Safe & Sound: Finland's Contemporary Tourism Identity in Times of Polycrises

Abstract

This thesis examines political speeches and tourism campaigns as co-creators of the modern Finnish country image and brand. The study frames Finland as an adjacent country — one affected by crisis but not directly involved in it. The thesis focuses on the crisis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its political implications.

The research is guided by one main question and three sub-questions. The main question asks how Finnish tourism campaigns and political leadership narratives co-construct Finland's nation brand around happiness and resilience following 2022. The sub-questions address each channel separately and the relationship between them.

The thesis applies Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), drawing on Fairclough, Wodak, Van Dijk, and Slemon on silence-as-data. The corpus consists of 55 source texts and 127 coded passages, covering Visit Finland and Business Finland campaigns, governmental strategy documents, international press coverage, and speeches of political figureheads — Presidents Sauli Niinistö and Alexander Stubb and former Prime Minister Sanna Marin. A five-claim coding scheme (happiness, safety/silence, sisu, continuity, World Happiness Report ranking) was applied across three Faircloughian levels.

The major finding is the identification of an asymmetric two-channel mechanism, in which the tourism channel maintains strategic silence on insecurity while the political channel openly carries the security register, with vocabulary running one-directionally from tourism into political speech. Without convergence between the channels, this asymmetry is what allows the Finnish brand to cohere through the post-2022 era.