Anachronism and Heritage

Back in Finland, bilingualism remains an evergreen talking point, on which much energy is spent and little headway made. Basically, 600 years of Swedish colonial rule left an ever-dwindling minority whose first language is Swedish, down to about 5% of the population at the last count, and the country remains officially bilingual, with everything from product labelling to street signs rendered in both languages, which can be fairly bewildering to foreigners getting around. What is less realised in all the debate over there is that the idea of a country accommodating such a tiny minority to the extent of imposing compulsory lessons in that language on the mass of the populace is possibly even more likely to bemuse outsiders.
Of course, it wasn't always so clear-cut: once, the minority was not only more substantial than now in terms of numbers but, more significantly, formed the ruling class. Even now, many in a country with a fragile history of less than 100 years of independence continue to maintain in the face of demographics that the retention of bilingualism is a question of preserving the country's heritage. It is part of history, and implicitly the country would be culturally poorer without it.
Ask the Romans if they need their emperors back. It's the same argument as that perennially advanced in favour of retention of the monarchy in the UK, never mind that without them we'd still have all those tourist-magnet palaces and be able to actually go inside them. Heritage doesn't vanish just because the anachronistic institutions that represent parts of that heritage are removed.
As for multilingualism, it should be regarded by any state as a desirable part of its citizens' education in that thereby at least some degree of understanding of other cultures is promoted. And minority communities should have a voice. But the issue here is one of inflicting an educational and occupational burden on 95% of the population in the form of a language which is only globally slightly less insignificant than their own. Many will maintain that it binds Finns to Scandinavia (rather than to the gangster behemoth on the other side). Yes, in a cutely servile way, so that meetings can be dominated by Swedes who happen to be fluent in the language.
Others bleat that it cultivates an international outlook and has a civilising influence. This always reminds me of the self-serving justifications attempted by Latin teachers in English public schools, which always ended up after the bits about it being the language of law and medicine (no, they have specialised vocabularies, mostly nouns, and nothing to do with parsing sentences out of Cicero's speeches) with blandly asserting that it would help immeasurably in learning languages (it doesn't - learn any modern Romance language instead). In the context of the two peripheral countries involved, it's also desperately provincial.
No nation's budget is really big enough that it can justify a frippery like the monarchy. Likewise, the capacity of the average brain for formal education has its limits and shouldn't have subjects with little more than decorative value crammed into it by the state. A society which is dependent on such historical flotsam to define itself is a flimsy society indeed.