Category Archives: nationalism

by | 9 September 2007 · 12:29 pm

Judt on Favored Czechs, Disfavored Slovaks

From Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt (Penguin, 2005), pp. 659-660:

Czechs and Slovaks, however indistinguishable they might appear to perplexed outsiders, had markedly different pasts. Bohemia and Moravia—the historical territories comprising the Czech lands—could boast not merely a remarkable medieval and Renaissance past at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire but also a pre-eminent share of the industrialization of central Europe. Within the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire Czechs enjoyed growing autonomy and a marked prosperity. Their major city, Prague—one of the aesthetic glories of the continent—was by 1914 a significant center of modernism in the visual arts and literature.

Slovaks, by contrast, had little to boast about. Ruled for centuries from Budapest they lacked any distinctive national story—within the Hungarian half of the Empire they were regarded not as ‘Slovaks’ but as slav-language-speaking peasants of rural northern Hungary. The urban inhabitants of the Slovak region were predominantly Germans, Hungarians or Jews: it was not by chance that the largest town in the area, an unprepossessing conurbation on the Danube a few kilometres east of Vienna, was variously known as Pressburg (to German-speaking Austrians) or Pozsony (to Hungarians). Only with the independence of Czechoslovakia in 1918, and the Slovaks’ somewhat reluctant incorporation therein, did it become the second city of the new state under the name Bratislava.

The inter-war Republic of Czechoslovakia was democratic and liberal by prevailing regional standards, but its centralized institutions strongly favored the Czechs, who occupied almost all positions of power and influence. Slovakia was a mere province and a poor and rather disfavored one at that. The same impulse that led many of the country’s three million German-speaking citizens to listen to pro-Nazi separatists thus also drove a certain number of Czechoslovakia’s two and a half million Slovaks to look with sympathy upon Slovak populists demanding autonomy and even independence. In March 1939, when Hitler absorbed the Czech regions into the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’, an authoritarian, clericalist Slovak puppet state was established under Father Józef Tiso. The first ever independent state of Slovakia thus emerged at Hitler’s behest and over the corpse of the Czechoslovak Republic.

Just how popular Slovakia’s wartime ‘independence’ ever was is hard to know after the fact. In the post-war years it was discredited both by its own record (Slovakia deported to death camps virtually all of its 140,000 pre-war Jewish population) and by its intimate dependence upon its Nazi patron. After its liberation, Czechoslovakia was re-established as a single state and expressions of Slovak nationalism were frowned upon. Indeed in the early Stalinist years, ‘Slovak bourgeois nationalism’ was one of the accusations levied at putative defendants in the show trials then being prepared—Gustav Husák spent six years in prison on the charge.

Dumneazu‘s recent travel report on Slovak Diglossia offers a fairly optimistic assessment of Slovakia’s economy these days.

Today Slovakia boasts East Europe’s fastest growing economy. During the first ten post communist years the country stagnated under the government of communist-turned-nationalist Vladimir Meciar. When Meciar left office a new generation of Slovak leadership – educated in the west and up on the latest economic theories – took the reins. A combination of smart economists, flat taxes (in a small country) and generous benefits for foreign investors has suddenly trust Slovakia from the backwater of the post 1989 East European changes to the forefront. Unemployment is expected to disappear in three years, forcing the importation of labor. Towns that were once dusty backwaters, like my beloved Ruzemberok, are becoming smart regional investment centers, and tidying up their downtown areas.

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by | 3 September 2007 · 10:37 am

Explaining Modernity Without Religion?

From Robert W. Hefner’s introduction to Islam in an Era of Nation-States: Politics and Religious Renewal in Muslim Southeast Asia, ed. by Robert W. Hefner and Patricia Horvatich (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 18-19 (references omitted):

Another reason Islam poses such problems for students of modern politics has to do with the conviction once widespread among Western political theorists that religion is, at best, a declining historical force, destined to give way to the twin forces of economic modernization and nation-state formation. One of the more remarkable facts of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western political theory was the near universality of this belief. On the left and on the right, among Marxists and Weberians, and among modernization theorists and their postmodern critics, the view that modernity is inherently secularizing—or, at the very least, so thoroughly destabilizing of religious certitudes as to demand the privatization of religion within a realm of personal belief—has dominated all the important schools of modern Western social thought.

