Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide? Author(s): Mark Levene Source: Journal of World History, Vol.

11, No. 2 (Fall, 2000), pp. 305-336 Published by: University of Hawai'i Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20078852 . Accessed: 28/04/2011 17:32
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uhp. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of World History.

http://www.jstor.org

Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide?

MARK University LEVENE ofWarwick

a statistical one at that: 187 million has become almost a platitude, now more or less accepted wisdom for the number It is the figure, the of human beings killed as a result of political violence?Zbigniew uses the unlovely term megadeaths?in Brzezinski this, our bloody century.1 More killing than at any other time in history. And yet at the as it passes across the its relentlessness, end of the twentieth century screens of those of us seemingly blessed with immunity from television to daze and bewil its catastrophic continues reality and consequences,
der.

For the historian, him or herself inured to centuries if not millen nia of mass atrocity, this picture of a special era of death and destruc tion invites, indeed demands further probing and analysis. Is "the Twentieth in scope Book of the Dead" really so very different Century or scale from previous ones?2 It has been argued that the effects of the in China from 410 reduced its population Taiping and other rebellions a couple in 1850 to 350 million in 1873.3 In southern Africa million of decades of Shaka's Zulu nation and the ensu earlier, the emergence or "great crushing" produced results ing Mfecane equally horrendous relative to the population of the region. Go back a few centuries and

1Eric Hobsbawn, (London, igi4~iggi Age of Extremes, The Short Twentieth Century 1994), p. 12. 2The work by Gil Eliot, Twentieth Century title of the path-breaking Book of the Dead (London, 1972). 3 John King Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution (New York, 1986), p. 81. i8oo-ig85

Journal ofWorld History, Vol. 11, No. 2 ?2000 of Hawai'i Press by University

305

3o6 the devastation the Near Asia,

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

to Central that the Mongol conqueror Timur wrought and Northern India impelled modern historian East, to note that this exterminatory Arnold of twenty-four span Toynbee to the one hundred 1379 and 1403) was comparable years (between and twenty of the last five Assyrian kings.4 If this seems to be an argument, albeit a cynical one, for saying plus as ?a change, plus cest lam?me chose, the very use of the term genocide, time suddenly stumbled upon a ifwe have in our current self-centered different order of things, is equally problematic. How do we find a sep arate niche for this exterminatory modus operandi when we are already civil war, revolution, with the idea of massacre, man-made total war, and indeed the potentiality for nuclear obliteration? famine, The signposting of the scholars is, to say the least, contradictory. The international jurist Raphael Lemkin, who both coined the term "geno cide" and was founding mover for its study, saw in it not so much as a reversion or regression to past "barbarisms." If he per modernity was not in the destruction a difference our century in it of peo ceived familiar per se but in the ability of international society, with ples or nations it. international law as its right arm, to outlaw and ultimately prevent In spite of the catastrophe which overwhelmed his own family in the Lemkin was essentially about a modern Holocaust, optimistic global The civilization founded on western 1948 enlightenment principles. on Genocide is his great legacy.5 Convention United Nations Convention the Genocide has been Yet, Kosovo notwithstanding, more honored stream in the breach than in the practice. A considerable Lemkin's would of current empirical thought, moreover, challenge for instance, has not only forcefully basic premise. Zygmunt Bauman, some "irrational that the Holocaust the notion rejected represented eradicated residues of pre-modern barbar outflow of the not-yet-fully . . . rational concern but on the contrary "arose out of a genuinely ity" by a bureaucracy generated this quintessential genocide true to it form and purpose." For Bauman, was a product of a planned, scientifically and technically coordinated, informed, expert, efficiently managed, resourced society like our own. Indeed, just in case anyone was in doubt was a as to his meaning, that the Holocaust he not only reiterated in the house of modernity and could not be "at resident legitimate

4 in Leo Kuper, Quoted 1981), p. 12. 5 For more on Lemkin's Lemkin, Raphael UN Convention, cide (New Haven

Genocide:

Its Political

Use

in the 20th Century

(New Haven,

to Genocide; seminal role, see Kuper's introductory chapter Axis Rule inOccupied DC, Europe (Washington, 1944). For the text of the see Frank Chalk The History and Sociology of Geno and Kurt Jonassohn, and London, 1990), pp. 44-49.

Le vene: Why home

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

307

between

in any other house" but that there was an "elective affinity" it "and modern civilization."6 seem to offer very different perspectives on If Bauman and Lemkin

be considered the century of genocide, this why this century might in itself offers a conclusive article would submit that neither argument case. Implicitly, both have the added danger of being reduced to dis Bauman the form genocidal takes. The short hand for killing thus might read: "gas chambers": routinized, systematized, belt killings; industrialized albeit with a grand vision at its conveyer end "of a better, and radically different, is something society."7 There in this theme. If gas chambers suggest a 1940's state-of compelling the-art technology for the accomplishment of a particular type of mass cussions about

of the Arme murder, telegraphs and trains in the Ittihadist destruction nians or the provision of index registers of the Rwandese population as a basis for the selection of Tutsi and other victims in 1994 equally seem to point the finger at a type of social organization in which vic as depersonalized or numbers tims can be characterized and freight as pen pushers or technical their perpetrators operators who conve or psychologically find themselves "distanced" from niently physically the act of murder. All well and good. Except that recent studies, such as Goldhagen on the Holocaust, or Prunier on Rwanda, remind us that provocatively like that; that genocide, whether perpetrated by a or a relatively advanced like Germany unde society technologically still requires the active mobilization of hun veloped one like Rwanda, dreds of thousands of their "ordinary" citizens to pull triggers or wield that this involves not a spatial removal but a direct con machetes; frontation between and victims; and that in consequence perpetrators in action can be every bit as passionate, and messy vicious, genocide as the massacres or Punic wars.8 By a different of the Peloponnesian that nei route, we seem to be back with Lemkin's barbarism. Except nor Greeks saw themselves as barbarians but rather ther the Romans as the most advanced and sophisticated societies of their time. If then, much of as Michael Freeman would assert, the argument cannot be about mod se but only about civilization and if we were to pursue this ernity per train of thought further by tracing in the classical and pre-modern it is not

and the Holocaust Bauman, Modernity Zygmunt (Oxford, 1989), pp. 17, 89, 88. 7 Ibid., p. 91. 8 Daniel Hitlers Willing Executioners, Ordinary Germans and theHolo Jonah Goldhagen, caust (London, 1996); Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, History ig5g-igg4 of a Genocide (London, 1995).

3o8

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

of societies?despite their usually politically dif record the capability nature?to fused and decentralized whole pop deport or exterminate is our case for a particular between ulations, where geno relationship cide and the twentieth century?9 in response that form is not the primary This article would contend issue whereas is. Or, to put it another way, framework most definitely we cannot begin to understand genocide without grappling with his context is implied not only the historical of each indi tory, by which must vidual genocide which tell us a special and unique necessarily story but rather the macrohistorical record, the broad and moving canvas in which we might chart and hopefully analyze the emergence of the current international and development system. Indeed, its first is that the origins of something which we specifically call proposition and prevalence of this phenom followed by the persistence genocide, enon into the contemporary is intrinsically bound up with that world, system and is indeed an intrinsic and crucial part of it. If this emerging cannot be simply cordoned is correct then genocide line of argument too ideo off as an aberration which afflicts states which have become to war, or internal conflicts prone to revolution, logical, totalitarian, and stratification. These may be which are the result of ethnic division of genocide. And features and important determinants they significant about why certain countries?Germany, may tell us also something Russia, China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Turkey, Rwanda, Burundi?have can be But none of these examples been particularly prone. genocide notes Anthony in domestic isolation. Nation understood states, purely Giddens, "only exist in systemic relations with other nation-states."10 states which we now take for granted Yet the global system of nation is thus not has only come to full fruition in this last century. Genocide as they attempt a by-product of particular national trajectories only or possibly con state building in order to operate within, circumvent, front But that functional system, nature. but a guide to and indeed cipher for its own dys

is closely should this be? The answer, on one level, why or neo-Marxist enmeshed with what Marxist analysis would call "the of uneven the interna historical Thus, development."11 dynamics

9 and modernity," The British Journal of Soci civilization Michael Freeman, "Genocide, 207-23. ology 46 (i995): 10 The Nation-State and Violence Giddens, (Cambridge, 1985), p. 4. Anthony 11Ron in Toward the "Societal madness: power and genocide," Aronson, Impotence, on the and Prevention of Genocide: Proceedings of the International Conference Understanding ed. Israel W. Charny Holocaust and Genocide, (Boulder and London, 1984), p. 136.

