[Discussion] book review: Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century
Europe
sule tarakcioglu
suletar@bilkent.edu.tr
Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:44:09 -0700
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*Norman M. Naimark.* /Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in
Twentieth-Century Europe//. /Cambridge and London: Harvard University
Press, 2001. 248 pp. Notes, index. $26.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-00313-6;
$16.95 (paper), ISBN 0-674-00994-0.
Reviewed by *Nick Baron*, School of History and Classics, University of
Manchester.
Published by H-Genocide <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egenocide> (March,
2004)
*Ethnic Cleansing, Modernity, and the State*
In his latest work, Stanford University historian Norman Naimark offers
a brilliantly engaging and deeply dispiriting examination of the role of
ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Europe. In doing so, he provides
the reader with a series of well-crafted, cogent, analytical narratives
describing the historical origins, political objectives, logistical
procedures, and savage outcomes of five case studies of ethnic
cleansing: the Turkish actions against the Armenians in 1915 and against
the Anatolian Greeks in 1921-22; the Nazi assault on the Jews from the
start of the Second World War to the initiation of policies of mass
extermination in 1941; the Soviet deportation of the Chechens-Ingush
from the North Caucasus and of the Tatars from the Crimea in 1944; the
expulsions of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia after 1945; and the
more recent inter-ethnic conflicts, and attempts at international
intervention, in Bosnia and Kosovo, which have brought the term "ethnic
cleansing" into common usage.
Beyond offering brisk, vivid empirical accounts of these events, Naimark
reflects more broadly on their commonalities and inter-relationships, on
definitional problems such as distinguishing ethnic cleansing from war
and genocide, on the character of the modern state, and on the murderous
potential of integral nationalism. His consideration of these conceptual
issues is compelling, and elaborated without the dense jargon and
solipsism so frequently encountered in the social science literature on
genocide and mass killing.[1] Naimark's slim volume is comparative
history at its most intelligent, lucid, and readable.
In the last decade of the twentieth century, the calamitous break-up of
the former Yugoslavia (as well as the even more bloody disaster of
Rwanda, which Naimark honorably concedes lies outside his field of
expertise) opened a dreadful new perspective on the course and
consequences of earlier events. This seemed all the more shocking to
many since it crushed the hopes of harmony and peace inspired by the end
of the Cold War and the collapse of state socialism. From this dismal
millennial vantage point, numerous scholars have been moved to
reconsider the history of the last hundred years and to re-assess the
trajectory of European modernity.[2] "Was the twentieth century's sordid
history of genocide simply repeating itself in this last decade?" asks
Naimark. "Or was there something new in these wars of 'ethnic cleansing'
about which the media spoke and wrote so often" (p. 2)?
Naimark's answer is twofold. Firstly, he argues, it is important to
distinguish between "ethnic cleansing" and genocide. These two
activities are characterized by their different objectives. "Genocide is
the intentional killing off of part or all of an ethnic, religious or
national group; the murder of a people or peoples ... is the objective.
The intention of ethnic cleansing is to remove a people and often all
traces of them from a concrete territory" (p. 3). The goal of the
latter, therefore, is concerned with securing the ethnic integrity of a
given space, usually identified with the borders of a new and insecure
state. This may involve expulsions, deportations, or forced transfers of
a population carried out in a more or less orderly, though invariably
brutal, manner. In certain circumstances, however, "ethnic cleansing"
can generate genocidal actions; as Naimark writes in his habitually
simple yet evocative prose, "ethnic cleansing bleeds into genocide, as
mass murder is committed in order to rid the land of a people" (pp. 3-4).
If it is necessary to distinguish in this way between genocide and
ethnic cleansing, this does not mean that recent events in the former
Yugoslavia were unprecedented. On the contrary, Naimark asserts that
"'ethnic cleansing' is a useful and viable term for understanding not
just the war in former Yugoslavia but other similar cataclysmic events
in the course of the twentieth century" (p. 3). This second point takes
us to the core of the author's comparative project.
