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In the “World’s Happiest Country,” 80 Percent Are Willing to Take Up Arms to Defend Their Homeland

Finland’s civil defense culture shows how historical memory, everyday preparedness, and public trust turn national resilience from an abstract ideal into a shared civic practice.

狗學校、博物館與防空洞的遊樂場：芬蘭如何將備戰與民防意識刻入日常

The Reporter · By 劉致昕 · 14 June 2026 · read the original in Chinese →

In the “World’s Happiest Country,” 80 Percent Are Willing to Take Up Arms to Defend Their Homeland「全球最幸福國家」有8成民眾願拿起武器保家衛國

連續9年在《世界幸福報告》（World Happiness Report）中名列全球榜首的芬蘭，還有另一項數字令其他國家自嘆不如。根據芬蘭國防資訊諮詢委員會（MTS）調查，當國家遭到攻擊且衝突結果不確定時，約8成芬蘭民眾願意拿起武器保衛國家；相較之下，歐盟國家的平均只有約3成。

Finland, which has ranked first in the World Happiness Report for nine consecutive years, has another figure that leaves other countries humbled. According to a survey by Finland’s Advisory Board for Defence Information (MTS), when the country is under attack and the outcome of the conflict is uncertain, roughly 80 percent of Finns are willing to take up arms to defend their country; by contrast, the average across EU countries is only about 30 percent.

擁有1,340公里陸地邊界、與俄羅斯接壤的芬蘭，如何在富足生活中保持備戰意識？怎麼在「幸福的日常」中融入民防訓練？《報導者》在芬蘭專訪指標性志工組織「赫爾辛基民防協會」（Helsingin Väestönsuojeluyhdistys ry），發現狗學校、博物館、地下游泳池和遊樂場，正隱藏著他們的韌性祕訣與決心。

With a 1,340-kilometer land border adjoining Russia, how does Finland preserve a readiness for war amid affluence? How does it fold civil defense training into the “happy everyday”? The Reporter interviewed the emblematic volunteer organization Helsinki Civil Defence Association (Helsingin Väestönsuojeluyhdistys ry) in Finland and found that dog schools, museums, underground swimming pools, and playgrounds conceal the secret of the country’s resilience and resolve.

Nearly 70, Helsinki resident Jukka Lehtiranta has a little travel map of his own. This itinerary has now also become a reason for foreign media and government delegations to visit Helsinki.

“First, you can go to the Merihaka metro station near us. It is a shelter that can accommodate 6,000 people; in ordinary times it is a swimming pool, children’s playground, and gym. Next, you can go to Central Station, where two arched steel doors are hidden. Because they are arched, they can withstand pressure as high as 18 bar, eighteen times normal atmospheric pressure. The blast doors at Kamppi metro station, meanwhile, are suspended from the ceiling. Six other metro stations are also air-raid shelters. If you look closely, you can see a metal strip on the ground. Giant blast-proof steel doors weighing several tons are normally concealed beneath the floor; in an emergency they rise upward, sealing off the outside and forming a completely airtight, three-dimensional CBRN protection space.”

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Lehtiranta, as chair of the Helsinki Civil Defence Association, has had to deliver this introduction several times almost every month. Over the past two or three years, foreign journalists and foreign government representatives have come one after another, trying to imagine and understand how spaces that citizens normally use for exercise, gatherings, exhibitions, and even the storage of classic sports cars would become Finland’s fortresses in wartime.

“Air-raid shelters are part of our lives. If children have played there since they were small, then when civil defense, drills, or a real emergency are discussed, people are probably less likely to panic.”「防空洞是我們生活的一部分。如果孩子們從小就在那裡玩，那麼談到民防、演習，或真的急難到來，大家也就比較不容易慌張了吧。」

After retiring from the communications giant Nokia, Lehtiranta has served as the volunteer chair of the Helsinki Civil Defence Association, hereafter the Civil Defence Association. These days, he spends half his life in an air-raid shelter that has been in operation since 1941.

Pushing open the semicircular door, one finds inside this 85-year-old air-raid shelter the Helsinki Civil Defence Museum, founded by the Civil Defence Association. As Lehtiranta led us along the winding path deeper inside, he explained how the bend of the corridors, the design of the doors, the ventilation ducts, the drainage valves, and other details provide protection in an emergency.

