Michael Mann, 1999
If the people or nation is conceived of as being internally stratified, then the state’s main role is to mediate and conciliate amongst its competing interest groups. Such a state preserves diversity among its citizen body and so is relatively unlikely to encourage ethnic and political cleansing among it. Yet, if the people or nation is conceived of as organic, as ‘a perfect union, one and inseparable’ (as in ‘The American Creed’), then some leaders and movements may be tempted to seek to enhance the ‘purity’ of the organic people or nation by suppressing the real-world diversity of its seeming members. Indeed, many modern régimes which claim to be democratic have exhibited a pronounced tendency toward ethnic and political cleansing.
We must distinguish between different types and degrees of ‘cleansing’, and we must clearly state that most do not approach genocide. The mildest types have been the most common. They are induced assimilation, induced immigration and induced emigration, which all lack significant coercion.
Liberal democracy and its dark side
Accounts of liberalism generally stress bourgeois individualism. It is said that liberal democracies are pacific because liberal constitutions first and foremost protect individual human rights. My position is different, seeing less the disembodied individual than groups, especially social classes, as central to liberalism. I will argue that class struggle and its institutionalization—far more than an essentialist respect for individual human rights—have restrained most liberal democracies from cleansing atrocities ‘within’ their core citizen body. Nonetheless, liberal democracies have committed massive cleansing, sometimes amounting to genocide—in colonial contexts where large social groups were defined as lying outside of ‘the people’. Let us consider the two liberal cases in turn.
Obviously, ‘the people’ did not really ‘ordain and establish’ the American Constitution. This was accomplished by fifty-five middle-aged white gentlemen of the highest rank and property, closeted for two weeks in Philadelphia. They claimed to represent ‘the people’ of the thirteen colonies. But who exactly was ‘we, the people’? The Founding Fathers did not mean to include women, slaves and native Americans. Most did not want to include white males without property, in other words, the lower classes. British politicians of the period were more explicit, distinguishing between ‘the people’ and ‘the populace’. The populace comprised the lower orders, the crowd, the mob—definitely not a part of ‘we, the people’. ‘We’ was comprised of groups of propertied males who were termed ‘interests’—gentlemen, merchants, manufacturers, artisans and so on. These interests were acknowledged to be divisive, though these men of property and education also shared ‘a common stake in the nation’. The citizen body was thus recognized as being both internally stratified and existing above lower classes who were entitled to some, but not all, the rights of citizenship.
There were two ways in which such stratification restrained the ‘we, the people’’s antipathy to ‘the other’—and both continued the tradition of restraint demonstrated by earlier ‘old régimes’, composed only of aristocratic and highly privileged classes. First, moves toward the deepening of liberal democracy, toward the extension of ‘we, the people’ were dominated by class relations, with which political actors were already highly familiar. Debates over the extension of the franchise were dominated by old issues. Where should the property line be drawn? Should employees or servants—incapable of independent judgement—have the vote, be jurors or hold office? Should some classes have more votes than others? It was recognized, as it was already within the citizen body, that these plural class and strata interests could be compromised but not eliminated. ‘The people’ was not one and indivisible but plural and stratified. Thus, the political essence of liberal democracy is less individualism than the acceptance of the legitimacy of contending group interests. These remain, institutionalized in a party system; they cannot be transcended, overcome, cleansed. And since the state is mainly a mediator between interests, it is a limited state, enjoying few powers of its own.
Conflict as Mainstay of Democracy
Class as a central conflict issue in liberal régimes was soon joined by age and gender. Should only household heads have full rights and at what age could other males in the household be said to be of independent mind? Then gender loomed, entwined with age and class, so that women of a certain age or class might be considered politically responsible before other women. This raises the second cause of restraint. Class, age and gender all stratify but they do not usually segregate people into different communities. These groups must necessarily live and work amongst each other. Even during bouts of severe class conflict, workers and employers spent most of their waking hours co-operating with one another. People of different ages and men and women also live and constitute families together. Though some residential segregation may occur between classes, they are also routinely interdependent. Such interdependence restrains most potential antipathy between ‘we, the people’ and ‘the other’.
