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106 Anssi Halmesvirta Jalava, it seemed guite natural in Hungary that the Hungarian authorities had to “discipline” (Jalava’s phrase) fifteen different nationalities in order to keep the state together. However, Hungarians had already gone too far in trying to abolish the use of other languages either by closing minority schools or by denying the support of state finances to them. Relative to this, the situation of Finnish in Finland was a paradox; there the language of the Finnish-speaking majority (92%) was treated in the way minorities and their languages were treated in Hungary. The “lust for power and thirst for suppression” of Swedish speakers was most glaringly seen in their efforts at obstructing the establishment of Finnish schools for Finnish speakers; this violated the “natural rights” of languages (Jalava 1876b: 349; Tervonen 1987: 321-322). As we have seen, Jalava approached the Hungarian nationality problem from the point of view of Finnish language strife, the fennoman onslaught against the predominance of the Swedish in order to provide ammunition in the fennomen’s own nationality policy doctrine: that “one state could be ruled only by one nation.” According to this integrative doctrine, minorities should not, however, be oppressed by any unnatural coercion but they had gradually to assimilate or die out—a Hungarian lesson of up-to-date “social Darwinism” for multinational states. “Freedom” (i.e., natural competition) and the rational statesmanship should have been the forces to regulate the process by which a nation became the “strongest”; in the end, in Hungary the “masters” should be Hungarians, in Finland, Finns but without despotic measures (Jalava 1876b: 337). The “magyarization” of minorities of Hungary violated the principle that every nation was entitled freely to cultivate its language and culture, and in keeping with this principle, Jalava relied rather on “natural growth” and competition in economy and culture controlled by smooth “guiding” by the Hungarian State that would in the long run assimilate “national caricatures” into Hungarianness. This process would result in “happiness” for the minorities, and—what was paramount to Hungarianness in Jalava’s opinion—it would preserve the vital force of the Hungarian nation, for example, in the face of threatening Germanization (Jalava 1876b: 319-321, 348-350). To put it in the language of political systems, Jalava envisaged a “democratic,” federal state ruled by Hungarians as the best solution for the future. It would have been acceptable also for the Western powers, for it would keep pan-Slavist movements at bay in central and eastern Europe (Jalava 1876b: 352-362). It would secure the balance of power between West and East, and it was favorable to the peaceful progress for small nations like Hungary and Finland between West and East. From his visit to Hungary, Jalava concluded: Finns and Hungarians were “brothers of the same flesh and blood” (Jalava 1876b: 365), confirming the possibility of understanding of and identification with Hungarian Alterity, which was geographically far away but close enough in terms of kinship relations and national characteristics. However, the reunion could not become complete: when