And after reminding us of the threshold beneath our feet, Lehtiranta asked us to look up: “We are inside granite bedrock. Where we are standing, roughly 10,000 years ago, there was still an ice sheet three to four kilometers thick above our heads. You can imagine how solid these rock strata must be to have withstood the test of the glaciers.”

Lehtiranta says such granite formations extend across almost all of Finland, and they are the natural condition that explains why Helsinki has 5,500 underground facilities. Yet beyond what nature has granted, what matters still more in civil defense is policy. Helsinki today can provide shelter space for one million people, more than its population; across Finland, shelters can accommodate as many as 4.8 million people. All of this is owed to more than half a century of policy investment.

Beginning in 1955, the Finnish government issued regulations requiring buildings larger than 600 square meters to include built-in shelter facilities, and it set clear standards for ventilation, toxic-gas protection, water supply, public health equipment, and other systems under extreme conditions. As the threat patterns of modern warfare and new technological tools have changed, this body of law has continued to keep pace. The hardware of air-raid shelters, the airtight pressure they can withstand, and more must be inspected regularly and upgraded to the latest standards.

“Many people now come to Finland and ask us how we did it. I think this whole museum is the answer,” Lehtiranta said.

Opened in 1999, the Helsinki Civil Defence Museum was converted from an air-raid shelter capable of holding 500 people. Its exhibition areas contain documents, objects, and reconstructions of crucial scenes. The oldest of these scenes is Finland 1,000 years ago.

At that time, people in Finland lived by village. Each village would identify a nearby hill and build a hillfort on it from stones and timber. When enemies came, the villagers would go up the hill together to defend themselves. To this day, nearly 100 such remains still exist in Finland.

“In every era, people have had ways to protect themselves and resist foreign enemies,” Lehtiranta said. The Civil Defence Museum’s exhibition is divided into two routes: one traces the evolution of defensive methods, the other the evolution of means of attack. Beginning with the use of poisonous snakes in ancient warfare, then the advent of aircraft and poison gas, the exhibition explains how changes in the form of war extended risk and the damage of attack far beyond the front lines where two armies met, all the way to cities and the rear. Bombing from aircraft and gas attacks did not strike only armies; civilians, too, were drawn into war. Thus, around the 1920s, the concept of “civil defense” emerged in Finland.

Pointing to a promotional poster from the period for “Air Defense and Anti-Gas Week,” Lehtiranta said that in 1927 the Finnish Anti-Gas Protection Association (Suomen Kaasusuojelujärjestö), hereafter the Anti-Gas Association, was founded chiefly because people felt the government was not doing enough, or doing it quickly enough. Civil society therefore launched an organization that began teaching the public about poison gas and holding drills, including how to put on protective gas equipment, how to wash and decontaminate, and even plans to set up its own gas-mask factory. The association also expanded into a national body. Several times a year it printed “fake newspapers” to simulate the circumstances of an attack; “Air Defense and Anti-Gas Week,” for example, called on civil society to spend a week at regular intervals drilling for situations of danger.

That same year, Finnish schools also began promoting civil defense courses. Lehtiranta speculates that, at the time, not many residents had radios or newspapers, so reaching families through students also became one strategy for promoting civil defense nationwide.

In 1934, the Anti-Gas Association founded a civil defense school in Helsinki and began formally training ordinary citizens. By this point, Finnish society’s understanding of emergency response was becoming more widespread; even horses, an important means of transport at the time, had their own gas masks. Today, by displaying these documents, posters, and even anti-gas equipment for different animals, the Helsinki Civil Defence Museum allows people to understand where Finland’s civil defense came from, how people in the past faced risk and danger, and how civil defense organizations of different generations, rising from the bottom up, stepped forward one by one in response to the times.

After the corridor introducing the history of civil defense, the other end of the museum is an educational space, where a documentary on the “Great Bombing of Helsinki” is screened and where there is lecture space for 50 people. Farther on lies the museum’s largest exhibition area: the wartime history of the Soviet-Finnish wars from 1939 to 1944.

To look back on those years is also to look back on a painful lesson in Finnish history. Although Finland broke free from Russian rule in 1917, after independence the country neglected the importance of building an army and investing in national defense. Only when Nazi Germany began its invasions and made a secret pact with the Soviet Union to divide Europe did Finland awaken to the fact that it had to confront the neighboring great power on its own, or face no fate but annexation.

