Gambling, Space, and Time: Shifting Boundaries and Cultures

Chapter 3: Gambling, Space, and Boundaries in Finland

60 3 Gambling, space, and Boundaries in Finland pa u l i i n a r a e n t o The Finns are gamblers. Eighty-seven percent of the country’s 5.3 million people participate in some form of gambling during their lifetimes , and an average household spends roughly 200 euros on gambling per year.1 Gambling is a prominent part of Finnish everyday culture and landscapes . Games are available at the nearest kiosk and grocery store, and Saturday Night Lotto is among the most popular television programs in the country . The general attitude supports gambling, because the profits are returned to society and because the state licenses and regulates the operators. However , major changes have taken place in Finnish gambling and its regulation over the past decades and continue to characterize the scene. Boundaries steering individual access to gambling, attention to problem gambling, and academic gambling research are all recent and debated phenomena in Finland. Finland’s membership in the European Union (since 1995) and the Internet have challenged the national operators’ monopoly and emphasis on national territorial boundaries. The Finnish government licenses three gambling operators, each of which holds exclusive rights to certain forms of gambling in mainland Finland. The gross gaming revenue of these three organizations was about €1.2 billion in 2009. The autonomous swedish-speaking province of the Åland Islands off the southwestern coast has its own gambling operator, the rapid expansion of which in Internet gambling has further challenged the national operators. In this chapter I examine contemporary Finnish gambling, its spaces, and its challenges from the perspective of boundaries. The (mostly Finnishlanguage ) sources include the gambling operators’ and some other organizations ’ annual reports and press releases, legal documents, and editorials, news reports, and feature articles from the Finnish print media in the 2000s. The examination draws support from my own observations and experiences as a Finnish citizen, gambling scholar, and consumer of these operators’ ser- Gambling, space, and Boundaries in Finland | 61 vices, and from informal chats with colleagues and industry experts. Previous academic research on Finnish gambling supports the assessment, but is still in its infancy, even if important steps toward higher quantity and quality have been taken recently. The assessment is arranged per scale, a basic concept in geography: an overview of the national setting is followed by a discussion about local and regional spaces, personal boundaries and the microscale of Finland’s only brick-and-mortar casino, and the virtual, borderless, and thus global space of the Internet. The discussion shows how the changing regulatory context of the European Union conditions all these spaces and their boundaries—and related conflicts, which in this chapter are exemplified with the case of the Åland Islands. among the outcomes of these processes are shifts in moral, legal, social, and scholarly boundaries in Finnish society. The National Setting The division of labor in Finnish law regarding gambling is both territorial and functional. The law regulates a tripartite monopoly system within mainland Finland, primarily through the Ministry of the Interior and the government . The provincial administration of the Åland Islands governs and controls all gambling activity in this autonomous swedish-speaking province off the southwestern coast.2 In the mainland, the law gives exclusive rights to slot machines, casino games, and casino operations to Finland’s slot Machine association RaY, the country’s oldest gambling organization (founded in 1938).3 Veikkaus, a state-owned limited company, generates money for Finnish culture through lotteries, betting games, and instant games. The roots of the company date back to 1940, when Finnish sports organizations founded the “Tipping agency” in order to support the status of Finnish sports through football (soccer) betting. arts, science, and youth work were added to the list of beneficiaries in the 1950s, and the state acquired the company in the mid-1970s.4 a more recent entry to the scene is Fintoto Limited, which was founded in 2001 as a subsidiary of the Finnish Trotting and Breeding association suomen Hippos to further organize horse betting in Finland. The licenses of these three operators have been issued for five years at a time. The current license is valid until the end of 2011, by which time the monopoly has been written more solidly into law as a conclusion of a legal reform of gambling launched in the late 2000s.5 The law requires that the three operators channel their net profits to society . From RaY a sum of €368 million was distributed to...