Ethnic Cleansing

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ETHNIC CLEANSING.

ETHNIC CLEANSING AND NATIONALISM
TWENTIETH-CENTURY EXAMPLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ethnic cleansing is similar to the main term used to describe Joseph Stalin's terror, chystki (purges), as well as Adolf Hitler's word for racial "hygiene," Säuberung. The term cleansing appeared in various languages (Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian) in the 1940s in the context of national violence. In the 1990s a mass viewing public was introduced to practices known as ethnic cleansing as they took place. During the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the term ethnic cleansing found its way from Serbs to the world mass media. The term opened new paths of interpretation of the history of Europe in the twentieth century. In general, these emphasized the continuity of national violence, the connections between the First and the Second World Wars, the similarity of practices between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the importance of war in the social history of modern Europe.

There is no accepted definition of ethnic cleansing as a term of scholarly investigation, although it is perhaps most often used in the sense of "coercive actions justified in national terms designed to clear territories of putatively undesirable populations without aspiring to their total physical extermination." Ethnic cleansing occupies a middle position between voluntary migration and total genocide. People can be ethnically cleansed without being killed, although the credible threat of murder is a basic tool of ethnic cleansers. Ethnic cleansing refers to the cleansing of a territory rather than the cleansing of a population. It and similar expressions are employed in a military or partisan context, when forces are used to eliminate civilians and thus putatively secure territory. As a term of analysis, ethnic cleansing captures the willingness to use force, which need not include the aim or desire to murder the entire population. The perpetrators of ethnic cleansing are usually acting on behalf of a state, although in some important cases they have been revolutionaries or partisans.

ETHNIC CLEANSING AND NATIONALISM

If ethnic cleansing is analytically distinct from earlier forms of politically motivated mass violence against civilians, this is because it contains a certain modern assumption about the national identity of populations. Modern nationalists believe that legitimate political power over a given territory flows from the national identity of its inhabitants. Many modern nationalists also believe that the national identity of populations is determined by factors that transcend human choice, such asmother tongue or family origin. These two views, taken together, are usually referred to as ethnic nationalism. Ethnic cleansing is a practical reconciliation of these two ideas of the nation and power. If political legitimacy rests with the nation, and the nation is defined in ethnic terms, minority groups have a poor claim to political rights. Yet political actors who express such views can rarely put them into practice, absent other favorable circumstances. These ideas may be more or less widely held, but they will generally seem more cogent at moments of threat, especially in times of war. Ethnic minorities connected to foreign powers during warfare are at special risk.

Over the course of the twentieth century, ethnic cleansing has taken place in much of Europe, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, from the Rhine to the Volga. Although the circumstances and actors present a tremendous variety, most cases, when examined closely, exhibit most or all of the following conditions: (1) the prior collapse of state authority; (2) the cover of a larger war or the plausible threat thereof; (3) the practical anticipation that the political map of the region in question can be redrawn, borders changed, and new states created; (4) the presence of a dedicated and committed group of ethnic cleansers, usually at work far from home; (5) historical propaganda that only seems plausible because of ongoing cleansing, and that seems to justify that cleansing projects be completed; (6) a conscious escalation by dedicated propagandists, who seek to transform the individual experience of loss into a social commitment to national war; (7) a property motive that attracts and implicates large numbers of people who have no apparent political or ideological motivation.

The popular explanation of ethnic cleansing, which also became current in the 1990s, can be summarized as "ancient hatred." Yet the very idea that the groups who cleanse and are cleansed are ancient is itself an artifact of modern nationalism. That such an explanation found credulous listeners testifies to the persuasiveness of nationalism itself. Even if national groups were antique and ever hostile, such a presentation of the issue can never provide an explanation of a given episode of ethnic cleansing. If the existence of ethnic groups and their hostility are taken as constants, they cannot explain the variable: a sudden eruption of forced population movements. In most recorded cases of ethnic cleansing in Europe, international or domestic political actors created, intentionally or unintentionally, a propitious moment for the expression of ethnic nationalism and the fulfillment of its program. At the level of high politics, those who resort to or profit from ethnic cleansing need not themselves be convinced ethnic nationalists. In some cases, especially in the communist world, leaders seek rather to divert national energy away from themselves.