Genocide, in Naimark's conception, is the consummate realization of the
"impetus to homogenize" (p. 8), which all too frequently in the
twentieth century prompted European states--as well as others which, as
noted above, remain outside the purview of this work--to embark on
ethnic cleansing.[3] It is this underlying motivation which makes the
phenomenon of ethnic cleansing "a profoundly modern experience" (p. 6).
Naimark offers a compelling account of why this is so. Firstly, the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries witnessed the spread of a
"racialist nationalism" which asserted an "essentialist view of nations,
a view that excluded the 'other' and foreswore assimilation" (p. 7).
This prompted European imperial powers to repatriate practices of mass
murder from the colonies to their continental homelands.
Secondly, as European imperial territories fragmented in the
early-twentieth century, there emerged a new form of state, defining
itself in ethnic terms and striving to "homogenize" society to meet its
own "needs for order, transparency, and responsiveness" (p. 8).[4] To
accomplish this, the modern nationalist state intervened to an
unprecedented degree in the lives of its citizens, subjecting its
population to regulation, surveillance, and manipulation by means of
policy and propaganda. Crucially, it "insisted on identifying ethnic
groups and concretizing difference and otherness with the goal of
banishing it" (p. 8).
Thirdly, the new states' capacity to intervene in society and effect
their desired social and spatial re-ordering would have been impossible
without modern innovations in communications, transportation, and the
means of killing: "the drive toward ethnic cleansing comes in part from
the modern state's compulsion to complete policies and finish with
problems but also in part from its technological abilities to do so" (p.
9).
Naimark, drawing on the work of historians such as Omer Bartov and
Elizabeth Domansky, identifies the First World War as the defining
experience, the "crucible for the development of the modern nation-state
and its willingness and ability to engage in mass population policies"
(p. 9).[5] In particular, he points to ways in which states at war
asserted "total" claims over the lives of their citizens and for the
first time engaged in mass-scale forced deportations and evacuations
(which persisted as practices of peace-making, as new post-war
governments embarked on the "unmixing" of territories and populations
before the treaties were signed, sealed, and implemented).[6] The Great
War also "introduced industrial killing into the consciousness and
reality of the European state system" (p. 9).
Finally, Naimark directs attention to the role of political elites in
instigating ethnic cleansing, and of bureaucrats and technical
professionals in organizing its implementation. Throughout the book, in
fact, the author repeatedly emphasizes that eruptions of inter-communal
conflict have more to do with the "warped ambitions" (p. 16) of cynical
political actors, and their machinations and manipulations, than with
the "ancient ethnic hatreds" so often adduced by the world's media (and
by politicians in other countries reluctant to intervene) as the source
of ethnic violence. This is doubtless true, but Naimark might have
attempted to examine the motives which lead "ordinary men" suddenly to
visit such fierce blood-letting upon neighbors with whom they have lived
for years in peace.[7]
Naimark, however, is more interested in writing history "from above" and
he writes this history with admirable clarity, constructing a series of
detailed analytical narratives that draw together an impressive range of
secondary literature in numerous languages as well as some of his own
archival research in the Russian archives. Each of the five case studies
examines the particular "confluence of events, political leadership, and
intercommunal hostility" (p. 16) which determined the context and course
of the events in question, and could stand alone as a short but thorough
introduction to each topic, suitable for students as well as for a more
general readership. At the same time, Naimark takes care throughout to
assess the similarities and differences between each instance of ethnic
cleansing.
A concluding chapter offers a useful systematization and reiteration of
the insights the attentive reader will have elicited from the case
studies, if they have not been numbed by the often gruesome descriptions
of violence. Through all the individual instances of ethnic cleansing,
from 1915 in Turkey to the present day in Kosovo, Naimark identifies a
marked consistency of purpose and commonality of procedure.
Firstly, Naimark notes that ethnic cleansing is always a violent
process. Unlike war, however, which "matches armed men against armed men
in a contest of will, machines and numbers, ethnic cleansing usually
involves an armed perpetrator and an unarmed victim--more often than
not, an armed man and an unarmed woman, child, or elderly person" (p.
