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Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide
Dr Mark Levene is a Reader in History at the University of Southampton.
It has become almost a platitude, a statistical one at that: 187 million is the figure, the now more or less accepted wisdom for the number of human beings killed as a result of political violence-Zbigniew Brzezinski uses the unlovely term megadeaths-in this, our bloody century. More killing than at any other time in history. And yet at the end of the twentieth century its relentlessness, as it passes across the television screens of those of us seemingly blessed with immunity from its catastrophic reality and consequences, continues to daze and bewilder.
For the historian, him or herself inured to centuries if not millen nia of mass atrocity, this picture of a special era of death and destruc tion invites, indeed demands further probing and analysis. Is "the Twentieth Century Book of the Dead" really so very different in scope or scale from previous ones? It has been argued that the effects of the Taiping and other rebellions in China reduced its population from 410 million in 1850 to 350 million in 1873.3 In southern Africa a couple of decades earlier, the emergence of Shaka's Zulu nation and the ensuing Mfecane or "great crushing" produced equally horrendous results relative to the population of the region.
Go back a few centuries and the devastation that the Mongol conqueror Timur wrought to Central Asia, the Near East, and Northern India impelled modem historian Arnold Toynbee to note that this exterminatory span of twenty-four years (between 1379 and 1403) was comparable to the one hundred and twenty of the last five Assyrian kings.
If this seems to be an argument, albeit a cynical one, for saying plus fa change, plus c'est la meme chose, the very use of the term genocide, as if we have in our current self-centered time suddenly stumbled upon a different order of things, is equally problematic. How do we find a separate niche for this exterminatory modus operandi when we are already familiar with the idea of massacre, civil war, revolution, man-made famine, total war, and indeed the potentiality for nuclear obliteration? The signposting of the scholars is, to say the least, contradictory.
The international jurist Raphael Lemkin, who both coined the term "genocide" and was founding mover for its study, saw in it not so much modernity as a reversion or regression to past "barbarisms." If he perceived a difference in our century it was not in the destruction of peoples or nations per se but in the ability of international society, with international law as its right arm, to outlaw and ultimately prevent it. In spite of the catastrophe which overwhelmed his own family in the Holocaust, Lemkin was essentially optimistic about a modem global civilization founded on western enlightenment principles.
The 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide is his great legacy.
Yet, Kosovo notwithstanding, the Genocide Convention has been more honored in the breach than in the practice. A considerable stream of current empirical thought, moreover, would challenge Lemkin's basic premise. Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, has not only forcefully rejected the notion that the Holocaust represented some "irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully eradicated residues of pre-modem barbarity" but on the contrary "arose out of a genuinely rational concern ... generated by a bureaucracy true to it form and purpose."
For Bauman, this quintessential genocide was a product of a planned, scientifically informed, expert, efficiently managed, coordinated, and technically resourced society like our own. Indeed, just in case anyone was in doubt as to his meaning, he not only reiterated that the Holocaust was a legitimate resident in the house of modernity and could not be "at home in any other house" but that there was an "elective affinity" between it "and modern civilization."
If Bauman and Lemkin seem to offer very different perspectives on why this century might be considered the century of genocide, this article would submit that neither argument in itself offers a conclusive case. Implicitly, both have the added danger of being reduced to discussions about the form genocidal killing takes. The shorthand for Bauman thus might read: "gas chambers": systematized, routinized, industrialized conveyer belt killings; albeit with a grand vision at its end "of a better, and radically different, society."
There is something compelling in this theme. If gas chambers suggest a 194o's state-of the-art technology for the accomplishment of a particular type of mass murder, telegraphs and trains in the lttihadist destruction of the Armenians or the provision of index registers of the Rwandese population as a basis for the selection of Tutsi and other victims in 1994 equally seem to point the finger at a type of social organization in which victims can be characterized as depersonalized freight or numbers and their perpetrators as pen pushers or technical operators who conveniently find themselves physically or psychologically "distanced" from the act of murder.
All well and good. Except that recent studies, such as Goldhagen on the Holocaust, or Prunier on Rwanda, provocatively remind us that much of it is not like that; that genocide, whether perpetrated by a technologically advanced society like Germany or a relatively unde veloped one like Rwanda, still requires the active mobilization of hundreds of thousands of their "ordinary" citizens to pull triggers or wield machetes; that this involves not a spatial removal but a direct confrontation between perpetrators and victims; and that in consequence genocide in action can be every bit as passionate, vicious, and messy as the massacres of the Peloponnesian or Punic wars.