The Civil Defence Museum records in detail the conflict known as the Winter War. “That is because after the Winter War ended, many Finns realized: if we had planned and prepared then, life under catastrophe might have been different; every civilian and volunteer could have done more for society,” Lehtiranta noted. After the Winter War, nearly 200 civil defense organizations were founded across Finland, including the Helsinki Civil Defence Association where he serves.

In August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Non-Aggression Pact, whose secret additional protocol divided Eastern Europe into their spheres of influence; Finland, along with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, was assigned to the Soviet Union. In September and October that year, invoking this secret pact and relying on great-power coercion, the Soviet Union forced the three Baltic states to sign agreements that were formally “mutual assistance” pacts but in substance allowed Soviet troops to enter and occupy them.

Stalin then turned the Soviet Union’s next target toward Finland, issuing an ultimatum demanding the cession of defensive fortresses and the lease of ports. Finland knew that compromise would be tantamount to national extinction and firmly refused to yield. After negotiations collapsed, the Soviet Union staged the Mainila incident itself, attacking its own troops and blaming Finland. On this pretext, it launched a full-scale invasion of Finland on November 30, 1939, beginning the Winter War after large-scale air raids.

Facing a million Soviet troops and armored forces, the poorly supplied Finnish army displayed immense national resilience. Using the bitter cold and forest terrain, and dressed in white snow camouflage, they waged agile guerrilla warfare, dealing heavy blows to an unprepared Soviet army and creating a military miracle in which the few struck the many. Although Finland, its ammunition exhausted and aid cut off, was ultimately forced in March 1940 to cede 11 percent of its most valuable territory, including the Karelian Isthmus, compared with the three Baltic states that were soon wholly annexed by the Soviet Union and completely lost their statehood, Finland still miraculously preserved its independence and sovereignty.

The period from August 1939 to the formal outbreak of war in November became, in Finnish history, a time when civil defense was rapidly legalized. The Winter War and the subsequent four-year Continuation War, in which Soviet power was thoroughly repelled, became a nationwide war of resistance in which Finnish society, regardless of gender or age, developed all kinds of civil defense and military-civilian cooperation mechanisms, further shaping Finnish national character.

The Civil Defence Museum does not whitewash the past. Its Winter War exhibition lays out a chain of lessons.

First came the shortage of air-raid shelters. During the Winter War, Helsinki was bombed more than 50 times, with a total of 16,500 bombs amounting to 2,600 metric tons. “A historian calculated that if all those bombs had hit Helsinki, on average one bomb would have fallen every nine meters. Russia intended to blast Helsinki to pieces.” Pointing to photographs in the exhibition, Lehtiranta recalled that on the eve of war the government hurriedly issued civil defense regulations, such as instructions telling people how to reinforce their home cellars with wood or block first-floor doors and windows with sandbags; even parks and large sewer systems were converted into temporary shelters.

But the greatest problem was the large-scale fires caused by bombardment. Once the common wooden buildings of the time caught fire, entire blocks would be affected. The government therefore mobilized all residents to move flammable objects out of their homes and store them together, and to pile sand and water on rooftops in an effort to reduce the damage after bombing. Hardest to imagine is that wartime citizens also designated “watchers” to remain on every household’s roof; if a house was unfortunately bombed, they had to put out the fire at the first possible moment to prevent it from spreading.

Second were the difficulties in keeping the city running after mass evacuation. Because there were no air-raid shelter facilities at the time, people had to leave their homes. But after the evacuation, Helsinki, originally a city of 250,000 people, had just over 60,000 remaining, and the severe shortage of manpower caused many problems.

Finally, there was the gap between alarms and public response. People at the time did not know what would happen to a city under attack after war broke out, and there was no reliable, rapid communications system. Although the Finnish government urgently installed an alarm system loud enough to be heard, the public’s limited understanding of air raids, sheltering, and wartime response meant that people later began to distrust the alarms. As a result, when a real air raid came, some people still ignored the warning, causing the tragedy of heavy civilian casualties.

Lehtiranta explained the photographs one by one, holding back his emotion. In a reconstructed domestic kitchen in one corner of the museum, he explained to us how, under conditions of extreme difficulty, those who stayed in the city cooperated across military and civilian lines to resist a war that nearly destroyed it.

