| Review of: | The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing by Michael Mann |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Richard Bourke |
| Reviewed in: | The Political Quarterly |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 78, Issue 1, Pages 182-196 |
Book Reviews: Modern Massacres
This book is a consistently engaging study of an urgent problem. Its author has set himself the ambitious task of explaining the emergence of 'murderous ethnic cleansing' in the modern world. The appearance in the 1990s of apparently systematic attempts to destroy substantial portions of the population of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia brought the question of the motivation behind popular and paramilitary outrages, and ultimately behind total genocidal extermination, to the forefront of academic and journalistic consciousness. Indeed, the levels of civilian animosity that accompanied attempts to broker peace agreements in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland during the same period only added to the widespread determination to understand the reasons for the occurrence of ethnic strife.
Today, the problem of ethnic hostility has certainly not receded, although awareness of its pervasiveness has steadily declined as the attention paid by the media to geopolitical strategy has come to drown out coverage of domestic conflict and disintegration in the reporting of international affairs since 9/11.
Michael Mann's purpose is to chart the extent and depth of popular hostility in the twentieth century, and to account for what he takes to be the modernity of the phenomenon. Ancient political cultures-for example, Assyrian, Persian and Babylonian civilisations-have repeatedly engaged in massacres and murders. But, Mann argues, these were typically motivated by political enmity and not by rival ethnic attachments and affiliations. The escalation of hostilities among ethnically distinct peoples is a characteristically modern political development, he suggests. More specifically, it is an integral feature of modern democracy-a recurrent aspect of democratic politics throughout the twentieth century. Ethnic cleansing is 'modern', as Mann puts it, 'because it is the dark side of democracy'.
According to the historical scheme that underpins this diagnosis, pre-modern politics was organised around the twin principles of popular allegiance to a political regime and class subordination within a hierarchy of ranks. Both of these organising principles were first shaken and then destroyed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe: first, salvation religions provided an alternative set of allegiances to established political loyalties; and, second, egalitarian values eliminated the subordination of ranks on which the order and cohesion of social relations had been founded.
Under pressure from these developments, modern democratic peoples (or nations) emerged, replacing both political subjects and class subordinates with capacious yet ultimately exclusive ideas of citizenship. Democratic nationality has been capacious in the sense that it has supported extensive membership since its inception, yet at the same time it has been alarmingly exclusive in Mann's view to the extent that ethnic foreigners are regularly greeted with suspicion.
In liberal democracies, according to Mann's argument, suspicion of this kind has been oset by the existence of additional social interests that cut across ethnic affiliation whilst in themselves being more amenable to political moderation. But not all modern democracies have been so fortunate as to restrain the overwhelming frenzy of ethnic passion. Where the achievement of moderation has fallen short, Mann contends, the scene has been set for collision amongst opposing nationalities newly liberated from the habits of affiliation and subjection by means of which population groups had hitherto been ruled.
When collision finally turned into outright conflict in the last century, the resulting mayhem proved more destructive than all the preceding struggles that have blotted the historical record.
In the process, Mann brings into focus some of the most appalling episodes in the history of twentieth-century bigotry and intolerance. His case studies include atrocities committed against Armenians, Jews, Bosnian Muslims, Croats, Serbs and Tutsis. Together, they make up a depressing catalogue of hatred and destruction perpetrated in democratic or democratising regimes. But Mann's purpose is not to itemise a litany of depravity, but to establish a firm connection between modernity and ethnic cleansing.
In pursuing this objective, Mann's method is a mixture of careful scrutiny and metaphysics. His aim is to produce a rigorously social scientific account of the scale and intensity of civil conflict in the era of representative democracy. At its most acute,
The basic metaphysical component in Mann's scheme is 'ethnic democracy' itself. In fact, ethnicity is at once a key explanatory device and a mysteriously evocative emblem throughout the book. Nearly everything depends on it, yet one is never quite sure what it means. The uncertainty surrounding the significance of this catchphrase is not peculiar to its employment by Michael Mann, but nonetheless his usage never quite gains the requisite purchase on the problem that he rightly believes needs desperately to be understood.
At its simplest, ethnicity is a modern word for a determinate kind of social relation. It denotes presumed affiliation between strangers who share a common culture. Of course, the varieties of social relationship have always been multiple and complex, including familial, personal, instrumental and cultural relations. What is relevant to this discussion is the nature of cultural relations in particular. But what the adjective 'cultural' means in this context is singularly difficult to grasp, because on the one hand the term identifies the presumption of affiliation between individuals who share a range of practices and beliefs, while on the other hand the word invokes the very practices and beliefs in terms of which affiliates expect to identify with one another.
