by | 21 June 2006 · 1:33 pm

Negative Action vs. Affirmative Action Inside Higher Ed

The 21 June issue of Inside Higher Ed reports on two articles that “challenge some conventional wisdom about affirmative action in higher education.”

The article about Asian Americans comes amid many reports that they are the group that most benefits from the elimination of affirmative action. That supposition is important for several reasons, both practical and political. On a practical level, it counters the idea that colleges will be all white in a post-affirmative action era. Politically, these projections have been used repeatedly by critics of affirmative action, arguing that they are not “anti-minority” and to appeal for Asian support in referendums. One of the most dramatic studies on this issue came last year, when two Princeton University researchers analyzed data from elite colleges and projected that, without affirmative action, four of every five slots lost by black and Latino students would go to Asian Americans.

In “Negative Action Versus Affirmative Action: Asian Pacific Americans Are Still Caught in the Crossfire,” William C. Kidder takes issue with the Princeton study and similar findings by other scholars. It’s not that the demographic shift seen by the Princeton researchers wouldn’t take place in an admissions system that’s truly race-neutral, says Kidder, a senior policy analyst at the University of California at Davis. Rather, it’s the question of why those slots would go to Asian applicants.

The reason, he says, isn’t the elimination of affirmative action, but the widespread use of “negative action,” under which colleges appear to hold Asian American applicants to higher standards than they hold other applicants. Using the available data from the Princeton study — and not all of it is available — Kidder argues that the vast majority of the gains that Asian American applicants would see come from the elimination of “negative action,” not the opening up of slots currently used for affirmative action. Based on the data used by the Princeton study, Kidder argues that negative action is the equivalent of losing 50 points on the SAT….

Tracking enrollment patterns from 1993, when all of the law schools had affirmative action, to 2004 — when they all did not — and then to 2005, when Texas restored it, his results were surprising. Without affirmative action, the share of Asian American enrollments dropped at two of the law schools and increased only marginally at three of the schools — even though people assume Asian American enrollments will go way up without affirmative action. Kidder notes that during the time period studied, the percentage of Asian Americans applying to law school increased 50 percent, so the pool should have created the opportunity for major increases.

What does this all mean? Kidder argues that all the references to growing Asian enrollments in a post-affirmative action world encourage a return to the “yellow peril” fear of people from Asia taking over. More broadly, he thinks Asian Americans in particular aren’t getting accurate information about the real cause of their perceived difficulties getting into competitive colleges. Their obstacle, he says, isn’t affirmative action, but the discrimination Asian Americans experience by being held to higher standards than anyone else. He says that the differential standards appear to be growing and are similar in some ways to the way some Ivy League institutions limited Jewish enrollments in the first half of the 20th century.

via Instapundit

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by | 17 June 2006 · 7:44 pm

Who Critiques Human Rights Interventions?

The application of human rights aspirations, in the policy practice of NGOs, the foreign policy of states and regional institutions, from the European Union to Nato, and in the activities of the UN, has not been without its detractors. Commentators across the board, from academics to journalists, state officials and NGO practitioners, have raised a large body of criticism.

This criticism has originated largely within the human rights discourse itself. The policy-makers and institutional actors have been criticised for failing to act on behalf of human rights in some areas of the world, or when they have acted, have been criticised for being too slow to respond or for merely taking half measures. Much of this criticism has also been focused on the low level of institutional change in the international sphere, for example: the UN Security Council composition and power of veto; UN Charter restrictions on international intervention; the slow development of the International Criminal Court; the lack of institutional integration of NGOs in international decision-making; and the remaining outdated privileges of state sovereignty.

As Alex de Waal has noted, ‘to date most sociological study of humanitarian action implicitly accepts the axioms of the humanitarian international’. Statements by human rights NGOs, states and international institutions acting in the name of human rights are often taken at face value as if the nobility of aim confers immunity from sociological analysis or political critique. Waal sums up the strength of consensus by analogy: ‘It is as though the sociological study of the church were undertaken by committed Christians only: criticism would be solely within the context of advancing the faith itself.’