Outside of Marxism, which had its own version, the most sustained expression of the secularization thesis was associated with the modernization theory of the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on the works of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, modernization theory asserted that modern political-economic development involves, above all else, the increasing differentiation and specialization of social and economic structures. Commerce and, later, industrialization bring about a growing division of labor, and this in turn promotes the differentiation of society into the pluralistic entities characteristic of much of the world today. It is the cultural consequence of this change that is the primary concern of secularization theorists. Where previously there was a “sacred canopy” stabilizing life experience and providing shared meanings, in modern times the canopy is rent and the collective bases of morality and identity are diminished or destroyed.

Given the severity of its forecasts, it is not surprising that from early on observers began to express doubts regarding the relevance of secularization theory for the Muslim world. Some theorists, such as the Turkish-born sociologist Bassam Tibi, continued to insist that secularization is intrinsic to modernization, and the Islamic world is no exception. How then to explain the Islamic revival occurring in the Muslim world today? Citing the experience of Christianity in Western Europe, Tibi notes that Protestantism, too, once had grandiose political aspirations, but it was eventually “domiciled within the sphere of interiority.” Islam, he predicts, will develop in a “parallel direction” because this is what modern development requires. It would seem that only inasmuch as the Islamic world is commandeered by antimodernizing reactionaries can it evade this privatization. Other observers of the Muslim world, however, appeared less certain of this prognosis. In his Islam Observed (a work that still shows the influence of his earlier training in modernization theory, which he subsequently rejected), Clifford Geertz argued that the “secularization of thought” is characteristic of the modern world. He attributed this trend to the “growth of science” and its destabilizing influence on revealed truths. Geertz qualified this generalization, however, by noting that “the loss of power of classical religious symbols to sustain a properly religious faith” can provoke the “ideologization of religion,” as the bearers of revealed truths mobilize against secularist assault. While thus embracing a variant of the secularization thesis, Geertz recognized the possibility of antisecularizing movements. Contrary to what he might argue today, however, he also implied that these were by their very nature countermodernizations, rather than alternative modernities.

Some observers, such as the philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner, have been even more adamant in rejecting the relevance of the secularization thesis for the Muslim world. Unlike Tibi or Geertz, Gellner attributes this exceptionalism not to Islam’s antimodernizing dispositions, but to its uniqueness in adapting to the modern nation-state. The key, Gellner argues, is that Islam has been able to play a role in the nation-state functionally (but not substantively) equivalent to that of nationalism in the West. In the West, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century nationalists revived and idealized popular ethnic culture, using it as an instrument of nation building. This change in political culture was facilitated by the social dislocation reshaping Europe, as the vertical allegiances of the feudal era were undermined and replaced by new lateral ones. Nationalism seized on the realities of vernacular language, folk customs, and myths of national origin to respond to this crisis and forge a new basis for the political order, one founded on the sovereignty of a “people” defined by common culture. In this manner, nationalism displaced Christianity as the key idiom of European political identity and, along the way, accelerated the secularization of modern European politics.

Gellner points out that a similar detraditionalization has altered social ties in the Muslim world. However, he argues that for several reasons Islam has been able to respond to the change while avoiding the secularist juggernaut.

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Filed under Europe, Islam, nationalism, religion, scholarship

by | 3 September 2007 · 10:08 am

Explaining Indonesian Nationalism Without Islam?

From Robert W. Hefner’s introduction to Islam in an Era of Nation-States: Politics and Religious Renewal in Muslim Southeast Asia, ed. by Robert W. Hefner and Patricia Horvatich (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 16-17 (references omitted):

During the 1960s and 1970s some of the most influential essays on politics, personhood, and culture in Muslim Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia, were written without serious exploration of Islamic influences. For example, Benedict Anderson‘s widely cited and otherwise remarkable essay, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,” drew extensively on Javanese literary and ritual traditions to develop a model of indigenous ideas of power in Java. In “A Note on Islam,” which appears toward the end of the essay, Anderson cites Clifford Geertz to back up his claim that “the penetration of Islam scarcely changed the composition and recruitment of the Javanese political elite or affected the basic intellectual framework of traditional political thought.” This observation raises complex and important issues. Its full assessment, however, would require at least some reference to Sufi notions of kingship, popular Islamic concepts of sainthood, and folk Islamic views of sacrifice and spiritual power, all of which exercise palpable influences on Javanese traditions.

