The Reunifcation of the People
Meanings and Usages of the Concept
Abstract
The reunification of the people (kansan eheytyminen) is a well-known and much-studied topic in Finland. The word pair most often refers to a development or process in which a nation divided in the Civil War of 1918 became united by the Winter War at the latest. In the article, I challenge and diversify the prevailing interpretation by focusing on what political actors at the time meant when they spoke and wrote about the reunification of the people. From a conceptual historical point of view, the wholeness (eheys) and reunification (eheyttäminen) of the people have been used since the 1860s as concepts for articulating domestic disagreements and determining who has the right to speak on behalf of the Finnish people. Based on digitized newspaper materials and parliamentary protocols, I argue that there were different ways the concept was used in political debates. From the 1860s onwards, the concept became politicized, temporalized, democratized, and historicized. From a conceptual historical perspective, the Civil War and the Winter War do not appear to be the beginning and end of the reunification discourse, as has been assumed in previous studies, but rather as turning points where the conditions for using the
concept changed significantly. The article also shows how parallel foreign concepts – Swedish folkhemmet and German Volksgemeinschaft – were used, especially in the 1930s as stimulation in the Finnish debate on the reunification of the people