186). The violence of ethnic cleansing is particularly vicious and
personal, motivated in part by a "rational" strategy of encouraging
flight, but also by a desire to punish the victims for "their crime of
being different" (p. 186). Even the "well-organised and premeditated"
deportations of the Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars involved high
rates of mortality from disease and starvation, and the "orderly
'transfer'" of Germans from Poland claimed up to half a million victims
(pp. 186-187).
Naimark's second observation is that all the surveyed cases of ethnic
cleansing have occurred either during war or during the "chaotic
transition from war to peace" (p. 187). In such circumstances, state
leaders can carry out extreme actions beyond the scrutiny of their own
public and outside the purview of international opinion. War also offers
regimes the opportunity to eliminate allegedly treacherous groups of the
population. Furthermore, war "habituates its participants to killing and
to obeying orders" (p. 188). The author remarks usefully that regular
armies are frequently employed to carry out ethnic cleansing, but many
of the worst atrocities are perpetrated by paramilitary formations.
Another characteristic common to all the cases of twentieth-century
ethnic cleansing under examination has been their "totalistic"
objectives. "Ethnic cleansing, driven by the ideology of integral
nationalism and the military and technological power of the modern
state, rarely forgives, makes exceptions or allows people to slip
through the cracks" (p. 190). Here, as throughout the book, Naimark
sensibly allows for exceptions to his generalizations: his comparative
treatment is admirably sensitive to nuance and difference. Thus, while
the author emphasizes the "totalizing" nature of the Soviet national
deportations and of the Nazi persecution, deportation, and, later,
murder of the Jews, he concedes that Turkish assaults on the Armenians
and Greeks did not aspire to total elimination of these ethnic
populations (permitting some Armenian women, for example, to convert to
Islam and join Turkish households), and that the Polish and Czechoslovak
governments in 1945 promulgated definitions of nationality and
citizenship which left some slight room for accommodation with
minorities, at least initially.
Throughout the case studies, Naimark stresses three further aspects of
ethnic cleansing that testify to its "totalizing" scope. He consolidates
these themes in his conclusion. Firstly, in almost all instances the
authorities responsible for uprooting populations have striven to
eradicate from the purged territory all residual traces of the former
existence of these departing groups. To achieve this, the instigators of
ethnic cleansing do not stop at the demolition of material remains of
the displaced, levelling churches, mosques, synagogues, monuments,
graveyards, and frequently homes (though sometimes the houses are
occupied by neighbors or new settlers of the ethnic majority
population). They also destroy all cultural and linguistic residues,
burning books, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and archives, changing
place and street names, re-writing history books and ethnographies, or
proscribing the use of a language.
Secondly, ethnic cleansing also involves dispossessing the displaced
population. Sometimes the state itself undertakes to expropriate their
property. More often it encourages its supporters to rob, exploit, and
cheat the refugees out of their possessions. There is purpose in this
criminality: to ensure departing communities have no means to return,
and to ensure that if they do return, they can make no claims over
confiscated or stolen property.
Finally, ethnic cleansing is deeply misogynistic, invariably being
directed disproportionately at female populations as the "cultural and
biological repository of the nation" (p. 83). In particular, Naimark
underlines the use of systematic campaigns of rape as a "tool of ethnic
cleansing" (p. 197), employed to terrorize the target population, to
drive them out of their homes and territories, and to punish and
humiliate them for their difference.