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 11-12

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by | 16 June 2006 · 8:22 pm

Holocaust in Romania vs. Hungary

A contrast between the outcomes in Hungary and Romania is puzzling. Despite the barbarity of the Romanian authorities, approximately half of Romania’s Jews survived, a larger percentage than in Hungary. Out of 756,000 Jews in Romania in 1930, 375,000 survived the war, the vast majority of them in Regat Romania [the old kingdom of Moldavia and Wallachia, not the parts of Greater Romania acquired after World War I]. Why? There are essentially two reasons for this outcome, both consistent with the theoretical framework put forward here emphasizing losses at the outset. First, as Radu Ioanid put it,

In regard to the experience of the Jewish community of Regat, one thing was clear during the Holocaust: not having come into contact with the Soviets in 1940, the Jews were not held accountable for the loss of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and therefore not singled out for prompt punishment at the beginning of the war.

Thus, Jews in the Regat were not murdered in the same extent as those in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, because they were not held responsible for the Romanian territorial losses and consequent refugee migrations.

Second, despite Romanian refusals to initiate these deportations, the Germans might still have intervened directly in Romania to effect deportations under different geopolitical circumstances. And here we find one of the crucial distinctions between Romanian and Hungarian behavior. Whereas the Romanians could refuse the German requests for deportation for their own reasons, having to do principally with the fear of Allied reprisals after the increasingly likely German defeat, the Hungarians could not. In contrast to Romania, Hungary lay directly in the path of the Soviet westbound march. In the Nazi view, as we saw earlier, the large concentrations of Jews in Hungary constituted a potentially collaborating fifth column that could ease the Soviet advance to the Reich heartland. Hence, direct German intervention was required.

Although geopolitically important principally due to the Ploesti oil fields, Romania did not lie directly in the path of the main Soviet advance and was not required for a strategic defense of the eastern reaches of the Reich. At this stage in the war, after Allied bombing of the oil fields and the absence of a perceived direct strategic threat Germany of Romania’s remaining Jews, an intervention was not required for strategic defense. It is ironic that a country with a far more virulent and barbaric anti-Semitic tradition could save a larger percentage of its Jews than one with an earlier history of strong Hungarian-Jewish collaboration. Yet here we see the importance of geopolitical imperatives, an important component of realpolitik (as identified in the three models [brute-force imprudent, prudent, and cynical] of realpolitik in chapter 5)….

Finally, the pattern of Hungarian-Jewish deportations suggests a transition even within imprudent brute-force realpolitik. Whereas the choice of genocidal behavior clearly was imprudent at the start of Operation Barbarossa in mid-1941, three years later, even to German opponents of Nazism, it could now appear to be prudent. By this time, the Germans could reason, many Hungarian Jews would have heard of the genocide elsewhere in Europe and would have become determined opponents of the Nazi regime. Aid to the oncoming Soviets would have been forthcoming. Having created this body of potential fifth columnists by their own unbridled brutality, the Germans were forced to live with the consequences. Deportation and death of this Jewish population then could easily have been seen by the Germans to be absolutely required in order to protect the German state and its population from Soviet revenge.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 258-259

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by | 13 June 2006 · 11:17 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Dekoboko, Kappou

凸凹 dekoboko ‘unevenness, roughness, bumpiness’ – Today I went to my neighborhood barbershop, not so much because my hair was getting too long for the increasingly muggy weather, but because my beard was getting too scraggly. Well, instead of looking up ‘scraggly’ in my electronic dictionary, which would have returned 不揃い fuzoroi ‘uneven, not uniform, irregular, mismatched’, I looked up ‘uneven’ and found the wonderfully graphic 凸凹 dekoboko ‘unevenness, roughness, bumpiness, inequality’.

The barber seemed to understand fine what I meant when I characterized my beard as dekoboko. He might have had more difficulty processing the Sino-Japanese pronunciation of the combination, tatsuou, but someone who works with lenses might have found it more familiar, as 凸 also translates ‘convex’ and 凹 translates ‘concave’.

