Review of Mann

Mann’s overwhelming analytical strength is in his command of his historical cases and his ability to correlate the various types of violence he studies with the social conditions under which they are produced. The book, in my opinion, is likely to be the finest in the set that I’m reading. His cases are what as a debater I was trained to call prima facie cases—cases that from the standpoint of rhetoric are well constructed, cases that at “face value” must stand. If you are to debate Mann’s argument, your major recourse is to return and review the secondary historical texts on which he draws and criticize his cases and argument on the basis of flaws in evidence that you may uncover. If you accept his internal evidence, and at face value, I see no reason to doubt his honesty and thoroughness, the construction of each case is sound, logical, balanced and thorough. He is also a clear writer and, alone among the writers on violence, offers sober and realistic assessments of what interested agents might do to stop ethnic cleansing. I wouldn’t hesitate to assign any part of this book for student reading. Certainly the other authors in the set will have to go to great lengths in order to beat Mann. I admire the book a great deal.

The only weakness I can find is that, by and large, he omits coverage of the psychological literature on violence. I see his argument is more concerned with correlating social structures with violence, rather than understanding why those structures are able to cause the corresponding violence. In all fairness, I believe he would debate this criticism. Without a doubt, I believe he is correct that ethnic cleansing is a modern phenomenon and that the social conditions he describes are strongly correlated with ethnic cleansing. That said, I hold that without understanding the psychology of the rhetoric needed to create and coordinate mass violence, the actual causes of the violence will elude us. Moreover, Mann’s central thesis that ethnic cleansing is the “dark side of democracy” cannot be developed as a critique of liberalism without analyzing the integrating the genuine impact of the ingroup-outgroup distinction on democratic practice.

Mann’s Theses

Mann’s theory takes the form of general predictive hypotheses about ethnic cleansing when it occurs. These are reproduced below:

Thesis 1: Murderous cleansing is the dark side of democracy

This first thesis contains several sub-theses:

Thesis 1a: Murderous ethnic cleansing is a hazard of the age of democracy since amid multiethnicity the ideal of rule by the people began to entwine the demos with the dominant ethnos, generating organic conceptions of the state that encouraged the cleansing of minorities.

Thesis 1b: In modern colonies, settler democracies in certain contexts have been truly murderous, more so than authoritarian colonial governments. The more settlers controlled colonial institutions, the more murderous the cleansing.

Thesis 1c: Regimes newly embarked upon democratization are more likely to commit murderous ethnic cleansing than are stable authoritarian regimes.

Thesis 1d: Stably institutionalized democracies are less likely than either democratizing or authoritarian regimes to commit murderous cleansing.

Thesis 1e: Regimes that are actually perpetrating murderous cleansing are never democratic. Apply these theses beforehand to monitor the state as it becomes less democratic.

The other theses are more simple:

Thesis 2: Ethnic hostility rises where ethnicity trumps class as the main form of social stratification, in the process capturing and channeling classlike sentiments toward ethnonationalism.

Thesis 3: The danger zone of murderous cleansing is reached when (1) 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 (2) this claim seems to have substantial legitimacy and some plausible chance of being implemented.

Thesis 4: The brink of murderous cleansing is reached when one of the two alternative scenarios play out: (1) The less powerful side is bolstered to fight rather than to submit (for submission reduces the deadliness of the conflict) by believing that aid will be forthcoming from the outside or (2) the stronger side believes that it has such overwhelming military power and ideological legitimacy that it can force through it own cleansed state at little physical or moral risk to itself.

Thesis 5: Going over the brink into the perpetration of 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 (political instability is required).

Thesis 6: Murderous cleansing is rarely the original intent of perpetrators.

Thesis 7: There are three main levels of perpetrator. These are: (a) radical elites running party states, (b) bands of militants forming violent paramilitaries, (c) core constituencies providing mass though not majority popular support.

Thesis 8: Ordinary people are brought by normal social structures into committing murderous ethnic cleansing and their motives are much more mundane.

Mann is not pursuing a generalized theory. He argues, “Given the messiness and uniqueness of societies, my theses cannot be scientific laws. They do not even fit perfectly to my case studies.” He sums up his position as follows:

Murderous cleansing is most likely to result where powerful groups within two ethnic groups aim at legitimate and rival states “in the name of the people” over the same territory, and the weaker is aided from the outside. It worsens in the presence of unstable, factionalized party-states. That is the main argument of this book, and it indicates that in explaining this particularly vicious area of human behavior, political power relations are ultimately decisive.

His claim that, “All my cases have peculiarities that I must respect,” is the mark of a good historian, a claim for which, in turn, I have a good measure of respect. Certainly the book is a testament to Mann’s scholarly thoroughness. That said, I am not convinced that a theory of ethnic cleansing cannot be causal, rather than descriptive.