Naimark's stated ambition in this work is that by identifying "the
characteristics of ethnic cleansing and [examining] the way it works in
concrete cases ... we may perhaps find ways to prevent future episodes,
or at least to stop them earlier in their fearsome trajectories towards
genocide" (p. 185). His conclusion, however, is not optimistic. Corrupt
and cynical political elites continue to exploit integral nationalism to
mobilize support; having gained power, they continue to implement
"homogenizing" programs on behalf of their own socio-ethnic
constituency. Yet when nationalist regimes undertake such actions, the
international community continues to be impotent, refusing to intervene
or intervening tardily and ineffectually. What is worse, history seems
to demonstrate that ethnic cleansing is successful in its own terms. In
Kosovo, despite international intervention (or, some would claim, partly
as a result of a belated and misconceived intervention), "ethnically
pure enclaves are under construction, separated from their former
neighbours by walls, barbed wire, and heavily armed NATO forces" (p.
182). As Naimark argues, societies in the longer term are left
impoverished by the departure of minorities and the permanent loss of
diversity.
Overall, this volume is a significant contribution to the literature on
genocide, as well as to our understanding of forms of collective
violence and the nature of the modern state. The book's strengths have
already been described. To criticize it for a lack of great theoretical
originality or sophistication would be to miss the point--this volume is
designed to be a comparative analysis of a series of empirical case
studies, and its conceptual framework is perfectly adequate for this
purpose. It raises many important and challenging questions, in
particular concerning the nature of "high modernism"; about the
correlation between modern state-building and the "totalizing" claims
and practices of different systems and regimes; about the rationality of
ethnic cleansing as a state strategy; about the character of popular
participation in collective violence; and about the displaced person's
own experience of ethnic cleansing. That a slim volume such as this
offers only partial answers is to be expected. Indeed, its great virtue
and value lie precisely in its vigorous exposition of a new and vital
research agenda, which will, without doubt, inspire many scholars to
pursue more exhaustive studies. That the publishers failed to include
relevant maps to illustrate the case studies is, however, unforgivable,
especially since the author defines ethnic cleansing specifically with
reference to its territorial dimensions.
Notes
[1]. For example, see Isidor Wallimann and Michael Dobkowski, Genocide
and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (New York:
Syracuse University Press, 2000). While many of the individual chapters
are engaging works of historical synthesis, social scientific
abstraction, or theological and philosophical reflection, the volume as
a whole, in the opinion of this reviewer, serves more to befuddle than
to enlighten.
[2]. See, for example, David Mazower's Dark Continent: Europe's
Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998); and Jonathan Glover,
Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1999).
[3]. For a magnificent treatment of collective violence in non-European
societies, offering meticulous analysis of many instances of ethnic
cleansing, see Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 2001).
[4]. Naimark here acknowledges the ideas of Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity
and Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); and James C.
Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
[5]. Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial
Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);
and Elisabeth Domansky, "Militarization and Reproduction in World War I
Germany," in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930, ed.
Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 427-463.
[6]. For the "unmixing of peoples," see Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism
Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially chap. 6.
[7]. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101
and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). See
also, for example, Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot.
*Subjects:*
* Racism--Europe--History--20th century.
* Population transfers.
* Political atrocities--Europe.
* Europe--Ethnic relations.
<http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=84591082031333>
*Citation:* Nick Baron. "Review of Norman M. Naimark, /Fires of Hatred:
Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe/," H-Genocide, H-Net
Reviews, March, 2004. URL:
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=84591082031333.
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<td width="80%"><font size="+2"><b>Norman M. Naimark.</b> <i>Fires
of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe</i></font><i>. </i><font
size="+1">Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. 248
pp.
Notes, index.
$26.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-00313-6; $16.95 (paper), ISBN 0-674-00994-0.
