Cleansing After 1945
Michael Mann
I have shown that modernity generated two different conceptions of democracy. First, North-Western European and white settler régimes had a pronounced sense of class conflict, and sought to institutionalize it. Thus they developed and deepened forms of liberal, not organic, democracy among themselves. But the white settlers developed an organic conception of their whole community as opposed to alien indigenous ‘others’. They practised severe forms of ethnic cleansing upon them, including the commission of genocide.
Second, the different circumstances of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, meant that not class but ethnic stratification became the central political issue. Unlike classes, most ethnic or religious communities are not necessarily interdependent. They can live in their own cleansed communities, with their own organic state. They were increasingly doing so. In two distinct ways, therefore, massive
and murderous ethnic and political cleansing was not really the antithesis of democracy—as is the most common view. Rather, it was its underside.
Nor did this history end in 1945. For then the cleansing rebounded ferociously on Germans. Of the 17.7 million Germans living east of the two post-war Germanys and Austria (excluding the 2 million in the Soviet Union), 1.1 million were killed in the War, 11.7 fled successfully to Germany, 2.1 million died or went missing during the flight and only 2.6 million remained in the East. Nearly 100,000 Croatians were put to the sword by Serbs as they surrendered, and 150,000 Turks were expelled from Bulgaria. Until Yugoslavia broke up, there was no more mass murder. But coerced emigration of Turks continued from Bulgaria—where those remaining were required to take Bulgarian names—with around 350,000 moving in 1989. Then Czechoslovakia broke up, peacefully, into two mono-ethnic states and perhaps a third of the last two to three million Germans in the East flocked ‘home’ to united Germany.
But is this history not over? Has not the liberal, stratified nation-state now triumphed? By 1945, fascism was discredited; state socialism mostly fell in 1989–91. And does not liberal democracy dominate all Western Europe, much of Central Europe and some of Eastern Europe, plus parts of Latin America and East and South Asia? Democratization is positively correlated with central features of modernity: with the level of economic development, with literacy and with urbanization. Yet the studies reveal that the absolute level of economic development seemingly required for a transition to democracy has steadily increased throughout the twentieth century.
Liberal democracy is becoming more difficult to attain. Its extension has sometimes been by force—as in the cases of Germany, Austria, Italy and Japan. It has also spread through particular cultural networks, to neighbours, co-religionists and kith and kin. Researchers have observed a ‘British effect’, whereby former British colonies such as India or the Caribbean Islands are more likely to be liberal-democratic than ex-colonies of other powers. The recent switch of both Vatican and US foreign policy to support democracy and human rights have boosted their chances in the South. At the moment, the outlook seems fair for liberal democracy. But such particularistic encouragements cannot be guaranteed to continue.
Towards Ethnic Homogeneity
In any case, where democracy has triumphed, it has often been tinged by organicism. Europe is actually nearing the end of its century-long drive toward ethnic homogeneity. In 1991, Kosovo was 90 per cent
Albanian, Slovenia was 88 per cent Slovene, Croatia was 78 per cent Croat, Serbia 66 per cent Serb, Macedonia 65 per cent Macedonian. Bosnian Muslims were only 44 per cent of Bosnia, but cleansing there and in Croatia then rapidly escalated into mass murder and desperate refugee flight. When the Albanians of Kosovo are either all cleansed by murder and expulsion or attain their own statelet, all of the states of the former Yugoslavia will be around 80 per cent composed of one ethnicity. So are the two statelets of a once-united Cyprus. We can follow most of the media and most Western politicians and blame the evil machinations of a few war criminals for this cleansing.
Clearly, in all the cases I have mentioned, organicist movements had to struggle to overcome their rivals. Their victories were carefully constructed, often closely-fought, partly dependent on coercion, not given by history. But they have also had a popular aspect. In the crucial elections of late 1990, nationalist parties won majorities in all the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Some—especially in Serbia and Croatia—already had organicist tendencies, but almost all the others rapidly developed them. Of course, from 1991 onwards, electoralism was joined by militarism and paramilitarism in the descent to murderous cleansing. Paramilitarism has especially remained an essential part of ‘popular’ organicism, wielding its distinctive coercive powers to silence doubts within the ‘people’—as well as to cleanse the enemy. But, as we have seen, such movements inhabit the centre of the European tradition. It is not surprising that they have been winning, since they can wield the powerful ideology of ‘We, the people; they, the enemy’. Where in modern Europe has there been a different outcome?