At the level of society, ethnic cleansing, once it has been started, tends to self-perpetuate. Perpetrators initiated into murder and rape acquire the habit. Victims who respond with armed force, and even victims who flee, can be presented as evidence that the initial action of cleansing was justified. Since some kind of self-defense or revenge can be expected, ethnic cleansers consciously or unconsciously are targeting their own group when they attack another. Once attacks on civilians of different groups are underway, the question of blame becomes a matter of propaganda. In general, populations that are attacked will believe that they are the victims, even when organizations acting in their name initiated the violence. A situation can quickly emerge in which rival organizations kill civilians in the name of the self-defense of their own civilians. In some cases of ethnic cleansing, this moment of general violence seems to destroy older social norms of cohabitation and create fertile ground for the spread and reception of nationalist propaganda. In a situation that seems senseless, nationalism seems to provide an explanation for what is happening and a program for collective survival. In the proper conditions, an armed attack on a small number of civilians can become a war of nation against nation.

This dynamic of escalation well describes the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansing of the 1940s, and the Greco-Turkish violence of the 1920s. It need not obtain in all cases. In Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the state carried out massive policies of ethnic cleansing at a moment when it enjoyed a monopoly or a near monopoly on the use of force. Soviet and Nazi policies of ethnic cleansing generally met little or no effective resistance. Yet even in such cases, many of the same conditions hold. Both Moscow and Berlin justified ethnic cleansing by the threat of war. Both, and especially Nazi Germany, radicalized their approach to enemy groups when war was actually underway. Both redrew the map of Europe, using national propaganda to justify their actions. Both deployed bureaucratic cleansers, trained security policemen or soldiers of paramilitary forces. In both cases, but far more in the German case than the Soviet one, venal motives drew in collaborators. People who are cleansed leave behind more property than the cleansers can themselves exploit. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, this motive of property was especially important. After the Red Army defeated the Germans, many Soviet citizens retained the apartments they had seized from murdered Jews.

One of the most controversial questions is the distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide. In a legal sense the question is badly put, because the legal definition of genocide is rather broad. It includes the motivated murder of part of a national group, for example. In this sense, almost all examples of ethnic cleansing are genocidal. Legally speaking, there can also be instances of genocide that do not involve ethnic cleansing. "Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group" is legally genocide if motivated by the intention to destroy that group. Such a policy need not involve ethnic cleansing. Even directly murderous policies of genocide need not involve ethnic cleansing. If part of a population (its educated classes, for example) is murdered in situ without the intention to expel the rest, this is legally genocide, but is not ethnic cleansing. In popular usage, however, genocide is sometimes taken to mean the attempt to exterminate an entire national or racial group. In this sense, not all episodes of ethnic cleansing are genocidal. The example of the Holocaust of the Jews, however, shows that episodes of genocide in this strong, popular sense of the term may be preceded by attempts at ethnic cleansing.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY EXAMPLES

After Germany occupied western Poland in 1939, it encountered large Polish and Jewish populations. Between 1939 and 1941 Germans expelled a few hundred thousand Jews from the expanded Reich, and compelled their settlement into ghettos. At this time, the Germans ethnically cleansed more Poles than Jews and placed far more Poles than Jews in concentration camps such as Auschwitz. In the Jewish case, ethnic cleansing preceded a policy of total extermination; in the Polish case, it coincided with a policy of eliminating the educated classes. During this period, the German leadership considered what to do with the large Jewish population under German rule. Two of the plans discussed, expulsion east to the Soviet Union and forced transport to Madagascar, would have been further and more radical ethnic cleansing. Had they been carried out, they likely would have led to mass murder by neglect or starvation. The decision to murder all the Jews of Europe, taken after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, was no longer ethnic cleansing. From autumn 1941 the German goal was no longer the removal of Jews from territory, but their total physical elimination as a people.