Le vene: Why tional

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

309

system was not created all of a piece but was primed and taken economic and forward by a small coterie of western polities. Their the system's ground rules and ensured determined political ascendancy would be carried forward and reg and development in their own hegemonic interests. As a result, not primarily relations been co-eval with the origins of the have "international only nation-state" but this process from its eighteenth-century origins was the fortunes of its leading players, most upon peculiarly dependent ulated States.12 We do not ourselves notably Britain, France, and the United to acknowledge have to be westernocentric this problematic reality or thrust of Immanuel Wallerstein's the essential thesis developmental core surrounded western in terms of a dominant by semi-peripheral himself would be the first to and peripheral zones.13 Yet Wallerstein was not naturally preordained, nor that this development acknowledge to lead to the permanent it have of specific states. ascendancy it was the outcome of a long series of inter-European Rather, power some proto in a global arena, in which struggles fought increasingly modern states, such as Spain, fell by the wayside while others, notably Prussia and Russia, came into frame as serious contenders for primacy. to have something If all this had and continues of a social Darwinian did "the intersection of capitalism, industrial quality about it, nevertheless, ism and the nation-state," which were the primary ingredients enabling western state supremacy in the first place, remain the enduring features of the system as globalized, while also ensuring the continuing hege broader but still relatively small group of states mony of a somewhat institutions and corporations also now (with a number of key western even though the relative position of these may be quite dif involved), or nineteenth ferent from that of the late eighteenth centuries.14 between and an emerging international genocide relationship the avant-garde further scrutiny. Was it, for instance, system demands or latter states who committed in their drive for hegemony, genocide it was, where do we locate our first And whichever day contenders? modern of the Iberian thrust to the Canaries, the example? Aspects are horribly suggestive, and then the New World mainland Caribbean, as are, in the Spanish and Portuguese domestic frames, the disgorging This or forcible of Jews and Moriscos. Similar integration early modern trends are perhaps to be found in the destruction of Albigensians and that its expansion

12 Giddens, Nation-State, 13 Immanuel Wallerstein, Modern World System, 3 vols. 14 Giddens, Nation-State,

p. 4. The Capitalist World-Economy (New York, 1974-88). p. 5.

(Cambridge,

1979)

and The

3io

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

Anabaptists

of French consolidation and German later still in the English or Anglo-Scottish state-religious to "clear" Catholic Irish and Gaelic Highlanders from their campaigns frontier hinterlands. The process could be said to have been carried on the forward in a still wider global frame with the British onslaught unities and of Australasia, the American expulsions, subjugations, of their remaining Indian nations, unsubdued closely not to say in Latin American countries, notably Argentina, replicated in the Russian anti-Circassian drive to consolidate the Caucasus firmly

en

route

to the

native peoples and massacres

within

the Czarist empire. in the case of the the scale of these killings, particularly Yet while not only equals but arguably Americas, surpasses sixteenth-century mass murder, instances of twentieth-century the specificity of "geno cide" cannot be confirmed or denied from this litany. If the corelation is the critical issue, a possibly more system ship to the emerging

authentic first contender might be the 1793-94 revolutionary Jacobin on the Vend?e region. Here we can observe a premeditated, onslaught if albeit geographically limited attempt at people-destruc systematic, tion closely linked to rapid nation-state the context of building within a much is an broader crisis of interstate relations. But if the Vendee a type of mass murder which has become par important signpost for in the twentieth its inclu and persistent century, ticularly prevalent sion as a case study has to contend with objections that Frenchmen cannot be "genocide."15 this killing other Frenchmen Interestingly, contrasts with a contention from an entirely different quarter which to pick and choose between which mass kill protests at any attempt are not.16 Even were we to put aside this and which ings are genocides ethically grounded restraint, the bewildering perfectly understandable, that perpetrator and victim groups outlined diversity of the situations so far confronts this writer, no less than others, with the obstinate is it that we are discussing? question: what exactly "we pres "At the most fundamental level," it has been asserted, and viable description of the processes lack even a coherent and ently circumstances implied by the term genocide."17 And this despite enor

main

15 La Vend?e-Venge Secher, Le genocide franco-fran?ais, (Paris, 1986) for the Reynauld source of this controversy. 16 of genocide: "Unless definition Israel Charny's ultra-inclusivist See, for instance, a large number of people are put can be reasonably self-defense clear-cut proven, whenever in Israel W. Charny, to death by other people, it constitutes A ed., Genocide, genocide," Review Critical Bibliographical (London, 1988), vol. 1, p. xiii. 17 11 (1986): a functional Toward Alternatives Ward Churchill, "Genocide: definition," 403.

Le vene: Why mous work

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

311

onomies

and continuing efforts by sociologists and etiologies of the phenomenon it. Leo Kuper, doyen for criminalizing

There is, he says, "no single despairing. no basis for developing "a general boot, probably theory of geno Fein warns that "comparisons cide."18 Similarly, Helen based on either or the Gulag Archipelago as a single archetype which the Holocaust assume there is one mechanically recurring script are bound to be mis 19Fein is correct. Each is different. The problem is leading." genocide the rubric in the first place, her very refer knowing what falls within ence to the Gulag being an interesting we example of how potentially might obscure rather than clarify our focus. Fein's example also high to conflate the act of "genocide" with "geno lights a general tendency cidal process," of which there is a great deal more. The latter, involv or coercive measures, of draconian ing all manner ranging from the of a group at one end of the spectrum through to forcible assimilation in murder at the other, does not have to culminate necessarily physical a program of systematic people-annihilation, that is, "genocide." Even

tax and jurists to provide not to say a legal frame of its study, sounds almost genocidal process" and, to

then it is rarely sustained to an attempted is perhaps This completion. one reason why the Holocaust remains so central to our vision of what as if in terms we had found our "ideal" constitutes Weberian genocide, to in contradistinction this argument type. Nevertheless, contends, terms of reference it is possible not only that with appropriate Kuper, to discern a pattern of genocide which in some way is relatable to the of contemporary also, at least in terms of history but which a coherent can be viewed as having study, identity. revolves around the two obviously interlinked ques My approach tions: "what is genocide" and "why does it occur" ?The first might be sense by proposing in a preliminary answered that genocide is, as in a type of state-organized Lemkin's modern warfare. But formulation, not all warfare in history this statement requires elucidation. Though has been conducted states, the ability of a state to wage war is both by a prime indicator of its power vis-?-vis other states and of its relation unfolding academic ship to its domestic populace. much about the self-perception a recourse to war tells us Additionally, of a state leadership and of its willing or otherwise, to pursue what it views as motivated ness, ideologically state's interests or agendas by these means. Yet war, by definition, is a even where carefully prepared, can be com strategy, which, high-risk

18Leo Its Political Use Kuper, Genocide: 19 Helen A Sociological Fein, "Genocide,

in the 20th Century (New Haven, Current Sociology Perspective,"

1981). 38 (1990):

56.

312

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

events. It also requires prodi demolished prehensively by contingent If the war fails these resources, and capital. gious inputs of manpower, of the may be lost in part or entirety to the great if not fatal detriment state. Alternatively, successful war may result in great material and benefits. This may sound paradoxical with psychological regard to but is in fact as true for it as for the two other main types of genocide war. is conducted modern often Indeed, state-organized genocide or in parallel with them. Equally all three simultaneously importantly, to the nation state's place within have a common types relationship the broader international system. sov is between and usually powerful Type One warfare recognized states within the system. In the twentieth the "total century ereign in the way that, for ization" of these interstate struggles, particularly instance during the Second World War, adversaries have indiscrimi millions of the noncombatants of the nately targeted and murdered has led some writers not only to describe this type of side, opposing warfare as "genocidal" but to discern similar psychological, technolog at work as those which inform genocide.20 ical, and political processes is to confuse the issue of moral with the This, however, repugnance and ends. The bombing observation of means of Dresden and Hiro the creation and active mobilization of shima, or for that matter are arguably, of producing nuclear arsenals capable global annihilation, no less "crimes against humanity" or Treblinka. than Auschwitz They of either traditionally also suggest the obsolescence grounded or more are supposed to codes of military conduct which formulated recently act as brakes on unlimited warfare between combatants. Nevertheless, in this type of war there remains, however residually, and even where one side demands the unconditional surrender of the other, a Clause witzian notion that the struggle is fought between adver "legitimate" saries and that at the end of the day negotiation rather than extermi nation will determine of both victor and vanquished the position within the postwar world order. The same is not true of the second type of warfare, however. This a sover in which characterized type is particularly by circumstances state which it one, acts against another eign state, often a powerful to be "illegitimate." less the second state is much perceives Usually powerful; one thinks of the British versus the Boer states at the turn of

20 and Eric Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality: Robert See, for example, Jay Lifton and David Kopf, The and Nuclear Holocaust Threat Nazi (New York, 1990); Eric Markusen in the 20th Century Holocaust and Strategic Bombing, Genocide and Total War (Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford 1995).

