The Estonian Swedish national awakening did not start until the turn of the twentieth century, but by the 1917 Russian February Revolution, it was well underway. This article studies Estonian Swedish political choices and outlooks in the period that followed: 1917-1923. As Estonia went through tumultuous political changes, the leadership of the Swedish minority faced the task of formulating and carrying out a political strategy that would safeguard their national interests. This article discusses how they did it, while also asking why the strength and influence of Estonian Swedish politics soon began to decline despite earlier remarkable successes.

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The Swedish political scientist, geographer and politician Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922) was an original, even pioneering thinker for his time. He is best known for his grand theory of statehood, abandoning the narrowly legal definition of the state and choosing instead to define and analyze states as something akin to living organisms (although this generalization hardly does his views full justice). However, Kjellén's ideas largely fell out of favor after his death and even more so after World War II, when his radical conservatism and Social Darwinism had become tainted by their connection to Nazism. As shown by the authors of the book under discussion, Kjellén's theories did go on to have a separate, more reverential reception abroad (for example, in Brazil), but in his native Sweden, Kjellén's postwar fate was to be consigned to the what-do-you-know type of footnotes pointing out that it had been this Swedish arch-conservative who originally came up with the notions of folkhemmet ('People's home', one of the central concepts in the history of Swedish welfare state), nationalsocialismen ('national socialism,' which Kjellén suggested would be a good thing and preferable to internationalist socialism) and geopolitik (geopolitics).

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