The Rauma Manifesto () was ratified in 1980 at the 36th
International Youth Congress in
Rauma, Finland. Its first subscribers were
Jouko Lindstedt from Finland, Giorgio Silfer from
Italy and Amri Wandel from
Israel. It emphasized that official acceptance of the language was not probable and not essential during the
1980s and that it was necessary for the
Esperanto community to have alternative goals. The manifesto emphasized the fact that the Esperanto-speaking community had itself become a culture, worthy of preservation and promotion for its own sake. It states: "We want to spread Esperanto to realize its positive values more and more, bit by bit (...)" – a fact that is not widely known. As a matter of fact, traditional Esperantism sometimes criticises Raumism, entailing that it is not interested in propagating Esperanto. Esperantist from
Zamenhof to
Baghy had often described the Esperanto community as something more than a loose network of language learners, but less than a traditional nation, stressing its character as a voluntary, transnational cultural community united by shared ideals rather than ancestry or territory. Their reflections, as echoed in the Rauma-oriented discourse around
Esperanto culture, treat the
esperantistaro as a kind of self-chosen linguistic “people” or minority whose cohesion rests on common language, literature and ethical commitments, not on state institutions or ethnic homogeneity. As Giorgio Silfer wrote in
Kontakto (1976): “Esperantists are the vanguard of the world, because they possess the means to solve the linguistic problem; but, like every vanguard, they have their feet in the past. For this means to be effective, one must free oneself from those ideas that either reduce Esperanto to a hobby or, conversely, exaggerate its value to the point of seeing in it the solution to all problems [...]. For the language to be effective, it must create a culture of international worth.” == See also ==