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Finland Constitutional Development
Finland, although independent of foreign rule only
since
1917, has traditions of self-government extending back
into the
Middle Ages. Because their country belonged to the dual
kingdom
of Sweden-Finland for more than 600 years, Finns had long
enjoyed
the common Nordic right to manage local affairs by
themselves.
Beginning in 1362, Finns took part in the election of the
Swedish
king, and they thus became involved in the government of
the
realm as a whole. This role was increased after 1435, when
they
began sending representatives to the kingdom's governing
body,
the Diet of the Four Estates (Riksdag).
The Swedish Diet Act of 1617 and the Form of Government
Act
of 1634 formalized the Finnish tradition of estates,
whereby
leading members of the country, representatives not only
of
regions but of social classes as well, met to decide
matters of
common concern. Although the acts restricted local
government
somewhat, they brought Finns more than ever into the
management
of the kingdom's affairs. At regular intervals a Finn
presided
over the nobility, the most important of the four estates
of the
Diet; consisting also of the estates of the clergy,
burghers, and
peasantry, the Diet continued to be Finland's
representative
governing body until early in the twentieth century.
Royal power was strengthened by the constitution of
1772,
forced on the Diet by King Gustav III. This constitution,
in
effect in Finland until 1919, long after it had been
abrogated in
Sweden, gave the king final say about the decisions of the
Diet.
The king's power was further augmented by the Act of Union
and
Security of 1789, which gave him exclusive initiative in
legislative matters.
Ceded by Sweden to Russia in 1809, Finland was not
incorporated fully into the empire by Tsar Alexander I,
but
retained its own legal system.
(see The Russian Grand Duchy of Finland, 1809-1917
, ch. 1). A small body, the Senate, was
established to administer the country. Its two sections,
finance
and justice, later became the basis of independent
Finland's
cabinet and supreme courts. The Senate's head, the
governor
general, the highest official in Finland, was a Russian
appointed
by the tsar. An indication of the country's relative
autonomy,
however, was that all other officials of the Grand Duchy
of
Finland were native Finns.
The tsar, who had the right to determine when the Diet
met,
dissolved the assembly in 1809, and it did not meet again
until
1863 when recalled by Alexander II, the Tsar Liberator.
Thereafter the Diet met regularly, and in the late 1860s
it
ushered in the "Golden Age" of Finnish legislation, a
period of
several decades during which the country's laws were
modernized
and were brought into harmony with the legal codes of
Western
Europe. It was during this period, too, that political
parties
appeared, emerging first from the campaign to give the
Finnish
language its rightful place in the country, then from the
growing
resistance to Russian rule, and finally from the question
of how
to contend with the coming of industrialization and labor
strife.
The aggressive Russification campaign that began in the
1890s
sought to end the relative autonomy Finland had enjoyed
under
tsarist rule
(see The Era of Russification
, ch. 1). A
military
defeat in East Asia weakened the Russian empire and gave
Finns a
chance for greater freedom. The Diet unanimously dissolved
itself
in 1906, and a parliament, the Eduskunta, a unicameral
body
elected by universal suffrage, was created. Finland became
in one
step a modern representative democracy and the first
European
nation to grant women the right to vote.
The tsarist regime allowed the assembly few of its
rights,
however, and only after the collapse of the Russian Empire
and
the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 were the Finns able to
secure
their independence. A civil war and bitter political
debates
about whether the country should be a monarchy or a
republic
preceded the passage of the Constitution Act of 1919,
which
established the present system of government in Finland.
Data as of December 1988
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