I like Varshney’s book. Unlike earlier books (with the exception of Golden and Gould), he writes very clearly and coherently about his larger theoretical framework and connects his empirical analysis quite carefully to the theoretical framework.
What’s more, the basic thesis makes a lot of sense. He even makes some effort to draw out the causal mechanisms through which cross-sectarian civil society associations manage to defuse growing tensions short of violence or manage to disrupt escalating cycles of violence. In his anecdote about media coverage of his research in Aligarh and Calicut and the differences in terms of the level of paranoia in the press, he also hints at how a virtuous civil society environment can actually prevent an atmosphere of tension and potential violence from arising – although a more detailed analysis of the role of the media while riots or potential riot situations were evolving would have been very nice to see.
I think he does well initially with his argument that between-city variations in basic socioeconomic indices like wealth or income and literacy doesn’t explain anything about variations in ethnic violence. It is disconcerting that there is not a single word of mention of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom carried out in Delhi by criminal elements of the Congress Party in revenge for the assassination of Indira Gandhi in which 3000 people were killed. Although his focus is on Hindu-Muslim violence, this is so much larger than all the other episodes of communal violence in Delhi put together that it seems it should be taken into account in some way.
Methodologically, his attempt to bracket out questions regarding the form and operational style of the state by looking at within-country comparisons makes a lot of sense – although, given the lack of centralization of the Indian state, two out of his three pairs (Aligarh and Calicut and Lucknow and Hyderabad) actually involve significantly different modes of governance. Only the pair of Surat and Ahmedabad controls for differences in provincial as well as national government and it’s no accident, I think, that his connection of the empirical with the theoretical is weakest in that case.
In particular, when he is faced with the challenge of Surat’s having actually evolved communal violence during the 1992-93 riots, he is rather unconvincing. After having invoked the decline in Congress Party organization as Indira Gandhi eviscerated intraparty democracy as a major causative factor in the rise of ethnic violence in Gujarat, he just tosses out a claim that this decline was much less in Surat than in Ahmedabad. It’s very hard to swallow this as an explanation simply because the collapse in party organization (and often replacement by thuggery as a mode of spreading political influence) was so total on a national scale that it’s hard to understand why Surat, one of the cities with the worst municipal government in the country (at least as far as the well-off provinces like Gujarat, Punjab, and Maharashtra are concerned) would somehow buck this national trend to a degree that it would be significant in preventing communal violence.
Varshney has done a lot of work to put flesh on Putnam’s rather casually developed, throwaway notion of bridging capital (while at the same time carefully emphasizing the ethnic/sectarian dark side of bonding capital), both through a useful study of correlations and through a specification of detailed causal mechanisms.
Still, the relentless focus on civil society and on “scientifically testing a hypothesis” lead to potentially very significant omissions.
First, although Varshney has in general successfully bracketed out the role of the state through his argument that it generally responds to the imperatives of civil society and only acts in accordance with the law if political interests align with human rights and law and order, the argument is still open to specific counterexamples. In particular, it is absolutely shocking that, in his lengthy discussion of Calicut, he says almost nothing about the terribly important fact that Kerala’s provincial government has more often been not been formed by the CPM (Communist Party-Marxist); West Bengal is the only other state where this has been the case, and the CPM quite clearly played a more transformative and “left” role in Kerala than in West Bengal.
There is a throwaway paragraph on p. 152 where Varshney casually acknowledges this, but it doesn’t color his analysis at all. He focuses on the evolution of “reading rooms” before independence and on something called “civil society” afterward without anything about the tremendous role of the CPM, using state resources, in building the very civil society organizations that he is talking about. He mentions at some point that Calicut, unlike Aligarh (or almost any Indian cities), actually has a union of “head-load” porters. The only reason something seemingly so improbable by standard economic analysis is possible is the Communist government in Kerala. The Science for the People movement, which is one of the largest civil society organs in Kerala, is wholly a creation of the CPM-run state government. One could go on.
Second, in his two best-argued cases regarding lack of sectarian violence, he brings up alternative explanations, admits their strength, and then completely ignores them. In Calicut, Hindu-Muslim violence is dampened because the true conflict is Hindu upper-caste vs. lower-caste; in Lucknow, the true conflict is Shia vs. Sunni.
It is entirely possible to correctly identify civil society as a causal factor in depressing ethnic violence and still to completely miss the picture. This is because this sort of analysis is very “microcausal;” it may well be that the proximate cause of defusing tensions and disrupting cycles of violence is the work of civil society organizations, but that may simply be a convenient mechanism for the playing out of some larger imperative. In Kerala, it may be that the provincial government is committed to anti-communalism; it’s well known among the political cognoscenti (and many others) in India that it is only the left parties that are resolutely anti-communal. That commitment may manifest in creation of “bridging” civil society groups, either directly at the behest of the state, or through the provision of space by the state, which then act to disrupt potential sectarian problems.
Or it may be that in Calicut caste tensions drive the creation of Hindu-Muslim civil society organizations and in Lucknow Muslim sectarian tensions do. And then those organizations act in the way Varshney has talked about.
In either case, though, if it did play out that way, a focus on civil society would be missing the forest for the trees and missing the deep causation for the proximate causation.
In the case of his remarkable ignoring of facts that everybody knows about Kerala’s Communist government, I have to suggest that the fact that Varshney is in political science, writes in Foreign Affairs (he has a fairly insipid piece about the tensions between democracy and economic growth in India in the latest issue), is a professor at Princeton (where they actually think Woodrow Wilson was a principled friend of democracy and self-determination) must have something to do with it. I think there is an obvious political bias as well as the intellectual bias created by the dominance of naïve Toquevillian notions of civil society within political science.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Reaching for My Gun
In the spirit of Nazi litterateur Hans Johst, I feel impelled to say, “When I hear the words ‘Deleuze’ and ‘Guattari,’ I reach for my gun.” “Nomadology” and “rhizomatic” engender very similar feelings as well.
I found this article useful primarily as a reminder of why I would never have dreamt of going into anthropology. I could find in it nothing but the most banal of conclusions dressed up with pretentious language and irrelevant references.
In fact, if the author were not so blinded by the rhetorical style of her field, she might have managed to say a few interesting things; she came at least within a stone’s throw of addressing important ideas relating to refugees.
Refugees (those who are not “internally displaced,” but have actually crossed a border) are subjected to an odd multiple displacement. First, they have left their “place,” and insofar as their actual home and home community has meaning to them they are displaced not just physically but emotionally. Second, they are living in a different country, where their legal status is sometimes clearly categorized and sometimes extremely unclear but is almost never the same as that of a native citizen of the country.
