ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the changing meanings of progress in Finnish politics from the 1930s to the 1960s. Particular attention is paid to the transformation of the Finnish agrarian republican political tradition, under the influence of which Kekkonen started his political career. The chapter unpacks Kekkonen's relationship to the then-available narratives of progress, understood broadly as social and political improvement. The rhetoric of the Agrarian League before the Second World War centred on the figure of the talonpoika, a freeholder peasant. The original Alkio-ist narrative of progress emphasized the nation state, democratic participation, and the superiority of the rural form of life over the cities and their conflicts, which had their ideological expressions in market capitalism and socialism. Perhaps the most original of these variations was the narrative of economic and ideological 'convergence' that shaped both Finland's domestic and foreign policies during the 1960s.
