Olli Rehn Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Olli, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you very much.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born and raised in Eastern Finland, some 100 kilometers from the Russian-Finnish border.
Is that a rural area?
The area around it is a rather rural and dependent on forestry and agriculture. But it's a provincial capital where I was raised and born, called Mikeli. It was the headquarters town of the Finnish armed forces during the Winter War and the Second World War.
So were there a lot of museums and remembrances of that?
There are, there are, yes.
Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?
They did quite a lot. My father was an orphan and a self-made man in business -- spare parts and car sales. As an entrepreneur, he certainly taught me the value of entrepreneurship in life. My mother, in the meantime, was the first university student of her family and she became an English teacher. So I read The Economist and Newsweek at home while in high school. I guess that must have had some impact on my thinking.
What about teachers? Any teachers, either as a young person or later, who shaped your thinking and influenced the directions that your career took?
I had a very remarkable history teacher, I would say, who, during the time of the Cold War and the pressure from the Soviet Union, was very staunchly, let's say, defending the basic values of the Finnish society. He was a good liberal, who gave us a lot of food for thought for our later life.
The fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of the [Berlin] Wall must have had a real impact on people in that local community -- we'll talk about Finland later -- but so close to the border.
Well, it had not so much immediately, because Finland was a market economy and was part of the West even during the Cold War, in terms of its societal system. But, of course, after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the immediate pressure was relieved, and therefore Finland could more freely consider her own future.
Where were you educated, and what was your field of study?
My field of study was political science and economics. I did, also, some journalism. I studied mainly at the University of Helsinki, but I spent one year at McAllister College in Minnesota, in the Midwest. I got my doctoral degree from the University of Oxford, England.
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