The Great Divide: Literacy, Nationalism, and the Communist Collapse Darden, Keith. Grzyma(cid:0)a-Busse, Anna Maria, 1970- World Politics, Volume 59, Number 1, October 2006, pp. 83-115 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/wp.2007.0015 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wp/summary/v059/59.1darden.html Access Provided by York University at 10/15/11 4:03PM GMT THE GREAT DIVIDE Literacy, Nationalism, and the Communist Collapse By KEITH DARDEN and ANNA GRZYMALA-BUSSE* I. INTRODUCTION WHY do some governing parties, closely associated with a col- lapsed authoritarian regime, nonetheless retain power and con- tinue to govern? This paradoxical outcome occurred in 45 percent of countries of the former Soviet Union and its satellites. In some of these countries the fi rst free elections returned the Communist Party to rule, while in others unreconstructed communists retained power and free elections were never held. In the remaining 55 percent, however, com- munist parties lost the fi rst free elections and exited power completely. In this article, we seek to explain these patterns of communist exit, which has spawned both empirical and theoretical controversies. The communist exit in the fi rst free elections has been strongly correlated with subsequent democratic consolidation, successful economic re- forms, and patterns of political party competition.1 Communist per- sistence, by contrast, resulted in “democracy with adjectives”: (1) quasi- democratic systems that hold elections but do not foster competition or representation and (2) the rise of antireform coalitions that extract private benefi ts from the state and sabotage reforms.2 *The authors are listed alphabetically and share responsibility. This paper was fi rst presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 2005. We are grate- ful to Stephen Hanson, Jeff Kopstein, Grigore Pop-Eleches, the participants of faculty workshops at Duke University and the University of Michigan, and the three anonymous reviewers, for their very helpful comments. We would like to thank Shale Horowitz and David Reilly for sharing their data. 1 M. Steven Fish, “The Determinants of Economic Reform in the Post-Communist World,” East European Politics and Societies 12 (Winter 1998); Valerie Bunce, “The Political Economy of Postsocial- ism,” Slavic Review 58 (Winter 1999); Herbert Kitschelt, “Accounting for Postcommunist Regime Diversity: What Counts as a Good Cause?” in Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen Hanson, eds., Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 2 Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democ- racy 13 (April 2002); Joel S. Hellman, “Winner Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcom- munist Transitions,” World Politics 50 (January 1998). World Politics 59 (October 2006), 83–115 84 WORLD POLITICS At the same time, considerable criticism of the communist exit as an explanation for subsequent trajectories has emerged. First, Herbert Kitschelt, in particular, has charged that accounts focusing on the com- munist exit as a main explanatory variable suffer from excessive causal proximity, leading to an explanation that “yields little insight into the causal genealogy of a phenomenon.”3 His critique begs a signifi cant question: if the communist exit is so highly correlated with favorable outcomes, how do we account for the exit? Second, the mechanisms of this infl uence on economic and democratic outcomes have been diffi - cult to pinpoint. Does the communist exit act as an independent causal factor that eliminates a source of antireformist sentiment and thus pro- motes greater elite consensus? Is it a simple symptom of deeper readi- ness for democracy and the free market or a necessary but not suffi cient condition for subsequent reforms? Third, there has been little explana- tion of the reasons behind the communist exit, or how those reasons might themselves relate to postcollapse outcomes. This shortcoming has led to the criticism that, much as with the communist collapse it- self, political science has focused on the wrong set of explanatory fac- tors and mechanisms. One striking omission, for example, is a theory of one-party rule and the factors that could sustain its effi cacy and even its legitimacy.4 The critical question underlying all these controversies is why com- munist rule ended in such divergent outcomes. Why, that is, was there communist exit from power in some countries but not in others? We argue that the ultimate roots of the explanation lie in precommunist schooling, which fomented and fostered nationalist ideas that led to the delegitimation of communist rule. The exit itself was the culmination of decades of nursed nationalist grievances, invidious comparisons, and carefully sustained mass hostility to the communist project as a foreign and inferior imposition. Section II reviews and tests the competing ex- planations. Section III examines the patterns of schooling. Section IV presents an alternative model that establishes a causal chain linking the introduction of mass schooling, subsequent ideas about the nation and its legitimate authority, the rise of anticommunist opposition, and the communist exit. As a result, some countries were much less hospitable to communism, more likely to kindle an opposition, and more likely 3 Kitschelt (fn. 1). 