Finland The Establishment of Finnish Democracy
Väinö Tanner, a leader of the Finnish Social Democratic Party
and prime minister, 1926-27
Courtesy Embassy of Finland, Washington
The end of the civil war in May 1918 found the
government of
Prime Minister Svinhufvud seated again in Helsinki. Many
Finns,
however, now questioned establishing the republic
mentioned in
the declaration of independence of December 6, 1917.
Monarchist
sentiment was widespread among middle-class Finns after
the civil
war for two reasons: monarchist Germany had helped the
Whites to
defeat the Reds, and a monarchy seemed capable of
providing
strong government and, thus, of better protecting the
country.
Owing to the absence from parliament of most of the
socialists,
rightists held the majority, through which they sought to
establish a monarchal form of government. On May 18, 1918,
that
is, two days after General Mannerheim's triumphal entry
into
Helsinki, Svinhufvud was elected the "possessor of supreme
authority," and the search for a suitable monarch began.
The new
prime minister was a prominent White politician, Juho
Kusti
Paasikivi. Its strongly pro-German mood led the government
to
offer the crown to a German nobleman, Friedrich Karl,
Prince of
Hesse, in October 1918. The sudden defeat of Germany in
November
1918, however, discredited Svinhufvud's overtly pro-German
and
monarchal policy and led to his replacement by Mannerheim.
Meanwhile, the SDP was reorganized under Vainö Tanner,
a
Social Democrat who had not joined in the Red uprising,
and this
newly formed SDP repudiated the extremism and violence
that had
led to civil war. In the general parliamentary election of
March
1919, the SDP again became the largest single party,
winning 80
of 200 parliamentary seats. In conjunction with Finnish
liberals,
the SDP ensured that Finland would be a republic. On July
17,
1919, the parliament adopted a constitution that
established a
republican form of government, safeguarded the basic
rights of
citizens, and created a strong presidency with extensive
powers
and a six-year term of office. This Constitution was still
in
effect in 1988. Also in July 1919, the first president of
Finland
was elected. He was a moderate liberal named Kaarlo Juho
StAhlberg, who had been the primary author of the
Constitution.
White Finland's main leaders, Svinhufvud, Mannerheim, and
Paasikivi, retired from public life in 1918 and 1919, but
each of
the three would later be recalled to serve as president at
a
crucial moment in Finland's development--in 1931, 1944,
and 1946,
respectively. It is a tribute to the strength of the
democratic
tradition in Finland that the country was able to undergo
a
bloody and bitter civil war and almost immediately
afterward
recommence the practices of parliamentary democracy.
The achievement of independence and the experience of
the
civil war helped to bring about a major realignment of the
political parties. The Old Finn Party and the Young Finn
Party
were disbanded, and Finnish speakers were divided into two
new
parties: conservatives and monarchists formed the National
Coalition Party (Kansallinen Kokoomuspuolue--KOK); and
liberals
and republicans formed the National Progressive Party
(Kansallinen Edistyspuolue--ED), the ranks of which
included
President StAhlberg. The Agrarian Party
(Maalaisliitto--ML) took
on the interests of farmers, and the Swedish People's
Party
(Svenska Folkpartiet--SFP), which had been founded in
1906,
continued to represent the interests of Swedish speakers.
The
process of rehabilitating the SDP proceeded so far that in
1926
it was entrusted briefly with forming a government, with
Vainö
Tanner as prime minister. Of the twenty governments formed
from
1919 to 1939, one was headed by the SDP; five by the KOK;
six by
the ML; and eight by the ED. On the average, there was
thus one
government a year, but this apparent parliamentary
instability
was balanced somewhat by the continuity provided by the
office of
president--in twenty years there were only four
presidents.
Another major political party was the Communist Party
of
Finland (Suomen Kommunistinen Puolue--SKP), which was
founded in
August 1918 in Moscow by Finnish Reds who had fled to the
Soviet
Union at the close of the civil war. During the interwar
period,
the party was headed by Otto Kuusinen, a former minister
in the
Finnish Red government. Like much of the SKP leadership,
he
remained in exile in the Soviet Union, from where he
directed the
party's clandestine activities in Finland. The SKP
attracted
mainly left-wing militants and embittered survivors of the
civil
war. In the 1922 election, the SKP, acting under the front
organization of the Finnish Socialist Workers' Party
(Suomen
Sosialistinen Työvaenpuolue--SSTP), received 14.8 percent
of the
total vote and twenty-seven seats in parliament. The
following
year the SSTP was declared treasonous and was outlawed. As
a
result, the communists formed another front organization,
and in
1929 they won 13.5 percent of the vote before being
outlawed in
1930. Deprived of political access, the communists tried
to use
strikes to disrupt the country's economic life. They had
so far
infiltrated the SAJ by 1930 that politically moderate
trade
unionists formed an entirely new organization, the
Confederation
of Finnish Trade Unions (Suomen Ammattiyhdistysten
Keskusliitto--
SAK), which established itself solidly in the coming
years.
