A Perpetual Borderland

This review was prepared within the framework of the joint “Book Review” project of the Political Sphere Institute and the Center for European Studies in Minsk.

Andrew Savchenko (2009). Belarus – A Perpetual Borderland. Leiden – Boston: Brill, 239+X p. 

Review prepared by Aliaksandr Paharely.

The appearance of new American studies on Belarus is very welcome, especially when their authors are Belarusians whose formation as scholars took place both in their homeland, in the Soviet and post-Soviet context, and beyond its borders. It is all the more interesting to trace how these factors influence the authors’ research strategies and the categories they use. The book reviewed here provides an excellent occasion for doing so.

Andrew Savchenko, a scholar at the University of Rhode Island (Kingston, USA), defended his candidate dissertation in economics at the Academy of Sciences of Belarus and later began an academic and teaching career in the United States. Earlier, he worked on comparative studies of post-communist transformations in Poland, the Baltic states, and Belarus. His scholarly interests include economics and sociology, while the range of issues he addresses is also quite broad: the intellectual legacy of Talcott Parsons, concepts of totalitarianism, and others.

The author’s interests and methodological preferences shaped the approaches that led to the emergence of the monograph under review, Belarus: A Perpetual Borderland, published by the Dutch publishing house Brill in a series whose title may be somewhat puzzling: “Culture and History of Russia”.

As is already clear from the title, the author examines Belarus as a nation situated on a civilizational borderland. The embodiments of these two different civilizations, western and eastern, are Poland and Russia. It is precisely from the standpoint of the opposition between these two civilizational poles, their influences, and the weakening or strengthening of such influences that the author considers the development of Belarus as a nation and a state. In doing so, he relies on the Polish sociologist Ryszard Radzik (Radzik, 2000), in whose books and articles this approach is presented quite clearly.

From the great variety of definitions of civilization, Savchenko chose those of Samuel Huntington and Vaclav Belohradsky, which treat communities defined in this way as inevitably separated from one another and mutually exclusive. Savchenko does not take into account the concept of Belarus as a civilizational borderland developed by Elżbieta Smółkowa, the first Polish ambassador to Belarus, and the Polish anthropologist Anna Engelking. Their approach seeks to show that in the Belarusian context confessional and civilizational differences complemented, rather than excluded, one another at the level of local communities (Smółkowa, Engelking, 2007). Savchenko, however, is interested in generalizations at the macro-level, at the level of civilizations.

Methodologically, Savchenko’s monograph follows Talcott Parsons’s model of society, which he combines with three approaches to the concept of the borderland: a geographical one, meaning the presence of a population made up of representatives of other civilizations within another; the ability of different social groups to adopt behavioral and cultural traits from representatives of another civilization; and a third approach that emphasizes the multi-level character of interaction between local normative structures and those borrowed from other cultures and civilizations.

According to Savchenko, such structures are embodied in the institutions of borderland society. As such institutions, the author names the state, the ruling elite, the political system, and the economy. The focus of the researcher’s attention is the analysis of changes in the character of these institutions over the course of history. This leaves open the question of which elements of local culture were primary, and to what extent they were “eastern” or “western” before they began to interact through changes within these institutions.

Savchenko uses Roman Szporluk’s concept of “cultural neighborhood” to explain that Belarus, unlike, for example, Lithuania or Estonia, did not have the kind of distinctive neighborhood that could have facilitated integration into the European political and cultural space. Whereas Lithuania saw itself as part of a Germanic-Scandinavian neighborhood for further integration into EU and NATO structures, and Estonia could count on support from Finland, in the case of Belarus, in his view, one can hardly speak of such a neighborhood.

Savchenko relied primarily on secondary literature in writing his monograph. He did not work in archives or conduct surveys. However, in the monograph he uses data from interviews with representatives of Belarusian urban professional classes.

The book consists of three large chapters, each divided into several subsections. The first chapter is “The Creation of the Borderland”. Here Savchenko first jumps ahead and makes an interesting comparison between the independent interwar Baltic republics and Belarus after 1991. Again, the interwar experiment with parliamentarism and hyper-democratic constitutions in the case of the Baltic states was nevertheless more stable, longer-lasting, and more productive than the Belarusian post-Soviet one. In Belarus, according to Andrew Savchenko, even if such an experiment took place in the first years of independence, it was very limited, fragile, and ultimately led to the establishment of an authoritarian regime.

