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by pavlov 2338 days ago
Go back a hundred years, and the notion of Finland as homogeneous or stable would seem laughable to its citizens.

The country had just been through a devastating civil war. It has two national languages unintelligible to each other’s speakers: Swedish spoken by traditional elites and coastal populations, Finnish spoken by peasants. Having just separated from the collapsing Russian Empire, few observers would give the new Finnish state good odds of surviving the decade. The last major famine was still in living memory.

Progress is made, not inherited as some kind of ethnonational attribute.

1 comments

Think about what you're saying, the country was in tatters in the wake of a civil war precisely when it was not culturally homogenous. Finnish is spoken by the vast majority of the population today. Progress has been made largely due to unification. Finland would not have been able to sustain itself otherwise.
Finnish is my native language, but I grew up in Helsinki in the 1980s in an environment where essentially everyone I met could speak at least three languages.

The notion that Finland is a culturally homogenous single-language nation is absurd to me.