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Historisk tidskrift 122:2 • 2002

Innehåll (Contents) 2002:2

Uppsatser (Articles)

En nationell strategi?

Nils Erik Forsgård

Fulltext (pdf)

Summary

A National Strategy?

The nineteenth century was also a century of nation building in Finland. The philosopher Johan Vilhelm Snellman and the author and professor of history Zacharias Topelius wanted to create a unified nation and a unified Finnish people with common and historically-based values. The problem in this respect was not the least the language. Would a unified people in a unified nation speak exclusively Finnish or both Finnish and Swedish? This was not just a practical question, but also had a fundamental philosophy of history dimension that influenced different ways of describing history. The question was if the Swedish period had been a good or a bad period for Finland. Finnish-oriented historians, under the leadership of the fenno ideologue and leader Yrjö Koskinen, and using Snellman as his philosophical guide, tended to generally answer no to this question. The Swedish-oriented historians answered yes to this question and therefore tried to link Finland in the common Nordic or Western value system. As a historian and author, Zacharias Topelius sought out moderation, but his intentions were often misunderstood and the Swedish-language historians sometimes called him fennoman. One of the sources of the misunderstanding was Topelius’ general philosophy of history. Like many of the fenno historians, such as Yrjö Koskinen, Topelius believed in providence and in an other-worldly pre-determined historical development. But while Koskinen and others thought that this development would eventually bestow the Finnish-speaking population their just place in the development of the nation, Topelius believed that the goal of providence was to unit all the people of the world and all nations in Jerusalem. It was also the conflict between a worldly and an other-worldly development that separated Topelius from the development optimist Snellman. When the fennomen replaced providence with the modern Darwinism at the end of the century, Topelius strongly rejected Darwinism using religious arguments. Particularly at the end of his life, Topelius stated many times that Finland had room for two languages and that Finnish history also had room for the Swedish period.