割烹 kappou ‘fine cuisine’ – To celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, the Far Outliers treated themselves to an elegant dinner at nearby 割烹 懐石 蝶や Kappou Kaiseki Chou-ya ‘fine-cuisine tasting-menu butterfly-shop’. Wikipedia’s “tasting menu” is a good characterization of kaiseki, which has an interesting etymology in its own right, but I want to examine 割烹 kappou, which was new to me. At one level, it’s just a synonym of 料理 ryouri, but the respective etymological ingredients of the two words bring out different flavors.

While 料理 describes cooking in the abstract, as Ingredients Management, 割烹 describes cooking as concrete actions, Slicing and Simmering. You can see the ‘sword’ (刀) radical (刂) down the right side of 割 waru ‘divide, cut, halve; separate; split, rip; break, crack, smash; dilute’ (Sino-Japanese katsu), and the ‘fire’ (火) radical (灬) flickering under 烹 niru ‘boil, cook’ (Sino-Japanese hou). (The usual way to write niru ‘boil, cook’ is with 煮, Sino-Japanese sha.)

Perhaps it’s not too misleading to propose a rough analogy along the lines of 割烹 : 料理 :: cuisine : cooking. At first I suspected kappou was only used for fine Japanese cuisine, but then I found 中華割烹 Chuuka kappou ‘Chinese fine-cuisine’, to label a Chinese-style “tasting menu” approach (to judge from the images).

So here’s how our kaiseki meal progressed. We sampled two local brands of sake as we ate, both served in a small teapot of clear glass with gold trim. Our sake cups were also of glass. Mine had gold flakes on the bottom, and with twelve delicate, alternating green and white vertical lines. My wife’s was slightly smaller, made of cut glass of a purplish hue.

  1. Starter: tiny scallop on half shell, fresh ginger shoot (myoga), and a slice of chicken on fishcake
  2. Hashiarai: clear soup with noodles made of fish cake (surimi) in lacquer bowl
  3. Sashimi: slices of snapper (tai), scallop (hotate), and yellowfin tuna (maguro)
  4. Mushimono: I can remember the dish, but not what was on it!
  5. Nimono: simmered pork kakuni hidden under a scoop of rice in covered lacquer bowl
  6. Yakimono: whole celebratory red snapper (tai, implying mede-tai)
  7. Hassun: clear broth with daikon, shiitake, takenoko, broccoli, green fishcake, and shrimp
  8. Agemono: oily shrimpcake
  9. Sumono: vinegared tomato with sesame-flavored bean threads
  10. Udon: thin Akita noodles and thin chirashi nori
  11. Dessert: fresh local strawberry gelato bursting with flavor, paired with bitter green tea

Our rather unpretentious hostess didn’t describe each dish as she presented it, but was only too happy to answer my questions when I asked. Here‘s a photo gallery of a more elaborate kaiseki dinner.

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by | 11 June 2006 · 7:05 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Hanabishisou, Hotaru-Bukuro, Tade

花菱草 hanabishisou ‘California poppy’ – The common, vulgar, lowly, ubiquitous (but not somniferous) California poppy has a most impressive moniker in Japanese: 花 hana ‘flower’ + 菱 hishi ‘water chestnut’ + 草 sou ‘grass’. Almost makes you want to ingest it.

蛍袋 hotaru-bukuro Campanula punctata ‘cherry bells‘ – One flower that seems to bloom with the sprightly bluebells is what looks like its depressive cousin, the hotaru-bukuro ‘firefly sack’. One can win many points with dowager gardeners by learning this obscure plant name.

The specific cultivar ‘Cherry Bells’ was developed in Japan. It is really one of the most pleasing campanulas for tidiness of basal leaves & beauty & colorfulness of large longlasting pendulous flowers. The stems have an appealing flowing tilt which does not look floppy, but permits the “bells” to dangle naturally, so that staking is never required.

