Expulsions,  POLS 844: Governing Difference

Mann, M. (2005) The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing

11 October 2020

Mann, M. (2005) The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Chapter 1: The Argument

  • Study of murderous ethnic cleansing (MEC) and genocide: eight general theses, from micro to macro:
  1. MC is modern: the dark side of democracy. It results from politicized nationalism: conflation of demos (citizens) and ethnos (ethnic group) that limit it and exclude ‘others’.
    1. MEC results from organic conceptions of nation and state than encourage it.
    2. Settler democracies have been truly murderous.
    3. Regimes newly embarked on democratization are more likely to commit MEC than stable authoritarian regimes.
    4. Stable institutionalised democracies are less likely to commit MEC than both above.
    5. Regimes perpetrating MEC are never democratic: “The dark side of democracy is the perversion through time of either liberal or socialist ideas of democracy” (4).
  2. Ethnic hostility rises when ethnicity trumps class as the main form of social stratification, in the process capturing and channelling classlike sentiments towards ethnonationalism.
    1. Ethnic and class conflict infuse each other: one ethnic group must be seen as exploiting the other for ethnic conflict to develop.
  3. Danger zone of MEC is reached when:
    1. Movements claiming to represent old ethnic groups claim their own state over all or part of same territory;
    2. This claim seems to have substantial legitimacy and chance of being implemented.
  4. MEC is reached when:
    1. Less powerful side in encouraged to fight rather than submit by believing it has outside help;
    2. Stronger side believes it has the military power and ideological legitimacy to force through its cleansed state at little physical or moral risk to itself.
  5. MEC occurs when state has been factionalised and radicalised amid an unstable geopolitical environment usually leading to war.
  6. MEC is rarely the initial intent of perpetrators: eventually perpetrated deliberately, but the route to deliberation is usually circuitous.
  7. Three main levels of perpetrator:
    1. Radical elites running party-states;
    2. Bands of militants forming violent paramilitaries;
    3. Core constituencies providing mass support.
  8. Ordinary people are brought by normal social structures into committing MEC, and their motives are much more mundane.
  • Defining terms: Ethnicity, nation, ethnic cleansing
  1. Ethnicity is not objective: macro-ethnicities are socially constructed. It is a group that defines itself or is defined by others as sharing common descent and culture.
  2. Ethnic cleansing is removal by members of one such group of members of another such group from a locality they consider their own.
  3. Nation is such a group that has political consciousness and claims political rights in a given territory.
  4. Nation-state results when such a group has its own sovereign state.
  5. Multicultural states try to ignore ethnicity or to manage it through various constitutional methods (confederal, consociational). Toleration is a minimum standard.
  6. Increasingly violent methods of coercion and production of a cleansed state:
    1. Voluntary assimilation;
    2. Discrimination;
    3. Segregation;
    4. Cultural suppression;
    5. Selective policed repression;
    6. General policed repression;
    7. Mistaken policies whose unintended consequences are mass deaths;
    8. Ethnocide: unintended wiping out of a group and its culture;
    9. Exemplary repression;
    10. Forced conversion;
    11. Politicide: target is entire actual / potential leadership of a victimized group;
    12. Classicide: intended mass killings of entire social classes;
    13. Genocide (R. Lemkin, 1944).
  • Why does MEC occur? Why does it turn ‘really nasty’ in only a few cases?
  • Rival Approaches to Ethnic Cleansing
  1. Primitive throwback (primitivism);
  2. old ethnic rivalries (perennialism);
  3. Modern conflation of political ideals and ideologies (ethnosymbolism).
  • Perpetrators: Nationalist Masses or Authoritarian Elites?
  1. Two views dominate: perpetrators are either whole ethnic groups or state elites.
  2. Whole ethnic groups never act collectively: individual members of core constituencies do – they also practice in-group policing.
  3. “Once an ethnic identity is socially constructed, it may engender deep and long-lasting sentiments such that it becomes institutionalized, even structural” (21).
  4. Radical elites, usually state elites are most usually blamed of MEC.
  5. Authoritarian regimes are better than democratizing ones at damping down ethnic tensions unless these are securely institutionalized.
  6. Party-states resting on mobilised mass movements are particularly prone to MEC through “unpredictable combinations of top-down bottom-up, and sideways-violent pressures that lead to the worst atrocities” (23).
  7. Factionalized and radicalised states are most dangerous for MEC, which is almost always led by state elites.
  • Rational, Emotional, or Normative Perpetrators?
  1. Rational choice theory is pervasive, but cannot explain emotions.
  2. Three ways in which war and violence seem rational (but are not):
    1. Security dilemma;
    2. Commitment problem;
    3. Information failure.
  3. All three presuppose norms, values, identity formation; tend to assume that ethnic group identities and rivalries already exist.
  4. Max Weber: four main types of human action:
    1. Instrumentally rational action;
    2. Habitual action;
    3. Affectual action;
    4. Value-rational action
  • Perpetrators’ Motives: Ordinary People or Fanatics?