4 Stathis Kalyvas, “The Decay and Breakdown of Communist One-Party Regimes,” Annual Re- view of Political Science 2 (1999); Timur Kuran, “Now out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989,” World Politics 44 (October 1991). THE GREAT DIVIDE 85 to promote the kind of communist party that could and would leave. Section V concludes. II. EXISTING EXPLANATIONS OF THE COMMUNIST EXIT The literature on both the collapse of the communist regimes and the transitions that followed provides us with several competing explana- tions for the variation in the communist exit. These locate the forces behind the communist exit along a temporal continuum that begins with long-standing structural forces, such as geography, moves through the legacies of the precommunist era, and ends with the immediate causes of the communist collapse, such as the strength of the anticom- munist opposition. One prominent explanation for postcommunist trajectories focuses on structural factors, the favorable geopolitical settings that placed some of these countries in the Western Christian orbit, with its Enlighten- ment tradition, potential for trade, and diffusion of democratic ideas. One manifestation of this infl uence is the remarkable correlation that exists between proximity to the West (defi ned as the geographic dis- tance between state capitals and either Vienna or Berlin) and the favor- able confi guration of communist exit, democratic reforms, and market liberalization, as Kopstein and Reilly 2000 demonstrate.5 Such settings allowed for the favorable infl uence of international organizations, “not so much of actual EU or NATO membership as of anticipated member- ship. These divergent, externally induced incentives are part of what accounts for differences in institutional reform, state behavior, and popular discourse in the countries of postcommunist Europe.”6 After all, the nearest neighbors were also the objects of the most intense focus of the EU and other West European initiatives, and communism may have appeared less desirable if one’s neighboring noncommunist points of reference were Germany and Austria rather than Afghanistan and Iran. Geographic proximity had also earlier fostered a sense of “belong- ing” to Europe. A second infl uential approach examines the legacies of precommunist development and the ways in which the political experiences of the in- 5 Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Reilly, “Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the Postcommunist World,” World Politics 53 (October 2000); Anna Grzymala-Busse and Pauline Jones Luong, “Reconceptualizing the State: Lessons from Post-Communism,” Politics and Society 30 (De- cember 2002). 6 Kopstein and Reilly (fn. 5), 25. 86 WORLD POLITICS terwar era shaped the politics of the communist years and beyond.7 In the classic “modernization” account, wealth, industrialization prior to statehood, and overall levels of economic development are critical to the development of democracy and to the maintenance of regime stability.8 Considerable disparities persisted here in the communist era. Even though East Central Europe has been characterized as a back- ward periphery relative to Western Europe,9 its development levels were always higher than in Central Asia, for example. The communist exit, therefore, could be a function of precommunist economic develop- ment and, more broadly, of modernization. In a similar account, the length of the prewar democratic experi- ence and the political confi gurations that dominated it translate into distinct communist regime types. The resulting typology of communist regimes comprises bureaucratic-authoritarian, national-accommoda- tive, and patrimonial systems.10 The fi rst type, built on interwar work- ing-class parties and a preexisting professional bureaucracy, results in a confi guration of weak communist insiders, unable to forestall their own replacement during the communist collapse. At the opposite end of the spectrum, patrimonial communism, built on authoritarian regimes and nonprofessional bureaucracies, privileges the communist insiders and allows them to hold on to political and economic power. One pre- diction is that the longer the democratic and legal-rational experience prior to the onset of communism, the greater the likelihood of a com- munist exit. Finally, the most temporally immediate explanation for the com- munist exit is the strength of the anticommunist opposition in the waning years of the communist regimes. As several scholars of regime transi- 7 George Schöpfl in, Politics in Eastern Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Grzegorz Ekiert, “Demo- cratic Processes in East Central Europe: A Theoretical Reconsideration,” British Journal of Political Science 21, no. 3 (1991); Ken Jowitt, A New World Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Ekiert and Hanson (fn. 1); Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart, “Enduring Political and Economic Change in Post-Communist Eastern Europe: Old Legacies, New Institutions, Hegemons, Norms and International Pressures,” Comparative Political Studies 28, no. 2 (1995). 