Svecoman
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The Svecomans, or Svekomans, was a political movement in the Grand Duchy of Finland, chiefly reactionary to the demands vigorously conveyed by the Fennomans for the substitution of Swedish in state administration, courts and schools with the Finnish language, then spoken by approximately 90 percent of the country's population.
The notion of Svecomans belonged to the public debate of the 1870s and 1880s, evoked by the restitution of the Diet of Finland that now convened every third year.
The Svecomans proposed the idea that Finland harboured two peoples, or nations, speaking different languages, having different cultures, and originating from separate parts of the country. In accordance with contemporary science these two peoples were denoted as members of different races. This idea was radically new. Until then, the Swedish-speaking countryfolk had been easily ignored. Now this relatively small minority was connected to the elite of Finland.
It was a popular belief among Svecomans, that their "Germanic race" be better suited to rule successful states, and hence that the Fennoman program would make Finland weaker and more vulnerable for the Russian threat. They were inspired by contemporary science and currents of ideas, as represented by Herder, Gobineau, Blumenbach, phrenologists and social-darwinists, in their belief that "race creates culture" rather than the reverse; but they were also inspired by the power-relations on the European continent, where the (Germanic) Prussians recently had defeated the French and established a German Empire, and in the world at large, where the ("originally Germanic") British Empire ruled over the seas and had defeated Imperial Russia in the Crimean War. Also the relations in Austria-Hungary proved the thesis: There Germanic Austrians ruled over the Magyars, who were a Finno-Ugric people like the ethnic Finns — and even in nearby Estonia, the Finnic Estonians were ruled by a Baltic German aristocracy in Russian service.
The strife between Fennomans and Svecomans in these decades mirrored also more general political divisions:
- the Fennomans were favoured by the Russian authorities, the Svecomans canalized remaining fear of the Russians and the feeling of cultural belonging to the Germanic world and the West
- the Fennomans were ideologically more conservative, the Svecomans were more liberal
- after the Crimean War, when the Swedish-speaking towns on Finland's south-coast and the merchant fleet had been severely damaged, neutralist opinions were strong among liberals and educated Swedish-speakers
- the Fennomans were chiefly dominated by the clergy, the Svecomans by industrialists and academics from other faculties than the theological, as for instance their spiritual leader the linguist Axel Olof Freudenthal
The feeling of unity between the Swedish-speaking countryfolk and the (remains of the) Swedish-speaking elite is the lasting legacy of the Svecoman movement, that became the core idea of the Swedish People's Party, when founded after the introduction of equal and common suffrage in 1906.