 He was a strong proponent of the use of Swedish in Finland, and subsequently established the theory that the Swedish-speaking population constituted a separate nationality.This theory strongly opposed any form of Finnicization, which it regarded as turning away from Western civilization, and even as a form of Russification.In its more extreme aspects, his theory connected language, nationality and race in a way that claimed supremacy of Swedes over Finns in a way that parallelled other contemporary theories of Aryan supremacy.