This second displacement is a highly nontrivial one, with huge ramifications in their daily lives, and it is based on a division (into nation-states that exercise control over ingress and egress, and nationalities for individuals, which give them the right to be certain places and not others), though it has been thoroughly naturalized by the practices of the last 50 to 150 years (depending on which part of the world), is not just an artificial construct but one whose construction one could see as a well-defined process with clear points of demarcation created by specific policies.
Orwell wrote about this construction penetratingly in one of his columns for the left-wing weekly Tribune (12 May 1944, http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19440512.html).
Taking aim at the then-conventional wisdom about the “disappearance of frontiers” and ever-increasing intercourse between nations, he said,
“Take simply the instance of travel. In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel. Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia. The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked. In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.
In our own time, however, travel has been becoming steadily more difficult.”
…
“All the countries of the New World did their best to keep the immigrant out unless he brought considerable sums of money with him. Japanese and Chinese immigration into the Americas had been completely stopped. Europe’s Jews had to stay and be slaughtered because there was nowhere for them to go, whereas in the case of the Czarist pogroms forty years earlier they had been able to flee in all directions. How, in the face of all this, anyone can say that modern methods of travel promote intercommunication between different countries defeats me.”
As he pointed out, it was not only the rise of borders and the policing of same that cut people off from one another; inventions that supposedly further communication can do the same:
“It is nonsense to say that the radio puts people in touch with foreign countries. If anything, it does the opposite.”
National media like the radio help to create national ways of thinking and viewing the world, which then helps to divide people by nationality.
Admittedly, Orwell was among the most brilliant political writers in English; still, the fact that he could say more of use, and more clearly, about this issue in a couple of paragraphs than Malkki could in her whole article is telling.
Analogizing from the highly constructed nature of this second displacement, it is worth probing the constructedness of the first. Are notions of traditional “place” in part a construct imposed on “primitive” refugees by, among others, sophisticated Western academics? I know very little more about that question than I did before I read the article.
The contrast she draws between Hutu refugees living in a camp and those living in Kigoma township suggests the obvious point that refugees construct their own sense of identity and can do it differently based on different circumstances. One wonders whether the primary difference between the racialized and (eventually) triumphalist construction she claims to find in the camp refugees and the cosmopolitanism and “hybridity” of the town refugees is simply that living in a refugee camp is in general much like living in hell. Palestinian militance began in the refugee camps as well, but, even though there is wide variation, the constructed Palestinian narrative certainly doesn’t divide into some neat dichotomy like the one that, one can’t help suspecting, Malkki very conveniently finds in the case she has looked at.
Her criticism of the glorification of indigenism and the “re-sacralization of place” (as far as I can tell, this means nothing at all) and the pathologization of displacement is useful and interesting, although hardly startling or revelatory; it’s easy enough to find academics writing things that are extremely stupid and then criticize them. If she had developed a critique of these ideas more systematically, it might have been helpful.
Finally, it’s interesting to discover a point of contact between Ronald Reagan and Deleuze and Guattari. His statement that trees cause 80% of all pollution , while not quite of the same scope as blaming trees for all the violence of human civilization, must still be highly congenial to them.
I found this article useful primarily as a reminder of why I would never have dreamt of going into anthropology. I could find in it nothing but the most banal of conclusions dressed up with pretentious language and irrelevant references.
In fact, if the author were not so blinded by the rhetorical style of her field, she might have managed to say a few interesting things; she came at least within a stone’s throw of addressing important ideas relating to refugees.
Refugees (those who are not “internally displaced,” but have actually crossed a border) are subjected to an odd multiple displacement. First, they have left their “place,” and insofar as their actual home and home community has meaning to them they are displaced not just physically but emotionally. Second, they are living in a different country, where their legal status is sometimes clearly categorized and sometimes extremely unclear but is almost never the same as that of a native citizen of the country.
This second displacement is a highly nontrivial one, with huge ramifications in their daily lives, and it is based on a division (into nation-states that exercise control over ingress and egress, and nationalities for individuals, which give them the right to be certain places and not others), though it has been thoroughly naturalized by the practices of the last 50 to 150 years (depending on which part of the world), is not just an artificial construct but one whose construction one could see as a well-defined process with clear points of demarcation created by specific policies.
Orwell wrote about this construction penetratingly in one of his columns for the left-wing weekly Tribune (12 May 1944, http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19440512.html).
Taking aim at the then-conventional wisdom about the “disappearance of frontiers” and ever-increasing intercourse between nations, he said,
“Take simply the instance of travel. In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel. Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia. The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked. In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.
In our own time, however, travel has been becoming steadily more difficult.”
…
“All the countries of the New World did their best to keep the immigrant out unless he brought considerable sums of money with him. Japanese and Chinese immigration into the Americas had been completely stopped. Europe’s Jews had to stay and be slaughtered because there was nowhere for them to go, whereas in the case of the Czarist pogroms forty years earlier they had been able to flee in all directions. How, in the face of all this, anyone can say that modern methods of travel promote intercommunication between different countries defeats me.”
As he pointed out, it was not only the rise of borders and the policing of same that cut people off from one another; inventions that supposedly further communication can do the same:
“It is nonsense to say that the radio puts people in touch with foreign countries. If anything, it does the opposite.”
National media like the radio help to create national ways of thinking and viewing the world, which then helps to divide people by nationality.
Admittedly, Orwell was among the most brilliant political writers in English; still, the fact that he could say more of use, and more clearly, about this issue in a couple of paragraphs than Malkki could in her whole article is telling.
Analogizing from the highly constructed nature of this second displacement, it is worth probing the constructedness of the first. Are notions of traditional “place” in part a construct imposed on “primitive” refugees by, among others, sophisticated Western academics? I know very little more about that question than I did before I read the article.
The contrast she draws between Hutu refugees living in a camp and those living in Kigoma township suggests the obvious point that refugees construct their own sense of identity and can do it differently based on different circumstances. One wonders whether the primary difference between the racialized and (eventually) triumphalist construction she claims to find in the camp refugees and the cosmopolitanism and “hybridity” of the town refugees is simply that living in a refugee camp is in general much like living in hell. Palestinian militance began in the refugee camps as well, but, even though there is wide variation, the constructed Palestinian narrative certainly doesn’t divide into some neat dichotomy like the one that, one can’t help suspecting, Malkki very conveniently finds in the case she has looked at.
Her criticism of the glorification of indigenism and the “re-sacralization of place” (as far as I can tell, this means nothing at all) and the pathologization of displacement is useful and interesting, although hardly startling or revelatory; it’s easy enough to find academics writing things that are extremely stupid and then criticize them. If she had developed a critique of these ideas more systematically, it might have been helpful.
