User:Tuomas/Finnish-Swedish relations

This article is intended to focus on 20th century relations between the governments of Sweden and Finland, but also on the relations between the "peoples" as represented by the public opinions in the both countries.

Background

Although Finland-connected issues during the 20th century have been more crucial for Sweden's cabinets, and among other things caused the demission of two foreign ministers, than the relation to any other international power, the relationship with Sweden has been even more crucial for Finland. Sweden has physically, politically, and culturally been Finland's link to the rest of the Western World, that the Finns were very eager to maintain despite the geographical closeness to the Soviet Union.

When Sweden was organized as a modern and Lutheran centralized nation-state by king Gustav Vasa in the first half of the 16th century, what today is Finland had already been an integrate part of Sweden for some centuries. Most of it was barely populated peripherial parts, but similar parts existed also elsewhere in Gustav Vasa's kingdom. Exactly from when these peripherial parts is to be considered parts of Sweden proper is not so simple to say, it depends on which criteria to use, as the unification of Sweden was gradual, and the incorporation of the periphery can be viewed as events in that process that was completed first in the mid-14th century. The start of Finland's association with Sweden may be given as the mid-12th century, as the Treaty of Nöteborg (1323), or as 1362. In any case, what later would become Finland was traditional parts of Sweden long before Jämtland in mid-Sweden, or all of Sweden's west coast, including Gothenburg, and also long before the populous Scania and Blekinge in the South became Swedish.

However, the seed of a future divide between Finland and Sweden was internal strifes in Sweden that chiefly were connected with power-struggles between the sons of Gustav Vasa, but also with plans for a closer association between Sweden and Catholic Poland, an idea that not the least noblemen from Finland supported. Unfortunately, for them, another party would ultimately come out on top, and plenty of noblemen who mostly were magnates of local extraction were replaced by men without connection to the land they were granted lordship over. Ultimately Sweden made her entry into the Thirty Years War, that came to be more successful than anyone could have anticipated. The fateful net effect was territorial gains in South-Scandinavia and south of the Baltic Sea. Sweden's interest, that for half-a-millenium at least had been primarily directed eastwards, was now redirected southwards. Muscovy was temporarily weakened after the Time of Troubles, and several generations later, when the Russians had regained strength, it turned out that Sweden couldn't, or at least didn't, once again refocus on the threat from the East, and in a process that lasted from year 1700 and the Great Northern War to year 1809 when the Finnish War was concluded, the Russian Empire conquered all Swedish land east of Scandinavia, most of which by then was known under the name Finland.

If the ultimate loss of Finland in 1809 was felt bitterly by the Swedes, the previous 100 years had been the more hurting for the Finns, as it turned out that Sweden was not willing or capable of providing sufficient defense for Finland, which was slowly realized by civil servants, militaries, townspeople, clerics, and other members of the educated classes. The disappointment wasn't diminished by the fact that Sweden, with Finland, in the 18th century experienced enlightenment and freedom of thought and a 50-years experiment with parliamentarism. In the perception of the Finns, it wasn't just a vicked king, or two, or a set of bribed councillors, but the morally legitimate representatives for all of the Swedish people that were responsible for the inadequate defense of Finland and for Finnish sufferings during four wars fought in Finland, two of which resulted in extended harsh Russian occupations. The Swedes, on their side, were in the end stunned over how Swedish civil servants, Swedish bishops, and Swedish noblemen could be prepared to do their outmost to facillitate the orderly transfer of Finland from Sweden to Russia in the face of intense fears for Russia from the yeomanry, that was convinced that serfdom and other sufferings would follow. In a Swedish mindset, only the peasantry of Finland had remained faithful to the fatherland, and the well-born had commited collective high treason, which was hard to fathom.

The following century was in fact good times for both countries, but that didn't change the mutually disfavorable perceptions. The contacts between Finland and Sweden were kept at a minimum. For both countries government, good relations with Russia were of outmost importance and nothing could be gained by arousing Russian suspicions.

So the association of Sweden and Finland ended with mutual bitter disappointment, and nothing that happened in the 19th century would change that.