Despite the establishment of authoritarian regimes by Antanas Smetona in Lithuania (1926), Kārlis Ulmanis in Latvia (1934), and Konstantin Päts in Estonia (1934, although in 1937 there was a partial return to democracy), later events in the 1990s showed that the experience of interwar independence and democratic parliamentarism during that period helped the Baltic states achieve much greater success in building democratic institutions and integrating into Euro-Atlantic structures.

Savchenko begins his analysis of the formation of Belarusian lands as a borderland with the sixteenth century, when, according to him, Europe saw the beginning of a dual process of the development of nations and modernization. The author therefore does not attach great importance to earlier historical and cultural processes. This, however, may lead the reader to question the perpetual character of the borderland status of the Belarusian lands, since it turns out that before this period they were not a borderland.

The author considers the trends of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the framework of his methodology and traces the nature of institutional and economic development. He comes to the conclusion that, as a result of the weakness of towns, it was the representatives of the magnates and the nobility who remained the guardians of those institutions, cultural models, fashions, and influences associated with western civilization. Savchenko does not consider the peasantry, which constituted the bulk of the population, in this capacity.

The subsequent development of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the abolition of the church union in the nineteenth century testify to the gradual increase of Russian influences and the decline of Polish ones, as Savchenko demonstrates.

The next chapter, “Ex Orient Lux: The Belarusian National State and the Soviet Union”, focuses on the Belarusian national project and the historical alternatives that confronted the national elites. What the author regards as important here is not so much that Belarusian national statehood took precisely the Soviet form in the 1920s, but that at the moment when Belarusian elites came close to realizing national independence, they were unable, in Savchenko’s view, to monopolize the use of force on Belarusian lands by using the resource of the state, as the German sociologist Max Weber put it. This precisely predetermined the relationship between Belarusian nationalism and political power in the twentieth century.

One can agree with the author that “Soviet modernity, based on ideas and technologies borrowed from the West (and in some cases rejected in their places of origin), came to Belarus in Russian form”. Yet Andrew Savchenko again emphasizes that, as a result of the Second World War, Soviet institutions demonstrated their viability.

The third and final chapter, “Borderland Forever: Contemporary Belarus”, analyzes the late Soviet period and trends in the economy and society. In the late Soviet period, most Belarusians saw nothing wrong with the Soviet order, since many had benefited from Soviet industrialization and urbanization.

It should be noted that in this chapter Savchenko shifts his attention from institutions to the capacity of Belarusian society to form a middle class, a group of self-sufficient private owners with their own interests and professionals independent of the state. The weakness of this group is precisely what Savchenko identifies as one of the reasons for the consolidation and continued existence of the current political regime in Belarus.

Taking this into account, it should be noted that between the lines of the book one can discern the famous aphoristic thesis from the scholarly legacy of the historian and sociologist Barrington Moore Jr.: “No bourgeois party, no democracy” (Moore, 1974). This is an evidently deterministic approach, as Moore’s critics have pointed out.

His model did not leave room for the “small” European nations of Western, Northern, and Central-Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, the influence of his ideas is very great, and it is not surprising that his analysis of the role of landlords and peasants in the creation of the modern world, as well as of the scenarios of political development of different societies toward democratic or dictatorial regimes, remains as relevant today as ever.

Yet analysis based on such an approach should not be reductionist. The researcher from Rhode Island did not try to adapt Moore’s ideas in any way to the Belarusian context and analyzed only one social component: the elites. It is unlikely that the author intended to reduce the specific features of the economic and political development of Belarusian lands to this component, but this is precisely the result.

Throughout the chapter, the author devotes a great deal of space to a detailed discussion of Belarus’s inflationary economy in the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s. One may get the impression that this undoubtedly necessary and relevant analysis nevertheless obstructs an understanding of which groups could become the foundation of such a class and who could already be included in it today. There are also no data on this topic in the form of tables, graphs, and so forth. The preventive policy of the regime, named by the author as the cause preventing the emergence of such a middle class, does not seem to exhaust all possible explanations.

The subsection titled “The Political Economy of Institutional Symbiosis: Belarus and Russia Build the Future Together” may be regarded as quite interesting. Here the author points out that although the restoration of production ties and exports to Russia, as well as preferential oil prices, made it possible to revive the Belarusian economy and even modernize some production facilities and increase investment in certain sectors, these opportunities were nevertheless not used for fundamental restructuring. This was because the institutional symbiosis of Belarus and Russia experienced, and will continue to experience, attempts at revision and reformatting, which, in Savchenko’s view, is not to Belarus’s benefit.