Finally, it’s interesting to discover a point of contact between Ronald Reagan and Deleuze and Guattari. His statement that trees cause 80% of all pollution , while not quite of the same scope as blaming trees for all the violence of human civilization, must still be highly congenial to them.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Identities in Formation
In Identities in Formation, David Laitin analyzes processes of identity formation among the Russian-speaking populations of the recently formed nations of Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Laitin rejects the dichotomy found within the literature on identity between ‘primordialist’ (emphasizing the fixity of identities) and ‘constructivist’ (emphasizing the fluid, instrumental dimension of identity formation) conceptions of identity, arguing that a Janus-faced conception of culture is needed to capture both features of identity (p. 20). In times of change and uncertainty – such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and formation of new states – the constructivist nature of identities will be particularly important. Laitin’s main theoretical claim is that the decisions Russian-speakers in the near abroad are making about their identities – Are they Russians? Are they (e.g.) Latvians? Should they learn Latvian? Should their children? – can be analyzed through a rational choice tipping model.
The basic premise of the tipping model in Laitin’s usage is that the decision of Russian-speakers about whether to learn the titular language of their countries (which Laitin uses as a proxy for cultural assimilation) is made by weighing the potential gains of assimilation against the potential costs of assimilation, and that the payoffs of assimilation increase as more and more people adopt the titular language. Laitin argues that three primary mechanisms influence the strategic calculations concerning linguistic assimilation performed by Russian-speaking populations. First is the possibility that learning the titular language will have economic returns for the Russian-speakers in each country. Second is the extent to which in-group status is positively or negatively impacted by adopting the titular language. Third is the extent to which those Russian-speakers who do linguistically assimilate will be fully accepted by the dominant out-group with which they interact – that is, the titular population of the states in which they live.
Laitin emphasizes the fact that the four countries in his sample do not start the tipping game at the same place. The historical legacies of Russian rule have left profoundly different linguistic landscapes in each country. For instance, while one third of Russians in Ukraine spoke Ukrainian in 1989, less than one percent of Russians in Kazakhstan spoke Kazakh (p. 252). Laitin looks to the nature of elite incorporation of each country into pre-Soviet and Soviet Russia to explain these divergences. In Ukraine, treated as a ‘most-favored lord’, elites had strong incentives to adopt Russian as a means of upward mobility. In Estonia and Latvia, incorporated as ‘integralist republics’, the titular language remained dominant, yielding lower incentives for titulars to speak Russian. In Kazakhstan, incorporated as a ‘colonial republic’, there were incentives for elites to learn Russian to reap the benefits of being political mediators. These historical patterns lead Laitin to predict that Russian-speakers are most likely to assimilate in Estonia and Latvia, least likely to assimilate in Kazakhstan, with Ukraine so divided that it is difficult to predict which language will win out. Laitin also attempts to establish the ways in which Russian-speakers in the near abroad are identifying themselves, arguing that the conglomerate identity as the ‘Russian-speaking population’ (russkoiazychnoe naselenie) may form the basis for a broader nationalist movement among Russian-speakers abroad.
Commentary and Critique
There are many things to appreciate in Laitin’s book. First and foremost is the extraordinary effort that went into data collection, which drew on a plethora of methodological approaches: large-scale surveys, rich ethnographies, linguistic experiments, historical analysis, and content analysis of different media sources. Second is Laitin’s commitment to identifying the micro-foundations for broader macro-processes. As a whole, the book is remarkably ambitious and thorough.
Laitin is by and large convincing that decisions made by Russian-speakers about whether to invest in learning their titular language are influenced by the incentive structures with which actors are faced. Clearly many of the characters in the book based their decisions about linguistic assimilation on instrumental calculations. But if the basic premise of analyzing linguistic assimilation with the use of choice models seems plausible, I think that Laitin’s reliance on rational choice tends to underemphasize the role of power in structuring the decisions of Russian-speakers. In focusing on actors’ considerations of economic returns, in-group status, and out-group status, Laitin overlooks the extent to which the state can employ coercive measures to impose high costs on those who do not assimilate to the desired language. This tension is evident when Laitin discusses the colonial model of incorporation in Kazakhstan, which predicts that a few Kazakhs would have incentives to learn Russian to serve as political leaders. But this explanation does not account for the fact that nearly all Kazakhs eventually learned Russian.
A related gap in Laitin’s model is his treatment of state policies concerning citizenship rights enacted in each country in the first years of independence. In Laitin’s initial vignette of the Grigor’yev family in Estonia, he attributes the obsessive efforts of Liuba to learn Estonian to her deep fear that her family could be separated if they could not all meet the Estonian government’s stringent demands upon Russian-speakers for receiving citizenship (p. 5). Because Russians living in Estonia were not automatically granted Estonian citizenship, deportation to Russia – a place many Russian families in Estonia had never lived – was a looming threat in the first years of Estonian independence. In this story, the harsh citizenship policies enacted by Estonia served as a powerful incentive for Russian-speakers to learn Estonian or contend with the uncertainty of living without citizenship.
Yet the citizenship policies that seem like such a strong motivator of behavior receive barely any attention in Laitin’s empirical analysis of the likelihood to assimilate. Contrary to Laitin’s model of choice, in Latvia and Estonia, where citizenship laws are the toughest (p. 253), the state has largely pre-empted choice by imposing severe costs upon Russian-speakers who refuse to assimilate to the titular language. To the extent that Laitin includes such state policies in his models of the tipping game, he considers them as supplementary factors in out-group status. The more restrictive the citizenship policies, the greater the stigma Russian-speakers will receive from the titular population for learning the titular language, and the lower the likelihood that Russian-speakers will learn the titular language (p. 256). But this assessment works in opposition to the commonsense notion (as well as Liuba Grigor’yev’s interpretation) that exclusive citizenship laws provided a powerful incentive to learn the titular language. Giving more attention to the role of power (especially state power) in influencing decisions about assimilation would help Laitin make more sense of the fact that many of his respondents insisted that they really did not have much choice at all.
In addition, Laitin sometimes stretches his rationalist explanation of assimilation decisions beyond its plausible limits. For instance, Laitin predicts that as compliance with titular language laws approaches 100%, some individuals will have incentives to remain monolinguistic Russian speakers in order to emerge as ethnic entrepreneurs to mobilize the Russian-speaking community (p. 29, p. 249). This interpretation suggests that those who refuse to learn the titular language do so because they expect the future payoff of becoming a future leader and ‘cultural hero’ after the language cascade has happened. It seems more likely that those who remain monolingual Russian-speakers due so out of habit, personal conviction, pride, stubbornness, or old age. It is possible that such holdouts would be heralded as ‘cultural heroes’ for their actions, but I doubt their decisions would be motivated by such a far-sighted desire, as Laitin seems to think.
A more general point to draw out from the limitations of a rational choice approach to cultural identities is that it would be helpful to delineate the scope conditions under which such an approach is valid. Laitin gives off the impression that he is justifying the application of choice models to the study of culture more generally, without acknowledging the specificities of his usage, such as the fact that the state has a big role in structuring incentives, the uniqueness of language versus other cultural elements, etc.
