Driftwood theory

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Finnish. (September 2023) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 204 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Finnish Wikipedia article at [[:fi:Ajopuuteoria]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|fi|Ajopuuteoria}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Driftwood theory" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The driftwood theory (Finnish: ajopuuteoria, Swedish: drivvedsteorin) states that Finland's involvement in the Second World War was the consequence of inadvertent decisions made on the basis of a limited choice of policies, emphasizing its reactive stance rather than inherent aggression.

The first arguments that Finland drifted into the Continuation War were made for the war responsibility trials in 1945 by the Hornborg committee, whose final report criticized Finnish political leadership for being passive and fatalistic. In the actual war responsibility trials of 1945–1946, the defense claimed that the defendants lacked active responsibility for the outbreak and continuation of the conflict.

In 1948, the professor and historian Arvi Korhonen anonymously published the book Finland in the World War II, in which he interpreted Finland as having acted only as the defender of Western society against communism, and denied all collaboration with Germany. During the war, the German ambassador Wipert von Blücher had written in 1950 that Finland had been at the great powers' mercy, entirely without the possibility of an independent political solution. In his memoirs, Blücher used the analogy of a piece of driftwood to describe Finland's situation: "In the battle of great powers the free will of small states has very narrow limits. Finland was drawn into the whirlpools of great power politics the way a swift Finnish stream snatches a driftwood."

Opposing viewpoints also formed, and in 1957 American Charles Leonard Lundin published Finland in the Second World War, in which he emphasized Finns' activeness and guilt in the war. However, the work contained factual errors, which inspired Arvi Korhonen to write Operation Barbarossa and Finland, again representing Finland as the innocent victim of great-power politics. Korhonen cited Blücher and established the driftwood theory, according to which Finland was forced into involvement in the world war.