ABSTRACT
Diasporas, professional networks and various transnational communities surfaced on the political landscape of the nineteenth century alongside modernising empires and nation-states. Some of them contributed to the intensification of state power, others sought to challenge it. The chapter focuses on two protagonists, the Finnish émigré in Stockholm Emil von Qvanten and the international revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin who sought to establish common ground in their pursuits of a united Scandinavia and liberated nations of the Russian empire. Utilising the short windows of opportunity that the Crimean War and the Polish Uprising of 1863 opened up for them, Bakunin and von Qvanten tried to reconcile their visions and collaborate for the sake of their reification in the political landscape of Sweden. The tensions that erupted between them on different issues, however, thwarted their cooperation and led to alienation between them. This contribution sheds light on von Qvanten's and Bakunin's trajectories of political imagination and contesting visions of the future of the region, empire and state. The chapter argues that their backgrounds, environments and political visions contributed to the growing exclusiveness and antagonisation of their respective projects of Scandinavianism and national revolution.