There are also some aspects of Laitin’s rational choice account which he does not fully develop. In setting up the tipping game as a collective action problem (p. 27) in which cultural entrepreneurs play an important role, Laitin seems primed for a discussion of leadership along the lines of Calvert. But Laitin never really delivers on this promise in his empirical analyses. In order to get at this dynamic, I think Laitin would need to examine a different unit of analysis. For the most part, Laitin focuses on the level of the individual, looking at survey responses and conducting interviews with select individuals to draw generalizations about entire countries. What might be interesting to study further would be to examine the connection between political and social movements, the role of leaders, and processes of assimilation.
Another drawback of the book is that Laitin’s deductive approach seems to color many of the interpretations of his data. Laitin starts with a strong theoretical statement of the relevance for tipping models to studies of identities. Later on, it becomes clear that many of the theoretical predictions he held were not borne out by the data. For instance, in introducing the tipping game, Laitin outlines ‘competitive assimilation’ as one of the primary mechanisms driving decision-making among Russian-speakers (p. 28). However, Laitin later acknowledges that this factor seemed to play little role at all in the calculations of actors (p. 123). Laitin similarly acknowledges the lack of support for his theories about the differences between nationalism in Russian and nationalism among Russian-speakers in the near abroad (p. 319). Laitin on the whole seems to offer pretty honest admissions of the limitations of his data, but one wonders what story he would have been able to tell if he let the data speak for themselves without bringing his strong theoretical ambitions to the table. What results in the book is more or less a test of Laitin’s predictions, rather than an attempt to account for the observed outcomes. Like Fransozi, Laitin draws on a wide range of methodological tools, but his work clearly lacks the theoretical agnosticism present in Fransozi’s book.
Perhaps related to his deductive approach is Laitin’s propensity to make big predictions about future trends that seem to be based more on a desire to be provocative than on a close analysis of the data. One of Laitin’s main claims is that the concept of the ‘Russian-speaking population’ (russkoiazychnoe naselenie) has emerged as the dominant mode of identification for the ethnic Russians living in Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Laitin even goes so far as to suggest that this emerging identity might serve as the basis for a nationalist project, in which the Russian-speaking populations of different countries would join together to assert their common interests. Laitin acknowledges one problem with this argument – that the prevalence of the term russkoiazychnoe naselenie has actually dropped off quite steeply in the mid-1990s in favor of lumping the minority populations together as ‘Russians’. However, an additional impediment to a nationalist project built around identification with the Russian-speaking population is the fact that the usage of the phrase is quite different across different countries. In Ukraine, the term has many uses, not one of which distinguishes Russian-speakers who are ethnic Russians from the rest of the Ukrainian population. The different identity cleavages in different societies call into question the extent to which Russian-speakers will be able to mobilize around a coherent identity.
The basic premise of the tipping model in Laitin’s usage is that the decision of Russian-speakers about whether to learn the titular language of their countries (which Laitin uses as a proxy for cultural assimilation) is made by weighing the potential gains of assimilation against the potential costs of assimilation, and that the payoffs of assimilation increase as more and more people adopt the titular language. Laitin argues that three primary mechanisms influence the strategic calculations concerning linguistic assimilation performed by Russian-speaking populations. First is the possibility that learning the titular language will have economic returns for the Russian-speakers in each country. Second is the extent to which in-group status is positively or negatively impacted by adopting the titular language. Third is the extent to which those Russian-speakers who do linguistically assimilate will be fully accepted by the dominant out-group with which they interact – that is, the titular population of the states in which they live.
Laitin emphasizes the fact that the four countries in his sample do not start the tipping game at the same place. The historical legacies of Russian rule have left profoundly different linguistic landscapes in each country. For instance, while one third of Russians in Ukraine spoke Ukrainian in 1989, less than one percent of Russians in Kazakhstan spoke Kazakh (p. 252). Laitin looks to the nature of elite incorporation of each country into pre-Soviet and Soviet Russia to explain these divergences. In Ukraine, treated as a ‘most-favored lord’, elites had strong incentives to adopt Russian as a means of upward mobility. In Estonia and Latvia, incorporated as ‘integralist republics’, the titular language remained dominant, yielding lower incentives for titulars to speak Russian. In Kazakhstan, incorporated as a ‘colonial republic’, there were incentives for elites to learn Russian to reap the benefits of being political mediators. These historical patterns lead Laitin to predict that Russian-speakers are most likely to assimilate in Estonia and Latvia, least likely to assimilate in Kazakhstan, with Ukraine so divided that it is difficult to predict which language will win out. Laitin also attempts to establish the ways in which Russian-speakers in the near abroad are identifying themselves, arguing that the conglomerate identity as the ‘Russian-speaking population’ (russkoiazychnoe naselenie) may form the basis for a broader nationalist movement among Russian-speakers abroad.
Commentary and Critique
There are many things to appreciate in Laitin’s book. First and foremost is the extraordinary effort that went into data collection, which drew on a plethora of methodological approaches: large-scale surveys, rich ethnographies, linguistic experiments, historical analysis, and content analysis of different media sources. Second is Laitin’s commitment to identifying the micro-foundations for broader macro-processes. As a whole, the book is remarkably ambitious and thorough.
Laitin is by and large convincing that decisions made by Russian-speakers about whether to invest in learning their titular language are influenced by the incentive structures with which actors are faced. Clearly many of the characters in the book based their decisions about linguistic assimilation on instrumental calculations. But if the basic premise of analyzing linguistic assimilation with the use of choice models seems plausible, I think that Laitin’s reliance on rational choice tends to underemphasize the role of power in structuring the decisions of Russian-speakers. In focusing on actors’ considerations of economic returns, in-group status, and out-group status, Laitin overlooks the extent to which the state can employ coercive measures to impose high costs on those who do not assimilate to the desired language. This tension is evident when Laitin discusses the colonial model of incorporation in Kazakhstan, which predicts that a few Kazakhs would have incentives to learn Russian to serve as political leaders. But this explanation does not account for the fact that nearly all Kazakhs eventually learned Russian.
A related gap in Laitin’s model is his treatment of state policies concerning citizenship rights enacted in each country in the first years of independence. In Laitin’s initial vignette of the Grigor’yev family in Estonia, he attributes the obsessive efforts of Liuba to learn Estonian to her deep fear that her family could be separated if they could not all meet the Estonian government’s stringent demands upon Russian-speakers for receiving citizenship (p. 5). Because Russians living in Estonia were not automatically granted Estonian citizenship, deportation to Russia – a place many Russian families in Estonia had never lived – was a looming threat in the first years of Estonian independence. In this story, the harsh citizenship policies enacted by Estonia served as a powerful incentive for Russian-speakers to learn Estonian or contend with the uncertainty of living without citizenship.
