Jason Wittenberg

Deadly Communities: Local Political Milieus and the Persecution of Jews in Occupied Poland

Why, after the outbreak of World War II in Eastern Europe, did the inhabitants of some communities erupt in violence against their Jewish neighbors? The authors hypothesize that the greater the degree of preexisting intercommunal polarization between Jews and the titular majority group, the more likely a pogrom. They test this proposition using an original data set of matched census and electoral returns from interwar Poland. Where Jews supported ethnic parties that advocated minority cultural autonomy, the local populations perceived the Jews as an obstacle to the creation of a nation-state in which minorities acknowledged the right of the titular majority to impose its culture across a country’s entire territory. These communities became toxic. Where determined state elites could politically integrate minorities, pogroms were far less likely to occur. The results point to the theoretical importance of political assimilation and are also consistent with research that extols the virtues of interethnic civic engagement.

Beyond Dictatorship and Democracy: Rethinking National Minority Inclusion and Regime Type in Interwar Eastern Europe

Most standard models of democratization privilege class-based actors and the regimes they prefer to account for patterns of dictatorship and democracy. These models are ill suited, however, to explain political regime change in interwar Eastern Europe, where the dominant cleavage was not class but nationality. As a consequence, neither the process of regime change nor the resulting regime outcomes in Eastern Europe conform to the standard Western European models. Through a detailed analysis of key episodes of regime change in interwar Czechoslovakia and Poland, the authors explore the different ethnic and social coalitions on which political authority was built and the circumstances under which these two countries made the transition from one regime type to another. The depth of the ethnic divide meant that sustaining democracy in Eastern Europe required sidelining the urban bourgeoisie of the majority ethnic group from a dominant role in political life, a finding quite at odds with common views of the origins of democracy.

Does Familiarity Breed Contempt? Inter-Ethnic Contact and Support for Illiberal Parties*

Does contact between ethnic groups lead to greater support for liberal parties? Research on this debate in the U.S. context is contaminated by high levels of mobility and a truncated party palette. This paper addresses the problem through an examination of the 1929 and 1935 national parliamentary elections in Czechoslovakia, where mobility was limited and the spectrum of parties was broad. We employ ecological inference on an original database of election and census results for several thousand municipalities to estimate ethnic group support for liberal and nonliberal parties across a variety of local demographic configurations. The results show that interethnic contact has indeterminate electoral effects: no uniform pattern of support for liberal parties exists either across or within ethnic groups. The electoral impact of contact depends upon the peculiarities of the group being studied and the national demographic context under which contact occurs. In and of itself, contact between ethnic groups breeds neither amity nor contempt.

Conceptualizing Historical Legacies

In the nearly quarter century since the collapse of communism, a great many outcomes in East Europe and the former Soviet Union, from patterns of democratic consolidation to state–society relations, have been attributed to legacies of the past. Yet despite the common goal of understanding the influence of the past, there is little consensus on how to conceptualize historical legacies. Through a focus on post-communist outcomes and their relation to prior outcomes and causal precursors, this article assesses what counts as a historical legacy and how legacies differ from non-legacies.

Timing Is Everything Changing Norms of Minority Rights and the Making of a Polish Nation-State

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.