In the Countries of the Dead

A new book on ethnic cleansing in Europe is likely to become required reading for those wishing to understand ethnic conflicts--especially in the Balkans. by Michael A. Innes 15 February 2002 Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe by Norman M. Naimark. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2001, 248 pages.

American writer and adventurer John Reed began covering World War I as a correspondent for Metropolitan Magazine in 1914, his travels taking him through most of Western Europe. Within a month of his return to New York in early 1915, he began a second journey, this time heading for the Continent's eastern reaches. One of his first destinations was Serbia, newly independent, riven with typhus, and still suffering from the devastation of multiple wars: "The country of death," Reed called it in The War in Eastern Europe.

A generation later, Dame Rebecca West's 1941 travel memoir Black Lamb and Grey Falcon articulated what everyone then thought they knew about the peoples residing in the mysterious and deadly region. "Violence," she wrote, "was all I knew of the Balkans." The perception, she admitted, was drawn from liberal philosophies of the time and "the prejudices of the French," for whom the term "Balkan" was a convenient stand-in for "savage."

West's rather jaundiced vision of life in the land of the South Slavs--passionately pro-Serb and conveying an unfortunate racialist disdain for Muslims--nonetheless captured what has since become the default portrait of frictions between the various ethnic groups--Serbs and Croats, Albanians and Greeks, Vlachs and Bulgarians, Turks and everyone else. "Each people was perpetually making charges of inhumanity against all its neighbors," she wrote.

To the outside world, attempts at understanding the violence reflected much the same ethno-hubris that prevails today. According to West, "English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer."

BALKAN CHIAROSCURO

If "ancient tribal hatreds" were thought to govern the conduct of Balkan violence in the first half of the 20th century, little has occurred in recent years to disabuse observers of the notion. Episodes of bloody nationalist conflict over the last decade have carried forward the same flavor of inhuman brutality that prevailed when Reed and West were recording events. In the early 1990s, former communist states began imploding, and the mad scramble for power that followed saw political entrepreneurs whipping up ethnic tensions in calculated bids to consolidate potential constituencies. The ensuing carnage was quickly portrayed in terms that convinced some solipsistic Balkan-watchers of the futility of intervention and the impossibility of constructive engagement between warring parties.

Robert D. Kaplan's best-selling Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History relied explicitly on West's observations, conveying the same dyspeptic understanding of conflict in Southeastern Europe. In his memoir To End a War, Richard Holbrooke wrote of the "Rebecca West Factor," suggesting that this "bad history" helped to propagate a misguided view of the inevitability of the Yugoslav wars. To policy-makers and media pundits, a culture of blood feuds and medieval sensibilities, sanctified heroes and mythologized history meant that immediate community and ethnic frictions were really an essentialized ethnic trap. Long-term pluralist accommodation thus had little hope of success, despite solid evidence to the contrary.

There is a certain incarnadine banality to the way human rights abusers can become dreamtime hostes humanis generis, decontextualized bogeymen whose perpetual and profound evil becomes the yardstick by which we define what we are not. Accepting the universal human potential to commit acts of barbarism has proven a challenge to shuttered sensibilities, one easily deferred to in favor of Manichean dichotomies and cosmopolitan arrogance. Given the images of bloodletting that predominated in the media throughout the early 1990s, views of this type are hardly counterintuitive. But serious analysis of ethnic conflict has consistently challenged such parochial interpretations, to the point where blaming flare-ups of intergroup violence--in the Balkans and elsewhere--on "ancient tribal hatreds" is now generally recognized as a decidedly outre fantasy. Norman M. Naimark's Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe engages the reader in just such a manner, laying bare the wounded soul of Europe's last century.

Naimark, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies in the Department of History at Stanford University, has managed to craft a text that is at once accessible and penetrating. Other thinkers--Jennifer Jackson-Preece, Andrew Bell-Fialkoff--have approached ethnic cleansing as something more than a local phenomenon, but Naimark's study is destined to become a classic. In current parlance, when "ethnic cleansing" is not being used as a sloppy euphemism for genocide, it serves, in the public mind, as a casual synecdoche of the predatory nationalisms that ran amok in the Balkans throughout the 1990s.

Fires of Hatred is a necessary and welcome corrective, taking the phenomenon seriously and historicizing it within 20th-century Europe, partly, as Naimark acknowledges, because Europe is what he knows. He rejects Bell-Fialkoff's broad historical array of case studies, arguing that the particularities of 20th-century European states make ethnic cleansing as we have come to know it distinct from similar atrocities committed in other periods and other places. Modern racialist nationalism, the state's ability to organize and control citizens, the "impetus to homogenize" internal populations, are all salient and interconnected characteristics of ethnic cleansing. About the role of political elites, Naimark is clear: "Ethnic cleansing would not have taken place in the twentieth century without the direct involvement and connivance of political leaders."