Soon, only three specific areas of multi-ethnicity will remain across the whole of Greater Europe. Russians will remain as substantial minorities in many others’ states (and vice-versa). Will this last? It is difficult to say. Second, a few older multi-ethnic states in Western Europe remain: the UK, Switzerland and Spain, with Belgium the relative newcomer of 1830. Their multi-ethnicity was acquired in the pre-organic era, when ethnicity mattered little. In these countries, only Northern Ireland retains its capacity for murder—though Basque terrorism is not yet finished. All other European Union countries are now over 85 per cent mono-ethnic. Indeed, emigration between the EU countries has been steadily declining over the last forty years. Third, however, immigrants to Western Europe from outside its borders now form 5–10 per cent of most national populations. Yet these immigrants, unlike inter-war minorities, are not plausibly linked by nationalists to some external threat to the nation. True, Muslim immigrants—especially in France—can be linked to Christian fears of neighbouring Islam. But most immigrants to Europe are resented for more material reasons—employment and housing competition. Such conflict between material interest-groups is more easily solved than are supposed ‘threats’ to the purity of the nation.
Thus organic nationalism, excluding to the point of murderous cleansing, has been one of Europe’s contributions to modernity. Of course, once the nation is cleansed, it requires little further violence.
Impeccably liberal nation-states can bloom above the mass graves of the cleansed—in the US, in Australia, in Germany—and eventually perhaps in Serbia. In South and Central America, as in some parts of Asia and Oceana, cleansing of small indigenous peoples continues, largely committed by local settler paramilitaries. The greatest irony is that the once-cleansed ex-settler colonies, later receiving mass immigration, can even flaunt their multi-culturalism. Though the indigenous peoples are silent because absent, the recent immigrants have not been associated with an external state, nor do they demand threatening regional autonomies. What Americans call ‘multi-culturalism’ is largely apolitical, in the sense that the cultures do not demand rival states. And since immigrants offer little threat to the
nation-state, the natives do not respond with organic nationalism—they are satisfied when the government strengthens the borders against further immigration.
Indeed, murderous cleansing is nowadays fairly rare anywhere. Though organic nationalism can be detected amid much ‘third-world’ or ‘southern’ political theory, most is fairly mild. Malaysia’sPrime Minister has justified a predominantly one-party régime in terms of ‘the philosophy that the group and the country are more important than the individual’. He likes to call this ‘Asian’ as opposed to ‘Western’, though the claim to an organic nation is actually thoroughly European. East and Southeast Asia contains a variety of states, some largely mono-ethnic (such as Japan and Korea), others noticeably multi-ethnic (such as India). More potential exists in a few states. In a few Islamic countries [sic], and in India and Israel, have arisen strong ‘fundamentalist’ claims that this religious people is the bearer of absolute truth and virtue, against the error, decadence and sin of the foreigners and secularists. A strong theocratic state must express this truth: its very intolerance is considered a virtue. Zones of murderous ethnic cleansing also exist in Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
On the whole, though, few Middle Eastern or Asian states seem in great danger of falling to organic nationalism. And this is also true of Africa. ‘Tribalism’ is, of course, the predominant political bane of the continent, and this intermittently generates atrocities. Yet, since most African countries contain so many ethnicities, their régimes are necessarily coalitions between ethnic groups, which helps restrain organic nationalism. The exceptions are those where religious schism provides a potentially organicist cement to these coalitions (as in the Sudan or Nigeria) or the handful of cases where there are only two predominant ethnicities (as in Burundi and Rwanda). It is worth noting that the periods of massive killings and coerced emigration in the latter case have been precipitated by Hutu movements brandishing the organicist banner of ‘majoritarian democracy’.
The Decline of Statism
Fortunately, the other half of the organicist formula, extreme statism, languishes, proclaimed only by some religious fundamentalists. The main historic carriers of extreme statism, fascism and communism, collapsed so disastrously that the whole statist project seems discredited for now. Current organic authoritarian régimes pretend that they are democratic, or that they will shortly move to democracy. The words ‘fascist’ and ‘communist’ have become merely terms of imprecise abuse. This means that—with the exception of a few fundamentalists—we are not dealing with movements as ideological, as impervious to pragmatic concerns, as the Nazis. Given time, however, this context-dependent rejection of the powerful state will probably fade. Then, extreme statist values may be harnessed once again to cleansing movements espousing organic nationalism, to generate ideologies as ferocious as fascism.
What lessons can we draw from the history I have charted as to where and when severe ethnic and political cleansing may be likely to emerge? Can we identify counter-measures that might be taken to
defuse it? First, we must abandon the false complacency conferred by the notion that the emergence of liberal democracy is the inevitable outcome of modernization.
Second, we must accept the fact that liberal democracy did not emerge out of social harmony but rather social conflict, especially class conflict. To encourage it requires realistic acceptance of such conflict and willingness to institutionally compromise it.