Nine common motives for MEC:

  1. Ideological killers;
  2. Bigoted killers;
  3. Violent killers;
  4. Fearful killers;
  5. Careerist killers;
  6. Materialist killers;
  7. Disciplined killers;
  8. Comradely killers;
  9. Bureaucratic killers.
  • Causal Model: The Sources of Social Power

Four sources of social power:

  1. Ideological power: partially private and substantially voluntary.
  2. Economic power: market choices.
  3. Military power: institutionalised and kept away from every-day-life.
  4. Political power: centralized, territorial regulation of social life. It is inherently territorial, authoritative, monopolistic. Political power relations are ultimately decisive in causing MEC.

Chapter 2: Ethnic Cleansing in Former Times

  1. In premodern states class usually trumped ethnicity – therefore, there was little MEC.
  2. People were killed for where, not who they were: murder to cleanse particular identities is modern.
  3. This began to change with the rise of monotheistic salvation religions. Full macro-ethnicity emerged later – in modern times, and with it the potential for MEC.
  4. Military power created most large states in history. Monarchies dominated political power, centered on regional courts, detracting from macro-ethnicity encompassing entire states.
  5. Assyrians specialised in deportations, but not MEC. They eliminated troublesome states, not peoples.
  6. “Macro-ethnicity and ethnic cleansing were rare in ancient times. Larger societies were ruled through class-bound lateral aristocratic assimilation. Conquered elites were assimilated into the cultural identity of the new rulers so that macro-ethnic identities were limited by class. There was massive violence, but it was almost never directed at cleaning whole peoples” (41).
  7. With monotheism, states became ‘defenders of the faith’.
  8. Christianity became the least tolerant of the world’s salvation religions: it practiced religious cleansing – targeting Christian heretics, Muslims, Jews, lepers.
  9. By the 16th century people, nation, sovereignty and state were becoming fused in Western Europe.
  10.  Ethnic cleansing remained rare, unlike religious cleansing.
  11. Post-reconquista Spain (1492) became laboratory of “total religious cleansing, becoming more ethnic as it proceeded” with expulsion of Jews and Moors: “a unique bridge to modernity” (48)
  12.  1648 Treaty of Westphalia: Cuius regio, eius religio. No foreign aid to religious minorities any longer. “Cleansing was shifting from a religious to a national base, because the soul was becoming partly nationalized” (49): first Spain, then Western Europe, then Eastern Europe.
  13. Cromwell in Ireland practiced forced expulsions and land expropriations in the mid-17th century; Settlement Act of 1652 enshrined this into law. 15% of the Irish population died during two decades of warfare, primarily from malnutrition and disease.
  14. Historically, cleansing was systematic, but not murderous cleansing; there was no relationship between religious cleansing and regime form. It ended when almost all states became about 80% mono-religious (53).
  15. Summary: “[E]thnic cleansing was uncommon since macro-ethnicity was also uncommon. Ethnicity rarely conquered distance or class. But as salvation religions spread, religion began to cut across class and other boundaries, leading to protonational democratization and cleansing of the souls. Yet secular matters remained dominated by class and other axes of stratification. And with religious cleansing achieved, things seemed to be improving in Europe” (54).

Chapter 3: Two Versions of “We The People”

  1. ‘People should rule’ rooted in US Declaration of Independence. Today, this legitimates most modern states and is considered to be “a good and moral collectivity” (55).
  2. Two different kinds of people can be distinguished: stratified and organic.
  3. Stratified:
    1. state as mediator;
    2. class-dominated,
    3. people as plural, shaped by contending interests institutionalised in political parties.
    4. voluntary assimilation into dominant linguistic group: no states were mono-ethnic.
    5. national identities only reached lowest classes in European states in mid- to late-19th century: the nation was born very late! (60)
    6. each country blended class and ethnicity in different ways.
    7. Violent cleansing was confined to Europe’s peripheries (Scotland, Ireland).
  4. Organic:
    1. Three differences led to organic rather than liberal conceptions of nation-state:
      1. Democracy appeared later – infused with idea that the whole people must rule; enhanced executive /statist powers and ideologies beyond liberal levels.
      2. State becomes “the bearer of a moral project” (62) and is more active for its citizens.
      3. Region was dominated by multiethnic dynastic empires, each dependent on elites of a single imperial ethnicity that divided, ruled and often discriminated against some minorities: imperial vs. proletarian ethnic conflicts.
    2. Organic conception of people and state: the people was one and indivisible, united, integral (63). “Class conflict and sectional interests were not to be compromised, but transcended, and displaced onto international conflict” (63). This generated ideal of transcendent nation and state, fueling “security dilemma” of dominant and subordinate ethnicities.
    3. Two potential vices:
      1. Can lead from democracy to authoritarian statism;
      2. Encourages notion that minority communities and political opponents can be excluded from full membership in the nation.
    4. Core beliefs:
      1. Enduring unique national character or soul;
      2. Right to a state that would express this;
      3. Right to exclude those with different characters who would weaken the nation.
  5. WWI escalated organic nationalism (ON) in central and eastern Europe.
  6. Rightist ideology embraced ON and idea of ‘cleansing’ the nation by resettlement (voluntary or coerced).
  7. Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of national self-determination confused liberal and organic views of the nation and promised “democracy for each majority nationality”: he “believed that it was sufficient to create unitary nation-states with constitutionally-enshrined rights” (67).
  8. For a minority, there were four possibilities in an ON:
    1. Revision of frontiers to minimize nationalities;
    2. Emigration and population exchange;
    3. Physical slaughter;
    4. Constitutional changes away from nation-state form.
  9. Result was discrimination against minorities, coerced emigration, large refugee flows (10 million European refugees by 1926).
  10.  Citizenship was now identified with ethnicity; minority members were second-class citizens.
  11. Brubaker’s ‘Triadic Nexus’ of actors: national minorities, nationalizing state, kin-state.
  12. Respectable conservatives were moving towards the ON model between the two WWs and mobilizing people behind nationalism, whilst denouncing leftists as enemies of the nation.
  13.  Geopolitics played a moderating role because almost every national minority was a majority in another state; but if the balance were upset, all minorities could suffer.
  14.  The combination of ON and the ideals of freedom, self-determination and representative democracy became ‘the dark side of democracy’, leading to vision of ethnically homogenous states grounded in ‘scientific racism’.
  15.  Genocide emerges out of this tradition of modern science, modern politics, modern society.