In a later and equally influential book on the origin and spread of nationalism, Anderson displays a similar blind spot. His comments on early Indonesian nationalism abound with insightful references to the “creole functionaries” who were recruited by the colonial state into institutions of modern learning and resocialized in the ways of European administration. These “functionary journeys,” Anderson argues, nurtured a sense of solidarity across linguistic and ethnic barriers that had previously segmented indigenous society, and thus created the links required for this group’s leadership of the Indonesian nationalist movement. In this otherwise subtle account, however, we once again hear nothing about Muslim pilgrimages across ethnic and linguistic boundaries. In places like North Sumatra, Java, and South Sulawesi, these movements also shaped an anticolonial imagination. Though, like their non-Islamic counterparts, many of these Muslim pilgrims at first enunciated political visions premised on only pre- or protonationalist ideals, their religious pilgrimage and political struggles still worked to create a commitment to transethnic solidarities. Eventually, like their counterparts in most of the Muslim world, Muslim leaders elaborated their own versions of the nationalist ideal. These were not secondhand derivatives of secular nationalism, but full- blown alternatives to the version created by Anderson’s European-schooled, “creole nationalists.” In religious centers in Aceh and eastern Java, among others, Muslim thinkers elaborated a vision of the nation premised on shared religion, not merely common ethnic culture. They linked its meanings to Islam’s ancient glories and the distant rumblings of Turkish, Persian, and Arab nationalism.

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by | 29 December 2006 · 1:29 pm

A Contrarian Take on the Six-Party Talks

On Christmas Eve, the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinion Journal ran a short stocking stuffer of an op-ed by literary contrarian B. R. Myers, who wrote his dissertation on North Korean literature (reviewed here).

No country today is as misunderstood as North Korea. Journalists still refer to it as a Stalinist or communist state, when in fact it espouses a race-based nationalism such as the West last confronted during the Pacific War. Pyongyang’s propaganda touts the moral superiority of the Korean race, condemns South Korea for allowing miscegenation, and stresses the need to defend the Dear Leader with kyeolsa, or dare-to-die spirit–the Korean version of the Japanese kamikaze slogan kesshi [決死]. The six-party talks are therefore less likely to replicate the successes of Cold War détente than the negotiating failures of the 1930s. According to early reports from Beijing, the North Korean delegation appears more confident than ever. It has clearly been emboldened not only by its accession to the nuclear club, but by the awareness that Seoul will continue providing food and financial support no matter what happens….

The ideological landscape of the peninsula defeats the reasoning that led to the six-party talks in the first place. North Korea is not a communist country with ideological and sentimental reasons to listen to China and Russia; it is a virulently nationalist state that distrusts all the other parties at the table. And though the rhetoric of a “concerted front” against North Korea has proved to be just that, it has sufficed to heighten South Korea’s sense of solidarity with the North. This will continue to mean plenty of aid money for Kim Jong Il with which to build weapons. The U.S. has urged Beijing to bring more pressure to bear on the North. But if America can do nothing with its own ally, it can hardly expect the Chinese to do more with theirs.

via The Marmot’s Hole

UPDATE: B. R. Myers responds to comments over at The Marmot’s Hole.

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Filed under China, Japan, Korea, nationalism, Russia, U.S.

by | 13 October 2006 · 6:26 pm

Pakistan’s Transition from Shia to Sunni Leadership

From: The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future, by Vali Nasr (W. W. Norton, 2006), pp. 88-90:

Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was an Ismaili by birth and a Twelver Shia by confession, though not a religiously observant man. He had studied at the Inns of Court in London and was better versed in English law than in Shia jurisprudence, was never seen at an Ashoura procession, and favored a wardrobe that often smacked as much of Savile Row as of South Asia. Yet insofar as he was Muslim and a spokesman for Muslim nationalism, it was as a Shia. His coreligionists played an important role in his movement, and over the years many of Pakistan’s leaders were Shias, including one the country’s first governor-generals, three of its first prime ministers, two of its military leaders (Generals Iskandar Mirza and Yahya Khan), and many other of its leading public officials, landowners, industrialists, artists, and intellectuals. Two later prime ministers, the ill-fated Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his Radcliffe-educated, currently exiled daughter, Benazir Bhutto, were also Shia. Feeling the wind shift in the 1990s, Benazir styled herself a Sunni, but her Iranian mother, her husband from a big Shia landowning family, and her father’s name, the name of Ali’s twin-bladed sword, make her Shia roots quite visible. In a way, Benazir’s self-reinvention as a Sunni tells the tale of how secular nationalism’s once solid-seeming promise has given way like a rotten plank beneath the feet of contemporary Pakistan’s beleaguered Shia minority.