During the 1930s, Stalin ordered Soviet security forces to deport all or part of every national group that inhabited both the Soviet Union and one of its neighbors. The entire Korean minority, for example, was deported to central Asia. Poles were probably the first national group in the Soviet Union to be targeted as such for deportations. In 1936 some sixty thousand Poles were ethnically cleansed from the western border of the Soviet Union. Some one hundred thousand Soviet citizens were also executed in 1937 and 1938 for supposed contact with Polish intelligence. This episode, the bloodiest part of the Great Terror, cannot be defined as ethnic cleansing. Although Poles predominated in that number, members of other nations were killed as well. Something similar holds for the famine of 1933, in which millions of Ukrainians and others perished. By directing resources in one way rather than another, the Soviet leadership chose which Soviet citizens would starve to death. This was not a policy of ethnic cleansing as such, since there was probably no intention of cleansing territory. Ethnic cleansing provides a useful lens through which to see important policies, but does not exhaust the possibilities for state violence against national groups.

At the end of the Second World War, after direct contact with German policy, the Soviet Union modified its policies in one respect. Throughout the 1930s, no group was actually deported from the Soviet Union. The official hope remained that individuals and communities could redeem themselves in exile or in the gulag, and one day become loyal Soviet citizens. In 1944, for the first time, the Soviet Union dispatched some of its own citizens beyond its borders. Stalin deported Poles and Jews from the Soviet far west, from territories that had been Polish before 1939. As before the war, the concern after the war was the consolidation of communist power. The Soviet Union was anything but a national state. Its leaders, however, were perfectly aware of the importance of nationalism. Initial optimism that national loyalties could be channeled to communist faith by way of administrative concessions was exhausted by about 1930. The less optimistic view that national questions could be resolved by deportation and execution no longer held by the 1940s. By 1944 the Soviet Union had in effect conceded a defeat to nationalism, treating Poles and Jews in its western territories as inassimilable, their ethnic identity as determinative of their future loyalty.

The negative moral coloration of ethnic cleansing obscures an important fact of the twentieth century: that many states, not only Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, believed that the forced resettlement of peoples was justified for political reasons. In several cases, ethnic cleansing was actually regulated by treaty. The first such instance was apparently a treaty between Turkey and Bulgaria of 1913, which provided for the mutual transfer of civilian populations at the end of the Balkan Wars. Its implementation was interrupted by the First World War. The Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 regulated the mutual expulsions of Greeks and Turks after the Greco-Turkish War that followed the First World War. Mutual ethnic cleansing was already underway, and the treaty was seen as a way to regulate and civilize a process that should be brought to its conclusion rather than reversed. At Potsdam in 1945, not only the Soviet Union but the United States and Great Britain took for granted that the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe was inevitable and desirable for the cause of future peace. While Potsdam led to an informal agreement between great powers rather than a formal peace settlement, it nevertheless stands as an important example of the attempt to regulate a process of ethnic cleansing seen as desirable. The Soviet Union did sign formal agreements with its satellite regime in Poland regarding the transfer of Poles westward and Ukrainians eastward.

In the Europe of the twentieth century, only Soviet state power and ideology seem to provide an exception to the general observation that ethnic cleansing is enabled by war. If the ideologies most associated with ethnic cleansing are Nazism and communism, the points of temporal concentration are the First and Second World Wars. Major examples of the ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Europe are: (1) the Bulgarian-Greco-Turkish "exchanges" of 1913–1922; (2) the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey in 1915–1919; (3) the deportation of "enemy nations" by the Soviet Union in 1935–1938; (4) the expulsion of Poles and Jews from the expanded Reich by Nazi Germany in 1939–1941; (5) the deportation of "collaborating nations" by the Soviet Union during the Second World War; (6) the mass murder of Poles by Ukrainian insurgents in Volhynia in 1943–1944 and the Polish response; (7) the "repatriations" of Poles and Ukrainians between the Soviet Union and communist Poland in 1944–1946; (8) the forced resettlement of Ukrainians in communist Poland in "Operation Vistula" in 1947; (9) the expulsion of Germans (and some Hungarians) from Czechoslovakia in 1945–1946; (10) the expulsion of Germans from Poland in 1945–1947; and (11) the murder of Bosnian Muslims, Kosovars, and others in the Yugoslav wars of 1992–1999.

The United States, Britain, and their NATO allies fought a war against Yugoslavia (Serbia) in 1999 with the aim of halting ethnic cleansing. By the end of the century, ethnic cleansing was a term not only of perpetrators and victims but of scholars, reporters, diplomats, and human-rights activists.