[Bilimsel Haber] Book review: Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Benjamin Lieberman. Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of
Modern Europe. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006. xv + 396 pp. Notes, index.
$27.50 (cloth), ISBN 1-56663-646-9.
*
Reviewed by:* Sabrina Ana Peric, Department of Anthropology, Harvard
University.
*Published by:* H-Genocide <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egenocide>
(December, 2006)



 From Ethnic Cleansing, a Nation-State Is Born

Reporters covering the violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early
1990s repeated a similar story over and over again, that of neighbor
killing neighbor. In his new book, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in
the Making of Modern Europe, historian Benjamin Lieberman describes a
similar situation in nineteenth-century Bulgaria, where victims of
ethnic cleansing under Achmet Aga point out that "he had lived thirty
years [as] their neighbor and had eaten bread and salt with them" (p.
17). How was it possible that such intimate acquaintances could commit
such atrocities against one another? Who was responsible and who could
be held accountable, individuals or larger institutions, states and
empires? These are questions familiar and ever-present for scholars of
genocide and violence. In Terrible Fate, both state-based institutional
ambitions as well as the everyday social relations that give rise to
ethnic cleansing command a central place. The everyday--or what
Lieberman calls "grassroots"--ethnic violence in fact coexists with
violence committed by states and empires. Under what conditions does it
arise?

Following both testimony of victims and witnesses as well as state
documents, Lieberman traces two centuries of ethnic cleansing in cities
and towns, arguing that ethnic cleansing is concurrent with the decline
of empires. Through this narrative, Lieberman deftly connects the
histories of Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle
East, showing not only the impossibility of disentangling the events
that occurred in these regions, but also the necessity of examining
violent acts in a larger historical and geographical setting. "A focus
on ethnic cleansing shifts perspective," (p. xv) asserts Lieberman,
focusing attention away from the "standard histories of Europe" (p. xiv)
which are the histories of the nation-state. Ethnic cleansing, Lieberman
argues, allows us to understand why Europe looks the way it looks today
and how nation-states came to be.

Written chronologically, Lieberman's narrative is divided into eight
chapters that describe three waves of ethnic cleansing which, Lieberman
argues, occur in tandem with three periods of "imperial" decline. The
first--spanning the nineteenth century and the moments during and after
World War I--examines ethnic cleansing during the disintegration of the
Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires. The second period covers
the interwar and World War II period, concurrent with the emergence and
swift end of Nazi Germany. The last period Lieberman examines follows
the violence generated by the "collapse of the Communist empires" (p.
xii). It is important to note that Lieberman's use of the term "empire"
is quite flexible in his timeline. The characteristics of empire
important to Lieberman's argument are those that describe a large
territorial entity (1) comprised of many diverse populations (2)
operating under one particular political system (3), rather than the
characteristics we traditionally attribute to empires: overseas
acquisitions, a defined metropole, particular economic relations between
core and periphery, etc.

Lieberman points out that ethnic cleansing was only coined as a legal
term (and therefore a prosecutable crime) at the end of the twentieth
century, but he argues that it is a valuable term with which to research
the past. He provides a useful starting point by defining understandings
of ethnic cleansing against other acts of mass violence. Ethnic
cleansing "refers to the removal, through violence and intimidation of
an ethnic group defined from a given territory" (p. xiii). It can
include deportation, population transfer, and forced migration. He
distinguishes this from genocide, which, for Lieberman, is synonymous
with the goal of large-scale extermination. The strength of the argument
Lieberman makes throughout Terrible Fate lies however, not in
Lieberman's ability to show how these types of violence are distinct,
but rather how they are related. Lieberman manages this particularly
well when describing the situation of the Armenians within the Ottoman
Empire and thereafter (see chapters 1 and 3), by linking pogroms,
rioting, population transfers, cleansing, and eventual genocide. It
seems counterintuitive then for Lieberman to continually separate out
forms of violence and refer to a "spectrum of violence … where genocide
or extermination lies at the extreme end … ethnic cleansing lies in the
middle [and] pogroms are a comparatively limited form" (p. 37), for his
argument suggests that all coexist, may be connected, be causal of one
another, or represent different stages in a particular government's
policy. In a suggestive move, he even points out that some ethnic
cleansing can be carried out under the umbrella of larger cleansings,
such as the ethnic cleansing of not only Jews but also Serbs and Gypsies
by the Croatian Ustasha government under the auspices of its alliance
with Nazi Germany (p. 188).

While he outlines "strategic" reasons why empires or states might want
certain regions to be ethnically "pure"--citing the importance of
loyalty to the state in volatile border regions--Lieberman also tries to
empirically pin down the motives behind everyday grassroots violence.
This is the central point that Lieberman returns to again and again:
what are the motives behind violence between neighbors? Some of
Lieberman's most poignant insights arrive in dealing with this question
comparatively and historically. First, Lieberman points out plunder (of
property, animals) as one possible motivation mentioned in almost all of
his examples of ethnic violence (pp. 29, 63, 309 among others). More
importantly, he then turns to the antipathy based on an understanding of
identity and/or national belonging. The nineteenth century, especially
those events unfolding around the Russo-Turkish War, "was one of the
first to feature what would become a common element of ethnic cleansing:
civilians who expect to be attacked because of their identity" (p. 20).
The notion of identity and national belonging in particular then becomes
a pivot point for Lieberman in determining violence between neighbors.
Lieberman's main contribution to this recognition of national belonging
and subsequent nationalism is a fascinating questioning of the idea of
nationalism put forth by Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities
(1991). How do people come to understand themselves as part of a group
and why do antagonisms appear with another group/(s)? For Anderson, the
main mechanism in the nineteenth century that allowed face-to-face
relations to translate into a translocal idea of nation was the advent
of print capitalism. As Lieberman points out, however, "key
institutions, such as schools, the press, and military conscription,
that encouraged nationalism among peasants in Western Europe developed
much more slowly in Europe's East" (p. 29). What accounted for the rise
of nationalism then in these areas? He offers three avenues for the
development of national identifications: education, the translation of
religious identity into national identity, and personal experience. It
is this final category of "personal experience" that remains the most
abstract, the most hard to grasp, yet the most pervasive in Terrible Fate.