Benazir’s father came from a family of large Shia landowners who could afford to send him for schooling to the University of California at Berkeley and to Oxford. He cut a dashing figure. Ambitious, intelligent, and secular, he was a brilliant speaker, with the ability, it is said, to make a crowd of a million people dance and then cry. His oratory manipulated public emotion as the best of Shia preachers could, and his call for social justice resonated with Shia values. His party’s flag conveniently displayed the colors of Shiism: black, red, and green. Although he never openly flaunted his Shia background, he commanded the loyalty of Pakistan’s Shia multitudes, around a fifth of the population. What he lacked in the area of regular religious observance he made up for with his zeal for Sufi saints and shrines, especially that of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, the widely popular Sufi saint of Shia extraction whose tomb is a major shrine in southern Pakistan.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s years in power (1971–77) marked the pinnacle of Shia power in Pakistan and the high point of the promise of an inclusive Muslim nationalism. But the country that Jinnah built and Bhutto ruled had over time become increasingly Sunni in its self-perception. The Sunni identity that was sweeping Pakistan was not of the irenic Sufi kind, moreover, but of a strident and intolerant brand. Bhutto’s Shia-supported mix of secularism and populism—sullied by corruption and his ruthless authoritarianism—fell to a military coup led by pious Sunni generals under the influence of hard-eyed Sunni fundamentalists. In April 1979, the state hanged Bhutto on questionable murder charges. A Sunni general, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, strongly backed by Sunni fundamentalist parties, personally ordered that the death sentence be carried out, even after Pakistan’s highest court recommended commutation to life imprisonment.

The coup of 1977 ended the Pakistani experiment with inclusive Muslim nationalism. Shia politicians, generals, and business leaders remained on the scene, but a steadily “Islamizing” (read “Sunnifying”) Pakistan came to look more and more like the Arab world, with Sunnis on top and Shias gradually pushed out. Pakistan in many regards captures the essence of the political challenge that the Shia have faced. The promise of the modern state has eluded them as secular nationalism has been colonized from within by Sunni hegemony.

UPDATE, 31 December 2009: Comments are now closed on this blogpost.

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Filed under Islam, nationalism, Pakistan, religion

by | 20 August 2006 · 1:32 pm

Back to the Balkans: No Victory, No Justice?

This Sunday’s lesson in international humility comes via The Rhine River, who quotes a sobering excerpt from an article entitled “Milošević in Retrospect” by David Rieff in the Summer 2006 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review:

Milošević’s death accomplished what all his delaying tactics and coutroom antics could never do–cement perception of the International Criminal Tribunal of Yugolsavia’s failure….

But this is not to say that victors’ justice can never succeed; what it cannot do is succeed in a political vacuum or when the outcome on the battlefield has been indecisive….

And in Serbia, this is emphatically not the case. Even in Bosnia, nationalism burns almost as fiercely in the Serb areas as it ever did, and certainly few ordinary Serbs, let alone the former leadership, feel any remorse for Srebrenica or the siege of Sarajevo. In Serbia proper, the current government, while not extreme itself, depends on the support of Milošević’s Socialist Party in order to remain in power. Under those circumstances, it is almost impossible to imagine that had Milošević lived and been convicted, the Tribunal’s judgement would have seemed legitimate to many Serbs. With his death, one more name has been added to the martyrology of extreme Serb nationalism–a victim, in this accound, of a kangaroo court whose pretensions of delivering justice ring hollow.

On Thursday, the BBC also included some retrospection in its report on forensic experts exhuming bodies from the largest mass grave yet from the war in Bosnia.

The team unearthed 144 complete and 1,009 partial skeletons at the site in Kamenica, a village in eastern Bosnia near the border with Serbia.

The grave contained victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which about 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb troops.

The bodies had been brought to Kamenica from elsewhere to conceal the evidence.

“Kamenica is the biggest mass grave” found since the 1992-1995 war, said Murat Hurtic, a member of the forensic team.

The massacre is the only event from the Bosnian war classified as genocide by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

The two men accused of masterminding the massacre, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic, remain at large.

