Michael Hechter is a Foundation Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. His latest book is The Genesis of Rebellion, with Steven Pfaff (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Although the differences between Ireland and Ukraine are vast, their histories have something important in common: both were once internal colonies of imperial states. Whereas modern Ireland had been governed by only one alien ruler, England, modern Ukraine was divided between the Habsburg and Russian Empires, and after 1917 suffered periods of German, Russian, Polish, and Czechoslovakian control. Beyond the fact of subjection to alien rule, Ukraine shares other parallels with the Irish experience. For example, as in Ireland, native culture was disparaged in Ukraine, and the Ukrainian language was suppressed in Romanov Russia.
Ireland’s status as an internal colony played a critical role in the Great Famine of 1845-50. Whereas the direct culprit in the Irish famine was the arrival of potato blight, the actual causes of the famine are a good deal more complicated. The key factor affecting the food supply was the extreme dependence of the Irish peasantry on the potato due to the small size of Irish peasant plots. The potato was the only subsistence crop that could be produced on plots of that size. The arrival of blight destroyed the main food supply for millions of Irish peasants, but this factor alone did not necessarily cause starvation. Ireland was a major producer of grain and beef for the British market, and the British government could have acted to divert some of the food destined for export to the Irish population — yet chose not to do so. The reasons why the government failed to alleviate the suffering of the Irish peasants remain the subject of vigorous and partisan controversy.
As in the Irish case, there is a good deal of debate about the causes of the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine (the Holomodor). No biological agent was involved; the famine was an entirely man-made affair caused by official Soviet policy.
I have neither the competence nor the inclination to weigh in on debates about the causes of these famines. What is indisputable in both cases, however, is that the policies of the respective core states led to continued export from these food-producing regions. In Ireland as in Ukraine, alien rulers in London and Moscow refused to suspend the export of grain and other foodstuffs and supply them to starving farmers in culturally distinct peripheries.
Had Ireland and Ukraine been self-governing rather than internal colonies subject to alien rule, their political leaders might have taken more steps to relieve the suffering. Unlike alien rulers, native ones generally have more reason to respond to the grievances of their constituents. In London as in Moscow, by contrast, leadership had little sympathy for the fate of the ethnically and linguistically distinct Irish and Ukrainians, and neither periphery had the political capacity required to exercise decisive influence in their respective cores.
Rather than viewing these two famines as solely the outcome of ideological commitments to economic liberalism or the malevolent ill will of central rulers like Stalin, we might also regard them as tragic by-products of alien rule. It is overwhelmingly clear that, in the best of circumstances, alien rule promotes indifference about the welfare of members of peripheral groups; more frequently, it is nakedly exploitative. The reason for alien rulers’ exploitative policies lies in their motivations to control or annex these territories in the first place. No one seriously believes that these motivations are altruistic.
Whatever they may say, alien rulers never seek to control or annex territories to make life better for their culturally distinct inhabitants. Instead, they do so for their own instrumental purposes: to help prop up their regimes, to loot resources of land and labor, to provide foodstuffs for their core populations, to open markets for their goods, to foster military expansionism, to increase security, and so forth. Since the point of alien rule is to profit the core regime, it comes as no surprise that alien rulers could not care less about providing good governance to the populations they have expended blood and treasure to conquer. Yet the historical record also reveals that, in a precious few cases, alien rulers do manage to provide good governance to their subjects.
If alien rule can have such divergent effects, then it is crucial to understand the conditions under which it promotes favorable outcomes. A large part of the answer lies in what economists refer to as "incentive compatibility." A policy is incentive compatible if each party can attain their best outcome merely by acting on the basis of their own true preferences. With respect to core-periphery interaction, the simplest implication is that an optimal policy is one that promotes the welfare of both parties.
What implications does this analysis have for understanding the Irish and Ukrainian famines? Since internal colonies are potential sites for the development of secessionist movements, central authorities are likely to adopt more repressive policies on the periphery than in the core of the state. During the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, the British government dreaded the prospect of a French invasion of Ireland—and the French indeed had mounted unsuccessful invasions in 1796 and 1798 to support the rebellious United Irishmen—but, by the mid-nineteenth century, this concern had waned. In 1932 Stalin, however, did express fear that Ukraine might be ripe for secession, a concern that might have exacerbated Soviet policy in the Holodomor. Yet each of these peripheries continued to produce grain and other critical foodstuffs for their alien rulers despite the massive starvation and social dislocation their inhabitants suffered. As a result, both sets of alien rulers could ignore the massive human costs of their policies with relative impunity.
And so they did.