8 Seymour Lipset, Political Man: The Social Basis of Politics (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1960); Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958); Alexander Inkeles, Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); Karl W. Deutsch, “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” American Political Science Review 55 (September 1961); see also Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Po- litical Institutions and Well-being in the World, 1950 –1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 9 Andrew C. Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre to Post-Communism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 10 Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldová, Radosl⁄aw Markowski, and Gábor Tóka, Post-Com- munist Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). THE GREAT DIVIDE 87 tions have noted, the strength of the opposition (and its constituent radicals and moderates) affects not only the likelihood of negotiations with an authoritarian government but also its outcome.11 The more powerful the opposition, the more likely is communist exit. Conversely, as Andrew Janos argued, “because it was rooted in the communalism and paternalism of Byzantine Orthodoxy, communism resonated far more positively in the Orthodox societies of the southeast, than in the legalistic, contract societies of the northwest tier.”12 The implication here is that cultural receptiveness to communism underlies the patterns we observe and either promotes the rise of the opposition or sustains communist rule.13 While all of these explanations offer compelling accounts, they face two challenges. First, many of the accounts tend to rely on powerful correlations, rather than on clearly specifi ed mechanisms by which the legacies of the past, for example, translate into outcomes decades later. Second, these accounts tend to address national-level variation: there- fore, they cannot as easily explain the differences among the countries emerging from the former Soviet Union or the intranational diversity in support of the communist party. Yet these are as intriguing and as potentially important for theory building as are their national-level counterparts. As several scholars have noted, pockets of subnational authoritarianism can coexist with democratic national governments,14 producing very divergent regimes within the same nation-state. More specifi c problems arise with the individual explanations. One complication with an emphasis on geographic factors is that some coun- 11 Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Laszlo Bruszt and David Stark, “Remaking the Political Field in Hungary,” Journal of International Affairs 46 (Summer 1992). For the negotiations, see Jon Elster, ed., Round Table Talks and the Breakdown of Com- munism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also Pauline Jones Luong, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Ishiyama, “Transitional Electoral Systems in Post-communist Eastern Europe,” Political Science Quar- terly 112 (Spring 1997); Thomas Remington and Steven Smith, “Institutional Design, Uncertainty, and Path Dependency during Transition,” American Journal of Political Science 40 (October 1996); Patrick O’Neil, “Presidential Power in Post-communist Europe: The Hungarian Case in Comparative Perspec- tive,” Journal of Communist Studies 9 (September 1993); Timothy Frye, “A Politics of Institutional Choice: Post-communist Presidencies,” Comparative Political Studies 30 (October 1997). 12 Janos (fn. 9), 326. 13 An excellent analysis of these arguments is in Grigore Pop-Eleches, “Which Past Matters? Communist and Pre-Communist Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 1–4, 2005). 14 Richard Snyder, “After the State Withdraws: Neoliberalism and Subnational Authoritarian Regimes in Mexico,” in W. Cornelius, T. Eisenstadt, and J. Hindley, eds., Subnational Politics and Democratization in Mexico (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1999); Levitsky and Way (fn. 2); Robert Mickey, “Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972” (Book manuscript, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, 2006). 