Sowing the seed to reap the harvest of unity : nationalization, fascism, and imperial legacies in authoritarian Latvia (1934-1938)

Abstract

The new Republic of Latvia that emerged from the ruins of the Romanov and Hohenzollern dynastic empires faced twofold challenges. Like most states in interwar Europe, Latvia had a heterogeneous ethnoreligious population. Class divisions added an additional layer of internal disparities. The fact that Latvia was a new state with limited resources and its inhabitants had previously been a part of an empire with limited political enfranchisement meant that there was very little in terms of shared civic identity binding this diverse population together. What further amplified the many divisions was the peculiar imperial context in which national and class identities had been constructed during the late imperial period (1860s-1914) and the violence that had accompanied the First World War and the collapse of the empire. Finding a resolution to 7this challenge of forming a coherent citizen body was one of the key political issues facing Latvia’s rulers throughout the interwar period. This dissertation focuses on how various actors in the circles around Kārlis Ulmanis sought solutions to this problem after Ulmanis established an authoritarian regime with a coup d’état in May 1934. The central subject of this dissertation is the ongoing unification project attempted and advanced from above by Ulmanis. This unification project serves as a lens through which to explore how imperial legacies still affected Latvian society in the 1930s and the tensions these legacies created with the assertion that Latvia was a nation-state. This investigation examines four aspects of this unification project: 1) Ulmanis’ unifying ambitions; 2) actual policies aimed at ethnic minorities and the working class; 3) ideological explanations for these unification efforts and the influence of fascism; 4) misalignments between these unifying ambitions coming from above and similar efforts undertaken by actors at lower levels.