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During the First World War, conflicts between the people's sacrifices and their political participation led to crises of parliamentary legitimacy. This volume compares British, German, Swedish and Finnish debates on revolution, rule by the people, democracy and parliamentarism and their transnational links. The British reform, although more about winning the war than advancing democracy, restored parliamentary legitimacy, unlike in Germany, where Allied demands for democratisation made reform appear treasonous and fostered native German solutions. Sweden only adopted Western political models after major confrontations, but reforms saw it embark on its path to Social Democracy. In Finland, competing Russian revolutionary discourses and German- and Swedish-inspired appeals to legality brought about the deterioration of parliamentary legitimacy and a civil war. Only a republican compromise imposed by the Entente, following a royalist initiative in 1918, led to the construction of a viable polity.

Analysing parliamentary references to the people, this book provides a more nuanced interpretation of eighteenth-century re-evaluations of democracy. It shows how interaction between parliamentarians and the public sphere in different political cultures produced more modern conceptions of the legitimacy of political power.

This book on the pre-history of democratization shows how and why more modern attitudes to democracy started to emerge in the late eighteenth century. Focusing on the language of parliamentarians, the author reconstructs and compares debates on the political role and representation of the people in Britain and Sweden. His analysis demonstrates not only the persistence of the classical, pejorative, conception of democracy but also the gradual re-evaluation of the notion prior to the French Revolution. The author analyses the clash between British and French conceptions of democracy as well as t.

This volume reconstructs the various meanings attached to the concepts of nation and fatherland in eighteenth-century English, Dutch and Swedish political preaching. After discussing sermons as a medium of national ideology, it analyses the decline of the Israelite prototype of nation, the changing relationship between religious and national communities, international Protestantism, the weakening stereotype of popery, redefinitions of the Protestant monarchy, and the diversification of national vocabulary. It also compares the rise of non-theological languages of classical patriotism, freedom, economy and nature in three political cultures, revealing how the secular worship of nation arose even within the public presentation of religion. As post-nationalist comparative history, this study will be welcomed by readers with varied national and scholarly backgrounds interested in the Enlightenment and nationalism

A Finnish socialist female parliamentarian stopped on the Dutch border: the (de) politicization of Finnish women's suffrage in Dutch battles on votes for women This research article in transnational history analyses an incident during which Hilja Pärssinen, a Finnish socialist woman MP, was stopped on the Dutch border in September 1913 on her way to visit a suffragette college in London. This two-hour event at the border and public controversy that followed were clashes between competing ideological and gendered discourses on women's political agency. The incident was a nexus of intersecting discourses on a range of issues: Dutch and international debates on women's suffrage, discourse on 'white slavery', racial prejudices towards East Europeans, Marxist class struggle discourse, and fears of socialism. During the incident, the authorities seemed to be casting the identity of an illegal immigrant or a Russian prostitute on Pärssinen. Provoked against her psycho-physical experiences, she protested by performing that identity. Afterwards, transnationally connected socialists politicized the case in their fight for women's political rights, while the authorities and the non-socialist press consistently depoliticized it. ; peerReviewed

The Finnish case is in many ways illustrative of the complexities of democratisation after World War I. Finland found itself at the nexus of a Swedish constitutional tradition, legalism and ideological controversies adopted from Imperial Germany, the radicalised Russian Revolution, and Western parliamentary democracy. After having been a model for reformers demanding women's suffrage, for instance, the country found itself in autumn 1918 going in the opposite direction to almost all other European countries. This article analyses the fragility of Finnish parliamentary democracy then, contrasting it with longer-term trends supportive of democratisation. 'Democracy' had been the goal for most Finnish political parties since the adoption of universal suffrage in 1906, but the meaning of the concept remained contested and became increasingly so after the Russian Revolution in disputes concerning parliamentary sovereignty, the declaration of independence, a civil war, monarchical reaction, and the search for a republican compromise. For as long as Germany was expected to win the war, democracy in Finland remained fragile, challenged from within first by the revolutionary far-left and then by the reactionary right. The victory of 'Western democracies' forced both the left and the right to rethink their opposition to 'Western' parliamentary democracy and to adapt to a constitutional compromise. The ideological contestability of democracy remained but confrontations were confined by extremism's loss of credibility, the growing influence of centrist groups, and a shared determination to avoid another civil war.

