Ethnic Identity and Civil Society in Latvia, Poland and Ukraine: The Case of Environmental NGOs

Abstract

This research tests the hypothesis that social identities play a key role in the success or failure of democracy, as individuals often hold ethnic and regional identities in a mutually exclusive fashion, resisting calls to act politically on other identities that cut across them. Activists in environmental non-governmental organisations were interviewed in Latvia, Poland and Ukraine in order to examine the policy process in an area that cuts across regional and ethnic lines. The results support the argument that ethnic and regional divisions harm cooperation on environmental issues, though other hypotheses cannot be ruled out.

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by a grant from the Institute for Humane Studies.

Notes

This paper was originally presented in a different form at the graduate student symposium on ‘Exploring Ukrainian Identity: Gender, Language, and Statehood’ at the University of Toronto, 12–13 March 2004.

Orr (2008) is ©2008 American Council of Learned Socities. Text from that article is reproduced here under licence provided by Sage Publications' contributor agreement.

This conclusion is based on the responses of multiple informants in the interviews.

‘Membership’ here is used not in the sense of formal membership in an organisation, but in the sense of identification with some social group.

Despite the usage of early scholars of democracy, the term ‘modern’ should probably be avoided for describing cross-cutting identities: although the usage is not strictly incorrect, the word ‘modern’ has over the past century collected a great variety of not entirely compatible meanings and connotations that are best avoided in a rigorous discussion.

This identification of course also brings to mind the ‘imagined communities’ of Anderson (1983).

First popularised by Olson (1965).

For an analogous argument about a free economic marketplace, see North (1981).

Gender is a very important exception to the general rule that ascriptive identities are perceived as mutually exclusive, probably for the very simple reason that gender necessarily cuts across every one of the identities that are perceived as mutually exclusive.

Indeed, Heisler (1991, p. 25) describes ‘the availability of choice’ to emphasise or not emphasise ethnic identity as the key difference between ethnic politics in the rich democracies and ethnic politics elsewhere.

In addition to the sources mentioned at the beginning of the previous section, see Parsons (1961).

The seminal work on civil society is Keane (1988); important discussions of civil society and political culture in the context of democratisation can be found in Arato (1981), Diamond & Linz (1988), Di Palma (1991), Perez Diaz (1993), Diamond (1994), Linz & Stepan (1996) and Bunce (1999a, 1999b, 2000).

Obviously, Mutz's findings in the USA suggest that differences in identity may well produce differences in behaviour even in an advanced democracy, though of course she measured attitudes about political behaviours, not the behaviours themselves. Another possible reason for Mutz's positive findings is that she (and this is also true of Gibson, 2001) focused not on the ‘objective’ cross-pressures measured by Powell (1970, 1976)—whether membership in organisations or membership in potential reference groups—but rather the perception by individuals of cross-pressures resulting from multiple identities.

Eastern Europeans speaking or writing in English almost always use the word ‘ecological’ rather than ‘environmental’, though the latter is more common in American English. The apparent reason for this usage is that ‘ecological’ is the cognate of the analagous term in most of the languages of the region.

The information in this section comes from the interviews, in addition to the other sources cited within the text.

Interestingly, where environmental movements became nationalist vehicles, they tended to unite rather than divide the inhabitants of each state across ethnic and regional lines, at least during the final years of the Communist era. See Dawson (1996) for a full description of the phenonomenon.

Useful accounts of this trend can be found in Dawson (1996), Hicks (1996), Baker & Jehlička (1998), Jancar-Webster (1998), Millard (1998) and Waller (1998).

Those familiar with NGOs in post-Communist Europe may find the idea that outside funding might be harmful puzzling, given these NGOs' overwhelming dependence on that funding. However, the fact that funding keeps Eastern European NGOs afloat does not preclude the possibility that the very same funding keeps them from cooperating with one another, and in fact the explanations for lack of cooperation actually rely on the critical importance of outside funding.

For a survey, see McAdam et al. (1996).

For some recent examples of studies that do examine the role of ethnic divisions, see Dawson (1996), Heilman & Lucas (1997) and Schatz (1999). It is notable that both Dawson and Schatz addressed their works to post-Soviet states and the role (or lack thereof) of ‘eco-nationalism’ in the environmental movements there.

For a few examples, see Garcia (1989), Parmar (1989) and Accad (1991).

Hrycak (2006, p. 85) also notes that the first foreign-funded groups seeking women's rights were made up of ‘elite Russian speakers’. Oddly, the impact of ethnic splits on the women's movement in Ukraine receives little attention in this most recent article, and the issue of splits within Rukh receives none at all; Hrycak seems to have moved from a more nuanced position in her earlier articles to a position that lays the blame squarely on Western funding.

In addition to complete results, the author's dissertation (Orr, 2005) includes details on the background of NGOs in Latvia, Poland and Ukraine, the methodology of the interviews, the interview script and a summary of the data.

One group in Ukraine was both a women's and an environmental NGO, and its operations in the two different sectors were assessed differently. One other NGO in Ukraine, and another in Latvia, had at least some operations in both sectors, but for these two groups, the operations in one or the other sector were not substantial enough to allow a meaningful assessment.