Levene: Why

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

313

in the century, Austria 1914, Nazi Germany against Serbia in August on Poland a global war later, or two decades its onslaught later still, the The Japanese post-1937 invasion United States versus North Vietnam. or the Nazi post-1941 of China, invasion of the Soviet Union might in this list, even though the perceived ille also, arguably, be included were relatively states in question ones, or, at the gitimate powerful a briefly other end of the "power" spectrum, vis-?-vis the Nigerians secessionist Biafra. The diversity of these examples warns us that too much can be made of their common features. Nevertheless, the nature is characterized of the Type Two warfare the supposedly by "legiti mate" side dispensing in entirety with Geneva Convention-informed are little more than "ter restraints on the grounds that the opposition rorists," "saboteurs," or "bandits" incapable of fighting conventional, "civilized" war. Worse, whose they are succored by a native population cultural and social level is beneath Racism contempt. invariably con In the circumstances, firms this judgmental verdict. all "necessary" measures are allowable: mass aerial for the liquidation of resistance mass deportation, scorched bombardment, earth, counterinsurgency, as well as repeated retributive or discipli environmental devastation, without nary massacre regard to the age or gender of victims. These to features of indiscriminate warfare inevitably bear close resemblance warfare Type Three which often (though not always) involves geno cide. Interestingly, Type Two is also much closer to Type Three in terms of its justification, the "enemy" in its resistance and obdurate unwill to threaten the integrity of the ingness to submit being perceived state. It is, therefore, of the "legitimate" agenda, or indeed existence, actions and belief "they," the adversary populace, by their misguided systems, not to say their atrocities against "us," who are accused of cul for the perpetrator's "war of self-defense" and responsibility pability as a result, has to be fought ? la outrance and without mercy. which, no the enemy is Type Two warfare becomes Type Three warfare when state but a perceived "illegitimate" longer a perceived "illegitimate" or imperial framework of within the territorial definition community as in the case of the Holocaust, state. Very unusually, the perpetrator to embrace population this can be extended groups within allied, vas

is only a sal, or subject states. Strictly speaking, however, genocide cases where a sovereign variant of Type Three, given that in many state assaults elements of its own subject population or citizenry it does so without to total warfare against them. For instance, the resorting vicious and punc struggle against the Irish, while undoubtedly never spilled over into tuated by atrocity at its crisis stage in 1919-21, mass people-killing. The French inde struggle against the Algerian British

314

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

in the 1950s and early '60s, teetered on its brink. pendence movement, The Nazi post-1939 of Poland arguably went over it, not occupation in its extermination of the country's but in its Jews and Roma, only to Polish national resistance. At stake here is what Vahakn response access to over has referred to as the issue of "preponderant Dadrian of power."21 Whitehall may never have contemplated the Irish not only because of inherent institutional against genocide restraints and humanitarian it was ultimately but because sensibilities to commit major resources to the struggle. Having assessed unwilling it opted to find another, diplo that the enemy could not be defeated, matic involve a degree of compromise and the strategy which would In other instances where of catastrophe. avoidance the state is weak the ability to deliver genocide but possibly resistant to recognizing it, or manpower may be limited by lack of military and/or by capabilities the strength of the communal "enemy." The struggles in the southern the Karen and other hill tribe regions of Burma, Sudan, Iraqi Kurdistan, or the northern Tamil part of Sri Lanka, where the recognized govern ment's of violence has been for much of the period of con monopoly in practice its administrative flict far from absolute, and where hold to countryside, has been limited to the major towns as opposed all pro vide contemporary illustration of this point. are also highly to the study these examples relevant Nevertheless, as they point to a sequence of events in which of genocide inasmuch the states in question, frustrated by their inability to defeat increasingly have lurched towards more these insurgencies, radical all-embracing as in some of these cases, in genocide. I Thus solutions culminating, occurs where a state, perceiving the integrity of argue that "genocide its agenda to be threatened by an aggregate population?defined by or communal to remedy the situ state in collective terms?seeks the en masse physical ation by the systematic, elimination of that aggre or until it is no longer perceived to represent a threat."22 gate, in toto, Yet not to say bewildering, in there is something perplexing, is predi research this proposed state-communal equation. Genocide that whatever cated on the proposition is, it cannot be con genocide sense between two armed in the normally understood sidered warfare an matched be?but combatants?however may they unequally clearly entirely one-sided affair in which a group of absolute perpetrators all resources

21Vahakn N. in Victi "The structural-functional of genocide" Dadrian, components and Emilio Viano MA, 1975), 4: 123. (Lexington, mology: A New Focus, eds. Israel Drapkin 22 "Is the Holocaust of Genocide?" Patterns of Mark Levene, simply another example 10. Prejudice 28 (1994):

Levene: Why

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

315

and unremitting massacre against apply instruments of terror, violence, not to say innocent men, women, and children.23 defenseless, entirely Thus, to ascribe threat from the people who are mass murdered appears as a two-sided not simply to define genocide dynamic relationship a state and an element between of its population but to potentially actions are both legitimate infer that the perpetrator's and justifiable. where a state goes down this path it is invariably accompanied Indeed, recent Serbian witness with behavior by the claim?as regard to it is defending itself against an imminent Kosovo?that danger to its national security, territorial integrity, or even sovereignty, while at the same time it is going to inordinate the evi lengths not only to conceal dence for mass murder but to deny that it has killed anyone. an actual threat?where This discrepancy it exists at all? between and what the perpetrator claims to be a threat is at the very heart of what one might call the genocide conundrum. this Yet, paradoxically, is the very reason that the perpetrator's claims cannot simply be dis missed out of hand but requires very careful examination and evalua tion not only in the forensic sense of proving whether mass killing did or did not occur but equally a necessary in providing importantly The repeated tendency by per insight into the perpetrator's mindset. to conjure up or imagine enemies, or to make of real ones petrators than they actually are, something much more terrifying and dangerous a clearly cultural and/or psychological to the dimension represents Iwill return later. But crack and one to which genocide phenomenon cannot be achieved in isolation. Indeed itmay be ing the conundrum that it can only be found in the intersection this dark?and between of the human condition and the level essentially unquantifiable?side are assumed of state and interstate to relations where leaderships in the best interests of their polities and societies. behave rationally Yet there is already a second conundrum here. Those who do not or at least have not done so in a commit genocide, twentieth-century time scale, do not necessarily look askance or in horror on those who have. Take, for example, this statement by a British observer of the first authentic 1904-05? twentieth-century example committed?in and Nama in South West against the Herero by the Germans people Africa "There can be no doubt, I think, that the war has (Namibia): to the German been of an almost unmixed benefit colony. Two war like races have been exterminated, wells have been sunk, new water holes discovered, the country mapped and covered with telegraph

23 See Chalk

and Jonassohn's

definition,

in History,

p. 23.

3i6 lines,

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

amount of capital and an enormous tenor of this comment unmistakably upbeat

has been stands

laid out."24 The contrast in marked

to the language of the United Nations in which genocide Convention is reviled as an "odious scourge." In principle, of course, leading politi cians stand shoulder to shoulder alongside human rights activists and is of what in the popular mind leaders in their condemnation religious of crimes. In practice, however, tend considered the most heinous they to be much more selective, not to say circumspect, before leveling the is this simply a case of narrow state interest. At the accusation. Nor level of international relations, Kuper highest, supposedly most moral asserts "that for all practical purposes" the United Nations defends the of "the sovereign territorial state ... as an integral part of its sov right
ereignty ... to commit genocide."25

about the quite schizophrenic something to genocide. On the one hand it international response community's treats it with repugnance and has a Convention, signed by a majority on those who to outlaw of its states, which seeks it; pours opprobrium a permanent tri commit international it; is in the process of creating There is, thus, clearly bunal to book; and yet, at the same time, has to bring its perpetrators or even who either look the other way, or condone powerful members it be then, that support incidents of it. Time after time. Could actively states that have not committed the last one hundred genocide within see in those that have too close a reflection of their years nevertheless former selves? Some scholars,

and Irving Louis Horowitz, notably R. J. Rummel in western of genocide the argument that the avoidance have posited societies the separation of lies in the strength of their civic institutions, and legislative branches, and above all, in their demo their executive cratic, liberal traditions.26 Thus, societies which are tolerant, open, and involve a Yet these assumptions democratic do not commit genocide. and more contemporary remarkable historical sleight of hand. True, polities nation that before 1900 had already experienced prolonged in their that were well advanced and state building, and that consequently and infrastructural izing development, periods of industrial felt rea

24 of all Parts of the in Tdman "A Certain Treatment Rigorous Quoted Dedering, in German of the Herero South West Africa, Nation: The Annihilation 1904," in The Mas sacre inHistory, and Penny Roberts eds. Mark Levene (Oxford, 1999), p. 217. 25 p. 161. Kuper, Genocide, 26 and State Power (Brunswick, NJ, 1980); Taking Lives, Genocide Irving Louis Horowitz, in The in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies R. J. Rummel, "Demoeide and Megamurders," ed. I.Charny, vol. 3 of Genocide, A Critical Bibliographical Review Circle of Genocide, Widening (New Brunswick and London, 1994), pp. 3-39.

