Politics & Power Quote by Harri Holkeri

Holkeri is doing something politicians do when they want to defuse panic without denying the pain: he normalizes catastrophe. By placing Finland’s 1918 civil war alongside Ireland’s revolutionary violence and then casually roping in the United States, he reframes civil conflict as a grim but familiar companion to state-building rather than a national aberration. The intent isn’t to excuse bloodshed; it’s to puncture the myth that “successful” countries are born clean.

The line works because it quietly shifts the moral geography. Civil war stops being a uniquely Finnish failure or an Irish tragedy and becomes almost a structural feature of “newly independent nations” - a phrase that sounds clinical, even inevitable. That little “almost every time present” is a rhetorical softener: not a deterministic law of history, but close enough to argue that shame and surprise are misplaced.

Subtext: independence doesn’t just produce flags and parliaments; it produces a fight over who counts as “the people,” who owns institutions, land, language, and legitimacy. Holkeri’s comparison also implies a warning. If civil war is common at the founding, then the real achievement is not purity but stabilization: building procedures that make conflict routinized (elections, courts, coalition politics) instead of lethal.

Context matters. Holkeri came from a Finland that had turned a brutally divided society into a high-trust welfare state, and he later operated in international diplomacy. The quote reads like a bridge-builder’s argument: history is messy, so stop treating political fracture as proof that a nation cannot cohere.