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Book Review
| Nature and National Identity after Communism: Globalizing the Ethnoscape. By Katrina Z. S. Schwartz. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. xvii + 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $27.95.
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| Communism was a mixed blessing for Latvia, a small Baltic land that endured Soviet occupation from 1940 to 1991. Collectivization of agriculture and attempts to implement the "Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature" scarred and sometimes destroyed traditional rural landscapes and communities. But ironically, the inefficiencies and paranoia of the Soviet regime left significant portions of Latvia undeveloped, including important bird habitat along the Baltic coast. |
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With Latvia moving toward membership in the European Union in the 1990s, environmentalists and pro-Europe forces, both in Latvia and internationally, saw Latvia's "biodiversity" as a substantial asset for Europe. Accordingly, international funds began to flow into Latvia to promote biodiversity and sustainable development. But other Latvians were wary of projects that would cut into traditional agrarian land use practices in the name of biodiversity. As many Latvian nationalists claimed, the carefully cultivated countryside, with its intertwined nature and human culture, was central to Latvian national identity. Entry into the globalizing economic and ideological community of Europe, they feared, threatened to destroy Latvia's distinctive culture. |
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In this finely researched and argued book, Katrina Schwartz puts this debate into historical context, tying the nationalist and internationalist positions to deeply rooted Latvian discourses about nationhood. Like many small ethnolinguistic groupings in Europe, Latvians underwent a "national awakening" in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Two strands of national imaginings emerged during this period. One group of Latvian patriots drew on the German idea of Heimat (homeland), which considered the cultivated nature of rural landscapes as the font of national identity. Another group of "internationalists" posited Latvia's central position on Baltic trade routes as the essence of Latvian distinctiveness. During Latvia's short-lived independence after 1918, the agrarian/romantic ideology held sway, as land reform and agricultural self-sufficiency became the overriding goals of the new state. |
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The agrarian discourse remained powerful, but took a different guise during the Soviet period. In addition to collectivizing agriculture, the Soviets liquidated individual homesteads and forced much of the rural population into Soviet-style villages (complete with housing blocks). Latvian dissidents in the 1970s honed in on the abandoned homesteads, arguing that a central component of Latvian identity was being lost. The intrepid poet-dissident Imants Ziedonis organized a "Great Tree Liberation Group" in the mid-1970s to look after old oaks that were threatened by rampant undergrowth. With Soviet materialism and an instrumental approach to nature crushing the Latvian countryside, dissidents turned to the Latvian Heimat discourse that stressed the spiritual values of a carefully and respectfully cultivated nature. |
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After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Latvia reemerged as an independent country and immediately faced a host of difficult questions about its place in the post-Soviet European order. Without heavy subsidies, Latvia's agriculture could not compete in the global marketplace. While some Latvian nationalists favored protectionism and price supports, an internationalist position emerged that saw the countryside's salvation in ecotourism that would use Latvia's natural assets to attract an international clientele. This divide also entered debates over the expansion of Latvia's national park system. One side favored national parks that blended nature and rural culture, while internationalists tended to prefer what might be considered wilderness preserves. Local opponents of wilderness parks did draw on at least one new international discourse, namely the idea of participatory decision making, to scuttle plans to change the borders of Gauja National Park. |
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Schwartz concludes with a question of import for many developing countries: "Can agrarian nationalists save their ethnoscape while globalizing it too, or will the re-imagining of nature as biodiversity necessarily erase indigenous landscapes of culture and labor" (p. 199)? In suggesting some possible answers to this question, Schwartz points out that globalization is more than just the homogenizing force of international capital. It is also a set of international discourses on everything from environmental sustainability to urban and rural development practices. Many of these discourses place an importance on local participation and careful use of natural resources. In the Latvian case, Schwartz implies, internationalism and globalization need not mean the end of Latvia's distinctive national culture. As long as Latvians play their cards right ... |
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Eagle Glassheim is associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is currently researching a book on the postwar history of the "Black Triangle," an industrial and coal mining region spanning Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. |
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