</font>
<p><font size="+1">Reviewed by <b>Nick Baron</b>, School of
History and Classics, University of Manchester.<br>
Published by <a href="http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egenocide">
H-Genocide</a> (March, 2004) </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"><br>
</font></p>
<center><font size="+1"><b>Ethnic Cleansing, Modernity, and the
State</b></font></center>
<p> <font size="+1">In his latest work, Stanford University
historian
Norman Naimark offers a brilliantly engaging and deeply dispiriting
examination of the role of ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century
Europe. In doing so, he provides the reader with a series of
well-crafted, cogent, analytical narratives describing the historical
origins, political objectives, logistical procedures, and savage
outcomes of five case studies of ethnic cleansing: the Turkish actions
against the Armenians in 1915 and against the Anatolian Greeks in
1921-22; the Nazi assault on the Jews from the start of the Second
World War to the initiation of policies of mass extermination in 1941;
the Soviet deportation of the Chechens-Ingush from the North Caucasus
and of the Tatars from the Crimea in 1944; the expulsions of Germans
from Poland and Czechoslovakia after 1945; and the more recent
inter-ethnic conflicts, and attempts at international intervention, in
Bosnia and Kosovo, which have brought the term "ethnic cleansing" into
common usage. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> Beyond offering brisk,
vivid empirical accounts of these events, Naimark reflects more broadly
on their commonalities and inter-relationships, on definitional
problems such as distinguishing ethnic cleansing from war and genocide,
on the character of the modern state, and on the murderous potential of
integral nationalism. His consideration of these conceptual issues is
compelling, and elaborated without the dense jargon and solipsism so
frequently encountered in the social science literature on genocide and
mass killing.[1] Naimark's slim volume is comparative history at its
most intelligent, lucid, and readable. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1">In the last decade of the twentieth century,
the calamitous break-up of
the former Yugoslavia (as well as the even more bloody disaster of
Rwanda, which Naimark honorably concedes lies outside his field of
expertise) opened a dreadful new perspective on the course and
consequences of earlier events. This seemed all the more shocking to
many since it crushed the hopes of harmony and peace inspired by the
end of the Cold War and the collapse of state socialism. From this
dismal millennial vantage point, numerous scholars have been moved to
reconsider the history of the last hundred years and to re-assess the
trajectory of European modernity.[2] "Was the twentieth century's
sordid history of genocide simply repeating itself in this last
decade?" asks Naimark. "Or was there something new in these wars of
'ethnic cleansing' about which the media spoke and wrote so often" (p.
2)? </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> Naimark's answer is twofold.
Firstly, he argues, it is important to distinguish between "ethnic
cleansing" and genocide. These two activities are characterized by
their different objectives. "Genocide is the intentional killing off of
part or all of an ethnic, religious or national group; the murder of a
people or peoples ... is the objective. The intention of ethnic
cleansing is to remove a people and often all traces of them from a
concrete territory" (p. 3). The goal of the latter, therefore, is
concerned with securing the ethnic integrity of a given space, usually
identified with the borders of a new and insecure state. This may
involve expulsions, deportations, or forced transfers of a population
carried out in a more or less orderly, though invariably brutal,
manner. In certain circumstances, however, "ethnic cleansing" can
generate genocidal actions; as Naimark writes in his habitually simple
yet evocative prose, "ethnic cleansing bleeds into genocide, as mass
murder is committed in order to rid the land of a people" (pp. 3-4). </font></p>
<p><font size="+1">If it is necessary to distinguish in this way
between genocide and
ethnic cleansing, this does not mean that recent events in the former
Yugoslavia were unprecedented. On the contrary, Naimark asserts that
"'ethnic cleansing' is a useful and viable term for understanding not
just the war in former Yugoslavia but other similar cataclysmic events
in the course of the twentieth century" (p. 3). This second point takes
us to the core of the author's comparative project. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Genocide, in Naimark's conception, is the
consummate realization of the
"impetus to homogenize" (p. 8), which all too frequently in the
twentieth century prompted European states--as well as others which, as
noted above, remain outside the purview of this work--to embark on
ethnic cleansing.[3] It is this underlying motivation which makes the
phenomenon of ethnic cleansing "a profoundly modern experience" (p. 6).