By a different route, we seem to be back with Lemkin's barbarism. Except that neither the Romans nor Greeks saw themselves as barbarians but rather as the most advanced and sophisticated societies of their time. If then, as Michael Freeman would assert, the argument cannot be about mod ernity per se but only about civilization and if we were to pursue this train of thought further by tracing in the classical and pre-modern record the capability of societies-despite their usually politically diffused and decentralized nature-to deport or exterminate whole populations, where is our case for a particular relationship between genocide and the twentieth century?
This article would contend in response that form is not the primary issue whereas framework most definitely is. Or, to put it another way, we cannot begin to understand genocide without grappling with his tory, by which is implied not only the historical context of each individual genocide which necessarily must tell us a special and unique story but rather the macrohistorical record, the broad and moving canvas in which we might chart and hopefully analyze the emergence and development of the current international system.
Indeed, its first proposition is that the origins of something which we specifically call genocide, followed by the persistence and prevalence of this phenomenon into the contemporary world, is intrinsically bound up with that emerging system and is indeed an intrinsic and crucial part of it. If this line of argument is correct then genocide cannot be simply cordoned off as an aberration which afflicts states which have become too ideological, totalitarian, prone to revolution, to war, or internal conflicts which are the result of ethnic division and stratification. These may be significant features and important determinants of genocide.
And they may tell us also something about why certain countries-Germany, Russia, China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Turkey, Rwanda, Burundi-have been particularly genocide prone. But none of these examples can be understood purely in domestic isolation. Nation states, notes Anthony Giddens, "only exist in systemic relations with other nation-states." Yet the global system of nation states which we now take for granted has only come to full fruition in this last century.
Genocide is thus not only a by-product of particular national trajectories as they attempt state building in order to operate within, circumvent, or possibly con front that system, but a guide to and indeed cipher for its own dysfunctional nature. But why should this be? The answer, on one level, is closely enmeshed with what Marxist or neo-Marxist analysis would call "the dynamics of uneven historical development." Thus, the international system was not created all of a piece but was primed and taken forward by a small coterie of western polities.
Their economic and political ascendancy determined the system's ground rules and ensured that its expansion and development would be carried forward and regulated primarily in their own hegemonic interests. As a result, not only have "international relations been co-eval with the origins of the nation-state" but this process from its eighteenth-century origins was peculiarly dependent upon the fortunes of its leading players, most notably Britain, France, and the United States.
We do not ourselves have to be westemocentric to acknowledge this problematic reality or the essential thrust of Immanuel Wallerstein's developmental thesis in terms of a dominant western core surrounded by semi-peripheral and peripheral zones. Yet Wallerstein himself would be the first to acknowledge that this development was not naturally preordained, nor did it have to lead to the permanent ascendancy of specific states. Rather, it was the outcome of a long series of inter-European power struggles fought increasingly in a global arena, in which some proto modem states, such as Spain, fell by the wayside while others, notably Prussia and Russia, came into frame as serious contenders for primacy.
If all this had and continues to have something of a social Darwinian quality about it, nevertheless, "the intersection of capitalism, industrial ism and the nation-state, which were the primary ingredients enabling western state supremacy in the first place, remain the enduring features of the system as globalized, while also ensuring the continuing hege mony of a somewhat broader but still relatively small group of states (with a number of key western institutions and corporations also now involved), even though the relative position of these may be quite different from that of the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.
This relationship between genocide and an emerging international system demands further scrutiny. Was it, for instance, the avant-garde states who committed genocide in their drive for hegemony, or latter day contenders? And whichever it was, where do we locate our first modem example? Aspects of the Iberian thrust to the Canaries, the Caribbean, and then the New World mainland are horribly suggestive, as are, in the Spanish and Portuguese domestic frames, the disgorging or forcible integration of Jews and Moriscos.
Similar early modem trends are perhaps to be found in the destruction of Albigensians and Anabaptists en route to the consolidation of French and German state-religious unities and later still in the English or Anglo-Scottish campaigns to "clear" Catholic Irish and Gaelic Highlanders from their frontier hinterlands.