Yet the citizenship policies that seem like such a strong motivator of behavior receive barely any attention in Laitin’s empirical analysis of the likelihood to assimilate. Contrary to Laitin’s model of choice, in Latvia and Estonia, where citizenship laws are the toughest (p. 253), the state has largely pre-empted choice by imposing severe costs upon Russian-speakers who refuse to assimilate to the titular language. To the extent that Laitin includes such state policies in his models of the tipping game, he considers them as supplementary factors in out-group status. The more restrictive the citizenship policies, the greater the stigma Russian-speakers will receive from the titular population for learning the titular language, and the lower the likelihood that Russian-speakers will learn the titular language (p. 256). But this assessment works in opposition to the commonsense notion (as well as Liuba Grigor’yev’s interpretation) that exclusive citizenship laws provided a powerful incentive to learn the titular language. Giving more attention to the role of power (especially state power) in influencing decisions about assimilation would help Laitin make more sense of the fact that many of his respondents insisted that they really did not have much choice at all.
In addition, Laitin sometimes stretches his rationalist explanation of assimilation decisions beyond its plausible limits. For instance, Laitin predicts that as compliance with titular language laws approaches 100%, some individuals will have incentives to remain monolinguistic Russian speakers in order to emerge as ethnic entrepreneurs to mobilize the Russian-speaking community (p. 29, p. 249). This interpretation suggests that those who refuse to learn the titular language do so because they expect the future payoff of becoming a future leader and ‘cultural hero’ after the language cascade has happened. It seems more likely that those who remain monolingual Russian-speakers due so out of habit, personal conviction, pride, stubbornness, or old age. It is possible that such holdouts would be heralded as ‘cultural heroes’ for their actions, but I doubt their decisions would be motivated by such a far-sighted desire, as Laitin seems to think.
A more general point to draw out from the limitations of a rational choice approach to cultural identities is that it would be helpful to delineate the scope conditions under which such an approach is valid. Laitin gives off the impression that he is justifying the application of choice models to the study of culture more generally, without acknowledging the specificities of his usage, such as the fact that the state has a big role in structuring incentives, the uniqueness of language versus other cultural elements, etc.
There are also some aspects of Laitin’s rational choice account which he does not fully develop. In setting up the tipping game as a collective action problem (p. 27) in which cultural entrepreneurs play an important role, Laitin seems primed for a discussion of leadership along the lines of Calvert. But Laitin never really delivers on this promise in his empirical analyses. In order to get at this dynamic, I think Laitin would need to examine a different unit of analysis. For the most part, Laitin focuses on the level of the individual, looking at survey responses and conducting interviews with select individuals to draw generalizations about entire countries. What might be interesting to study further would be to examine the connection between political and social movements, the role of leaders, and processes of assimilation.
Another drawback of the book is that Laitin’s deductive approach seems to color many of the interpretations of his data. Laitin starts with a strong theoretical statement of the relevance for tipping models to studies of identities. Later on, it becomes clear that many of the theoretical predictions he held were not borne out by the data. For instance, in introducing the tipping game, Laitin outlines ‘competitive assimilation’ as one of the primary mechanisms driving decision-making among Russian-speakers (p. 28). However, Laitin later acknowledges that this factor seemed to play little role at all in the calculations of actors (p. 123). Laitin similarly acknowledges the lack of support for his theories about the differences between nationalism in Russian and nationalism among Russian-speakers in the near abroad (p. 319). Laitin on the whole seems to offer pretty honest admissions of the limitations of his data, but one wonders what story he would have been able to tell if he let the data speak for themselves without bringing his strong theoretical ambitions to the table. What results in the book is more or less a test of Laitin’s predictions, rather than an attempt to account for the observed outcomes. Like Fransozi, Laitin draws on a wide range of methodological tools, but his work clearly lacks the theoretical agnosticism present in Fransozi’s book.
Perhaps related to his deductive approach is Laitin’s propensity to make big predictions about future trends that seem to be based more on a desire to be provocative than on a close analysis of the data. One of Laitin’s main claims is that the concept of the ‘Russian-speaking population’ (russkoiazychnoe naselenie) has emerged as the dominant mode of identification for the ethnic Russians living in Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Laitin even goes so far as to suggest that this emerging identity might serve as the basis for a nationalist project, in which the Russian-speaking populations of different countries would join together to assert their common interests. Laitin acknowledges one problem with this argument – that the prevalence of the term russkoiazychnoe naselenie has actually dropped off quite steeply in the mid-1990s in favor of lumping the minority populations together as ‘Russians’. However, an additional impediment to a nationalist project built around identification with the Russian-speaking population is the fact that the usage of the phrase is quite different across different countries. In Ukraine, the term has many uses, not one of which distinguishes Russian-speakers who are ethnic Russians from the rest of the Ukrainian population. The different identity cleavages in different societies call into question the extent to which Russian-speakers will be able to mobilize around a coherent identity.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Paths toward Democracy,The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America
In her 1999 book Paths toward Democracy. The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America Ruth Berins Collier looks at the literature on democratization and seeks a middle ground. Collier identifies two main “camps” in the literature. The first being the standard class-based analysis, with roots in both the Marxist and historical sociological literature, which links the strength and actions of the working class and worker-based parties to the success of democracy and democratization. The second “camp” avoids or ignores the class category and provides a strategic interaction model, with emphasis on the negotiating or bargaining role of elites.
Collier covers a lot of ground including 27 cases in her analysis in greater or lesser detail. She looks at 17 “historical” cases that cover democratization in primarily Western European countries from the mid-1800s through 1920. These cases are contrasted with 10 cases from the 1970s and 1980s primarily in South America. The book concludes that the literature tends to imply that the historical cases were class-based successes and the more recent cases were examples of the success from elite strategic negotiation.
Collier is not satisfied with this clean, tidy package and posits that the historical cases tended to overstate or misspecify the role of the working class while the contemporary cases underemphasized the working class. Collier puts forward a 3D cube diagram (page 19) to aid in a more nuanced mapping of the dimensions of democratization. The three dimensions are presented as continua of class, prior inclusion (“ins” and “outs”) in the regime, and arena of action (ranging from mobilization/protest to deliberation/negotiation). Then in Chapter 4 she identifies 4 patterns of democratization that show the different paths (Table 4.1 on page 113 provides a summary). In the end she calls for an integration of the class and strategic interaction analyses and urges a focus on the process of democratization not an end result of democracy.
Collier does a good job in making the case for uniting the two “camps” of the democratization literature. However the result is in essence she makes her own clean, tidy package. The problem is there are a bunch of loose strings hanging around the edges. She makes some key assertions that I think are more interesting than this unity package but don’t seem fully supported or developed in the book.
