Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Finland, territorially almost as large as Germany, has only 5.5 million residents, most of them concentrated in the southern triangle formed by the capital, Helsinki, the textile-producing complex of Tampere, and the shipbuilding center of Turku. A land of evergreen forests and glacial lakes, Finland’s national income has long been sustained by wood and wood-product exports. But the Finns have now developed a more diversified economy with staple agricultural crops and the manufacture of precision machinery and telecommunications equipment. Finland’s environmental challenges and relative location have created cultural landscapes similar to those of northern Sweden and Norway, but the Finns are not a Scandinavian people—their linguistic and historical affinities are with the Estonians across the Gulf of Finland to the south. In fact, other ethnic groups speaking these Finno-Ugric languages are also widely dispersed across what is today western Russia. Finland shares a long border with Russia, and during the Cold War it had to tread very carefully in international affairs. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union it joined the EU in 1995 . . ."