AHC: Independent Finnish monarchy

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
Would it be possible to keep him King and still have the CPs lose?
No, the whole reason to have a king was to keep a strong alliance with Germany (and to appease Conservatives). When Germany lost, there was really no reason to be close to them anymore (especially since the German monarchy fell), and even the Conservatives in Finland began to cozy up to the idea of a strong president.
 
With a POD after 1900 is it possible for Finland to exist as a fully sovereign state as a monarchy?

This is one of the main goals of my TL, though accomplishing it will have repercussions down the road. In essence, I am tweaking the post-1917 timeline in every possible way I can think of that would skew the circumstances towards the introduction of monarchy in 1918. I'm not sure about the plausibility of it all in the end, but I'll leave that to yourworstnightmare and our other experts on Finnish history to decide.

Now if I only had the time and energy to keep writing...:eek:
 
Central Power victory. Finland was supposed to get Friedrich Karl of Hessen as king, but then the CPs went and lost the war.

Is there any chance that Friedrich Karl and his descendents could have remained in Finland, tried to endear himself to the Finnish public as well as the other Scandinavian monarchs in the public eye, and if a Finnish president were discredited...

Maybe if there was a right-wing turn in Finland in the inter-war period, Finland restores Friedrich Karl but, as he becomes a popular monarch and opposes fascism, he remains King during the War for the rest of his life. Due to the opposition of his country to fascism, it endears support from Stalin on his doorstep too, guaranteeing support of the Finnish status quo among the "Big Three"...
 
No, the whole reason to have a king was to keep a strong alliance with Germany (and to appease Conservatives). When Germany lost, there was really no reason to be close to them anymore (especially since the German monarchy fell), and even the Conservatives in Finland began to cozy up to the idea of a strong president.
Is it possible for Finland to get a monarch from Sweden? Having close relations with Sweden is kinda important, with the Soviet Union on the border and all. Finland's going to need allies somewhere.
 
Is it possible for Finland to get a monarch from Sweden? Having close relations with Sweden is kinda important, with the Soviet Union on the border and all. Finland's going to need allies somewhere.

IMHO, if the monarch has to stay after CP victory the monarch could come from Denmark. Sweden is too affiliated with Finland to produce a monarch for a newly independent country. How about Prince Harald of Denmark? As Denmark was quite "Finlandized" with Germany this might be a good compromise between affiliating too much with Germany while still getting a monarch from a country which was under German thumb.

In 1918 he would be 42 years old. Harald served as an officer in the Danish Army and considering his later activities might be considered to be close enough to Germany for Germany to accept.
 
Is there any chance that Friedrich Karl and his descendents could have remained in Finland, tried to endear himself to the Finnish public as well as the other Scandinavian monarchs in the public eye, and if a Finnish president were discredited...

Maybe if there was a right-wing turn in Finland in the inter-war period, Finland restores Friedrich Karl but, as he becomes a popular monarch and opposes fascism, he remains King during the War for the rest of his life. Due to the opposition of his country to fascism, it endears support from Stalin on his doorstep too, guaranteeing support of the Finnish status quo among the "Big Three"...

Highly unlikely. Finland was very republican, one bad president would never turn the electorate to monarchy. It is much more likely that Finland would go authoritarian or full-on Fascist, that is if the republican trappings of power are retained.

Around and after the latter part of WWI, the post-Civil War period was the only, very short time window for making Finland a monarchy. If the moderate left and the Agrarians have their full political rights, Finland would not elect a parliament that would accept a king, not with the legal majority. Thus a king would only come to power through a sort of coup by the pro-monarchy right (with foreign support, likely), never mind how they would spin the events to profess the ostensible legality of the new system to the people and to foreign governments.
 
One possibility would be for a negotiated peace ending the First World was. If this happen and Russia had already lost the war it might be possible to retain the Monarchy. Remember in this case Germany would still be a military power capabile of checking Russia.
 
One possibility would be for a negotiated peace ending the First World was. If this happen and Russia had already lost the war it might be possible to retain the Monarchy. Remember in this case Germany would still be a military power capabile of checking Russia.

When talking about "retaining the monarchy" we should remember that there was no such thing as a Finnish monarchy. Finland was ruled by a foreign absentee Grand Duke, in the person of the Tsar of All Russias, represented in Helsinki by his Governor-General. The Finnish parliament, in turn, while under the Tsar did not represent him but only the Finnish people.

According to the dominant theory among the Finnish political elite this meant that Finland was in effect joined to Russia by personal union. When Nicholas II was overthrown in Petrograd, most politicians in Helsinki thus saw that the link that joined Finland to Russia had been severed and the parliament itself had become the highest power in the land. Which is a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the Grand Duchy's very liberal Prodedure of Parliament dating from 1906. That text, in itself, doesn't include a procedure for the event of a vacant throne but only affirms the position of the legislature. This was indeed why the monarchists turned to the frankly obsolete Swedish 1772 Instrument of Government instead to justify the need for a new monarch in 1918.

No matter how Finland is detached from Russia during or after WWI, the same legal difficulty remains: without the Tsar, due to the form of government introduced to the Grand Duchy in 1906 and the absence of a local monarchical tradition , Finland is naturally on a path to democracy. Rather than "retaining monarchy" we should talk about the possibilities of "introducing a Finnish monarchy" by reverting to a more conservative constitution like the OTL monarchists tried to do.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
I still say Central power victory, they'd never convince the Liberals, the Agrarians, never mind the Left to cozy up to a monarchy if it didn't come with that sweet German alliance attached. Also, the Conservatives quickly lost interest in a monarchy when Germany lost.
 
Top