88 WORLD POLITICS tries were considerably more pro-West than their geographic location would seem to suggest: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are all farther from Western capitals than Belarus, for example. Nor can geography explain the differences in achieving a “return to the West.” How, that is, did geographic or cultural affi nities translate into domestic political action. Moreover, the mechanisms of the affi nity for Europe remain underspecifi ed. Integration into specifi c regional and international organizations is an unlikely candidate: neither the EU nor NATO of- fered any serious prospects for membership until many years after the communist exit and the initial democratic and market reforms.15 In East Central Europe, when even the most ardent reformists spoke of a “return to Europe,” they were referring to a normalcy defi ned by the lack of Soviet imperial interference and not to anticipated membership in specifi c international structures. Further, these sentiments did not break cleanly along geographic lines. Thus, European Serbians kept their communist party in power, while non-European Georgians rap- idly dispensed with theirs. The desire to “join the West” or “return to Europe” was a signifi cant motive and clustered geographically, but its roots do not lie in location alone. We thus need a better account of the mechanism underlying the desire to “return to Europe.” The mechanisms by which precommunist bureaucratic develop- ment and regime types translate into the communist exit are similarly underspecifi ed. Temporal distance should not be confl ated with causal depth. What, for example, are the causal links between a professional interwar bureaucracy and the weakness of communist insiders at the time of the communist collapse? There is little question that the pre- communist development of a rational bureaucracy and direct rule dis- tinguishes the communist and postcommunist development of many Central European countries from that of Central Asian states, where the Soviet Union was the fi rst to bring any bureaucracy to nomadic so- cieties. However, it is not clear why these differences would lead to the rejection of communist parties. Indeed, one could easily argue that the superior bureaucracy made communism more rational, effi cient, and competent and that its bureaucratic legacy should have bolstered rather than undermined the legitimacy of communism. Moreover, having the right bureaucratic legacy was not a necessary condition; otherwise pat- rimonial Moldova, Armenia, and Georgia would have kept their com- munist parties in power. 15 Thus, the EU was content to conduct bilateral agreements with postcommunist countries; mem- bership as a feasible option did not even enter the discussion until 1995 and the Bosnia confl ict. THE GREAT DIVIDE 89 The strength of the anticommunist opposition movement as an ex- planatory variable explains both too much and too little. On the one hand, it is so strongly correlated with the communist exit that the pos- sibility the two are part of the same phenomenon cannot be discounted. Once again, if we take warnings of excessive causal proximity seriously, we ought to beware of positing such powerful causal relationships be- tween events that are so temporally close together. On the other hand, this explanation requires that we identify the determinants of a strong opposi- tion: what are they, and do they explain the communist exit as well?16 A better, alternative explanation of the communist exit is therefore needed, one that accounts both for the immediate impetus for the exit and for its facilitating conditions. It should also provide a mechanism through which the communist exit becomes feasible and likely. If we turn to the precommunist past, we need to specify precisely which fac- tors and processes made some societies less hospitable to communism on both the individual and the collective level, more likely to foment opposition, and more likely to foster the kind of ruling party that could and would leave power. A country’s location and “neighborhood” by itself is unlikely to infl uence either the popular opposition or the legiti- macy of communist rule. Prewar democratic statehood is a more likely candidate, since it may very well engender memories of noncommu- nist governance and the subsequent identifi cation of communism as an “abnormal” form of governance. Finally, the development of anticom- munist opposition itself needs explaining, since it is analytically and empirically so close to the communist exit. One of the most striking aspects of the anticommunist opposition was its fusion with nationalism. Opposition movements claimed to be rescuing the nation from the grasp of an alien, imposed, and illegiti- mate communist regime. As Valerie Bunce argues, “The diffusion of the national idea served as the mechanism for opposition elites to con- front imperial domination by seeking states and regimes of their own making.”17 Yet if nationalism drives the opposition to communism, this begs the questions of how and why these mass sentiments varied across the region and of which mechanisms link those beliefs—largely his- torical in origin—to contemporary events. Although the development of nationalism has been linked to many tools of the modern state, the clearest mechanism for the transmission 16 Bunce (fn. 1) and Janos (fn. 12) identifi ed the rise of the opposition with prior statehood and the linking of the state project with liberalism. 