In order to preserve anonymity, each NGO was assigned a unique letter code. The codes have no significance other than indicating the issue area of the organisation (‘W’ for women or ‘E’ for the environment) and the order of the interviews (A–GG). The study included several types of organisation, some engaged in politics and others engaged in less controversial projects, while some were national and others local. If the data for all of these subtypes were being presented, it would make sense to give each one a new designator that reflected its specific type, but this article considers only those NGOs engaged in political activities, making it impossible to place them in different categories without being so specific as to compromise their anonymity. Political organisations were typically national, though a handful were local, and these groups are so noted whenever mentioned in the text.

Organisations in Poland also cooperated extensively with counterparts in the West and in some cases with those elsewhere in Eastern Europe, though such cooperation hardly made Polish groups unique—groups in Latvia and Ukraine that seldom cooperated inside their own countries almost universally cooperated internationally. Most of this enthusiastic cooperation is probably explainable by fact that Western NGOs were a primary source of money and other forms of assistance.

Informants from environmental NGOs mentioned such coalitions perhaps not quite as frequently as did those from women's groups.

Only one informant, in the non-Silesian city of Krakow, mentioned having Silesian roots, and two of the three informants in Upper Silesia said that their own roots lay outside the region (that is, their families moved there in the aftermath of World War II), while no activist mentioned Silesian identity without prompting. This could mean that the identity is weak among most Silesians, though it might well be stronger among those with deeper roots in the region than the informants interviewed for this study. In any case, there was no evidence of an impact of Silesian identity on environmental activism.

Group EC in Warsaw had managed to persuade 95% of the people who voted in a referendum on the incinerator project there to disapprove of it. However, evidently due to intentionally poor publicisation of the referendum by the authorities, only 26% of voters showed up at the polls, not enough to make the referendum valid.

Amusingly, Latvia solved the problem of statelessness in 2004 by definitional fiat, passing a Law on Stateless Persons that classified former citizens of the USSR as ‘non-citizens’ rather than ‘stateless persons’ (‘Law on Stateless Persons’, 2010); the motive for this action was probably less an effort to obfuscate the problem than an attempt to evade the country's commitments under international conventions on stateless persons, as can be seen, for example, in the 2007 report by Latvian Human Rights Representative Inga Reine to a seminar of the European Parliament (Reine, 2007). At the end of 2009, after considerable if reluctant efforts to naturalise Russian-speaking residents, non-citizens still made up about 15% of Latvia's population (Farrand, 2010).

I accidentally assigned the code ‘EX’ twice, to two unrelated organisations.

This town is small enough that giving its actual name would in effect identify the organisations studied there, violating the confidentiality of the informants.

From this point forward, the term ‘Russian’ can be taken as shorthand for the more accurate but awkard ‘Russian-speaking’ and ‘Russian-speaker’.

One NGO in the study, local group EY in Daugavpils, lobbied against conservation—that is, it lobbied in favour of allowing property owners to use environmental resources as they wished; because its work opposed that of the other groups in the study, EY has not been included in the discussion in the main text. Interestingly, though, this NGO was mostly Russian, but chose an ethnic Latvian leader in order present a better face to the authorities and the Latvian public.

EZ may have been regarded by other organisations as partly Russian simply by virtue of its location in Daugavpils.

This refrain was also heard from women's organisations, suggesting that it was not unique to the environmental sector.

The NGO in question was not one of those engaged in lobbying on environmental issues, but this particular informant had long participated in the environmental movement, and was in a position to be aware of the internal workings of other NGOs.

Enviromental NGOs did not claim any credit for the orginal passage of either the Arhus Covention or the Law on Enviornmental Impact Assessments, both of which were adopted as the result of Western pressure—they had merely exploited their provisions.

The level of inter-ethnic cooperation and cooperation in general among environmental NGOs in Latvia was clearly lower than that among women's NGOs, but general cooperation among women's NGOs had increased dramatically in the previous year, perhaps even more so than cooperation among environmental NGOs, and so the comparison between the two sectors may have looked different a year earlier (Orr, 2008).

For more details, see Laitin (1998).

The environmental NGO sector was quite a bit more vigorous than the women's sector (Orr, 2008).

The interview for this last organisation was conducted in Kharkiv.

The researcher's interpreter in Kharkiv was an ethusiastically nationalist Ukrainian who was of entirely Russian descent. One of the (self-identified) Ukrainian informants interviewed was of Korean descent and had close ties to an ethnic-Korean cultural organisation.

Notably, Ukraine was one of the first signatories to the Arhus Convention.

Furthermore, the trouble that interviewees had in explaining their successes and failures might pose problems for future research, even if the right questions are asked the next time.

Though this paper uses the term ‘divisions’ to refer to the more or less stable boundaries between ethnic and regional groups, for want of a better term, not all divisions prove equally divisive, let alone uniform across time or differing individuals—a point made particularly evident by the case of Ukraine.

The detailed account of the development of women's NGOs in Ukraine that Hrycak provides in ‘Coping with Chaos’ (2005) does very much suggest such an explanation, especially when contrasted with the sunny picture in Poland.