The competition between Finnish speakers and Swedish
speakers
was defused by the Language Act of 1922, which declared
both
Finnish and Swedish to be official national languages.
This law
enabled the Swedish speaking minority to survive in
Finland,
although in the course of the twentieth century the
Swedish-
speakers have been gradually Finnicized, declining from 11
percent of the population in the 1920s to about 6 percent
in the
1980s. The unanimity with which both language groups
fought
together in World War II attested to the success of the
national
integration.
The enduring domestic political turmoil generated by
the
civil war led to the rise not only of a large communist
party,
but also to that of a large radical right-wing movement.
The
right wing consisted mainly of Finnish nationalists who
were
unhappy with the 1920 Treaty of Dorpat (Tartu) that had
formally
ended the conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland
and
recognized Soviet sovereignty over Eastern Karelia. The
more
extreme Finnish nationalists hoped for the establishment
of a
Greater Finland (Suur-Suomi) that would unite the Finnic
peoples
of Northern Europe within boundaries, running from the
Gulf of
Bothnia to the White Sea and from Estonia to the Arctic
Ocean,
that included Eastern Karelia. Eastern Karelia was the
area,
located roughly between Finland and the White Sea, that
was
inhabited by Finnic-speaking people who, centuries before,
had
been brought under Russian rule and had been converted to
Eastern
Orthodoxy
(see The Era of Swedish Rule
, this ch.)
Since the
nineteenth century, romantic Finnish nationalists had
sought to
reunite the Karelians with Finland.
The most prominent organization advancing the Greater
Finland
idea was the Academic Karelia Society (Akateeminen
Karjala-Seura-
-AKS), which was founded in 1922 by Finnish students who
had
fought in Eastern Karelia against Soviet rule during the
winter
of 1921 to 1922. In the 1920s, the AKS became the dominant
group
among Finnish university students. Its members often
retained
their membership after their student days, and the AKS was
strongly represented among civil servants, teachers,
lawyers,
physicians, and clergymen. Most Lutheran clergymen had
been
strongly pro-White during the civil war, and many of them
were
also active in the AKS and in the even more radical anti-
communist Lapua movement. Thus the AKS created a worldview
among
an entire generation of educated Finns that was
relentlessly
anti-Soviet and expansionistic. (The Eastern Karelians
were
eventually assimilated into Russian culture through a
deliberate
Soviet policy of denationalization, aimed at removing any
possibility of their being attracted to Finland.)
The military muscle for the right wing was provided by
the
Civil Guard. In the 1920s, the Civil Guard had a strength
of
about 100,000, and it received arms by parliamentary
appropriation; however, Social Democrats, branded as
leftists,
were not welcome as members. Finally during World War II,
the
Civil Guard was integrated into the regular army, and
peace was
made with the Social Democrats. The Civil Guard included a
women's auxiliary called Lotta Svard after a female hero
of the
war of 1808 to 1809. This organization performed important
support work, behind the lines during the civil war and
later
during World War II, thereby releasing many men for
service on
the front.
The apogee of right-wing nationalism was reached in the
Lapua
movement, from 1929 to 1932. The emergence of the SKP in
the
1920s had contributed to a rightward trend in politics
that
became evident as early as 1925 when Lauri Kristian
Relander, a
right-wing Agrarian, was elected president. In November
1929, a
rightist mob broke up a communist rally at Lapua, a
conservative
town in northern Finland. That event inspired a movement
dedicated to extirpating communism from Finland by any
means,
legal or illegal, an imperative that was termed the "Law
of
Lapua."
Under pressure from the Lapua movement, parliament
outlawed
communism through a series of laws passed in 1930. Not
content,
however, the Lapuans embarked on a campaign of terror
against
communists and others that included beatings, kidnappings,
and
murders. The Lapuans overreached themselves in 1930,
however,
when they kidnapped former president StAhlberg, whom they
disliked for his alleged softness toward communism. Public
revulsion against that act ensured the eventual decline of
the
Lapua movement.