蓼 tade ‘smartweed, knotweed’ (Polygonum spp.) – At Uotami (‘Fish Nation’) izakaya in nearby Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, over the weekend, the Far Outliers were served an unusual blue-hued dipping sauce for our tasty whole ayu (鮎) ‘sweetfish’ on a stick. The waitress said the sauce was made from tade, which The New Nelson defines oversimply as ‘smartweed’ (also known as ‘smartass’), a plant with a nasty reputation. But the blue hue turns out to offer a subtle hint. The Japanese variety, also known as dyer’s knotweed (Polygonum tinctorium), is one of several secondary herbal sources for indigo dye (Indigofera tinctoria), along with woad (Isatis tinctoria), a favorite of the Picts, who got their Latin name from their fondness for body-dye.

UPDATE: Matt of No-sword adds a tade-related proverb that I neglected to mention: 蓼喰う虫も好き好き Tade kuu mushi mo sukizuki ‘Even bugs who eat tade are quite fond of it’—corresponding to “There is no accounting for taste” or De gustibus non disputandem est. I wonder if the smell of tade, like other indigo dyes, is supposed to repel mosquitoes.

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by | 10 June 2006 · 4:59 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Tanchou, Momonga, Kuroten

Among the things I’ll miss when I leave Japan at the end of this month are NHK nature shows. The photography is often spectacular, of course, but the spare and clear narrative style, with equally spare but clear captions on screen, are perfect for an obsessive language-learner who watches Japanese TV with denshi jisho in hand—and a mute button within easy reach if it’s a commercial channel. Here are three animal names I learned while watching a show about Hokkaido wildlife recently.

丹頂 tanchou ‘Japanese crane, red-crested white crane’ – The 丹 is ‘red’ (as in cinnabar or vermilion), while the 頂 is ‘crest, peak, summit’, so the prosaic version of the name is ‘red crest’.

ももんが momonga ‘Eurasian flying squirrel’ – A rare, nocturnal creature of the far north whose image graces Estonian postage stamps. It’s possible to write the name much more obscurely in kanji, but I don’t see the point, and neither did NHK.

くろてん kuroten ‘sable’ – There are at least three kinds of てん (a native Japanese word that can also be written 貂): 黒てん kuroten ‘sable‘, 白てん shiroten ‘ermine‘, 松てん matsuten ‘pine marten‘. (These flesh-and-blood creatures are not to be confused with the animé “Black Angel” Kuroten. Nor should ermines be confused with ferrets!)

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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 | 8 June 2006 · 10:56 pm

Holocaust a Contingent Event?

Thus the Holocaust was a contingent event, one not predestined by the intensity of Nazi anti-Semitism, virulent as it was, but facilitated by the exigencies of a world war that threatened to destroy the Nazi state, with the Jews perceived by Hitler as leading a vanguard of that destruction. Each step in the decision-making process concerning the Jewish Question was dependent on critical war-related events. After the defeat of France in 1940, Madagascar, a French colony, was chosen as the future “homeland” of the Jews. When the undefeated British navy made such mass shipping impossible, an area at the fringe of the German empire near Lublin was chosen, to be later changed to an unnamed destination in the soon-to-be-conquered Soviet Union. This harsher decision was made in March 1941 at the same time as the Lend-Lease Agreement between the United States and Great Britain. Difficulties in the invasion of the USSR led to the killing of Jewish women and children after August 15. As these difficulties became increasingly apparent to the Germans, harsher measures including deportations of Jews from Western to Eastern Europe were carried out, to be followed by the ultimate decision to commit genocide after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the first Russian land victory defending Moscow….