The forensic team found documents in the mass grave indicating that the victims died in the massacre, the Associated Press reports.

Bullets and bindings around the victims’ arms were also found there.

In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica, where tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians had taken refuge from earlier Serb offensives.

The Serb forces later separated thousands of men and boys from the women and killed them, dumping the bodies in mass graves.

Is anyone intimidated by international war crimes tribunals? Two alleged “masterminds” of mass slaughter in Bosnia have been at large for over a decade, most probably in the mountains of Serbia. If they are indeed guilty, better they should die in battles decisively lost than to be hauled before an unconvincing international court. And the same goes for other alleged war-criminal “masterminds” who may still be at large in the mountains of Pakistan.

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by | 4 August 2006 · 8:17 pm

Oil Barons of Baku, 1901-1905

By 1901, Baku was supplying half the world’s oil. It became an international city overnight, and the local Azeris were soon outnumbered by Russians, Georgians, Ossetians, and others from the four corners of the earth. Between 1856 and 1910, Baku’s population grew at a faster rate than that of London, Paris, or New York. The Nobel brothers, who dominated the industry in the first decades, invented the concept of the tanker to handle the demand for Baku oil in the Far East, appropriately naming their first tanker Zoroaster. They made the bulk of the family’s fortune in Azeri oil, though brother Alfred’s invention of dynamite is more famous.

The oilmen came in all stripes—Swedes and Jews and Poles and Armenians—but the dominance of big foreign groups like the Nobels and Rothschilds didn’t last long. By the turn of the century, half of the tanker business and much of the production was in local hands. So-called oil barons arose from both the peasantry and the feudal aristocracy—anyone who dug a hole in the ground and got lucky. (The Nobels tried whenever possible to buy out these new oil barons, along with smaller producers. According to documents in the Baku archives, Abraham Nussimbaum sold the Nobels most of his wells in 1913, on the eve of the Great War, a highly opportune business decision.)

The new oil millionaires became great philanthropists, determined to turn their city from a provincial backwater into the finest Islamic city in the world—a showcase of the possibilities of the positive merger of East and West. As the representative local group, the Muslim oil barons felt the most obliged to make showy public statements with their new wealth. They took grand tours of Europe and hired architects to build copies of the mansions, museums, and opera houses they had seen, all in an attempt to anchor their city in the Occidental future rather than its Oriental past. While some Azeri Muslims were outraged by the education of women or their appearance onstage or in an office building, Baku benefited from having been so long at the crossroads of East and West that people were used to new fashions and change.

Equal parts Dodge City, medieval Baghdad, industrial Pittsburgh, and nineteenth-century Paris, fin de siècle Baku was the last great city built before the First World War spoiled the dream that the West could keep expanding forever in a grand civilizing pageant. It was a place of fantastic extremes of wealth and poverty, where gas lights and telephones made a stark contrast to camel caravans and emaciated Zoroastrian monks. The city’s wild and clashing history came to ahead at the turn of the century, when it was the “Wild East” frontier of Europe, the world’s greatest oil-boom town: A British visitor at the time wrote, “One might almost fancy oneself in an American city out west. There is the same air of newness about everything, the same sanguine atmosphere. Everyone is hopeful.”

Yet by 1905, the entire Russian frontier was bathed in blood, as the empire entered the first of its revolutions. The unrest reached from the coast of Korea to St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, and Baku was not spared. The revolution came, as many do, on the heels of a disastrous war, one of the bloodiest in history. The czar’s advisers had dreamed up the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War in part as a means of diffusing revolutionary tension, by acquiring, via quick victory, an injection of patriotism as well as some much-needed timber concessions on the Korean coast. Instead, the Russians experienced total defeat. The catastrophe in the Far East—against a people the czar called “little, short-tailed monkeys”—made the Russian Empire look fragile and moribund. As the war’s losses sank in—in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, practically the entire Russian Navy was sunk by the Japanese fleet—years of left-wing terrorism and czarist oppression collided in a year of uprisings, ethnic cleansing, and generalized breakdown.