In addition to this integrated middle ground she makes some efforts to assert that the antecedent regime is a key factor in understanding democratization processes. She finds that the regime’s ability to affect the resources and perceived interests of different actors and how they do or do not pursue democratic reform impacts their success in achieving or starting democratic reforms. This is an important finding and she does back this up with anecdotes from the cases but she spends so much time discussing the two “camps” and how labor and elite interacted that the case for the antecedent regime is not strong in my reading.
Perhaps an even more interesting assertion is that, on page 15, of the importance of identities and the creation of shared meaning in the process of democratization. It is not clear from what we read exactly how this plays into the different cases that she highlights. As an example Collier references Sewell and his assertions that artisans in the French Revolution, despite not being working class, achieved a “class consciousness” because economic restructuring changed their position in society and their livelihood opportunities. Artisans shared in the struggle of workers because they had a shared identity as being afflicted by the new economic order. This points to the importance of positionality which seems to be covered in the strategic interaction literature and the naming of “ins” and “outs” in Collier’s 3D cubes.
She throws in the identity card but does not follow up with it and include it in the final analysis. Reading through the cases in the chapters we read and skimming in the chapters not assigned there are many references to different identities and parties but never any assessment of identify formation in the democratization process. This is disappointing because she brings it up in the introductory chapter but then fails to deliver.
One thing that Collier does deliver is an examination of the definition of terms or the boundaries that she uses and others use in analyzing democratization processes. I found this to be quite interesting and useful. In the introductory chapter she lays out a tweaking of the definitions or boundaries of terms and concepts like; working class, democratization, success or effectiveness…etc. (page 14) that support her claim that her analysis is different than other analyses. First I think that her focus on the process of democratization rather than the end result of democracy or a functioning democratic regime is novel and worthwhile. This allows for her interesting discussion of suffrage and how having the goal of suffrage vs. not having the goal of suffrage impacted the different movements within their time periods and cultures. It is interesting to think about Collier’s examination of suffrage with regards to Clemen’s argument in The People’s Lobby and her other work that highlights the strengths that can be gained and repertoires of action that can be engaged by interest groups and social movements by being “outside” and not being engulfed in the institutional structures of formalized rules and rights. I would like to think about this more.
But another part of Collier’s tweaking of the definitions and boundaries of analysis is problematic to me. Clearly using her own definitions her work is different and unique. But when the next scholar comes along and remakes the boundaries and definitions then his/her work will then be different and unique. But it is not to say that it is better. Collier writes, “the definition of democracy one chooses determines the choice of episodes to be analyzed” (page 24). This raises a red flag. Does this mean that you pick your theory or definition of democracy and then go searching for those episodes that are going to prove your theory? Collier points out that one could look at the Weimar Republic as part of a process of democratization but many, including Moore, Luebbert and Ertman, would characterize this as the path to fascism. She points out that by shifting definitions and boundaries we make it difficult to compare data. Indeed I think this is true but I don’t think this means that we shouldn’t, as Collier did, challenge the definitions and boundaries that have been set out in the cannon. But the fundamental question is what do we learn or accomplish by shifting the terms of the debate? Or is this just a cover to make your work seem new and unique, because in fact it is if you shift the definitions so that it can’t be compared to anyone else’s work.
Collier covers a lot of ground including 27 cases in her analysis in greater or lesser detail. She looks at 17 “historical” cases that cover democratization in primarily Western European countries from the mid-1800s through 1920. These cases are contrasted with 10 cases from the 1970s and 1980s primarily in South America. The book concludes that the literature tends to imply that the historical cases were class-based successes and the more recent cases were examples of the success from elite strategic negotiation.
Collier is not satisfied with this clean, tidy package and posits that the historical cases tended to overstate or misspecify the role of the working class while the contemporary cases underemphasized the working class. Collier puts forward a 3D cube diagram (page 19) to aid in a more nuanced mapping of the dimensions of democratization. The three dimensions are presented as continua of class, prior inclusion (“ins” and “outs”) in the regime, and arena of action (ranging from mobilization/protest to deliberation/negotiation). Then in Chapter 4 she identifies 4 patterns of democratization that show the different paths (Table 4.1 on page 113 provides a summary). In the end she calls for an integration of the class and strategic interaction analyses and urges a focus on the process of democratization not an end result of democracy.
Collier does a good job in making the case for uniting the two “camps” of the democratization literature. However the result is in essence she makes her own clean, tidy package. The problem is there are a bunch of loose strings hanging around the edges. She makes some key assertions that I think are more interesting than this unity package but don’t seem fully supported or developed in the book.
In addition to this integrated middle ground she makes some efforts to assert that the antecedent regime is a key factor in understanding democratization processes. She finds that the regime’s ability to affect the resources and perceived interests of different actors and how they do or do not pursue democratic reform impacts their success in achieving or starting democratic reforms. This is an important finding and she does back this up with anecdotes from the cases but she spends so much time discussing the two “camps” and how labor and elite interacted that the case for the antecedent regime is not strong in my reading.
Perhaps an even more interesting assertion is that, on page 15, of the importance of identities and the creation of shared meaning in the process of democratization. It is not clear from what we read exactly how this plays into the different cases that she highlights. As an example Collier references Sewell and his assertions that artisans in the French Revolution, despite not being working class, achieved a “class consciousness” because economic restructuring changed their position in society and their livelihood opportunities. Artisans shared in the struggle of workers because they had a shared identity as being afflicted by the new economic order. This points to the importance of positionality which seems to be covered in the strategic interaction literature and the naming of “ins” and “outs” in Collier’s 3D cubes.
She throws in the identity card but does not follow up with it and include it in the final analysis. Reading through the cases in the chapters we read and skimming in the chapters not assigned there are many references to different identities and parties but never any assessment of identify formation in the democratization process. This is disappointing because she brings it up in the introductory chapter but then fails to deliver.
One thing that Collier does deliver is an examination of the definition of terms or the boundaries that she uses and others use in analyzing democratization processes. I found this to be quite interesting and useful. In the introductory chapter she lays out a tweaking of the definitions or boundaries of terms and concepts like; working class, democratization, success or effectiveness…etc. (page 14) that support her claim that her analysis is different than other analyses. First I think that her focus on the process of democratization rather than the end result of democracy or a functioning democratic regime is novel and worthwhile. This allows for her interesting discussion of suffrage and how having the goal of suffrage vs. not having the goal of suffrage impacted the different movements within their time periods and cultures. It is interesting to think about Collier’s examination of suffrage with regards to Clemen’s argument in The People’s Lobby and her other work that highlights the strengths that can be gained and repertoires of action that can be engaged by interest groups and social movements by being “outside” and not being engulfed in the institutional structures of formalized rules and rights. I would like to think about this more.
