Timing Is Everything

Abstract

There is broad agreement that states seeking to nationalize their minority populations require both capacity and intent. We argue that political opportunity is also important through a focus on Poland’s policy toward its Ukrainian minority during the first half of the twentieth century. The shift from international norms protecting minority group rights in the interwar period to the defense of individual human rights during the immediate postwar era gave Polish state elites new and devastating tools with which to create a Polish nation-state. Through forced expulsions, internal deportation, and the cultural homogenization of the public sphere, all practices that had been unfeasible during the interwar group rights era, Polish state elites denied Ukrainians sufficient means to perpetuate their culture. The postwar process was relatively quick and almost always brutal.

Fragmentation of Political Authority and Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship: Explaining Instances of Minority Accommodation in Israel and Estonia

“…Another strand of theories focuses on political elites' interest, agency, and mobilization strategies to explain the adoption or change of policies toward ethnic minorities (Cramsey & Wittenberg, 2016;Grigoryan, 2015). A significant contribution in this line was made by Aktürk (2012), who argued that a break from a previous policy regulating ethnic diversity would occur if new elites equipped with a new discourse on ethnicity come to power and succeed in institutionalizing their ethnic preferences.…”

“…Other explanations for the development of state policies and their subsequent change use minority characteristics as predictors. States consider minority features of group size, territorial concentration, indigeneity, and transnationality when adopting policies (Buhaug et al, 2008; Cramsey & Wittenberg, 2016; Fearon & Laitin, 2003; Grigoryan, 2015; Horowitz, 2000; Posner, 2004). These characteristics offer parsimonious predictors for ethnic groups’ behavior and the likelihood of mobilization against the state.…”

Comparative Politics in Borderlands: Actors, Identities, and Strategies

“…In contrast to the experience of African states, new nation-states in Eastern Europe were drawn to the border to pursue homogenization efforts, defend and strengthen national identity, and deny local elites the resources to challenge the central state. For example, Cramsey & Wittenberg (2016, p. 1489) study the attempts of Polish nation builders to "Polonize" the Eastern borderlands by "populating the territories with trustworthy Poles, such as military veterans, border guards, and Roman Catholic priests" in an effort to protect the region from the competing nationalist activisms of Belarusian and Ukrainian socialists across the border. Similarly, in Western Poland, the state encouraged the formation of a Polish-dominated school system "to be a beachhead of Polish language and culture" against the ethnic German population in the area (Cramsey & Wittenberg 2016, p. 1490.…”

“…For example, Cramsey & Wittenberg (2016, p. 1489) study the attempts of Polish nation builders to "Polonize" the Eastern borderlands by "populating the territories with trustworthy Poles, such as military veterans, border guards, and Roman Catholic priests" in an effort to protect the region from the competing nationalist activisms of Belarusian and Ukrainian socialists across the border. Similarly, in Western Poland, the state encouraged the formation of a Polish-dominated school system "to be a beachhead of Polish language and culture" against the ethnic German population in the area (Cramsey & Wittenberg 2016, p. 1490. Where ethno-national minorities were the most threatening, as in the case of the Ukrainian minority in Eastern Poland in the wake of World War II, the Polish state organized military and security forces to expel hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to the Soviet Union between 1942 and 1947.…”

“…Although this approach dates back at least to Lipset's (1971) work on the US-Canadian border, this line of research has received an enormous boost in recent years under the influence of scholars who argue that borders, and colonial borders in particular, can be taken as arbitrary and exogenous treatments that can be analyzed as natural experiments (Posner 2005). Third, and perhaps most importantly, scholars are attracted to national boundaries for substantive reasons as they are home to the most important forms of political contestation, including, but not limited to, civil war (Buhaug et al 2009) and competing state formation (Cramsey & Wittenberg 2016).…”