The final major political success of the Lapuans came
in the
election to the presidency in 1931 of the former White
leader,
Svinhufvud, who was sympathetic to them. In February 1932,
the
Lapuans began calling for a "Finnish Hitler," and in March
1932,
they used armed force to take over the town of Mantsala,
not far
from Helsinki, in what appeared to be the first step
toward a
rightist coup. Members of the Civil Guard were prominent
in this
coup attempt. The Lapuans had, however, underestimated
President
Svinhufvud, who used the Finnish army to isolate the
rebellion
and to suppress it without bloodshed. The leaders of the
Mantsala
revolt were tried and were convicted, and, although they
were
given only nominal sentences, the Lapua movement was
outlawed.
The last flowering of right-wing nationalism began the
month
after the Mantsala revolt, when a number of ex-Lapuans
formed the
Patriotic People's Movement (Isanmaallinen
Kansanliike--IKL).
Ideologically, the IKL, calling for a new system to
replace
parliamentary democracy, picked up where the Lapua
movement had
left off. Much more than had the Lapua movement, the IKL
styled
itself a fascist organization, and it borrowed the ideas
and
trappings of Italian fascism and of German Nazism. Unlike
the
Lapua movement, the IKL achieved scant respectability
among
middle-class Finns. A future president of Finland, Urho
Kekkonen,
who in 1938 was minister of interior, banned the IKL. Like
the
communists, however, the IKL demanded the protection of
the
Constitution that it sought to destroy, and the IKL
persuaded the
Finnish courts to lift the ban.
By the late 1930s, Finland appeared to have surmounted
the
threat from the extreme right and to have upheld
parliamentary
democracy. The White hero of the civil war, General
Mannerheim,
speaking in 1933 at the May 16 parade, called for national
reconciliation with the words; "We need no longer ask
where the
other fellow was fifteen years ago [that is, during the
civil
war]." In 1937 President Svinhufvud was replaced by a more
politically moderate Agrarian Party leader, Kyösti Kallio,
who
promoted national integration by helping to form a
so-called Red-
Earth government coalition that included Social Democrats,
National Progressives, and Agrarians.
A final factor promoting political integration during
the
interwar years was the steady growth of material
prosperity. The
agricultural sector continued to be the backbone of the
economy
throughout this period; in 1938 well over half of the
population
was engaged in farming. The main problem with agriculture
before
1918 had been tenancy: about three-quarters of the rural
families
cultivated land under lease arrangements. In order to
integrate
these tenant farmers more firmly into society, several
laws were
passed between 1918 and 1922. The most notable was the
so-called
Lex Kallio (Kallio Law, named after its main proponent,
Kyösti
Kallio) in 1922; by it, loans and other forms of
assistance were
provided to help landless farmers obtain farmland. As a
result,
about 150,000 new independent holdings were created
between the
wars, so that by 1937 almost 90 percent of the farms were
held by
independent owners and the problem of tenancy was largely
solved.
Agriculture was also modernized by the great expansion of
a
cooperative movement, in which farmers pooled their
resources in
order to provide such basic services as credit and
marketing at
reasonable cost. The growth of dairy farming provided
Finland
with valuable export products. In summary, the
agricultural
sector of the Finnish economy showed notable progress
between the
wars.
In addition, Finnish industry recovered quickly from
the
devastation caused by the civil war, and by 1922 the
lumber,
paper, pulp, and cellulose industries had returned to
their
prewar level of production. As before the war, the lumber
industry still led the economy, and its success fueled
progress
in other sectors. By the Treaty of Dorpat in 1920, Finland
had
gained nickel deposits near the Arctic port of Petsamo.
These
deposits were the largest in Europe, and production began
there
in 1939. The success of Finnish products on the world
market was
indicated by the general rise in exports and by the
surplus in
the balance of payments. Finnish governments protected
economic
prosperity by following generally conservative fiscal
policies
and by avoiding the creation of large domestic deficits or
foreign indebtedness.
In the 1920s and the 1930s, Finnish society moved
toward
greater social integration and progress, mirroring
developments
in the Nordic region as a whole. Social legislation
included
protection of child workers; protection of laborers
against the
dangers of the workplace; compulsory social insurance for
accidents, disability, and old age; aid for mothers and
young
children; aid for the poor, the crippled, the alcoholic,
and the
mentally deficient; and housing aid. Finland reflected
European
trends also in the emancipation of women, who gained
voting
rights in 1906 and full legal equality under the
Constitution in
1919. The 1920s and the 1930s witnessed a great increase
in the
number of women in the work force, including the
professions and
politics.
Although in many ways Finland was predominantly
nationalist
and introspective in spirit, it participated increasingly
in the
outside world, both economically and culturally, a trend
that
contributed to its gradual integration into the
international
community.
Data as of December 1988
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