December 6 is the national day of two European countries - Finland and Spain. How different can you get? Granted, both countries celebrate their liberation from authoritarian regimes in the 20th century, but they were more than 60 years apart. European political scientist Stein Rokkan spent much of his life seeking to understand why European countries modernized at quite different times and at different rates of progress - some rapid, others painfully slow. Spain was one of the tough cases; Finland much earlier, but still the latecomer among the Nordics.
And if we look at the specifics, they are curious, to say the least. Finland’s release from Russia’s grasp was a battle not against the Tsar, but against his imperial heirs, first the Kerensky regime from March to November 1917, then against the new Soviet regime (established on November 7) – with Red forces all along desperately seeking to retain Finland for the new revolutionary regime, heavily supported by Finnish Red guards. Hence, Finland’s liberation was by half a civil war, half a war of secession. The price in internal wounds was such that even fifty years later it was difficult for Finns to talk about it and find reconciliation. But December 6, 1917 was the day that independent Finland was born.
The Spanish celebrate their democratic constitution of 1978, approved on December 6 by a resounding majority. Their enemy was not any outside force – it was their own authoritarian regime, the Franco regime, which had for forty years kept democracy at bay, first by force of arms, then by vengeful repression. Spanish democracy is by now solidly engrained in society, but the wounds are still there, visible for those who take their time to look. As time goes by, the consensus decision of the new democracy to leave the past in the past seems slowly to be coming apart.
History does not necessarily move “forward” - it moves backward and sideways as well.
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