The semi-destroyed Russian military was in no position to quash the unrest. The only part of the vast czarist navy that had not been sunk by the Japanese was the famous Black Sea Fleet, and on its main battleship, the state-of-the-art Potemkin, the sailors rioted in the spring of 1905 and shot their officers. All around the Black Sea and the Caspian, public order broke down. While the staggering numbers of Russian dead, machine-gunned on the icy hills of Manchuria and the Korean peninsula, showed the new lethality of war, the revolutionary terrorism and pogroms that arrived inside Russia that year showed the new brutality of politics—and both foreshadowed what horror might be born through the mediums of modern mass violence.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 11-13

One of the most intriguing photographs reproduced in the book is labelled “Muslim-Jewish Christmas party, Baku, 1913.” Days long, long gone.

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Filed under Caucasus, Central Asia, energy, industry, Japan, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, Turkey, war

by | 10 June 2006 · 3:07 am

Genocide as Compensation for Loss

The invasion of Rwanda by the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF; initially based in Uganda) in October 1990 threatened to reverse these Hutu gains. Early RPF military successes led to the convening of the Arusha peace talks beginning in July 1992.

Four factors then led to an extraordinary evocation of the domain of losses. First, very early in the talks, it became clear that the presidential system that had favored Hutu power would be replaced by a parliamentary system combined with a council of ministers. Later in the talks, the strongest advocate of Hutu power, the Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR) was to be excluded from any transitional political institutions. At about the same time, it was decided that the number of seats in the new assembly and government ministries would favor the opposition to the Hutu-led government party, the Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour la Démocratie et le Développement (MRNDD, formerly MRND).

Second, after the massacre of several hundred Tutsi, the RPF renewed its offensive in February 1993, and within two weeks had doubled the amount of territory under its control. Only French intervention prevented the RPF from taking Kigali, the Rwandan capital. A consequence of this success was the agreement to allow 50 percent of the armed command of the RPF to be composed of Tutsi, despite the 10 percent representation of Tutsi in the population at large. Refugees abroad, including of course many Tutsi in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa, were to be allowed back in the country as envisioned by the earlier Dar-es-Salaam declaration on the Rwandan refugee problem.

Third, the assassination on October 30, 1993, of Melchior Ndadaye, the first Hutu president of Burundi by the Tutsi-dominated army began a series of killings of thousands of Hutu in that country. According to Bruce Jones, “The assassination and killings were rich material for the extremists in Rwanda, who used the events to lend credence to their claims that the Tutsi of the RPF were returning to Rwanda to reestablish their historic dominance over the Hutu.”

Finally, as in our other two cases [the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide], the presence of refugees grievously accentuated the dimension of loss. The refugees were of two types, both Hutu, but from different locations. First were the Hutu from Burundi who fled the Tutsi-led massacres of 1972 and again in 1993. In 1988, poor harvests led to near starvation in Burundi, leading to an additional refugee influx. The latest of these, however, was to be the most consequential. After the assassination of President Ndadaye of Burundi in 1993, waves of violence spread that led to some 400,000 refugees from Burundi, mostly Hutu, crowding into Rwanda. Many of the génocidaires would be drawn from this group. According to Gérard Prunier, “The psychological impact of the Hutu President’s murder and the arrival in Rwanda of hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees spreading tales of terror and massacre at the hands of the Tutsi army of Burundi had enormous negative consequences on the already overcast Rwandese political weather.”

The assassination and refugee arrivals solidified the position of the extremist “Hutu-power” advocates. Supporters of a hardline approach suggesting virtually a “final solution” of the Tutsi now secured additional public support. Many of these Burundi Hutu participated in the genocide, even to the point of committing extraordinary torture and atrocity.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 163-164

Selah. This concludes Genocide Week here at Far Outliers. On to cheerier thoughts but less frequent postings next week.

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by | 6 June 2006 · 10:25 pm

Threat of Numbers, Democracy, and Ethnic Cleansing

Threat of numbers also weighed heavily in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. Ethnic cleansing was committed by all major actors in Bosnia – Serbs, Croats, and Muslims – but the greater part of the ethnically cleansed population was victimized by the Serbs. As a consequence, the Bosnian Serbs will be emphasized in the following account. In contrast to the preceding cases [British encouragement of the Irish famine and emigration during the 1840s and 1850s, and newly independent Poland’s attempt to drive out Germans and Jews during the 1920s and 1930s], the Srebrenica massacre incorporates a clear genocidal element within the overall ethnic cleansing.