Chapter 17: Combating Ethnic Cleansing in the World Today

  • Eight Theses Reconsidered
  1. Murderous cleansing has been modern – the perverted dark side of democracy, where demos and ethnos are merged.
  2. Where successful, such movements trump class divisions.
  3. Conflicts arise where two old ethnic groups make legitimate and credible political claims to the same territory.
  4. Mass murder requires either a minority emboldened to fight by outside help, or a majority with the power to creates at present its own cleansed state without much physical moral or physical risk to itself.
  5. Faction-ridden, radicalised states replace conciliation with repression and are assisted by external geopolitical pressures, usually war.
  6. MEC is rarely the original intent of the perpetrators.
  7. MEC perpetrators arise from complex interactions between leaders, militants, and masses, drawn predominantly from core constituencies favoring violent ethnonationalism. “Leaders are always the most important agents” (504).
  8. Perpetrators are driven by motives found among ordinary people participating in mundane social movements, who believe in their cause and in the ends justifying the means. Three main ideological components can be detected: extreme nationalism, extreme statism, endorsement of violence.
  • Ethnic Cleansing Declined in the North but Revived in the Global South
  1. “The geopolitical environment of the northern peripheries is no longer supportive of murderous cleansing” (509).
  2. Today, all MEC takes place in the global South, marked by the spread of the ideal of the nation-state that conjoins ethnos and demos into one ‘people’.
  3. Elections become ethnic censuses, as ethnicity now trumps class.
  4. The world is polarised between a Northern zone of peace and Southern zone of turmoil.
  5. The rise of fundamentalism has weakened secularism, liberalism, and socialism.
  6. These trends set the stage for rise of ethnic-religious conflict across the South.
  7. Ethnocracy: a demos only for the ethnos. (519).
  8. Struggles are not mainly between faiths, but within faiths, between secular and sacred conception of ‘democracy’ and ‘people’, often resulting in a politicization of religion into rival claims to sovereignty over the same territory.
  • Policy Implications
  1. Eight theses identify circumstances in which MEC occurs and processes whereby it unfolds. Liberal, tolerant democracies are not inevitable outcome of modernity. Democracy’s dark side is organic and exclusionary, dangerous for minorities.
  2. We must engage with the world as it is and identify early warning signals of ethnic conflict – although exact prediction is not possible.
  3. Rival plausible and achievable claims to political sovereignty spell difficulties, deriving from some past history of sovereignty and some recent continuity of claim (523).
  4. Most minority movements could be satisfied with wider autonomy within existing boundaries, on confederal or consociational models.
  5. Mere liberal guarantees of individual rights are inadequate: “Individual and group-based conceptions of rights are both necessary” (524).
  6. These must be supplemented by collective guarantees of minority rights, policed by international agencies.
  7. Neoliberal ideology enable inequalities to acquire ethnic overtones, thus encouraging “ethnic conflict between proletarian and imperial ethnic groups” (526).
  8. Whilst ethnonationalism has grown ever stronger in the world and acquired global legitimacy, “[w]e are a long way from an international regime capable of enforcing global norms” against MEC (527). International courts or tribunals are ill equipped to deal with MEC claims involving thousands of offenders.
  9. Ethnic cleansing is essentially modern, the dark side of democracy, but is NOT a necessary feature of the human condition; nor does ethnicity always trump other less violent bases of social organization.
  10. Although we can now recognise circumstances in which ethnic cleansing threatens danger and then goes over the brink into mass murder and devise solutions to prevent this from actually occurring, “at present we lack the will to commit resources to those solutions in the South of the world.” (529).

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