During the First World War, the legitimacy of established polities was challenged everywhere in Europe. Not only the combatant great powers but also smaller states witnessed a resurgence of constitutional disputes and competing ideological conceptualizations of revolution and reform, the will of the people, democracy, and parliamentarism. While these controversies primarily focused on the future of the national polities concerned, historical experiences and discourses accelerated by the war and the Russian Revolution were transnationally interconnected and contributed to discursive transfers between political cultures. Swedish and Finnish socialists were linked by their internationals, liberals were connected by transnational debates for and against 'Western' democracy and parliamentarism, and conservative politicians and academics were involved in ideologically oriented networks. This article reconstructs transnational links and discourses in order to understand the exceptionally confrontational dynamics (which, in Finland, partly led to a civil war) and the outcomes of the Swedish and Finnish constitutional debates in 1917–1919. It examines the nature of the transnational connections of eight Swedish and Finnish conservatives, liberals, revisionist socialists, and far-Left socialists, analysing their argumentation on constitutional questions in published works and parliamentary speeches as illustrative examples of the political groups they represented. ; peerReviewed

The external forms of contemporary occasions of Finnish and Swedish national worship organized to celebrate political events differ little from those of early-modern Sweden. However, the expressions of the political values of the national community in them have been totally revolutionized. After discussing social theory on the relationship between religion, nationalism, modernization and secularization and introducing a long-term historical context, this chapter proceeds to analyze two sermons given in 2009 and 2010 to demonstrate the adaptability of the Lutheran religion to modernity: the national churches have turned from advocates of theocratic monarchy and uniformity to preachers of popular sovereignty, democracy and equality in multicultural societies. A gradually redefined religion has reconciled itself with radical societal changes. This development challenges simplifying secularization theses. ; peerReviewed

In the aftermath of the First World War, constitutions of European states were widely democratized and parliamentarized, and similar turns were expected in international relations as a consequence of the creation of the League of Nations. This comparative analysis of Swedish and Finnish parliamentary debates on the League membership focusing on conceptualizations of the national versus international demonstrates how democratization and internationalization merged discursively. This happened to a greater extent than in the British parliament or the First Assembly of the League. Such entanglements followed from the interconnectedness of constitutional and foreign policy questions during preceding disputes on constitutional reform when Britain and Germany had provided competing models, the determination of the ministries to reconfirm national constitutional compromises by joining an international organization of democratic nations, an exceptional possibility for parliamentarians to debate foreign policy and willingness among the leftist oppositions to extend the democratization and parliamentarization of the constitutions to the field of foreign policy. After a turn from German to British political models and under a Bolshevik threat, British internationalist arguments found a positive reception among the Swedish Liberal–Social Democratic coalition and the Finnish bourgeois coalition as well as half of the redefined Finnish Social Democratic Party. Rightist and far-leftist opponents of the League were left to the margins as the membership was used to redefine the polities as internationally oriented democracies. ; peerReviewed

The Finnish case is in many ways illustrative of the complexities of democratisation after World War I. Finland found itself at the nexus of a Swedish constitutional tradition, legalism and ideological controversies adopted from Imperial Germany, the radicalised Russian Revolution, and Western parliamentary democracy. After having been a model for reformers demanding women's suffrage, for instance, the country found itself in autumn 1918 going in the opposite direction to almost all other European countries. This article analyses the fragility of Finnish parliamentary democracy then, contrasting it with longer-term trends supportive of democratisation. 'Democracy' had been the goal for most Finnish political parties since the adoption of universal suffrage in 1906, but the meaning of the concept remained contested and became increasingly so after the Russian Revolution in disputes concerning parliamentary sovereignty, the declaration of independence, a civil war, monarchical reaction, and the search for a republican compromise. For as long as Germany was expected to win the war, democracy in Finland remained fragile, challenged from within first by the revolutionary far-left and then by the reactionary right. The victory of 'Western democracies' forced both the left and the right to rethink their opposition to 'Western' parliamentary democracy and to adapt to a constitutional compromise. The ideological contestability of democracy remained but confrontations were confined by extremism's loss of credibility, the growing influence of centrist groups, and a shared determination to avoid another civil war. ; peerReviewed