The demography of Bosnia-Herzegovina underwent a dramatic change in the decades preceding the Yugoslav wars. In 1961, Muslims constituted only 26 percent of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the Serbs comprising 43 percent. By 1991, virtually a complete reversal had occurred with the Muslims rising to 44 percent and the Serbs dropping to 31 percent. Many Serbs had migrated from Bosnia to Belgrade or other locations inside Serbia proper. A differential birth rate between Muslims and Serbs also favored the former. Thus, from a near majority in 1961 or at least a large plurality, the Serbs now were a distinct minority. One group’s former dominance was exchanged for a secondary status. And all of this was in addition to the genocidal elimination of a large portion of the Bosnian Serb population by the fascist Croatian Ustaše (with some Bosnian Muslim collaboration) in alliance with Nazi Germany.

In Tito’s Yugoslavia under single-party Communist rule, such a reversal of fortune, however dramatic, would not necessarily yield a commensurate diminution of influence. However, by the early 1990s, more than a decade after Tito’s death, democratic reforms ensured that ballots would count very heavily in the power distribution. The desire for electoral victories and the resulting power gain stoked the nationalist fires…. Indeed, ethnic cleansing, and its genocidal corollary, had its roots in a democratization process associated with the emergence of sovereignty in the new post-Cold War period. According to the Badinter Arbitration Commission and the European Community (EC) support of its ruling, international recognition of national sovereignty required a referendum of the residents of a given territory on their choice of a state.

Military control was not sufficient; a vote was required. Thus, the only guarantee of eventual incorporation of a stategically or economically desired territory within the borders of a state was the conformity of the (ethnoreligious) identity of most of the residents of that territory with that of the incorporating state. Ethnic cleansing, therefore, became a preferred modus operandi to maximize the security of the emerging state.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 129-130

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by | 5 June 2006 · 2:24 pm

Role of Altruistic Punishment in Genocide

Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter have introduced the concept of altruistic punishment to explain cooperation [in group projects for the “public good”]. Following Fehr and Gächter, I define altruistic punishment as punishment inflicted on a defector from cooperation, which is costly to the punisher and without material gain. In a series of public goods experiments that pitted private return against public welfare requiring cooperation in a group project, cooperation was found to flourish when altruistic punishment was possible and to break down when it was ruled out.

Subjects were given the opportunity to invest in a group project with monies handed to them, or to keep the funds. Individually, if they chose to invest, they would receive less than if they kept the money, but collectively the group as a whole would receive more, if all invested…. Subjects could punish others after information was provided as to how much each had invested. But each punishment of another subject was costly. Specifically, subjects who chose to punish were required to forfeit an amount equal to one-third of the monetary punishment imposed on a defector. Thus, the punishment is altruistic. Defectors – those who refused to cooperate – were punished even when material self-interest was sacrificed by cooperators. Participants who chose to punish defectors by withholding monies themselves had to sacrifice monetary rewards….

“Negative emotions towards the defectors are the proximate mechanics behind altruistic punishment.” Concerning altruistic punishment, Fehr remarks, “It’s a very potent force for establishing large-scale cooperation, every citizen is a little policeman in a sense. There are so many social norms that we follow almost unconsciously, and they are enforced by the moral outrage we expect if we were to violate them.” The greater the extent of deviation from cooperation by defectors, the more heavily they were punished by cooperators. It was “punishment per se [that] provided the motivation, not some consequence anticipated by the player.” Instrumentality was not especially relevant….

Altruistic punishment has been robustly established. These findings stem from public goods experiments, but are readily generalizable to social groups seeking a basis for cooperation in the absence of a functioning external authority. Given an extreme, even life-threatening environment, such as massive economic failure followed by war, the particular form of altruistic punishment chosen can be severe.

Even as they were clearly losing their respective wars, Hitler proceeded mercilessly with his extermination campaign, Enver Paşa lent his approval to the Armenian genocide, and the Hutu extremists were rapidly eliminating Rwandan Tutsi. Hitler would die by his own hand, Enver in battle to unite Turkic peoples against the Soviets, and many of the Hutu génocidaires in the refugee camps of northern Congo.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 108-109

In a chapter somewhat disturbingly redolent of “the freakonomics of genocide” Midlarsky highlights altruistic punishment as a factor that not only motivates followers to cooperate in a genocidal project they otherwise find extremely distasteful (or worse), but also motivates leaders to persist in genocide at the expense of losing larger battles against their enemies.

On a more familiar level, “altruistic punishment” might well describe the motivations of political activists who would rather purge their party of defectors than win the next election.

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