</font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> Naimark offers a compelling account of
why this is so. Firstly, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries witnessed the spread of a "racialist nationalism" which
asserted an "essentialist view of nations, a view that excluded the
'other' and foreswore assimilation" (p. 7). This prompted European
imperial powers to repatriate practices of mass murder from the
colonies to their continental homelands. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Secondly, as European imperial territories
fragmented in the
early-twentieth century, there emerged a new form of state, defining
itself in ethnic terms and striving to "homogenize" society to meet its
own "needs for order, transparency, and responsiveness" (p. 8).[4] To
accomplish this, the modern nationalist state intervened to an
unprecedented degree in the lives of its citizens, subjecting its
population to regulation, surveillance, and manipulation by means of
policy and propaganda. Crucially, it "insisted on identifying ethnic
groups and concretizing difference and otherness with the goal of
banishing it" (p. 8). </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> Thirdly, the new
states' capacity to intervene in society and effect their desired
social and spatial re-ordering would have been impossible without
modern innovations in communications, transportation, and the means of
killing: "the drive toward ethnic cleansing comes in part from the
modern state's compulsion to complete policies and finish with problems
but also in part from its technological abilities to do so" (p. 9). </font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Naimark, drawing on the work of historians
such as Omer Bartov and
Elizabeth Domansky, identifies the First World War as the defining
experience, the "crucible for the development of the modern
nation-state and its willingness and ability to engage in mass
population policies" (p. 9).[5] In particular, he points to ways in
which states at war asserted "total" claims over the lives of their
citizens and for the first time engaged in mass-scale forced
deportations and evacuations (which persisted as practices of
peace-making, as new post-war governments embarked on the "unmixing" of
territories and populations before the treaties were signed, sealed,
and implemented).[6] The Great War also "introduced industrial killing
into the consciousness and reality of the European state system" (p.
9). </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> Finally, Naimark directs attention
to the role of political elites in instigating ethnic cleansing, and of
bureaucrats and technical professionals in organizing its
implementation. Throughout the book, in fact, the author repeatedly
emphasizes that eruptions of inter-communal conflict have more to do
with the "warped ambitions" (p. 16) of cynical political actors, and
their machinations and manipulations, than with the "ancient ethnic
hatreds" so often adduced by the world's media (and by politicians in
other countries reluctant to intervene) as the source of ethnic
violence. This is doubtless true, but Naimark might have attempted to
examine the motives which lead "ordinary men" suddenly to visit such
fierce blood-letting upon neighbors with whom they have lived for years
in peace.[7] </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> Naimark, however, is more
interested in writing history "from above" and he writes this history
with admirable clarity, constructing a series of detailed analytical
narratives that draw together an impressive range of secondary
literature in numerous languages as well as some of his own archival
research in the Russian archives. Each of the five case studies
examines the particular "confluence of events, political leadership,
and intercommunal hostility" (p. 16) which determined the context and
course of the events in question, and could stand alone as a short but
thorough introduction to each topic, suitable for students as well as
for a more general readership. At the same time, Naimark takes care
throughout to assess the similarities and differences between each
instance of ethnic cleansing. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> A
concluding chapter offers a useful systematization and reiteration of
the insights the attentive reader will have elicited from the case
studies, if they have not been numbed by the often gruesome
descriptions of violence. Through all the individual instances of
ethnic cleansing, from 1915 in Turkey to the present day in Kosovo,
Naimark identifies a marked consistency of purpose and commonality of
procedure. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> Firstly, Naimark notes that
ethnic cleansing is always a violent process. Unlike war, however,
which "matches armed men against armed men in a contest of will,
machines and numbers, ethnic cleansing usually involves an armed
perpetrator and an unarmed victim--more often than not, an armed man
and an unarmed woman, child, or elderly person" (p. 186). The violence
of ethnic cleansing is particularly vicious and personal, motivated in
part by a "rational" strategy of encouraging flight, but also by a
desire to punish the victims for "their crime of being different" (p.