The process could be said to have been carried forward in a still wider global frame with the British onslaught on the native peoples of Australasia, the American expulsions, subjugations, and massacres of their remaining unsubdued Indian nations, closely replicated in Latin American countries, notably Argentina, not to say in the Russian anti-Circassian drive to consolidate the Caucasus firmly within the Czarist empire.
Yet while the scale of these killings, particularly in the case of the sixteenth-century Americas, not only equals but arguably surpasses instances of twentieth-century mass murder, the specificity of "geno cide" cannot be confirmed or denied from this litany. If the correlation ship to the emerging system is the critical issue, a possibly more authentic first contender might be the 1793-94 revolutionary Jacobin onslaught on the Vendee region.
Here we can observe a premeditated, systematic, if albeit geographically limited attempt at people-destruc tion closely linked to rapid nation-state building within the context of a much broader crisis of interstate relations. But if the Vendee is an important signpost for a type of mass murder which has become particularly prevalent and persistent in the twentieth century, its inclusion as a case study has to contend with objections that Frenchmen killing other Frenchmen cannot be "genocide."
Interestingly, this contrasts with a contention from an entirely different quarter which protests at any attempt to pick and choose between which mass killings are genocides and which are not.16 Even were we to put aside this perfectly understandable, ethically grounded restraint, the bewildering diversity of the situations that perpetrator and victim groups outlined so far confronts this writer, no less than others, with the obstinate question: what exactly is it that we are discussing?
"At the most fundamental level," it has been asserted, "we presently lack even a coherent and viable description of the processes and circumstances implied by the term genocide. And this despite enormous and continuing efforts by sociologists and jurists to provide tax onomies and etiologies of the phenomenon not to say a legal framework for criminalizing it. Leo Kuper, doyen of its study, sounds almost despairing. There is, he says, "no single genocidal process" and, to boot, probably no basis for developing "a general theory of genocide."
Similarly, Helen Fein warns that "comparisons based on either the Holocaust or the Gulag Archipelago as a single archetype which assume there is one mechanically recurring script are bound to be mis leading." Fein is correct. Each genocide is different. The problem is knowing what falls within the rubric in the first place, her very refer ence to the Gulag being an interesting example of how potentially we might obscure rather than clarify our focus. Fein's example also highlights a general tendency to conflate the act of "genocide" with "genocidal process," of which there is a great deal more.
The latter, involving all manner of draconian or coercive measures, ranging from the forcible assimilation of a group at one end of the spectrum through to physical murder at the other, does not have to culminate necessarily in a program of systematic people-annihilation, that is, "genocide." Even then it is rarely sustained to an attempted completion.
This is perhaps one reason why the Holocaust remains so central to our vision of what constitutes genocide, as if in Weberian terms we had found our "ideal" type.
Nevertheless, this argument contends, in contradistinction to Kuper, that with appropriate terms of reference it is possible not only to discern a pattern of genocide which in some way is relatable to the unfolding of contemporary history but which also, at least in terms of academic study, can be viewed as having a coherent identity.
My approach revolves around the two obviously interlinked questions: "what is genocide" and "why does it occur"? The first might be answered in a preliminary sense by proposing that genocide is, as in Lemkin's formulation, a type of state-organized modern warfare. But this statement requires elucidation. Though not all warfare in history has been conducted by states, the ability of a state to wage war is both a prime indicator of its power vis-a-vis other states and of its relation ship to its domestic populace.
Additionally, a recourse to war tells us much about the self-perception of a state leadership and of its willing ness, ideologically motivated or otherwise, to pursue what it views as state's interests or agendas by these means. Yet war, by definition, is a high-risk strategy, which, even where carefully prepared, can be comprehensively demolished by contingent events. It also requires prodigious inputs of manpower, resources, and capital.
If the war fails these may be lost in part or entirety to the great if not fatal detriment of the state. Alternatively, successful war may result in great material and psychological benefits. This may sound paradoxical with regard to genocide but is in fact as true for it as for the two other main types of state, organized modem war. Indeed, genocide often is conducted simultaneously or in parallel with them. Equally importantly, all three types have a common relationship to the nation state's place within the broader international system.
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