Some critique of Mann’s concepts and analysis
“The extensive mass murders of Communist states are problematic,” argues scholar Martin Shaw in his review of Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy. “Mann plausibly describes many of them as classicide, because their targets were social classes, and explains them as ‘mistaken revolutionary projects’ rather than as ethnic conflict. But he also offers the perversion of socialism as a class variant of the more common ethnic perversion of democracy: ‘socialist ideals of democracy also became perverted as the demos became entwined with the term proletariat, the working class, creating pressures to cleanse other classes.’ Along with the perversion of national democracy, this was then a second ‘general way in which democratic ideals were transmuted into murderous cleansing.’ However[,] we may question whether the idea of the proletariat (working class) was really a moving force in the perversion of Soviet democracy, or in creating ‘pressures to cleanse other classes’. When this idea had most meaning, just after the October Revolution, the Soviet Union was at its most democratic and although the Bolsheviks repressed the peasantry there was no ‘cleansing’. Later, although the term proletariat remained at the centre of Communist ideology, it had come to mean the rule of the party, which substituted itself for the working class. Only after the idea had lost its class meaning did Stalin develop his most murderous policies towards peasants. Mann’s main thesis foregrounds ideology but in this case at least the argument seems overstated.”
“Mann,” adds Shaw, “does not fully justify the adoption of ‘cleansing’ as a master-concept.” This is unfortunate, since the term reflects ideologies of racial purification: it is widely rejected as a perpetrator euphemism unsuitable for social-scientific use. As even Norman Naimark, a historian who uses the term, remarks (2001: 193): ‘There is nothing “clean” about ethnic cleansing. It is shot through with violence and brutality in the most extreme form.’ Mann defines it as ‘the removal by members of one [ethnic] group of another such group from a locality they define as their own.’ His insistence that ‘murderous cleansing’ is a subtype gives credence to the notion that removal can be non-violent – a manifestation of political but not military power.
Yet the wholesale removal of a population group from their homeland is generally involuntary, resisted, and enforced through extreme coercion. The forms and extents of violence vary greatly, but ethnic removal generally falls under Raphael Lemkin’s (1944: 79) original concept of genocide as the ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group’. The ‘cleansing’ of other groups (classes, political enemies, etc.) falls under the expanded generic concept of genocide as group destruction that others have developed from his starting-point.”
According to Mann, writes Dylan Riley, “The biggest danger that the South faces is thus organic nation-statism, for many states in this zone are located precisely in the transitional phase between old regimes and democracies, which produced ethnic cleansing in Europe. In other words, ‘the greatest threat is the spread into the South of the ideal of the nation-state, where this confuses the demos and the ethnos, the mass electorate and the ethnic group.’ The evident flaw in this argument is that the nation-state ideal, especially in its organic form, does not seem to be particularly thriving in the global South. As Mann himself points out, post-colonial socialism in both its African and Middle Eastern variants is in tatters. Liberalism has been reduced from a political theory of group rights to an ideology of the market. In the place of these a new ideology of religious fundamentalism, ‘theo- democracy’ has emerged. This, Mann argues, is the functional alternative to ‘organic’ democracy in the developing world.”
“What is to be made of this view?,” asks Riley. “First, in a very broad sense religious fundamentalism seems to be less a theologized version of organic nationalism than a reaction to the failure of state-led development projects. Indeed religious fundamentalism in the global South is often associated with movements to dismantle the developmental state, most notably in India. Second, Islamic fundamentalists at least do not seem to associate any particular value to the nation-state. Their ideologies are aimed at a transnational religious community. The imposition of shari’a hardly counts as a statist political programme. The notion of a global South awash in nation-statism strains credibility. These considerations are obvious enough.
But a deeper, and more troubling, problem plagues Mann’s evaluation of the role of the rich world, and particularly the us, in these processes. Mann warns that the North should be wary of naively encouraging the democratic nation-state in a geopolitical zone where this is likely to produce ethnic cleansing: ‘We must abandon the complacency conferred by the notion that the emergence of liberal, tolerant democracy is the inevitable outcome of modernity, sidetracked only by [the] primitive or malevolent in peoples and their leaders’. The question, of course, is to what extent can US policy in particular be understood as tending to promote the ideal of the nation-state, let alone the democratic nation-state?”
“This,” continues Riley, “seems to confuse the ideology of imperialism for its substance, which in many respects operates in the opposite direction. Surely arms sales and austerity packages operate as a powerful disintegrating force on states in the global South, and are at least partially responsible for the very state failures to which fundamentalism is a response. It would be unfair to argue that Mann is unaware of these processes. But his political field of vision, polarized between the liberal and organic nation-state, marginalizes them.” [My italics N.M.]
“The absence of a geopolitical explanatory framework,” concludes Riley, “is particularly problematic in the book’s concluding discussion, where the world zones of peace and turmoil are seen as groups of states with contrasting levels of economic development. Such a vision transcends distinctions between liberal and organic nation-states, pointing to the connections between the policies of the North and state failure in the South. In this regard, Mann notes current US policies that seek to limit controls on capital, rather than institutionalize class compromises. But he lacks a conceptual apparatus for explaining this shift from the developmentalism of the post-war era, or elucidating its connections with outcomes beyond the advanced capitalist heartlands. The fundamental link between geo-economic and geopolitical power, imperialism, remains beyond the purview of this remarkable work. Yet if we are to ask, what is ethnic cleansing the dark side of today, imperialism might not be the worst candidate.” [My italics N.M.] (Dylan Riley, NLR, Nov/Dec 2007)
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