There are discernible links connecting the episodes discussed, the actions and ambitions of Continental powers inextricably bound, each case establishing deadly "lessons learned" for the planners of the next. Naimark begins with the Armenian genocide of 1915, "the most contentious of all the cases I consider," as well as the expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia in 1921-1922. It takes a good deal of courage to label the Jewish Holocaust anything but genocide, but the author does so, to great effect. Discussing the stage of the Final Solution that occurred between September 1939 and June 1941, he asks, "At what point did ethnic cleansing stop and genocide begin?" Soviet perpetrators of ethnic cleansing were particularly thorough, so much so that both the expulsion of Chechens-Ingush from the northern Caucasus in early 1944 and the forcible deportation of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia in May of that same year come under scrutiny.

The Polish and Czech expulsions of Germans after World War II make for useful case studies "because they reverse the moral lenses through which we view ethnic cleansing," and because in those two instances, "ethnic cleansing was conceived and carried out by democratic regimes." In the former Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansing in the 1990s became the atrocity of choice, the cruel handmaiden of Balkan warfare. Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Kosovar Albanians: Each was in turn perpetrator and victim, in a world where "political elites seem to be doing everything they can to complete, one way or another, the unmixing of peoples."

A TERRIFYING POTENTIAL

Naimark observes that ethnic cleansing "is not the product of the cultural peculiarities of Turks, Germans, Serbs, or other peoples." A dark territorial ambition--the bastard child of a genocidal age--"its traces can be seen in every society, and its potentiality is part of us all." This is perhaps the greatest contribution of Fires of Hatred. It succeeds, despite being limited to modern European occurrences of barbarism, in illustrating the universal implications of ethnic cleansing.

"At one extreme of its spectrum," Naimark writes, "ethnic cleansing is closer to forced deportation or what has been called 'population transfer.'" In its most extreme form, "ethnic cleansing and genocide are distinguishable only by the ultimate intent." The latter is a form of mass destruction, while the former is a collective eviction notice, albeit an often murderous one. Recognizing the two as related but distinct is integral to Naimark's work and avoids perpetuating the myth that ethnic cleansing is just genocide with a Balkan twist. It is a project, he writes, that will help us understand "the causes and consequences of this devastating process." Just as important, it reminds us of "the fact that ethnic cleansing has terrifying potential for genocide."

Ethnic cleansing "has remained remarkably consistent over the past 100 years," Naimark explains, even though as a species we have demonstrated a virtuoso capacity for destructive innovations. It is violent, vicious, and personal and usually results in substantial body counts, the individual torments of the damned writ large. It tends to happen during wartime, when the usual constraints of civil society no longer apply and state control, organized killing, and acting out strategic interests are all facilitated by the general permissiveness of conflict. It is thorough in the way that only a modern, totalizing state can be. It "rarely forgives, makes exceptions, or allows people to slip through the cracks." It attempts to eliminate the cultural as well as the physical presence of unwanted minorities, monuments and records alike disappearing into an Orwellian memory hole, "just to be sure no one [can] make any claims about coming back." Property and wealth is appropriated and redistributed among the perpetrators.

Ethnic cleansing is also inherently misogynistic, Naimark argues, with women bearing the brunt of territorial purges--because they are "the carriers, quite literally, of the next generation of the nation," or by virtue of circumstance, left behind by men who have either emigrated ahead of them or gone off to fight.

Naimark's predictions about the future are far from uplifting. He suggests that the international community's history of somnambulism in the face of atrocities does not bode well, especially given the instability of many of the former communist states of Europe and Eurasia. There, "countries with weak civil societies, fragile constitutional arrangements, struggling economies, and ideological confusion ... cannot be drawn into NATO and the European Union fast enough to avoid the perils of ethnic cleansing."

The lingering loyalty in international affairs to principles of state sovereignty is another stumbling block to intervention, he writes. But with Kosovo, "NATO and the Americans made it clear that they were not willing to face the repeated campaigns of ethnic cleansing of the Serbs." His pessimism is tangible: Without some greater interest on the part of external observers, some will to step in and prevent or halt atrocities, "the horrors recounted in this book will surely happen again."

There is little about Fires of Hatred that is brilliantly original. Many of Naimark's conclusions have been addressed elsewhere, and some of his observations are rather anodyne. The case studies are far too thin to satisfy those looking for "thick" history. Taken as a whole, however, the book is a coherent and sober treatment of the subject, one that does away with the emotive chaff of other works and synthesizes a great deal of relevant material into a single work of comparative history. The sheer clarity with which Naimark articulates his ideas suggests that this book will become a standard text on the issue of ethnic cleansing, located on the shelf next to the growing corpus of literature devoted to genocide and ethnic conflict.