Transmission of personal experience, often in the form of rumor and
stories, generally precedes instances of violence in Lieberman's
narrative and analysis. Lieberman sources will mention not only what
happened in their community but what "they heard" happened elsewhere. He
describes how the Jews of Vilna, who suffered fewer attacks than others
Jews in Lithuania, "heard of worse crimes than [the] kidnapping [that
occurred in Vilna]" (p. 184). Similarly, Turkish national extremists
told stories of "treasonous Armenians" during World War I (p. 216). As
Lieberman argues, "stories, of course, do not by themselves turn people
into thieves and murderers, but the nationalist stories of Europe's war
were powerful because they changed the way many residents of Central and
Eastern Europe looked at people who lived nearby but spoke different
languages or practiced another religions" (p. 216). Though this part of
the argument appears in every chapter, it remains sadly underdeveloped
by Lieberman in his overarching theory of the perpetuation of ethnic
cleansing. This is unfortunate since Lieberman's source evidence spans
two hundred years; it is thorough and remarkable for it offers the
possibility that storytelling and the spread of rumors--the very
face-to-face interaction that Anderson discounts in the formation of
national identity--are a key element in understanding group belonging
and violence, and the "cycles of revenge" (p. 217) that follow
identification with an ethnic or national group. This rapid spread of
information, of opinion, of experience over large distances is not
dependent on the paths traced by print capitalism. Lieberman's extensive
evidence and sources provide rich material that only begins to hint at
new possibilities for how images of "the enemy" are formed among groups
and how "nationalist desires and myths" (p. 78) come to pit neighbor
against neighbor. Classificatory systems and their production, then, are
not just the domain of large states, empires, or bureaucracies but also
of social groups that can span a continent and create interconnections
in novel ways.

Lieberman must be credited for his clear and lucid prose, which makes
his narrative not only a fluid and enjoyable read for interested
scholars, but also for the general reader. His writing style comes
through most vividly in wonderfully detailed descriptions of the former
diversity of cities such as Salonica and Smyrna, and the subsequent
melancholic nostalgia its expelled residents describe in letters and
other writings. The sources Lieberman uses are varied and range from
news stories, to travelogues, government documents, other written
histories, and even the poetry of literary figures that witnessed
(sometimes both disparagingly and other times triumphantly) instances of
ethnic cleansing. In addition, Lieberman introduces a large body of
documents from both the British Foreign Office and the American
Diplomatic Records (p. 343) reminding us (probably most usefully the
non-historians amongst us) of Britain's and the United States' ongoing
interests in these regions.

One of the most important contributions Lieberman makes in Terrible Fate
is that he empirically shows how easy it is for perpetrators and victims
of ethnic cleansing to change roles. As he points out in the case of the
Armenians and the Turks: "precisely because of the extermination of
Armenians in Turkey, Armenians in the Republic of Armenia moved toward
more extreme violence to protect themselves" (p. 137). Similarly, Croats
who were driven out from eastern Slavonia in 1991-92, later expelled
Serbs from the Slavonia and Krajina regions (p. 320). Lieberman also
points to the little-known aftermath of the most extensive genocide
project of the twentieth century, the Holocaust: the exodus of millions
of Germans forced out of their homes by new authorities. Lieberman
argues that "the exodus of Germans at the end of World War II was the
largest single population movement in modern European history" (p. 221).
The value of this empirical research--demonstrating shifts among victims
and perpetrators--and its addition to a growing body of scholarly work
is as academic as it is political for it situates acts of violence in
time, space, social, and political settings. It negates racist,
prejudiced arguments that attribute particular people or entire social
groups with inherent tendencies towards violence or aggression. Though
scholars often claim that work such as Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts
(2005) or any other suggesting a "clash of civilizations" has been
discredited or debunked, it is work like Lieberman's, however, that will
continue to positively reach and shape a general readership.

Lieberman's conclusion to Terrible Fate is very prescriptive in its
assertion that we can use historical evidence to pinpoint future sources
of potential ethnic cleansing: "we should look for an ethnically and
religiously diverse region, a border zone of civilizations, especially
one undergoing rapid modernization, where the boundaries of major ethnic
and religious groups do not match the boundaries of states" (p. 334).
The simplicity of this statement however does not appear to do justice
to the complexity of the argument Lieberman presents in the rest of his
book, especially since he so acutely shows that boundaries of groups and
of states are but one factor in the complex set of conditions that
allows violence to occur. He shows us cities that survive for hundreds
of years as places where diversity thrive peacefully but then collapse
suddenly. Does a diverse modernizing region always mean ethnic violence?
Or does his conclusion point to an oversimplification that scholars of
violence and genocide are often quick to make because of the recognition
that it is a necessary step in the transition from scholarly research to
policy change in today's world of the nation-state?



Citation: Sabrina Ana Peric. "Review of Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible
Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe," H-Genocide,
H-Net Reviews, December, 2006. URL:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=284281169491837.