Food in the kitchen was rationed then. No one could eat their fill; everything was allocated according to workload, to ensure people had the strength to work. For mothers cooking at home, everything from caring for children alone to preparing food was a difficulty; once they took off the apron, many women also had to assume medical and logistical roles. Many students became assistants to soldiers, useful in air defense, sentry duty, and supply work; even the scouts had their own assigned tasks in municipal work and other nonmilitary public duties.

Next to the kitchen are photographs of air defense from the period. Visitors can see the “barrage fire” air-defense method developed by a colonel: the sky was divided into different grids, and each anti-aircraft gun calculated the angle required to fire into the different grids, the gun elevation, the aiming method, and the time lag before explosion. When lookouts spotted the enemy and reported the direction of flight to the commander, the commander would order anti-aircraft units to bombard specific grids with phosphorus shells.

Thus, as enemy aircraft flew, a “wall of explosions” would appear before them. Most enemy pilots therefore decided not to continue forward; after dropping their bombs early, they turned back. Lehtiranta said a study published in 2023 found that this air-defense method, based on military-civilian cooperative observation, meant that in the end only 25 percent of pilots could fly as far as Helsinki, and only 5 percent of the shells successfully landed and exploded there.

In another unassuming corner of the museum, there is an unusual reconstruction of what a basement looked like then.

Lehtiranta led us over. After bending down to enter, it was as if we had stepped into a wooden-reinforced cellar in the basement of a home at the time. Then the reconstructed alarms and bombing sounds rang out one after another; the ceiling and walls of the exhibition space even shook as the air-raid shelters did then.

“We have had elderly people who lived through the war bring their descendants here. Between two generations, three generations, many conversations began this way. But there are also people who cannot speak at all. As soon as the alarm sounds, their tears begin to fall.”

Lehtiranta says the museum is one of the Helsinki Civil Defence Association’s missions. Once people understand the city’s past, its wartime resistance and cooperation, and the origins of civil defense, they naturally begin to think about what they themselves can do now.

The association’s second and third missions, therefore, are to lower the threshold for action and enable citizens to participate directly in national defense.

Lehtiranta himself is the best example. “I joined the association because my daughter had a German shepherd.” He lowered his head and shyly took a sip of tea. One day in 2001, his daughter suddenly adopted a newborn stray dog and asked her father to help raise it. Then father and daughter discovered that an organization near their home ran a dog school, perfectly suited to a dog that needed activity. This became their first point of contact with the Helsinki Civil Defence Association.

The association not only recruits search-and-rescue dogs through its dog school; it also trains people. Its long educational tradition has even helped it win places many times in world-class search-and-rescue dog competitions. Standing before an entire wall of puppy photographs, Lehtiranta introduced their 190-person search-and-rescue team division: it trains weekly during spring and summer, and currently 50 people are registered in the national emergency rescue mechanism. Once a search-and-rescue mission arises or war is encountered, they are specialists the state can quickly call up and mobilize.

After building the community, the Helsinki Civil Defence Association joined its own capacities with government collaboration, together with the formal military training of the National Defence Training Association of Finland (MPK), so that the public and private sectors jointly provide courses such as basic civil defense training and shelter survival training. The Civil Defence Association has also launched its most acclaimed course: professional training for shelter operators, which over two days prepares participants to become professional operators capable of running a shelter for 6,000 people. The association now has 109 certified shelter operators, who in an emergency would immediately take their positions and become part of the government’s defense.

“We are only one of many civil society groups. Other friendly organizations focus specifically on women volunteers or on children; each group has its own way of promoting civil defense and helping its own community find a place,” Lehtiranta added. All of them work closely with the Finnish national and local units that coordinate and manage emergency relief.

Just before we arrived for the interview, a central government official had left the museum. “That official is actually also a member, just not a very active one beyond paying dues,” Lehtiranta said with a wry smile. The Civil Defence Association currently has more than 400 members and is sustained by an annual fee of 21 euros, about NT$765. In return, the association offers members first-aid courses with a market value of 200 euros, about NT$7,300.

The visitors to the museum that day were not only Finnish officials. On Lehtiranta’s desk also lay the business card of a Polish journalist and gifts brought by the Taiwanese government. “A few days ago it was Germany. The question everyone asks is: ‘Why do people take part in civil defense?’” Lehtiranta said. Visiting delegations are all struggling with how to communicate with the public and awaken public participation, reflecting a common anxiety among countries around the world in this era.

