Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (review)

Naimark brings great clarity to this vital yet profoundly dispiriting subject, in which enlightenment can bring no pleasures but only an "overwhelming sadness" (242). He wishes both to distinguish ethnic cleansing from genocide and to show how one becomes inscribed in the other. Clarity about the former's specificities is necessary to avert "the terrifying potential for genocide" (15). For this purpose, comparison remains the best antidote to the commonsense recourse to "age-old" cultural peculiarities in explaining ethnic hatreds. Against such essentializing, Naimark offers a model of "historical contingency" focused on "the confluence of events, political leadership, and intercommunal hostility within the modern state," first enabled by the societal mobilizations and expanding state interventions of the two world wars. The resulting "modernity," which joined integral nationalism to the state's enhanced capacities for violence and regulation, delivered the specifically twentieth-century coordinates for what is now known as ethnic cleansing.

Naimark builds his argument around five twentieth-century examples: the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia in 1921/22; the Nazi persecution of the Jews, concentrating on the years 1939 to 1941; the Soviet Union's forced resettlement to Central Asia of the Chechens-Inguish from the northern Caucasus and the Tartars from the Crimea in February and May 1944; the deportations of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1947; and, finally, the violent expulsions associated with the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, dominated by Serb attacks on Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims from 1991 to 1995 and in 1998/99, Croatian removals of Muslims and Serbs in Bosnia and Krajina in 1991/92, and Kosovar retaliation against Serbs in 1999. All of these cases display the desire "to remove a people and often all traces of them from a concrete territory," which was to be repossessed by violence, usually under conditions of war. This scenario involved "an armed perpetrator and an unarmed victim" (186), bringing horrendous atrocities and abuse of individuals, callous indifference to health, sanitation, and nutrition, and a brutal disregard for the fate of whole populations. In each case, violence acquired a "totalizing" quality, embracing all members of the targeted group with no distinctions of age or gender, and directed against culture (churches, synagogues, mosques, graveyards, monuments, libraries, icons, and public names) and property as much as persons. Misogynist violence against women via rape and public humiliation, by attacking them "as the cultural and biological repository of the nation" (83), and by centering patriotic identity around a particularly brutalized version of hard and militarist masculinity was also key to this story.

The strength of Naimark's account is in the clarity of the individual chapters, with their carefully crafted narratives synthesizing a wealth of specialized research. For his general argument, he relates ethnic cleansing to the crucible of World War I, with its unprecedented societal mobilizations, expanding states, and "industrial killing." Taking his cue from Baumann and Scott, he sees the "marriage of modern nationalism and the post-World War I state" spawning a new totalizing logic in the state-society relationship, thereby bringing new forms of regulation, classification, and surveillance into economy and society, with a growing intrusiveness into areas of health, sexuality, family, and personal life. ¹ As part of this "high modernist" dynamic, states sought to harden ethnic boundaries and make them absolute, "concretizing difference and otherness with the goal of banishing it" (8). Under the impact of late nineteenth-century imperialism, the advancement of modern science and technology, and what might be termed the eugenicist complex, moreover, this nationalism also became racialized, reaching its baleful apogee in the Third Reich.

This general framework is persuasive. It works least successfully in the Yugoslav case, which requires explanations less beholden to the consequences of World War I, and the German expulsions from Poland and Czechoslovakia also...