However, the problem is that neither these cultures nor the presumed relations between their members have a definite political significance by themselves. Cultures notoriously shade into another, while apparent cultural associates are every bit as prone to disaffection as they are to enduring coexistence. The point here is that cultural (or ethnic) nationalities do not in any obvious way unite or divide into social units through processes of interpersonal connection alone-like sexual partners, football supporters, customers or business rivals. Theorists of ethnic conflict therefore need to lay bare the dynamic element within social relations that propels ethnic interaction toward organised antagonism between the members of such an indefinite conglomeration as a culture.
Does the occurrence of national hostility and solidarity pose a problem for modern democracies as a result of specific issues confronting the political organisation of cultural relations? Or does conflict among nationalities arise purely as a consequence of attitudes inherent in the particular kind of relationship that we understand ethnicity to be? The ambiguity surrounding the answer to these questions in Mann's book recalls the confusion that used to permeate older theories of nationalist bigotry that began with the simple idea that there are in fact 'two types' of modern nationalism. From the beginning of the last century up the end of the 1960s, individual contributions to this overarching thesis were advanced by a succession of political thinkers and historians ranging from Friedrich Meinecke and Otto Bauer to Elie Kedourie and John Plamenatz. But the concrete significance of the distinction has long remained elusive.
According to the core tenets of the argument, on one side there exists a benign form of national allegiance that underpins Western liberal democracy: civic-minded and patriotic, this basically Anglo-American brand of national affiliation used habitually to be distinguished by political scientists and historians from its fanatical, allegedly Eastern European opponent. On the other side, the insular, unaccommodating, Eastern European variety was assumed to be a breeding ground for acrimony and intolerance.
It is, of course, a stark fact of human history that while some political relationships have been sharply antagonistic, yet others have been relatively collaborative and harmonious. But simply noting the historical reality of the polar trajectories that have affected social life does not in itself amount to an advance in understanding. The ongoing difficulty for historians of nationalism and ethnic conflict is that an explanation for this diversity of experience in the past cannot be supplied by the bare gesture of enumerating typologies, nor by tagging the resulting types with names.
Having repeatedly been revived in ever more subtle incarnations by analysts and commentators aspiring to discover the true nature of populist allegiances in democratic states, the influential notions of ethnic democracy and cultural nationalism have succeeded in directing the research agendas of historians and social scientists for generations. Michael Mann's work explicitly distances itself from the more spuriously 'sociologistic' accounts of ethnic identities in conflict to have appeared in the burgeoning literature on the subject. But at the very root of his argument a familiar confusion nonetheless persists.
There are, Mann tells us, two distinct ways of conceiving of a democratic populace, each of which has had a powerful impact on the formation of modern states. In accordance with the benign conception, fellow citizens or nationals are viewed pluralistically 'as a
Mann sets up this pivotal antithesis as part of a laudable attempt to move the debate about nationalism and ethnic antagonism beyond the impoverished paradigms that dominated the 1990s. Back then, discussion revolved around a set of unlikely alternatives: mass killing was seen either as the product of elite manipulation or as the resurgence of an array of primitive hatreds. Mann is meticulous in pointing out how neither piece of analysis even begins to address such examples as Bosnia or Rwanda. Hostility in Bosnia, for instance, was neither primitive nor ancient. Equally, while the Hutu assault on the Tutsis had various strands of political leadership, it also enjoyed an astonishing level of popular support and participation. Therefore, the common idea of elite-driven slaughter is easily contradicted. So too is the mythology of primeval Balkan animosities. Recourse to the theory of ethnic democracy is Mann's attempt to develop an overview of the subject that establishes the preconditions for mass popular violence, whilst better accounting for the gruesome facts of intercommunal brutality as they happened on the ground.
As a critical exercise, Mann's treatment is utterly convincing. But as a fresh and original enterprise, it is rather more problematic. The problem with the thesis is easy to identify. Its author unleashes a torrent of evocative epithets designed cumulatively to capture a set of unprepossessing 'ethnic' attitudes, but he does not actually explain how this set of attitudes tends to come about-other than asserting, somewhat tautologically, that they are the hallmarks of ethnic democracy.
More fundamentally still,
However, while it is true that there is a crucial missing link between the identification of bigoted or prejudicial attitudes and the existence of what the book calls ethnic democracy, the real achievement of Mann's study lies in the attention that it pays to the deteriorating dynamics that afflict democracies once a contest between rival national constituencies is under way.
Mass murder among civilians is rarely the product of an annihilating intention that was originally as malevolent as it was ultimately to become. To understand such an outcome, Mann writes, 'we must analyse the unintended consequences of a series of interactions yielding escalation'. Mann's application of this insight to various instances of popular violence in the twentieth century is bold and discriminating. It marks a significant advance on the unscientific moralism that commonly passes for the analysis of democratic nationalism. But it might usefully have been applied to explaining the process of development that culminates in the form of bigotry that the book alluringly conjures up as 'the dark side of democracy', without showing how this relates to the daylight version.