But another part of Collier’s tweaking of the definitions and boundaries of analysis is problematic to me. Clearly using her own definitions her work is different and unique. But when the next scholar comes along and remakes the boundaries and definitions then his/her work will then be different and unique. But it is not to say that it is better. Collier writes, “the definition of democracy one chooses determines the choice of episodes to be analyzed” (page 24). This raises a red flag. Does this mean that you pick your theory or definition of democracy and then go searching for those episodes that are going to prove your theory? Collier points out that one could look at the Weimar Republic as part of a process of democratization but many, including Moore, Luebbert and Ertman, would characterize this as the path to fascism. She points out that by shifting definitions and boundaries we make it difficult to compare data. Indeed I think this is true but I don’t think this means that we shouldn’t, as Collier did, challenge the definitions and boundaries that have been set out in the cannon. But the fundamental question is what do we learn or accomplish by shifting the terms of the debate? Or is this just a cover to make your work seem new and unique, because in fact it is if you shift the definitions so that it can’t be compared to anyone else’s work.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
The Social Democratic Moment "Berman"
At first glance, Sherri Berman’s attempt at an “ideational” analysis of interwar European social democracy and the determinants of success or failure in achieving hegemony seems very promising. I sympathize strongly with her feeling that state-centric and institutional theories on the one hand and “class coalition” theories on the other have something missing (although it’s possible to conclude that Berman ends up reproducing from a slightly different point of view much of the conventional class coalition analysis).On closer inspection, though, it seems to me that Berman’s analysis is so riddled with methodological flaws and lacunae that the ultimate value is questionable.The most important is that the comparative project is dramatically ill-conceived. Germany and Sweden were similar in that they had social-democratic parties with very extensive or potentially extensive electoral support, and in being latecomers to the game of extending their influence in the Third World (Sweden never quite became a colonialist competitor and Germany didn’t get very far), but not in much else.Germany’s status as a potential major power, its defeat in World War I and the harsh conditions imposed at Versailles (which were far harsher in the minds of the Germans than in reality, but …) are completely different from Sweden’s case, the existence of a large revolutionary (or “revolutionary”) left (the KPD) and, most important and intimately related to both Germany’s military power and its defeat, the rise of Nazism completely confounds the comparison.Perhaps one can make the case that the strategies of Sweden’s SAP can be analyzed in an essentially self-contained way (I don’t know enough about the case; since the interwar failures of German social democracy dramatically affected the entire subsequent history of the world and the successes of Swedish social democracy only affected Sweden, I’ve retained rather more interest in the former), but in the case of Germany this is impossible.
The rise of the NSDAP, affected as it was by mistakes made by the SPD, is also an independent phenomenon. The KPD, its analysis of the SPD as “social-fascists,” and its repudiation (until it was too late) of a Popular Front strategy is again a critical and partially independent phenomenon. Trying to connect the ideas of the SPD with its political strategies and thus with success or failure with only the most notional attention to these two other major players is, frankly, fatuous. I don’t see the point.Or, to be more charitable, I can only see this as a reflexive application of a certain notion of sociological method – “use comparisons to elucidate causes” – when far more useful tools were at hand and ready for use.Next, although the ideational analysis is an excellent idea, it is carried out in a half-baked manner. The dogmatic economic determinist Marxism and the Kautskyan travesty of “scientific socialism” and its effect both on the position of “theorists” like Kautsky and Hilferding and on their lack of political vision is at least developed enough that one can guess at how it worked. But there is no discussion of the ideology of the Swedish SAP in relation to that of the German SDP, beyond saying that Marx and Engels’ being German made Marxism more important to the SDP. What role did Marxism play in the SAP, was there the split between revolutionary Marxism and “parliamentary cretinism,” and if so, how did they end up not seriously affecting the SAP’s decisions?Even more striking, rigid dogmatic Marxism is easily determined to be the primary source of the SDP’s political mistakes or tendency to be simply out of touch with pressing concerns, but nothing is said about how a nominally Marxist party nominally dedicated to the creation of a workers’ state became not just an implementer of standard economic doctrines but also of authoritarian, conservative (though “centrist”) German nationalism.How did a Marxist party start using the standard elitist doctrines of having to protect the nation from the “crazies on the left and the right?”",1]
);
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The rise of the NSDAP, affected as it was by mistakes made by the SPD, is also an independent phenomenon. The KPD, its analysis of the SPD as “social-fascists,” and its repudiation (until it was too late) of a Popular Front strategy is again a critical and partially independent phenomenon. Trying to connect the ideas of the SPD with its political strategies and thus with success or failure with only the most notional attention to these two other major players is, frankly, fatuous. I don’t see the point.Or, to be more charitable, I can only see this as a reflexive application of a certain notion of sociological method – “use comparisons to elucidate causes” – when far more useful tools were at hand and ready for use.Next, although the ideational analysis is an excellent idea, it is carried out in a half-baked manner. The dogmatic economic determinist Marxism and the Kautskyan travesty of “scientific socialism” and its effect both on the position of “theorists” like Kautsky and Hilferding and on their lack of political vision is at least developed enough that one can guess at how it worked. But there is no discussion of the ideology of the Swedish SAP in relation to that of the German SDP, beyond saying that Marx and Engels’ being German made Marxism more important to the SDP. What role did Marxism play in the SAP, was there the split between revolutionary Marxism and “parliamentary cretinism,” and if so, how did they end up not seriously affecting the SAP’s decisions?Even more striking, rigid dogmatic Marxism is easily determined to be the primary source of the SDP’s political mistakes or tendency to be simply out of touch with pressing concerns, but nothing is said about how a nominally Marxist party nominally dedicated to the creation of a workers’ state became not just an implementer of standard economic doctrines but also of authoritarian, conservative (though “centrist”) German nationalism.How did a Marxist party start using the standard elitist doctrines of having to protect the nation from the “crazies on the left and the right?”