17 Bunce, “The National Idea: Imperial Legacies and Post-Communist Pathways in Eastern Eu- rope,” East European Politics and Societies 19 (Summer 2005). 90 WORLD POLITICS of a shared national identity and history is education.18 Although edu- cation is typically seen as part of a bundle of developments—urban- ization, industrialization, income growth—due to the legacy of mod- ernization theory,19 the role of education is causally and empirically distinct. Schooling provides the one clear channel for the deliberate and systematic inculcation of a set of values.20 And the critical aspect of mass literacy is its timing: the national ideas instilled in a population during the fi rst round of mass schooling—when a community fi rst shifts from an oral to a literate mass culture—are durable, and the fi rst schooled gen- eration will transmit those values in ways that previous or subsequent cohorts do not, as we will see.21 We therefore focus on a historical legacy that predates not only com- munism but also, in several cases, nation-states; the legacy includes the timing of mass schooling and the nature of its national content. The communist exit could not have occurred without mass opposition to the regime—and that opposition in turn rested on notions of statehood and legitimate governance fi rst inculcated by mass schooling. Attain- ing literacy under a noncommunist regime led to the transmission of a national identity separate from, and often directly opposed to, the com- munist regimes. Precommunist schooling thus lowers the magnitude of support for the communist party and increases the likelihood that widespread opposition to the communist party will arise. We therefore hypothesize that the communist exit is more likely to occur where literacy preceded the onset of communism. The extent and content of mass literacy for the region are shown in Ap- pendix 1. To establish the basic correlations and to test the rival hypotheses, we turn to straightforward statistical analyses that compare the impact of precommunist schooling on the communist exit with the infl uence of eco- nomic development, years of precommunist democratic statehood, and re- gional effects, including distance to the West. (The full operationalization and coding of these variables is included in Appendix 2.) The fi ndings support the claim that where precommunist school- ing was fi rmly established and literacy was widespread, the populations were more likely to vote the communists out of power at the fi rst avail- 18 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983); E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 3; Barry Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army and Military Power,” International Security 18 (Autumn 1993). 19 Deutsch (fn. 8); Lipset (fn. 8); Inkeles (fn. 8); Lerner (fn. 8). 20 Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, “Cognitive Consequences of Formal and Informal Educa- tion,” Science 182 (November 9, 1973). 21 Keith Darden, “Mass Schooling and the Formation of Enduring National Loyalties” (Book manuscript, Department of Political Science, Yale University, 2007). THE GREAT DIVIDE 91 100 Ukraine W n st Free Electio 80 BoMsnaicae-dHoneriazegovina ArmeniGaeCorrogaiatia PolanSdlovLeSantliHvoaivauankECgiaasztreoycnhia Rep. 1 Lithuania s 60 st ni Moldova u m Bulgaria m co 40 n o N Albania Romania o ats t 20 ABezlearrbuasijan Serbia e S Kazakhstan % Tajikistan Russia Ukraine E Turkmenistan Uzbekistan 0 Kyrgyz Republic 0 20 40 60 80 100 Levels of Precommunist Literacy FIGURE 1 PRECOMMUNIST SCHOOLING AND SHARE OF SEATS TO NONCOMMUNIST PARTIES IN THE FIRST FREE POSTCOMMUNIST ELECTIONS able opportunity. As shown in the simple scatterplot of Figure 1, there is a clear linear relationship between the percentage of the population that was literate at the onset of communism and the defeat of the com- munists in the fi rst free elections.22 In all countries with high levels of precommunist literacy, the communists were soundly defeated in the fi rst free elections. To conduct some basic statistical tests of our hypothesis, we chose a simple cross-sectional OLS regression as our estimation procedure and applied it to the universe of postcommunist cases.23 The fi ndings in 22 Only Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, both with low levels of education prior to 1945, diverge from this general pattern. These two cases will require further research; given the high level of decentralization in the Yugoslav school system, we currently lack suffi cient data on the content of schooling in these provinces under communism. 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 signifi cant regional differ- ences 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.