The representatives from Germany also asked Lehtiranta: Do you think these shelters will one day be used?

“I answered: ‘If war really breaks out, these shelters will be used. But all the effort is made so that war does not happen.’”「我回答：『如果真的爆發戰爭，這些避難所會被啟用。但所有的努力，都是為了讓戰爭不發生。』」

“What the shelter system builds is public confidence. This has to do with ‘resilience.’ Everything you see here, woven together, is building confidence for the people.”

Lehtiranta does not think Finland is truly superior to other countries in any way. It is simply that historical events have taught Finns the aggressive nature of their neighbor Russia, and history has also told them that those who do not prepare will pay the price.

“After Ukraine was fully invaded, I went back and looked for materials, and came to understand Finland’s own history of invasion. Before the Winter War, there was the event Finns call the ‘Great Wrath,’ Isoviha. From 1713 to 1721, Russian troops invaded Finland, plundering and destroying within its territory, setting fire to everything, more brutal than ordinary invaders. I’m not entirely sure what they really wanted.

“So we have a very deep historical memory of the ‘cross-border tradition’ of our neighbor to the east. Every now and then, they come across the line.

“Russia as a threat has not ‘really troubled’ us, because we know they have always been a threat. Finland has an unattractive saying: ‘A Russian is a Russian, even if you fry him in butter. (Ryssä on ryssä, vaikka voissa paistaisi.)’ It means their nature is simply not to do things in our way.

“That said, there are also Russian members in our search-and-rescue team, and over the years I have had several Russian colleagues at work, so this has nothing to do with individuals.”「話雖如此，我們搜救隊裡也有俄羅斯成員，我多年來在職場上有過幾位俄羅斯同事，所以這跟個人無關。」

After recognizing that nature, people ask themselves: Have we prepared the supplies, skills, knowledge, and psychological readiness? If not, then go to a civil defense organization and draw up a rescue plan for when disaster occurs. For many Finns, this is a “shared responsibility.”

Lehtiranta speculates that the reason “shared responsibility” has become part of being Finnish may have to do with geography and culture. Historically, when Finns moved from hunting to agriculture, communities were not large. Especially in eastern Finland, covered in boreal forest, simply opening fields required logging, leveling the land, and clearing all vegetation before the soil beneath could be found. In the end, they also had to race ice and snow to farm. Cooperation and mutual aid were thus etched into Finns’ memory of survival.

To survive, Finns had to shoulder shared responsibility; the same is true when disaster strikes. In 1827, for example, Turku, then Finland’s largest city, suffered the worst urban fire in Nordic history, and the following year Finland established its first volunteer fire brigade. After the 1939 Winter War, Finland also saw a wave of civil defense organizations. Another example came in 1963, when a five-year-old girl in northern Finland went missing. The whole country mobilized support within five days, but because of inadequate command and communications coordination and because volunteers lacked professional training, the golden window for rescue was missed; her body was finally found on the thirteenth day. This tragedy led the following year to the founding of the Voluntary Rescue Service (Vapaaehtoinen Pelastuspalvelu, Vapepa). At the time, 50 companies and 50 associations jointly signed an agreement to form a national rescue network. Today, more than 10,000 volunteers nationwide are on call around the clock; with a single phone call, the police can summon support to assist joint searches anywhere in Finland.

Lehtiranta points out that whether it is a city’s great fire, a war, or the death of a missing girl, “we always ask: What if we had been prepared? If on the first day the girl was lost we had had as many people, capabilities, and organization as we had on the fifth day, the outcome might have been completely different.”

Under external threats and natural disasters that cannot be changed, creating a different outcome for one’s own safety and interests: this is the purest reason Finns take part in civil defense.

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In the “World’s Happiest Country,” 80 Percent Are Willing to Take Up Arms to Defend Their Homeland

In the “World’s Happiest Country,” 80 Percent Are Willing to Take Up Arms to Defend Their Homeland「全球最幸福國家」有8成民眾願拿起武器保家衛國

“I answered: ‘If war really breaks out, these shelters will be used. But all the effort is made so that war does not happen.’”「我回答：『如果真的爆發戰爭，這些避難所會被啟用。但所有的努力，都是為了讓戰爭不發生。』」

Seeking Truth in Depth, Walking with Many Voices深度求真 眾聲同行

Seeking Truth in Depth, Walking with Many Voices深度求真眾聲同行