Within one page, Berman refers to the SPD’s tendency (in dismissing the threat of the Nazis) to talk about Bruning as an exemplar of the “truly dangerous” German fascist tendencies and mentions that they used their at the time massive parliamentary clout to support him as chancellor. What ideas went into that kind of strategy? Those choices are of the essence in understanding the SPD’s failure and its final decision to back Hindenburg as a bulwark against the Nazis only to see him turn around and appoint Hitler as chancellor.Finally, in setting an ideational against an institutional analysis, one is compelled at least to pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of institutional analyses. It amazes me that there is essentially no reference to Robert Michels in the entire book. Not only is “Political Parties” a major foundational work in sociology, most of its 400 pages are devoted to the German SDP. Surely it is necessary to try to tease out the contributions made by the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” as played out in the SDP from those made by Kautskyism if one truly wishes to understand the political paralysis and ineptness of the SDP?All in all, it seems to me that it would have been a much better book if it eliminated the Swedish case (except for occasional mention as an example) and actually really did focus in depth on the ideas of the SDP and their effects.",0]
);
D(["ce"]);
//-->
Within one page, Berman refers to the SPD’s tendency (in dismissing the threat of the Nazis) to talk about Bruning as an exemplar of the “truly dangerous” German fascist tendencies and mentions that they used their at the time massive parliamentary clout to support him as chancellor. What ideas went into that kind of strategy? Those choices are of the essence in understanding the SPD’s failure and its final decision to back Hindenburg as a bulwark against the Nazis only to see him turn around and appoint Hitler as chancellor.Finally, in setting an ideational against an institutional analysis, one is compelled at least to pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of institutional analyses. It amazes me that there is essentially no reference to Robert Michels in the entire book. Not only is “Political Parties” a major foundational work in sociology, most of its 400 pages are devoted to the German SDP. Surely it is necessary to try to tease out the contributions made by the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” as played out in the SDP from those made by Kautskyism if one truly wishes to understand the political paralysis and ineptness of the SDP?All in all, it seems to me that it would have been a much better book if it eliminated the Swedish case (except for occasional mention as an example) and actually really did focus in depth on the ideas of the SDP and their effects.
The rise of the NSDAP, affected as it was by mistakes made by the SPD, is also an independent phenomenon. The KPD, its analysis of the SPD as “social-fascists,” and its repudiation (until it was too late) of a Popular Front strategy is again a critical and partially independent phenomenon. Trying to connect the ideas of the SPD with its political strategies and thus with success or failure with only the most notional attention to these two other major players is, frankly, fatuous. I don’t see the point.Or, to be more charitable, I can only see this as a reflexive application of a certain notion of sociological method – “use comparisons to elucidate causes” – when far more useful tools were at hand and ready for use.Next, although the ideational analysis is an excellent idea, it is carried out in a half-baked manner. The dogmatic economic determinist Marxism and the Kautskyan travesty of “scientific socialism” and its effect both on the position of “theorists” like Kautsky and Hilferding and on their lack of political vision is at least developed enough that one can guess at how it worked. But there is no discussion of the ideology of the Swedish SAP in relation to that of the German SDP, beyond saying that Marx and Engels’ being German made Marxism more important to the SDP. What role did Marxism play in the SAP, was there the split between revolutionary Marxism and “parliamentary cretinism,” and if so, how did they end up not seriously affecting the SAP’s decisions?Even more striking, rigid dogmatic Marxism is easily determined to be the primary source of the SDP’s political mistakes or tendency to be simply out of touch with pressing concerns, but nothing is said about how a nominally Marxist party nominally dedicated to the creation of a workers’ state became not just an implementer of standard economic doctrines but also of authoritarian, conservative (though “centrist”) German nationalism.How did a Marxist party start using the standard elitist doctrines of having to protect the nation from the “crazies on the left and the right?”",1]
);
//-->
The rise of the NSDAP, affected as it was by mistakes made by the SPD, is also an independent phenomenon. The KPD, its analysis of the SPD as “social-fascists,” and its repudiation (until it was too late) of a Popular Front strategy is again a critical and partially independent phenomenon. Trying to connect the ideas of the SPD with its political strategies and thus with success or failure with only the most notional attention to these two other major players is, frankly, fatuous. I don’t see the point.Or, to be more charitable, I can only see this as a reflexive application of a certain notion of sociological method – “use comparisons to elucidate causes” – when far more useful tools were at hand and ready for use.Next, although the ideational analysis is an excellent idea, it is carried out in a half-baked manner. The dogmatic economic determinist Marxism and the Kautskyan travesty of “scientific socialism” and its effect both on the position of “theorists” like Kautsky and Hilferding and on their lack of political vision is at least developed enough that one can guess at how it worked. But there is no discussion of the ideology of the Swedish SAP in relation to that of the German SDP, beyond saying that Marx and Engels’ being German made Marxism more important to the SDP. What role did Marxism play in the SAP, was there the split between revolutionary Marxism and “parliamentary cretinism,” and if so, how did they end up not seriously affecting the SAP’s decisions?Even more striking, rigid dogmatic Marxism is easily determined to be the primary source of the SDP’s political mistakes or tendency to be simply out of touch with pressing concerns, but nothing is said about how a nominally Marxist party nominally dedicated to the creation of a workers’ state became not just an implementer of standard economic doctrines but also of authoritarian, conservative (though “centrist”) German nationalism.How did a Marxist party start using the standard elitist doctrines of having to protect the nation from the “crazies on the left and the right?”
Within one page, Berman refers to the SPD’s tendency (in dismissing the threat of the Nazis) to talk about Bruning as an exemplar of the “truly dangerous” German fascist tendencies and mentions that they used their at the time massive parliamentary clout to support him as chancellor. What ideas went into that kind of strategy? Those choices are of the essence in understanding the SPD’s failure and its final decision to back Hindenburg as a bulwark against the Nazis only to see him turn around and appoint Hitler as chancellor.Finally, in setting an ideational against an institutional analysis, one is compelled at least to pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of institutional analyses. It amazes me that there is essentially no reference to Robert Michels in the entire book. Not only is “Political Parties” a major foundational work in sociology, most of its 400 pages are devoted to the German SDP. Surely it is necessary to try to tease out the contributions made by the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” as played out in the SDP from those made by Kautskyism if one truly wishes to understand the political paralysis and ineptness of the SDP?All in all, it seems to me that it would have been a much better book if it eliminated the Swedish case (except for occasional mention as an example) and actually really did focus in depth on the ideas of the SDP and their effects.",0]
);
D(["ce"]);
//-->
Within one page, Berman refers to the SPD’s tendency (in dismissing the threat of the Nazis) to talk about Bruning as an exemplar of the “truly dangerous” German fascist tendencies and mentions that they used their at the time massive parliamentary clout to support him as chancellor. What ideas went into that kind of strategy? Those choices are of the essence in understanding the SPD’s failure and its final decision to back Hindenburg as a bulwark against the Nazis only to see him turn around and appoint Hitler as chancellor.Finally, in setting an ideational against an institutional analysis, one is compelled at least to pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of institutional analyses. It amazes me that there is essentially no reference to Robert Michels in the entire book. Not only is “Political Parties” a major foundational work in sociology, most of its 400 pages are devoted to the German SDP. Surely it is necessary to try to tease out the contributions made by the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” as played out in the SDP from those made by Kautskyism if one truly wishes to understand the political paralysis and ineptness of the SDP?All in all, it seems to me that it would have been a much better book if it eliminated the Swedish case (except for occasional mention as an example) and actually really did focus in depth on the ideas of the SDP and their effects.
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