Overview

My semester in Warsaw during my junior year of college proved to be one of the most formative times in my life. For one, I met my girlfriend Frankee, whose interests in Eastern Europe dovetail nicely with mine. I also established a life long research interest in Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine, Belarus and Poland.

Frankee and I differ from others who research the region in that our primary interests do not revolve around specific World War II or Holocaust events. Our interests pertain to Poland’s historical ethnic diversity, though her focus is on Jewish populations right after WWII. Her work explores how the Polish communist government’s handling of the “problem” of Jewish Poles in the 1950’s forged a new understanding of Polish citizenship and Poland’s ethnic history. While her focus is on the politics of memory, mine concerns the economic legacy of empire.

For over a hundred years, three different empires governed the lands that constitute modern day Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. In modern human history I can’t quite come up with a situation analogous to this. The iron fist of Prussian governance differed wildly from the hands-off approach to economic development of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which didn’t bother to construct railroads to connect the capital of Vienna to the region they ruled (known as Galicia). While Prussia modernized its lands and focused on developing industries like coal, Russia focused on cultivating the fertile lands on their western border for agriculture. It’s inevitable that this diversity in governance affected the development of the countries that eventually arose from these lands. However, I have not seen a definitive analysis of the economic legacies of the lands many considered the “borderlands” of Europe.

Motivations

Traveling around Poland, it’s easy to notice differences in regional development. If a few clueless foreigners step off a plane and decide to trek from Wrocław to Opole, both cities in western Poland, they can easily find their way. There are several train lines that connect the two cities, as well as modern highways (courtesy of EU funds!). Yet traveling from Warsaw, the biggest city in Poland by far, to anywhere west requires either an absurdly long bus ride, two or more train connections, or a veteran van driver whose job it is to chauffeur foreigners between big cities. A quick look at a map of railroads (this one is from 1953) reveals why:

There is a robust transportation network in the former Prussian west not found in the Russian east nor in former Galician lands in the south. This is only one example of the lasting impact on economic development of the former empires. My view is that analysts of the region don’t hold in high enough importance the economic consequences of empire, especially as they play out in politics. The following chart of the 2007 elections is famous for illustrating the political divide in Poland. What many don’t consider is how closely the above map on transportation development hews to this electoral map:

Historically Polish lands are ripe for research in other ways. The conditions created by a shared, tumultuous history make them fitting for comparative economic analysis. The expulsion of Germans after WWII is a great example of a dramatic event whose economic consequences are not well understood. After WWII, ethnic Germans were forcibly removed from their homes after Poland’s borders were moved west. People from all different regions moved to these lands, bringing with them a completely different set of values and shared cultural knowledge.

Below is a map Allied forces used to figure out how many Germans to expel, using German census information. Notice the various scenarios for redrawn borders. Today’s borders in Eastern Europe mask the historical reality of a region whose boundaries were often in a state of flux. The Polish city of Grodno would eventually become part of modern Belarus, and the Polish city Lwów would become part Ukraine.

Flash forward 50 years, and the lands that these Germans occupied are now one of the most economically prosperous and socially progressive in Poland. I have yet to see an economic study on this expulsion, so attempts at connecting economic development and social conservatism in the region are only conjectures.

Dramatic events like these make for great natural experiments for economists who seek to understand what happens when people move, borders change, different governments rule, and minority populations disappear. The history of these partitioned lands is full of these events. I have already written about the presence of Jews in these lands, and if you are interested I suggest you read that post for more about the borderlands' past ethnic diversity. My larger point is that the history of these lands are ideal for seeking to understand economic history’s pressing questions, but are still understudied.

My Approach

I aim to fill in the gaps in terms of economic research into this borderland region. My goal is to create a blog devoted solely to this endeavor. I value the flexibility that a blog allows in terms of creating content that features history, economic analysis and data visualization. I dislike the idea of simply writing a paper on my findings, since it limits the number of people who actually read my work and engage with the content.

There are others whose work I admire that is in a similar vein. The Nintil blog series on the Soviet Union is a great example of how fruitful economic research into Eastern Europe can be. The posts touch on a wide range of topics pertaining to the economy of the Soviet Union, from productive efficiency to food consumption. I appreciate how thorough the research is, and how diverse the posts are. I too will feature a breadth of diverse content on the site I will create.

Mark Koyama and Noel Johnson are also active researchers whose work touches Eastern Europe, though their work engages with Jewish populations more generally. I’ve read what work they make available on their sites, and I’m especially interested in their use of novel instrumental variables in their economic analyses. I hope to add to their dataset on Jewish persecutions, and I could build upon their analysis on Jewish communities and city growth by incorporating the data I’ve scraped together on shtetl populations to quantify the effect that not only the presence but also the size of a Jewish community has on city growth.

Importance

This research has broader implications outside of the narrow field of economic history. The narrative of Poland as the green island of the EU is now turning towards one of increasing authoritarianism. In popular media Ukraine’s story revolves around political turmoil, while their sputtering economy takes a back seat. The country’s current political turbulence extended even further projections of future EU membership. Concurrent with the rise of authoritarianism in the region are regrettable pieces of legislation like Poland’s now repealed Holocaust bill that make research into the region’s shared ethnic history difficult. Popular reporting on the region, however, does not help matters by focusing only on the communist experience of Eastern Europe countries. Such treatment, especially of Poland and Ukraine, unfairly condenses the long and complicated history these countries share. The typical media approach is to look at current social unrest and apply a blanket “post-soviet state” analysis to explain away political and social trends as the “inevitable backlash” against western democratic ideals. This narrow view ignores the broader historical continuities of a “borderlands” region that shares a tumultuous past of economic fragmentation and ethnic conflict. A thorough historical analysis of this region can help reconcile today’s political turbulence with this past, and provide a sharper lens with which to view countries whose politics are of grave importance to the future of Europe.