A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (review)

The term "genocide" was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a legal adviser to the U.S. State Department and a Polish Jew by birth, to describe Nazi atrocities against the Jews of Europe. Although the targeted killing of specific groups was hardly unprecedented in world history, only in the twentieth century did it become an emblematic practice, a technique that relied on the fully mobilized violent resources of the nation-state. Or as Eric Weitz argues in his important and elegant A Century of Genocide, only recently did genocide emerge as a phenomenon so widespread and so oft-repeated that it lies "at the center of our contemporary cultural crisis" (p. 2).

The subtitle of Weitz's book—Utopias of Race and Nation—suggests his main thesis. Weitz argues that utopian ambitions, when wedded to ideologies of race and backed by the force of the state, invite genocidal excess. This is particularly true when states come to see themselves not as the defenders of the political rights of all citizens, but as agents for the creation of purified racial communities. Even then, however, circumstances have to be right for genocide to flourish. Only when confronted by extreme crises unleashed by war or domestic upheaval have revolutionary regimes found the opportunity to practice the most extreme and horrific form of population politics.

Weitz expounds this thesis in case studies of the Soviet Union under Iosif Stalin, Germany under Hitler, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and Serbia under Slobodan Milosevib. Each of these four discussions provides a model of concise, clear, and vivid historical writing. Weitz's analysis of Stalin's population politics does an excellent job of showing how ethnicity and national origin came to serve as a proxy for, and thus to supplant, class as the critical oppositional term of Soviet ideology. Weitz argues that although Stalin's Soviet Union was not a genocidal regime per se, it delivered a template of population purges followed and perfected by later regimes centrally organized around projects of genocide, notably the Nazi state. Weitz's study of Hitler's Germany provides a masterful synthesis of the vast material on the Third Reich and the Holocaust. By avoiding the polemical pitfalls of an overly intentionalist or functionalist account, Weitz provides a compelling narrative that deftly balances the role of ideology and circumstance in the Nazis' practice of mass extermination.

Weitz's discussion of Pol Pot's Cambodia is likewise excellent, providing a sturdy overview of current historical understanding of the genocidal regime created by the Khmer Rouge. Here again, Weitz demonstrates how a revolutionary program that originally defined enemies of the regime along lines of class came to rely on nationality and ethnicity as serviceable and lethal substitutes.

Weitz stumbles only in his treatment of Serbia. Although he offers a fine précis of Serbia's politics of ethnic cleansing, he fails to demonstrate that Serbian leaders were motivated by a utopian desire to revolutionize society. Most historians would insist that Milosevib and his cronies eschewed a politics of radical renewal and instead practiced a politics of resentment and shared grievance, appealing less to a vision of a purified future than to the humiliations and indignities of the past. If Weitz is to challenge this received wisdom, he must do so directly and vigorously, and he does not.

Overall, though, Weitz's central argument finds powerful support in his case studies. His command of his sources is sure, and the reader is pleased to find quotations not just from political actors and historians, but from poets and writers, eyewitnesses and diarists (though in an odd and uncharacteristic lapse, Weitz on p. 89 describes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic historical treatise, The Gulag Archipelago, as an "acclaimed novel"). Such progressive historical writing at times goes too far: Weitz's observation that acts of genocide have been "overwhelmingly the work of men" (p. 248) seems irrelevant and almost pandering in a book devoted to the destructive consequences of ideologies...