The dynamic approach adopted here helps explain an apparent anomaly. While there is clear evidence of virulent German anti-Semitism during the war even among “ordinary” Germans who behaved abominably toward Jews in the death marches from the concentration camps into Germany proper in 1944–45, the evidence of earlier German anti-Semitism is variable. German anti-Semitic political parties had declined precipitously in their share of the Reichstag vote prior to World War I, achieving only 0.86 percent in 1912 compared with 3.70 percent in 1898. Even after World War I and the rapid rise of anti-Semitism, reasons for joining the Nazi Party given by early members generally did not include anti-Semitism among the primary factors. The economic boycott of Jewish businesses called by the Nazi leadership for April 1, 1933, shortly after its accession to power, was generally regarded as a public relations failure, even by the Nazis themselves. Only after the events of World War II and the growing threat to the Nazi – by now identified as German – state did the German population behave in a deeply anti-Semitic manner. Thus one resolution of the apparent inconsistencies between Goldhagen‘s account and the many critics of his emphasis on “eliminationist anti-Semitism” can be found in the dynamics of the confrontation between Nazi Germany and its systemic environment.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 151-153

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by | 7 June 2006 · 1:12 pm

External Threats to Serbian Security, 1990s

Serbia, despite its domination of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), had legitimate security concerns as the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia loomed on the horizon. The July 1991 accord at Brioni stipulated the withdrawal of all JNA units from Slovenia, thereby implying international recognition of that new state. As a consequence, Prime Minister József Antall of Hungary warned Serbia that it could not assume that its province of Vojvodina with its large Hungarian minority would continue to be part of Serbia. “We gave Vojvodina to Yugoslavia. If there is no more Yugoslavia, then we should get it back,” declared Antall, referring to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. This verbal threat was supported by the earlier sale of at least 36,000 Kalashnikov rifles to the Republic of Croatia in 1990. Serbia, therefore, could legimately feel threatened not only by the newly emerging states of the former Yugoslavia, but by neighboring existing states as well.

German domination of the EC political decision making at this time raised perhaps even deeper security concerns for Serbia. The taking on of Croatian fascist symbols by Franjo Tuđman, the Croatian leader, as the Croatian state emerged, of course, was hardly reassuring to the Serbs. Memories of the mass murder of at least 500,000 Serbs by the fascist Croatian state in alliance with Nazi Germany during World War II were rekindled by Tuđman’s behavior.

The recent German unification and German emergence as the clear economic, even political leader of the EC made matters worse. After considerable lobbying by the Croatian and Slovenian leadership as well as by the Vatican, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister, emerged as an unequivocal supporter of Croatian and Slovenian independence. When the actual recognition, by Germany, of both new countries came on December 23, 1991 – with agreement of the remaining EC members, apparently bullied by the newly augmented Germany – the Western threat became palpable. With growing economic ties to Germany, the Slovenian and Croatian economies, already burgeoning relative to the remainder of Yugoslavia, and the presence of NATO nearby, the JNA and mainly its Serbian leadership would feel an imminent threat to the Yugoslav state….

Bosnia was also pivotal to the JNA. During the 1980s, 40–55 percent of the Bosnian economy was tied to military industries. “Sixty to 80 percent of the army’s physical assets (armaments factories, supply routes, airfields, mines and basic raw materials, stockpiles, training schools, oil depots) were located in Bosnia-Herzegovina. On the eve of the war, 68 percent of the federal army’s 140,000 troops were stationed in the republic. To the extent that the Yugoslav army was fighting a war for its own integrity and state, it could not easily be a neutral party in Bosnia-Herzegovina or abandon its own economic foundations.

A two-tiered threat to the Serbs emerged from Serbian numerical weakness within Bosnia coupled with the looming presence of the newly united Germany at the head of the EC. The end result of the military clashes and ethnic cleansing was a near-equal division of Bosnia between the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (the Bosnian Muslim–Croat Federation) holding 51 percent of the territory and the Republika Srpska (the Bosnian Serb Republic) occupying 49 percent with corresponding ethnic majorities within each. The two halves together formed the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but with rights of each half to affiliate with other political entities, if they so wished.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 131-132

One of Midlarsky’s major themes is that genocides evolve in response to many contingencies: feelings of prior national or ethnoreligious loss or betrayal, threats to communal security, ongoing defeat in war, validation of past massacres, and so on.

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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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