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Economic Reform and Ethnic Accommodation: Explaining Nationalist Demobilization in Latvia and Ukraine
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The Indivisible Bad:
Economic Reform and Ethnic Cooperation
in post-Soviet Latvia and Ukraine*
Stephen R. Bloom
University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Political Science
## email not listed ##
ABSTRACT
Economic reform has been linked to ethnic conflict in states as varied as the former Yugoslavia, India and Nigeria. I argue in this paper that the economic reform measures implemented in the former Soviet Union paradoxically facilitated ethnic cooperation rather than conflict by leveling perceived group-based differences in social mobility inherited from the Soviet period. Soviet ethnic politics, like much of Soviet politics, were zero-sum. In the Soviet shortage economy, the allocation of goods by the state was believed to benefit some ethnic groups at the expense of others. Economic reform, however painful for the majority of the population, has helped to break down the economic differentiation of ethnic groups, thus decoupling ethnic concerns from economic problems. In this sense, the consequences of economic reform represent an “indivisible bad” seen as affecting everyone equally, irrespective of ethnicity. Evidence for my argument comes from a dataset I have constructed of 1,785 street demonstrations in Latvia and Ukraine from 1989-1999.
Prepared for presentation at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, August 28-31, 2003. Panel 13-11: Ethnicity: Conflict, Integration, Democracy?
I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the Social Science Research Council and the University of California Center for German and European Studies, which made my research in Latvia and Ukraine possible.
*Working draft: Do not quote without the permission of the author.
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The Indivisible Bad:
Economic Reform and Ethnic Cooperation
in post-Soviet Latvia and Ukraine*
Stephen R. Bloom
University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Political Science
## email not listed ##
ABSTRACT
Economic reform has been linked to ethnic conflict in states as
varied as the former Yugoslavia, India and Nigeria. I argue in
this paper that the economic reform measures implemented in
the former Soviet Union paradoxically facilitated ethnic
cooperation rather than conflict by leveling perceived group-
based differences in social mobility inherited from the Soviet
period. Soviet ethnic politics, like much of Soviet politics, were
zero-sum. In the Soviet shortage economy, the allocation of
goods by the state was believed to benefit some ethnic groups at
the expense of others. Economic reform, however painful for the
majority of the population, has helped to break down the
economic differentiation of ethnic groups, thus decoupling ethnic
concerns from economic problems. In this sense, the
consequences of economic reform represent an “indivisible bad”
seen as affecting everyone equally, irrespective of ethnicity.
Evidence for my argument comes from a dataset I have
constructed of 1,785 street demonstrations in Latvia and Ukraine
from 1989-1999.
Prepared for presentation at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association,
Philadelphia, August 28-31, 2003. Panel 13-11: Ethnicity: Conflict, Integration, Democracy?
I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship
Board, the Social Science Research Council and the University of California Center for German
and European Studies, which made my research in Latvia and Ukraine possible.
*Working draft: Do not quote without the permission of the author.
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