Cultural autonomy in politics and in Swedish voluntary organizations

Abstract

The political organization of the Swedish-speaking Finns, the Swedish People's Party (SFP), was founded on the principle of cultural autonomy. The party is thus closely connected to unilingually Swedish organizations. We argue that the SFP is dependent on the support from the network of Swedish-speaking voluntary associations that functions as a recruitment base for the SFP and enhances an awareness of the importance of language. We describe the declining electoral support for SFP over time and argue that this decline reflects the transgression of the field of Swedish-speaking voluntary associations that has become increasingly bilingual. We show that bilingual voluntary associations tend, in practice, to turn into unilingually Finnish ones and test the assumed connection between language choice in activities in civil society and support for the SFP among Swedish-speaking and bilingual youth in Finland. Membership in unilingually Swedish organizations was strongly associated with the support for SFP and with emphasizing the importance of language in political behavior, while membership in bilingual or Finnish-speaking organizations was not. We argue that bilingual voluntary associations cannot be considered part of the Swedish cultural autonomy and that their increased proportional representation within the field of Swedish voluntary associations weakens the basis of the cultural autonomy and the position of the SFP.