Le vene: Why

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

317

a wider geo-strategic context sonably secure of their position within since then, for committing it. less likely candidates, have been much But in order to arrive at this happy condition, the leading modernizing states certainly did commit, at the very least, proto-genocides as well as a number of other practices, which under today's international rule book?created largely out of western Enlightenment thought and prac tice?would be considered dubious if not downright illegal. These recourse to war, conquest, included and above all slavery. repeated these states with practices, however, were crucial in providing to capital accumulation, turn fueled their techno in shortcuts which and which, by the mid logical cutting edge and industrial revolutions to late-nineteenth century, had assured for them an entirely hege monic around the globe. Not only was this the beginning of position a new world order, but a "new world pecking order," in which these These set the tune and everybody to dance to it.27 else was expected This would suggest that the twentieth century practice of genocide has more in common with states which are new, or are heavily engaged or are redefining or refor in the process of state and nation building, in order to operate more autonomously themselves and effec mulating an international states. Thus, polities system of nation tively within which were latecomers to it, including potentially very powerful ones at a disadvantage like Russia and Germany, themselves vis-? finding vis the frontrunners, had to consider how best they could make up lost or unwillingly ground. Willingly taking on board much of the leaders' administrative, the only way states

military, and infrastructural aspects, superficially seemed forward. The ensuing cultural, social, and institutional set in motion the most profound of econ reformulation borrowings omies and societies. One of the key dilemmas for such late nation to borrow from a cul states, however, was not simply the requirement as players within alien template but, once acknowledged the turally it. Its regulators and supervisors?the system, how to keep up with an implicit leader states?demanded of new candidates undertaking that they would transform themselves into polities which would oper ate effectively to its rules. But being funda and coherently according and dynamically fueled by capitalism?by its very nature a mentally new state could afford to stand still and had, cutthroat business?no this dominant rather, to find ways and means of staying afloat within political economy. True, some states were able to do so by finding for

27 The 4, 31 March

term

is borrowed

from Misha

Glenny's

BBC

broadcast,

"All Fall Down,"

Radio

1995.

3i8

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

or geo-political a secondary position under the economic themselves a few, sometimes while by dint of their aegis of the leading nations, a relatively found for themselves comfortable position, geographic or entrep?ts. Still other later niche by acting as trading intermediaries were able to trade on newcomers, arrivals, particularly postcolonial and underdevelopment their poverty Western aid. These, interestingly, were to commit genocide. included to become major of recipients a number of states which

This deterministic framework clearly has its limits and explanatory limitations. To restate a list of some of the main genocide perpetrators the Ottoman Russia of this century?Germany, (the USSR), empire Indone China, Cambodia, (later Turkey), Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh, to obvious Burundi?is sia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, hardly an invitation and power, The range of this group in terms of wealth communality. not to say political and cultural background, represents a major disin or totali to suggest ideological centive while any attempt proclivities the tarian systems as the connecting thread would either be stretching to the ridiculous or demanding with other ideologi comparison point or authoritarian prone regimes who have not been cally hard-line notable offenders. where do we find the Moreover, states who have committed ernizing those who have not? To argue that tiality is all well and good but would on the essentially specific instances is a crucial factor. edly, circumstance distinction between those mod

of and the generality genocide all such polities have the poten for require us to offer explanation basis of circumstance. Undoubt But is it sufficient? A final thrust posit that what all our genocidal

of the deterministic approach might acute anxiety about the wide states share is a particularly practitioner leaders themselves and the global and ever-increasing gap between to their special in relationship within the international system but or even mythic, sense of a historic, tradition of premodern coherence, in authority, or imperium, both in regard to their own societies and/or arena. Thus, a broader regional or continental states/soci genocide com eties have been the ones with the strongest and most persistent a position within the inter plexes about having been blocked off from on past historic national record, ought to believe, system which they be theirs; have been the ones most prone to support leaderships who also have this anger and resentment; articulated and, consequently, to radicalize their domestic been the ones mostly arrangements likely or as well as foreign policies in ways that consciously contravened rules. the system's "liberal," inclusivist ground challenged in the poem, "Esnaf is perhaps best encapsulated This state of mind soon written by the famous Turkish nationalist, Destani," Ziya Gok?lp

Le vene: Why

Is the Twentieth

Century Ottoman

the Century defeats

of Genocide? in Tripolitania

319 and the

Balkan

after a series of catastrophic wars: We were defeated

To take revenge, we

because we were
we shall adopt heart. the

so backward.
enemy's science.

We
On

shall learn his skill, steal his methods.

progress will set our

We shall skip five hundred And not stand still. Little time is left.28 The

years

in other words, is closely linked with genocidal mentality, or force-paced aimed at accelerated social and economic agendas or in the interests of "catching up" or alternatively change avoiding, the rules of the system leaders. If this gets us a little circumventing, of the genocide it still falls closer to the wellsprings phenomenon, somewhat short of explaining frustrations why and how state/societal are unleashed on specific domestic After all, the enemy populations. in Gok?lp 's message appears to be the West. As a result, rapid infra structural overhaul and military industrialization should logically have geared Ottoman Turkey only toward Type One warfare as the route to at break out from the system's perceived And we might straightjacket. note that other states at various times have adopted this juncture also recourse to genocide. Wilhelmine this formula without obvious Ger in its 1914 bid for "Weltmacht oder Niedergang"?world many power or collapse?did not unleash its fury at this point against the Jews. a in my understanding Nor of the term did Japan commit genocide it attempted its own dramatic breakout, despite global war later when its repeated Type Two mass atrocities and other against the Chinese Asian century since this is because peoples. Perhaps of its Christians, near-extirpation Japan religious, or social grouping who could fulfill an its now tiny "enemy." Indeed, notwithstanding its early-seventeenth no ethnic, contained obvious role as inside and isolated northern earlier times?Japan's rather era perpetra its contemporary

Ainu

in much population?subdued unusual national makes homogeneity tion of genocide unlikely. cannot be said of Ottoman The same, however, Turkey at the time of Gok?lp's writing. Thus, if the specificity of genocide over and above a drive to rapid nation building is also bound up with the social and at what point does this ethnic of a state's population, composition on toxic? The Ottoman for instance, was historically, become Empire,
28 Uriel (London, Heyd, Foundations 1950), p. 79. of Turkish Nationalism, The Life and Teachings

of Ziya Gok?lp

320

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

a rather successful multi-ethnic the whole, entity. Even with the emer and, thanks to the events of 1789, the explosion gence of modernity onto the wider world, there was no of the French nation-state model reason why the Sublime Porte should not have been able to particular its diverse ethnographic and religious elements refashion along these citizens. After lines into good Ottoman all, there were no given blue or guidelines as to what constituted Even Gok?lp's the nation. did not exclude his half Turkish community "imagined" presumably in nation the first eighteenth-century Kurdish self. Indeed, states, which Gok?lp and other national France and the United States?to in principle ist theoreticians would have looked for inspiration?were print and highly assimilationist, embracing people of dif and ethnic origins under the rubric of citizenship. By a religious these somewhat different route, a hybrid British "nation" also followed contours. code for all thus became the recognized Inclusive citizenship to sovereignty, for instance, by followed, aspirants nineteenth-century both universalist ferent to its Jews (and Catholics), and for an Ottoman state desirous of inter late-nine of its territorial national integrity. Another recognition as we have entrant into the nation-state system, Japan, teenth-century in starting out from a base line of people-homo seen, was fortunate with regard Germany post-1871 least on paper?by that matter?at to state proposed Soviet the post-1917 (countersystem) geneity, while at least in part, by founding circumvent the national itself on issue, for a genuinely internationalist supposedly provided principles which and all-embracing color-blind citizenship. with the early liberal universalist French and The major weakness was that what and what models they they proclaimed Anglo-Saxon actually did in practice were quite at variance with one another, most it came to their colonial black populations. when When, blatantly the ilk sought to scrutinize of the Gok?lp thus, latter-day ideologues source of western state advantage and to adapt the recipe for their own they most readily latched onto was not the or technological innovation per se but the abil modernizing impulses a supposedly to mobilize ethnos? national distinct ity people?the a coherent inter ismost In retrospect, what into and powerful unity. on a is his emphasis poem alarming?in Gok?lp's esting?and ethnic compo exclusive "we," that is, those "authentic" thoroughly in the past nents of the Ottoman which had supposedly population reassem the empire great and glorious and which made consciously return it to greatness would bled as a tool for national regeneration societies' benefit, what
once again.

