In late 1909, the liberal Russian newspaper Birzhevye Vedomosti expressed the fear that Finland could become ‘Russia’s Ireland’. The implication was that by restricting the autonomy that Finland had enjoyed within the Russian Empire for much of the preceding century, Russian nationalists risked creating a chaotic, discontented eastern province, dangerously close to the imperial capital. The ‘Russia’s Ireland’ motif became so prominent in the following eight years – before Finnish independence in 1917 – as to become an international cliché. The discourse of imperial subjugation that existed in both Ireland and Finland in the first decade of the twentieth century has rather obscured the fact that, despite obvious superficial parallels, the nineteenth-century experiences of these nations differed considerably. Both Finland and Ireland were part of larger imperial systems in the nineteenth century, and national movements emerged in both countries that sought to develop political, economic and cultural autonomy. Finland became a sporadic model for diverse Irish national aspirations, but the analogy was rejected consistently, and often vigorously, by Finns in the nineteenth century. This article charts the development of the Finnish–Irish constitutional analogy from the middle of the nineteenth century to the eve of both nations’ independence. It demonstrates that despite the similarities in overall historical timelines, contemporaries perceived differences between the two cases.

This article explores the comparative history of land agitation and how it evolved and intersected with nationalism and socialism in Finland and Ireland between the Irish Land War and the Finnish Civil War of 1918. Drawing on current scholarship as well as contemporary newspapers and official records, the article shows that an organised land movement developed later and was markedly less violent in Finland than in Ireland. Moreover, while in Ireland the association of landlordism with British rule helped to fuse the land movement with nationalist mobilisation during the Land War, in Finland the tie between the land movement and nationalism remained weak. This was a consequence of Finnish nationalists’ strong affiliation with landowning farmers, which hindered their success in mobilising tenant farmers and agricultural workers. Consequently, the Finnish countryside witnessed a remarkable rise in the socialist movement in the early 1900s. The socialist leanings of the Finnish land movement were greatly influenced by the Russian revolutions, whereas in Ireland militant Fenianism, often emanating from Irish America, affected land agitation more than socialism. As to transnational exchanges, the article also indicates the influence of Irish rural unrest and the related land acts on Finnish public debates and legislation.

Agricultural co-operative societies were widely discussed across late nineteenth-century Europe as a potential solution to the problems of agricultural depression, land reform and rural poverty. In Finland, the agronomist Hannes Gebhard drew inspiration from examples across Europe in founding the Pellervo Society, to promote rural cooperation, in 1899. He noted that Ireland’s ‘tragic history’, its struggle for national self-determination and the introduction of co-operative dairies to tackle rural poverty, seemed to offer a useful example for Finnish reformers. This article explores the exchanges between Irish and Finnish co-operators around the turn of the century, and examines the ways in which the parallels between the two countries were constructed and presented by those involved in these exchanges. I will also consider the reasons for the divergence in the development of cooperation, so that even before the First World War it was Finland, not Ireland, that had begun to be regarded as ‘a model co-operative country’.

Capital cities play a significant role in interpreting a country’s past and charting its future. In the aftermath of the First World War nine new European states, Finland and Ireland among them, were confronted with the question of how to create a capital city befitting their new status and national identity. Instead of designing and constructing an entirely new capital city which would have marked a clean break from the past, all these states chose an existing city as the capital. This article will examine processes through which two capitals, Helsinki and Dublin, were renewed physically and symbolically to make the political change ‘real’ to people, but also to reinterpret the past and create a ‘teleology for the present’. The aim is to discuss the ways in which the changes, planned and implemented, both reflected and reinforced new interpretations of the history of the city and the nation, and the continuities and discontinuities the changes created between the past and the present. Some elements and versions of the past were chosen over others, preserved and reinvented in the cityscape, while others were ignored, hidden or denied.

This select document is an annotated translation of John Hampden Jackson’s 1937 Finnish-language text ‘Finland and Ireland: assorted comparisons’, an article previously unavailable in English. It represents an intriguing and extended instance of the generalised comparisons that were made between Irish and Finnish history by observers from the nineteenth century onwards. Therefore, as an example of a mid-twentieth-century primer of the two countries’ ‘parallel histories’, Hampden Jackson’s article is an excellent resource. Moreover, although Hampden Jackson had carved out a niche by the 1930s as an expert on Finland, his reflections on Ireland expose a rather patchy and superficial knowledge, and arguably a degree of condescension. Some of the value of translating this article is that it exposes attitudes of the (broadly-defined) British Left towards Ireland in the 1930s, and particularly the way these were presented, in comparisons with other countries, to an overseas audience.