On Monday, September 22, HSSH director Risto Kunelius moderated a panel discussion with Elina Holmberg (Senior Director of EU collaborations, Business Finland), Gabi Lombardo (Director, EASSH), Jesse Maula (CEO, Ecobio), and Ville Niinistö (Member of European Parliament, former Minister of Environment of Finland) about the tensions between sivistys/bildung and the new EU research policy preparations.
The panel discussion took place in Helsinki Central Library Oodi’s Maijansali hall at 12:30-13:30 and was hosted by the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities (EASSH) and its member universities in Finland: the University of Helsinki, the University of Eastern Finland, Turku University of Applied Sciences, the University of Turku, and the University of Oulu.
The Maijansali was relaxed as the audience and panellists arrived leisurely with a quiet lofi-music playing at the background. After short informal greetings, and everyone finding their own places, Kunelius gave a welcoming speech and opened the event. The theme of the discussion was to explore how the EU’s policy focus, centering for example on green transition and digitalization, is shifting towards new key concepts such as competitiveness, security, and defence, and what this shift means for social sciences and humanities (SSH). Kunelius introduced the concept of bildung (sivistys) as a 19th-century idea combining knowledge, ethics, responsibility, and self-critique. The aim of the panel discussion was to figure out what bildung could mean today.
Bildung vs competitiveness
The first part of the discussion addressed tensions between competitiveness and societal values, as well as a worry about SSH fields becoming limited to crisis management research.
Holmberg stressed that competitiveness must serve broader societal goals and cannot be separated from social impacts. She highlighted the role of critical thinking in an AI-driven world, arguing that well-educated citizens are key to safeguarding democracy.
Lombardo emphasized that SSH already underpins Europe’s service economy. According to her, the real question is not about the importance of SSH but the political question whether Europe wants to maintain its human-centric industrial model that is based on fairness and rule of law. She stressed the need for scaling up SSH funding in EU to address major challenges like migration and climate change.
Maula noted that SSH are important since the more complex the world is the more education we need just to keep peace in societies. Furthermore, solving big problems with innovation requires having highly educated people. On the other hand, Maula argued that Europe has an opportunity to lead in AI and green technologies as long as it becomes more attractive for companies around the world.
Niinistö warned that the rules-based international system is eroding and framed the challenge in current EU policy preparations as whether competitiveness will be interpreted narrowly or broadly to include environmental and societal concerns. He highlighted the need for more education that fosters skills AI cannot replace.
When it comes to science funding, panellists agreed that excellence should remain the basis for allocation and warned against political interference. Lombardo reminded that science is meant to create ecosystems for thinking, not provide instant solutions.
How to inject bildung into competitiveness
Kunelius asked the panellists how SSH experts can better integrate into industry and interdisciplinary projects. Maula and Niinistö noted that Finland lags behind countries like Sweden in embedding SSH expertise in business strategies. They both also emphasized that there is a clear demand for companies to understand the end customers’ social contexts and wider surroundings of their new technological implementations. SSH insights are essential for companies to be able to provide more human-centric end products as well as comprehensive solutions with complex societal entanglements (eg. ecocities).
Lombardo added that the integration of SSH hasn’t happened evenly across different fields. For example, she explained that the portion of SSH publications in environmental climate change research goes up to 7-8%, whereas in health and life sciences the number is around 0.05%. Lombardo also pointed out that SSH researchers themselves are partly to blame for the lack of integration. According to Lombardo, SSH researchers often hold prejudiced attitudes towards engineering fields and silently prefer staying in their isolation. As social scientists and humanists, we need to know what we bring to the table but also bring it, Lombardo encouraged.
Audience questions
Audience comments raised issues such as diversity of language and educational standards in EU and the importance of Nordic cooperation. One comment inquired whether bildung could be framed as a form of defence. Responses varied: Holmberg supported the idea, Maula worried that there is still no consensus of what bildung means, and Lombardo warned that many would not buy the story since the whole idea of an active knowledge society is under attack globally and being replaced by the ideas of compliance and resilience. Niinistö acknowledged the viability of the strategy but cautioned against reducing bildung entirely to defence rhetoric.
Other questions addressed funding biases and the misconception that critical thinking lacks economic value. Lombardo criticized outdated funding systems prevalent in all OECD countries and defended the importance of critical thinking. Critical thinking is always needed since even perfect systems can get things wrong and messy because they’ll always be ultimately managed by people, she noted.
At the end of the discussion, the panellists encouraged SSH communities to claim their rightful role in shaping Europe’s future. They urged SSH researchers and actors to engage in decision-making boards, influence actively in Brussels, and demonstrate why their research is important.