Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe by Donald Bloxham & Robert Gerwarth

Author:Donald Bloxham & Robert Gerwarth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusions: continuous themes

It is often said that genocide is a matter of killing people simply because of their human identity. Yet in many cases, where the victims lived (and what they owned) was vital to heightening the salience of who they were. Where territory was contested – either recently acquired or liable to be lost – then people not belonging to the titular national group of the state in question were in particular peril. Muslims in Serbia ‘proper’ were usually left untouched even as Serbian forces and Bosnian Serbs murdered and expelled Bosnian Muslims. Armenians stood a greater chance of survival if they lived in the western parts (and particularly the western cities) of the Ottoman Empire than the eastern provinces, which the CUP realized were most likely to fall to Russian military advance and post-war Great-Power partition. The life chances of Jews in Bulgaria or Romania in the Second World War were largely determined by the length of time their dwelling places had been under Sofia’s and Bucharest’s control respectively.

The matter of location tells us much about the political calculus underpinning genocide and ethnic cleansing. The targeted groups clearly suffered because of their ethnic difference, but this does not mean that in all cases the perpetrators were convinced of the inherent and irredeemable enmity of the victim populations in their entirety. At crucial points, collective ‘reprisal’ measures against populations that included some political activist enemies or guerilla fighters was simply more expeditious than a prolonged and uncertain battle for hearts and minds. But in a world where other states and peoples were also playing the irredentism card, collective measures in sensitive border areas could also result from the fear (or the observation) that one’s opponent was using the population in question collectively as a wedge for its policies. French ‘civic nationalists’ in interwar Alsace might be driven to acting identically to ‘ethnic nationalists’ in measures of forced assimilation simply by their fear of the loyalty of other Alsatians to Germany. The Soviet authorities considered nationalism to be a social construction and in principle rejected it outright (even while at times supporting cultural diversity), but still deported entire national populations from the state’s peripheries because of paranoia or vengefulness about the putatively collectively disloyal sentiments of those populations. Whatever the variety of governing ideologies and constitutional make-ups in Europe’s state system, every state was prepared to sacrifice population groups in the interests of internal security, uniformity of purpose and territorial integrity.

The international community – the Great Powers in their successive constellations – was (and remains) generally more tolerant of state brutality against subject populations to maintain existing borders. Where those borders seem particularly unstable or indefensible, localized wars of secession were permitted in the interests of a more stable future, even though ethnic cleansing of the weaker group in the new state was likely. As a general principle, irredentism was to be opposed because it transgressed boundaries previously agreed by the power constellation and always brought the risk of more general war by upsetting regional power orders.

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