Gok?lp was hardly alone Europe, nineteenth-century

in his leading

search

for national

ur- man.

scholars

and academicians

Across in the

Levene: Why new

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

321

and literature had of history, archaeology, philology, disciplines drawn the contours for the study of the remote "national" past, already not only for its own sake but as an instrument to "mobilize by which in the future."29 Even that most forceful nineteenth-century change to the national to be counterblast claimed thesis, namely Marxism, able to construct the genuinely universal modern man?the for homo sovie?cus?on the basis of a scientific examination prototype of man's

from his natural history. All ascendance these historical and prehis were not only highly reinventions torical but often utterly selective them from becoming this did not prevent spurious. Nevertheless, received wisdoms which, adopted and adapted by the elites or would serve radical agendas. be elites of other "latecomer" It is states, would no coincidence, that the primary frontrunner and moreover, perhaps for these lines of enquiry should be that nineteenth-century state par excellence, Germany. Nor that it should be Ger many again which would most strikingly appropriate new racial lines in this national of thought quest. construc and indeed antinational The flip side to these national assumed the existence of tions, however, was that they all implicitly exemplar latecomer not only would not fit the prescribed which groupings population to contaminate in some critical sense, threatened model but which, it. can be located in European, the crystallization of this tendency Again from the late nineteenth informed wisdoms and early scientifically centuries. In particular, medical twentieth science's of "discovery" bacteria and bacilli not only coincided with mass epi death-dealing in the new urban and metropolitan centers but also with new demics and obsessive Social Darwinian discourses about the "survival of the fittest." Fears of communal weakness and febrility thus became associ ated with anxieties that "foreign bodies" operating from within the or contaminate undermine the physical and mental might body-politic of the nation, informed but leading in turn to further medically on how to protect or improve value-free prognostications supposedly the national stock by eugenics or other programs of social engineering. anxieties were a common These fin-de-si?cle feature of the western or western-orientated world at large. But they arguably played or were to play more prominent states roles among political elites in latecomer who perceived their national weakness and who sought radical keenly to overcome or transcend their limitations. One policies tendency we health have already noted with regard to these elites is the extreme lengths to which we these goals. Another they have gone in order to achieve

29 Giddens,

Nation-State,

p. 12.

322

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

to blame supposedly is the tendency internal corrupting these strategies go wrong. The two aspects, "foreign bodies" whenever in the sense that by their very effort connected indeed, are intimately to attain what is usually unattainable such state strategies are likely to come unstuck, not only to increased frustration but with it the leading should that this must be the result of the insider enemy further rationalization or enemies' conscious of the state's heroic not to say Her sabotaging in crisis scenarios culean efforts. Thus, genocide regularly crystallize a regime's conscious situations in which effort at break out from its fetters encounters fail obstacles which recall some previous perceived a predecessor. The classic ure, either of its own or that committed by the Holocaust, whose full-scale implementation began dur example, life and death struggle with the Soviet ing an early stage of the Nazis' in 1941, makes no sense without Union reference back to the previ ous major crisis of German Jews qua Jews popular consent, same token, the Stalinist drive from other "ethnic" peasantries, crisis of revolution and civil war ist extermination state and society in 1918-19, in which by were held to be responsible. By the the "kulaks," Ukrainian and against to 1933, has to be set against the 1929

note

between 1917 and 1921; the Ittihad in 1915-16, of the Armenians against the repeated state from 1878 through the 1890s, culminating in crises of Ottoman extermination the Indonesian military's the Balkan wars of 1912-13; movement communist of the countrywide (the PKI) in 1965 against to nationalist PKI challenge rule in 1948; the Rwan the attempted in 1994 against of the Tutsi the dese "Hutu Power" extermination efforts to destabilize and destroy the of counterrevolutionary backdrop new postcolonial in the period the only Indeed, regime 1959-64. notable prequel being perpetrated without and political destruction of ethnic Rouge an example which from 1975 through nevertheless 1979, groupings cat to a quite extraordinary of immediately sequence preceding points as the grist added to the Khmer Rouge mill. Even with this astrophes is here termed the perpetrators' "Never what however, example, in some historic context the regime locating Again" syndrome applies: a communal intent on the dis adversary, or adversaries, supposedly ruption or sabotage of its transformative-salvationist agenda.30 one might wish to draw from this picture An obvious conclusion or authoritar are stridently of genocide that perpetrators ideological is major example of genocide is the Cambodian Khmer

30 For more Holocaust Understanding, 27-64.

and The

see Mark Levene, The Threads: this argument, Rwanda, "Connecting in Genocide: of Contemporary Pattern Genocide," Essays Towards ed. Roger W. Smith and Prevention, (Williamsburg, 1999), pp. Early Warning on

Levene: Why

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

323

ian regimes more often than not led by unhinged, dicta psychopathic tors. Popular portrayals of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, or Pol Pot only reinforce the sense that their actions against "imagined" enemies are essentially of extreme and projec symptoms delusion, paranoia, tion. The very fact that in some instances, as for example in the case of the "kulaks," the construction of a coherent and identifiable adver in the heads of the Stalinist sary took place leadership and bore no to social realities, only adds to the view that our subject relationship is one primarily for clinical psychological Indeed, Nazi investigation. as just cause for and raving about Jewish world conspiracy ranting are their actions would behavior suggest that worst cases of genocidal not simply deeply irrational but completely mad. this line of reasoning, is threefold. however, problem with while the alleged "madness" of the above genocide is First, instigators one way or the other, an extended not easily verifiable list which for instance, include Atat?rk, and Milosevic would be Mao, might, to support the generality of this assumption. hardpressed even where states are totalitarian and heavily Second, genocidal are founded on a domestic lim base?however support they policed, must itself at least in part be mobi ited or narrow that may be?which in the perpetration lized as accomplices of genocide. Itmust therefore follow that either this support base is itself suffering from similar delu sions as its leaders, or alternatively is act that the leadership believes in the best interests of polity and people. In fact, the two ing rationally are not necessarily irreconcilable. Norman Cohn positions provoca some thirty years ago the manner in which fan tively demonstrated tasies reminiscent times took strong hold of a significant of medieval German of post-1918 indeed especially, proportion society, including, in the form of amongst many highly educated and professional people, the notion that worldwide its dispersal, minority status Jewry, despite was actually spearheading an international, and history of persecution, even cosmic conspiracy to emasculate and ultimately wipe out not the German but all western civilization.31 Fears of sexual, only people of the spread of disease, and the contamination, a healthy, debilitation of virile volk by races of Jewish or consequent it could be argued, did not so much have to be manu gypsy antimen, as the factured by the Nazis but simply echoed and then amplified instincts of a vox populi. In this way, it could be further argued, visceral cultural, and mental The

31 See Norman The Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, the Protocols of the Elders ofZion (London, 1967); and mystical anarchists of theMiddle tionary milleniarians Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt and

Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy The Pursuit of theMilknium: Revolu (London, Ages 1970); Europe's (New York, 1975). Inner

324 state organized but bottom-up

bias.

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

not from the top down, is actually constructed genocide from hate models societal pho grass-roots provided by

in which is, of course, the well-known position Goldhagen is plausible because it is deeply embedded within the cultural genocide of a society. But Goldhagen does not conclude from his archetypes in the Holocaust of ordinary German that they were study participants other than normal, toward anything simply that they were impelled of Jews by an eliminationist often sadistic killing anti-Semitism. This thesis is important for the issue of compar Undoubtedly, Goldhagen's ative research in its implicit demand for further consideration of the as well as stepping stones between interconnections genocidal popular ismissing culture and state-building from Goldhagen agendas. What is the context. Traditional anti-Semitism within large sections of the into something population crystallized utterly toxic only dur in other words in quite extraordinary circumstances of ing 1918-19, a third reason why mass trauma and disorientation. This provides "mad" or "evil" regimes alone for genocide will not suffice if blaming in which those regimes this fails to take heed of the circumstances German
arise.

accident that the first great wave of contemporary out of the actuality of that great and aftermath in and watershed, the First World War, twentieth-century catastrophe ones which collapsed, or were defeated, or which particular states?the were most obviously embittered by the war and postwar outcome? not least by the post-1929 economic and aftershock?were also the ones which the received wisdoms of the liberal increasingly discarded "second" or "third" ways to system in favor of alternative capitalist and ultimate progress triumph. Ordinary people did not initiate the But the manner which were sometimes of their consequent. genocides or to these domestic in their enabling, either convulsions, to resist or put the brakes on new masters in their inability possibly with their programs for a radical reshaping of society, were critical to response
these outcomes.