186). Even the "well-organised and premeditated" deportations of the
Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars involved high rates of mortality
from disease and starvation, and the "orderly 'transfer'" of Germans
from Poland claimed up to half a million victims (pp. 186-187). </font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Naimark's second observation is that all the
surveyed cases of ethnic
cleansing have occurred either during war or during the "chaotic
transition from war to peace" (p. 187). In such circumstances, state
leaders can carry out extreme actions beyond the scrutiny of their own
public and outside the purview of international opinion. War also
offers regimes the opportunity to eliminate allegedly treacherous
groups of the population. Furthermore, war "habituates its participants
to killing and to obeying orders" (p. 188). The author remarks usefully
that regular armies are frequently employed to carry out ethnic
cleansing, but many of the worst atrocities are perpetrated by
paramilitary formations. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> Another
characteristic common to all the cases of twentieth-century ethnic
cleansing under examination has been their "totalistic" objectives.
"Ethnic cleansing, driven by the ideology of integral nationalism and
the military and technological power of the modern state, rarely
forgives, makes exceptions or allows people to slip through the cracks"
(p. 190). Here, as throughout the book, Naimark sensibly allows for
exceptions to his generalizations: his comparative treatment is
admirably sensitive to nuance and difference. Thus, while the author
emphasizes the "totalizing" nature of the Soviet national deportations
and of the Nazi persecution, deportation, and, later, murder of the
Jews, he concedes that Turkish assaults on the Armenians and Greeks did
not aspire to total elimination of these ethnic populations (permitting
some Armenian women, for example, to convert to Islam and join Turkish
households), and that the Polish and Czechoslovak governments in 1945
promulgated definitions of nationality and citizenship which left some
slight room for accommodation with minorities, at least initially. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Throughout the case studies, Naimark stresses
three further aspects of
ethnic cleansing that testify to its "totalizing" scope. He
consolidates these themes in his conclusion. Firstly, in almost all
instances the authorities responsible for uprooting populations have
striven to eradicate from the purged territory all residual traces of
the former existence of these departing groups. To achieve this, the
instigators of ethnic cleansing do not stop at the demolition of
material remains of the displaced, levelling churches, mosques,
synagogues, monuments, graveyards, and frequently homes (though
sometimes the houses are occupied by neighbors or new settlers of the
ethnic majority population). They also destroy all cultural and
linguistic residues, burning books, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and
archives, changing place and street names, re-writing history books and
ethnographies, or proscribing the use of a language. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Secondly, ethnic cleansing also involves
dispossessing the displaced
population. Sometimes the state itself undertakes to expropriate their
property. More often it encourages its supporters to rob, exploit, and
cheat the refugees out of their possessions. There is purpose in this
criminality: to ensure departing communities have no means to return,
and to ensure that if they do return, they can make no claims over
confiscated or stolen property. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Finally, ethnic cleansing is deeply
misogynistic, invariably being
directed disproportionately at female populations as the "cultural and
biological repository of the nation" (p. 83). In particular, Naimark
underlines the use of systematic campaigns of rape as a "tool of ethnic
cleansing" (p. 197), employed to terrorize the target population, to
drive them out of their homes and territories, and to punish and
humiliate them for their difference. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Naimark's stated ambition in this work is that
by identifying "the
characteristics of ethnic cleansing and [examining] the way it works in
concrete cases ... we may perhaps find ways to prevent future episodes,
or at least to stop them earlier in their fearsome trajectories towards
genocide" (p. 185). His conclusion, however, is not optimistic. Corrupt
and cynical political elites continue to exploit integral nationalism
to mobilize support; having gained power, they continue to implement
"homogenizing" programs on behalf of their own socio-ethnic
constituency. Yet when nationalist regimes undertake such actions, the
international community continues to be impotent, refusing to intervene
or intervening tardily and ineffectually. What is worse, history seems
to demonstrate that ethnic cleansing is successful in its own terms. In
Kosovo, despite international intervention (or, some would claim,
partly as a result of a belated and misconceived intervention),
"ethnically pure enclaves are under construction, separated from their
former neighbours by walls, barbed wire, and heavily armed NATO forces"
(p. 182). As Naimark argues, societies in the longer term are left
impoverished by the departure of minorities and the permanent loss of
diversity. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> Overall, this volume is a
