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  • The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing
  • Ronald Grigor Suny
The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. By Michael Mann (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005) 590 pp. $70.00

In recent decades, the deepening interest in the Holocaust and the spreading of civil and ethnic violence have led social scientists to turn to the study of mass killing, violence, and genocide. As students of international relations have shifted attention from interstate wars to intrastate conflict—which in the second half of the twentieth century became the [End Page 92] major source of violent deaths—theories of ethnic conflict have ranged from primordialist narratives of deep cleavages between peoples based on ancient antipathies to rationalist accounts of the instrumental employment by elites of ethnically inspired rhetoric to mobilize masses for murder. Reversing an older image of ethnic violence as emanating from the masses, strategic interactionist approaches have located initiative at the top, while provoking the question of why ethnic appeals have such powerful resonance below. In this mammoth comparative study of modern mass killing, Mann elaborates a compelling analysis of ethnic cleansings as applied to the Armenian Genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, and the murderous "cleansings" in Stalinist states, disintegrating Yugoslavia, and Rwanda.

In his model, Mann begins with eight theses about ethnic cleansing: Murderous cleansing is . . . the dark side of [modern] democracy" (2); "ethnic hostility rises where ethnicity trumps class as the main form of social stratification" (5); "the danger zone . . . is reached when (a) large movements claiming to represent two fairly old ethnic groups both lay claim to their own state over all or part of the same territory and (b) this claim seems to them to have substantial legitimacy and some plausible chance of being implemented" (6); "the brink of murderous cleansing is reached when [either] the less powerful side is bolstered to fight rather than to submit . . . by believing that aid will be forthcoming from outside [or the] stronger side believes . . . that it can force through its own cleansed state at little physical or moral risk to itself" (6); "murderous cleansing occurs where the state exercising sovereignty over the contested territory has been factionalized and radicalized amid an unstable geopolitical environment that usually leads to war" (7); "murderous cleansing is rarely the initial intent of perpetrators" (7); other plans fail before the most radical solution is adopted; "there are three main levels of perpetrator: (1) the radical elites running party-states; (b) bands of militants forming violent paramilitaries; and (c) core constituencies providing mass though not majority popular support" (8); rather than perpetrators being psychotic or uniformly sadistic, "ordinary people are brought by normal social structures into committing murderous ethnic cleansing" (9).

Mann argues that when ethnicity combines with economic inequality, the likelihood of ethnic conflict increases, but murderous cleansing is fundamentally related to rival claims to sovereignty in a given territory. Thus, such mass killing is a modern phenomenon, the consequence of the fusion of two understandings of "the people," demos and ethnos. Citizenship is identified with a homogenous concept of organic ethnicity, rather than with liberal tolerance of diversity. Europeans and others thought of solving ethnic conflicts through population transfers, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. For example, settler democracies, like the early United States or Australia, cleansed their landscape of native peoples whose labor was not needed but whose territory was desired.

In the case of the Armenian Genocide, Mann compellingly rejects [End Page 93] the view that the Turkish governments had a consistent, long-term genocidal intent. He emphasizes the radicalization of Turkish policies from the "exemplary repression" of Sultan Abdul Hamid II to the forced application of "Turkification," to politicide, and to the annihilation of the entire potential Armenian political and military leadership class, before the deportations (ethnic cleansing) and the mass killings of full-blown genocide became a reality.

Mann's various histories are deeply researched and nuanced, with due recognition of anomalies and loose ends. His is historically sensitive social science rather than water-tight model building, more like the work of the great comparativists of classic sociology—Karl Marx and Max Weber, than the reductive current practices of many formal political scientists or sociologists. Critics both from...

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