Third, organic democracy has tended to emerge where a dominant ‘people’ lives amid either one or two ethnic or religious minorities, plausibly identifiable as some kind of ‘threat’ to the dominant people. This perceived threat should be realistically confronted, not simply dismissed. It has usually arisen when the self-styled representatives of the dominant ‘people’ can plausibly associate a minority with a foreign enemy or exploiter, either a foreign state or an ‘international conspiracy’. The identification of such enemies permits the rallying of the whole organic people, overcoming its internal social conflicts.
Fourth, this has implied distinct types of ‘threat’. Where the minority is regionally concentrated and supported by a neighbouring state, the threat is of potential loss of territory to that state. Where there is concentration and support from non-neighbours abroad, the threat is of possible secession and the founding of a new state. Where there is no regional minority concentration, the threat is sensed as a more diffuse international exploitation, as in the historical notions of ‘Jewish finance capitalism’ or ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’.
Fifth, we must appreciate the nature of the main institution linking together the leaders, ‘the people’ and their joint coercion over minorities: the armed paramilitary, a distinctly modern and populist form of organization.
We should thus be somewhat concerned about several parts of the world today. Many developing countries possess a dominant ethnicity or religion, many possess minorities with strong regional implantation, some of which form the majority in a neighbouring state. Many experience some degree of exploitation by foreign imperialism and/or international capitalism—to which some local minorities can be plausibly linked and so regarded as far more ‘powerful’ than their numbers would warrant. Finally, the kinds of small-arms on which paramilitaries rely—which enable quite small groups of young men to coerce their own community into the prison-house of organic nationalism—have never been easier to acquire in the world. All this is a recipe for intermittent organic nationalism, occasionally surging into murderous cleansing.
Preventing Genocide
Can we in the North help the countries of the South avoid the worst scenarios—that is, our own past ones? We should reflect on the history of popular sovereignty I have outlined. The dominant Western system of liberal democracy has made sacred a majoritarian and territorial form of sovereignty. It has often added a high degree of state centralization—though this is not universal. These qualities have never been good at dealing with spatially concentrated minorities—and that is why so few of these remain in Western
countries. The few older ‘deviant’ countries, like Switzerland or Belgium, which developed confederal and consociational practices of power-sharing which are not simply majoritarian, are actually more
appropriate solutions to such conflicts. Indeed, late communist Yugoslavia was, in certain respects, going one step further, to the removal of the notion of an unproblematic locus of territorial sovereignty. Had the international community understood this, and also understood the dangers of replacing it by a series of majoritarian and sovereign nation-states, then this terrible burst of murderous ethnic cleansing might have been averted.23 Democracy is as problematic a form of political régime as any other.
We should also seek an international régime more sensitive to regional conflicts, which would reduce rather than widen inequality in the South and which would encourage the institutionalization of
internal social, especially class, conflict. Yet, in recent years, international institutions have sought to free capital from ‘the dead hand’ of regulation and economies are to be given the ‘shock therapy’ of market freedom, almost regardless of the consequences in terms of unemployment, wage levels, worker protections—and political reactions. Nothing could be more likely to generate extreme local nationalist reactions against foreign exploitation, and against any local minorities who could be plausibly linked to this—such as Chinese capitalists in Indonesia and elsewhere, the supposed ‘Jews’ of Asia. Finally, the North must exercise much greater control over its own arms sales[*], both of the heavy weapons of repression by the state, and the small-arms upon which paramilitarism thrives. Guns preempt ballot-boxes—since the paramilitaries wielding them claim to represent the vanguard of the people. In this industry, capitalist profit subverts liberal democracy. [My italics N.M.]
If all this fails, we could be confronted once again with mass murder. In the most extreme cases, we should be prepared to countenance vigorous political and military intervention and swift international
prosecution of crimes against humanity[**]. But we should also view both present and past with greater realism and honesty. Ethnic and political cleansing was central to the modernization of both the Old and New Worlds. We must recognize how difficult it was and is to achieve modern multi-ethnic liberal or social democracy. Organic nationalism is more popular than is normally recognized. Where all else fails, we do need Vance-Owen plans—backed by all necessary force—to help deflect organicism into milder stages of cleansing achieved by mutual negotiation[***]—through agreed population and property exchanges, border alterations and so on. Something more is always needed beyond pious denunciations of the machinations of evil leaders. Unaccompanied by more constructive or comprehensive action, mere threats to the leaders may actually increase their local popularity. Since we ourselves live in ethnically cleansed states, our denunciations also smack of hypocrisy.
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing, NLR, May/June 1999
23. See S. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, Washington, DC 1997.
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