It is surely no comes genocides

thus emerges from the period 1914 to 1945 is a pattern of or overthrow is closely of which linked to the supercession genocide, or bankrupt and their replacement discredited traditional regimes by at least in part popularly radical ones with maximalist agen legitimized All these regimes were das for social and/or national regeneration. or in the sense that they sought to challenge, "revisionist" circumvent, What transcend And all, coherence, world order. the terms of either the pre- or post-Versailles a streamlined in their efforts to socially engineer people both for its own sake and also for this wider purpose, were

Levene: Why

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

325

to greater or lesser degrees ready to reject or abandon former policies or assimilating aimed at integrating ethnic, religious, or social group "fit" into the state's organic con ings which did not easily or obviously of itself. ception sees in these strivings, Bauman in Nazism and most particularly and Stalinism, "the most uninhibited of the consistent, expressions of modernity."32 In other words, a highly rational project. Yet spirit on the Roma, or, again under Nazi when we look at the Nazi onslaught extermination Romania's of its Bessarabian and Bukovinan or Stalin's genocidal of Tatar, Chechen, and other Jewry, deportations or lesser known such as the Iraqi "Assyr minority peoples, examples ian affair" of 1933, or almost coincidentally, Mussolini's of extirpation one cannot but be struck by their per the hill peoples of Cyrenaica, suffer genocide petrators' irrationality. Their victims did not ultimately because did not "fit" a regime's perception of people simply they aegis, at them suffered it because the finger was pointed homogeneity. They as the group or groups accused of actively or polluting the disrupting state's drive to transcend its limitations. are back with or hyperinflated We the massive imaginings of the acute observer, Ron Aronson, another as a has described state, which Aronson does not propose that this "rupture with reality."33 However, to modernity. has no relationship On the contrary, what he argues is as an instrument that in situations where modernity is harnessed for the realization of impossible goals what you end up with is a dialecti cal set of tensions between power and impotence, reason and madness. In a critical sense the gargantuan nature of a regime's agenda may indi cate in advance the degree to which it has already lost touch with real "the realization of the ity. But the actual attempt at implementation, as he calls it, is likely to result in a crisis in which, hav unrealizable" to retreat, the itself into a corner from which it is unable ing boxed is in "reshaping what resists," that regime finds that its only recourse violence.34 Aronson is, massive suggests that it is not Interestingly, that this extreme and seemingly irra only in instances of genocide can occur. The United tional behavior in its for instance, States, to obliterate first much of North Korea in the early 1950s, attempts and then North Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, not to say the rest of Indochina, an between speaks volumes about the contradictions and the actuality of its inability to apparently all-powerful hegemon in its own assured image. The discrepancy reorder the world between
32

Bauman, Modernity, p. 93. 33 Ronald Aronson, The Dialectics 3< Ibid. p. 136.

of Disaster,

A Preface

toHope

(London,

1983),

p. 169.

326

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

of a recog hubris and humiliation does not have to be the prerogative nized genocide taken out on a communal state, nor necessarily scape crisis resolution could as easily be in the form of an goat. Attempted breakout 1914 attempted aggressive Type One warfare; Germany's or Iraq's Type Two from perceived for instance, encirclement, 1990 invasion of Kuwait or, as a latter day extension of either of these tra a scenario?bar of nuclear weapons, the the unleashing different of World War Two?nar sequence culminating to date. rowly avoided is the state leaderships' all these scenarios share in common What jectories, somewhat conviction of the malevolence of forces "out there" that have con not only to frustrate the realization of their agenda but to harm spired and even possibly physically their own people. This does not eradicate these anxieties have some grain of truth in rule out instances where are those most extraordinary them. However, the examples of genocide to suggest notable for the complete evidence absence of any concrete a communal that let alone ability, group qua group has the intention, to carry through such a maleficence. The Nazi assertion that "the Jew is the German the enemy" perhaps represents people's most dangerous most Aronson's rupture thesis.35 example confirming thoroughgoing in the Serbian parliament in 1991 that "the But the statement made Croats, ethnic the truth is (my italics) that all non-Serb groups, especially are at this very minute the genocide of all Serbs" preparing are hardly exclusive to the era of Stal suggests that such projections inism and fascism.36 since the of genocide the persistence and prevalence Indeed, to an average of almost one case a destruction of Nazism?running lead one to further ponder what motor contin year since 1945?must

ues to drive this seemingly immediate after irresistible lunacy?37 The its trials of German and Japan math of the Second World War, with ese war criminals at Nuremberg of the and Tokyo, the inauguration on Human it both its Charter and and with United Nations, Rights Genocide Convention, international system leaders should have been crystal-clear signals from the newcomer states that its perpetration by

35 in Uriel Tal, "On the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide," Yad Vashem Quoted Studies 13 (1979): 7-52. 36 on the in Paul Parin, "Open Wounds, Reflections Quoted Ethnopsychoanalytical inMass Rape, The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Former Yugoslavia," Wars ed. Alexandra and London, (Lincoln 1994), p. 50. Stiglmayer 37 See Barbara Harff and Ted Robert of Genocides "Toward Empirical Gurr, Theory since 1945," International of Cases Studies and Measurement Identification and Politicides: of the State: Genocides, and more their "Victims 32 (1988): 359-71, recently Quarterly from 1945 to 1995," in Contemporary Genocides: and Group Repression Politicides Causes, Cases, Consequences, ed. Albert]. Jongman (The Hague, 1996), pp. 33-58.

Levene: Why would

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

327

not be tolerated. Yet, paradoxically, it was the willingness of or condone, these very same leaders at this very same time to acquiesce or even officially or allies such as the Czechs sponsor, former wartime the Poles in their sub-genocidal ethnic cleansings of millions of Ger mans and other unwanted peoples from their territories, not to say of continuance the Soviet Union's of its prewar reordering of communal which seemed to offer a populations primarily by mass deportation, and hardly subliminal It was as if countermessage. quite different human rights were being put on a frozen pedestal of abstract principle for the foreseeable future in order to enable states created or recreated to get on with the creation of social conditions in a postwar context to their rapid modernization and consolidation. Indeed, appropriate to be that it was expected that the practical the message seemed achievement of these goals would involve ethnic standardization, the or difficult population of troublesome removal or dissipation groups, or those who, perhaps because of their "primitive" and "backward" cul in the path of progress. tures, were deemed obstacles These would suggest, ? la Bauman, that genocide would imperatives new state leaderships be committed for perfectly rational reasons, by to operate and compete associated with their developmental blueprints within an increasingly international economy. The integrated political in the interwar years was most associ which very fact that genocide, states in Europe and the Near East, ated with new or newly remodeled in the post-1945 became a global phenomenon ebb of the European or neo-imperial to this line of tide must give some credence imperial for instance, the genocidal of a num behavior thought. Superficially, ber of South American countries and South Asian tribal peo against and integrate rich forest and ples, in their efforts to reach out, connect, resources of geographically other extractive for peripheral hinterlands the benefit of their already advancing metropolitan would economies, suggest a wholly developmental logic. But even in these largely "off the map" instances of contemporary such logic has been genocide, so one dimensional. rarely quite The name of the game in these instances has been that of former Zia's "develop or perish," in other words, President the Bangladeshi courses in rapid modernization, whatever the conse in the global race for position, fear of being left behind quences.38 or much worse, being forced back into a thus perpetual dependency, pursuit of crash The

38The Zia of Bangladesh, in the late 1970s, coinciding with rallying cry of President on the the onset of the genocidal Hill Tracts. See Veena Kukreja, onslaught Chittagong in South Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh Relations and India, (New Delhi and Lon Civil-Military don, 1991), p. 164.

328

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

era something has always had in the contemporary of an air of desper ation about it. That native peoples have particularly been the casual ties in this process, however, has not been a case simply of their inhab or hydroelectric for roads, mines, dams. iting territories designated or Bangladeshi in the eyes of notably Brazilian, Rather, Indonesian, to some preconceived it has been their failure to behave their barbarous, and preferably passive type who, recognizing primitive, station in the great scheme of things, would consequently and allotted or as soon as the first bulldozers fade away into oblivion conveniently settlers appeared. On the contrary, the refusal of, for transmigratory or Papuans in Irian Jaya (West the jumma in Bangladesh instance, to lie down and die quietly but instead organize and fashion Papua) in order to more into modern "fourth world" identities themselves resist state encroachment, provides a potent clue both as to effectively technocrats, of the genocidal upon them and the per onslaughts that behind them must be some other justification petrators' repeated more organized force directing their sabotage of the state outside the intensification agenda. developmental This notion that the targeted victim group are really the proxies, or hid or agents of a much more malevolent but dissembled stooges, mission intent on denying the state its own, self-directed den power and genuine unfettered integrity seemingly independence us back yet again toward an explanation in the for genocide gravitates mindsets where the perpetrator much murkier waters of psychological sees international in everything. In the post-1945 world conspiracies towards have international such accusations of Cold War-dominated politics, results. Tagging whole flown thick and fast with devastating popula in the Indonesia of 1965, East Timor a decade tions as "communist" state justification of the early 1980s provided later, or the Guatemala and Cambodia, But so too, in the Soviet Union, for genocide. China, or as "cosmopolitan," "Soviet diverse did revisionist," branding of these examples, In the most extreme "stooge of US imperialism." not only were specific ethnic in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge regime Chams of Chinese, and Muslim Vietnamese, minority populations to such charges, but literally anyone who had vulnerable particularly to have been living or seeking refuge in the US-backed the misfortune zone around Phnom it fell to the Khmer Penh when government into "true" of society, division in April 1975. The ensuing Rouge Khmer who would "super enjoy the fruits of the country's projected slated for perpetual hard labor great leap forward" and "new" people that the latter, and probable death, was founded on the assumption however fleetingly, were tainted by their association with western