The researcher from Rhode Island sees one of the reasons for the consolidation of Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s regime in Belarus in the fact that Belarusians lack any historical experience other than the Soviet one. Above, however, Savchenko mentions the experience of the interwar history of Western Belarus, where Belarusians in fact voted for the first time in history in parliamentary elections for their own candidates to the Sejm. In light of this, the thesis can be regarded as more than debatable.

The author’s assertion that “neither [Russia] nor [Poland] is interested in preserving the independence of its smaller neighbor” also appears controversial. The researcher leaves out the significant role of the ideas of Jerzy Giedrojć, editor of the Paris-based journal Kultura, in shaping Poland’s contemporary foreign policy course toward its eastern neighbors, including Belarus. This course is based on support for an independent and sovereign Belarus as a future part of a united Europe.

Nor can one agree with the author’s statement that the postwar population exchange between Poland and the BSSR had the character of ethnic cleansing. Contemporary publications do not allow one to speak about this so categorically (Vialiki, 2005; Mironowicz, Tokć, Radzik, 2005).

Savchenko tries to outline likely scenarios for Belarus’s future development, pointing to various factors of possible change. These may include traditional institutions such as the Catholic Church, or new ones such as the Internet. It is worth adding that the spread of Protestant denominations may also be included here. However, the potential of all these trends is difficult to assess unequivocally today.

The Belarusian peasantry is scarcely present in Savchenko’s analysis. It also seems strange that he did not make use of the potential of Ernest Gellner’s work, which analyzed the conditions necessary for the transformation of a predominantly agrarian society into a modern pluralist and capitalist one. This scholar took into account in his work the place of Central-Eastern Europe and its peasantry in the transition to capitalist modernity (Gellner, 1989: 154-170).

The author emphasizes only one, western, dimension of nation-building processes in Belarus, whereas historiography is consolidating the view that different factors and civilizational vectors interacted rather than opposed one another. This can be traced in the example of West-Russism and the Belarusian national movement (Tereshkovich, 2004: 134-144).

Andrew Savchenko has made an interesting attempt, on the basis of the literature and accessible sources available today, to present his own authorial version of the history of Belarus over the last five centuries as a borderland. He succeeded only partially, but the researcher’s merits in analyzing the Belarusian economic model and in observing certain social trends in the country should also be acknowledged.

The work itself, and its methodology, represents an interesting example of scholarly uncertainty. He seeks to simplify the presentation of his material and subject by using the highly debatable and dubious concept of civilizations. At the same time, his work is an example of how theoretical approaches to Belarus as a field of study, born in its immediate neighborhood (the concept of the Polish sociologist Ryszard Radzik), can, through this same uncertainty, be popularized in western scholarship. Still, one should not expect a surge in the number of western works written within the framework of this concept.

Considering that in western academic culture research is not a solitary effort, since Andrew Savchenko mentions scholars who gave him advice and assistance and read the manuscript, his monograph, taking into account all the peer reviews, can also be regarded as a cross-section of views on how at least part of the western academic community approaches the study of Belarusian issues.

 

Literature mentioned in the review

1. Ryszard Radzik (2000). Między zbiorowością etniczną a wspolnotą narodową:Białorusini na tłe procesow narodotworczych w Europie Srodkowo-Wschodniej w XIX wieku. Lublin:UMCS.

2. Elżbieta Smółkowa, Anna Engelking (2007). “Uwagi o metodzie badań terenowych na pograniczach Białorusi”, 5-14, у Elżbieta Smółkowa (Red.). Pogranicza Bialorusi. W perspektywie interdyscyplinarnej. Warszawa: DiG.

3. Barrington Moore, Jr (1974). Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Harmondsworth: Penguin University Books.

4 Анатоль Вялікі (2005). На раздарожжы. Беларусы і палякі ў час перасялення (1944-1946 гг.). Мінск: БДПУ імя М. Танка‒НА РБ.

5. Eugeniusz Mionowicz, Siarhiej Tokć, Ryszard Radzik (2005). Zmiany struktury narodowościowej na pograniczu polsko-biłoruskim w XX wieku. Białystok: Wydawnictwo uniwersytetu w Białymstoku.

6. Ernest Gellner (1989). Plough, Sword and Book. The Structure of Human History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

7. П. В. Терешкович (2004). Этническая история Беларуси 19 – начала 20 вв. в контексте Центрально-Восточной Европы.  Минск: БГУ.