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The Great Divide: Literacy, Nationalism, and the Communist Collapse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Keith Darden  and
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Keith Darden
Affiliation:
Yale University, [email protected]
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, [email protected]

Abstract

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As communist regimes collapsed in the years 1989—91, communist parties and leaders exited power in roughly half the cases. The causes and the impact of this variation have generated considerable controversy. The authors show that the combined timing and content of the introduction of mass literacy was responsible for generating the national standards and comparisons that either sustained the legitimacy of communist party rule or led to its rapid and complete demise during the collapse of communist regimes. Mass literacy explains more of the patterns of the communist exit than do structural, modernization, or communist legacy accounts, and it provides a clear and sustained causal chain.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , October 2006 , pp. 83 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2006

References

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23 With one notable exception, Ukraine, our units were the current countries and the historical data are for the population that lived within the current boundaries. Given the significant regional differences in the content and extent of schooling prior to communism, we created two units out of Ukraine, one for the three provinces that made up Austrian Galicia and another for the remaining provinces.

24 Janos (fn. 12).

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35 Hobsbawm (fn. 18), chap. 3; Posen (fn. 18).

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41 Eklof(fn.37)

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50 Considerable experimental evidence supports the notion of a direct causal relationship between schooling and abstract thought and reliance on general concepts not drawn from experience. See the discussion of these experiments in Luria, A. R., “Towards the Problem of the Historical Nature of Psychological Processes,” International Journal of Psychology 6, no. 4 (1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Scribner and Cole (fn. 20); and especially idem, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. As demonstrated most persuasively by the experiments conducted by Scribner and Cole (pp. 130–33), with the Vai tribe of Liberia, the shift toward abstraction is linked only to Western-style schooling (that is, curricular content), not to the development of literacy or written languages of the type of rote memorization typical of Islamic madrassas.

51 In one of the few efforts to test the hypothesis Unking schooling and nationalism systematically, Howard Schuman, Alex Inkeles, and David H. Smith, in their study of East Pakistan in the 1960s, found that even controlling for factors such as urbanization and occupation, literacy had a massive substantive impact on the likelihood that respondents would identify first and foremost as Pakistanis (rather than with their Bengali, regional, or village identities); Schuman, , Inkeles, , and Smith, , “Some Social Psychological Effects and Noneffects of Literacy in a New Nation,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 16 (October 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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53 On the importance of this modern “pyramid” of schooling for the development of nationalism, see Gellner (fn. 18), 34.

54 The postwar demographic shifts had little impact on nationalist sentiments. Germans returned to Germany, Poles moved from Ukraine and Lithuania into the new borders of Poland, and so on. The forced migrations did not insert new populations with distinct linguistic or national identities into established national communities. The tragedy of the Holocaust further homogenized the ethnic composition of Poland, Hungary, and other countries.

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61 The lower enmity to Russia in Bulgaria stems from the 1905 liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman rule by the Russians.

62 The Serbian Orthodox church claimed a kinship with its Russian Orthodox brethren.

63 The most explicit example of this conflation is the Polish Black Madonna, both an object of religious veneration (pilgrimages, prayers) and the symbol of divine protection of Poland (credited with inspiring the resistance to the Swedish invasion in the seventeenth century and with the success of the Bolshevik War of 1920).

64 For example, Hungarian postwar inflation was the worst the country had experienced. Similarly, industrialization plans in the Czech lands failed largely because the country was already industrialized, had few natural resources, and had been dependent on foreign trade, largely with Germany.

65 Figures calculated from Janos (fn. 12), 349.

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72 The same depictions of the positive impact of communist rule depicted in the 1920s propaganda film, Three Songs for Lenin (Dziga Vertov), were repeated in many conversations with Central Asian respondents in the mid-1990s.

73 According to State Department surveys conducted through the 1990s, the share of respondents with a “favorable” opinion of Russia in 1994 was 74 percent in Azerbaijan, 78 percent in Kazakhstan, 86 percent in Uzbekistan, 83 percent in Kyrgyzstan, 90 percent in Armenia (up from 43 percent in 1992), but only 36 percent in Georgia. See Faranda, Regina, “Ties That Bind, Opinions That Divide” (Manuscript, U.S. State Department Opinion Surveys, 2001)Google Scholar; see also Laitin, David D., Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Nationality in Estonia and Bashkortostan (Glasgow: Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, 1995)Google Scholar.

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76 See Kubik, Jan, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power (Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Wedel, Janine, The Private Poland (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1986)Google Scholar.

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