Levene: Why

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

329

Even then, as the regime's closed Utopian experiment imperialism. a halt and began disintegrating under the weight of the ground to tasks it had set itself, the list of "enemies" shifted and impossible further still to embrace anyone that the regime deemed for expanded we come face to face with anxi Here, however, eign or inauthentic. War go much deeper than any set in motion simply by Cold to have denied The historic the enemy perceived ideologies. Khmer their rightful greatness were the neighboring Vietnamese. Com in 1978, of course, was supposed to be a fraternal ally. munist Vietnam Yet in that year the genocidal reached trajectory of the Khmer Rouge eties which both its apogee and nemesis when practically the whole population of its Eastern Zone were provided with blue scarves for their deportation on the collective and then extermination indictment that their Khmer were occupied minds."39 by "Vietnamese The episode of the blue scarves ought to throw doubt on arguments treat genocidal as in some Lin victim groups as fixed entities which naean system of plant and animal classification, instead of as the prod ucts?often the perpetrators' imaginary ones?of entirely assemblage of social reality. Lemkin's formulation of genocide based on genos (race) to our well-rounded in this sense is a disservice of the comprehension bodies Lemkin's focus on the destruction of the Certainly, was correct and appropri structure" of a communal group "biological ate inasmuch as a distinctiveness of genocide lies in the mass murder of women of all ages equally and without discrimination from the men who are their blood relatives and with the purpose of denying or seek as well as social reproduction.40 But how ing to deny their biological this group of people it does so at all, in eth identifies itself, or whether terms is immaterial to either a "genocidal nic, religious, or political or the actuality of sys of human rights abuse and persecution process" tematic liquidation. When it came to legalizing discrimination against phenomenon. of them as a "race" proved to have Jews the Nazis' conceptualization no empirical or juridical foundation. By the same token, Himmler's to isolate the authen of academics and special institutes engagement tic Roma achieved but contradictory In the end, messages. nothing state perpetrators exterminate of people because groups they perceive them as a threat and find racial, ethnic, venient for this purpose. or social tags for them as con

39 Ben don,

Kiernan,

The Pol Pot Regime, Rule, p. 79. See

Race,

Power

and Genocide in "Genocide,

(New Haven A

and Lon Per

1996), p. 408. 40 Lemkin, Axis p. 24. spective,"

Fein's

definition

Sociological

330

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

that a group need necessarily does not mean be a This, however, to be victimized. to know is important is What tabula rasa waiting or appears in the perpetra what it is about "the group" that challenges tor state's mind to challenge its authority, legitimacy, or integrity. The jumma Sudan, in Bangladesh, in southern in Burma, Dinka and Nuer Karen in Rwanda may not have objectively Kurds in Iraq, or Tutsi states, but the fact that represented mortal dangers to their respective elites of each have sought a more pluralistic framework of significant

it against the grain of centralist-minded state, or an autonomy within have been enough for them to be viewed as such. Add agendas, may to this a historic association of these groups with former imperial rulers and one can begin to itemize common pro ingredients which might in Saddam's recipe. Of the Kurds Iraq, Kanan notes than others not that they "suffered more Makiya specifically because they resisted and fought back they were Kurds, but because hard."41 Not all Kurds, Some were considered though. "loyal" and on the Ba'athist In another side. case, that of the significant fought in the Chinese it was perhaps not only of 1959, Tibetans onslaught a territorial which their bid to reassert their autonomy represented vide to the People's Republic but a cultural one to its hegemonic challenge In other words, the threat of a bad example. and monolithic wisdom. a thorn One can note many similar cases where a people have become in the side of a regime not so much for their "ethnic" or "national" characteristics but for what they socially or even morally represented, that power and resources might be shared the idea, for instance, that soci between different communal tendencies; groups or political or perhaps but diverse and multicultural; ety need not be homogenous at the world. George that there are other ways of looking context of Christianity and Euro has spoken of the Jews in the as the incarnation, and unaware? "albeit wayward pean civilization in the shape of the Nazis, of its own best hopes." When Europe, simply Steiner to extirpate attempted lation" but a "lunatic ers of the ideal."42 them, it was thus not only a form of "self-muti carri retribution" against the "inextinguishable for a genocidal

All this surely brings us back less to the victim groups and more to it is commit what the nature of the driven regimes which genocide, to that, what most that impels them and, as a necessary corollary them. Our argument has rested on the proposition frightens or haunts
41Kanan don,

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and Makiya, 1993), p. 219. 42 in Bluebird's Castle Steiner, (London, 1971), pp. 41-42. George

theArab World

(Lon

Levene: Why that

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

331

marked War

the drive to genocide or latent tendency

is a function of states with a particularly to dispute the discrepancy between the way

the world is and the way they think that it ought to be. The era of Cold
and of bipolar, nuclear-armed, struggle including potentially to the toxic potential gave an added edge and intensity undoubtedly or "enemies of the peo in this condition. inherent "Enemies within" were communist up by both hard-pressed conjured regularly ple" or geographically sensitive oppo regimes and their most vehement

nents

in the "free world" camp as justification for the extirpation of or other elements to stand as in the population ethnic perceived to their monodirectional obstacles paths to progress. Competition to given in their support or opposition the superpowers, between some of these outcomes. eth states, also directly affected Supporting nic insurgencies, for instance, as the United States covertly did with in Tibet in the 1950s, or the Kurdish Tsogdu regard to the Mimang or in the 1970s, not only seemed to make tangible Chinese pesh merga international there really were plots aimed at in so doing vastly increased the vulnerability them, undermining of ordinary Tibetans and Kurds to genocide. Likewise, US geo-strate as to the imminence to of South East Asia's obsessions gic collapse in the wake of Phnom Penh's fall in 1975, provided one communism, Iraqi state fears that but

stark examples of a state?Indonesia?being given the to extirpate the following the marxisant-led and newly green light year of liberated Portuguese colony of East Timor to the tune of one-third its million-strong inhabitants. Western for Indonesia's of course, stands in backing advantage, contrast to the simultaneous, marked and utterly autarkic self-willed to overcome drive by the Khmer Rouge the limitations of Cambodia's of the most that scenarios, perceived febrility. Of all twentieth-century genocidal in many in its nature of late-1970s Cambodia demonstrates respects extreme to be deemed away everything crystallization. By clearing non-Cambodian debris the Khmer Rouge aimed to begin again, as it from scratch. In so doing they assumed that this would provide were, innate power would the necessary springboard from which Cambodia's to its twelfth-cen be dramatically the country unleashed, returning in a matter of years. Yet if on one level this marks out tury glory days not to say the Khmer Rouge's Salvationist, agenda as both peculiarly on a narrow and unwavering Utopian, as well as unusually dependent set of ideological to arrive at this transcendent in order assumptions in reading too much into this perspec there is a danger destination, tive. Ideological Pol Pot and his followers certainly were. And good communists?in But ultimately what so desper their own eyes?too.

332

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

ately impelled them was an intense Khmer patriotism which demanded state against of an ancient not to say mythic Khmer their revitalization the grain of an unjust, hostile, and bloody world. One might go fur ther and say that what mattered most to the Khmer Rouge was less the a simple, brazen would get them there and more ideology which reassertion We have more recent man happily their Hutu in of the same functional pragmatism something While Serbia's Milosevic and Croatia's Tudj genocides. on to arch-nationalist spots from communist changed in Bosnia and beyond, Rwandese roads to war and subgenocide leaders sought to defy regional pressure and international accords of Wille seen zu Macht.

to eliminate for power sharing with former Tutsi exiles by attempting all perceived this latter great end-of-the-century That opponents. came after the collapse of the Cold War and in an era in genocide to American the ideological guru Francis Fukuyama, which, according to liberal capitalism had been comprehensively alternatives trashed on the slag heap of history, must surely give us pause.43 to Fukuyama in Kosovo Events there surely confirm that contrary as strong for genocide does remain one great ideological underpinning now, at the onset of the twenty-first century as it was at the end of the nineteenth: nationalism. Indeed, one might posit that the emergence states out of multi-ethnic in the wake of of new nation Yugoslavia communist demise both there and more generally, the most represents in world historical reassertion marked of toxic tendencies develop ment record. Kosovo should remind us that these from the pre-1914 never can perhaps be tendencies away. Their continuity truly went to a Serbian opinion-former and pol illustrated best by brief reference to say on the Kosovo issue. Vaso Cubrilovic icymaker who had much was one of the group of young terrorists, alongside Gavrilo Princip, who had planned the assassination of in Sarajevo. Unlike however, Princip, a respected historian to become War where he wrote policy papers for the ing, in effect, state terrorism to get rid Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. the Archduke Franz Ferdinand survived the Great Cubrilovic at the University of Belgrade, advocat government Yugoslav and of the country's Muslims He also regularly attended, in Belgrade, where quasi-scien in

in particular, the 1930s, the Serbian Cultural Club and the general staff initiated by the government tific discussions, In one such paper for the this extirpatory theme. reiterated office, Club, Cubrilovic systematic regretted that there had not been a more

43 Francis

Fukuyama,

The End of History

and

the Last Man

(London,

1992).

