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Internal Empires: Politics and Culture on the Frontier

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Internal Empires: Politics and Culture on the Frontier An Empirical Examination of the Frontier Thesis: Settlement and Institutions in Brazil, Russia, Canada and the United States Roberto Foa1 Anna Nemirovskaya2 Abstract: One of the attributes most consistently highlighted in the literature on frontier society is the tendency to spontaneous social organization. However, despite the resilience of the ‘frontier thesis’ within history and social science, it has not been subject to a rigorous empirical examination. Does it constitute a description only of the social norms and institutions of the western United States, or is it a manifestation of a more general ‘frontier phenomenon’, found in other times and places? In order to answer this question, this article examines data on the nature of social relations in frontier zones in four countries: Brazil, Russia, Canada and the United States. Taking a wide range of survey items, we find that higher levels of voluntary activity, social trust, tolerance of outgroups, and civic protest are distinctive features of frontier life more generally, and not simply a feature of the American historical experience. We suggest that the experience of settlement is conducive to the formation of norms of community solidarity and cooperation, including in the American historical case. JEL Z13, N90, R23. Keywords. Social institutions, social capital, settlement patterns, historical institutionalism, frontier thesis. 1 Department of Government, Harvard University. 1737 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. [email protected]. 2 Department of Sociology, National Research University Higher School of Economics. Office 310, 47a, Prospekt Rimskogo-Korsakova, St Petersburg, Russia, 190068. [email protected]. 1. Introduction “The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe…” (Turner, 1920, 4) Among the most significant developments in modern history has been the territorial expansion of the west. In 1491, Europeans occupied a small, peripheral peninsula accounting for 6.8% of the world’s landmass. Four centuries later, the peoples of the European peninsula had charted, conquered, and settled much of North America, Australasia, South America, and, via the Russian Empire, the northern third of Asia - a group of territories accounting for a phenomenal 45.1% of the world’s surface3. 3 The Americas constitute 42,549,000 km2, Siberia and Central Asia 16,806,550km2, Australasia 7,885,000km2, out of a total global landmass of 148,940,000km2. Europe’s landmass, including European Russia, is 10,180,000km2. 2 This experiment in population resettlement has provided rich material for social scientists seeking to understand how values, religious traditions, and cultural norms replicate in new social settings. Huntington (1996) argued that the social and political institutions of new societies are strongly predicted by the religious traditions of their founding peoples, a view given empirical support by Inglehart and Baker (2000). Meanwhile, Hartz (1964) and Lipset (1990) had argued that settler colonies crystalized the class structure and underlying ideology prevalent in the mother country at the time of their foundation: with Latin America and French Canada seen as fragments of feudal Europe, whereas the United States embodied the liberal tradition. Less widely explored, however, is the possibiity that the settlement process itself could have a universal and transformative effect. The experience of colonial settlement saw newcomers struggling to establish government in regions very different from their home countries, and their relationship with indigenous peoples, the availability of free land, and their distance from titular rulers in Europe, entailed greater self-reliance, independence, and equality among settlers. Authors such as Turner (1920) and de Tocqueville (1835) saw in this process the origins of a distinct 'civic culture' based on norms of individualism and voluntary association. Taking comparative survey data from four frontier zones – eastern Russia, the western United States, western Canada and northwestern Brazil – we find evidence of such a frontier legacy, as evidenced by higher rates of associational membership, civic engagement, trust and tolerance. While Turner and de Tocqueville made their arguments regarding the early colonial United States, we find this to be characteristic of a more general pattern of frontier settlement. Thus the distinctive trajectory of the United States is one of degree and not of kind: in North America the frontier became the modal set of 3 social institutions, whereas in other frontier states, such as nineteenth century Russia or Brazil, this frontier society remained demographically and politically marginal. Yet frontier society did exist, and the record of its social legacy remains in evidence today. THE FRONTIER THESIS The 'frontier thesis' of Frederick Jackson Turner had argued that the uniqueness of American social and political institutions – liberalism, egalitarianism, and ultimately democratic values – stemmed from the experience of settling the western frontier. As Turner had put it, ‘what the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom' so too ‘the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States’ (Turner 1920: 20). A similar idea was expressed by de Tocqueville, who argued that the process of founding a new society had allowed a break from feudalism, and a new form of democratic community: ‘At the end of the last century a few bold adventurers began to penetrate into the valleys of the Mississippi, and the mass of the population very soon began to move in that direction: communities unheard of till then were seen to emerge from the wilds: States whose names were not in existence a few years before claimed their place in the American Union; and in the Western settlements we may behold democracy arrived at its utmost extremes.’ Among the attributes most noted by such authors was the tendency to spontaneous social organisation. In the words of Turner, one of the things ‘that impressed all early travelers in the United States was the capacity for extra-legal, voluntary association,’ 4 and the ‘power of the newly arrived pioneers to join together for a common end without the intervention of governmental institutions’ (Turner, 1920: 189). Similarly, Tocqueville had also noted the widespread flourishing of ‘not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types – religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute’ (Tocqueville 1835). Indeed, so impressed was Tocqueville with this aspect of American society that he considered local voluntarism a defining attribute of American democracy (Goldhammer, 2007). Why did frontier settlement have this effect? First, the availability of land meant that, in the context of an agrarian society, independent farming was more widespread, and exploitative relations were more difficult to maintain: ‘men would not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social subordination when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs for the taking’ (Turner 1920: 145). Second, the frontier offered a selection effect: only the most adventurous and autonomy-seeking individuals would choose a frontier life. Finally, the frontier was distant from central government, such that in matters of policing, relations with indigenous peoples and the provision of public goods, settlers were left to organize themselves. Yet a question raised in the subsequent literature is whether their observations are valid for frontier areas in general, or must be considered only a particularity of the American historical experience. For if the settlement of the western US was a natural experiment in history, then it is one which has been repeated many times and in many contexts, from the Brazilian jungle, to the Australian outback, to the Siberian taiga. And while the settler peoples, colonial powers, and historical context may vary from 5 one context to another, if the root hypothesis is true that differential endowments of land and labour pattern the evolution of social and political institutions, then some trace of its effects should be found in all such cases. And yet with a few local exceptions, such as the nineteenth-century writings of Sarmiento (1868) or Solovyov (Bassin, 1993), the signficance of the frontier for the development of other societies is less widely discussed. In the late twentieth century, scholarship on the Turner thesis has tended to dismiss the notion of a 'generalized' frontier effect, and even its applicability to the United States has been questioned. When Hofstadter (1949) and Hofstadter and Lipset (1968) came to re-examine comparative frontiers in the postwar era, the differences
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