almost all of whom tower over me. (When I met Vladimir Putin some years later, my surprise and relief in discovering that we are about the same height totally scuppered my previous determination to treat him with a cold and dignified reserve—I couldn’t stop beaming at him.)

I suspect that we ordinary citizens suffer from a primitive instinct that a big man is going to protect us against the invading hordes, and it really is high time we got past this, along with a whole lot of other primitive rubbish we’ve been carrying with us since before the nation-state was invented. When a country elects a female leader, as Iceland did in 1980 with Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the world’s first elected female president, it is potentially taking an important step forward in wisdom, maturity, and human development. However that female may turn out as a leader, the act of electing her implies we’re no longer simply looking for a champion to defend us or fight for our cause. We might be looking for a guide, an introducer, a negotiator, a connector, even a mother, all of which would be an improvement on the traditional model.

It seems to me that this is a necessary stage in human evolution. Nations used to go forth to make war; more recently they have learned to go forth to do business; but from now on they need to go forth to work and to repair and to build together. From combat to competition to collaboration: those are my three ages of humankind.

During my first meeting with President Grímsson, I discovered to my surprise that this cultured, urbane, and very tall gentleman nurtured a surprisingly virulent dislike for the United Kingdom because of its disagreements with his country over fishing rights in the North Atlantic. The feeling was strong enough for it to poke clean through his polished diplomatic exterior. It was clear that coming from the United Kingdom was a big negative mark on my personal scorecard, and if my aim was to impress him or be friends with him, I was starting from a point well below zero. (I apologize to Mr. Grímsson if I misread him, but the impression was a strong one.)

To be categorized in this way, to have points docked from your character before you’ve even had a chance to speak, simply because of an accident of birth, is never a pleasant sensation, and it hurts mainly because it’s so unfair. Almost nothing is more painful than injustice.

The source of the pain is the fatal and universal human tendency to generalize, simply because it’s less trouble than particularizing. It’s so much quicker and easier to hate a whole race or nation than worry about the subtle differences between individuals; so much easier to pigeonhole people on the basis of their appearance or their affiliations than to go to the trouble of finding out what they’re actually like. Prejudice is often the result of ignorance, but often also of sheer laziness.

If we could only train our children always to take the trouble to particularize a lot more and generalize a lot less, and do so much more carefully, about other people, the world would unquestionably be a healthier and calmer place for everyone to live in. I do believe that this is one of the fundamental problems of humanity.

Lutefiske and Peperoncino

The Icelanders are, to generalize carefully for a moment, indeed a curious folk. Their particular genius is, I think, the genius of a people with both ice and fire in their soul. Icelanders combine a Nordic love of order, efficiency, fairness, and competence, with a flair, warmth, informality, and passion that seem positively Mediterranean. The recipe for making an Icelander is lutefiske (dried salt cod) with a generous pinch of peperoncino (hot chili pepper). This Latino-Nordic quality of the Icelander is at the heart of both Iceland’s recent successes and its failures.

Unlike the Scandinavians, the Icelanders are seldom held back by the need for full consensus on every decision. They have a very Latin habit of “doing deals in the corridor,” getting things done by knowing the right people, using the right networks, and depending on their highly developed family and community cohesion to crack any problem with the minimum of fuss and delay.

This is well illustrated by observing the departure of the evening Icelandair flight to Reykjavik from Heathrow: As the disembarking passengers arriving in London pass the embarking passengers bound for Iceland, the two groups merge. Almost everyone on the inbound flight has to greet and embrace, noisily, almost everyone on the outbound flight, to the despair of the Heathrow gate staff, who need to set everybody off in the right direction. You could be forgiven for thinking it was the flight to Damascus, Bogotá, Rome, Nicosia, or Lagos.

It is this utterly reliable bedrock of social and business support which gives Icelanders the confidence and security to travel far and wide, to attempt the impossible, to question the norm, to behave like giants despite the tiny size of their country, with remarkably little fear or even much humility. Yet at the same time, this fierce independence is contrasted with a kind of collectivism that at first looks very Southern: an interdependence which is in fact more benign than the self-interested “credit bank” of many Latin societies (I’ll do you a favor so you can owe me one). The Icelanders have famously strong family values, a love of children, and a tendency toward matriarchy—all highly endearing qualities which wouldn’t seem out of place in Sicily or Catalonia—and an emphasis on roots which is more redolent of Greece or Turkey than of Sweden or Denmark. This is a society where your surname is the name of your father, not the birthplace or occupation of your forefathers; and the question some older Icelanders still ask today when introduced to a stranger is not “What is your name?” but “Who are your people?”

The self-assuredness, even self-importance, that comes from this society can seem almost absurd to anyone who is accustomed to measuring the status of a country by the size of its population or the square area of its territory, and one eventually wonders whether the Icelanders’ fixed belief that their tiny island is truly of global significance is indeed some kind of self-fulfilling delusion.

Certainly, if ambition and daring and chutzpah are part of the recipe for success in today’s world, the Icelanders have some unique cultural advantages. Driven to international trade from the very start of their civilization, gifted with all the qualities of the entrepreneur, being natural team players and natural knowledge workers, the Icelanders are paragons of globalization. They are capable of taking full advantage of the rich potential which global trade, global communications, and the rise of the intangible economy have thrown up in the twenty-first century. If they’re careful.

Things started to fall apart for Iceland at around the time we were discussing the Global Sword. This was a plan for a highrise hotel designed in the shape of a Viking sword, its jeweled hilt buried at an angle in the ground in Reykjavik, its long pointed blade sticking out of the other side of the globe as a steel-and-glass skyscraper in downtown Shanghai. There was to be a live-feed video floor in both buildings so you could wave up, or down, at people on the other side of the world: a project that should become the conduit for new people-to-people diplomacy between Iceland and China. These Icelandic warriors with their extraordinary self-belief are one of the few peoples I can think of that could so simply and confidently picture themselves thrusting their blade right through the whole planet, making their mark on both sides.

But before we’d had a chance to think about implementing this bold little project, the financial crash came. Only much later did I learn how close Iceland had come during that period to being bought by Russia, when it became clear that the net assets of the entire country were petty cash for the Kremlin.

Not for the first or last time, the realization struck me that working on a nation’s standing is just an idle game compared with the real forces that shape our world; the realization of our absolute, irreversible interdependence.

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