Educate me on Finland as part of Sweden
Currently reading about Finland's status as part of Sweden, a favorite subject of mine.
I was inspired to create this thread by the other one about Ottomans effects in the Balkans. Here I've attempted to explain why some people think as they do and argue against that thinking with arguments based on explaining the circumstances. This thread's foremost purpose is to reach an accurate picture of Finland's status as part of Sweden and has nothing to do with me trying to wash any hands.
1. ''Finland had to fight for itself and was an expendable battleground''
This argument claims that although part of Sweden, it was nothing but an expendable buffer region against Russia, the battleground between the two nations. This has a quite natural explanation. First of all the location was located inbetween Novgorod (later Muscovy & Russia - for simplicity's sake I will hereby refer to all three as Russia) and Sweden.
The other part, which is my own conclusion, is that Sweden itself was not agriculturally rich in the first place and supplying an army in Finland was a nightmare for anyone involved because of the landscape and the very sparse population which meant that there were no centers to control. This meant that a kind of indecisive guerilla warfare tended to surface in Finland since a decisive conclusion was rarely possible, bringing with itself long grinds between Russia and Sweden. There were no cities to capture, no armies to face and crush, no prosperous areas to conquer.
The third reason is that Sweden constantly had to guard itself against attacks by Denmark-Norway. Even during the Finnish War which tore Finland from Sweden, a lot of Swedish troops could not be deployed in Finland because it would mean that Sweden itself would lie completely open to Danish-Norwegian attack.
In conclusion, this argument is founded upon the reality of Sweden's situation and Finland's natural makeup but makes the fault of assuming that this was an engineering on Sweden's part. On the contrary, Sweden fought a war for thirty years trying to bring the Finnish border further east during the middle ages of Russian-Swedish wars. Later on the provinces of Kexholm & Ingria would be annexed into Sweden. The only purpose of Kexholm was to serve as a buffer region for Finland proper - Gustav Adolf II himself said, presumably about Kexholm, that he ''hoped it would be hard for the Russian to jump across this lake''. Ingria had the same purpose along with the strategic motivation of forcing Russian trade to pass through Swedish land.
2. ''Finns were mistreated second-class citizens in Sweden''
This I have found to have a more tangible foundation:
1) The Finnish language was not supposed to be used for official purposes outside of church duties.
2) Finns were exploited by Swedes.
The first one is a rather natural occurance considering that Finland was an integrated part of Sweden. Finnish was supressed in official matters because the Swedish statesmen wished to maintain unity in the country and bring about closer integration, the same aim of Karl XI's politics in the mid-late 17th century. Danish and Norwegian received the same treatment but harsher until the provinces of Jämtland, Härjedal, Skåne, Halland & Bohuslän - but not Gotland which was simply Swedish under Danish rule AFAIK - had become culturally Swedish and the policy was no longer necessary.
You won't find people speaking Finnish on these boards either outside of the foreign language part. Everyday useage of Finnish was completely accepted though. I would think that the reason stuff like newspapers were (correct me if I'm wrong) always written in Swedish was that it was simply more convenient as Swedes would understand it too, that would also bring about larger Finnish knowledge of Swedish, rather than some national policy of language suppression. Back in those days a lot of people - many, many more than today - knew and spoke Swedish in Finland. Most of them were either Finns that simply spoke Swedish (most frequent near the coastline) or Finland-Swedes, ie. Finns with Swedish background.
Part of this goes hand in hand with the second reason. Because the coastline and its hinterlands contained the vast bulk of the Swedish-speaking population, was the easiest & closest to access from anywhere else in the Swedish realm and was where much/most of the population was located, it only makes sense to focus development and such on this region. One must understand that the reason for this is not that Finns in the inland were disregarded, but that in short summary inland Finland was much larger and less valuable while also being much harder to get around etc. I would think that the people living near the coastline happening to speak Swedish was a favorite pretext for accusations of mistreatment against Finns among later Finnish nationalists.
Also, I have heard that Finns were in general just simply treated worse than Swedes by the Swedish state. This has two parts. One; Finland was a poorer, less populated area than Sweden which led to there also being less nobles, which in turn meant that more of Finland than Sweden was crown land rather than noble land. Crown lands didn't have to pay taxes to a noble but were required to conscript proportionally more men than noble lands. It was exactly the same in Sweden, but here more land was held by nobles. This ceased to be the case after Karl XI reformed Indelingsverket, the system of recruitment in Sweden, which had previously relied more on just conscripting people than formal training and proportional numbers of recruits. With this reform ended the indirect injustice that was the greater conscription of Finns.
There are also accounts of Finns being harshly taxed and so on. To this I say that it was the same in Sweden. Swedish peasants were taxed just as harshly. The difference could be related to the first argument in that Sweden pretty much never experienced a foreign invasion after a while in history while Finland continued to be invaded by Russia, thus imposing relatively harsher conditions. Basically, the mistake is that Finland gets viewed as a separate entity as if Swedish policies were only subject to Finland but not to Sweden. Thus, general harshness is misconstructed into anti-Finn treatment. Contrary to other cases such as Ottoman dominance of the Balkans where riots and uprisings were relatively frequent compared to Finland where the only thing of note that has happened is a very small nationalist officer conspiracy 20 years before Russia annexed Finland, Finns seem by my conclusion to have experienced this more as harsh times than an effort on Sweden's part to crack down on Finland.
3. ''Finland was better off without Sweden''
This argument is born out of Finland's autonomous existance, which brought great development to Finland. The thing is that it did the same to Sweden simply as a result of the 19th century. Everything that improved in Finland improved in Sweden too at the same time. The only thing that imo holds any credit here is that Finnish became the language for official matters in Finland, a title previously held by Swedish. This meant that officials didn't have to know Swedish any longer. As it had always been, it was still in the interest of anyone who wished to deal with a Swede to learn Swedish since the two languages couldn't communicate with eachother. Only with the coming of English has this been rendered moot. This helps to explain why coast-Finns to inland-Finns had and continue to have different proportions of Swedish aptitude since the former group was much closer both by geography and travel time to Sweden.
Also, Finns were not required to serve in the military anymore in Russia. I explain this as a conscious effort on Russia's part to becalm the Finns into acceptance since the Russians were very aware of Finnish skepticism against Russia, what with migrations to Sweden and constant guerilla resistance during the Finnish War out of fear of becoming part of Russia. Russia could afford to appease the poor backwater of Finland in a way Sweden could not afford to do and Sweden was not in the same shoes as Russia on the matter anyway, it would be like suddenly starting to appease a random part of the country just because. Russians knew that they couldn't afford to treat Finland the same way they treated what would come to be called Old Finland, which was annexed earlier during the 18th century and not appeased, which was a large part of why Finns were so wary of Russian rule during the Finnish War - they saw the effects of Russian rule right across the border. Of course, Finns couldn't care less whatever agenda Russia had with doing this because they were being appeased, which is a perfectly reasonable way of thinking if a bit of a misrepresentation of the real situation.
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Originally Posted by Trax
that sounds so damn hilarious man! someone should make a comic based on what you just said, or just the Baltic in general.
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oh the irony!
But better part of Sweden than Russia.