Levene: Why removal Serbian

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

333

as had been practiced in pre-1914 of the "foreign element" state building to the and concluded that the only solution was to make Arnaut them leave the country. (Albanian) problem to force tens of thousands of the Jews "When it is possible for Germany to emigrate, for Russia to transfer millions of people from one part of to another, a world war will not break out just because the continent of thousands of displaced Arnauts."44 At the end of the Second World War Cubrilovic reappeared as adviser to the Yugo in essence slav communist the same "Albanian" regime, advocating policy. Of course one riposte to this illustration might be to argue that, in the light of the contemporary realities extolled by Fukuyama, today's are actually yesterday's men peddling nationalisms Cubrilovices that are a redundant irrelevance. Of the hundred most economic important in the global political units currently economy, only half of them are nation states; the others are transnational (TNCs). Or to corporations it another way, of some 180 nation states in the world, put 130 of them have smaller economies than the fifty largest TNCs.45 Yet it is exactly in this rapid globalizing that we should be able to discern trajectory the Cubrilovices and Milosevices of the world, rather than disap why to have a following and why, consequently, pearing, will continue in the near future than it was genocide will in fact be more prevalent years ago. fifty or a hundred states will not readily give up their power or their promise Nation to the forces which drive the global economy, however inexorable those forces may appear to be. One might add that this may well con true for state regimes which because tinue to be particularly they are to compensate the economically faltering may attempt by amplifying national self-esteem message and conversely, the malevolence of the international system towards them. We forget at our peril that Rwanda had a political coherence and sense of cohesive iden (and Burundi) the colonial since then, era, perpetuated tity which long preceded albeit in fiercely competing Tutsi and Hutu narratives. Or that Milo sevic's bid to create a greater Serbia out of the carcass of Yugoslavia was predicated not only on a Serb self-perception of a special mission of some hundreds

44 from H. T. Norris, "Kosova and the Kosovans: Past, present and future as seen Quote and Muslim through Serb, Albanian eyes," in The Changing Shape of the Balkans, eds. F.W. Carter and H. T Norris see (Boulder and London, 1996), p. 15. For more on Cubrilovic, also Noel Malcolm, and Basingstoke, Kosovo, A Short History (London 1998), pp. 284-85, 322-23. 45Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas (London, 1996), p. 158.

334 dating

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

back to the nineteenth century but even further back to some times. Serb civilization from medieval supposedly mythic In both Rwandan and Serbian instances, war and genocide repre of state regimes to their inability to achieve sented the crisis-response tore up the their national agendas by other accepted means. They system and instead gambled on rad apparent rules of the international to a solution. Yet the great irony is that until shortcuts ical, high-risk

air campaign of the Kosovo 24 March 1999?the day of the opening ?so as such efforts were contained within the territorial confines long or had no noticeable of the state's own sovereignty it, impact beyond or even genocide anxiety about human rights violations into international In this let alone action. translated censure, hardly assessment inertia has of international sense, Cubrilovic's 1930's there is a simple remained accurate until almost the present day. And international reason hardly
system.46

the nation surprising given that for this:

state has remained is which sacrosanct, it is the basic building block of the global

As a result, nobody censured Democratic for its geno Kampuchea cides despite the fact that by the late 1970s these were already quite well known and documented. international Instead, the Western-led it was invaded by became with anger when incandescent community to its Vietnamese neighbor. Nor, while followers of Pol Pot continued seat at the United hold the Cambodian Nations long after they had ousted, did the international community complain when another in 1988 in increasingly full Saddam's state, genocidal Iraq, attempted to liquidate its most troublesome Kurds in the notorious public view, it did respond when Saddam made Anfal the However, campaigns. of invading oil-rich Kuwait. It could thus be argued that the mistake New World Order, which the US-led against Iraq campaign military is very much it comes to geno like the old when supposedly heralded, in Northern allies set up a "safe haven" cide. True, the Western Iraq been because of fleeing Kurds but only primarily they more its for their NATO ally Turkey?with greatly feared the consequences own "troublesome" it have had to admit Kurdish population?should for millions
46 at the thirty-fourth in September session of the General of the UN, Thus, Assembly were out "that the United in pointing successful and ASEAN 1979, Western delegates is based on the principle and that UN membership has of non-interference Nations charter on the basis of respect for human never been granted or withheld rights. If it were, a large to leave." Quoted inWilliam there would have of the governments proportion presently and Modern Conscience Holocaust The Quality Cambodia, (London, Shawcross, of Mercy, 1984), p. 138.

Levene: Why

Is the Twentieth

Century

the Century

of Genocide?

335

of displaced the refugees. Fears of the impact of millions persons also some role in the very belated postgenocide of the decisions played to act with regard to Rwanda In the latter case, and Bosnia. "powers" status as a sovereign state certainly Bosnia's did initially uncertain not help its plight anymore than the earlier case of East Timor, whose continued remained?until very recently? by Indonesia subjugation The Kurdish safe haven acquiescence. largely a subject of international on the vine; Tibet remains off the international withers agenda; the international and Milosevic's ethnic community upholds Tudjman itmight The message, carve-up of Bosnia through the Dayton Accords. international tribunals on Rwanda and appear, is rather clear. Despite court to try crimes against Bosnia and the prospect of a permanent the leading states who constructed the humanity, including genocide, to be its prime movers have demon international system and continue strated not only an ability to live with states who commit genocide but to applaud its successful consequences. IsWestern action over Kosovo, the herald therefore, will Or, even of a new era in which beginning? genocide even of a new

be finally from the human experience? Undoubtedly, the willingness expurgated arm NATO, of the international system leaders, through their military to respond specifically to gross human rights violations sov in another state does represent a remarkable and possibly quite unprece ereign

under the auspices departure. But the fact that this happened of today's Great Powers rather than at the behest of the UN also recalls a more familiar pattern of self-interested in the action international was actually highly far from being universally very past which, benign, If this pattern reasserts itself, the Western selective. system leaders may act in the future to prevent or halt genocidal threats where they are sure of being able to do so with minimal military, political, or economic to themselves?in other words against very weak states consequence not against, for instance, Russia, China, or Turkey?all ?but states with for genocide?where Western self-interest significant potential would dictate a strictly hands-off policy. Thus with the UN and other to the real conduct international institutions marginal of genuinely international Western will be able to pick and choose affairs, powers where they wish to intervene against actual or would-be per genocidal
petrators.

dented

Yet even this sobering prediction in the light of post-Kosovo analy sis and assessment may be too optimistic. in early the euphoria Despite June 1999, when Milosevic agreed to the new peace deal and removed his forces from Kosovo, the fact that this had been achieved less by

336

JOURNAL

OF WORLD

HISTORY,

FALL

2000

and more by a deal days of constant NATO seventy-plus bombing reliant on the Russians the strict limits upon Western suggests heavily to pursue, let alone punish, those who commit genocide. willingness A final, ominous historical example. Back in 1923, at the treaty of smashed its way to modern nation-statehood Lausanne, Turkey, having out of the imperial hulk of the Ottoman Empire, was duly recognized into the concert of nations pow by the great Western to this goal, the Ittihadist and subsequent Kemalist or ethnically than cleansed many more regimes deported, massacred, two million Armenians, and Assyrians. There had been Greeks, Kurds, in earlier years, particularly much Western about the genoci outrage and even plans to try the perpetrators dal fate of the Armenians, court. But as Richard Hovannisian has noted before an international and welcomed ers. En route "The absolute Turkish protocol: triumph was reflected ... neither nor in the final version the word Armenia, was to be found. It was as if the Armenian the word Armenian, Ques to exist."47 In tion or the Armenian themselves had ceased people of the "official" rules of the other words, Turkey's blatant repudiation geno game in favor of a series of accelerated shortcuts?including were ultimately statehood cide?toward conveniently ignored and even condoned of Lausanne. On the contrary, by the treatymakers of the Lausanne in the fact that into a series of long-term by entering diplomatic, they reciprocated and ultimately relations with Turkey. Talaat commercial, military in the 1915 destruction said at of the Armenians, Pasha, prime mover that as long as a nation does the best the time: "I have the conviction the world admires it and thinks it for its own interests, and succeeds, into the present the message might be to Sad moral."48 Translated and other would-be emulators: be bloody minded, dam, Milosevic, and letWestern self-interest do the rest. batten down the hatches,

47 Richard of the Armenian "Historical Dimensions G. Hovannisian, Question, in Armenian in Perspective, Genocide ed. R. G. Hovannisian (New Brunswick, 1878-1923," N] and London, 1986), p. 37. 48 in Vahakn N. Dadrian, Ethnic Con The History Genocide: Quoted of the Armenian to the Caucasus toAnatolia and Oxford, (Providence 1995), p. 383. flict from the Balkans