Class conflict has always been important in the development of modern society. It has tended to result in liberal and social-democratic institutions. And that is also true of age and gender conflict. All these groups remain as contending interests within the people, recognized as having legitimate conflicts which are institutionalized in the multi-party systems of liberal or social democracy. Stratification is the essence of liberal and social democracy. Since this form of democracy does not try to eliminate exploitation, some groups will always feel oppressed and they will perennially rise up to contest new forms of exploitation. But class conflict amid liberal institutions is not resolved by cleansing the land of one’s opponents, still less by mass murder. Thus, though capitalism is not in itself particularly benign, the class resistance it generates tends to produce liberal conciliation.
The importance of class and then gender conflict in liberal states meant that, in Europe, ethnicity—language communities or supposed communities of descent—played little role in early politics. British property owners were all considered citizens—whether they spoke English, Celtic or Gaelic (which many of them then did). Religion, an older axis of stratification, remained important, especially in Europe’s only internal colony, Ireland. There, it continued to range a ‘Protestant Constitution’ against an ‘uncivilized’ Catholic ‘other’, leading on occasion to mass killings. But, until the twentieth century, most dominant ethnic and even religious groups in Europe expected to assimilate ‘the other’. This might involve some institutional coercion, especially to suppress minority languages. But ‘the other’ was not forced out, still less butchered. It was allowed to become British or French or German.7
In Europe, liberal states dominated only in the North-West—the Nordic countries, the Low Countries, France, Switzerland and the British Isles. As we shall see later, the other half of Europe moved less easily toward liberalism. Yet almost all Western European countries also had colonies. Especially in settler colonies, organicism did permeate conceptions of ‘the people’. Though recognized as containing diverse interests, the people was considered organic in one respect: it was essentially ‘European’, superior to, though potentially polluted by, other ‘races’. Thus some of the states I began by calling ‘liberal’ were in reality dual. They had a dark side. Capitalist class compromise, liberal democracy and tolerance among the European settler people were all built on top of terrible atrocities committed against the indigenous ‘others’—for this was Herrenvolk democracy.
The worst-case scenarios resulted where colonization was by whole settler families. These were more interested in seizing the natives’ land than in trading with them or exploiting their labour. Nor did such settler families need to procreate with—and eventually intermarry with—the natives. Thus they were more likely to regard the natives as a racial ‘other’ and seek simply to drive them away, by whatever methods worked, including murder. Often this involved brutal deportations, occasionally it amounted to bursts of deliberate genocide. Brutal slavery was actually a milder alternative: here the ‘inferior’ group was not usually removed but exploited and segregated outside the liberal institutions of the Europeans.
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing, NLR, May/June 1999
Comments
In the ongoing wars – genocidal and of ethnic cleansing – Israel, contends Peter Harling, “is fighting with our weapons. Israel benefits most of the time from the backing of our media, our politicians, and our diplomats, in a struggle which dredges up all the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’, the defence of the Western world, and even its ‘civilizing mission’ against barbarism. In short, this war is being fought, very explicitly, in our name.”
In our name means in the name of ‘the civilised, liberal, democratic West’. ‘In our name’ in this case means in the name of the ‘Western values and Western people and replaces ‘in the name of the people’ – the people of a nation.
“More than that, from here it is easy to see how our governments are using the opportunity provided by Israel’s wars, in Lebanon and in Gaza, to become ever more radicalized themselves, to the point of abandoning the principles of international humanitarian law, one of Europe’s finest contributions to the stability of the world. We are witnessing a kind of letting go, a growing disinhibition : It is as if we were encouraging Israel to do what we don’t yet dare to do ourselves. These wars, like the one on Gaza, act as a disloser and accelerator of our own fascism, which is now taking root almost everywhere in Europe. So it is not only in Lebanon that this confict is reshuffling the cards.” [The italics is my own retranslation from the original text.]
“It is as if we were encouraging Israel to do what we don’t yet dare to do ourselves.” It is almost Brechtian: “It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.”
“Class conflict amid liberal institutions,” argues Mann, “is not resolved by cleansing the land of one’s opponents, still less by mass murder. Thus, though capitalism is not in itself particularly benign, the class resistance it generates tends to produce liberal conciliation.” In the case of Israel, one can say, that the almost historical absence of class conflict in the Israeli society has allowed the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In other words, the absence of class conflict had led to national chauvinism, paranoia, psychosis, and therefore and aproving and normalising the oppression and the brutal colonial project to go in and expand.]
Notes
7. In fact, the most violent cleansings of this period tended to be those on the European periphery, where exploited classes could also be defined as culturally—though rarely ethnically—inferior. This was so in the ferocious ‘Highland clearances’ by landlords of their crofters, resulting in much coerced emigration to the New World.
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