Critique of the Causal Model

While Mann openly stresses that leader decisions are critical causes of ethnic cleansing, he does very little actual theorization the role of agents in his book. His method consists of reviewing the historical narrative of several ethnic cleansings to determine common social conditions that precede ethnic cleansing. This analysis is valuable, but not complete. I believe that psychological insight, specifically a deeper knowledge of how the ingroup-outgroup distinction is activated at times of threat would help make his collection of theses into a more parsimonious and compact theory.

Let’s spend a moment on thesis one. Mann believes that, ironically, given the literature on the democratic peace in international relations and a general belief that liberalism is the panacea for all intolerance, it seems that democracy, particularly weak, unconsolidated democracy, actually seems to be a critical component in the causality of many cleansings. I am more than delighted to grant this. That said, the reasons why this is so are unclear and the effect appears highly inconsistent.

For example, thesis 1a tells us that people have a tendency to confuse the ethnos (an ethnic, organic notion of the people that indicates that the community shares “a common culture and sense of heritage, distinct from other peoples,” (Mann, p. 3) with the demos, a view of the population that sees the community as “the ordinary people” (Mann, p. 3), by which, as far as I can tell, means that it is a collection or more or less atomized individuals who live in a given space. An important characteristic of the common identity of the demos is a capacity to be stratified into interests that are not linked to an idea of separate community. The most important of these is class, but age and gender are important as well. The core idea, however, when contemplating itself, the demos is never divided into communities that can be seen as an ethnos. Ethnic cleansing is always a clash of more than one ethnos (ethnoi?—sorry, my Greek is non-existent). To arrive at ethnic cleansing, people must be in an ethnos “state of mind.”

Mann does not sufficiently explain how one travels between these two interpretive frameworks. To be fair, he does tell us quite a bit. For example, he explains that slower emergence of the nation as a result of slower integration into the world capitalist system leads to a demos self-concept, because ethnic elites can be assimilated into the ethnicity of the dominant ethnic group and slowly integrate lower classes as they become politicized (Mann, pp. 57-60). In contrast, quick integration into the world capitalist system means that ethnic elites will be “captured” by their ethnic subordinates who become politicized too quickly to permit for this slow, top-down integration into a single demos. Conservatives within the various ethnoi will stir up the mobilizing masses and create conflict (Mann, pp. 61-63). Of course, Mann is not the first to tell us this story. We can look at least as far back as Anthony Smith’s Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986) and Leah Greenfeld’s Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992) for different parts of this story. And Mann does not explain why individuals who are often confronted with the option of seeing group identity as ethnos or demos will pick one over the other.

The only clue we have is Thesis 2: Ethnic hostility rises where ethnicity trumps class as the main form of social stratification, in the process capturing and channeling classlike sentiments toward ethnonationalism. We know that subsuming class grievance under ethnos, makes ethnic cleansing more likely. We do not know why.

He admits that Thesis 3 does not apply to Holocaust (Mann, p. 503). He simply replies that the Holocaust is the most atypical of the cases and despite its pre-eminent coverage in the literature, should not be viewed as paradigmatic. I think a more logical approach would be to admit that in many cases, leaders must rely on forces other than coercion to gain obedience of the population and staff that are to carry out the cleansing. In the case of Nazi Germany, Hitler had created an ultra-authoritarian state that was responsive to his directives. He did not need to sell a threat anymore. It was sufficient that he believed that “subhumans” were a threat. In short, no ultra-authoritarian state is likely to fit into a paradigm, because any theoretical explanation must look at the structural constraints facing a ruler’s freedom of action. Largely unconstrained rulers, a rare phenomenon to be sure, do what they wish. If you wish to predict what the dictator of an ultra-authoritarian state will do next, you have no recourse but to study the leader.

Mann’s Policy Prescriptions

Mann is alone among those prescribing for policy with respect to preventing cleansing in combining moral sensitivity with pragmatism. His lists a number of suggestions toward the reform of the international system of collective security, the international system of justice and U.S. foreign policy priorities that he immediately admits are “pie in the sky,” (Mann, p. 526). Far more interesting is his constructive suggestion for helping reconstruct post-conflict states. He suggests combining federalism or consociationalism with features that ultimately undermine those provisos in favor of cultivating a demos. Mann argues that acquiring peace very often requires stop-gap measures that end up reinforcing ethnic identity. That said, if electoral incentives are created to undermine guarantees to varying ethnoi by making it possible for politicians to develop cross-ethnos parties that reinforce the demos, then a long-term future may be possible. Finally, Mann is frank that this problem may not survive the 21st century simply because if ethnic cleansing is simply a response to creating “nations” that “fit the states,” we may well arrive at an ethnically cleansed state system by the end of the century. His view is depressing, but realistic.

That said, his causal argument does not explain the inexorability he sees. I see the inexorability, too. I’m rather hoping that I can draw on (1) a psychological knowledge of the political deployment of rhetoric and (2) a better theory of elite action to help explain why.