significant contribution to the literature on genocide, as well as to
our understanding of forms of collective violence and the nature of the
modern state. The book's strengths have already been described. To
criticize it for a lack of great theoretical originality or
sophistication would be to miss the point--this volume is designed to
be a comparative analysis of a series of empirical case studies, and
its conceptual framework is perfectly adequate for this purpose. It
raises many important and challenging questions, in particular
concerning the nature of "high modernism"; about the correlation
between modern state-building and the "totalizing" claims and practices
of different systems and regimes; about the rationality of ethnic
cleansing as a state strategy; about the character of popular
participation in collective violence; and about the displaced person's
own experience of ethnic cleansing. That a slim volume such as this
offers only partial answers is to be expected. Indeed, its great virtue
and value lie precisely in its vigorous exposition of a new and vital
research agenda, which will, without doubt, inspire many scholars to
pursue more exhaustive studies. That the publishers failed to include
relevant maps to illustrate the case studies is, however, unforgivable,
especially since the author defines ethnic cleansing specifically with
reference to its territorial dimensions. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> Notes </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> [1]. For example, see Isidor Wallimann and
Michael Dobkowski, <cite>Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and
Case Studies of Mass Death</cite>
(New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000). While many of the
individual chapters are engaging works of historical synthesis, social
scientific abstraction, or theological and philosophical reflection,
the volume as a whole, in the opinion of this reviewer, serves more to
befuddle than to enlighten. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> [2]. See, for example, David Mazower's <cite>Dark
Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century</cite> (London: Allen Lane,
1998); and Jonathan Glover, <cite>Humanity: A Moral History of the
Twentieth Century</cite> (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999). </font></p>
<p><font size="+1">[3]. For a magnificent treatment of collective
violence in non-European
societies, offering meticulous analysis of many instances of ethnic
cleansing, see Donald L. Horowitz, <cite>The Deadly Ethnic Riot</cite>
(Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2001). </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> [4]. Naimark here acknowledges the ideas of
Zygmunt Bauman, <cite>Modernity and Holocaust</cite> (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1989); and James C. Scott, <cite>Seeing Like a
State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed</cite>
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> [5]. Omer Bartov, <cite>Murder in Our Midst:
The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation</cite>
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Elisabeth Domansky,
"Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany," in <cite>Society,
Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930</cite>, ed. Geoff Eley
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 427-463. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> [6]. For the "unmixing of peoples," see
Rogers Brubaker, <cite>Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the
National Question in the New Europe</cite> (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), especially chap. 6. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> [7]. Christopher Browning, <cite>Ordinary
Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland</cite>
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993). See also, for example, Horowitz, <cite>The
Deadly Ethnic Riot</cite>. </font></p>
<p><font size="+1"> </font></p>
<p></p>
<p><font size="+1"> </font></p>
<p></p>
<p><font size="+1"><br>
<b>Subjects:</b></font></p>
<ul>
<li><font size="+1">Racism--Europe--History--20th century. </font></li>
<li><font size="+1">Population transfers. </font></li>
<li><font size="+1">Political atrocities--Europe. </font></li>
<li><font size="+1">Europe--Ethnic relations. </font></li>
</ul>
<center>
<table bgcolor="#d2d2d2" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"
border="0" width="585">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td width="86"><a
href="http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=84591082031333">
<img alt="PDF Printable Version" border="0" height="39"
width="86" src="cid:part1.07040103.00080207@bilkent.edu.tr"></a></td>
<td align="left"><img height="39" width="181" alt="gradient"
src="cid:part2.01030208.04080602@bilkent.edu.tr"></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<font size="+1"> </font></center>
<font size="+1"><br>
</font>
<p><font size="+1"><b>Citation:</b>
Nick Baron. "Review of Norman M. Naimark, <i>Fires of Hatred: Ethnic
Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe</i>," H-Genocide, H-Net Reviews,
March, 2004. URL:
<a
href="http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=84591082031333"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=84591082031333</a>.
</font></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</body>
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